Advent Books part 3 - and that's a wrap! Festive greetings to all our followers!

 

The final days of Advent bring us more great recommendations. Christmas greetings to all our contributors and followers!

Which have you read? Please tell us in the comments!

Reviewed by Cindy Jefferies: "In 2012, Hassan Akkad was a refugee from Syria, where he had been imprisoned and tortured for protesting against the regime. His story, including the perilous journey across Europe in 2015, as borders began to close, was told in the BBC series Exodus, our journey to Europe, some of which he filmed himself. The programmes won a BAFTA for Best Factual Series in 2017, by which time he had settled in London, spending a while with a family who hosted refugees through the charity Refugees At Home ... His excellent English meant that he was able to travel around the country, speaking about his experiences. Now he has put all this down, and more, in this challenging and moving book. It is a story that needed to be told."

Reviewed by Jane Rogers: "The book started life as four lectures presented at the University of Chicago, and it retains the lean essay structure, with each part pursuing a specific line of argument as to why humanity has failed to engage with the climate emergency. He calls that inability ‘the great derangement’. Why do we continue to live as if the earth’s resources are infinite? Why do we burn coal, drive petrol cars, take flights, drill for oil, heat our homes with gas and destroy trees across the world, from the Brazilian rainforest to the ancient English woodlands being felled for HS2? We know these activities will cause catastrophe for our grandchildren. What is wrong with us?"

Reviewed by Simon Mason: "Temple’s love of language is evident in the urgent, evocative writing which strips away inessentials. What’s left are shrewd, concentrated descriptions (‘wicked-eyed gulls’, ‘the beach tightly muscled’) and bursts of dialogue which capture the sounds, moods and evasions of taciturn Australian men who live in danger."Story-lines, as likely to be personal as investigative, spiral outwards and continue to proliferate even at the end. Though its virtues are literary, its plot grips like a thriller. Its immediate focus is crime but its deeper enquiry is into human nature. It asks Who are we now, and by what appalling path did we get here?"

Reviewed by Philip Womack: "One of the worries many authors have about the increasing professionalisation of the writing life - creative writing courses, residencies, prizes, university posts and so forth - is that everything will shape into a corporate blandness. Writers are becoming a kind of bureaucrat, efficient administrators, reliable colleagues to the Academy. Workshops hone away rough edges and controversial ideas in prose and poetry; large publishers, worried about reputational consequences, discourage eccentricity.

Plug is a delicious, delirious antidote to all that. There is something impish about him, a kind of naughty nature spirit thrust into the world of the mundane. His optimism in the face of disaster is a tonic."

Reviewed by Celia Rees: In recollection, it seems a much longer novel, so much is contained within it and much of that actually goes on within the reader’s own head. The elliptical style, the sudden changes, the refusal to provide any easy explanations mark it as a true Young Adult novel defined, not by content, but by narrative sophistication. There is nothing easy about it but it is utterly compelling. Challenging in the true sense, it makes demands on the reader and demands to be read and read again.

Reviewed by Sara Collins: What really sets Goon Squad apart for me is the shape-shifting quality of its prose. From powerfully lyrical (Egan describes Sasha’s urge to pilfer an unattended wallet as feeling herself “contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite”) to character conjuring (“I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery”) to sucker punching (“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?").

Reviewed by Hazel Gaynor: "Part murder-mystery, part publishing industry satire, Yellowface is a clever, dark, witty, provocative story that I devoured in a couple of days. I’m a very slow reader so this is a very good sign.

Through her two brilliant protagonists, Athena Liu and June Hayward, Kuang not only navigates the moral conundrum of plagiarism, but also addresses complex issues of toxic friendships, cancel culture, and the highly topical question of cultural appropriation that has been raised many times in the publishing industry in recent years."

 

Reviewed by Jane Rogers: "Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and owns Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Elements of the novel are clearly rooted in this biography, since most of the action takes place in a similar Minneapolis bookstore, which specialises in books by and about indigenous people. Tookie is a one off; tough, funny, sarcastic, prickly, thoroughly off the rails (in her early life, at least), and convinced she is unlovable ..."

