My reading this year has been the usual eclectic mix. I normally (normal for me, I hasten to add) have four books on the go at any time. One will be in French, maintaining a fairly recent resolution (so far this half year, de Beauvoir, Gide, Mauriac, Fatou Diome and Francois Emmanuel, of whom the last two were new to me). At least one will be non-fiction. One will be on the Kindle, two will be by my bedside to read before I turn out the light, and one in my library room (currently the French one).

Having brought so many books, half-forgotten in many cases, down from the attic this year, I’m instituting a new ‘rule’ for 2025 – one of the four books will be a re-read. Or, possibly, a first read if it’s one I’ve had for yonks but honestly can’t recall whether or not I did read it (there’s a lot of M’s sci-fi stuff that’s in that category). But there are also books the mere sight of whose covers made me yearn to revisit them. And whilst life is short and there’s so many great new books out there, there are also so many great old books that absolutely deserve to be savoured all over again.

I read a lot of crime fiction, but would not want to be reading more than one in that genre, as clues and corpses could easily get in a muddle. When it comes to crime fiction in particular, I haven’t listed everything I read, not because it wasn’t any good, but because ongoing series are hard to review without just repeating myself about how good, e.g. Elly Griffiths or Val McDermid is.

There are a few books here that slide across genres – Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots is crime + sci-fi, Leonora Nattrass’ Blue Water is crime + historical fiction. For more straightforward historical fiction the stand-out is Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait. And for books that don’t present us with the world that we know or that existed, or not straightforwardly, there’s Evaristo’s alt history/alt geography Blonde Roots, Mullen, Jenny Erpenbeck’s End of Days which plays around with how death normally operates, and Kate Atkinson’s short stories (see below). I was pleased to discover some new novelists in this batch, notably Nathan Harris, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Margot Singer and Anna Burns – my top books of this half year are Nelson’s Open Water and Burns’ Milkman, and in non-fiction, Paul Besley’s The Search. As always, I try to avoid spoilers, but do proceed with caution.

Fiction

Kate Atkinson – Normal Rules Don’t Apply

I love Atkinson – Life after Life in particular is one of my absolute favourite books. I’m not generally a fan of short stories but these are – as the title suggests – quirky and sometimes baffling, as well as being often very funny, and definitely need to be re-read asap.

Simone de Beauvoir – Les Belles Images

Reading this, I felt as if it should be one of those French films where elegant people sit around talking about ideas, when they’re not sleeping with each other’s partners. Isabelle Huppert should be in this. I’ve not found it an easy read, partly because the narrative voice switches between our protagonist Laurent, and a narrator, without the distinction always being clearly made on the page. It’s short on event (another reason why it should be one of those French films), very introspective. Worth persevering, because it’s intelligent and perceptive and sharp, and the discussions they have are still pertinent fifty years on.

Mark Billingham – The Wrong Hands

The second in his new Declan Miller police procedural series. Miller is infuriating, but funny and human (though I’m not sure he’s quite different enough from Tom Thorne, about whom the same things could be said), and the crime here is woven together with his own search for truth about the death of his wife, which gives it a lot of heart.

Anna Burns – Milkman

I’ve been meaning to read this for a long time – urged on by my Belfast-born sister-in-law in particular – and I’m so glad I did. It’s darkly funny and terribly sad and horrifying and the people in it blaze with individual life, despite not being named.

Candice Carty-Williams – People Person

I loved her debut, Queenie but this didn’t quite work for me. It started off brilliantly, with the crackling dialogue that was so enjoyable in Queenie, and the deft characterisation of the group of half-siblings and their hopeless father. But the event that dictates the rest of the plot and what flowed from it just seemed so improbable, and then it all got resolved rather too neatly. A lot to enjoy along the way but flawed.  

Fatou Diome – Le Ventre de l’Atlantique

A Senegalese woman, making a living (just about) in France, talks on the phone to her younger brother who (along with many of his contemporaries) is desperate to make the same journey, with dreams of being a professional footballer. Through their phone conversations and her own account of her life in their village, we explore those dreams and the realities that the dreamers don’t want to face, all with the backdrop of the 2000 European Cup and the 2002 World Cup.

