Books

The question at the heart of Amanda Knox’s latest memoir Free: My Search For Meaning is a simple one: what are the life prospects for an exoneree? It follows 2013’s Waiting to be Heard, which detailed the Seattle student’s imprisonment in Italy before and after a wrongful murder conviction, and her fight for justice. For anyone who was asleep under a boulder at the time, Knox is the gauche American student who became the target of a media firestorm following the brutal murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. She was convicted of the crime alongside her boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito in 2009 and freed on appeal in 2011. (Kercher’s actual murderer, Rudy Guede, was convicted in a fast-track trial in 2008, and released in 2021.

In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book, The Apple, shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that makes it the ideal punchline for Spector, and, for Coulthard, a perfect vehicle to carry the history of how we grow, trade, cook and eat together and take responsibility for each other and the environment (or not).

It has never been easier, or less rewarding, to be a Great Gatsby bore. As the book that is frequently, and speciously, cited as the Great American Novel — perhaps because, at around 180 pages, people have bothered to read it — turns 100 this month, it has become the byword for a certain kind of middlebrow literary appreciation. Even people who are barely aware of the novel know certain images and lines, such as the omnipresent lighthouse, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” and the whole Ralph Lauren-esque visual aesthetic that F. Scott Fitzgerald appeared to anticipate. The novel, published in April 1925, has achieved the impossible by breaking free of the page and reverberating across the world in a kind of endless meta-narrative.

Russia’s war on Ukraine presages a dire future for all of Europe unless Vladimir Putin’s military is decisively defeated. That is the powerful and persuasive argument advanced in Keir Giles’s new book. To appreciate fully the importance of his contentions, you must acknowledge not only Giles’s own status as a supremely well-connected senior fellow at the famed Chatham House think tank in London but even more so the all-star cast of international military luminaries who have publicly endorsed his analysis: the now-retired US generals John Allen and Ben Hodges, UK general David Richards, Australian general Mick Ryan, plus former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Giles’s assertions thus should be taken with the utmost seriousness.

I know that our readers have led varied and colorful lives, but I would suggest that few, if indeed any, of you have spent decades cowering under the daily terror of a fatwah imposed upon you by a totalitarian state because of a literary novel that you once wrote. I would also suggest that, when Salman Rushdie — for he had that dubious privilege — emerged from a lengthy, frightening and tedious period of hiding, he chose to immerse himself in the social life of both London and the United States to show that he was not afraid, and that the threats and grimacing of extremists did not mean that he was not entitled to lead his own version of his best life. He was right to do so.

Evie Wyld’s powerful fourth novel opens from the perspective of Max, a ghost who haunts the south London apartment where he lived with his girlfriend Hannah. A ghost story is new ground for Wyld, the multi-award-winning Anglo-Australian writer, but her signature traits are immediately evident — poetic observations of unusual details; a pervasive sense of grief and palpable trauma, leavened with a wry sense of humor (Max notes his "strong urge to file a complaint" about being a ghost); and an intricate plot that compels readers to delve into complex past events.

What’s in a name? Well, if it’s Einstein, quite a lot. For Roberto Einstein, it was to prove a devastating connection, even though he had lived in Italy all his adult life, was married to an Italian Christian woman, Nina, with whom he had two children who regularly attended church, and was father to two motherless nieces who were brought up Catholic. In 1944, the increasingly paranoid German occupation decided that Roberto’s whole family was Jewish and inextricably linked to the world-famous Nobel prizewinning scientist Albert Einstein, now in America and high on the Nazi death list. There were connections, of course. Roberto and Albert were first cousins — their fathers were brothers — and were both committed atheists.