Race and gender identity; racism and colonialism; family and outsiders; social dislocation; police and thieves; war, violence, and survival; spies, footballers, and ordinary lives.
I thought I'd keep on reading social/political academic books when I retired from my sociology academic job in the summer but so far I haven't. I've read fiction and easy-to-read non-fiction in 2024. About half the books I read this year (and late last year) I found out about from Booker Prize long or shortlists.
Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway.
Someone bought me this as a gift. A good readable yarn. Set in the 1950s about a road trip over a few days, that doesn't go as planned, and four key characters, centrally two brothers. Great storytelling and characters. It's quite long but it didn't feel like it.
Mary Lawson, A Town Called Solace.
I loved this. Set in a small town in Canada, it tells the intertwining stories of two teenage girls, one who goes missing and the old lady who lives next door, her cat, and a younger man who stays in her house while the old lady is away. Absorbing, and beautifully written, I also found it very painful in places, about the old lady, a bit close to personal experience.
Ben Macintyre, The Spy and the Traitor
I read every Cold War spy non-fiction book I can get my hands on. Most I have read are about the British communists who spied for the USSR. This is an astonishing account of Oleg Gordievsky, a Russian who spied on the USSR for the British. When he comes under suspicion in Russia there is an amazing and dramatic plan to extricate him from the USSR, almost comical, like something out of a spy novel. I also read Macintyre's book The Siege this year, see below.
Anne Tyler, Redhead by the Side of the Road
A man of routine and caution, to the amusement of those who know him, a self-employed roving tech expert, ordinary, has his steady life knocked out of synch by a girlfriend and someone claiming to be his son. Funny, gentle, human, lovely.
Mick Herron, Slow Horses
My son recommended this. I've read a lot of factual books about spies and was sceptical I'd get into a fictional one. It took me a while to get into the style. But once I did, I was engrossed. A bunch of failed or rejected spies who want to get back to real spy jobs again are put in a unit together and these are stories of what they get up to. I bought the next one in the series.
Gabriel Krauze, Who They Was
About a Polish-British London gang member called Gabriel who is doing a degree in English literature, told in street language by a Polish-British ex London gang member called Gabriel who did a degree in English literature. It's brilliant.
Audrey Magee, The Colony
A really great compelling book about colonialism. Two outsiders visit a tiny island off Ireland one summer, one to paint the island, the other to study the islanders' Irish language. Intercut with harrowing references to the violence of the Troubles. Clever and thought teasing. Fantastic.
Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time
It's about a retired Irish detective and how his old life comes back to him. Otherwise, I don't want to say what this is about as part of the book is that unfolding. It's a book full of passages of thought and description, weaves around, is beautifully and carefully written, unusual, shocking, stunning. I seem to love Irish writers for some reason.
Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
Pretty stunning book about a repressive state in Ireland and the personal and societal disintegration that follows. I got very immersed in this and it changed my whole mood in the days I was reading it. Could be read as outlining and echoing horrors going on across the world now and in the past, with many contemporary connotations. But read as something that could happen in Ireland (or somewhere like my country, the UK) it was scarily not impossible to believe as a real possibility in the light of many recent and current political developments. It shakes you, terrifying, real. I've often thought the idea that fiction can tell us about or shake us about reality a bit overdone, but feels like this novel does that.
Mary Lawson, The Other Side of the Bridge
After reading A Town Called Solace (see above), I decided to check out others of Mary Lawson's books. This one is a simply told story, set in two periods, one during the Second World War and the other 20 years later, featuring (mostly) the same people in both, in a small provincial community (in different senses of the word) in North Canada. Quite intense with much tragedy, but also humanity. Very readable and engrossing and affected my mood, which is always a sign of a good book.
Sarah Bernstein, Study for Obedience
About a woman who stays in her brother's house on the edge of a hostile small town. Lots of complex things going on here packed in but centrally the persecution of Jews. Dense and quite formal style yet short and quite readable.
Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You
About racial identity/culture, especially racial ambiguity. It's more focused on the culture and identity side of things than the economic and political. There's a hurricane and brothers with changing fortunes, the main character an American of Jamaican heritage. It is made up of different parts that are almost like short stories.
Elaine Feeney, How to Build a Boat
Another Irish author. Very original and novel (to me). About a boy who wants to build a special kind of boat, a desire to find his mother who died at his birth, and how this neurodiverse and special kid gets the support of some teachers at his school, with their own stories, in the face of baddies. Great book.
