More from Books

Thursday

Ian Thomson

The new age of the refugee

After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered warmth and blazing beauty of Jamaica have remained with some British West Indians for over half a century of exile. Yet 100 changes will have occurred since they left. Long brooding over the loss of one’s homeland can exaggerate its charm and sweetness. The first mass immigration to British shores occurred in the late 19th century, when Ashkenazim arrived by the thousand after escaping the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. Many changed their names and even their accents. The trappings of orthodoxy — beards, sidelocks — left them vulnerable to anti-Semitic abuse as they settled in cramped London streets north of Whitechapel Road.

Thursday

Jeff Noon

Latest crime fiction

Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (Pushkin Press, £14.99) is set in 1972 and moves back and forth between a North African city and a small unruly town surrounding an oasis. One man is on the run through the desert regions: he has no name, no memory and no clue as to why he’s being pursued by at least three different parties, all intent on doing him harm. Other characters inter-mingle with this tale of woe: ineffectual detectives, a glamorous sales agent, a commune of hippies, and a paranoid spy whose sense of purpose evaporates in the midday heat. The sun bakes the streets, the sand, people’s faces. And their minds. The amnesiac really does suffer, painfully at times, running blindly from one problem to the next.

Mark Cocker

On matters maritime

The Greenland shark has to be one of the most fascinating creatures of which you’ve probably never heard. Growing sometimes to 25ft, it is the largest flesh-eating shark, longer even than a great white. It dwells in the deepest northern oceans. It eats seabirds, huge fish and seals, most of which it probably surprises and devours on the seabed. The youngest Greenland shark of reproductive age is 100 and the oldest may have been alive when the Mayflower set sail. It is, thus, the longest-lived vertebrate life form on the planet. Whalers and the native people of the Arctic have hunted it for centuries, primarily for the immense oil-rich liver. Yet catching one is no easy business. As the author notes, the teeth are like ‘over-sized steel traps’.

Viv Groskop

Beyond the pale

You can tell everything you need to know about what Victoria Lomasko thinks of her homeland by the titles of this book’s two sections: ‘Invisible’ and ‘Angry’. A graphic artist from Serpukhov, just south of Moscow, Lomasko spent eight years documenting people from all walks of life across Russia, producing drawing and commentary about the ‘Russia that is hardly ever seen’. Many of her fellow citizens feel invisible. Almost all of them are angry. The effect of seeing this in cartoon form is disturbing, impressive and fascinating. The subject matter she is dealing with is almost unbearable: juvenile prison wards, sex workers, protesters affected by Russia’s homophobic laws.

Dominic Cummings

China syndrome | 13 July 2017

Every day on his way to work at Harvard, Professor Allison wondered how the reconstruction of the bridge over Boston’s Charles River could take years while in China bigger bridges are replaced in days. His book tells the extraordinary story of China’s transformation since Deng abandoned Mao’s catastrophic Stalinism, and considers whether the story will end in war between China and America. China erects skyscrapers in weeks while Parliament delays Heathrow expansion for over a decade. The EU discusses dumb rules made 60 years ago while China produces a Greece-sized economy every 16 weeks. China’s economy doubles roughly every seven years; it is already the size of America’s and will likely dwarf it in 20 years.

Tim Martin

Self’s obsessions

This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a tank commander in Iraq, an autistic computer genius, the autistic computer genius’s mother and a closeted MI6 spy who thinks his cock is talking to him — which, for this stage in Will Self’s writing career, is pretty much situation normal. Readers of Umbrella (2012) and Shark (2014) will know the score already, as this is the third instalment in a loose trilogy following Self’s recurring psychotherapist Zack Busner as well as several generations of a family called Death (De’Ath for the posh ones).

Andreas Campomar

Voices of exile

During the military dictatorships of the 1970s, exile for many Latin American writers was not so much a state of being as a vocation. Some were given early warning of what might befall them if they stayed. The polemicist Eduardo Galeano remembered receiving an evening telephone call from the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance: ‘We’re going to kill you, you bastards.’ ‘The schedule for calling in threats, sir, is from six to eight,’ I answer. I hang up and congratulate myself... But I want to stand up and I can’t: my legs are limp rags. Other writers were not so lucky. Antonio di Benedetto was rounded up in the first wave of arrests in 1976 and sent to prison, where he was tortured over a period of 18 months.

