Corruption

The life of Juan Carlos I, Spain’s 88-year-old former king, who reigned from 1975 until his abdication in 2014, falls into two parts: richly deserved triumph followed by richly deserved disgrace. Building on his 2004 biography, Juan Carlos: A People’s King, Paul Preston’s account of this extraordinary life is magisterial. The son of Don Juan de Borbon, the exiled heir to the Spanish throne, Juan Carlos was born in Rome in 1938. With a view to the eventual restoration of an authoritarian monarchy, he was sent to Spain, aged ten, to be indoctrinated in General Franco’s political tenets. He also had to endure the dictator’s long lectures on the mistakes made by previous Spanish monarchs.

Anand Gopal has form when it comes to war. In Afghanistan, distrustful of President Bush’s ‘good vs evil’ and ‘you’re either with us or against us’ narrative, he did what every good reporter does: ‘I learned the language, grew a beard and hit the road like a local.’ The result was No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, a Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist. In its refusal to stick to the script – especially American and British propaganda about all the ‘progress’ which later proved so illusory – the book recalled Michael Herr’s classic Vietnam exposé, Dispatches.

There lived a certain man in Russia long ago. He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow. You know the rest. Antony Beevor’s telling of the story of Grigory Rasputin will surely be the greatest literary chart hit of the year. That the life and death of one of history’s most extraordinary charlatans is a well-known and often-told morality tale doesn’t matter. Beevor makes no claim to have uncovered any great revelations. Rather, he carefully sifts Okhrana surveillance logs, court diaries, memoirs, the Empress’s correspondence and contemporary press accounts and, with his characteristically sharp eye for telling detail, extracts enough gems to decorate a whole Romanov party dress. For instance, the Empress’s letters to Rasputin make for startling reading.

Rime Allaf takes the long view of Syria’s descent into hell. Her story begins with President Hafez al Assad, the architect of the socialist Baathist dictatorship that, from 1970 to 2000, immiserated and impoverished an entire nation before his son and successor Bashar utterly destroyed it. It Started in Damascus is part history, part memoir, the story of a people whose hopes for a better life have been consistently strangled by the Assad dynasty for more than half a century. A Syrian-born writer and analyst who comes from a distinguished diplomatic family, Allaf is unflinching when she trains her sights on regime depravity. It makes for disturbing, compulsive and at times heart-in-the-mouth reading.

Twenty years on from winning the Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai returns with a vast masterpiece of a love story which has been longlisted for this year’s prize. Our two protagonists, Sonia and Sunny, come from wealthy neighbouring families in Allahabad, but both are in America when the novel begins. Sonia is in Vermont, working for the college library while finishing her studies, and Sunny is in New York, as a reporter for the Associated Press. When Sonia flees a coercive relationship after suffering depression and Sunny agrees to help a childhood friend choose a bride, they both return to India, where they encounter one another on a train from Delhi to Allahabad.

In the 18th century, the cash-strapped British crown imposed customs duties on tea imports that rose as high as 119 per cent. Unsurprisingly, such huge tariffs sparked a smuggling boom in coastal towns such as Deal, in Kent, where the cliffs were pockmarked with secret tunnels and half the inhabitants lived off profits from such illicit activities. When the government tried to crack down in 1781, it had to send in a 1,000-strong militia, headed by 100 men on horseback. Yet smuggling may have accounted for more than half of England’s trade at the time – and it often involved respected figures in communities who regularly bribed officials. This underlines how the imposition of taxes creates illegal markets that can eat into state revenues and corrupt society.

The tale of Credit Suisse ought to be Buddenbrooks on steroids. A staid Swiss lender enters marriage with a racy Wall Street investment bank and gives birth to a monster. Scandal follows scandal. CEOs come and go. In March 2023, the bank ends up being flogged to its arch rival UBS for a miserly $3 billion. Inside Credit Suisse, the backstabbing and treachery were more suited to a medieval court Duncan Mavin is well placed to tell this corporate horror story, having written a book about one of Credit Suisse’s most notorious clients, Lex Greensill, an Australian melon farmer turned fintech champion. Greensill Capital, which employed David Cameron as a Whitehall lobbyist and international frontman, turned out to be a house of cards.

The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of two ostensibly literary novels (both longlisted for the Booker prize), Burnet has also written a trilogy of self-declared thrillers. Yet the concluding volume, A Case of Matricide, demonstrates literary talent of the highest order. It features the same protagonist as in the two earlier volumes – Inspector Georges Gorski, chef de police in Saint-Louis, a provincial French town near the Swiss border. Divorced from his wealthy wife, whose father is the corrupt and powerful mayor of Saint-Louis, Gorski lives rather sadly with his mother, who suffers from increasing dementia.

A better title for this book might have been ‘Lula: A Drama’. In the first of two long- anticipated volumes, Fernando Morais has delivered an unconventional but riveting account of the key moments of tumult in the career of Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-11; 2023-present). A veteran journalist, Morais is clinical in his detail of the underground union gatherings, abject poverty and family tragedy which formed Lula. He brings São Paulo’s working-class culture to life throughout, with popular car brands, pop songs and sessions of cachaça and gin rummy ever present. Lula’s upbringing was marred by hardship.

Imagine: it’s 16 December 2004 and you are a middle-ranking banker living in Moscow – prosperous but ordinary, a long way below oligarch level. You are looking forward to a New Year’s trip with your family to Prague – the hotel is booked; your young son is excited. Your phone rings while you are at lunch: an investigator whom you’ve never heard of asks you to come and answer a few questions. You ask if tomorrow will do. ‘No, you must come today,’ insists the caller. ‘It’ll take around 20 minutes.’ What do you do? If this were the beginning of a thriller, Vladimir Pereverzin would have instantly made his way to the secret lock-up with the false identity documents and gone on the run.