The Curious Life of the Cuckoo
John Lewis-Stempel
Doubleday, £9.99, pp112
Double Wainwright-prize-winner Lewis-Stempel has been producing these short paeans to the natural world for a while now. This celebration of spring’s songbird follows explorations into the lives of the owl, fox, hare and oak and is just as adeptly put together, laying out a convincing case for the cuckoo’s conniving importance through a cultural and ornithological lens. There are, however, so many lists, so many nods to and tracts of texts from centuries-old writers, that at times there’s something missing – Lewis-Stempel’s own call, as it were.
The Dream Hotel
Laila Lalami
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp336
When Sara ends up in a bewildering US “retention centre” – not for a crime she has committed but for a felony she’s determined at risk of perpetrating – it sets the scene for an engrossing psychological mystery. Striking at the heart of current fears surrounding technology and control, and with distinct echoes of Orwell, Kafka and Atwood, there’s nothing particularly new about Lalami’s exploration of the self in an authoritarian world. But the way she skewers notions of supposed privacy and freedom make this less speculative fiction, more gripping allegory for our times.
The Rising Down
Alexandra Harris
Faber, £12.99, pp512 (paperback)
Interestingly, the paperback of Harris’s remarkable microhistory of the small part of southern England where she grew up has removed Sussex from the subtitle. It’s now simply “Lives in a Landscape”, and the lack of specificity makes perfect sense. For although The Rising Down is forensic in its depiction of the area around Horsham, detailing everyone from writers and iron-workers to farmers across millennia, it’s the universal process of finding their stories that gives this book its majesty.
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