Francois Emmanuel – La Question humaine

I saw the film based on this – Heartbeat Detector, starring Matthieu Amalric – some years ago and it’s pretty close to the book. A psychologist in the HR department of the French branch of a German firm is asked to investigate the fitness of the CEO and finds himself investigating complicity or direct involvement in the Holocaust. At the heart of it is an exploration of language – the inhuman language of memos dating from the early phases of the Holocaust, and the reductive language of HR practice in large corporations.  

Jenny Erpenbeck – The End of Days

The structure frequently wrong-footed me at first – characters are unnamed – it’s the daughter, the mother, the grandmother – and so as we move around in the chronology those relationships change too. Worth the effort to focus. The central conceit reminded me of Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life – a life ends, but it need not have, and what if it didn’t end then, but a bit later, or much later than that? Compelling and moving.

Bernardine Evaristo – Blonde Roots

An alternative world, where the slaves are white, their owners African. It’s not a straight reversal of history, geography has been adjusted too. It’s funny – I love the scene where the white peasant family raise the newborn to the heavens to see ‘the only thing greater than you’, a skit on that same scene in Roots, and perhaps on the Lion King too… The Independent said, ‘Running through these pages is not just a feisty, hyperactive imagination asking “what if?”, but the unhealed African heart with the question, “how does it feel?” This is a powerful gesture of fearless thematic ownership by one of the UK’s most unusual and challenging writers’.

Sebastian Faulks – Charlotte Gray

I think I read this slightly too soon after Simon Mawer’s The Girl who fell from the Sky/Tightrope which has a very similar plot (young female SOE agent parachuted into France, but with her own agenda). It was worth reading though, and it avoids the clichés of wartime heroics, with a compelling protagonist. Apparently Faulks received a Bad Sex award for this but honestly, I’ve read far, far worse…

Damon Galgut – The Promise

Across the years, from the ‘80s to 2018, a South African family wrestles with the huge changes in society, and with the titular promise, made on her deathbed by the matriarch Rachel, that the family servant, Salome, would be given a house of her own on the family farm. It’s a promise that’s explicitly disavowed, or deliberately forgotten about, or that simply is impossible to keep, but that promise speaks eloquently about South African society and its history. It’s in four sections, each beginning with the death of a member of the family, and each reflecting key episodes in the country’s recent history. In each section we see things from the perspective of one of the family members, although always with dry asides from the narrator to puncture their naivety or complacency. But the person into whom we get the least insight is Salome, who is more of a symbol than a character, let alone a protagonist.

André Gide – La Porte étroite

The only Gide I’d read before this was Thesée, his version of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, which I read whilst writing my PhD thesis, and preoccupied with labyrinths. That was published in 1946 – this is a much earlier work, from 1909, and with a strong biographical element, as the central relationship between his protagonist Jerome and Jerome’s cousin Alissa reflects Gide’s relationship with his own cousin, who he married, despite his homosexuality. Here the issue is not so much sexuality – the relationship between Jerome and Alissa is intense but spiritual rather than physical, and mired in misunderstandings and things unspoken.

Patrick Hamilton – Hangover Square

Rather a depressing read, TBH. But bleakly funny at times. The Critic said that ‘This novel could not have been written at any other point in history. Hamilton is a great navigator of human frailty in the face of desolation. It is not the bar room drinkers, but the articulation of the tragic lack of power man has over the madness that swirls about him that makes Hangover Square a novel of its time.’

Nathan Harris – The Sweetness of Water

Set in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, Harris’s debut novel tells of a white farmer whose encounter with two newly freed slaves both transforms his life, and brings about tragedy. It’s beautifully written, with the central characters all given depth and complexity. It’s about change, and how even the most desired, necessary, righteous social change is traumatic, and not just for its opponents. It’s about how people – individuals and communities – move on from that, about what freedom might mean at this time and in this place. Deeply moving, and with a sense of hope.

Robert Harris – Archangel

Harris never lets me down. We start off in Death of Stalin territory, and then jump forward to the post-Soviet era to meet our protagonist, an academic specialist in Soviet history who gets embroiled in highly dangerous secrets that show how that great dictator is not and perhaps cannot ever be entirely consigned to history. Thrilling up to the final page.

Sarah Hilary – Sharp Glass

The latest stand-alone psychological thriller from Hilary, and it’s another corker, perhaps her best yet. It’s not about twists for the sake of twists (I do go on a bit about this, but it really annoys me, when all credible plotting or character development is jettisoned for the sake of ‘a twist you’ll never see coming’…). Here, character is all, and these characters gradually become clearer, to themselves, to each other and to the reader, but there are loose ends left loose, not tidied away, so we’re still wondering about the protagonists after we’ve turned the final page.

