{"id":482699,"date":"2025-10-08T10:26:26","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T10:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/482699\/"},"modified":"2025-10-08T10:26:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T10:26:26","slug":"what-to-read-this-october","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/482699\/","title":{"rendered":"what to read this October"},"content":{"rendered":"

Craftland: A Journey Through Britain\u2019s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades<\/a>
by James Fox (Bodley Head, \u00a325)<\/p>\n

James Fox set out to find the last practitioners of skills that a century ago would have been familiar across Britain. The result, Craftland, turns out to be a sometimes melancholy and elegiac investigation into regional customs and traditions, richly distinctive local vocabularies and ecosystems, and the kind of craftsmanship it takes a patient lifetime to master. It is the story of the collateral human damage of industrial and technological revolution and of 20th-century social changes so rapid that what we have lost can never now be retrieved.<\/p>\n

Fox travelled all over the country, talking to dry stone wallers in Yorkshire, woodsmen in the Chilterns, thatchers in Scotland, eel catchers, rush weavers and makers of bells, brushes and baskets. Mostly, he finds they represent the last redoubts of what had once been burgeoning industries employing thousands of people. In mid-19th-century High Wycombe, then famous for furniture making, 150 workshops turned out 4,700 chairs a day. In 1901, there were 63,000 wheelwrights in Britain; in 1951, there were only 3,361; in 2025, fewer than 20.<\/p>\n

Many of Fox\u2019s interviewees reflect that their skills will probably die with them. Not many young people are encouraged to enter rarefied crafts like these unless they have been brought up in households imbued with a reverence for them (the mother of one of the last Chilterns coppicers is the region\u2019s last lacemaker) or are taking a conscious stand against the globalised standardisation of modern life.<\/p>\n

Steve, a bodger (wood turner) in the Buckinghamshire beechwoods, was inspired by EF Schumacher\u2019s Small is Beautiful. Schumacher once wrote: \u201cAny intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius \u2013 and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction,\u201d which is a fine description for the men and women Fox meets in these pages. We can only hope it is more than their epitaph.<\/p>\n

Lucy Lethbridge<\/p>\n

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People\u2019s History of Afghanistan<\/a>
by Lyse Doucet (Hutchinson Heinemann, \u00a325)<\/p>\n

If you think this book is about a glamorous, five-star hotel in 1970s Kabul, you are only partly right. The hotel in question\u2014known as the Inter-Continental, though now unaffiliated with the brand\u2014has played constant witness to five decades of oppression and bloodshed. It was also home to Lyse Doucet, the BBC\u2019s chief international correspondent, during her years reporting there. She traces Afghanistan\u2019s fundamental conflict between western influence and authoritarian rule through its corridors.<\/p>\n

And so we meet Afghanistan\u2019s answer to Elvis Presley, Ahmad Zahir, serenading guests during the hotel\u2019s \u201cgolden years\u201d. We watch as the famous singer Aryana Sayeed plans to perform on a stage once used for Taliban executions, her music \u201crooted in Afghan culture, while reaching out to a new and much wider world\u201d.<\/p>\n

But it is the stories of unsung, ordinary Afghans that carry the narrative forward. Inter-Con staff such as housekeeper Hazrat and engineer Amanullah persevere through hostile governments, donning more traditional clothing and switching out portraits of transient \u201cleaders\u201d. Despite these challenges, warm Afghan hospitality prevails. Chef Abida\u2019s \u201cperfect plump packages of ashak and mantu\u201d serve the reader too with a mouthful of sumptuous plosives.<\/p>\n

Then there are the most unsung Afghans of all: Doucet does the important work of archiving the otherwise silenced voices of Afghan women and girls, many of whom are denied literacy under the Taliban today.<\/p>\n

Because, whoever\u2019s in charge, the revolving doors of the Inter-Continental Hotel are always open; its attentive staff are always watching\u2014and so, too, is Lyse Doucet.<\/p>\n

Sophie Farmer<\/p>\n

I Do Know Some Things<\/a>
by Richard Siken (Copper Canyon Press, \u00a315.99)<\/p>\n

If Hollywood ever takes an interest in 21st-century American poetry, my money would be on the life and work of Richard Siken. Rejected by editors for a decade, Crush (2005), his debut, became a sleeper hit with a young online fandom, who memed the doomed queer romance of its most resonant lines\u2014\u201cSorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine\u201d\u2014and turned it into an unlikely bestseller.<\/p>\n

His long-awaited second collection, War of the Foxes (2015), was a quieter meditation on painting and storytelling. It began to seem possible that Siken would be forever known as the man who wrote Crush. But his third book, another decade later, might just change that. I Do Know Some Things is a sequence of 77 one-paragraph prose poems which flash through a personal saga of such relentless intensity that it feels as likely to win an Oscar as a Pulitzer.<\/p>\n

