Books

Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent burst into the world in 1987, zinging out of bookstores into bestseller-dom like nobody’s business. It concerned Rusty Sabich, a lawyer who became a suspect in the case he was prosecuting. There were enough twists and turns to satisfy the most Daedalian of labyrinth-makers, and its longevity was demonstrated by its being adapted into a new, Jake Gyllenhaal-starring show last year on Apple TV+. Presumed Guilty’s title plays nicely on its predecessor’s, and also points toward this new book’s consideration of racism within the American justice system. Sabich is now an old man, nearing his eighties. But boy, is he active. We know this because he likes to canoe while stripped to the waist. He chops wood in the outdoors!

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.

For a few days in February 2000, Masayoshi Son was the richest person in the world. A risk-taker and showman, universally known as Masa, he had long been disdainful of Japan’s staid "salaryman" business culture and was riding the wave of dot-com mania. His company SoftBank, founded in 1981, had bet big on the growth of online shopping. The bullish mood didn’t last, and Masa slunk away from the limelight — but only for a while. A techno-optimist, the now sixty-seven-year-old has repeatedly reinvented himself, urging doubters to see beyond the immediate: "You’re limiting your field of vision to thirty years… Start bold and think 300 years ahead.

"Gliff" is a word which can mean "a short moment," "a wallop," and "a post-ejaculatory sex act;" to "dispel snow," "to frighten," and to "escape something quickly." It’s "really excitingly polysemous," says one of Ali Smith’s characters. It’s certainly an apt title for a book which can’t seem to define itself. At its center are two children, Briar and Rose, who have been abandoned. Their mother is absent, caring for a sick sister, and their other responsible adult leaves to find her. The children exist in a stock dystopian world (people are surveilled by CCTV cameras and zombified by screens) with a twist: they repeatedly wake up to find that a red line has been painted around their house or camper van. They are on a list of "Unverifiables.

In February 1974, the British prime minister Edward Heath, then facing one of his country’s cyclical economic crises, called a snap general election. The result was close; Heath’s Conservative Party won the popular vote but secured fewer parliamentary seats than the Labour opposition. After power-sharing discussions broke down, Heath resigned from office. A fifty-seven-year-old bachelor without a London home of his own, he lodged for the next several months at a small Westminster flat owned by his political secretary Timothy Kitson. The man who had served as his nation’s head of government for the previous four years was left with a typist, a single daytime detective and a part-time driver at his disposal.