This month’s best paperbacks
June
Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some exciting new paperbacks, from the tales of a rock star's past to heartfelt novels
Thu 22 Jun 2023 13.38 BST
Thu 22 Jun 2023 13.38 BST
Fiction
From Karachi to London
Best of Friends
Kamila Shamsie
Best of Friends Kamila Shamsie
From Karachi to London
Literary genres age, much as people do. Postcolonial literature – PoCo to friends – was once an angry young outsider leading the charge against empire. Now, much older and having made some money, PoCo seems to have compromised with the world, depicting chic, transnational lives jetting between humid capital cities and the glamorous locales of New York and London. After a radical youth, it seems, PoCo has put away the placards and started to indulge capitalism.
So say many of PoCo’s former admirers. James Wood, glossing the position of those critics, describes the contrast they see between such “smoothly global” literature and “thorny” novels full of “sharp local particularities”, asking why anyone wouldn’t read “Elena Ferrante over Kamila Shamsie”? The Pakistani-born novelist’s new book is an opportunity to examine that contention, since Best of Friends has much the same premise as Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet: a friendship charted from girlhood to middle age, taking in education, puberty, sex, ideological conflicts, personal rivalries, intimate secrets – all transcribed, however, to one of those “global” contexts.
The best of friends are Zahra and Maryam, both from the cream of Karachi: Zahra the daughter of a cricket journalist, Maryam the heiress to a luxury brand. Although both girls are from the same milieu, Zahra is framed as having an “uncertain social position”. She is introspective and intellectual, compared with waggish, academically indifferent Maryam, who is destined to inherit the family fortune.
The latter part of the novel, where Zahra and Maryam are high-powered women in contemporary London, seems a misjudged appendage to the engrossing earlier narrative, a lapse into smooth globalism. Here the novel loses its bite, I think, because the worlds depicted – big tech, judicial activism – are not ones Shamsie knows as indelibly as that of her alma mater.
Towards the end, in the novel’s only formal experiment, newspaper interviews with the two women are presented. Zahra, sensitive to the unreliable narration of our selves, unpicks the lies, telling Maryam: “We all create our neat narrative arcs, don’t we?” It’s when Shamsie does that herself, crafting the vivid facts of her life into fiction, that Best of Friends is at its admirably thorniest.
Tanjil Rashid
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Fiction
Portrait of a tycoon
Trust
Hernan Diaz
Trust Hernan Diaz
Portrait of a tycoon
“How is reality funded?” asks the wealthy tycoon at the centre of Hernan Diaz’s Booker-longlisted second novel. His answer is “fiction” – specifically, the “fiction of money”. The value of any commodity comes from us buying into its wider narrative. Unless we trust that a banknote “represents concrete goods”, it is just a piece of printed paper, as open to distortion as a novel, or a memoir, or a diary.
Trust incorporates all three of these literary forms. As with David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas or Richard Powers’s The Overstory, its structure relies on interconnected narratives which deepen and destabilise one another. Diaz’s first novel, the Pulitzer prize finalist In the Distance, was about a penniless young Swedish immigrant meeting swindlers and fanatics in California. In Trust, he has built a postmodern version of a historical novel around a character at the other end of the economic scale – a Gatsby-like tycoon in 1920s New York who dutifully hosts lavish parties at which he is rarely glimpsed. His name is Andrew Bevel, a guy who becomes “a wealthy man by playing the part of a wealthy man”. At his side is his seemingly longsuffering wife, Mildred, a figure occasionally reminiscent of Zelda Fitzgerald.
