An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

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Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Bodley Head) has already been hailed as a fascinating breakthrough in natural history. Exit Management by Naomi Booth (Dead Ink, September) is a timely, original dissection of class and desperation in Brexit London; in The First Woman by Kintu author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Oneworld, October), a young woman comes of age in 1970s Uganda. He interlaces the stories of these personal and family experiences with critiques of the contemporary Western progressivism that seeks to denigrate its own culture (as being, say, uniquely racist) while simultaneously proposing and implementing oppressive “solutions” (e. Episodes of Triggernometry regularly chalk up greater viewer numbers than Newsnight or other political shows on terrestrial TV.

High-profile, bestselling books have played a vital role in focusing opposition to the Trump presidency, from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to the recent broadsides fired by John Bolton and Mary Trump. It is unclear to what degree Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power (Little, Brown, September) is an act of rebellion but it is, by all accounts, amusing, indiscreet and causing some consternation in parliament. During these two decades, she has also been keeping a secret diary about life as a political plus-one, with lots of details of mansplaining and mixing with Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Cameron. There is some interesting lane-switching from Sarah Crossan, known for her brilliant YA verse novels: Here is the Beehive (Bloomsbury) brings the same form to an adult tale of love, betrayal and loss. They have hair-raising stories to tell about their employers: “Naturally and reflexively,” the author says, cleaners “are cultural anthropologists”.There’s also the rare treat of a new novel from Marilynne Robinson, whose Jack (Virago) revisits the world of Gilead for a story of interracial love after the second world war. First up in the flood of autumn fiction are the last two unpublished novels from the Booker longlist: Gabriel Krauze’s Who They Was (4th Estate), a hard-hitting debut set amid London gang culture, and US author Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness(Oneworld), in which a mother and child escape a polluted metropolis for a dangerous experiment in living. Investigations into dark and difficult areas of society give a presence to people who usually remain invisible. For those who recognize the truth of such assertions, Kisin offers nothing objectionable; he also, however, offers little new or insightful.

Dollyites will celebrate the arrival of Dolly Parton’s Songteller: My Life in Lyrics (Hodder, November), while the two major football memoirs are by contrasting figures in the game: Jamie Redknapp, who has written Me, Family and the Making of a Footballer (Headline, October) and Arsène Wenger, whose account of his 22 years of managing Arsenal appears under the title My Life in Red and White (Weidenfeld, October).For instance, he explained the effort to “change the perception of reality for every American to such an extent that despite the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their countries. Freedom of speech, the sanctity of the individual and equality of opportunity,” he notes, “are both the products of and the necessary ingredients for the tremendous progress we have made in science, art, technology and culture. Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill(Scribner) is a stylish examination of far right culture and the roots of our contemporary chaos. The political leadership class comes in for its fair share of criticism as well, with many high-profile failures highlighted: the hypocrisy on adherence to COVID guidance, flip-flops on the efficacy of mask-wearing, and the sudden reversal of social-distancing rules when people wanted to gather en masse to protest preferred causes.

Two noteworthy celebrations of books are Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books by Cathy Rentzenbrink (Picador, September) and Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread by Michiko Kakutani (William Collins, October). Kisin’s criticisms of Western media are presented not as inherent flaws of the economic or social structures prevailing in the relevant countries but as self-betrayals that threaten to undo those things.Many of his interviewees are immigrants who came to the UK dreaming of a better life, and ended up draining buckets of bleach. It gives him an important perspective on the West at a time when the West would appear to be throwing away so much of what it has achieved. Her previous work H is for Hawk established Macdonald as a brilliant practitioner of nature-memoir; this new book cautions against viewing the natural world as a ‘mirror of ourselves, reflecting our own world-view and our own needs, thoughts and hopes’. Yiyun Li delves into family tragedy in Must I Go(Hamish Hamilton), while Rose Tremain’s Islands of Mercy(Chatto) ranges from 19th-century Bath to Borneo via Paris and Dublin exploring colonialism, self-determination and the nature of desire. Jonathan Coe promises some much needed escapism in Mr Wilder and Me (Viking, November), in which a young woman works for the Hollywood director on a Greek island during the summer of 77.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (translated by Adrian Nathan West, Pushkin) describes itself as “fiction based on real events”; it illuminates unexpected and often darkly ironic connections between scientific discoveries, and showcases the minds seeking to pierce the mysterious heart of mathematics. Kisin is right to feel a certain sickness of stomach at the way in which so much journalism in the West has ended up wasting the opportunities of freedom. For all these reasons, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West is perhaps best suited for those uninitiated in the basics of classical liberal thinking or who need to be reminded of the blessings of living in a contemporary Western society.

Iraqi-born Hassan Blasim follows searing short-story collections with his first novel God 99 (translated by Jonathan Wright, Comma, Nov ember), in which an Iraqi refugee tracks down the real stories behind Europe’s “refugee crisis”. A revealing portrayal of the stubborn-man-behind-the-genius is expected from Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics, by his long-term collaborator Leonard Mlodinow (Allen Lane, September).