Eleven books to look out for in September
Upcoming history and non-fiction titles that have caught my eye
As with my previous post of book recommendations, these are based on scouring the publishers’ catalogues for titles that I think look interesting. It’s inevitably a partial list, in both meanings of the word. There are undoubtedly many excellent books coming out in fields I have no interest in – which are many and various – and I will certainly have missed books even for fields which I was actively looking for. With the additional caveat that I haven’t read any of them yet, I offer this for your interest…
Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction
Jerry Brotton; Allen Lane
This is a quirky and original idea: an exploration of how societies and cultures have understood themselves through the ways they oriented themselves and mapped their identities on to the world. There is more than one kind of geography, of course, and the cardinal points have always spoken to moral and political imperatives as much as merely directional ones. Brotton is an excellent historian – his book This Orient Isle: Elizabeth England and the Islamic World is worth seeking out – and I have high hopes of this one too.
Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade 1649–1660
Alice Hunt; Faber & Faber
There have been a number of wonderful books about the English Civil War and the Cromwellian era in recent years, and I expect Alice Hunt’s Republic to add to the list. Hunt is Professor of Early modern Literature and History at the University of Southampton and her promises to be an enthralling account of an intellectually and politically tumultuous period in British history, packed with incident and argument and the lives of some truly remarkable men and women.
The Story of Nature: A Human History
Jeremy Mynott; Yale University Press
I was a huge fan of Mynott’s last book Birds in the Ancient World and reviewed it for History Today. His new book looks to be a kind of cultural history of the natural world, exploring the ways in which humanity has understood the nature from pre-history to the present day. It encompasses everything from cave art and domestication to today’s fraught environmental debates, taking in classical, Christian and Romantic ideas – and much else too – along the way. Mynott is brilliant at showing how humanity’s evolving and competing conceptions of the world around us always speaks to how we think about ourselves. This should be superb.
Saints: A new legendary of heroes, humans and magic
Amy Jeffs; Riverrun
Saints follows on from Jeffs’ two previous books Storyland and Wild. But whereas those two books tapped into the market for early medieval and pagan-adjacent folklore and myth in the British landscape, this promises to bring the same formula of story-telling, lightly but firmly underpinned by scholarship - and accompanied by Jeffs’ own evocative artwork - to the world of the medieval saints. The cults of the saints are a fascinating source of often fantastic stories – and extraordinary phenomena in their own right – but they come with a lot of baggage in terms of contemporary antipathies to catholicism and Christianity more broadly, so I am very interested to see how successful Jeffs is with this. Making sense of these cults to a modern audience would be no small miracle, I think. (I’m reviewing this for The Spectator and will share my thoughts here in due course.)
Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Seduction, Intrigue and Power
Sonia Purnell; Virago
By any measure, Harriman led an extraordinary life. Born into the English aristocracy and a sometime daughter-in-law to Winston Churchill – Harriman lived at 10 Downing Street during the war – she ended her days as a power player in the Democratic Party and Bill Clinton’s choice as US Ambassador to France. Purnell has gained access to newly uncovered letters and diaries, as well as previously unpublished transcripts of interviews with Harriman herself. Kingmaker therefore promises to be the definitive account of a woman whose lifelong reputation for extensive sexual adventure among the rich and powerful masks another, more complex story about politics, intrigue and patronage at the very apex of British and American society.
The Bible: A Global History
Bruce Gordon; John Murray
Gordon could hardly have a more epic canvas on which to work here. His book promises to explore the Bible’s very beginnings and the processes which came to bring its various texts together as a codex in the first place. And from there it ranges across two thousands years of history examining the tensions between the idea of it as a single, authoritative text, and the infinitely varied ways in which it has been re-interpreted and re-invented ever since.
Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind: In Pursuit Of Remarkable Mushrooms
Richard Fortey; William Collins
I’ll say straight away: I know almost nothing about fungi. Much, much nearer to nothing than anything, for sure. But I do know that the kingdom of fungi is full of strangeness and wonder, entirely unlike the kingdoms of animals and plants, and I would very much like to read a book that reveals some of its otherworldly glory to me, that shows me how it functions, how it interacts with the worlds around it, and what meanings it might have for us. I don’t know for sure that this is that book, but Fortey is a reliable guide and it looks very much as though it could be.
The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading
Sam Leith; OneWorld
Like a lot of us, I suspect, my childhood was very much defined by the things I read, and I probably lived more in that great interior world of books than I did in the small space of the playground or schoolroom. (A tangent, but one of my bugbears about ‘relevance’ as a metric for children’s books is that it robs the young reader of so many rich emotional and intellectual experiences.) So The Haunted Wood is right up my street, promising to explore what children’s books tell us about the changing lives of childhood as much as the books themselves. (I should note that Sam commissions reviews from me at The Spectator, so I would have a conflict of interest if I reviewed it.)
Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before The Storm
Katherine Carter; Yale University Press
Churchill is a perennially interesting character, and this promises to be a perceptive and illuminating study of his life in the 1930s and the circles of advisers and confidants he gathered around himself – among them Albert Einstein and T.E. Lawrence – at Chartwell, his country house in Kent. Carter is a curator at Chartwell as well as being a historian, and I’ll be interested to see how she brings the the house to life on the page, as well as what details there are of what conversations were had with whom in its rooms and hallways, as war - and destiny - came ever closer.
Embers of the Hands Hidden Histories of the Viking Age
Eleanor Barraclough; Profile
This pitches itself as a kind of social history of the Viking world, looking at the lives away from the frontlines of the raiding parties and armies that define our idea of Viking society. We get very preoccupied with the Viking incursions into Britain but the extent of the travels - and of their success - was astonishing, from North America across to Byzantium. If Barraclough’s book can bring to life the experiences of those who belonged to the diaspora, without necessarily taking up arms for it, it should be really good.
The Mysterious Case of the Victorian Female Detective
Sara Lodge; Yale University Press
A slice of social history I know nothing about. Lodge’s book looks behind our traditional image of the Victorian detective to show that, contrary to what we might expect, women were active in investigations for both the police and private detective agencies. Examining the lives of these women on both sides of the Atlantic, Lodge also explores representations of female detectives in Victorian drama and fiction, comparing morally complex realities to the sentimental fantasies of the imagination.
Alice Hunt's and Sarah Leith's books sound particularly tempting. And so true, your comment about the "relevance" of kids' books. That notion irked me as a youngster when teachers and librarians were starting to bang on about it. Who can decide what's "relevant" to another reader? I was also wary of "suitability", i.e. nothing you're not supposed to know about.
Nowadays, I suspect "relevance" has more to do with how our brains are wired. Some writers write close to their own personal experience, and some readers enjoy their writing. Others, both writers and readers, like to push their personal boundaries as far as they can. For the latter, the pleasure is all in the leap of connection.
The relevance-utility axis is pretty much a disaster. Interesting selection.