Category: Non fiction
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Divided: Racism, Medicine and Why We Need to Decolonise Healthcare
This essential and well-written book is a mixture of useful history and current issues in UK healthcare. The author explores areas including eugenics, race science, development of health policies and treatments. Sowemimo brings her personal experience as NHS doctor to her analysis. Her first-hand accounts of training and practice in UK medicine map her historical…
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Arrangements in Blue
In this memoir, poet Amy Key takes the lovely pretext of Joni Mitchell’s seminal album Blue to explore various aspects of her own life and relationships. Each chapter, guided by a song lyric, focuses on something different: building a home, her relationships to parents and grandparents, her friendships, her romantic and sexual relationships, and her…
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The Red Parts
Before Maggie Nelson was born her mother’s sister was murdered in a shockingly violent way, an unsolved crime which overshadows the family in the subsequent decades and which Nelson has previously explored in her collection of poetry Jane: A Murder. In 2005 the case is unexpectedly re-opened, The Red Parts, as described in its subtitle,…
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The Return – Fathers, Sons and the Land In Between, by Hisham Matar
Hardback, Penguin:Viking, £14.99, out now Hisham Matar’s father Jaballa Matar, an active opponent of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and imprisoned in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim jail. After 1996, there was no word of what happened to him. This beautifully written memoir concerns not only Matar’s memories of family life…
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Skyfaring – A Journey with a Pilot, by Mark Vanhoenacker
Paperback, Vintage, £8.99, out now The cover of this book makes me want to jump on a plane and fly off somewhere. As someone who likes flying, despite serious concerns about climate change, I thought I might like this book. I was wrong. I love it. If I’m looking for escape in a book, I’m…
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Gratitude, by Oliver Sacks
Hardback, Picador, £9.99, out now Gratitude is a final gift from the excellent neurologist and writer of popular science, Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015. These short but beautiful pieces encapsulate all that is best about his writing. Humane, kind, interesting and funny, they offer his reflections on a life well lived from one who…
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East West Street – On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, by Philippe Sands
Hardback, Orion Books, £20, out now International human rights barrister Philippe Sands opens his remarkable new book with a quote from Nicolas Abraham: “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”. Sands tries to fill some of these gaps in the stories of both his family…
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Being a Beast, Charles Foster
Hardback, Profile Books, £14.99, out now If the belated but welcome Spring sunshine has you feeling newly mindful of our wildlife and hankering for all things natural then I couldn’t recommend anything better than Charles Foster’s latest book, Being a Beast ( – short of actually departing for the country and taking up residence in…
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London Fog: the Biography, by Christine L. Corton
Hardback, Harvard University Press, £22.95, out now This very readable history of London fog was a surprise hit this winter. Beautifully illustrated, with colour pictures well integrated into the text, Corton provides not only a good summary of why fogs happened and why they stopped but also gives an erudite account of how they affected…
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The Outrun, by Amy Liptrot
Hardback, Canongate, £14.99, out now A young woman flies back into Orkney with her newborn baby – pausing at the airport to introduce the baby to her husband, who is being flown out, in a straitjacket, to a psychiatric hospital. Amy Liptrot, the author of this engaging addition to the nature/memoir selection, was the baby…
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A Notable Woman: The Romantic Journals of Jean Lucey Pratt, edited by Simon Garfield
Hardback £20, Canongate, out now “There is so much in this world to make me happy. Small things such as cats, a good meal, one’s garden, trees in spring and autumn, clouds, colours, fabrics, clothes, companionship, books and music and films, a drink in the friendly atmosphere of an English pub, a ride in a…
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The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning: a Polar Journey, by Wendy Trusler and Carol Devine
Hardback £25, HarperCollins, out now Wendy Trusler and Carol Devine have created a beautiful visual and written record of a 1995-96 volunteer expedition to clean up rubbish on the South Shetland Islands in Antarctica. The book is illustrated with photographs both from the trip and from previous historic outings by Scott and Shackleton, among others.…
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Carl Cattermole, H.M. Prison: A Survival Guide
Carl Cattermole’s short, sharp, shockingly good guide to life on the inside is without a doubt one of the best books I’ve read all year. Unlike so many of the squillions of things that get ushered into print each month, H.M. Prison: A Survival Guide is a book that feels like it urgently needed to…
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Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter about People Who Think Differently, by Steve Silberman
Allen and Unwin, £16.99, paperback out now A worthy winner of the Samuel Johnson non-fiction book prize, this is a fascinating and highly readable history of autism. We also get to meet several interesting people affected by autism, and an invitation to reconsider what we think we know about it. Silberman, a journalist for Wired…
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Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories, by Thomas Grant
John Murray, out now, £25 A child of the Bloomsbury group, Jeremy Hutchinson became a leading QC at the criminal bar in postwar Britain. Fellow lawyer Thomas Grant has written Hutchinson’s life in an unusual style – a shortish biographical sketch, followed by in depth accounts of Hutchinson’s most famous cases. This approach successfully illuminates…
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This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, by Samanth Subramanian
Atlantic Books, out now Just longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize, this well written account of the Sri Lankan civil war does not take sides. Indian Tamil journalist Subramanian approaches a notoriously tangled and controversial subject through the stories of diverse individuals. These include former combatants from the Tamil Tigers and the army, refugees and…
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Top 10 Fiction and Non-Fiction: August 2015
No surprise this month – Harper Lee is back, back, back. The holiday reading season has also revived several titles including The Girl on the Train, which benefited from a Radio 4 adaptation. Incidentally, Go Set a Watchman is not the only literary sequel in town: The Meursalt Investigation is an Algerian writer’s companion novel…