It is perhaps telling that Diaz started his writing life with a scholarly text about Jorges Luis Borges, who once wrote that money represents “a panoply of possible futures”. A Borgesian sense of play imbues almost every page of Trust, along with a dash of Italo Calvino’s love of exploring different versions of a single idea or city. Through perfectly formed sentences and the skilful unpicking of certainties, Trust creates a great portrait of New York across an entire century of change – a metropolis that is “the capital of the future”, yet consists of citizens who are “nostalgic by nature”. A city that, in other words, looks backwards and forwards at the same time – as any place that mixes old money and new money must. Trust is so packed full of ironies that it can sometimes feel airless. But it is also a work possessed of real power and purpose. It invites us to think about why the category of imaginative play we most heavily reward as a society is the playing of financial markets, often at a heavy cost. It’s a testament to Diaz’s cunning abilities as a writer that you end his book thinking that – if truth is your goal – you might be better off relying on a novelist than a banker.
Jonathan Lee
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Letters
Missives accomplished
A Private Spy
John le Carré
A Private Spy John le Carré
Missives accomplished
John le Carré – David Cornwell as he then was – grew up among the lies of his fraudster father Ronnie. He then entered a world of secrets, reporting on leftist students when he was at Oxford before working in intelligence for MI5 and MI6. Deception was his domain and as much as he hated Ronnie he worried about coming from the same “mad genes-bank”. Instead he became a novelist; a less damaging way to tell lies.
He kept his cold war career under wraps for more than 20 years, until Newsweek blew his gaff in 1983. Even then he wouldn’t talk about it, refusing interviews, shunning publicity and taking refuge in Cornwall (“my feeble substitute for exile”) to avoid “the whole mercenary army of distractors”. Yet he wasn’t ashamed of the spying he’d done. To a 10-year-old who wrote asking how to be a spy, he said the key was to serve a cause and know “whom you would like to help, whom to frustrate”. And to an angry communist he’d “betrayed” at Oxford, his riposte was that he’d done “what any sensible country does: we kept watch, and spread a net, and tried to protect ourselves. Looking back, I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
The lasting impression this collection of his letters leaves is of his doubleness: “A right little cutthroat on my way up, I’ve also been an insecure softie.” He’s acidic one moment, warm-hearted the next, sometimes about the same person – Ian McEwan, for instance, whose novel Amsterdam he dismisses as “piss awful” but to whom he writes with affection and respect after they’ve met. He feels the same sense of division about himself, describing his first two novels as “unputdownable. I prefer them to Dickens” yet worrying if his work is up to scratch. “I’ve had an amazing run,” he says when facing death, and exults in his life with Jane as two “old honeymooners on a cliff”. But the residue of unhappiness can’t be denied: “Looks so terribly impressive from the outside. But the inside has been such a ferment of buried anger and lovelessness from childhood that it was sometimes almost uncontainable.” What contained it was the fiction. And the letters show how hard he worked to get the fiction right.
Blake Morrison
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Short stories
Humour and heartbreak
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Deesha Philyaw
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies Deesha Philyaw
Humour and heartbreak
Deesha Philyaw’s touching short story collection focuses on the sex lives of various Black women in the southern US. In perhaps the most memorable story, Peach Cobbler, a young girl, Olivia, believes the local pastor to be God, because when he visits she overhears her mother screaming “Oh, God!” from the bedroom. Central to this funny, sweet yet devastating tale is the “best cobbler in the world”, a fruit pie that the protagonist’s mother bakes for her lover each week, but which Olivia is not allowed to taste. The relationship between food and forbidden desire is acutely observed elsewhere in the collection, too. We meet Eula, who insists on “saving herself” for marriage to a man, but happily celebrates her birthday each year with a hotel room feast followed by sex with her female best friend; a bakery owner, implied to be an older Olivia from Peach Cobbler, who provides married men with a set of instructions before they begin an affair with her; and Arletha, who lives with her partner in Pittsburgh, but desperately misses the food and weather of her family home in the south, where she is no longer welcome having come out as gay. Deftly handling the difficult subjects of shame, religion, love and lust, Philyaw treads the line between humour and heartbreak in stories you’ll want to wolf down.
