This month's best paperbacks: Hanif Kureishi, Alexei Navalny and more

The Guardian

2 days ago

Memoir Shattered Hanif Kureishi
Fiction Long Island Colm Tóibín
Fiction Tell Me Everything Elizabeth Strout
Memoir Patriot Alexei Navalny
Health The Story of a Heart Rachel Clarke
Fiction Blue Ruin Hari Kunzru
Fiction Heart, Be at Peace Donal Ryan
Fiction The Spoiled Heart Sunjeev Sahota
History Immaculate Forms Helen King
History The Golden Road William Dalrymple
Fiction The Unwilding Marina Kemp
Fiction The Echoes Evie Wyld
Society Goodbye Globalization Elizabeth Braw
Memoir Picking up the pieces Shattered Hanif Kureishi
Italian and English hospitals, being prodded, rearranged and invaded while sending dispatches to his fans (dictated to Isabella and to his son, Carlo) via his popular Substack. 'I will never go home again. I have no home now, no centre. I am a stranger to myself. I don't know who I am any more. Someone new is emerging.' Now, those dispatches have been collected, edited, and expanded into a memoir.
Kureishi's fans will find Shattered wildly inspiring; his singular voice, his bawdy humour, his efforts to create meaning, all so characteristic and moving. He is back home in London now, his world forever altered. 'I sat in the centre of this old city that I loved … surrounded by people I loved,' Kureishi wrote 35 years ago, in The Buddha of Suburbia, 'and I felt happy and miserable at the same time. I thought of what a mess everything had been, but that it wouldn't always be this way.' The young Kureishi wrote his way into a different kind of life. And now, someone new is emerging. I can't wait to read everything he has to write.
Dina Nayeri £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction Happy ever after? Long Island Colm Tóibín
Asked recently why he had chosen to write a sequel to his much-loved 2009 novel, Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín said, 'The answer is why not? The other answer is that there are very good reasons not. I mean, leave it alone – why interfere with people's imaginations about what happens to the characters? Also, and this is not true for Hilary Mantel or The Godfather, but in general sequels tend to be pale.' Not this one. While Tóibín's palette may be rather lighter on vermilion than Puzo's – or indeed Mantel's – Long Island is anything but pale. As for the characters, it is pure pleasure to be back in their absorbingly complex company. Twenty years have passed since Eilis sailed for America for the second time, leaving local Enniscorthy barman Jim Farrell to return to Brooklyn and Tony Fiorello, the plumber to whom she was already secretly married. Since then she has not once gone back to Ireland. She and Tony live with their two teenage children on Long Island, in a suburban cul-de-sac built for the family by the Fiorello brothers. It is a stiflingly close-knit arrangement. That peace is smashed to pieces in the opening pages of Long Island when a stranger, an Irish customer of Tony's, turns up on her doorstep. Tony's plumbing, he informs her, has proved 'too good'. His wife is expecting Tony's baby. Since the Irishman has no intention of raising a 'plumber's brat', when the child is born, he will leave it on their doorstep. As the baby's birth approaches and the question of its future remains unresolved, she seizes on her mother's 80th birthday as a pretext to return to Ireland for the summer with her children.
After its explosive opening, Long Island unfolds in a series of small events: a shopping trip to Dublin, a walk on a beach, a wedding. This deceptively quiet novel is the work of a writer at the height of his considerable powers, a story of ordinary lives that contains multitudes. In general, it is true, sequels are pale things, but the exceptions to the rule are glorious, contriving both to satisfy on their own terms and to deepen the reader's relationship with the book that came before. Long Island can safely count itself among their number.