Winifred Holtby – The Crowded Street

Holtby’s second published novel. I’d read South Riding many years ago, and several times – my Mum was a fan – and also Anderby Wold, but this one was new to me.  Her protagonist is a young woman who feels a strong sense of familial duty but nonetheless struggles to fit the role that is expected of her. It’s often funny but there’s a deep sadness too, and anger.

Aldous Huxley – Point Counterpoint

A roman à clef about interwar intellectuals (based on, inter alia, D H Lawrence, Middleton Murry and Huxley himself). Like a fugue, the novel unfolds through a series of different voices and different debates, interweaving and recurring in different forms. As such it’s wordy and light on incident, but nonetheless fascinating.

Tom Kenneally – Fanatic Heart

I was looking forward to this – I’d read a few of Kenneally’s books years back and remember liking them, and Fanatic Heart covers an interesting period of history, spanning three continents, from the Irish Famine through to the first stirrings of civil war in the US, through the life of Irish nationalist writer John Mitchel. But the style was somehow so inert. The story was eventful enough, it should have been engaging but instead it dragged, and I ended up skim reading the last chapter or so just to finish it. The story is also cut off before what would potentially have been an opportunity to explore Mitchel’s controversial views on slavery (he was for it), and his loyalty to the Confederate cause during the Civil War. But I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy this enough to read a sequel, if there is one.

Jhumpa Lahiri – The Namesake

Touching, funny account of a young man’s life, from a Bengali family, growing up with a Russian name in the USA. Julie Myerson in the Guardian said that ‘this is certainly a novel that explores the concepts of cultural identity, of rootlessness, of tradition and familial expectation – as well as the way that names subtly (and not so subtly) alter our perceptions of ourselves – but it’s very much to its credit that it never succumbs to the clichés those themes so often entail. Instead, Lahiri turns it into something both larger and simpler: the story of a man and his family, of his life and hopes, loves and sorrows.’

Francois Mauriac – La Pharisienne

Mauriac’s Le Noeud de Viperes was one of the first French novels that I read (in French) without having to, whilst I was at school. I’ve read several of his other novels, and his remarkable clandestine pseudonymous publication Le Cahier Noir, a rallying call to Resistance during the Occupation. He’s a hero of mine – he was in many ways a conservative – family, the Church, his country – but never an unquestioning one, and his questioning led him to challenge the Church’s support for Franco, and to bring his skill as a writer to the Resistance. He was never going to be a fighter (too old, too weedy), but he still risked everything by his activities and associations. This novel was published during the Occupation, under his own name, because it isn’t, at least overtly, about that. It’s the study of a woman whose religious convictions make her seek perfection not only in herself but in those around her, and to deal harshly with those who fall short. As a critique of religious zeal it was controversial enough – but the depiction of a culture of denunciation perhaps does refer obliquely to the Occupation. It’s powerful and Brigitte Pian, the ‘Woman of the Pharisees’ is a horrifying creation.

Arthur Miller – Focus

I was prompted to re-read this by watching Joseph Losey’s film Mr Klein (see my screen blog). This is Miller’s only novel and it’s premiss is a man who gets a new pair of specs and realises he now looks like a Jew, and that people around him are suddenly seeing him as a Jew. It’s a powerful and shocking account of antisemitism in the US at the end of WWII, and all the more interesting because the protagonist is himself a repository of antisemitic and other racist prejudices (unlike, for example, Gregory Peck’s character in Gentleman’s Agreement, who is noble and righteous and allowing himself to be seen as a Jew consciously and deliberately).

Thomas Mullen – Blind Spots

I have read and loved Mullen’s trilogy (Darktown, Lightning Men and Midnight Atlanta) dealing with Atlanta’s first black cops in the era of segregation and civil rights protests. This is completely different – we’re in an unspecified future, where everyone, worldwide, gradually lost their sight. A technological solution has been found (even if it’s not available, or acceptable, to everyone), downloading visual data directly to people’s brains. But then, it gets hacked, and no one can really trust what they’re seeing… It’s a sci-fi crime thriller, which is completely gripping, but also thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Leonora Natrass – Blue Water

A cracking historical mystery, set in the days of the American Revolutionary Wars, and we’re all at sea, en route to Philadelphia with a disgraced FO clerk, who is trying to ensure that a vital treaty will reach the Americans in time to stop them joining France’s war on Britain. This is the second in a series so I should really have read Black Drop first, but thoroughly enjoyed this one nonetheless and will backtrack to its prequel asap.