Lucy Knight
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Fiction
Love virtually
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Gabrielle Zevin
Love virtually
Teenagers of the 21st century are as likely to bond over video games as they are rock music or movies. Gabrielle Zevin’s exhilarating, timely and emotive book is perhaps the first novel to truly get to grips with what this means.
Sadie and Sam meet as precocious, somewhat awkward children in a hospital where Sadie’s sister is being treated for leukaemia and Sam is recovering from injuries sustained in a car crash. Sam hasn’t spoken since the collision, but Sadie gradually drags him from his self-imposed exile, via long sessions of Super Mario Bros in the hospital games room. Their video game-enabled friendship sets in place a major theme of the novel. “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk,” writes Zevin. “It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt.”
Eventually, the two fall out, only to meet again by chance eight years later in a crowded Boston subway. Sam is at Harvard, Sadie at MIT and they both still love video games enough to start developing one together, aided by Sam’s charismatic roommate Marx. Their game, an artsy adventure inspired by Hokusai’s woodblock print The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, is a smash hit and the trio set up a development studio in Los Angeles. But as their success grows, so does the complexity of their intricately entwined lives.
Zevin has written young adult fiction and Tomorrow … leans towards the accessibility of that genre; the subject matter, too, will no doubt attract a younger audience. But this is not a YA novel about video games. Instead, it’s a novel where video games are a conduit for self-expression and emotional connection, and where play is the most intimate and important human activity there is. Game development becomes a compelling metaphor for the way in which we build our friendships and love affairs – a process of imagination, effort and shared myth-making. On two occasions Sam and Sadie say to each other: “There’s no point in making something if you don’t think it’ll be great.” They’re talking about games, but they mean relationships too.
Keith Stuart
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Essays
Life, death and politics
The Plague
Jacqueline Rose
The Plague Jacqueline Rose
Life, death and politics
Sigmund Freud thought that an awareness of death gave life a special value. According to the renowned cultural critic Jacqueline Rose, the sudden death in 1920 of Freud’s favourite daughter Sophie Halberstadt-Freud resulted in his “philosophy of grief”, one that stems not just from his inner realm but also from the external political world. At the time, Europe was dealing with the aftermath of the First World War and was on the cusp of an even more deadly war.
Rose says that she was sensitised to the linkage between death and politics in Freud’s work by the fact that she was writing in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, a century after his daughter, whom he called his “Sunday child”, died from Spanish flu. At this time Rose, like many people, was also revisiting Albert Camus’s The Plague. The novel showed her that “however inexplicable and random the arrival of plague or pandemic might feel, however indiscriminately death-dealing, it is part of history, something which human societies and those who make up their number bring upon themselves”.
The pandemic created the sense that there was “a new global solidarity”, as countries united in the fight against the threat faced by humanity. However, this illusion was shattered by the outbreak of a new war in Europe. Putin’s megalomania, including nuclear threats, will only bring sorrow for the Russian people, writes Rose: “they will be left with the death bowl of their dreams.”
In the western world, we tend to treat death as everyone’s problem but our own, denying its reality. In this deeply humane series of linked essays drawing on the life and thought of Camus, Freud and Simone Weil, Rose argues that death is not random but “at once the starkest measure of unjust social arrangements, the prized monopoly of statecraft, and a reminder of the limits of human power”.
Through what she terms “living death”, by acknowledging death’s inescapable reality in our lives, she challenges us to embrace a new understanding of life: “can we imagine a world in which the deepest respect for death would exist alongside a fairer distribution of the wealth of the earth so that each individual has their share?”
This is a brief but beautifully written book, full of memorable insights into life, death, and politics. In particular, the final essay on Weil is a wonderfully moving mix of biographical, philosophical and political analysis.
