Profound insights and platitudes The inspiration for Midnight’s Children came to Salman Rushdie on a backpacking trip around India. It was 1974, and he had just received an advance of £700 for his debut novel, Grimus. But he still saw himself as an apprentice novelist who worked part-time for an ad agency in London. He stretched out his advance over four months of travel, roughing it in 15-hour bus rides and humble hostelries, reacquainting himself with the country he had known as a child. Rushdie has previously written here and there about his rookie years, and he writes about them again in his new collection of essays, Languages of Truth. Many of the old rhythms course through the essays in this new book, at least across the first 200 pages. There is the same impervious sense of wonder about “storytelling”, difficult for the reader to share in the age of fake news and social media algorithms. There is the same uncomplicated nostalgia about growing up in Bombay 70 years ago: how the young Rushdie was obsessed with fairytales and fables, how they all fed into the magic realism of his novels. The rare occasions of vulnerability – the too-late discovery, for instance, that his charming grandfather had actually been a paedophile – are hushed up in parentheses, snubbed for a more palatable narrative. In a piece written after Philip Roth’s death, Rushdie admires the author of Portnoy’s Complaint for starting off as a “literary revolutionary” and branching out, with the late novels, into political prescience. Rushdie’s own trajectory has been different: the effusive ambition of his early work has run out of steam. The trademark sentences, once full of showy allusions and turns, are now rife with chatty platitudes. And yet, just when you think his late style has set in, you run into a different, more private, Rushdie. The final 50 pages or so – comprising pieces on painters, photographers and personal ephemera – contain probably the best nonfiction he has written in years. Rushdie is a perceptive art critic, stirred alike by Mughal-era cloth paintings and Kara Walker’s contemporary silhouettes. Reading the artist Amrita Sher-Gil’s letters, he notices a sensibility moving “naturally towards the melancholy and the tragic”. Midway through a memoir of celebrating Christmas as an atheist, he recalls climbing up the roof of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge. The sentences carefully rise to the intensity of these moments. Rushdie is happy to record just what he sees and feels. You sense that he has arrived somewhere new after a long impasse and hope that it is a sign of good things to come. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty £11.04 (RRP £12.99) - Constructing a Nervous System Margo Jefferson An account of black female identity Margo Jefferson is the rare memoirist who is always daring the reader to keep up. She’d rather recall her fleeting impressions instead of recounting a scene and the sheer volume of her allusions to 20th-century Americana – she worked for years on the culture desk of the New York Times – casts an instant spell. In her 2015 book, Negroland, she found a form that held together a portrait of her childhood in a rarefied black enclave in 1950s Chicago, and her early encounters with feminism as a young woman in New York, interspersed with musings on Little Women, James Baldwin and The Ed Sullivan Show. The book was alternately categorised as social history and memoir. The typical Jefferson paragraph, zigzagging through different perspectives, freely borrowing and repurposing other writers’ sentences and song lyrics, invariably reminds me of something one character tells another in Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities: “It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.” The Rathbones Folio prize winning Constructing a Nervous System begins with Jefferson reporting a bad dream: she is alone on a stage and “I extended my arm – no, flung, hurled it out – pointed an accusatory finger” at herself. You sense straight away that Jefferson’s intention is not to tell a story, but to relay an inner tempest on the page. In the next few pages, she quotes from a letter she wrote in 2018 to her dead mother, rewrites lines from an Ethel Waters song and confesses to secretly idolising mid-century black male singers because of their “immersive lure of danger and dominance”. She bristles at classifying these mental leaps as either criticism (“too graciously incantatory”) or memoir (“commemoratively grand”): “Call it temperamental autobiography.” Abhrajyoti Chakraborty £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop The Premonitions Bureau Sam Knight Astonishing adventures in precognition On 20 October, 1966, 10-year-old Eryl Mai Jones, from Aberfan in south Wales, told her mother about a dream she’d had the night before. “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there,” she said. “Something black had come down all over it.” The next day, at 9.14am, a colliery waste tip came crashing down the hillside, smothering the village school and the surrounding houses. Eryl Mai was among the 144 dead. Visiting Aberfan in the days after the tragedy was John Barker, a 42-year-old psychiatrist and superintendent of a large mental hospital in Shropshire who had an interest in “psychiatric orchids”, or unusual mental conditions. Barker had conducted studies on Munchausen syndrome, sufferers of which are known to feign illness, and was in the midst of researching Scared to Death, a book about people who accurately foretold their own deaths. Eryl Mai Jones wasn’t the only child to anticipate the tragedy