Nonfiction and literary fiction: the best-written recent releases
Read the opening pages from our picks below
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COMING SOON
—More of the best-written recent releases in literary fiction.
—Han Smith, Arreshy Young, and Kia Corthron answer our questions on style.
—The best-written works on the shortlists for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—’Cut off from their compulsory commutes and their mind-numbing round of distraction from distraction by distraction, they heard silence, or something close to it, sometimes punctuated by birdsong. Whether they liked it or not, they all became anchorites or anchoresses. They became unwitting mystics.’: our first pick from the recent releases in nonfiction.
CHALLENGE FOR AURAIST READERS
This seems a fitting point to set again the challenge we put to our readers last year: Can you prove that you exist? Or more specifically: can you provide a valid (non-circular) justification for the existence of the self, as that term is commonly understood?
If you can, we’ll give you a complimentary lifetime paid subscription and publish your answer here.
Nobody has yet met this challenge. Thaddeus Thomas’ response was brilliant and accurate (IMO), but his understanding of the self is unusual, to say the least.
And it almost goes without saying — though curiously few ever say it — that the self is what our entire civilisation is based upon. So another way to put this challenge: Can you show that our civilisation’s foundational idea, the one we base most of our lives on, is anything more than just brainwashing?
And if not, and if nobody can, then where does that leave the foundations of our civilisation and our lives?
—’I leant on the gate and scanned the field, which rose in a gentle incline towards the horizon and then dropped out of sight. The sky was gunmetal grey. I ran my gaze along the hedgerows, over the expanses of bare stubble and lingering patches of slowly dissolving snow, and towards the dark silhouette of the nearest wood. Whatever dog had been on the loose was no longer visible’: our next nonfiction pick.
—’And all at once, as though commanded into being, a great wave rose. It rose at first like the broad back of a whale, and then, like something monstrous, something mountainous, it rose higher still’: and our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. The full list of books considered is here.
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NONFICTION BOOKS CONSIDERED
Hubris by Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe
Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank
Unmasking Lucy Letby by Jonathan Coffey and Judith Moritz
Psychedelic Outlaws by Joanna Kempner
The Gates of Gaza by Amir Tibon
Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe by Vivien Goldman
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Life of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade
Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy by Simon Critchley
The Elements of Marie Curie by Dava Sobel
The Forbidden Garden of Leningrad by Simon Parkin
Box Office Poison by Tim Robey
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
Breakthrough by William Pao
Patriot by Alexei Navalny
In One Ear by Simon Raymonde
I Haven't Been Entirely Honest With You by Miranda Hart
Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot
Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller
Muslims Don't Matter by Sayeeda Warsi
Our first pick from these is
Plague Bill
ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a plague. Fearing disease and death, people led a hermit-like existence, distanced from each other in their domestic cells, advancing masked against a contaminated and untrustworthy reality defined by pestilence, pain, and suffering. They were suddenly aware of living in a world of contagion, and possibly being contagious themselves. They followed a practice that the ancients called anachoreisis, a retreat from the world, a withdrawal into solitude.
Some of them, the richer ones, fled their cities for the apparent safety of the countryside. The poorer ones stayed put, hoping for the best while fearing the worst. Cut off from their compulsory commutes and their mind-numbing round of distraction from distraction by distraction, they heard silence, or something close to it, sometimes punctuated by birdsong. Whether they liked it or not, they all became anchorites or anchoresses. They became unwitting mystics.
There was a strange asceticism to the world of isolation and disease experienced by these people, which opened them up to extreme experiences of doubt, dereliction, dreams, hypochondria, and hallucination. Many of them felt a desperate desire for the touch of love, for a connection with something or someone outside or larger than the self, however that might be understood, possibly even as something divine.
Their intense and confused feelings seemed to have echoes with practices and beliefs considered outdated, superstitious, irrational and, frankly, embarrassing. It was as if something archaic – elemental, primeval, and long dead – awakened in the plague. Some of them began to wonder about the nature of these archaic feelings and how they might understand the mysticism that had revived, like some unbidden ghost.
'Philosopher Simon Critchley's painstaking attempt to explore transcendent experience provides a fascinating overview of Christianity's great outliers' — 'Book of the Day', Guardian
Mysticism is about existential ecstasy - an experience of heightening one's senses and self into a sheer feeling of aliveness. Mystical experiences offer us a practical way to open our thoughts and deepen the sense of our lives, whether through a mainstream connection to God or by taking part in mind-altering experiences.
Here, Simon Critchley explores the history and practice of mysticism, from its origins in Eastern and Western religion, through its association with esoteric and occult knowledge, and up to the ecstatic modernism of T.S. Eliot and others. Through a discussion of the lives of famous mystics, like Julian of Norwich and Jesus Christ, Critchley reveals how embracing the spectrum of mystical experience can refresh our thinking and help us live deeper and freer lives.
Philosophical and playful, analytical and inventive, On Mysticism is a definitive account of humanity's quest to understand the divine, and a call to thinkers everywhere to broaden our minds to life larger than our selves.