Weil, a refugee from the war in Europe, died of tuberculosis in Middlesex Hospital in 1943 aged just 34. Rose celebrates Weil’s lifelong commitment to justice and confronting human violence. She believed that death is the “norm and aim of life”. Only when we surrender our dreams of power and acknowledge that we are a “mere fragment of living matter” will we stop killing each other. In Weil’s writings, Rose finds a glimmer of hope in dark times: “against race, class and national affiliations, Weil’s heart is beating right across the globe”.
PD Smith
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Humour
Sparkling wit
Haywire
Craig Brown
Haywire Craig Brown
Sparkling wit
According to the acclaimed humourist Craig Brown “a world gone haywire has long been the satirist’s guiding star”. As an example of the craziness of our modern world, Brown introduces this immensely entertaining collection of his writings with an anecdote. He recently discovered that a piece he wrote a decade ago, containing the preposterous assertion that James Bond’s middle name was Herbert, has now been accepted as fact on the internet. What’s worse, Brown only realised this after he googled “James Bond middle name” while researching a Christmas quiz based on the middle names of famous fictional characters: “like the prankster who balances a bucket of water on the top of a door and then forgets it is there, I had stepped into a trap of my own making”.
This is a doorstep of a book – more than 500 sparklingly witty pages of his writing – ranging from parodies to exquisitely succinct clerihews. But as well as hilarity, there is also wisdom in this book, as in the section on comedians. Among the highlights are brilliant pieces on Tommy Cooper (“the greatest of all surrealists”), Arthur Lowe (“even at the age of seven he looked like a middle-aged clerk”) and Peter Cook (“the funniest prophet who ever set pen to paper”). Brown claims that “Angst is the hidden engine of British comedy”, something that was particularly true of the grotesquely hilarious Kenneth Williams, about whom he observes: “rarely has comedy been so clearly fuelled by neurosis”.
One of the longest essays is devoted to the art of writing biographies, in which Brown criticises the fashion for exhaustive – or as he puts it, “exhausting” – works which enumerate in a “dull and dogged” way every last detail of their subject’s life. Such biographies can often seem like an exercise in “shooting a bird to find out how it used to fly”. For Brown, who is himself the author of an award-winning study of Princess Margaret, the value of a biography lies less in its encyclopaedic scope than in its ability to focus on expressive details that capture the essence of a person’s life.
This is a sublimely funny collection of Brown’s best work, one that is designed to be dipped into whenever the craziness of modern life threatens to overwhelm you. The perfect antidote.
PD Smith
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Fiction
A war cry for rebellious women
Fight Night
Miriam Toews
Fight Night Miriam Toews
A war cry for rebellious women
Miriam Toews’s novels are often described as tragicomedies, populated by war survivors, and set in or around Mennonite communities where Toews, too, grew up. In works such as All My Puny Sorrows, following the relationship of two sisters, and the spectacular Women Talking, about cloistered women who gather in secret after a series of sexual assaults, Toews grapples with the humiliations of motherhood, the burdens of sisterhood, abuse, grief and suicide: a wound from her own life that she nurses throughout her work. The author’s primary theme is the battles of women in a world of cruel men, and intergenerational misfires as mothers try to protect and warn their daughters. Her eighth novel, Fight Night, is an ode to grandmotherly defiance, embodied by a kind of ancestor that I, too, know well: a mouthy immigrant, an old-world fighter, a fiery human contradiction.
Swiv is nine and comes from a family of fighting women. Her grandmother keeps a scrapbook of the fights in her life, and now Swiv is suspended from school for the same thing. She’s stuck in a tiny Toronto home with her embarrassing mother and grandmother. Her father is gone, her mother pregnant, and Swiv must now protect her unborn sibling from these loud, bawdy, messy mothers who gab about sex and nakedness and drop pasta and pills everywhere and can’t even rinse the sink after gargling oregano oil. “Grandma is hard of hearing and Mom is hard of listening,” she writes, “so I have to yell all day long.”