Thursday

Simon Kuper

Always the Superbrat

John McEnroe’s father calls. In fact, he calls McEnroe’s manager’s phone, presumably because dad doesn’t have a direct line to the great man himself. John Sr, who is tennis-mad, has a request: can he come with his son to a veterans’ tournament in Belgium? McEnroe is horrified. Having dad around is a major drag. ‘I was about to say absolutely not,’ he writes — when his old rival Björn Borg, who happens to be dining with him, interjects: ‘Let me speak to him.’ Borg, who had lost his own father three years earlier, tells McEnroe Sr: ‘Don’t worry, JP, if John doesn’t bring you to Knokke-Heist, I will.

Katrina Gulliver

Crossing the pond

What led a person in 17th-century England to get on a ship bound for the Americas? James Evans attempts to answer that question by exploring both the push and pull factors involved. His descriptions are vivid, so the reader can imagine the life choices that would lead to one finding oneself heaving up over the side of a small ship somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, or watching the burial at sea of a fellow passenger, and hoping to God one had made the right choice. God, of course, was a big part of the choice for many of them. The Mayflower pilgrims, who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, are the quintessential ‘religious liberty’ seekers, so many of whom headed across the Atlantic.

Philip Hensher

In defiance of Il Duce

The details of Mussolini’s fascism are perhaps not quite as familiar in this country as they might be. Even quite well-meaning people have a tendency to treat him as, in part, a joke. Just how horrible the period was needs to be explained with reference to individual lives. Caroline Moorehead’s book about the Rosselli family, who were central to the principled resistance, has a valuable and sobering subject. They were intellectual and idealistic Jews. The matriarch, Amelia, from an eminent Venetian family, had married a clever and dissolute man. They had three sons together before Amelia had enough of his philandering, and left him with the children. She settled in Florence, and made a place for herself in radical Italian society.

Alex Clark

Mother Medea

Medea’s continuing hold over spinners of tall tales from Euripides to Chaucer to Pasolini needs little explanation; she’s an archetype with everything going for her. As a fratricide and murderer of her own children, among assorted other acts of blood lust, her acts of brutality are so transgressive and symbolic that they offer themselves up to psychoanalytic deconstruction; as a woman abandoned and betrayed by Jason, for whom she has arguably risked everything, she presents herself neatly as a sacrifice thrown to the god of male ambition, arrogance and insecurity.

Laura Freeman

Something nasty in the woodshed

I’ve diagnosed myself with early onset cottage-itis. It’s not supposed to happen for another decade, but at 29 I dream of just the smallest bolthole in the country: a bothy, a gatehouse, a folly below the ha-ha in someone else’s stately home. A shepherd’s hut in tasteful shades of prime ministerial greige. Liberated from the city I would be a nicer, calmer, more industrious person. I would write my magnum opus and be self-sufficient in rhubarb crumble. Every morning when the drills start on the cycle super-highway that will speed the passage of Deliveroo couriers through west London, I put my head in my hands and will myself into a gingerbread cottage in the country. Be careful what you wish for, is Amanda Craig’s message.

Boyd Tonkin

Hot Spring

Imagine if Kathy Lette — or possibly Julie Burchill — had written a feminist, magic-realist saga that sent four women on a road-trip around the broiling hotspots of the Arab Spring. No, not easy to do — yet the intrepid Turkish journalist and writer Ece Temelkuran has, in this novel, come up with just that sort of pantomime chimera. Temelkuran, an outspoken truth-teller whose fearless reportage has jeopardised both her livelihood and security in Turkey, flings together a quartet of ill-assorted travellers — one of whom resembles the author. She whisks them around the crisis zones of the eastern Mediterranean just as revolutions flare and tyrants tumble.

