Fiction
A dazzling sequel
Crook Manifesto
Colson Whitehead
Crook Manifesto Colson Whitehead
A dazzling sequel
In his last novel, 2021’s Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead introduced us to Ray Carney, a vibrant creation of fierce contradictions. A family man and respectable businessman, he’s constantly drawn back into the nefarious legacy of his own father’s villainy. As a furniture salesman and occasional receiver of stolen goods, his dual occupations reflect these polarities. His legitimate enterprise is one of modish interiors and the promise of comfort; his crooked side hustle plays out in the harsh exterior and threat of the street. And he’s not just holding it together in his own being – he’s somehow making sense of the chaotic environment of 1960s New York.
This compelling juxtaposition intensifies as we move into the 1970s with Whitehead’s follow-up, Crook Manifesto. Carney has been going straight: “four years of honest and rewarding work in home furnishings”, as the period style moves from sedate mid-century modern into the mad extremes of that most garish of decades. The city beyond is spiralling into an apocalyptic decline, nearing bankruptcy with staggering levels of crime, corruption and political violence. But it’s a simple act of parental generosity that gets him into real trouble once more.
Two-time Pulitzer-winning author Whitehead shows no sign of resting on his laurels. Crook Manifesto continues the brilliantly realised sequence that began with Harlem Shuffle, intricately depicting cultural history and family drama with the compelling energy of a crime thriller and the sharp wit of social satire. Harlem itself is one of the lead characters, and there are echoes of other chroniclers of this burg such as James Baldwin and Chester Himes. In ambition and scope, in the way the intimate is so deftly weaved with the epic, one is also reminded of Balzac. Whitehead has embarked on a great comédie humaine of his own.
Jake Arnott
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Fiction
Criminally entertaining
Chain-Gang All-Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Chain-Gang All-Stars Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Criminally entertaining
Chain-Gang All-Stars is an exuberant circus of a novel, action-packed and expansive, almost too much to process. It plays out in a dystopian US just a shuffle-step from the norm, where predominantly Black prisoners fight not just for the entertainment of a primetime TV audience but, indirectly, for the reader’s benefit too. The narrative explodes in all directions. The tale at the centre is sometimes obscured. The book is unruly and knowingly compromised but it comes fuelled by a sense of thrilling, righteous rage.
Just as most hit TV shows plunder from material that has scored well in the past, so too does Chain-Gang All-Stars, which lifts freely from The Hunger Games and The Running Man, Rollerball and Battle Royale. Where it differs from more straightforward genre fare is in foregrounding what would normally remain as a political subtext. Adjei-Brenyah wants to highlight the factual springboards beneath his flights of fancy, providing footnotes to explain the intricacies of the 13th amendment, the psychological effects of solitary confinement and the 1944 state murder of 14-year-old George Stinney. Chain-Gang All-Stars, he stresses, isn’t fantasy at all. Instead, it’s a nightmarish burlesque about industrialised racism.
Xan Brooks
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Memoir
A pop star’s stinging rebuke
The Woman in Me
Britney Spears
The Woman in Me Britney Spears
A pop star’s stinging rebuke
Over the course of Britney Spears’ career, she was repeatedly subject to narratives constructed to disempower her. She was a teenage pop star presented as a virgin then scolded for a sexualised image sold by those same forces. After her breakup from Justin Timberlake, Spears was vilified and forced to undergo a grilling from Diane Sawyer so severe you might have thought she was a war criminal, not a double denim-wearing singer.
It made her suspicious of entertainment’s gendered double standard, she writes in her highly anticipated memoir, though that was nothing compared with the legal disfranchisement she later experienced. She was advised to divorce husband Kevin Federline to avoid the humiliation of him doing it first, only to take the flak for fracturing their young family. Her 2008 breakdown was conveniently framed as a sign of madness, not a proportional response to exploitation and losing custody of her children. Once she was placed under the conservatorship that would rule her life for 13 years, she became trapped further: “If I became flustered, it was taken as evidence that I wasn’t improving,” she writes. “If I got upset and asserted myself, I was out of control and crazy.”