Clare Clark £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction When Olive Kitteridge met Lucy Barton Tell Me Everything Elizabeth Strout
Ever since Elizabeth Strout's first novel, Amy and Isabelle (1998), introduced us to the imaginary New England town of Shirley Falls, she has developed a grippingly cohesive fictional landscape that gets richer with every book. The lives of ordinary people in ordinary places are Strout's speciality. Her debut featured an emotionally wounded single mother and her equally wounded daughter, while in Olive Kitteridge (2008) and Olive, Again (2019) we became acquainted with the cantankerous schoolteacher Olive and her longsuffering husband Henry in nearby Crosby. The Burgess Boys (2013) returned to Shirley Falls with the story of legal aid attorney Bob, his more successful corporate lawyer brother Jim, and their fraught relationship. My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), meanwhile, launched the parallel account, presented as a memoir, of the New-York based writer Lucy, a survivor, barely, of an impoverished and abusive post-second world war childhood in Illinois. The Barton family history was explored from different angles in a volume of linked stories, Anything Is Possible (2017), and in the Booker-shortlisted novel Oh William! (2021), where we learned more about Lucy's failed first marriage to the microbiologist William Gerhardt. These worlds finally converged in Lucy By the Sea (2022), a pandemic novel that brought Lucy's memoir-writing up to date in real time. The outbreak of Covid saw Lucy and her ex-husband, William, renting a house together in Crosby in order to escape locked-down New York. In Tell Me Everything they are now permanently settled there and are on the point of remarrying. The central pillar in this configuration is Bob Burgess, who happens to be William's solicitor and who was responsible for introducing him and Lucy to the community. We are told at the outset that this is Bob's story – the story of an apparently unexceptional 65-year-old man, who 'would never believe he had anything worthy in his life to document. But he does; we all do.' 'Tell me everything' is a credo of sorts, a statement of the writer's voracious need to know, to solve the human case. But that Strout's oblique approach to matters of the heart works so well is partly due to her judicious use of silence and omission to suggest the complexity of our closest connections. After Bob tries to act as the middleman in repairing Jim's relationship with his son, Larry writes Jim a letter: 'He unfolded the letter that was inside the envelope, and Bob put on his glasses and read 'Dear Dad,' and then the page was empty except for at the bottom where it was signed, 'Love, Larry.''
Sometimes, in this taciturn but deeply felt and profoundly intelligent novel, a kindly blank page is as good as it gets. Tell me everything. Or tell me nothing.
Elizabeth Lowry £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Memoir Last testament Patriot Alexei Navalny
Alexei Navalny was watching his favourite cartoon show, Rick and Morty, when he suddenly felt unwell. He was 21 minutes into an episode where Rick turns into a pickle. The late Russian opposition leader was on a flight back to Moscow after campaigning ahead of regional elections in the Siberian city of Tomsk in August 2020. Something was clearly wrong, and Navalny staggered to the bathroom. He is clear who gave the order to kill him with the nerve agent novichok: Vladimir Putin. Navalny spent 18 days in a coma, waking up in hospital in Germany. It was while recovering in Freiburg that he wrote the first part of his extraordinary memoir, Patriot. The second section consists of letters from prison, following his January 2021 return to Moscow, when he was dramatically arrested at the airport. Navalny says he embarked on an autobiography knowing the Kremlin could finish him off. 'If they do finally whack me, this book will be my memorial,' he notes.
During one of Yulia's visits, Navalny told her there was a 'high probability' he would never get out of prison alive. 'They will poison me,' he said. 'I know,' she replied. He sketches out what this means – no chance to say goodbye, never meeting his grandchildren, 'tasseled mortar boards tossed in the air in my absence'. Maybe an unmarked grave. His philosophy: hope for the best, expect the worst. His death is a terrible loss, for Russia and for all of us.
Luke Harding £9.34 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Health A remarkable account of an organ transplant The Story of a Heart Rachel Clarke
In 2017, a nine-year-old girl from Devon was involved in a car crash that left her with a catastrophic brain injury. Keira had been a keen horse rider who loved animals, and would go out of her way to rescue insects in distress. After her family were told she was brain dead they immediately asked if she would be able to donate her organs, knowing it was what she would have wanted. As Keira lay in intensive care, a young boy from Cheshire was on his eighth month in hospital with a dangerously enlarged heart. Before he became ill, nine-year-old Max loved to play football, climb trees and wrestle with his friends. But now, with acute cardiomyopathy brought on by a viral infection, Max was painfully thin and being kept alive with a mechanical heart pump. Not only did he not have the strength to leave his bed but, on his darkest days, he didn't want to live. He and his family knew his heart could give out at any minute and his only hope was a transplant.
In the Women's prize for nonfiction shortlisted The Story of a Heart, Dr Rachel Clarke writes about the feat of modern medicine that allowed Keira to give life to Max by donating her heart. There are moments, within this intricate tapestry, where her evocative, empathetic writing makes you catch your breath. In one of the most remarkable passages, we find ourselves privy to the meeting of the two families – a rarity in transplant cases – three months after Max's surgery. Joe, Keira's father, is handed a stethoscope. Putting the buds in his ears, he lays the drum on Max's chest and listens to his daughter's heart: busy, pulsing, alive.
