Book Reviews

Our reviews of the latest in literature

Tuesday

Peter Frankopan

The greed and hypocrisy of the opium trade continue to shock

‘A fact that confounds me now when I think back on it,’ writes the acclaimed Indian author Amitav Ghosh at the start of this expansive and thoughtful book, ‘is that for most of my life China was for me a vast, uniform blankness.’ There were many reasons for this, he says. The war between India and China in 1962 might have played a part, along with the complex relationship between the two countries since then; but also the way that ‘an inner barrier’ has been ‘implanted in the minds’ of many around the world – one that blocks out China but allows in the ‘language, clothing, sport, material objects and

Thursday

David Abulafia

A wealth of knowledge salvaged from shipwrecks

The flow of histories of the world, or parts of it, in a bundle of items never ceases, 12 years after Neil MacGregor presented world history through 100 objects from the British Museum. Many of these were of unknown provenance and therefore disconnected from their original context. By contrast, world history built around shipwrecks offers the opportunity to seize precise moments in time – most often when a sudden emergency has taken a ship to the bottom of the sea in the midst of everyday activities. In many ways, shipwrecks bring one nearer to daily life than almost any other archaeological sites. They are only surpassed by the remains of

Dennis Duncan

Is writing now changing the world for the worse?

How do you feel about writing? Does that sound like a bizarre question? OK, what about this? Do you worry that you don’t read enough? About the encroachment of screen time into book time? About the decline of letter-writing or penmanship? In universities, where ChatGPT has made a nightmare of written assessments, lecturers have had to fall back on viva voce interviews to determine whether students are the true authors of the essays they submit. My hunch is that writing – the idea of writing – is now more fretted over than celebrated; that what we feel towards this venerable invention is, on the whole, something like a complex of

Charles Parton

The thoughts of Chairman Xi – in digestible form

While giving a talk on China I was asked an unusual question: ‘What is the one word you would use to describe China?’ By China we mean of course the Chinese Communist party (CCP) and, more specifically, Xi Jinping. My reply was: ‘Solipsistic.’ Xi wants China to lead the world, but to take very limited responsibility for solving the world’s problems Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, have produced a study in solipsism, and a mighty fine one. Xi and the CCP are solipsistic in the vulgar rather than true philosophical sense. They are supremely self-centred in their belief that the external world

Philip Womack

Back from the beyond: The Book of Love, by Kelly Link, reviewed

Kelly Link’s short-story collections bewilder and delight with their sideways takes on fantasy tropes. People might turn into cats, but they do it while texting emojis (dancing lady, unicorn, happy face). In The Book of Love, Link’s debut novel, she revels in upholding and upturning the genre’s conventions. Mainlining Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and with a dose of recent teen Netflix fantasies such as Locke & Key, her setting is a small coastal town in Massachusetts to which three sarky adolescents have suddenly returned home – although not, as is generally supposed, from a short trip to Ireland, but from what they, alongside assorted supernatural beings, know to be Death

Boyd Tonkin

The truth one year, heresy the next: The Book of Days, by Francesca Kay, reviewed

Bad historical novelists assume that people always live at the spearhead of their age. Good ones, like Francesca Kay in her fourth book, know that even when the world spins ‘faster than a weathervane in a gale’, most hearts and minds will tarry in the past, behind events. The Book of Days unfolds in a village north of Oxford in 1546 and 1547, as the unnamed old king dies and the accession of his child heir brings another round of ‘newfanglery’ in faith. The ‘commotion time’ returns with all its frightening convulsions: now, ‘what was truth one year is heresy the next’. It would be tempting to treat this book

Claudia FitzHerbert

No one could match Tess, to Thomas Hardy’s dismay

In her disillusioned later years Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, bitterly reflected: ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’ In Hardy Women, Paula Byrne sets out to recover the stories of the women in his life ‘who did not have a voice and who were often deliberately omitted from Hardy’s self-ghosted autobiography’, in order to reveal that ‘the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination’. She has not come up with anything that radically changes what we already know of Hardy’s background and what he