Anyone looking for starry anecdotes or studio vignettes won’t find them here. Instead, The Woman in Me tells a focused story that makes inarguable the ties between patriarchy and exploitation, and deserves to be read as a cautionary tale and an indictment, not a grab-bag of tabloid revelations. After all Spears has lost, the sharpness of her perspective is a miracle. She repeatedly questions why – whether as a teenager in a crop top “corrupting” the youth, or a 25-year-old getting drunk at the club – she was perceived as “dangerous”. May her truth pose a legitimate threat to the system that exploited her.
Laura Snapes
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Fiction
A sizzling debut of nostalgia and secrets
Kala
Colin Walsh
Kala Colin Walsh
A sizzling debut of nostalgia and secrets
In Colin Walsh’s remarkably assured debut, the eponymous Kala plagues the memories of her former friends as they reunite for the first time in more than a decade in the Irish seaside village of Kinlough.
Spiky journalist Helen has returned, reluctantly, from Canada to attend her father’s wedding. LA-based rock star Joe Brennan is back for a series of gigs, basking in the role of local boy done (very) good. Meanwhile, sweet, self-conscious Mush never left – he still spends his days working in his mum’s coffee shop and his nights nursing cans of beer, wondering what might have been.
As wildly different as their lives now are, these three were once part of the close-knit group that had beautiful, magnetic Kala Lannan at its white-hot centre. However, at the end of the summer of 2003 she disappeared without a trace; 15 years on – the morning after her friends’ reunion – Kala’s remains are found on a building site at the edge of town.
The novel jumps back and forth between the resulting police investigation and the events of that fatal, sweltering summer. The momentum builds via a series of dramatic turns, culminating in a genuinely shocking twist. And yet, as with the novels of fellow Irish author Tana French, there is much to savour beyond the thrilling plot. The characterisation is particularly strong, each psychological portrait richly drawn; the prose is beautifully atmospheric throughout. Kala is both a genuine page-turner and a profound meditation on memory and how it shapes our lives – how our past selves forever haunt the people we become.
Ruth Gilligan
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Environment
The London mayor's climate emergency manifesto
Breathe
Sadiq Khan
Breathe Sadiq Khan
The London mayor's climate emergency manifesto
Sadiq Khan’s first book is ostensibly structured as a self-help title in the vein of, say, Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It tackles his commitment to “effective climate action” and presents obstacles – fatalism, apathy, cynicism, deprioritisation, hostility, cost and gridlock – and then addresses how to overcome them. But it is also a memoir in which each one of the seven chapters concerns a new episode in the story of Khan’s political career, framed around the personal awakening that took place in the aftermath of his 2015 selection as Labour’s candidate for London mayor.
Khan covers his key achievements in office including the delivery on the city’s declaration of a climate emergency in 2018, the introduction of the ultra-low emission zone [ULEZ] in 2019, London’s designation as the first “national park city” in 2019 and leadership, since December 2021, of C40 Cities, a mayors’ network, which now speaks, Khan writes, for “over 700 million citizens [around the world] and one quarter of the global economy” and through which London’s climate policies have “gone global”. A further term, he suggests, could see the fruition of plans to “make public transport better and more appealing… plans for a further £3m mass-tree-planting initiative and to introduce a new, more comprehensive road-user charging system”.
As ideas, these are not the most visionary, and Breathe will not score Khan points for political imagination, but the strategic lessons he imparts do mark him out as an exemplar for an age of climate breakdown and progressive governance. The book succeeds as a manual, too, for how to elevate the public discourse and deserves to be widely read, not least by a Labour leadership that has shown itself increasingly open to falling back on questionable campaign lines.
Ahead of the general election, Khan’s book reminds us that this approach didn’t work for Goldsmith at the ballot box. Ultimately, as its title promises, Breathe is a breath of fresh air, offering an antidote to cynicism and demonstrating the power of a politics that aims to bring people together in the search for solutions.
Ashish Ghadiali
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Short stories
Brilliantly subversive stories
After the Funeral
Tessa Hadley
After the Funeral Tessa Hadley
Brilliantly subversive stories
Tessa Hadley presents everything as fine at the front while it comes apart comprehensively at the back. The dozen short stories that comprise After the Funeral, her absorbing and thoroughly readable fourth collection, manage with a quiet dexterity the emotional situations that promote this kind of undoing.
