graphic novel * 

*Actually described as a graphic novella, this slender book is a powerful work from an illustrator at the top of his game. No One Else takes place on Maui, R. Kikuo Johnson’s hometown, and in a series of vignettes and interludes describes a family navigating grief and unmet expectation. Charlene takes care of her elderly father while working full-time and raising her son Brandon, and when they are joined by Charlene’s deadbeat brother the fragile structure wobbles even more. The setting is skillfully introduced and the experience of small-town paradise comes across in the way the characters chafe and gripe at their circumstances. Johnson’s debut Night Fisher is also set on Maui, and though both books are fiction I get a sense that its the autobiographical elements which give the stories their keen emotional edge. I’ve read and re-read No One Else and Night Fisher several times, from start to finish, revisiting panels and dialogue and enjoying a new revelation each time. Highly recommended.

Fantagraphics 2021

fiction

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2021

Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.

Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country—an atmosphere of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones.

Chatto & Windus, 2021

fiction

Oneworld Publications, 2022

biography

From 1936 to 1940, the newly-wed George Orwell lived in a small cottage in Hertfordshire, writing, and tending his garden. When Rebecca Solnit visited the cottage, she discovered the descendants of the roses that he had planted many decades previously. These survivors, as well as the diaries he kept of his planting and growing, provide a springboard for a fresh look at Orwell’s motivations and drives -and the optimism that countered his dystopian vision – and open up a profound mediation on our relationship to plants, trees and the natural world.

Tracking Orwell’s impact on political thought over the last century, Solnit journeys to England and Russia, Mexico and Colombia, exploring the political and historical events that shaped Orwell’s life and her own. From a history of roses to discussions of climate change and insights into structural inequalities in contemporary society, Orwell’s Roses is a fresh reading of a towering figure of 20th century literary and political life, which finds optimism, solace and solutions to our 21st century world.

Granta, 2021

What would it be like to experience the ancient landscapes of the past as we experience the reality of nature today? To actually visit the Jurassic or Cambrian worlds, to wander among their spectacular flora and fauna, to witness their continental shifts? In Otherlands, the multi-talented palaeontologist Thomas Halliday gives us a breath-taking up close encounter with worlds that are normally unimaginably distant.

Journeying backwards in time from the most recent Ice Age to the dawn of complex life itself, and across all seven continents, Halliday immerses us in sixteen lost ecosystems, each one rendered with a novelist’s eye for detail and drama. Every description – whether the colour of a beetle’s shell, the shambling rhythm of pterosaurs in flight or the lingering smell of sulphur in the air – is grounded in fact. We visit the birthplace of humanity on the shores of the great lake Lonyumun, in Pliocene-era Kenya; in the Miocene, we hear the crashing of the highest waterfall the world has ever known as it fills the evaporated Mediterranean Sea; we encounter forests of giant fungus nine metres tall in Devonian-era Scotland; and we gaze at the light of a full and enormous moon in the Ediacaran sky, when life hasn’t yet reached land.

To read Otherlands is to time travel, to see the last 550 million years not as an endless expanse of unfathomable time, but as a series of worlds, simultaneously fantastical and familiar.

 Allen Lane, 2022