If you’re still choosing Christmas gifts, consider…
Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. The author’s strangely poetic account of being rushed on stage by a black-clad assassin who stabbed him in frenzy at a literary event in 2022. An erudite love letter to literature and Rushdie’s wife.
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan. Flanagan weaves his confusion over Hiroshima saving his PoW father’s life with his attempts to understand his parents, the Tasmanian genocide, and questions of guilt, morality and narrative. A beautifully written meditation on unanswerable questions.
The Picnic by Matthew Longo. In the summer of 1989, a group of Hungarian activists picnicked in the forbidden militarised zone of the Iron Curtain, joined by East German holidaymakers. Told through interviews, this unreported moment in history unspools the role of ordinary citizens in ending the Cold War.
Street Level Superstar: A Year with Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson. What happens when fame does not call? This affecting account of the eponymous failed could-have-been indie star playing tiny gigs and bemoaning his lot with little grace and plenty of hopeless delusion is sympathetic but clear-eyed.