Caleb Azumah Nelson – Open Water

Stunning debut from a young British-Ghanaian writer, with a second-person narrative that involves the reader intensely in the protagonist’s thoughts, emotions and experiences. It’s about love, race, masculinity. The i review describes it as ‘an emotionally intelligent and tender tale of first love which examines, with great depth and attention, the intersections of creativity and vulnerability in London – where inhabiting a black body can affect how one is perceived and treated’.

Maggie O’Farrell – The Marriage Portrait

Gorgeously written historical novel, beautiful and tragic and very memorable. Its heroine is Lucrezia de’Medici, married at 15 to the Duke of Ferrara, whose early and suspicious death inspired Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’.

Ann Patchett – The Dutch House

This almost sounds like a fairy tale – a magical house from which the children are driven out by their stepmother. But for all of the motifs from those archetypal narratives, it’s really about how we deal with the past when the past has hurt us. Maeve (an extraordinary creation) and Danny, the two exiled children, struggle with and find different approaches to this. As the Guardian reviewer put it, Patchett ‘leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature’.

Richard Powers – Orfeo

I discovered Powers last year through The Time of our Singing. Like that book, this one is suffused with music. The Independent reviewer said ‘There are passages that make you want to rush to your stereo, or download particular pieces to listen to as you read — Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time — and others that seem to offer that same experience for pieces you will never hear, pieces composed by Powers’s composer hero, Peter Els.’ It’s not just about the subjective experience of music, it’s about composition, and microbiology and technology, and it’s absolutely compelling.

Margot Singer – Underground Fugue

Another novel that invokes musical form (see also Huxley’s Point Counterpoint). In this case, fugue is both structure – there are four voices here, which alternate and interweave, and connect or echo each other in different ways – and psychological state – all four are exiled and unrooted (and there’s a connection too to the case of the so-called ‘Piano Man’). As these stories interconnect, we move closer to the climactic event of the novel, the 7/7 London bombings. Beautifully written, suffused with a sense of loss.

Cath Staincliffe – The Fells

A police procedural dealing with a cold case – the discovery of a skeleton in some caves in the fells. As always, Staincliffe is interested not just in the crime, and who was responsible for it, but in the ramifications of the crime, the effects on the family and friends. And as always, she makes you believe in her characters, including her new detective duo, and care about them.

Elizabeth Strout – The Burgess Boys/Lucy by the Sea

I do love a Strout. As always, these novels connect with each other, and with others of Strout’s oeuvre. The Burgess brothers connect here to Lucy Barton (via Bob), and we also encounter (indirectly) Olive Kitteridge and the protagonists of Abide with Me – there are more links than those, and I think some kind of a flowchart is called for. Lucy is a Covid novel, it starts with Lucy’s ex-husband William insisting on taking serious steps to isolate the people he cares about as the pandemic looms, and it explores the strange world that we all inhabited then with Strout’s remarkable insight and empathy.

Douglas Stuart – Shuggie Bain

This is a tough read. It’s brilliantly written, with profound sympathies for its characters, including some of the more hopeless ones, but most of all for Shuggie as he tries to survive a chaotic childhood and navigate a path to some kind of stability. There were many moments when I feared how this would end, when a brief period of hope ended in yet another heartbreaking betrayal or failure, but ultimately there is some hope. Just enough.

Kit de Waal – Supporting Cast

These short stories connect to de Waal’s novels – as the title suggests they take characters who played a supporting role in those narratives and bring them to the foreground. As always with de Waal, these people, the lost and the losers, are drawn with tenderness and understanding, and I found them very moving.

Colson Whitehead – Crook Manifesto

A brilliant sequel to Harlem Shuffle. We’re now in the 70s, and furniture salesman Ray Carney is trying to stay on the right side of the law, but things get messy… The writing is marvellous, edgy and with bleak humour. As the Independent says, ‘the blend of violence, sardonic observation and out-and-out comedy reflects Whitehead’s ability to neatly balance the trick of writing both a homage to, and affectionate tease of, noir crime fiction’.

