Non-Fiction
Klein starts with people confusing her with the “other Naomi” (Wolf), using Wolf’s move to the conspiracy fringe to explore how technology has divided culture into opposing mirror image doubles.
An epic and prophetic account of the May 2016 destruction of Fort McMurray, Alberta, by a ferocious urban wildfire, Valliant’s book was published as fire obliterated Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Expect more.
From the cell’s discovery by English polymath Robert Hooke and Dutch cloth merchant Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 1600s, through to future medicine that may defeat Alzheimer’s and lung cancer, all cellular life is here. Read more.
“We should understand race in Britain through a British perspective, and we shouldn’t reduce black people to their race,” Owolade argues, opposing the exporting of US race politics to these shores.
The Rest is Politics presenters Stewart vs Campbell are the least combative double act in podcasting. Both have books out, and both play to type. Campbell calls to arms to save the country’s politics, while Stewart’s memoir is laced with melancholy.
Fiction
Four members of an Irish clan capsized by the 2008 recession take turns to narrate in this vertiginously entertaining, horribly poignant novel about the nature of families, personal histories, and storytelling itself.
The Booker panel lost their mettle in not awarding the prize to this sly, elusive, mysterious fable about a woman abroad in a hostile new country. You’ll be pondering it for months.
The lives of those who inhabit the same patch of land in Massachusetts over a 400-year period are constructed with flamboyant precision and playful connectivity in this giddily inventive take on the historical novel.
An extraordinary debut about an 11 year-old girl who turns to squash in the aftermath of her mother’s death. It’s deceptively quiet and still, and saturated with life and feeling. Maroo is a major talent.
The hypnotic fugitive rhythms of the underground dub scene of 1970s South London are conjured with almost mystical power in this blazing debut about a young black woman coming of age in London and Jamaica.
