Our Lady of the Nile
Scholastique Mukasonga’s début novel, now re-released by Daunt Books, is a startling and surprising approach to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Read MoreHow to Argue with a Racist
Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue with a Racist has a morally important purpose. It is also a brilliant example of how to write about complex ideas in an accessible way.
Read MoreMinds Made for Stories
Thomas Newkirk is one of the best writers on education today. His book Minds Made for Stories examines the ways non-fiction texts have narratives at their cores, and how these can be used to teach them.
Read MoreBeing Betjeman(n) by Jonathan Smith
Jonathan Smith’s enormously enjoyable Being Betjeman(n) is an unclassifiable and highly personal book about the poet, but also about mental health, teaching, parenting and friendship.
Read MoreRadical Attention
Julia Bell’s pocket-sized essay, Radical Attention examines the ways our attention has become a commodity and how an industry has developed out of our distractions.
Read MoreA Ghost in the Throat
Doireann Ní Ghríofa's remarkable first prose work, as befits a poet, is itself a weaving, as it braids to and fro in its consideration of female bodies, erasures and absences, texts and textures, rooms, ghosts.
Read MoreThe Five
In Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Linda (Willy Loman’s widow) says, ‘Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person’, and this is what Hallie Rubenhold is doing in The Five. She rescues the murder victims from history, from their erasure by stereotype, laziness and misogyny, and makes them real again.
Read MoreThe Years
‘Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same’. This is a great narrative about family, first as a child and moving through the teenage years to marriage, motherhood and eventually being a grandmother. It is also about France itself, culture, technology, consumerism and so much more.
Read MoreThe Ministry of Truth
Dorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth: a biography of George Orwell’s 1984 is a superb introduction to the novel, and a vital read for English teachers.
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