Leyla Sanai

Doctor of humility

Henry Marsh’s book Do No Harm (2014) was that rare thing — a neurosurgeon showing his fallibility in public and admitting to the great harm that good intentions can cause. It was a stunning, even revolutionary work, displacing doctors from their traditional ivory towers and showing them to be not only human and vulnerable to misjudgments, but also capable of self-admonishment and regret. At the time, I said it should be required reading for medical students. The follow-up, Admissions, continues the theme of self-examination. Marsh is an atheist, and in many ways his writing is like a secular confessional — hence the dual meaning of ‘admissions’.

Claire Kohda

A woman of some importance | 6 July 2017

It might seem unlikely that a Christian noblewoman could have had influence over a Muslim city in the 13th century, when women were considered by Muslim society as being ‘underlings without complete intelligence’ and by Christian society as ‘a fish hook of the devil… a source of evil… a treasury of filth’. However, Tamta — a woman of Armenian Christian heritage, who travelled extensively and acted as a link between people of various faiths and backgrounds — seems to have governed, influenced taxation, provided passage for pilgrimage and even, possibly, played a role in battles and military negotiations, in Akhlat, a Muslim city in what is now Turkey, in the early 1200s.

Allan Mallinson

Northern exposure | 6 July 2017

Amid the shambles that was the Anglo-French campaign in Norway in April and May 1940, a French officer observed that ‘the British have planned this campaign on the lines of a punitive expedition against the Zulus, but unhappily we and the British are in the position of the Zulus’. A month later, many British officers would be pronouncing on French generalship equally tartly during the shambles that was the Fall of France. On the whole it doesn’t do to criticise allies, but soldiers have got to be able to grumble about somebody, and it’s best (at the time, at least) to lay the blame elsewhere than one’s own high command.

Ruth Scurr

Dark night of the soul

As bombs fall everywhere in Syria and IS fighters destroy Palmyra, a musicologist in Vienna lies awake all night thinking of the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, where he stayed in 1996, following in the footsteps of Lawrence of Arabia, Agatha Christie and King Faisal. He remembers the hotel’s Ottoman ogival windows and its monumental staircase, with its old, worn-out rugs and shabby rooms where there were still useless bakelite telephones and metal clawfoot bathtubs whose pipes sounded like a heavy machine gun whenever you turned on the tap, in the midst of faded wallpaper and rust-stained bedspreads. In 1996 Franz Ritter was travelling with a fellow student, Sarah, a beautiful French woman, studying for her PhD in Orientalism.

Thursday

Frank Brinkley

A choice of first novels | 29 June 2017

Patty Yumi Cottrell’s blackly comic and sophisticated debut Sorry to Disturb the Peace (And Other Stories, £10) opens with Helen Moran learning that her brother —adopted, as she was — has committed suicide. Helen lives in New York, working with troubled teenagers who have dubbed her ‘Sister Reliability’. Against familial expectations she returns to Milwaukee to her adoptive parents’ home for the funeral. But Helen has not arrived simply to grieve: Perhaps to investigate his death would revitalise my own life, and if I could communicate my eventual findings to them, it would strengthen and support the lives of my adoptive parents as well.

Jonathan Mcaloon

Life classes

It has taken much of a celebrated literary life for Elif Batuman to produce a novel. At the beginning of her wonderful 2010 book The Possessed —a chimera of memoir, travelogue and literary criticism — she declares: I remember believing firmly that the best novels drew their material and inspiration exclusively from life... and that, as an aspiring novelist, I should therefore try not to read too many novels. Selin, the Turkish-American protagonist of her first novel, is engaged in gathering writerly experience at Harvard, reading novels and falling for Ivan, a Hungarian mathematics student with a girlfriend. The pair begin an online relationship at the dawn of email.

Dominic Green

Vice guys

In 1981, an FBI team visited Donald Trump to discuss his plans for a casino in Atlantic City. Trump admitted to having ‘read in the press’ and ‘heard from acquaintances’ that the Mob ran Atlantic City. At the time, Trump’s acquaintances included his lawyer Roy Cohn, whose other clients included those charming New York businessmen Antony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul ‘Big Paul’ Castellano. ‘I’ve known some tough cookies over the years,’ Trump boasted in 2016. ‘I’ve known the people that make the politicians you and I deal with every day look like little babies.’ No one minded too much. Organised crime is a tapeworm in the gut of American commerce, lodged since Prohibition.