The Manifesto House by Owen Hopkins

Almost all houses, says the architectural historian Owen Hopkins, reflect “received ideas” ingrained in architects, planning bodies, regulations and clients “about how houses are designed and built in particular places at particular moments in time”. Manifesto houses, on the other hand, embody new theories, utilise innovative techniques and materials, and represent self-contained visions for how we could live. In his handsome, illustrated survey, Hopkins presents 21 houses that have shifted the nature of what architecture can be.

Nearly all are 20th-century buildings, although Hopkins starts with Palladio’s 16th-century Villa Rotonda before ticking off the familiar likes of Le Corbusier (Villa Savoye), Frank Lloyd Wright (Fallingwater) and Mies van der Rohe (Farnsworth House). More interesting, because less familiar, are buildings such as Sou Fujimoto’s House NA in Tokyo (2012), a series of irregularly stacked glass boxes that blur the boundary between nature and architecture, and Anupama Kundoo’s Wall House (2000), which transposes the artisanal ethos of Arts and Crafts houses to rural India. Hopkins’s hope is that the ideas embedded in some of these structures will have a beneficial effect not just on architecture but on wider society.
Yale University Press, 240pp, £30. Buy the book
By Michael Prodger

Her First American by Lore Segal

The New York Times has described Lore Segal as “coming closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel” with Her First American – now published in a UK edition for the first time, 40 years after it appeared in the US. Its story follows an Austrian Jewish refugee, Ilka Weissnix, who arrives in New York City in the early 1950s only to come across fellow immigrants. Her search for a “real American” takes her on a train journey south, where she meets one – Carter Bayoux, a black intellectual – with whom she begins an affair. But this isn’t a simple love story – it’s a nuanced narrative of the immigrants who shaped New York and how the US has shaped them.

Ilka details her personal experiences of alienation, anti-Semitism awhile observing the deep wounds of racism in America. Thanks to Carter’s connections, she attends Jewish weddings, satirical African-American shows and holidays with her lover’s friends, both black and Jewish, in moments of solidarity between the two cultures. Both groups move forward constantly looking over their shoulders – it is these people that are the “real Americans” moulding the country into its current form.
Sort of Books, 304pp, £10.99. Buy the book
By Zuzanna Lachendro

Picky by Jimi Famurewa

In Picky, Jimi Famurewa revisits the culinary terrain of his youth to map the contours of identity, memory and belonging. The Evening Standard ’s chief restaurant critic threads his evolution from a boy who pocketed mashed potato to a literal arbiter of taste, unpacking the politics of it all along the way. School lunches become metaphor for institutional imposition; a bowl of jollof rice defiant reclamation.

As a British-Nigerian man, the author’s “scrambled identity” becomes both the text and subtext of a life navigated between cultural poles. Famurewa is sharpest when teasing out how personal pickiness can belie greater truths about identity, like when a fellow student at school steals lunch not because they are a bully, but rather their mother has neither the time nor money to pack them one. Food is a code – social, familial, psychological – and his questions about what it means to belong are asked not in abstractions, but in mouthfuls. Picky is thoughtful, bubbly and honest, and Famurewa does well to exhume painful memories with a light touch. His prose drips like beef fat on chips: it’s rich, if not at times a little indulgent. But his book reminds us that caring about what we eat is not about self-gratification but self-formation.
Hodder & Stoughton, 384pp, £20. Buy the book
By Zoë Huxford

Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick

Genre-wise, large tracts of the Irish writer Gethan Dick’s debut novel, Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night, could be described as gentle apocalypse. Or softcore Armageddon, perhaps. Society has collapsed after plague and war, but while wolves do howl and marauders do maraude, such menaces feel distinctly remote. Consequently, the book opens to strange and tender emotions. A band of neighbours team up and resolve to cycle from their shattered south London street to southern France. But they don’t flee in panic. They leave only once they’ve lain on their home beds long enough to feel ready to abandon them forever.

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One character cannot reconcile himself to the new world, insisting that one day “the clock would run backwards and it would once again be the time of beer in taps and burgers in freezers and bread in packets and milk in cartons”. So held “by the solidity of how things had been”, he cannot understand they will never be that way again. These quiet melancholies of a slow calamity give the reader pause – especially as Dick nudges us to ask if we’re in one already.
Tramp Press, 220pp, £13.99. Buy the book
By George Monaghan

[See also: On freedom vs motherhood]

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