RECOMMENDED
A WINTER LEVERET
Standing by the back door, readying for a long walk, I heard a dog barking, followed by the sound of a man shouting. I jammed my feet into my boots and walked across the gravel to the wooden gate to look for the cause of the disturbance. There was no reason for a dog to be nearby. The barn where I lived stood alone in a broad expanse of arable farmland, quartered by streams and hedgerows and interspersed with stands of woodland. I had grown up with stories of poachers cutting locks and forcing open gates to drive onto the farmers’ fields and into the woods, hunting deer and rabbits or setting their dogs to chase hares. More benignly, dogs had been known to bolt from their owners walking down the lanes, in pursuit of a rabbit or simply drawn by the open spaces, scattering sheep or disturbing nesting birds in the process. A zealous dog, panting from the chase, had jumped over the wall into my garden once the previous year, lunging at nothing and sawing the air with its tail in a playful manner before bounding up and off and away. But such incidents were rare, and I was curious to know what was happening.
I leant on the gate and scanned the field, which rose in a gentle incline towards the horizon and then dropped out of sight. The sky was gunmetal grey. I ran my gaze along the hedgerows, over the expanses of bare stubble and lingering patches of slowly dissolving snow, and towards the dark silhouette of the nearest wood. Whatever dog had been on the loose was no longer visible. The wind cut at my cheeks with an icy edge. The white fog of my breath was whipped away. I fumbled in my pocket for my gloves, pulled my coat closer around me and set off for a walk.
The path I took was a short, unpaved track leading along the edge of a cornfield and emerging into a narrow country lane flanked with tall hedges overflowing with bramble and snowberry. The track, formed of two strips of hard packed earth, was solid enough for a car to pass but pocked with potholes and puddles. I crested the skyline, deep in my thoughts, and began to walk down the slight slope towards the lane, when I was brought up short by a tiny creature facing me on the grass strip running down the track’s centre. I stopped abruptly. Leveret. The word surfaced in my mind, even though I had never seen a young hare before.
The animal, no longer than the width of my palm, lay on its stomach with its eyes open and its short, silky ears held tightly against its back. Its fur was dark brown, thick and choppy, and grew in delicate curls along its spine. Long, pale guard hairs and whiskers stood out from its body and glowed in the weak sun, creating a corona of light around its rump and muzzle. Set against the bare earth and dry grass it was hard to tell where its fur ended and the ground began. It blended into the dead winter landscape so completely that, but for the rapid rise and fall of its flanks, I would have mistaken it for a stone. Its forepaws were pressed tightly together, fringed in fur the colour of bone and overlapping as if for comfort. Its jet-black eyes were encircled with a thick, uneven band of creamy fur. High on its forehead was a distinct white mark that stood out like a minute dribble of paint. It did not stir as I came into view, but studied the ground in front of it, unmoving. Leveret.
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE HATCHARDS AND BIOGRAPHERS' CLUB FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE
A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE HAY FESTIVAL, SUNDAY TIMES, THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, SPECTATOR AND iNEWS
the great wave
1957
And all at once, as though commanded into being, a great wave rose. It rose at first like the broad back of a whale, and then, like something monstrous, something mountainous, it rose higher still.
Those men who stood on the ship’s bridge looked out upon the water, and they knew in that instant just how frail their vessel could be. For weeks, they had sailed the ice-clotted ocean, seeking and slaughtering the creatures of this place. They had left them, those giant bodies, to be flensed and rendered, to be translated into blubber and blood, into oil and meal, into lipstick and margarine. They had worked until their own bones shuddered with exhaustion, their skin puckered and split with cold. They had longed, these men, for their homes.
In storms past, they had found shelter, had huddled in the lee of icebergs, some as big as islands, others as big as cities. They had waited for the worst to pass, and then had gone to work again. But this storm was different. It came without warning, in the last week of the year. The wind had pawed and needled, then had struck them like a fist. The ship had rocked and groaned as the first waves came. But those were as nothing compared to what came next.
Most of the men aboard could not see the great wave – from their cabins, from the engine room, from the mess – but all seemed to know it was coming. Inside the ship, the air had thickened; nostrils, eyes and throats had clogged with salt. All senses turned towards the water.
As the wall of ocean began to crest above them, each man took hold of what seemed to him most solid. Some of them must have prayed, mouthing words they had not spoken since last in church. Others thought of wives and children, or the wives and children that they hoped one day to have. They thought of mothers and fathers and friends and lovers, and of the islands and the cities they had left behind.
And when the great wave fell finally upon them, when air became water and water became everything and everything was drenched in darkness, death seemed certain – the end, for all of them, decided. They closed their eyes and clenched their bodies, each believing they had few breaths left to breathe, few seconds still remaining.
And then, those seconds gone, another moment came, drenched in light, in which those men could wonder if perhaps their prayers had been answered, if perhaps the ship on which they stood might stay afloat, if perhaps – a miracle – each one of them would see his home again.
There were some amongst those men who felt in that bright moment, and in the hours that came afterwards, as though they had been reborn, as though the wave had washed them clean and thrown them out into the world again anew. None spoke this feeling aloud. All assumed that they alone had felt it, that they alone had been spared for a reason.
For one of those men – Sonny, a deckboy, just turned twenty, and on his third trip to the Southern Ocean – the reason was clear. When he returned to Shetland in five months’ time, with the packet of cash in his pocket, and the smell of rancid oil and caustic soda embedded in his skin, he would ask Kathleen Anderson of Treswick to marry him. Sweet, honey-eyed Kathleen. And together they would make a home.