Reviewed by Paula Knight: "Despite being left with no illusions as to the potential challenges of life in a remote and wild location, I still found myself searching Orkney house prices on the internet for a few weeks after reading The Outrun. The book confirmed a distinct notion that it’s as plausible to suffer loneliness living in close proximity to millions of human beings as it is on a far-flung island with mainly wildlife for company. The latter seems more palatable to me."

And finally: our joint tribute to the much-loved, much-missed Helen Dunmore. Celia: "Helen Dunmore was one of those writers who could do everything, seemingly effortlessly. As well as her prize-winning adult fiction, she wrote for children and young adults and she wrote poetry. It seems wrong to be writing about her in the past tense. She was the kind of writer you thought would always be there to show the rest of us how it is done ... 

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We hope you've enjoyed revisiting our Advent Books. Follow us for more great recommendations in 2025!

Guest review by Jane Rogers: THE GREAT DERANGEMENT by Amitav Ghosh

 

"This is the best book I’ve found in a year of seeking out fiction and non-fiction about climate change."

Jane Rogers has written ten novels, including The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Man-Booker longlisted and winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award 2012. Other works include Mr Wroe's Virgins (which she dramatised as a BBC drama series), and Promised Lands (Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award). Jane also writes short stories, radio drama and adaptations, and has taught writing to a wide range of students.

Her new dystopia Body Tourists was published in November and is now available in paperback. For more information, see Jane's website. 

This is the best book I’ve found in a year of seeking out fiction and non-fiction about climate change. Quite apart from being beautifully written, it’s continually surprising and thought-provoking. Ghosh invokes the scientific, philosophical and spiritual traditions of the global East as well as the West, exploring ways of living in and understanding the world, which are far outside our colonising Anglo-American, Northern European, Protestant mindset. My thinking was repeatedly turned on its head.

And every idea he discusses emerges from a real-life incident. It may be an event from Ghosh’s own life, like being caught in a tornado in Delhi in 1978; or it may be historical, like the gloom of 1816, the ‘year without a summer,’ thanks to skies full of volcanic ash. The range of these illustrations reveals a staggering knowledge of history, geography and geology; this reader leaned something new on every page.

The book started life as four lectures presented at the University of Chicago, and it retains the lean essay structure, with each part pursuing a specific line of argument as to why humanity has failed to engage with the climate emergency. He calls that inability ‘the great derangement’. Why do we continue to live as if the earth’s resources are infinite? Why do we burn coal, drive petrol cars, take flights, drill for oil, heat our homes with gas and destroy trees across the world, from the Brazilian rainforest to the ancient English woodlands being felled for HS2? We know these activities will cause catastrophe for our grandchildren. What is wrong with us?

As a novelist, I was most challenged by part 1, ‘Stories’. Ghosh asks, ‘What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction? And what does this tell us about culture writ large and its patterns of evasion?’ He puts forward evidence for several explanations; I think the most radical is his suggestion that the nineteenth and twentieth century novel has closed down on communal experience and is simply interested in the narrowly ‘realistic’ day-to-day life of the individual. Since I write, and love to read, these kind of character-based novels, this felt like a serious put down. But his arguments make sense:

‘Before the birth of the modern novel, fiction delighted in the unheard-of and the unlikely. Narratives like those of The Arabian Nights, The Journey to the West, and The Decameron proceed by leaping blithely from one exceptional event to another.’  Myths, legends, epics, fables and chronicles are staples in the story-telling history of many – maybe all – human cultures. They range over vast expanses of time and space, where humans are challenged or helped by supernatural beings, intelligent animals, or the elements. Character is not central.

The modern literary novel reduces this scope to as little as one day in one place; silences the non-human; and charts ‘an individual moral adventure’. Ghosh sees nineteenth century ideas of progress, and rational control over the natural world, as feeding into this literary development. Natural disasters and sentient non-human forces have been banished to genre fiction, to Sci Fi, Fantasy and Horror.

‘At exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics, and literature alike.’

I can’t help feeling he is right, though I would love to disprove him. It’s humbling to realise just how much one’s world view is determined by the time and place of one’s birth. But if he can lead readers to question themselves, then as a writer he is surely succeeding, beyond the wildest expectations of most of us. If you’ve read this book, I’d love to hear your take on it.

The Great Derangement is published by University of Chicago Press

See also: Jane's review of Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie

Her account of adapting Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease for BBC Radio 4

Jane's latest novel, Body Tourists, reviewed by Linda Newbery