In a 2007 review of Hadley’s first collection, Anne Enright described her as “immensely subversive” – a judgment that has only gathered force since. Whatever Hadley’s characters believe about themselves, they’re always working hard for change, striving, consciously or otherwise, to knock the props out from under whatever life they’re leading.
M John Harrison
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Science
The science of a fabric
Silk
Aarathi Prasad
Silk Aarathi Prasad
The science of a fabric
When she was a child, author and biologist Aarathi Prasad saw the threads of the silkworm (Bombyx mori) being woven “on hand looms in the south of India, intricately interlaced with fine gold wire”, to make the exquisite garments that her female relatives wore on special occasions. She also kept silkworms, feeding them on mulberry leaves and watching them grow, weave silk cocoons and finally emerge as “small, pale and flightless” moths. As she writes in this evocative and fascinating study of its history, science and cultural importance, “silk is a precious – and a mysterious – thing”.
Bred for domestication during the Neolithic period, between 9,500 and 7,500 years ago, the silk of Bombyx mori was the most prized of all textiles in early Chinese empires, used as tributes and even to pay armies: “silk was imbued with as many forms as the metamorphosing insect that had created it and as much power”. Five-thousand-year-old carvings of silkworms have been discovered in Chinese graves, buried “with a prayer that death was merely a kind of sleep within which we might transform, from whose bindings we, too, might escape”.
As Prasad shows, it’s not just silkworms that produce silk. Astonishingly, there is sea silk, sometimes called “byssus”, produced by the Pinna nobilis marine mollusc, which at a metre long is one of the largest shelled animals in the Mediterranean. It forms a silken foot to anchor it to the seabed and these golden threads were once both coveted and costly. Spider’s silk was also harvested in the eighteenth century and it was said that gloves made from it were many times lighter than even ones from the silk of Bombyx mori. In the Second World War, spider’s silk was used for the crosshairs in bombsights. More recently, there have even been attempts to produce spider’s silk using genetically modified “spider-goats” that make silk proteins in their milk.
From the seventeenth-century naturalists and anatomists who first probed the biological secrets of silkworms, to modern technological uses of silk, such as creating temperature-stabilized vaccines that don’t need refrigeration and implantables embedded with sensors that could become part of our cyborg future, Prasad is especially good at revealing the remarkable science of silk. As she explains, what began as a luxurious cloth and a conduit of trade between nations along the Silk Road is today seen as an extraordinarily versatile substance that promises sustainable solutions to some of our most pressing problems: “in this one material lies our protean relationship with the natural world”.
PD Smith
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Biography
The spy who loved me
The Secret Life of John le Carré
Adam Sisman
The Secret Life of John le Carré Adam Sisman
The spy who loved me
In the late stages of writing John le Carré’s biography, a doorstopper of 600-plus pages published in 2015 to largely appreciative reviews, Adam Sisman received an email from the writer’s wife, Jane. Attached was a 22-page memorandum of 196 corrections from the author, some of which queried source material that, as Sisman coolly notes with the mild glee of the vindicated, came from le Carré himself. The entire project – not an officially authorised biography but one undertaken with the knowledge and, to varying degrees, the cooperation of its subject – had been something of a push-me, pull-you affair.
Now comes Sisman’s addendum to his previous book, one that concerns itself largely with the writer’s fondness for “a full and frank exchange of views” – his euphemism, borrowed from his conman father Ronnie, for sex.
Le Carré exchanged views with a lot of women, and several have their say in this book. Last year one of them, Sue Dawson, published her own account of their relationship, which began in 1982 when she worked on the audio version of Smiley’s People. Sue was but one: there was also a dalliance with a pal’s wife, an affair with an American reader that was almost entirely epistolary, an MI5 typist, a French woman who died in a road accident during an aid mission in Kosovo, an au pair and a journalist killed in an embassy bombing in Beirut.
The writer appeared to be a romantic partner almost entirely comprised, in the modern parlance, of red flags. But some of his more preposterous behaviour as a lover – the mawkish devotions, the extravagant gifts, the sudden cooling of affection – speak of someone monstrously unhappy; someone, perhaps, who never felt quite right in his own skin, and had to invent his way out of it.