at Aberfan: the day before, an eight-year-old boy, Paul Davies, had drawn a picture of a mass of figures digging at a hillside accompanied by the words “The End”. Barker was so struck by their portents that he wrote to Peter Fairley, science editor at London’s Evening Standard, and asked him to publish an appeal requesting that anyone who had experienced premonitions of Aberfan to get in touch. They received 76 replies. In The Premonitions Bureau, a strange and gripping account of Barker’s adventures in precognition, the journalist Sam Knight writes: “Premonitions are impossible, and they come true all the time. The second law of thermodynamics says it can’t happen, but you think of your mother a second before she calls.” His book – an expansion of a New Yorker article published in 2019 – blends history and popular science with biography as it plots the career of Barker, a highly respected doctor who was also a member of Britain’s Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882 to investigate paranormal happenings. Even the most hardened sceptic can’t fail to be electrified by the stories of ordinary citizens assailed by visions of earthquakes, tornadoes, collapsing buildings and planes falling out of the sky, and the eminent physician in their thrall. The final chapter brings a doozy of a plot twist that stretches all rational responses to breaking point. If there is something to be understood from the Premonitions Bureau, it’s that not everything can be explained. Fiona Sturges £9.29 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida Shehan Karunatilaka Life after death in Sri Lanka Shehan Karunatilaka made a splash a decade ago with his debut novel Chinaman. Winner of the 2012 Commonwealth book prize and hailed as one of the great Sri Lankan novels, it recounts the alcohol-soaked life of a retired sports journalist who sets out on a zany quest to track down a great cricketer of the 1980s who has mysteriously gone missing. His Booker-winning state-of-the-nation satire, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, returns to 1980s Sri Lanka, and similarly has a debauched protagonist. Maali, the son of a Sinhalese father and a burgher mother, is an itinerant photographer who loves his trusted Nikon camera; a gambler in high-stakes poker; a gay man and an atheist. And at the start of the novel, he wakes up dead. He thinks he has swallowed “silly pills” given to him by a friend and is hallucinating. But no: he really is dead, and seemingly locked in an underworld. It’s no Miltonian pandemonium; for him, “the afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate”. Other souls surround him, with dismembered limbs and blood-stained clothes; and they are incapable of forming an orderly queue to get their forms filled in. Many of the people he meets in this bleakly quotidian landscape are victims of the violence that plagued Sri Lanka in the 80s, including a Tamil university lecturer who was gunned down for criticising militant separatist group the Tamil Tigers. The novel also depicts the victims of Marxist group the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna , or People’s Liberation party, who similarly waged an insurrection against the Sri Lankan government, and killed many leftwing and working-class civilians who got in their way. The obvious literary comparisons are with the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. But the novel also recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The scenarios are often absurd – dead bodies bicker with each other – but executed with a humour and pathos that ground the reader. Beneath the literary flourishes is a true and terrifying reality: the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars. Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history. Tomiwa Owolade £8.49 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Young Mungo Douglas Stuart Grit and longing in Glasgow Douglas Stuart’s second novel appears hard on the heels of 2020’s Shuggie Bain, a Booker prize winner with strong claims to instant-classic status, and is similar in a number of ways. Mungo Hamilton, like Shuggie, is born in the late 1970s and grows up in a tenement in Glasgow, a crabbed but oddly magical locale, with an older sister (Jodie), an older brother (Hamish) and an erratic “alkahawlick” mother to whom he is devoted (Mo-Maw). Again Stuart proves himself a wonderfully gifted writer, a virtuoso describer with a more or less infinite supply of tender detail and elegant phrasing. But Young Mungo, though immersive and rarely dull, emerges as a chaotic cousin to its straight‑shooting predecessor, and offers an altogether bumpier experience. The key event is Mungo’s encounter during the winter half-term break with James Jamieson, a slightly older Catholic boy who keeps a dovecote near the grounds of the housing scheme where they live. Mungo and James fall in love and plan to escape as soon as Mungo turns 16, but their bond is doubly star-crossed. Mungo cannot tell which would be considered the worse betrayal in the eyes of his fearsome brother Hamish – that James is male or that he’s “Fenian”. The backdrop is 1993, with sections titled “The May After” and “The January Before”. The first trajectory lasts a matter of days, during which Mungo takes a trip to the banks of Loch Lomond with a pair of men, even more unsavoury than they first appear, who are known to Mo-Maw from her occasional attendance at AA. But the other timeline moves briskly forward, so that Mungo’s meeting with Jamie takes place in the second chapter of the section entitled “The January Before”. Stuart is a