Anne Margaret Daniel

Copyright chaos grows deeper by the minute

The law doth punish man or woman That steals the goose from off the common But lets the greater felon loose Who steals the common from the goose The authors of a fascinating new look at the patchwork chaos called copyright begin their book with this epigraph from an ancient English protest song against fencing, and thereby privatising, common land. David Bellos, a comparative literature professor at Princeton University and winner of the first International Booker Prize in 2005 for his translations of Ismail Kadare, and Alexandre Montagu, a lawyer specialising in intellectual property and new media law, have written a timely history of a ‘relatively simple idea – that

A.S.H. Smyth

The magic and mystery of Georgia: Hard by a Great Forest, by Leo Vardiashvili, reviewed

In my drafts folder there languishes an email to The Spectator pitching a letter from a then-forthcoming trip to Georgia. That was, alas, the spring of 2020. So when I saw Leo Vardiashvili’s debut novel billed as ‘a winding pursuit through the magic and mystery of returning to a lost Caucasian homeland’, I leapt at the vicarious travel opportunity. Fleeing the disintegrating post-Soviet republic in the early 1990s, Irakli Donauri and his sons (though not his wife) arrive in London – Tottenham, specifically – where they are surprised to find ‘no top hats, no smog and no afternoon tea’. The boys grow up; two decades pass; their mother never joins

Nicholas Lezard

Music was always Anthony Burgess’s first love

Anthony Burgess, a professional to his finger- tips, knew how to write an arresting first sentence. The locus classicus is his opening to Earthly Powers. But try this for size, a lapel-grabbing start of a piece about William Walton in The Listener: Waking crapulous and apothaneintheloish, as I do most mornings these days, I find a little loud British gramophone music over the (a) bloody mary and (b) raspberry yoghurt helps me adjust to the daily damnation of writing. Apo-what? I have just enough Greek to know that it’s something to do with death; a helpful footnote reminds us that ‘άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω’, or ‘I want to die’ are the

Alex Clark

Three men in exile: My Friends, by Hisham Matar, reviewed

Hisham Matar’s third novel is, among its many other virtues, a paean to reading widely; to imagining literature as not, in the narrator Khaled’s words, ‘a field of demarcations’, but as a great river that connects and animates ‘the entire human event’. Reading is how Khaled – exiled from Libya when his part in the anti-Gaddafi demonstration at the country’s embassy in St James’s Square in April 1984 made a return to Benghazi impossible – lays the foundations beneath his precarious life in London. Carrying with him his father’s copy of Abual Ala al Ma’arri’s The Epistle of Forgiveness, an 11th-century  precursor to Dante’s Divine Comedy, he ponders the links

Francesca Peacock

Gang warfare in the west of Ireland: Wild Houses, by Colin Barrett, reviewed

Until now, Colin Barrett has made his name as an artist of the short story. Both his debut collection, Young Skins (2014) and Homesickness (2022) won him acclaim for their depiction of rural Ireland. But his tales stretch beyond the constraints of their size, and his dispossessed drinkers, small-time crooks and depressed teenagers seem too large and real to have their stories end in a matter of pages. Barrett’s first novel, Wild Houses, is, then, a delight, with a wider space for his talent to spread and for his acutely observed characters to linger. In the first few pages he gives us a man whose tattoos appear like ‘the pages

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

Adam Phillips: On Giving Up

37 min listen

On this week’s Book Club my guest is the writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, whose new book is On Giving Up. He tells me how literature relates to psychoanalysis, why censorship makes life possible, and what Freud got wrong. 