From the first page, it is evident that Fight Night is a story of a grandmother’s coming death – a looming final battle that will arrive on or off the page. In a certain light, Fight Night can be read as the fantasy of the grownup child who, years after their parent or grandparent is gone, wishes they had saved something more.
The novel is that something more: a record of one singularly irritating and beloved human who is missed before she’s gone. A triumph of devotion and imagination, it’s rooted in the understanding that we keep our loved ones close with every strange, shameful, hilarious detail we commit to memory, recording device or paper; that the dead leave the world altered, that life is continually renewed, and that we are made to survive the most unbearable losses. “We’re all fighters, our whole family,” Swiv’s mother assures her when she worries about her grandmother. “Even the dead ones. They fought the hardest.”
Dina Nayeri
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Fiction
Epic of a feckless boomer
Lessons
Ian McEwan
Lessons Ian McEwan
Epic of a feckless boomer
Ian McEwan’s 17th novel is old-fashioned, digressive and indulgently long; the hero is a gold-plated ditherer, and the story opens with a teenage wank (few books are improved by an achingly sentimental wank). But Lessons is also deeply generous. It’s compassionate and gentle, and so bereft of cynicism it feels almost radical. Can earnestness be a form of literary rebellion?
In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, an English schoolboy arrives unannounced at his piano teacher’s house. He stands on her doorstep in his drainpipe trousers and sharp-toed winklepickers, twitchy with eroticised terror. The boy, Roland Baines, is 14; his teacher, Miss Cornell, is 25. Roland fears that the world is about to end, and he will die a virgin. Miss Cornell does not turn him away. What happens between them in that quiet cottage will score a line across Roland’s life. It is “the moment from which all else fanned out and upwards with the extravagance of a peacock’s tail”.
It is the female characters – from joyful children to art monsters – who give this novel its heft and verve (and perhaps its title). Next to them, McEwan’s everyman feels a little gormless and grey. There’s Miss Cornell, of course, with her piano lessons and her terrifying thrall; and Roland’s timorous mother, whose cast-iron silences hide a story of wartime shame. There’s Roland’s best friend, who teaches him how to die; and his mother-in-law, who – for the briefest of moments – lives the life she wanted. And then there is Alissa, Roland’s first wife, who chooses her writerly ambitions over motherhood, and leaves him in embittered awe.
Roland learns from them all, lesson after lesson, everything from the demands of genius to the virtue of a clean kitchen table. It’s a wearying trope: women as instruments and catalysts of male insight. But as Roland’s granddaughter reminds him: “A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson.”
Beejay Silcox
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Fiction
A terrifying treat
Fairy Tale
Stephen King
Fairy Tale Stephen King
A terrifying treat
Once upon a time there was a boy called Charlie. His mother died in a terrible accident when he was young, and his father turned to drink, but Charlie grew up to be a good, strong, clever young man. The sort who helps strangers in need – such as the misanthropic Mr Bowditch, who has an equally elderly dog and a crumbling property. Which, as this is a Stephen King novel, sits on a tunnel leading to a mysterious world in need of saving from a horrifying evil.
Fairy Tale is vintage, timeless King, a transporting, terrifying treat born from multiple lockdowns which, in true King style, puts its finger right on that tender point which is the threshold between childhood and growing up.
Alison Flood
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Fiction
Why Medusa is no monster
Stone Blind
Natalie Haynes
Stone Blind Natalie Haynes
Why Medusa is no monster
Once upon a time, someone remarked of three old women that they had a single eye and a single tooth between them. The jibe became a stock joke and then a legend, and the Graeae took their place in the pantheon of Greek mythology. And now along comes Natalie Haynes to write a knockabout Beckettian riff on the theme. In her darkly comic retelling of the entwined stories of Medusa, Perseus and Andromeda, Perseus steals the shared tooth and eye and throws them into the sea. Haynes’s narrator steps forward to jeer at any reader on his side. “I suppose you thought it was clever. Clever Perseus using his wits to defeat the disgusting old women?” In this version of the ancient stories, the hero is as thick as two planks, the maiden tied to a rock is vain and self-centred, and the monster is piteously misunderstood.