lucid storyteller, moving between the narratives with ease, but the novel is characterised by overkill and we are never trusted to get the message. Almost every paragraph seems to contain a redundancy – an extra bit of scene setting, or the near synonymous rephrasing of a well-established conceit. At one point, when Mungo is waiting for the “proverbial penny to drop” in a conversation with Hamish, there’s a 118-word description of a slot machine at “Mo-Maw’s favourite bingo” which creates a similar – albeit literal – coin-induced sense of anticipation. Yet despite the multifarious frustrations, and even at its most overexplicit and overwrought, Young Mungo is the work of a true novelist. Bizarre technique cannot crowd out the energy of Stuart’s characters or the organic force of his teeming world. At times he recalls Dostoevsky, in whose work the powerful exists alongside the galumphing. Mungo’s predicament is piercing, and as the story draws to a close, a spectral beauty prevails. Leo Robson £9.29 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fire and Flood Eugene Linden A lesson for the future In 60 years from now, when the effects of climate change are far worse than they are today, people may ask themselves “what happened in the past that allowed this nemesis to ruin the world”? Eugene Linden’s forensic examination of the last 40 years would be an excellent place to start for anyone interested in the answer to that question. An American author and journalist, Linden has been writing about climate change since the 1980s. President Carter was warned by scientists in 1979 that if greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) were not curbed, then the Earth’s climate would begin to change before the end of the 20th century. According to Linden, we have been warned about the climate crisis “more than any disaster in history”. When the scientific consensus on the threat from climate change solidified in the 1990s, the world could have come together to take collective action. But, of course, it didn’t. There were later opportunities too. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was, says Linden, “toothless” and the Paris Agreement in 2015 was a “false dawn”. The emissions kept rising. They are now 60% higher than they were in 1990. He says the biggest missed opportunity was when, at the start of their push for industrial development, the emerging economies chose coal, the most polluting fossil fuel. This decision has more than outweighed all subsequent efforts by developed nations to reduce their dependence on carbon. In 2019, China alone emitted more GHG than all 38 developed nations in the OECD combined. Linden’s study explores the missed opportunities and policy failures that resulted in the US and the world continuing along a path that many scientists knew to be disastrous. Starting in the 1980s and ending in the 2010s, he takes each decade in turn and considers attitudes to climate change in the realms of science, public opinion, as well as business and finance. Having once worked in finance, it is clear that this is where Linden attributes the greatest blame: “business interests have proved adept at reframing the issue, dismissing the risks, demonising the scientists, and defaming those seeking action as elitist dilettantes who want to tell you what to do and take away your job”. In the 30 or so years since climate change became an international issue, the world has emitted more GHG than it did in the entire industrial age up until then. Even if we stopped pumping these gases into the atmosphere tomorrow, they would remain there for many decades. Despite this, change is coming. The world of business and finance has finally woken up to the reality of the costs from increasingly frequent natural disasters, as well as the profits to be made from renewables. More than half of Germany’s grid capacity now comes from solar and onshore wind. Linden suggests a universal climate tariff, in which every country is set a GHG reduction target and tariffs imposed for failure, could speed up reductions in global emissions. Although Linden’s book focuses mainly on the debate within the US, this is a valuable contribution to the history of climate change and the way society has responded. In particular, it reveals an important lesson for the future – that our economic system is not fit for purpose when it comes to reacting to global crises: “if the markets had the incentives and penalties to price in the likely future costs of climate change, the world would have acted decades ago”. PD Smith £9.67 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop there are more things Yara Rodrigues Fowler A beautiful, transporting novel Yara Rodrigues Fowler, who has this month been announced as one of Granta’s 20 Best of Young British Novelists, published her first book, Stubborn Archivist, in 2019. That novel was an elegant, introspective take on coming to terms with dual heritage and trauma, themes that are revisited in the 30-year-old’s second novel. Yet there are more things, shortlisted for both the Goldsmiths prize and the Orwell prize for fiction, is broader, both in size - it is more than 400 pages long - and in scope: the novel tells two intertwined stories, one that focuses on east London housemates Melissa and Catarina and begins in 2016 (“the year that Prince died and the guy who played Professor Snape died”) and one set in 1960s/70s Brazil, following Catarina’s revolutionary aunt, Laura. For some, this novel will be too sprawling, its structure too loose - as in Stubborn Archivist, Rodrigues Fowler builds her story via vignettes, this