Eamon Dunphy, The Rocky Road
I saw Eamon Dunphy play for Reading FC in the 1970s. I was only a kid but I always felt he looked to have a bit more skill and guile than the rest of the team. He had come from Millwall. He wrote a book Only a Game about his time there, diary-style warts and all with no glorification, better than the often banal football autobiographies you get. Dunphy went on to be a media pundit on football and sports but also politics in his native Ireland. He was extremely critical and negative at times, candid, and controversial, a a maverick, and made many enemies amongst those he wrote about. This is his autobiography. There is a great short section on his time with Reading, with great tales. There is also religion and his views on Ireland and England. It's a great read, packed full of stories, incidents and information, and covers more than can be summarised here. It only goes up to about 2013 and over 10 years later he is 79 so there may be more to come. He has written other books on U2 and Matt Busby, for instance, and there is a great little book about the 1975-6 Reading FC season, More than a Job?, (see Books I Read in 2022) where I went to the home matches, where the author Roger Titford reviews the season using Dunphy's local newspaper columns of the time followed up by more recent interviews with Dunphy about the season, where Eamon often remembers matches wrongly.
C Pam Zhang, How Much of These Hills is Gold
This was a very different book for me, about gender, identity, racism, a feminist western set in the American gold rush, about Chinese Americans one of whose parents was a Chinese immigrant, also about belonging, home, identity. I found it pretty grim to be honest, because so harsh, not because not a good book, in fact the opposite.
Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz
I read Spufford's Light Perpetual and loved it (see Books I Read in 2023). This one is a totally different book. It's easy to not realise it's written by the same person. I didn't get so much into this one. I'm not great at plots that are anything more than simple. I get lost easily. And I probably wasn't in the reading zone when I read this. But sometimes I read a book and think that with a bit of advice, research, and lots of work I could do this. But I read the first paragraphs of this and thought I could never do this. Some of the description is amazing - rich and evocative. The book is an alternative history, imagining a city in the USA in a scenario where many indigenous people lived and made up a much bigger part of the population than happened in real history. It's about race and politics and jazz and starts with a gory murder that has big social and urban ramifications. It's imaginative and full of incident.
Andrew Tudor, The Zeno Effect
Another one that I would never have come across if it wasn't for fortuitous circumstances, in this case that the author was a former tutor of mine at York University in the mid-1980s and when I saw he had written a fiction book was curious to read it. I have occasionally kept in touch with Andy. He is now retired and lives in the Scottish highlands (which I know a bit, half my family is Scottish, I have visited many times) and in the book there are plenty of familiar places across the UK, including York and the highlands. Someone deliberately releases a virus as a response to the environmental effects of population growth, to reduce the population and save the planet. The novel charts the subsequent events through a small group of characters, from initial political responses to later great social dislocation. It starts in 2029 with a UK where Scotland is independent and England has become a surveillance state. It was absorbing and compelling, a gripping read that also has social, sociological, and political themes, not ones that are in your face but more embedded in the tale. I got bound up in the characters. Andy taught the sociology of fiction including of narrative so it's not surprising that it is expertly written. It was written just pre-Covid and echoes many things evocative of the Covid period, due to good research on viruses and the science. My only qualm is that it could lead some to support the view that environmental problems are due to population growth rather than system issues and over-consumption by some sections of of that population. Someone should snap up the film rights for this!
Nathan Harris, The Sweetness of Water
This novel is set just at the end of the American Civil War in the South as Union troops arrive and slaves are freed. It's about slaves being freed but its openness, including carrying the history of their slavery after freedom and the perils of being free immediately post-slavery. Sexuality is also part of the story. It has larger social themes but also quite personal ones. A farmer and his family take on two freed slaves who have nothing and they (and their new employers) face hostility and intolerance. Bad things happen and the story unfolds. It's full of love and humanity, as well as bitterness, tragedy and grimness, warmth and generosity (eg from the author to the white family) as well as contempt and conflict. It's evocative and easy to read, romantic in places, and quite liberal, in the non-American sense. I enjoyed it and it made me think.
Ben Macintyre, The Siege
I was 15 when the 6-day 1980 Iranian embassy siege in London happened. I don't remember there being anything quite like it until then in terms of a live real-life drama unfolding on TV and I don't think anyone really knew who the SAS were at the time. They have since, of course, acquired a sort of mythical status. The book is organised around the SAS intervention in ending the siege, something that could have gone very wrong but turned out well in its own terms, only one hostage killed in the actual intervention, the others freed. I remember watching Kate Adie, the BBC reporter, reporting as the events unfolded behind her. On camera SAS soldiers abseiled down the building throwing explosives into the embassy, then going in through the windows, followed by the sound of gunfire. It took place over several floors but was all over in 11 minutes. The book culminates in the SAS raid (and the run-up to it) but covers the cause of the hostage takers (who are quite sympathetically portrayed), the experiences of the diverse hostages, the geopolitical situation, the personalities, media, the police and other agencies involved, British politics (Thatcher was PM, it was all a great success for her), what else was going on at the time, and (briefly) the aftermath. A compelling and seemingly well-researched read.
As an alternative to Amazon for obtaining books, the public library is great.
Related post: Books I Read in 2023