Non-Fiction

Albinia – The Britannias

Alice Albinia takes us island-hopping, and on each of the islands that surround Great Britain, she explores the history (going back to ancient times, and moving gradually forward to our own), folklore, landmarks and traditions, weaving in her own personal history and the conversations she has with locals and fellow-travellers. A lovely, intriguing read.

Paul Besley – The Search: The Life of a Mountain Rescue Dog Search Team

I probably would not have come across this book had I not known its author. And that would have been such a loss. I’m not particularly a dog person – that is, I’ve never lived with a dog, and there are only a few that I have got to know at all well (Alfie, Loki and Bentley). I did have my own encounter with Mountain Rescue though, when I was a teenager with a small group on a church youth hostelling trip who got stuck in awful weather on Great Gable and I can still vividly remember hearing and then seeing our rescuers arrive, with duvet coats and hot chocolate and the relief and joy and gratitude that I felt. The book describes Paul’s own experience of being rescued (a great deal more dramatic than mine) and subsequent involvement with Mountain Rescue, culminating in training a dog, Scout, to work with him to track people who need help in the hills. It’s that training process that forms the bulk of the book, and it’s extraordinary – fascinating and moving and gripping. The title turns out to mean much more than the literal search for those lost bodies – it’s a very personal search for meaning, for a way of living well and in the present, for contentment even in the toughest of times. Do read it, whether or not you are a dog or a hiking person – it’s quite remarkable.

Jarvis Cocker – Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory

Not a memoir. Rather, this is Jarvis rummaging in his attic and telling us stories about some of the stuff he finds there, whilst debating whether to keep or get rid of each item. It’s very engaging, playful and tricksy (just how random are these random items? Were they all actually in that attic at the start of the project? Did the things he tells us he decided to ‘cob’ (a Sheffield word – albeit not one I’m familiar with – for chuck out) actually get cobbed?). And along the way lots of brilliant anecdotes about Jarvis’s youth and the early days of Pulp.

Joan Didion – Blue Nights

I read The Year of Magical Thinking last year, just long enough after the sudden death of my husband. That book deals not only with her husband’s death but with the serious illness of their daughter Quintana, who was in hospital, unconscious when he died, and after an initial recovery became seriously ill again, dying just before Magical Thinking was published. Blue Nights tells – in a non-linear fashion – the story of Quintana’s adoption, her issues with depression and anxiety, her illness and death, through Didion’s eyes. Didion shows, with brutal clarity, how little she understood her daughter, and it offers no healing insights into dealing with such a loss. Cathleen Sohine wrote in the NY Review of Books that ‘Blue Nights is about what happens when there are no more stories we can tell ourselves, no narrative to guide us and make sense out of the chaos, no order, no meaning, no conclusion to the tale’. It’s utterly bleak. Whereas Magical Thinking is an act of mourning, Blue Nights, permeated by Didion’s sense of failure as a mother, and failure to understand Quintana, is a cry of despair.

Jeremy Eichler – Time’s Echo: Music, Memory and the Second World War

Brilliant, fascinating and eminently readable. A study of four composers (Richard Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten and Shostakovich) and a key work by each, responding to World War II and the Holocaust in particular. It generated a powerful playlist: Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Strauss’ Metamorphosen, Britten’s War Requiem and Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony (specifically the 1st movement, the Adagio, often referred to as Babi Yar) and along the way lots of other pieces are discussed, with such clarity that one almost feels as if one can hear them.

Paul Fussell – The Great War and Modern Memory

Fascinating study – published in the ‘70s – of how the ‘Great War’ was portrayed in poetry and fiction, how literary references, mythology and religious ideas permeated these portrayals, along with a strong strand of homoeroticism. Some of the work Fussell explores is familiar to me (Owen, Sassoon, Graves), some not at all, but it’s full of interest and new insights. I was particularly struck by how the ‘literariness’ of the accounts was not restricted to the officer class but is present in diary and memoir from other ranks too, suggesting a widespread familiarity with, e.g. Shakespeare and Bunyan.

Rebecca Godfrey – Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk

An insightful account of the murder, carried out by a group of teenagers, of another teenage girl, a bullied outsider. I watched the TV adaptation of this, which oddly makes Godfrey a protagonist, getting directly involved in the investigation, and having a personal history that connects her to the suspects, none of which is actually what happened. It’s odd because it derails the drama, which really needs no embellishment. The book is much better than I was expecting, having been irritated by the dramatization (but sufficiently intrigued to see what the source material actually said).