Tuesday

Leyla Sanai

Escape into fantasy: My Heavenly Favourite, by Lucas Rijneveld, reviewed

When Marieke Lucas Rijneveld won the International Booker Prize in 2020 for The Discomfort of Evening, a novel set in the Netherlands about the daughter of a dairy farmer growing up in a strict Christian household in the wake of the tragic death of her brother, the earthy, uncompromising voice was striking. The book was disturbing in its subject matter (the parents, blinded by grief, allow their remaining children to become semi-feral, experimenting with sex and death) and its visceral animal similes: bloody birth, brutal mating, culls for foot-and-mouth disease, slaughter. The ten-year-old girl protagonist had a lot in common with the author; and so it is again in My

Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

An insider’s account of the CCP’s stranglehold on China

All families have secrets, but few family histories are classified by the state. After the death of Snow’s father, his study is cleared out by officials from the Chinese Communist party; but Snow discovers letters and unmarked hard drives hidden in hollowed-out dictionaries that they’d missed. The material reveals that her father was a high-ranking intelligence officer in the party, handpicked to build China’s intelligence service after the founding of the new People’s Republic. He’d hidden them for his family to find. Jie provides a rare insider account showing just how much the CCP knew and how much it covered up This isn’t the set-up for a new spy novel,

Jonathan Boff

A Guardsman’s life as not as glamorous as it might seem

This book is the perfect present for the Guardsman in your life. It offers an authorised biography of the five regiments of Foot Guards and two of Household Cavalry from 1969 to the present day. In that half century the Guards have been under fire in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan, with much of the time also spent maintaining a presence in West Germany. These were busy years. Units of the Household Division took part in no fewer than 24 operational tours in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2013, many of them involving intense combat. At the same time, the Guards have also had to keep up

Jenny Colgan

Secrets of the dorm: Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid, reviewed

Oh hell, the novel after the Big Book. It’s so, so difficult. David Nicholls took seven years to follow up One Day with Us. Alex Garland gave up after The Beach and went off to write films. Lawyers prevent me from speculating on precisely what it did to Allison Pearson. And Kiley Reid’s Big Book was a joy. Her debut novel Such a Fun Age was razor-sharp, incredibly funny and utterly unafraid: commercial fiction with serious things to say and with wide appeal. It won prizes and sold brilliantly. Of course it’s difficult to follow up. And Come and Get It, whose title is difficult to remember and has nothing

Andrew Hankinson

Have we all become slaves to algorithms?

Here I am, a human, recommending Kyle Chayka’s book about the negative impact of algorithms on our culture. Hopefully that will calm him down a bit, because he worries a lot, possibly far too much, at least as it seems to someone who is less online. Chayka is a staff writer at the New Yorker and he is concerned about the effect of the Filterworld, his word for the ‘network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed’. He is referring to the songs Spotify cues up, the films Netflix suggests, the stories Facebook

Nigel Jones

Conrad Black adheres firmly to the ‘great man’ view of history

George Orwell has a story that when Sir Walter Raleigh published the first volume of his projected history of the world while in prison, he witnessed a brawl outside his rooms in the Bloody Tower which resulted in the death of a workman. Despite diligent enquiries, Raleigh was unable to discover the cause of the quarrel. Reasoning that if he could not even ascertain the facts behind what he had observed he could hardly accurately report what had happened in distant lands centuries earlier, he burned his notes for the second volume and abandoned the entire project. No such doubts assail the 79-year-old Conrad Black, sometime proprietor of The Spectator,

Susie Mesure

Mystery in everyday objects

‘The surest and quickest way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare unafraid at a single object.’ Cesare Pavese wrote those words in Dialogues with Leucò, one of two quotations that preface Lara Pawson’s deceptively slim third book, Spent Light. When her dog starts killing squirrels, Pawson cooks them, acquiringa Whitby Wild Cat skinning knife Pawson takes the Italian writer at his word, turning to a toaster for inspiration. The electrical appliance, which appears two pages in, is a gift from a neighbour, Reg, after his wife dies. Pawson uses it to launch a deeply empathetic piece of writing exploring the brutality of the world in