Haynes speaks in many voices. Brief sections admit us to each of the principal characters’ points of view; others are narrated by a crow, an olive grove and the snakes on Medusa’s head. Her narrative encompasses a war between the gods and giants, earthquakes and floods and the passage of aeons of time. Her focus, though, remains sharp and her message clear.
“Who decides what is a monster?” asks Euryale, one of the elder Gorgons.
“I don’t know,” says Medusa. “Men, I suppose.”
Haynes left standup comedy when she realised she preferred tragedy. The dichotomy is a false one. Comedy can break your heart, while tragedy is intensified by a wise-cracking grave-digger. When Haynes turned to prose fiction in A Thousand Ships and The Children of Jocasta she began by playing it disappointingly straight-faced. But with this, her third novel based on ancient myth, she has found a way of using all her classical erudition and her vivid sense of the ambiguous potency of the ancient stories, while being simultaneously very, very funny.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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History
Light amid darkness
The Island of Extraordinary Captives
Simon Parkin
The Island of Extraordinary Captives Simon Parkin
Light amid darkness
When war broke out in 1939, the British government was faced with a giant and immediate problem: what to do with the 73,000 Germans and Austrians living in Britain who had become “enemy aliens” overnight. The answer was mass internment, a policy authorised by Churchill days after he took office as prime minister in May 1940. Police around the country were dispatched to arrest male nationals of axis powers – which would soon include Italy – aged between 16 and 60 and cart them off to prison. Some of these internees would be sent on perilous voyages to Canada and Australia, but the majority were taken to camps on the Isle of Man. One of these, Hutchinson camp, is the subject of Simon Parkin’s excellent new book.
Parkin has told his story with energy and flair. The book is not without minor flaws: the cast of characters is dizzyingly large, and at times the narrative is obscured by extraneous information, but these do not detract from Parkin’s achievement. The Island of Extraordinary Captives is a powerful tribute to the wartime internees, and a timely reminder of how much Britain gained from their presence.
Charlie English
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Memoir
Laughter in the dark
Happy-Go-Lucky
David Sedaris
Happy-Go-Lucky David Sedaris
Laughter in the dark
David Sedaris presents himself as a damaged specimen, scarred by a cantankerous father and an alcoholic mother, hen-pecked by four domineering sisters, additionally suffering from a lisp, a nervous tic and the usual addictions. All the same, this feisty fellow has undertaken to set the world to rights through comedy. In Happy-Go-Lucky, his new collection of autobiographical sketches, he broods about the cosmic injustice of Covid-19: noting that a million Americans died in the pandemic, he fumes that he didn’t get to choose a single one of them.
In a mock-solemn mood, Sedaris asks: “Doesn’t all our greatest art address the subject of death?” Perhaps so, but tragedy has no monopoly of mortality; comedy may be a better guide to living with the certainty of extinction. Four years ago in Calypso, Sedaris seemed to be edging towards reconciliation with his nonagenarian father and grieving over the death of his druggy, distressed sister Tiffany, but Happy-Go-Lucky instead documents the jocular horror of their last days.
The book begins and ends with Sedaris considering an armed response to our crazed world. He first apes what cops call an “active shooter” at a firing range in North Carolina. He is dragged there by his sister Lisa, who fancies acquiring a handgun for self-defence, but while Lisa’s bullets puncture the heart of the man-sized cardboard target, Sedaris farcically misfires, spraying his ammo far and wide. At the book’s conclusion, he drives through rural Indiana past shops selling crackers, sparklers and rockets to be set alight on 4 July. Viewing these establishments as symbols of combustible America, he dismisses fireworks as “guns for children”. It’s a telling remark: his wickedly hilarious riffs are pyrotechnics in words, although when the aerial explosions fade he can’t help noticing that nothing has changed on the mucky ground below.