Richard Holmes – The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science

A rather wonderful account of science in the Romantic era – Herschel and Davy, Mungo Park and Joseph Banks. There are important women here too, most notably Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville. Very readable, and not just for historians of science – one of the fascinating things about this period is that people weren’t silo’d into arts or sciences as later generations, including my own, tended to be – William Herschel was a composer and Humphrey Davy a poet.

Stuart Jones (ed.) – Manchester Minds: A University History of Ideas

Full disclosure – I contributed a small ‘vignette’ to this volume, on W G Sebald and Michel Butor. But there’s masses of interest here, all marking the 200th birthday of the University of Manchester by celebrating some of its most notable and influential figures. I was drawn to the outsiders or exiles amongst them – like economist W Arthur Lewis, from St Lucia, Gilbert Gadoffre whose time at the University was interrupted by a spell of activity in the French Resistance, Eva Gore Booth, the Irish poet and activist, and philosopher Dorothy Emmett, plus a number of Jewish academics who had left Europe either because of pogroms in the East, or the advent of the Nazis.

Hilary Mantel – A Memoir of my Former Self

A collection of Mantel’s short non-fiction, on a wide range of topics, some autobiographical (these overlap with Giving up the Ghost, a memoir that she published in 2010), some film and book reviews, and most enjoyably and interestingly her Reith lectures on writing historical fiction. As in her novels, she is sharp, funny, and sometimes fierce – her account of how her endometriosis was dismissed by a series of doctors as just female neurosis is utterly enraging.

D. Quentin Miller (ed.) – James Baldwin in Context

A collection of short essays on aspects of Baldwin, his life, his novels, his politics. I’ve immersed myself in Baldwin periodically over the years (first as a teenager when I discovered the novels and short stories, then a couple of years ago inspired by Black Lives Matter, and now for his centenary), and there is much to be savoured here, that can enrich my understanding. I supplemented the reading (I also re-read Go Tell it on the Mountain, and I am not your Negro) with watching some of Baldwin’s interviews, and as always, I find his voice so very compelling. He doesn’t do soundbites or inspirational quotes – when he talks about politics it is all about narrative, the narrative of the African American chained and trafficked and exploited, and then subjected to segregation and the daily evidence of white hatred. Rewatching his ‘debate’ with Paul Weiss was rage-inducing, Weiss’s complacency in his own privilege staggering, but Baldwin’s narrative overwhelmed him. His speech and his writing have a rhythm, a beat, that comes from the church (he was a preacher in his late teens), and from blues and jazz. He’s never less than piercingly articulate, and never less than fiercely passionate, but more than that, his humanity always shines through.

Graham Robb – The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War

It’s described as historical geography but it’s also what I would have called social history – it’s about the people who didn’t make it into the history books, and who were for the most part buffeted by Great Events rather than playing an active role in them. And really, as the title suggests, it’s about how little the concept of ‘France’ meant to most of those people, vast numbers of whom did not speak any language resembling French (perhaps one of the reasons why the Académie is so protective of that language now). It also provides a fascinating context for the 19th century novels I’ve been reading since my teens – Balzac, Flaubert, Zola.

Sathnam Sanghera – Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain

My schooling until the 11+ year was in two newly independent West African nations. Whilst I mixed primarily with other ‘expatriates’ I could not be unaware (and my parents were profoundly aware) of the reasons we were out there, and how the legacy of empire was still playing out. My understanding may have been primitive (I was 9 when we left) but it influenced my thinking about so many things as I grew up. So it was fascinating to read Sanghera’s exploration of the ramifications of our imperial history in British culture and politics. It is clear-sighted and forward looking, and asks what we do once we have recognised what empire did to its overseas subjects and what it did to those who grew up here in its shadow.

Claire Wills – Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Postwar Britain

The story of immigrants from the wreckage of the war in Europe, from Ireland, from the Caribbean, from across the Commonwealth, at work, at home and at play. It’s a rich and varied picture – the experiences of immigrant life varied enormously as one would expect depending on why they came, where they came from and who they’d been in their previous life. Some of these stories are familiar but a great many are not, and it is good, in particular, to get beneath the generalisation of ‘Asian’ to explore the very different communities who arrived, with different expectations, and different challenges to their integration.