The tragedy that inspired Crush is addressed in \u201cCover Story\u201d (\u201cHe died on Christmas Day, 1990\u201d). But Siken\u2019s intertwined, timeslip structure is really concerned with the autobiographical before-and-after of that book: growing up gay in a dysfunctional family and then, in 2019, suffering a stroke that stripped him of mobility and eloquence.<\/p>\n

This is writing as rebuilding, each sentence placed unwaveringly on the page (\u201cI set the margins and surrounded the thoughts on all sides\u201d). Siken is a deadpan virtuoso of the wrongfooting observation, his prose flickering between confessions as he remembers the frightening poetry of pure confusion: \u201cThe doctor was handsome and it embarrassed me. For a while, I was talking to a brightness in the corner of the room […] I said black tree when I meant night.\u201d It\u2019s a spectacular comeback.<\/p>\n

Jeremy Noel-Tod<\/p>\n

Will There Ever Be Another You<\/a>
by Patricia Lockwood (Bloomsbury, \u00a316.99)<\/p>\n

How to write about something that nobody wants to remember, let alone relive? This is the problem with the pandemic. But how to write about that while also covering the times in which we live? That is, an era when life is online and offline and in-between, where interactions circle around, or are mediated by, our phones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Patricia Lockwood\u2019s second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, is an autofictional account of her experience of Covid-induced mania. Like her first novel, No One Is Talking About This, it is surely also one of the most precise renderings of our digital era, if there can be anything like precision about so strange and liminal a thing.<\/p>\n

Lockwood\u2019s story encompasses her disorienting experience of illness, parts of her Christian upbringing (her 2017 memoir, Priestdaddy, was a bestseller), TV shows, literature and Wikipedia. There is also the grief, narrated in that debut novel, of her baby niece dying of a rare genetic disorder: this latest book opens with a family trip to Scotland, where her sister misplaces a phone filled with pictures of the child they had lost.<\/p>\n

In the next chapter, \u201cThe Changeling\u201d, the mania kicks in. \u201cSometimes she sat at the foot of the illness and asked it questions,\u201d writes Lockwood. \u201cHad it stolen her old mind and given her a new one?\u201d The book itself is experienced like mania, or like reading the internet\u2014small bits making up a whole, remembrances of things you might rather forget.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s all leavened by Lockwood\u2019s singular sense of humour: \u201cShe re-tucked her shirt. Nothing that serious, she knew, could be happening to the body of a person wearing a Looney Tunes T-shirt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alona Ferber<\/p>\n

Pick a Colour<\/a>
by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Bloomsbury, \u00a312.99)<\/p>\n

In the eyes of Souvankham Thammavongsa\u2019s narrator, Ning, \u201ceveryone is ugly\u201d\u2014a claim she makes in Pick a Colour\u2019s first line. \u201cI should know,\u201d she insists: her working life is spent manicuring, pedicuring, threading and waxing, aka monetising other people\u2019s physical imperfections. More kinds of \u201cugliness\u201d reveal themselves, too. Over the course of one day, the nail salon she runs becomes a stage for the full range of human misdemeanour.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Laotian-Canadian author makes cynicism Ning\u2019s defining trait in what is a shrewd, carefully observed character study. Her previous work in the short story genre\u2014winning the O Henry Award and the Giller Prize\u2014painted crisp portraits of the lives of Laotian immigrants in Canada. This debut novel explores similar terrain, its subject the near invisibility of migrant workers.<\/p>\n

Ning deliberately augments that anonymity. Her embittered employees share the same haircut and, knowing customers would mispronounce their actual names, all wear \u201cSusan\u201d nametags. As work grinds on and clients divulge their most pent-up secrets, the Susans act as a kind of catty Greek chorus. They openly mock customers\u2019 bodies, flaws and privileges, from behind the safety of the language barrier.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the 41-year-old, single protagonist, her clients\u2019 confidences also serve as wounding reminders of her own squandered potential. The novel does not go deep into Ning\u2019s backstory as a former boxing pro, retired in disgrace. (Pointedly, Ning is also mysteriously missing her ring finger.) There is the sense that the narrator withholds as much from the reader as from those around her.<\/p>\n

But we catch glimpses, through the manicurist\u2019s hardened exterior, of her more optimistic core\u2014making the nail salon an unlikely setting for poignant ruminations about love and loss. As Ning notes towards the end, \u201cpeople who get their nails done are hopeful. They think things can change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miriam Balanescu<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Craftland: A Journey Through Britain\u2019s Lost Arts and Vanishing Tradesby James Fox (Bodley Head, \u00a325) James Fox set…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-482699","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115338070464943279","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}