Culture

One critic memorably described Waiting for Godot as a play in which nothing happens, twice. Twenty Minutes of Silence is a novel in which something happens, repeatedly. Ina luxurious villa in northern France a man lies dead, surrounded by disorder – apparently a robbery gone wrong. When the police arrive, they find he was shot with his own gun and the murder weapon is missing. His wife and 15-year-old son become suspects. What is really going on here? Again and again we are taken through the night’s events, starting afresh each time. The dead man was a multi-millionaire with dubious associates. The marriage relationship seems ambiguous: the wife could have been deceived or unfaithful.

China and Russia are twins. Both are great Asian land empires; both are continental, multi-ethnic powers that expanded by pushing forward their borders rather than by crossing oceans; both have a deep tradition of autocracy that survives to this day; and both (more plausibly in China’s case) believe that their social contract, ideology and system of government is a universal one superior to all others. In Entangled Empires, the German historians Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner explore the convoluted story of Russo-Chinese relations from the moment in the mid-17th century that roving Cossack bands bumped up against Siberian tribes who owed fealty to Beijing up to the latest performative amity between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Child narrators are tricky little beasts. Misjudge their vocabulary and they lose all credibility or are unreadably twee. Even the brightest young minds can’t penetrate the nuance of adult life, which limits their perspective and reliability. That, though, can be a positive in the right hands. Throw them into an unstable family (show me a stable fictional family?) and they really start pulling their weight. Enter Frank Dart, Charlotte Edwardes’s first-person protagonist in Trouble Was, her debut novel. He is nine years old, something Edwardes makes us work out for ourselves, which is a neat taster of everything Frank has to figure out for himself.

I finished reading The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, and leaned out of my attic window to smoke and think about it, when there among the tumbling spires of the apple trees was a spasm of fluttering and a flurry of notes: two spotted flycatchers! One held the air for a moment, hovering and looking me in the eye, and then darted back to its perch while the other called. It has been years since we have seen them, and straight to my bird books I went. The Book of Birds was no help because it does not include the spotted flycatcher and is not designed as a recognition guide. Instead, Macfarlane writes: ‘Ours is a field guide with a difference... It asks not “What is that bird?” but “Who is that bird?”. The aim is to help readers identify with them.

At first glance, Tie Ning’s The Passage of Roses appears to be yet another Chinese novel set during the Cultural Revolution in which bourgeois families and pre-1949 intellectuals are purged and banished. But the unnerving characters of Si Yiwen and her granddaughter Mei, whom Si cares for, influences and later harms, soon promise something different. Born into wealth in Old China, Si survives under the new regime as a marginal housewife, insignificant enough to avoid persecution. Yet it is precisely this insignificance that piques her desire for recognition. From an early age, she was denied love with a young revolutionary and was then ignored by her husband and in-laws. Now she finds herself drawn to the political fervour like a moth to a flame.

Most conventional second world war military histories focus on weapons, materiel and even the manpower needed for a decisive victory over Hitler and the Axis powers. Little has been written about blood as a strategic resource. However, a pioneering service of specially trained medics who worked dangerously close to the front lines, pumping blood into the veins of battle casualties, saved not only lives but contributed significantly to winning the war. They did this by returning men to the front line and boosting morale by persuading them that, if wounded, they had the maximum chance of life.