Looking for your next page-turner? Here’s our guide to the best books to read.
It’s 1938 and on a windswept island off the coast of Wales a young girl is pondering her choices: to stay in her father’s house or marry and leave. Two anthropologists turn up … are they a ticket to the mainland? And what are we meant to make of the stranded whale? A remarkably assured debut novel.
Autocracy, Inc.
Autocracy Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
The title says it all: Anne Applebaum (formerly of this parish) identifies the crucial aspect of contemporary autocracies, viz, their mastery of contemporary technologies and kleptocratic financial structures to manipulate opinion and fund elites. Salutary and depressing.
Magic Pill
Which of us on the wrong side of the fat divide hasn’t toyed with the idea of Ozempic? Johann Hari, three stone overweight, tried it; this is his exploration of the territory. Hari has form in making up quotes, but it’s a readable account of a social as well as medical phenomenon.
The Dark Horse
Virago is publishing new editions of Rumer Godden’s most captivating novels. Among the first batch from this unmatched storyteller is The Dark Horse, a 1981 novel set in Calcutta about a disgraced racehorse, a horsetrainer, an Irish nun who loves horses and the mystery of how the dark horse of the title vanishes three days before the Viceroy Cup. A terrific read.
The Invisible Doctrine
George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson
This polemic by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson is premised on the notion that the belief in globalisation, deregulation and free markets is orthodoxy now. But I wonder how that squares with Trumpian protectionism, tariffs and America First? Whatever. It’s combative stuff.