time interwoven with poetry and recipes. It is an intentionally fresh take on realism - just as the lowercase title reflects the way young people message each other, a multi-layered, fragmented form is reflective of a generation that is constantly glancing from screen to screen, tab to tab (as Rodrigues Fowler told the Guardian, only her dad uses full stops). All of this makes for a novel that is skilled and discussion-worthy, but Rodrigues Fowler’s true talent lies in the fact that it is also hugely enjoyable - the plot is gripping and the characters easy to root for. there are more things is a beautiful, transporting book from an exciting young novelist - and I suspect she is only just getting started. Lucy Knight £9.29 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Without Warning and Only Sometimes Kit de Waal The making of a writer In Without Warning & Only Sometimes, Kit de Waal – born Mandy O’Loughlin – recalls her 1960s childhood in the Birmingham suburbs as one of five children of an Irish mother and a West Indian father. Arthur was a bus driver while Sheila worked variously as a childminder, cleaner and auxiliary nurse. Despite the family’s financial struggles – the children would often go to bed hungry – Arthur would intermittently blow his earnings on a pair of Chelsea boots or a fancy suit. When not indulging his sartorial cravings, he would put aside his wages claiming he was saving to buy a house in his beloved St Kitts. “I mean, what kind of fool helps her husband buy a house in another country?” Sheila would rant to her children. “What idiot would help him make a life for himself somewhere else? Me, that’s who.” De Waal is a remarkable observer and her skill lies in elevating the everyday. Hers is a rich portrait ofunremarkable lives. An inveterate daydreamer, she recalls the delight of sitting on her front garden wall watching the goings-on on their road, which were “like a film sometimes, a very slow film without any guns or fights”. Family members, friends and neighbours make colourful character studies. Her maternal grandmother who is tiny “with a quickness about her, a throaty laugh and a vinegar tongue” is particularly vivid. De Waal’s memoir takes her up to early adulthood when, after a bout of depression, she gets a job as a clerk at the office of the chief crown prosecutor. When she tells her boss she is struggling to sleep, he suggests she reads to counteract the swirling 4am thoughts, and gives her a list of his favourite books. In doing so, he sparks in De Waal a love of literature, and, with it, a new life begins. Fiona Sturges £9.29 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop People Person Candice Carty-Williams Daddy issues Cyril Pennington, the roving Jamaican patriarch and shifty centre of People Person, Candice Carty-Williams’s follow-up to her bestselling debut Queenie, considers himself “more of a people person than a father”. He has five children with four different women and zips around south London in his gold Jeep, ingratiating himself with everyone but his own aggrieved offspring. Dimple Pennington, the middle child, has a list of Cyril’s contact numbers saved on her phone under “Dad”, “DAD”, “Dad recent”, “Dad THIS ONE”. Cyril is a well-drawn cad, a “master of detachment” who affably deflects any personal responsibility. People Person explores the legacy of emotional damage wreaked upon his five adult children when an unexpected event draws them all together, as Dimple winds up in a dire situation that requires her family’s help and these half-siblings who barely know one another are suddenly made present and vitally instrumental in each other’s lives. The narrative includes crime and subterfuge, uncomfortable sexual situations, and not one but two funerals – yet despite all this, People Person is a breezily enjoyable read that foxes genre; a family comedy in the guise of domestic noir, with a redemptive fairytale journey from alienation to acceptance at its heart. While the novel contains several madcap plot turns and implausible red herrings, it is anchored in emotional realism and a hopeful warmth. People Person is highly empathic towards its characters’ struggles to accept the indelible failings and traumatic legacies of their childhood and regain agency over who they are and how they want to be. Ultimately, this is a delightful, uplifting and emotionally satisfying novel about building new connections in the face of deep-rooted abandonment wounds and hideous disappointment. The Pennington siblings may never get the paternal love and approval they so crave – but they have each other, and that’s more than enough. Sharlene Teo £8.36 (RRP £8.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Africa is Not a Country Dipo Faloyin A long-overdue corrective Although he now lives in London, writer and editor Dipo Faloyin was raised in the sprawling Nigerian metropolis of Lagos (“loud and plagued by joy”), which is bigger than New York and London combined. He is “half Yoruba and half Igbo”, descended from “a long line of bad poker faces, a clan genetically unable to hide the frustrations or joys etched in our hearts”. He has three older sisters which, he adds with typical humour, means “23 percent of my life has been spent mourning the points I wish I had brought up in a long-finished argument”. Being able to define yourself, as Faloyin does so eloquently at the outset to this book, “is a grace many take for granted”. Stripping someone or a community of this identity can create a poisonous narrative whose effect can be felt for generations, until eventually fiction becomes fact. In this powerful