Fiona Sturges £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction Art monsters Blue Ruin Hari Kunzru
Blue Ruin opens with the protagonist, Jay, delivering groceries to a palatial home in a rich enclave of upstate New York. On the doorstep his customer stands masked; this is happening in the early days of the Covid lockdown. Thus it takes him a moment to recognise Alice, his girlfriend from another life. Twenty years before, Jay and Alice lived together in London. He was then an up-and-coming Young British Artist, and she an aspiring curator. They had one of those relationships that made people run their names together: Jayanalice, Aliceanjay. Now she is 'radiant with the kind of health that's made of yoga and raw juices and massage and money'. She's also married to Rob, Jay's erstwhile best friend and rival, for whom she left him without a word. Jay, meanwhile, is prematurely aged from poverty and the punishing jobs that go with it. He's sick with long Covid and filthy from weeks of living in his car. 'See me, Alice,' he thinks. 'Nothing but a ragged membrane. A dirty scrap of ectoplasm, separating nothing from nothing.' She does see him; she calls out his name. A moment later he collapses, struggling to draw a breath. Alice takes Jay in, hiding him in a barn to conceal him from Rob and the other two members of her lockdown pod. In Jay's long, fevered days of convalescence, he is haunted by memories of their past.
Blue Ruin is bracingly intelligent and often just plain beautiful. It's a reminder that fiction, at its best, is a place to encounter new experiences and dwell in big ideas. Kunzru is known for ambitious novels that bring politics to rich, imaginative life; Blue Ruin shows him at the top of his game.
Sandra Newman £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction Bravura small-town chorus Heart, Be at Peace Donal Ryan
Donal Ryan made a stir straight out of the gate. His first novel, The Spinning Heart, published a dozen years ago, won the Guardian first book award and was longlisted for the Booker prize. A work of choral elegance, it is told in a sequence of 21 voices, inhabitants of a community in County Tipperary, Ireland – where Ryan himself is from – and unspooled the long and bitter wake of the 2008 financial crash in Ireland. Since then, Ryan has published five more novels and a book of short stories. He is a writer who likes a conceit: a chronological structure to contain the narrative; multiple voices. It is a measure of his skill, and gift for both language and character, that these techniques don't seem like contrivances, but rather widen the reader's sense of what a story can be.
And so it is with this sequel to his debut, Heart, Be at Peace. Once again, he gives us a sequence of 21 voices; readers of the first book will be reunited with many of the folk they came to know – but never fear, this works just as well as a standalone. Ryan is always deeply engaged by the way the fortunes of 21st-century Ireland impact directly on his characters: the financial emergency that afflicted this small town may have faded, but new troubles – opportunities, to some – have arisen to take their place. Ryan deftly interweaves a larger sense of danger, and an understanding of Ireland's history, with domestic concerns.
Erica Wagner £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction The political is personal The Spoiled Heart Sunjeev Sahota
On the release of his third novel, 2021's Booker-longlisted China Room, Sunjeev Sahota noted with some frustration the limiting lens through which his work tends to be viewed. 'Everyone always comments on the fact that my novels all have brown protagonists,' he remarked, 'but what no one ever says is that there aren't actually any characters in my novels who aren't working class.' As is to be expected from a novelist whose work has addressed religious radicalisation, migration and intergenerational trauma, Sahota was probing challenging territory. He was also, it now becomes clear, laying the groundwork for his fourth novel, which leans decisively into exactly this ideological tension. At the centre of The Spoiled Heart is Nayan Olak. From a factory job in the small Derbyshire town of Chesterfield, Nayan has worked his way up to the point where he is running to be union leader. Espousing a politics firmly rooted in class analysis, he emphasises tan­gible material improvements: safer working conditions, fairer contracts, better pensions. Well known and well liked, he polls strongly, and seemingly can't lose. While Nayan benefits from the relative privilege that attends a middle-aged man who is largely affirming the status quo, Megha, his determined young opponent for the position, has to work far harder to be heard. For a narrator, Sahota casts a Zuckerman-like alter ego: Sajjan, a writer from the same town who reconnects with a bruised Nayan and pieces together his unravelling. This additional layer of perspective provides both layered ambiguity and a broadened scope, allowing the novel to take in other lives and viewpoints: Helen, towards whom Nayan is increasingly attracted, and her son Brandon, who is rebuilding his life after a viral public shaming. As Sajjan probes, he gives shape not only to the collapse of Nayan's seemingly assured election campaign, but to the weight of grief that precedes and in some ways informs it: the death, in an unexplained fire, of Nayan's mother and infant son.