That might be why, since settling in West Sussex in 2010, Sedaris’s hobby or mission has been to collect rubbish dumped along country roads. When not travelling between sold-out international gigs, he dirties himself as his bleeding hands grope in blackberry bushes for fast-food containers and bags of dog poo. As he says when Tiffany blackmails their father by claiming that he sexually abused her, people are “trashy”. If satire can’t goad us into reforming, Sedaris can at least clean up the mess we so squalidly strew behind us.
Peter Conrad
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Fiction
Larks and losses
Amy & Lan
Sadie Jones
Amy & Lan Sadie Jones
Larks and losses
Amy Connell and Lachlan Honey are childhood soulmates on a Herefordshire smallholding, closer even than siblings, born just a few days apart. They celebrate their birthdays every summer solstice with a ramshackle picnic on a nearby hill, surrounded by sweaty adults and grubby children. The
grownups bring cake and red wine and homemade elderflower champagne. They also drag up a greased wheelie bin full of rats, which have been caught on the farm and need to be released in the wild. The rats squeak and scratch. They make the wheelie bin shake. “I bet they’re eating each other,” sniffs one of the kids. “Or having sex.”
Throw too many creatures together, one fears, and sooner or later they’ll devour each other or start having sex. It’s a harsh law of nature, as immutable as the seasons and as applicable to hippies on the Welsh borders as it is to rodents in a bin. Amy and Lan love living on Frith Farm, scything and baling and naming all the goats. But the idyll can’t last, the weather turns chilly – and that squeaking and scratching grows more persistent by the month.
Sadie Jones’s sixth novel is a fabulous thing: vivid and funny, sometimes heart-rendingly sad. Like Frith, it positions itself as a retreat from the big bad modern world, a deliberate step-change after 2019’s moneyed state-of-Europe bestseller The Snakes. But again, like the farm, the setup is misleading. Jones’s fictional landscape is jam-packed, abundant, and her smallholding as thick with intrigue as the Borgias’ court.
Read between the lines of Jones’s prose and you can guess where we’re heading. The clues have been placed; the lid’s about to come loose. It’s tempting, then, to file Amy & Lan alongside the likes of What Maisie Knew and The Go-Between, part of a subgenre of detective fiction that trains a guileless child’s eye on a world of adult foibles and invites the reader to join the dots. Except that this doesn’t quite wash. The truth is more complicated than that. The happiest childhoods, perhaps, are lived in a spirit of ruthless innocence. Kids see what they like and gloss over the rest, figuring that it’s inconsequential, un-fun, almost a waste of breath to describe. And so it is with Amy and Lan, the sun children of Frith, who know an awful lot more than they choose to admit. They like kittens and goats and mucking about on the roof. They love their cow, Gabriella, and her calf, Angel Rocket. Parental dramas don’t matter until the very moment they do: when they break in, brown and ugly, and burn paradise to the ground.
Xan Brooks
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Music
Opening up about the past
Faith, Hope and Carnage
Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan
Faith, Hope and Carnage Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan
Opening up about the past
The first thing Nick Cave says in Faith, Hope and Carnage is that he hates interviews. You could see that as a dispiriting start to a book that’s basically a 304-page interview – by Observer journalist Seán O’Hagan – but it’s hardly news. In the 1980s, Cave’s relationship with journalists was so fraught and combative it occasionally spilled over into actual violence. It subsequently calmed considerably, but always remained slightly uneasy and guarded. Eventually he stopped giving interviews altogether, a decision that seemed understandably prompted by the death of his 15-year-old son, Arthur, in 2015.