Alex Clark
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Fiction
A new Nineteen Eighty-Four
Julia
Sandra Newman
Julia Sandra Newman
A new Nineteen Eighty-Four
For decades, feminists have been pointing out undeniable limitations to George Orwell’s work and life. As Deirdre Beddoe put it nearly 40 years ago, he was “totally blind” to the role that women “were and are forced to play”, and this insight is now being vividly fleshed out by other writers. Anna Funder’s recent Wifedom was a fascinating exploration of what it might have meant for Orwell’s wife Eileen to live in his shadow, while Sandra Newman’s novel Julia is an even more ambitious creation.
Here, Newman turns Orwell’s classic vision of the future inside out, and readers will find themselves gripped and surprised by what happens when the object of Winston Smith’s gaze looks back, and retells their journey into love and resistance. I began the book a little sceptical about whether a reimagining of Nineteen Eighty-Four would work as a novel in its own right. Fan fiction can rarely stand on its own, particularly when the source material is as precise and complete as Orwell’s. But Newman delivers on more than one level.
This book stayed powerfully with me. Julia’s will to survive, her childhood experiences, her sensual joys, her relationships with other women, all make this a complex and empathic vision that stands up well beside Orwell’s original, and at many points enriches it.
Natasha Walter
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History
How this city shaped our modern world
Vienna
Richard Cockett
Vienna Richard Cockett
How this city shaped our modern world
According to the journalist and historian Richard Cockett, Vienna “lit the spark for most of Western intellectual and cultural life in the twentieth century”. From psychoanalysis (Freud) and nuclear fission (Lise Meitner), to the design of shopping malls (Victor Gruen) and fitted kitchens (Margarete Lihotzky), Viennese men and women played a crucial role in transforming the way we live and think.
Cockett argues that this was not just due to the golden age of Viennese cultural life in the years before the First World War, when the “sprawling, multiethnic, plurilingual” Austro-Hungarian empire was still ruled by Franz Joseph from Vienna’s beautiful Schönbrunn Palace. Rather he shows that the real key to Vienna’s influence stems from the lesser-known interwar period, when the city council undertook a “radically ambitious democratic experiment in human evolution”. At a time when the rest of Austria was turning to the far right, the socialist city became known as Red Vienna and produced “the last great flourishing of the city’s intellectual and cultural life”.
Thanks to its diverse population drawn from across the Austro-Hungarian empire (in 1910 about half the population was not born in Vienna), at the beginning of the twentieth century it was a uniquely dynamic and tolerant intellectual community: “to be brought up, to be educated and to work in Vienna was to share in a particular, unique, open and cosmopolitan environment.” But this same city was also home to Adolf Hitler and many of the divisive and anti-democratic ideas that shaped him were formed in his mind there before the First World War, in particular the opposition to Viennese liberalism.
In the interwar period however, Cockett argues that the critical rationalism that was the hallmark of Red Vienna’s intellectuals became the antithesis of fascism. From sociology to economics, Vienna’s evidence-led intellectuals believed their ideas should serve real people not ideology, opposed totalitarianism and embraced political pluralism.
The Viennese diaspora have proved to be astonishingly influential, across a wide range of fields. They include film directors, such as Otto Preminger and the “flamboyant, domineering” Fritz Lang, as well as actress Hedy Lamarr, who was also a talented inventor. In the war, she devised a frequency-hopping signal for torpedoes that was hard to jam, an invention that led to Bluetooth wireless communication. Among many outstanding Viennese architects was Richard Neutra, who from the 1920s became synonymous with the new American home and described his profession as “applied biology and psychological treatment”. Viennese émigrés also shaped modern British publishing, from Thames & Hudson, founded by Walter Neurath, to Weidenfeld & Nicolson, co-founded by George Weidenfeld, “Britain’s most famous and certainly best-connected, post-war publisher”.
Cockett’s highly original and informative study offers a remarkable insight into how the people of this diverse and liberal city helped create our modern world. As he rightly says, “we are all in their debt”.
PD Smith
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