What lifts this tightly patterned novel from the weight of its own mechanics is Sahota's remarkable skill in characterisation. Every person, however narratively significant, feels intimately alive, partly because Sahota is so clever in his shifts of perspective. His characters don't just appear, they emerge and grow, revealing of themselves a little more in every finely judged interaction.
Sam Byers £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
History Understanding women's bodies Immaculate Forms Helen King
In this study, the historian of medicine, Helen King, tells the story of women's bodies using four body parts: breasts, clitoris, hymen and womb. Chosen for their importance to debates on gender identity, sexuality and reproductive health, she shows how the understanding of these parts has changed over time, sometimes being used 'to demonstrate that women are basically the same as men, at others to claim that they are entirely different'. For example, the ancient Greeks thought female bodies and minds were 'biologically unstable', because menstrual blood accumulated inside them and made the womb move, pressing on their organs. For this reason, they were excluded from much of the life of the Greek city-state. Throughout history such body-based beliefs – usually conceived by men – have been used to tell women 'what our bodies can and can't do'. As well as medical knowledge, King draws on mythical and religious ideas about women's bodies, especially regarding sexuality and pregnancy. Generally she finds that 'men come as the human default setting; women as the ones who need to be explained'. Breasts are 'the place where embodiment as female is most expressed and most deeply felt', probably because they are the most visible parts and are both maternal and sexual. The hymen has been used to promote 'ideals of purity as physical closure', as well as signifying, through its loss, the passage to womanhood. The clitoris – whose existence, like the hymen, has been disputed – is 'solely for joy'. Supposedly discovered in the 16th century at the end of the Age of Discovery by a man, King notes ironically: 'America, and the clitoris, were already there'. The purpose of the womb is just reproduction and she comments that 'being impossible to see has made it a breeding ground not only for us, but for myths about its nature and function', a uniquely powerful and mysterious organ in medicine, religion, as well as art and literature.
This is an immensely impressive work of scholarship, the result of a lifetime of thought and research on the subject and its implications for women today. Authoritative and wide-ranging, it is a remarkably rich scientific and cultural survey. King notes that history offers women many explanations of these four body parts and how they explain 'who we are'. But she concludes: 'whether or not we agree that our bodies are our 'selves', they are our bodies, and knowing their past is the key to understanding our present.'
PD Smith £10.79 (RRP £11.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
History When India ruled the world The Golden Road William Dalrymple
Forget the Silk Road, argues William Dalrymple in his dazzling new book. What came first, many centuries before that, was India's Golden Road, which stretched from the Roman empire in the west all the way to Korea and Japan in the far east. For more than a millennium, from about 250BC to AD1200, Indian goods, aesthetics and ideas dominated a vast 'Indosphere'. Indian merchants, travelling huge distances on the monsoon winds, reaped vast profits from its matchless cloth, spices, oils, jewellery, ivory, hardwoods, glass and furniture. The Golden Road deftly charts these economic developments. But Dalrymple's larger theme is India's intellectual hegemony. As he shows, during this era India was the great religious and philosophical superpower of Eurasia, with lasting effects into the present.
Dalrymple is a born storyteller, with a wonderful facility for expounding complex events with verve and clarity. Like any successful synthesis, his text draws on vast reading as well as a keen eye for telling details. Yet it's also a deeply personal work. Before writing a string of acclaimed books about British imperial adventures in south Asia, he was already renowned as a chronicler of its esoteric religious traditions. The Golden Road, teeming with his own evocative descriptions of far-flung cave and forest temples, sculptures and wall paintings, is not just a historical study but also a love letter – to a lost syncretic world of interacting and evolving religious creeds and intellectual movements, when Indian ideas transformed the world.
Fara Dabhoiwala £11.69 (RRP £12.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction Dark family secrets The Unwilding Marina Kemp
A sultry August in Sicily in 1999 provides the initial setting for Marina Kemp's powerfully compelling second novel. The court of the revered novelist and patriarch Don Travers – his four children; his silent, apparently surrendered wife Lydia; and a revolving guestlist of the great and good, the influential, the useful and the up-and-coming – is in situ at Il Frantoio, the rambling villa the family takes every summer.
