In a Strange Room In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut Galgut’s previous two novels, The Impostor and The Good Doctor, were dark, dramatic tales in which he took the pulse of post-apartheid South Africa. In his powerful new work, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, he travels everywhere but South Africa: from Greece to Goa, and from Switzerland to Tanzania. With an emphasis on menacing, dislocating atmosphere over plot, the three journeys in the novel are ones that Galgut made in the 1990s. Each story traces an abortive relationship that his protagonist-narrator, Damon, has with a different, sinister travelling companion. In the first piece, he meets a German walking near Mycenae and accepts the man’s invitation to travel with him to Lesotho. Although attracted to the man, Damon resists his advances. This false dawn recurs in the next story, in which Damon falls in love with a Swiss man in Malawi. As before, inertia scuppers his chances of romance, and “a thin column of grief rises in him like mercury”. This melancholy tone presides, not unpleasantly, over all three stories.
In the final, most dramatic tale, Damon heads to Goa with a bipolar friend. Refusing to take her medication, she becomes violent and threatens suicide, forcing Damon away once more. Like a backpacking Sisyphus, he is condemned to repeat the same journey indefinitely, never settling down, never forming ties. In Galgut’s deceptively simple prose, these pieces linger in an impressively indefinable no man’s land between memoir and fiction. It is quite an achievement to have made real stories feel as bewitching and unnerving as fables. Robert Collins
Buying the Bones Burying the Bones by Hilary Spurling Spurling’s life of the Pulitzer prize-winning American writer Pearl S Buck may seem small-scale for the British reader, even obscure, but her style, and the addictive character of her subject, make it an intriguing read. Growing up in late 19th- and early 20th-century China, Buck introduced the country to the world, then campaigned for peace and an end to racial and sexual discrimination after moving to America in the 1930s. One finishes the book full of admiration for her. Andrew Holgate
War games War Games by Linda Polman Polman’s unflinching account of the way in which western aid has been mercilessly manipulated by warlords, especially in Africa, is a tour de force. Every page contains devastating anecdotes; yet they will not surprise anyone who has been involved at the sharp end of the international aid business. The main reason for what amounts to a conspiracy of silence is that if the public knew what happens to their charitable donations, they might never give again. Dominic Lawson
Lives like Loaded Guns Lives Like Loaded Guns by Lyndall Gordon The poet Emily Dickinson rarely left the house where she was born in Massachusetts in 1830; finally, she rarely left her bedroom. Daringly, Gordon suggests that the reason for this was because Emily was an epileptic, and that her bedroom felt safe. She also tells how, for the last five years of her life, Emily lived in a domestic war zone. When an ambitious young woman began an affair with the poet’s married brother, who lived next door, it split the family. This book will shake up an already formidable body of work on the Dickinsons. The affair becomes the stuff of nightmares, and Gordon brilliantly reveals how, after Emily’s death, a subsequent feud determined her legacy as a poet. Frances Wilson
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the memory of love The Memory of Love by Aminatta Forna Forna’s novel traces the human stories contained in Freetown in Sierra Leone, traumatised after a civil war in which thousands have been raped, butchered and orphaned. She explores the city from the perspectives of several characters linked by hidden connections that become visible as the novel unfolds. This is delicately done, and although it is a slow novel, its steady pace makes the awful revelations all the more disturbing. Lucy Atkins
The Final Act of Mr Shakespeare The Final Act of Mr Shakespeare by Robert Winder In this hugely entertaining novel, Shakespeare, disgusted by regal corruption, fears his life’s work might be seen as an apologia for tyranny. So when James I’s agents order him to cobble up a drama flattering Henry VIII, he writes a seditious alternative (The Tragicall History of Henry VII) to put the record straight about the Tudors. The play, made up by Winder, is a remarkable pastiche. Overflowing with vivid phrases, it embraces a range of tones, and Henry VII himself, in true Shakespearian fashion, is both a murderer and a soul in torment. David Grylls