Books
Olivia Fletcher
Death in Her Hands was a forgotten manuscript, the product of a series of daily automatic writing exercises performed by Ottessa Moshfegh in 2015 and then set aside to marinade in a desk drawer while the world fell apart. Moshfegh’s characters “zoom” and gallop, they feel “glued down” and lost: a neat array of overactive but introverted low-lives, possessed by a miscellany of sordid desires. Moshfegh’s attraction to creating obsessive personalities breeds a type of paranoia in her readers, who may very well remain unsure about whether her narrators speak in earnest or in jest. Death in Her Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The former slave, and coachman on a sugar plantation, began one of his early public proclamations in a typically defiant vein: “I am Toussaint Louverture, you have perhaps heard my name.” At that point, in 1793, almost everyone in the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue did know about the inspiring but elusive rebel chieftain. Often in the shadows, he had led a slave uprising across Saint-Domingue (the western part of the island of Hispaniola) with a strategic brilliance and tactical flair that set it apart from the brutally crushed insurgencies of past decades. Within a few years Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Ian Williams’s writing is always in motion. For his 2012 poetry collection Personals, and since, he has composed little circular poems, similar (in style though not sentiment) to the posies you sometimes find inscribed on the inside of rings. He incorporates a couple into Reproduction, his debut and Griffin Prize-winning novel. “I’m sorry I made you hate me”, “no I don’t hate you baby don’t hurt me”, they read. Supposedly thought up by a teenager in the throes of childbirth, they speak to the seeming endlessness of labour pains as well as the forging of new bonds that are as hard to split as Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
The Girls, Emma Cline’s acclaimed debut novel of 2016, was billed as a story based on the Manson murders. But in fact, like some of the stories in Daddy, her new short-story collection (written over a decade, several have already been published in magazines), it was an investigation into female friendship and what it means to be a teenage girl, when that state in itself makes feelings unreliable, “handicaps your ability to believe yourself”, and when so much time is spent trying “to slur the rough, disappointing edges of boys into the shape of someone we could love”.Daddy’s style is tighter Read more ...
James Dowsett
On Fire brings together a decade’s worth of dispatches from the frontline of the climate disaster – spanning the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill (“a violent wound in the living organism that is Earth itself”), devastating tropical cyclones in Puerto Rico and choking wildfires in British Columbia. Compiled chronologically, the essays of award-winning journalist, social activist and filmmaker Naomi Klein represent a powerful reminder of the startling pace of change. We feel a mounting sense of urgency in the words that she conveys. But Klein does not content herself with simply screaming bloody Read more ...
India Lewis
Coming from a family of farmers, with periods of time spent working on a farm in the past ten years, I found James Rebanks’ English Pastoral: An Inheritance to be a highly urgent, important book. It is a perfect encapsulation and explanation of how and why farming in Britain has changed over the past century, and what a devastating effect this has had on the land. It’s not only the story of one farming family, but also a clear and well-argued proposal for a new attitude towards an essential resource, which has been cheapened and exploited, with ultimately harmful environmental Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
This is a biography like no other, more or less dictated by Lucian Freud. William Feaver spoke with the artist perhaps almost daily for nearly 40 years, visiting frequently, taking notes, recording, and being shown work in progress. The second volume of the resulting kaleidoscope – the two together, the first published last year, come to over 1,100 pages – is a mesmerising, entertaining account of Freud’s life and art. Freud’s own comments on other artists, his own paintings, and art in general, its purposes and his own aesthetic, are intelligent, enlightening and absorbing.Feaver’s Read more ...
Sarah Collins
Nick Hornby’s protagonists are worlds apart. Joseph is a Black 22-year-old with a “portfolio career", which includes shift work at a butcher’s and a leisure centre and the distant dream of becoming a DJ. Lucy, a regular customer at the butcher’s where Joseph works, is a white, forty-two-year-old mother, recently divorced from an addict ex-husband and Head of English at a local “troubled inner city school.” When she asks Joseph to be a babysitter for her two children, the pair embark on an unexpected romantic relationship. Just Like You charts the highs and lows of that journey, as they Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The man called Piranesi lives in a House (he likes Capital Letters, and he tells the story). This House consists of an endless labyrinth, like “an infinite series of classical buildings knitted together”. Each of its Halls measures “approximately 200 metres in length and 120 metres wide” (pretty much the Golden Ratio of classical art and architecture). Alcoves and niches in each Hall contain a multitude of symbolic Statues that resemble Baroque tableaux of ancient myths. Piranesi’s favourites include “the Gorilla, the Young Boy playing the Cymbals, the Woman carrying a Beehive, the Elephant Read more ...
Daniel Lewis
Strange, that novels like this, which seem to have their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, already have a tinge of sepia about them. Set in a bustling east Berlin, this sharply plotted tale of start-up bliss and blunder, then bliss again, sees characters commuting on public transport, working in an office, attending first-thing-in-the-morning “hype sessions” to run-of-the-mill meetings, bouncing in and out of bar-cafes, going on dates in restaurants, jetsetting on same-day return flights, and schmoozing potential clients and buyers at soirees buoyed by champagne, canapes (the least “safe Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
When you try to get rid of something, it comes back to bite you – so says Naomi Booth in her new novel Exit Management. It’s one of those books that you want to read very quickly, its writing slickly modern and its characters compellingly flawed. Lauren is a graduate HR employee specialising in the tricky task of making people redundant. She comes from humble beginnings, but wants to put all that behind her, focusing on the dream apartment and the adjoining shiny City life. Callum is a university drop-out who works in guest hospitality, tending rental properties for the rich and famous before Read more ...
James Dowsett
Readers of Left Out may be surprised to find out how much of party politics is conducted over WhatsApp. The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn had an encrypted chat for every occasion – whether it was to smear a colleague, to slime the “scumbag” press, or (as was the case with two rogue party staffers) to plot the demise of the “Project” from the inside. In their new book, The Times’ Patrick Maguire and Sunday Times’ Gabriel Pogrund exploit their access to dozens of party insiders and a myriad of leaks in order to tell the story of the Labour Party from “Glastonbury to catastrophe.”An 860-page Read more ...