To whom does the truth of lived experience belong, Kemp asks. If the same family secret inspires rage in one victim and shame in another, whose is the copyright? The tension Kemp applies to this tightrope is the key to her success in walking it. Holding all her narratives in balance and leaving final judgment to the reader, she is meticulous and unsparing in her dissection of the creative process and its casualties. And our reward is the miraculous potency of the written word, the tale shaped and told through Lydia – who barely speaks even to those she held closest, but does finally set her story down in writing – and through Kemp's own masterly skill.
Christobel Kent £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Fiction Ghosts of the past The Echoes Evie Wyld
Max, a thirtysomething creative writing tutor, has died, and now haunts the second-floor flat in London's Tulse Hill where he once lived with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah. This is inconvenient, as Max doesn't believe in ghosts, and yet here he is, watching Hannah grieve, 'floating about like a jellyfish, my tendrils … sweeping up the lint and hair from the floor. Sometimes when I come forth I take up the whole of a room, like a balloon slotted between ribs and blown up to make a space for breath.' Notice that funny, mysterious 'come forth', and the near-violence of the simile that follows ('slotted between ribs'): this is not going to be a quirky-sad love story, all poignant memories and hard-won insights. We are in Evie Wyld's precise and unforgiving hands, and she knows exactly where she wants to take us. The narrative jumps largely between Max's sections as a ghost trapped in the flat, titled 'After'; Hannah's chapters, set in the run-up to Max's death, called 'Before'; and 'Then' – flashbacks to Hannah's childhood in rural Australia. She grew up with her parents, her Uncle Tone and older sister Rachel on The Echoes, land on which a residential school for Indigenous and mixed-race children once stood. An old paddock concealed their small bones: victims of racist child removal policies that, until as recently as 1969, saw tens of thousands of kids taken from their families and either fostered with white families or sent to orphanages, missions or 'training homes'. Few records were kept, but it's known that many children died of neglect or from physical punishment, and their remains were secretly buried on site.
Yet as well as terror The Echoes is also suffused with love, from the deep bond between Hannah and Rachel to the consoling and celebratory love of female friends, and the imperfect, wavering but ultimately lasting love between Hannah and Max. It is also – and this is important – a deeply funny book: there's Max, who 'has recently decided that the thing about him is fermentation', burping a jar of homemade kimchi; Hannah's brief liaison with a godawful friend, the whole thing watched by Max's ghost, who is tersely surprised to observe that the friend is circumcised; Hannah's chaotic pal Janey and her brilliantly serious daughter, who has a habit of upending adult conversations; a scabrously excruciating comic set piece of a Christmas dinner; and Max's ghostly war, and eventual entente, with the cat Hannah gets after his death.
Melissa Harrison £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
Society A divided world returns Goodbye Globalization Elizabeth Braw
After the Cold War, globalisation was hailed by politicians and business leaders as the way to create higher living standards, reduce the threat of war and spread Western-style liberal democracy through free trade. According to security expert Elizabeth Braw, 'it was an exhilarating time, with limitless opportunities for companies, cheaper products for consumers and better relations between countries'. In 2008, the Beijing Olympics neatly captured this ideal of a harmonious global community in its motto 'One World, One Dream'. But by 2023, when Braw was writing this illuminating book, the war in Ukraine had led to the West severing economic and political links to Russia and an increasingly frosty relationship with China. Indeed, President Xi Jinping – though often praising globalisation – has not hesitated to use his country's new-found economic power to intimidate states, such as Lithuania and Australia, as well as companies, including H&M and Nike: 'executives lived in fear of punishment by the country that had seemed capitalism's most adept pupil'. The dream of Western politicians – that if countries like Russia and China embraced a market economy they would also introduce democracy – has turned into a nightmare. Instead they have become more aggressive and authoritarian. Braw explores the rise of globalisation from the late 1980s up to the present, arguing that, despite an initial period of turbulence, its demise may even offer countries the opportunity to come up with a new way of coexisting and the chance to forge 'a better world'. Through revealing interviews with key business leaders, politicians, bankers and ordinary citizens, she charts the optimism of the early years of globalisation (the 'economics-is-everything' mindset), to the current realism of 'the new friendshored world', which could see manufacturing jobs returning to places like the Midlands in the UK, where former Labour MP John Spellar tells Braw: 'we need to start training people in anticipation of the kinds of jobs that may arrive'.
This is a timely study that offers many fascinating insights into the ideas and people behind globalisation. What could so easily have been a dry, scholarly text, is instead a pacy and very human story, weaving economics, technology and history into a compelling geopolitical narrative of the last three decades.
PD Smith £12.99 - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop