An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

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Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Bodley Head) has already been hailed as a fascinating breakthrough in natural history. Freedom of speech, the sanctity of the individual and equality of opportunity,” he notes, “are both the products of and the necessary ingredients for the tremendous progress we have made in science, art, technology and culture. High-profile, bestselling books have played a vital role in focusing opposition to the Trump presidency, from Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury to the recent broadsides fired by John Bolton and Mary Trump. Investigations into dark and difficult areas of society give a presence to people who usually remain invisible. The grandfather did not wind up in a gulag but was effectively “canceled” from polite society, leading eventually to his own move to the United Kingdom.

As he says at one point in a plea to journalists, “The media … is not yours to co-opt or use to spread propaganda. Her previous work H is for Hawk established Macdonald as a brilliant practitioner of nature-memoir; this new book cautions against viewing the natural world as a ‘mirror of ourselves, reflecting our own world-view and our own needs, thoughts and hopes’. Exit Management by Naomi Booth (Dead Ink, September) is a timely, original dissection of class and desperation in Brexit London; in The First Woman by Kintu author Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Oneworld, October), a young woman comes of age in 1970s Uganda.For those who recognize the truth of such assertions, Kisin offers nothing objectionable; he also, however, offers little new or insightful. As he says at one point, “If there is one thing my Soviet childhood taught me, it’s that subscribing to someone else’s ideology will always inevitably mean having to suspend your own judgment about right and wrong to appease your tribe.

Much of it has grown out of discussions he and Foster have had with their guests, and it seems from the book that as he has spoken to other people he has developed his own thinking. Andrew O’Hagan considers male friendship in Mayflies (Faber), as memories of youthful camaraderie in 1980s Scotland are refracted through experience and loss in the decades that follow.It gives him an important perspective on the West at a time when the West would appear to be throwing away so much of what it has achieved. Rather different is the powerful Just Ignore Him by QI star Alan Davies (Little Brown), which looks back to a dark childhood. And there are reasons for that, not least that when they say “here is an important question that’s central to our future”, they do not then devote a four-and-a-half-minute segment to it where the airtime is divided between four maniacs.

The political leadership class comes in for its fair share of criticism as well, with many high-profile failures highlighted: the hypocrisy on adherence to COVID guidance, flip-flops on the efficacy of mask-wearing, and the sudden reversal of social-distancing rules when people wanted to gather en masse to protest preferred causes. Iraqi-born Hassan Blasim follows searing short-story collections with his first novel God 99 (translated by Jonathan Wright, Comma, Nov ember), in which an Iraqi refugee tracks down the real stories behind Europe’s “refugee crisis”.Coming a decade after the mega-selling How to Be a Woman, this mid-life book follows, with Moran’s irresistible comic candour, a day in the life of a woman in her early 40s as she deals with ageing parents, divorcing friends, teenagers having “micro-breakdowns”, greying hair, “maintenance shags” and the tyranny of the to-do list. Meanwhile, Australian Laura Jean McKay gets her first UK publication with The Animals in That Country (Scribe, September), a powerful, uncanny tale of a flu pandemic that allows humans to understand the language of animals. Estate, October), edited by Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené, the authors of hit book and podcast Slay in Your Lane, ranges from Marvel’s Black Panther to “how we can teach our daughters to own their voices”. Now more than ever before, we need to look long and hard at how we view and interact with the natural world. Part memoir and part cultural commentary, the book recounts the arc of Kisin’s family story as it ranges from the gulags of the Soviet Union to the present-day United Kingdom, recounting how the family’s experiences shaped the author’s appreciation for the virtues of the Western world as opposed to the actual “lived experience” of communism.

Yiyun Li delves into family tragedy in Must I Go(Hamish Hamilton), while Rose Tremain’s Islands of Mercy(Chatto) ranges from 19th-century Bath to Borneo via Paris and Dublin exploring colonialism, self-determination and the nature of desire. Kisin gives examples of the heroes of modern journalism, not least Anna Politkovskaya, murdered by the Russians in 2006 for exposing what Putin and his cronies did not want the world to know. In this way, the memoir is a pleasant and welcome read for those inclined to agree with Kisin’s classical liberal, pro-West, centrist vision of the world. There are shining passages in the book, particularly in each and every family story Kisin tells, as well as his exploration of how media in the West are actively undermining confidence in themselves. Many of his interviewees are immigrants who came to the UK dreaming of a better life, and ended up draining buckets of bleach.

I started with a vision of empty streets in Manhattan …” Covid-19 casts extra resonance on this slim disquisition on catastrophe, in which a group gathers in a New York apartment to watch the 2022 Super Bowl – and then the world goes dark. For all the faults that one may want to point out in contemporary Britain and America, and even in their respective histories, Kisin argues, they have produced the freest, most equitable, and highest living-standard societies in the history of the world.