Which Books Should You Be Buying This Week?
Your digest of the weekend's newspaper book reviews Jan 6/7
This post is free to all subscribers, but upgrading to become a member of White Ink enables me to keep producing content like this that everyone can enjoy. Being a member of White Ink also gives you access to my full archive of posts, including posts by 25 guest authors, and access to my monthly online creative writing club.
Hello! And here we are on our first literary round up of the new year!
I hope you enjoyed the Twelve Days Of Christmas Writing Advice Series, don’t forget you can catch up on the series, and previous series here for eternity – I’ve migrated them all into one handy place.
For people new to White Ink – “welcome!” – this is your weekly round-up of some of the best books the literary pages were talking about this weekend – think of it as me scrolling through all the book pages so you don’t have to.
And, if you like the sound of them, you can buy them from my online bookshop, The Book Room by clicking on the titles of the books below.
First up, SURVIVORS - THE LOST STORIES OF THE LAST CAPTIVES OF THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE. Saturday’s Times Culture section describes this new book as a ‘gripping account’ of the last American slave ship to leave Africa.
The ‘deal’ which found 125 inhabitants of the west African village Tarkar on a ship bound for the US (only 108 arrived), was struck as punishment for their failure to supply half of their harvest to the kingdom of Dahomey, the regional power that ran a slave-trading empire and a protection racket.
Before these men and women were forced into iron collars, they had witnessed the obliteration of their town by female warriors who had marched on them with machetes and muskets. Those who these warriors didn’t kill, were finished off by a second round of male invaders, and those who made it were marched off to the slave port of Ouidah.
We prefer to think that such barbarism does not exist anymore, although current world events might signal otherwise. It is in equal parts terrifying and depressing what human beings are capable of doing to one another, and this book bears witness to that in powerful detail. As one of the survivors would remark sixty years later: "The inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me.”
‘SURVIVORS tells the store of the Tarkars in gripping, harrowing detail,’ writes Pratinav Anil reviewing. ‘It was, Hannah Durkin observes, a miracle that 108 survived this journey. Packed like sardines and subsisting on occasional gulps of vinegary water, approximately 1.8 million slaves had died on the hellish Middle Passage; 10.7 million Africans survived, reading the New World, where they enjoyed a life expectancy of seven years.’
The life they lived on US soil made ‘animals out of us’, so states one of the testimonies used as research for Durkin’s book describing how these people were forced to eat ‘a dense treacle out of a trough like a hog.’ Of course they also endured much worse.
This will not, in any way, be a comfortable read, but it is important to bear witness to such events, to remind ourselves that we have said never again, to look around our world now and see how humans are still treating each other, to wonder what we can possibly do to stand up against injustice in all its grotesque forms – to not look away.
One good thing is the title of the book, it emancipates these people from the crimes committed against them, it celebrates them for what they managed to withstand – a reminder of the greatness of the human spirit also in the face of its darkness. These people were survivors – against all odds.
And if you would like to honour their stories, you can buy SURVIVORS here.
The Telegraph gave two four-star reviews to these paperbacks, one I featured in these pages on hardback release and I’m still desperate to read so we’ll start with that one. It’s BIG SWISS by Jen Beagin.
‘Set to be an HBO series, Beagin’s third novel is a sly, twisty tale of eavesdropping, power games and sexual drama, featuring a sex therapist who becomes entangled with a client, the titular “Big Swiss”’
Get ahead of it dropping on your screens and buy BIG SWISS here.
And there’s KING by Jonathan Eig. Here’s what The Telegraph had to say about it:
‘This biography of Martin Luther King Jr recentres his radicalism. Eig’s King is a firebrand radical who argued for the overturning of the police, not the cosy “centrist dad” of “I have a dream.”’
For another view of MLK, you can buy KING here.
Ooh, this book I’ve been excited about for a while, it’s historian Bettany Hughes’ latest THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD.
The reason I am so excited is because my second novel (my current work-in-progress) is set partly around one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – the mausoleum at Halikarnassos.
The Guardian’s Saturday gave this a great review hailing Hughes a ‘beguiling guide’ to bring these seven wonders back to life in her 416-page book, and the Observer’s New Review also loved it describing this whizz around the world as ‘quite the adventure.’
‘Of the great wonders of the ancient world, only the Pyramid of Giza remains. So a trip to modern-day Egypt is an appropriate starting point for Bettany Hughes fascinating exploration of the impact such structures have had on our history and imagination. Mixing the latest archaeological and historical research with a bright, inquisitive style makes these places – and their peoples – come alive.’
I can’t wait to read it. If you agree, you can buy THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD here.
Let’s finish up with a bit of fiction in translation and one that looks like another winner from Fitzcarraldo Editions – as the Observer New Review describes them ‘the coolest publisher in town.’
It is certainly true that they have a keen eye for bringing brilliant writers to us (Fitzcarraldo publishes Jon Fosse and Annie Ernaux, both recent winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature). This book described in The Observer as ‘a novel of brilliance and beauty’ is THE SINGULARITY by Balsam Karam, a Swedish writer of Iranian-Kurdish descent, and translated by Saskia Vogel.
I know that in this short round-up, I cannot do the book, its plot, or the various narrators justice as it weaves in and out of voices and takes some explaining. But the reviewer in The Observer was blown away by its originality, and if my experience of anything Fitzcarraldo publishes is anything to go by, this will be one worth checking out.
Here’s the blurb from the book, which tells you a little more:
In an unnamed coastal city home to many refugees, a mother of a displaced family searches for her child, calling her name as she wanders along the cliffside road where her daughter used to work. She searches and searches until, devoid of hope and frantic with grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to this suicide is another woman – on a business trip from a distant country, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby.
In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers her own litany of losses – of a language, a country, an identity – when once her family fled a distant war. Weaving between both narratives and written in looping prose rich with meaning, THE SINGULARITY is an astounding study of grief, migration and motherhood from one of Sweden's most exciting new writers.
Sounds intriguing, right? If you think so too, you can buy THE SINGULARITY here.
That’s all for this week, I hope you enjoyed that round-up and it gave you some ideas for your next reads. Until next time…