From Lisa Nandy to Ann Yu: Recent Books Briefly Reviewed

All in: How we build a country that works by Lisa Nandy
HarperNorth, 224pp, £16.99

There is an alternate universe in which Lisa Nandy won the Labor leadership election in 2020. For anyone who wants to imagine what kind of leader she would be, her new book All In will help. Here, the MP draws on her own background – she grew up in Manchester with an English mother and an Indian father – and her time as shadow foreign secretary and, later, stepping up to diagnose the malaise of modern Great Britain.

Whatever one makes of the style, full of typical political anecdotes – “It was the summer of 2018 and I was on a picket” – Nandy makes a powerful case for rethinking politics. The reason Labor should “seek power”, she wrote, “is to give it back” to communities. The fate of the individual is tied to the whims of multinational companies and distant world leaders. She argued that “quiet patriotism” was part of the answer, but refused to provide her own “plan for Britain”.

Sometimes the book is revealing. Politics sometimes “has the unreal feel of a charade,” Nandy writes. “That’s why when the rush to attend Prime Minister’s Questions starts on Wednesday morning, almost without exception, I find myself heading the other way.”
By Alyona Ferber

White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Prisoners by Narges Mohammadi
Oneworld Publications, 272 pp, £20

As civil unrest in Iran continues — sparked by the September killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the country’s “morality police” — the regime is finding increasingly brutal ways to crack down on demonstrators. The personal stories collected in White torture offer insight into the particularly grim way in which the Iranian authorities impose punishment.

Journalist and human rights activist Narges Mohammadi interviewed 13 women, including Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, about their experiences in Iranian prisons, where they were all subjected to solitary confinement, a monstrous practice known as “white torture”. Mohammadi is an experienced interviewer: she spent many years in prison and is currently in prison. The women, all of whom were imprisoned for political reasons, recount mentally devastating isolation, unsanitary living conditions, manipulation and harassment by male interrogators, and horrific physical abuse (including electric shocks). It is harrowing reading, but their stories highlight the courage of those who still demonstrate against the regime every day – many of them young women – in the hope of something better.
By Megan Gibson

Wild: The Life of Peter Beard by Graham Boynton
St Martin’s Press, 352pp, £27.99

Peter Beard was a blessed man. He came from American railroad money, was incredibly good-looking and a favorite of other beautiful people, and he turned photographing African animals into an art form. Beard, who died under strange circumstances in 2020, first visited East Africa as a hunter and only later realized that big game needed saving, even though he hated the word “conservation”. Photography was his chosen method and what elevated his prints was the addition of everything from marginalia and newspaper clippings to leaves and dried blood – often his own.

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Beard’s life is like an unwritten Hemingway novel. He attended bullfights with Picasso and was friends with both Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali; was painted by Francis Bacon and was next door to Karen Blixen; his numerous lovers included Lee Radziwill and his later wife, Cheryl Tiggs; and his equally innumerable scrapes included being whipped for abusing a poacher and gored by an elephant. All this is a gift to a biographer, and Beard’s long-time friend Graham Boynton, a journalist who grew up in Zimbabwe, does justice to his absurdly full life.
By Michael Proger

Spooky music by An Yu
Harvill Secker, 240pp, £14.99

This novel uses an unassuming symbol to explore the meaning of life: the mushroom. In Ghost Music, Ann Yu examines loss—not only in terms of death and relationships, but also in terms of her character’s disintegrating sense of self. Song Yang is a young woman who gives up her long-held ambition to become a concert pianist in order to get married. But her emotionally distant and often absent husband doesn’t want to start a family, and she’s stuck in an apartment with a mother-in-law who doesn’t like her. She is going through an existential crisis.

Orange mushrooms appear and multiply as “ghosts” to taunt her in moments of emotional insight, from the terror she feels when she forgets how to play long-practiced piano pieces to the pain she feels upon discovering the most her husband’s dark secrets. Yu uses magical realism to infuse mystical elements into the otherwise mundane urban setting of Beijing, and her symbolism is confusing at times. However, Spooky music has beautiful prose and claustrophobic imagery that intensely evokes its protagonist’s alienation.
By Sarah Dowd

[See also: Books of the year 2022]