From Barbara Demick to Emily Kasriel: new books reviewed in short

New Statesman​

18-06-2025

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China's Stolen Children by Barbara Demick
China ended international adoption less than a year ago. Today there are around 160,000 internationally adopted Chinese children, the majority of whom are girls. Foreign adoption of Chinese babies was so popular in the 2000s that Mattel partnered with the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, China, creating a set of limited edition white dolls holding an Asian baby. These were given to the families staying at the hotel, meeting their new baby for the first time before taking them home.
Well-intentioned adoptive parents believed they were rescuing babies who had been abandoned under China's strict one-child policy. A much darker truth is explored in Daughters of the Bamboo Grove. Drawing on the story of two identical twins separated between China and the US as infants who reconnected in adulthood, and supported by two decades of reporting, Barbara Demick shows that many of these babies were taken from the arms of their parents by government officials and trafficked. With details fudged during the adoption process, and Chinese bureaucracy opaque, many families are still unable to find their lost children.
Granta, 336pp, £20. Buy the book
By Catharine Hughes
Poor Ghost! by Gabriel Flynn
Losing a Harvard PhD, a blossoming romance and dreams of literary fame brings Luca's coming-of-age narrative crashing down. Back in a reality that he desperately tried to escape, Luca finds himself in his hometown of Manchester, unemployed and sofa-surfing. He thinks he is above the place of his youth but has little to show for it. The city's grey skies, broken glass and hollow gentrification (its 'artificial smile') are as much of a burden on Luca's supposed destiny as was his father, a troubled academic and alcoholic. His father's substance abuse only worsened after a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS) when Luca was a child, eventually leading to his dad's suicide.
Luca tries to find purpose in Andy, who is looking for a writer to pen his memoir before he too is incapacitated by MS. But this is mainly self-serving; Luca's haughty manuscript and its projections of ruin – his own, his father's, the city's – run counter to Andy's laddish contentedness. Their dynamic is tricky and at times uncomfortable, but it's a more compelling arc than the author's exploration of Luca's romantic fatalism. Reinforced by stinging deployment of similes and metaphors, Poor Ghost! is a solid exploration of trauma, class and people's sense of place – wherever that may be.
Sceptre, 272pp, £18.99. Buy the book
By Harry Clarke-Ezzidio
Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends and Foes by Emily Kasriel
We have lost the knack of listening properly, says the academic and author Emily Kasriel, and in a divided world one of the things we are distanced from is our own agenda: what is it we want when we talk to another person? Our ears may be open but our thoughts are not always on what is being said but elsewhere – too often waiting for our own turn to speak. The need to engage properly in these fractious times hardly needs stating, but how to do it is a different matter.
Here Kasriel outlines a method to enable deep listening which includes techniques to encourage curiosity about another person's thoughts, to help lose our fear of conversational silences, and for deeper reflection. The very act of listening properly, she says, is a recognition of both respect and empathy. She has used, and taught, this approach in assorted areas of stress – from families to war zones – and reinforces her method with both science and real-world examples, from Nelson Mandela to Antony Gormley. Her tone is equally considered, eschewing the woo-woo for calm and reasoned elucidation.
Thorsons, 320pp, £16.99. Buy the book
By Michael Prodger
The Buried City by Gabriel Zuchtriegel, translated by Jamie Bulloch
Why do people feel compelled to visit Pompeii? Are we just accumulating experiences like stamp collectors, ticking off the greatest artworks and monuments of antiquity to collect the complete set? Or could Pompeii be about something more, something living, a way for us to see ourselves through the lens of a city buried under volcanic ash and frozen in time nearly 2,000 years ago?
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As director-general of the archaeological park in Pompeii, these are not just abstract questions for Gabriel Zuchtriegel. 'Explaining a work of art, an ancient city or an entire culture is like planting a seed,' he writes, urging readers to look beyond temple floor plans or artefact inventories. 'The fertile ground is your audience's capacity to let this seed grow.' Yes, The Buried City is about history: the Romans who lived in Pompeii, how they lived and died, and what archaeological secrets this unique site is still offering up to those willing to keep digging. But it's also about now. Issues of identity, citizenship, community, belonging are explored through rescued artefacts and ruined buildings. This isn't a book about antiquity. It's a book about what our love of antiquity can teach us about ourselves.
Hodder & Stoughton, 256pp, £22. Buy the book
By Rachel Cunliffe
[See also: The ghost of Muriel Spark]
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