Which Books Should You Be Reading This Week?
Your digest of the weekend's newspaper reviews Jan 7/8
Well, here we are on the other side, and I am sure I have wished you a Happy New Year already, but if not then here are all good wishes for you for the year ahead.
So, where do we start, well… isn’t it obvious? You would have to have been on another planet to have escaped the media coverage of Prince Harry’s memoir SPARE in the last week. But wait, if you think you have heard everything you need to, let’s just press pause a minute because you have, but only what the newspapers have ingested and spat out for you in headlines – and isn’t that kind of the point of what Harry has been saying?
As someone who worked as an executive editor on the very newspaper that he is talking about, I kind of feel I come at this story from a point of some authority. Also, as someone who makes a living as a ghostwriter, I have to admit that I did wince when it emerged that Harry had admitted to killing 25 insurgents during his time in the Army. As ghostwriters, do we not abide by a sense of ethics and moral duty to filter out some details that might be damaging to our subject? This admission could surely put him in mortal danger, (and, if Salman Rushdie’s experience of publishing The Satanic Verses proves anything, his editorial team too). But it was, bizarrely, a weatherman who tweeted a full extract of those pages, asking if it changed people’s opinion to read in Harry’s words how he felt about those killings rather than the journalists’. Here is the extract he tweeted:
How he got hold of it, I don’t know. But, perhaps it made you more curious to read more, not the sensationalist headlines, but the book itself, and if so you can buy SPARE here and I’m assured by the wholesaler that copies will be dispatched to arrive on publication day (Tuesday).
In the Observer’s New Review this weekend, were their ten debut novelists to watch out for. Last year, my pal Ayanna Lloyd Banwo was one of their one to watch, and her debut WHEN WE WERE BIRDS was published in 2022 to critical acclaim. Ayanna and I were in the same workshop studying our masters degree in Creative Writing at University of East Anglia (UEA) and so I was familiar with the work already from critiquing it each week.
The paperback is due out soon, and you can pre-order this magical novel here. But it was encouraging to see other alumni from UEA had also made the cut and had been singled out by The Observer as ones to watch.
Stephen Buoro won a Booker prize foundation scholarship to join the UEA’s creative writing MA, and his debut THE FIVE SORROWFUL MYSTERIES OF ANDY AFRICA is out in April with Bloomsbury. The Observer described it as ‘an exhilarating, tragicomic novel that questions what it means to come of age in Nigeria today; a place where western culture abounds but opportunity is scarce.’ It is narrated by a fatherless 15-year-old boy ‘with a thing for blondes and a voice unlike any other.’
It sounds like it might make some prize longlists this year, so get ahead and pre-order it here.
Jyoti Patel was another UEA alumni to watch and her debut THE THINGS THAT WE LOST is out on January 12 with Merky Books which is an imprint created by British rapper Stormzy of all people.
‘At the centre of THE THINGS THAT WE LOST – a delicate and empathetic debut – is Nik, an 18 year old who is struggling to navigate university life in a rural town, and his mother, Avani, who has long been grieving the tragic death of her husband, Elliot. When Nik’s grandfather dies, he is left a key that unlocks uncomfortable secrets about his fathr’s life and his family’s shame. The novel also jumps back in time to the 1980s and explores Avani and Elliot’s relationship and their experiences as a couple from Indian and white British backgrounds respectively.’
It is a book about family secrets and lies and how immigrants navigate their dual identity, and it is coming from a fresh new voice that we need to watch out for. You can pre-order it here.
Now this one is a little pricey, and you might want to wait and see if there is a paperback (possibly not given that it’s Cambridge University Press), but it did have a brilliant review in The Times on Saturday and I am a little obsessed with witches and witch trials, so that’s why it’s here. Marion Gibson, the author of THE WITCHES OF ST OSYTH, is an academic, a historian who specialises in witchcraft phenomenon (how cool). However, this is no dry academic text (though it might explain the price) and it was hailed a ‘small triumph of popular scholarshop’ by David Aaronovitch reviewing.
It turns out that by the busy interchange of the A1060 and A1016 in Essex, near a housing development named prettily Primrose Hill, an altogether less pretty event took place. In 1582, it was the site of the public gallows and the place where two women, Ursley Kempe and Elizabeth Bennett were hanged for the crime of witchcraft. They were not the only women to be accused, in total 14 people in and around St Osyth were arrainged but these two were the only ones to be executed. This took place at the height of the witchhunts in the late 16th and throughout the 17th century. The evidence on which the claims of witchcraft were made against them was shaky, if not wholly absent, and in THE WITCHES OF OSYTH Gibson examines it all again, giving the reader not only the backdrop of the Witchcraft Act itself, but a deep dive into Elizabethan rural England.
‘A researcher of obvious determination, Gibson teases out the relationships that gave rise to the accusations through exhaustive trawling through parish records and other contemporary archives,’ writes Aaronovitch. ‘For the lay reader this can become a little listy, but it is worth persevering with to better understand the rural world of the late Elizabethans. It also allows Gibson to discover, for example, this terribly poignant detail: the children of the accused, under questioning, would sometimes conjure up imaginary demonic familiars for their parents, named after their dead siblings – names they will have heard on the lips of their parents.’
…which is one way of getting out of being told as a teenager to tidy your bedroom – thank goodness me and my daughter were not around in those days otherwise reader, I would not be typing this now.
If you’re as interested in this part of the stain on our history as I am then THE WITCHES OF ST OSYTH is the book for you, and you can of course buy it from me here.
American Psycho author, Bret Easton Ellis’ new novel, THE SHARDS is out next week too – his first in 13 years – and you can pre-order it here. The Sunday Times described it as: ‘…told in the first person, it’s the story of what happened to him, Bret, in his final year at his Los Angeles prep school, Buckley, in 1981 when he was 17. Specifically it’s about what happened between September 8 and November 7, recalled in microscopic detail over about 600 pages: every song heard, all the drugs and drink consumed, all the sex…’
The book has been serialised on Easton Ellis’ subscription-only podcast and strangely, was initially described as a memoir rather than fiction, perhaps what has emerged as the final product is a work of autofiction? But the backdrop of all Easton Ellis’ nostalgia is a serial killer that is on the prowl in LA and ‘the concept behind the book is that a writer’s imagination, reordering their world, is all too analogous to a serial killer’s plotting of scenes, and the novel toys with the idea that Bret, split into ‘the writer’ and what he calls ‘the tangible participant’, is the sick one – even perhaps the killer.’
Fans of Easton Ellis are going to love THE SHARDS, and you can buy it here.
So there you go, six books that are being talking about this weekend in the newspapers, none of course as much as Prince Harry’s but then he isn’t for everyone.
I hope you’ve found something here that has piqued your interest, and if so remember that you can still support The Book Room by buying online while I look for a new place to pop up, and you can send me custom orders here and I’ll aim to get your books to you within 24-48 hours.
Writing these posts does take up a lot of my time and so I am planning on changing this subscription to a paid one in the next few weeks, subscribing for as little as £5 a month means that even if you’re not buying a book you are still supporting my work and valuing my skill, my words, my time and research (and wit and wisdom), and though I hate to ask (I HATE TO ASK) I do need to make a living and I hope you will support that.
I’ll send more details soon of how you can sign up and help — think of it as buying me a coffee each month for writing these posts for you, and a bit of cake – just half a slice perhaps.
More soon