Nine books to look out for in October

Upcoming history and non-fiction titles that have caught my eye

As with my previous posts 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 – with one exception – I haven’t read any of them yet, I offer this for your interest…

The Basque Witch-Hunt: A Secret History
Jan Machielsen; Bloomsbury

Machielsen is a really interesting historian who is developing a strong body of work around witchcraft, demons and saints. His new book re-examines the story of a notorious witch-hunt in 1609 which left 80 Basque women and men dead and sparked waves of terror in the Pays de Labourd region, situated on French side of the Franco-Spanish border. It stands as the most violent witch-hunt in French history. Machielsen promises to use newly discovered evidence to examine not just the case itself, but the way it illuminates geo-political tensions arising from the Basque population’s indeterminate, marginal status both in and between two powerful nation states.

Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World’s Greatest Writer
Darren Freebury-Jones; Manchester University Press

I doubt that it’s news to anyone that Shakespeare’s particular genius has helped to obscure a great number of genuinely extraordinary poets and playwrights who had the misfortune to be his contemporaries. But to make him stand alone from his period is to profoundly misunderstand his writing and its processes. Freebury-Jones’s new book promises to place his work back in the at-once collaborative and competitive milieu of the early-modern playhouse, using a range of techniques – including computer-aided comparative analysis – to explore how his work engaged creatively with those of his contemporaries, and theirs with his. Which is to say, I think, that it considers influence as more of a holistic process rather than a simple uni-directional one. In any event, I think writers like Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, Ben Jonson, et al are towering figures on their own terms and this should be a fascinating study of the ways in which they and their work helped Shakespeare shape and refine his own art.

Predator of the Seas: A History of the Slaveship that Fought for Emancipation
Stephen Taylor; Yale University Press

Predator of the Seas is an exploration of the transatlantic slave trade through the life of a single ship. The Henriqueta, a Baltimore clipper, carried slaves to Brazil for years. But in 1827 the Royal Navy bought it and renamed it the Black Joke. In that guise it became a powerful weapon against the trade, patrolling the shores of West Africa, intercepting shipping and freeing captives. The book promises to be a taut, vivid and well-constructed narrative, taking the eradication of the slave trade – often characterised as a great moral battle and a mark of British exceptionalism – and showing the messiness of the process in practice, subject to the push and pull of different factors of which morality is only one: Admiralty indifference, if not obstruction; the lives and careers of the naval officers; the courage of the crewmen; the dangerous practicalities of intercepting slave ships; the sometimes delicate, sometimes brutal realities of international trade and politics; and so on.

I’m a great admirer of Taylor’s work. He is a superb naval historian with a gift for conveying the rich varieties of human experience among those who lived and died on the sea. (I reviewed his last book, Sons of the Waves, for Literary Review here.) This new book should bring those talents to a fraught and contested period in British history, revealing humanity at its most complex and compelling and breathing new life into an old story.

Church Going: The Curious Story of Britain’s Churches
Andrew Ziminski; Profile

A guide to the medieval churches of Britain written by a practising stonemason. Books about the church estate seem in vogue at the moment. I really enjoyed Peter Ross’s Steeple Chasing when I reviewed it last year, and Bodley Head recently bought the rights to Church Crawling, a book about the parish churches of England by Rachel Morley, director of the wonderful Friends of Friendless Churches. However, I’m hoping Ziminski’s technical knowledge and expertise will make this a distinctive and illuminating contribution to an important and - to me - compelling subject.

Fernando Pessoa
Bartholomew Ryan; Reaktion

In all honesty I haven’t read much of Pessoa’s work, but he’s such an interesting writer that I do want to learn more about him. Probably the key figure in Portuguese literary modernism, Pessoa’s approach was unique: he invented dozens of different alter egos for himself with different literary styles and interests. As well as an astonishing achievement, the kind of fragmentary identity he pioneered seems particularly apt for our own age of multiple and fractured selves. Part of Reaktion’s Critical Lives series, this shortish book - it’s 240 pages - looks like an ideal place to start with Pessoa.

England: A Natural History
John Lewis-Stempel; Transworld

The publisher is describing this as Lewis-Stempel’s magnum opus, which is a lot of pressure, but it does sound good. A journey through twelve distinctive and varied habitats that together comprise the English landscape – estuary, woodland, fenland, moor, and so on – this promises to draw on the author’s knowledge and observational expertise, as well as that of England’s great treasure house of nature writers like Gilbert White, John Clare and Richard Jefferies, to examine how the landscape has shaped our ideas about ourselves and about the meaning of England too.

Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women
Hetta Howes; Bloomsbury

We have few testimonies to the way women of medieval Europe thought about themselves, about their experiences, and how they articulated the texture of their lives. In what I think is her first book, Hetta Howes explores the lives of four who were able to bear witness to themselves: Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Christine de Pizan and Marie de France. While these are not exactly surprising choices, all four were both extraordinary women and extraordinary writers, who always bear returning to, and in whom there are always new things to find.

The Falcon and the Hart: The Tragedy of Richard II and Henry IV
Helen Castor; Allen Lane

I have reviewed this for the Daily Telegraph, so I will share my thoughts here in more depth shortly. But briefly, this is a gripping study of the psychological consequences of power on those who wield it. It’s a dual biography of the two kings, cousins born months apart. Packed with drama and incident, it is written with an electrifying sense of the tensions between individuals and institutions, innovation and tradition, legitimacy and tyranny. I think it’s a masterpiece of narrative history.

The Artist’s Palette: The Palettes Behind the Paintings of 50 Great Artists
Alexandra Loske; Thames & Hudson

A bit of an outlier, perhaps, but this struck me as an intriguing idea. Loske has used images of artists’ palettes – whether painted in self-portraits or photographed – and used them to explore the processes of art: colour choice, colour creation, brushstroke, technique, and so on. The artists in question range from Artemisia Gentileschi in the seventeenth century, through the likes of Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh to Wassily Kandinsky and Georgia O’Keeffe. It’s hard to say how this will work on the page, but as I said, it has the potential to be a thoughtful – and, who knows, perhaps even revelatory – insight into how great art is made.