Giving up speaking to the press is not uncommon in a 21st-century pop world rich with other means of communicating with your audience. But it’s usually rooted in a desire to tightly control one’s public image. What’s striking about Cave’s retreat is that it presaged a radical shift in the opposite direction. He has never been more open, or more available, than in recent years. In 2018, he started The Red Hand Files, a website on which he invited fans to “ask me anything”: four years on, he’s written hundreds of disarmingly frank, thoughtful answers to questions that range from profound to playful. He took the same approach during 2019’s Conversations With Nick Cave, a world tour that revolved not around music but an audience Q&A. In both online and live incarnations, the topic returned again and again to his son’s death and its aftermath: the assumption it was a subject Cave wouldn’t want to discuss publicly couldn’t have been more wrong.
The same is true of Faith, Hope and Carnage, essentially the transcripts of several long conversations between Cave and O’Hagan that began in summer 2020. Its 15 chapters cover a lot of ground – from Staffordshire pottery to the existence or otherwise of God. The book often functions like the memoir its cover expressly announces it is not, drawing vivid, witty recollections of Cave’s childhood, his years as a heroin addict and the often combustible relations within his band, the Bad Seeds. But, as Hagan points out in his afterword, Arthur is “an abiding presence throughout”.
It’s occasionally deeply harrowing reading: even O’Hagan seems stunned by Cave’s precise, agonising description of the day his son died. But it’s ultimately enriching, a story suffused with love, teeming with ideas, a document of an artist’s journey from holding the world “in some form of disdain” to a state of empathy and grace. “Despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is, and how degraded the world has become,” Cave says at one point, “it just keeps on being beautiful. It can’t help it.”
Alexis Petridis
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Fiction
Regicides on the run
Act of Oblivion
Robert Harris
Act of Oblivion Robert Harris
Regicides on the run
In 1675, the scattered tribes of New England formed an alliance and rose up against the English colonists who were forcing them off their land. At that time Hadley was a small, remote settlement on the Connecticut river. One Sunday, when the God-fearing inhabitants were in church, the Norwottuck tribe launched an all-out assault.
From nowhere a stranger appeared, a middle-aged man who raised the alarm, organised the town’s defences and led a brutally efficient counterattack. Afterwards he vanished as abruptly as he had arrived.
The town’s unknown saviour became known as the Angel of Hadley. The mystery of his identity soon gained an extra frisson: it was rumoured that the Angel was the fugitive Major General William Goffe, a man with a huge reward on his head. Goffe was one of the regicides, the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant, whose lives had become forfeit after the Restoration of the monarchy.
Robert Harris is a remarkably versatile novelist whose settings range from Ancient Rome to 800 years in the future. A former political journalist, he often explores the darker aspects of politics and its corrupting effects on individuals. Here he looks at one of the great conflicts of English history: the bitter civil war between royalists and parliamentarians. The extremists on both sides were imbued with an absolute conviction that they operated under carte blanche from God.
The execution of the king was the defining event of this struggle. Harris chooses to focus instead on the lives in exile of two of the regicides, Goffe and Edward Whalley. In 1660, they fled to America, where many of the colonists were Puritans with no love for the king. Both men were distinguished soldiers. Whalley was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin, a trusted member of the Lord Protector’s inner circle, and Goffe was Whalley’s son-in-law. We know tantalisingly little about their lives in America. They lived in hiding, in constant fear of arrest by the royalist agents who were searching for them.
Harris underpins the book with substantial research and writes in unobtrusively effective prose. It’s not easy to make Whalley and Goffe sympathetic to a modern sensibility. They were hardcore Puritans who believed that only the elect would go to heaven, that their aggressively righteous ends justified their often ruthless means and that the world would come to an end in 1666 (on the divine authority that 666 was the Number of the Beast). The novel’s greatest achievement is that it makes us understand them, even like them, while paying the same compliment to the equally fanatical Nayler. This is Harris at his best, which is very good indeed.
Andrew Taylor
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This article was amended on 25 June 2023. The image accompanying the section on The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw was not of that author, but of Gabrielle Zevin, who wrote Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which is featured in the section below. This has been corrected.