and heartfelt book, Faloyin argues that this has been Africa’s fate – a whole continent that is now commonly treated as a single country, and one which is “cursed to be forever plagued by deprivation”. This is a long-overdue and compelling corrective to the ubiquitous stereotypes of Africa as a place either of eternal strife and poverty, or as an immense safari park. Instead, Faloyin presents “a rich mosaic of experience, of diverse communities and histories”. Taking the reader back to the end of the 19th century, he shows how the continent was divided up by European nations, forcing different cultures and language communities into the strait-jacket of artificial countries with arbitrarily-drawn boundaries, “formed by people with poor maps and even poorer morals”. This “grossly illegal” act divided up ancient kingdoms and nomadic communities, creating long-term frictions that would take generations to untangle and also sowing the idea that the continent’s fate should not be left to Africans to decide: “modern Africa was designed against its will to be a divided thing. A continent of 54 houses built on sand.” These new territories were then ruthlessly plundered by colonialists, or “White Men in Khaki”, as he terms them. In what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, around 10 million people died as a direct result of the brutal rule of the Belgian King Leopold II. According to Faloyin, 90% of Africa’s material cultural legacy – most of it stolen – is still kept outside of the continent, an appalling injustice that has yet to be put right. Among these artefacts are the famous Benin bronzes, looted by the British in 1897 when they destroyed the ancient Kingdom of Benin. Now part of southern Nigeria, it was a remarkable culture that “defied the colonial trope of backwards Dark Africa”. In a moving moment, Faloyin sits in the British Museum and admires them, hearing “the ghosts of my ancestors” whispering: “steal them back”. From white saviours to Africa’s difficult path towards democracy, Faloyin has written a book inspired by love and hope for a much-abused and maligned continent, whose future, he insists, is filled with promise. PD Smith £9.67 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Sea of Tranquility Emily St John Mandel Time-travel drama Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 breakout novel, Station Eleven, told the story of a global pandemic that originates in the former Soviet Union and decimates life on Earth. A page-turner with an eerie, elegiac quality, it won the Arthur C Clarke award and was widely praised for its fine storytelling and for the unsettling glimpses it gave of our world plausibly unravelling into chaos and the dystopian existence beyond it. Five years after it came out, and with an HBO adaptation in the pipeline, it acquired an aura of creepy prophecy as Covid-19 made us all fluent in the language of pandemics. What made the book’s apparent prescience doubly strange is that one of Mandel’s hallmarks as a writer is noticing the echoes between apparently chance events: the links between distant characters, motifs from art recurring in life, and the historical echoes of long-separated incidents. The coincidence of a book meaningfully anticipating a current predicament could be one of her novelistic devices. An interest in complex patterns animates Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility, though, as in Station Eleven, the naturalism and specificity of its opening gives little idea of the strangeness to come. The story begins in 1912 as a young British immigrant, Edwin St John St Andrew, is embarking on a new life in Canada. He’s one of the so-called “remittance men” – wastrel sons of upper-class British families who were packed off to the colonies on a private income to keep them out of further trouble. One day, as Edwin wanders in the woods of western Canada, he undergoes a paranormal experience whose meaning he cannot begin to fathom. A few dozen pages on, the scene suddenly shifts and we are plunged into the present. At a concert in New York a composer is playing an old piece of video that seems to show a version of whatever Edwin found in the forest. Now that we’re invested in the mystery, the weirdness can really begin. There are two subsequent interwoven storylines. One unfolds in the 23rd century, where a writer called Olive Llewellyn, who was born and raised on a lunar colony, is visiting Earth on a book tour. The other plot strand takes place 200 years later, when an investigator named after a character in one of Olive Llewellyn’s novels begins to piece together the connections between all these different lives. Just as Station Eleven seemed ultimately to be about mortality itself and how art allows us to step outside the immediate confines of our existence, Sea of Tranquility reminds us that humanity’s resting state is crisis. Someone’s world is always ending: that is the keynote of this book. And the echoes and callbacks that give it its shape reflect the ways we make our own lives meaningful. Marcel Theroux £9.29 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop We Move Gurnaik Johal Virtuosic stories of British-Punjabi life The award-winning story Arrival, which opens Gurnaik Johal’s virtuosic debut collection, exemplifies his deceptively simple style. A young couple live near the airport, and a car has been left on their driveway by the sister of a friend. The car’s presence – its practicality and luxury – changes the couple’s relationship. Both humans and objects often appear or disappear in Johal’s stories, altering the destinies and dynamics of the protagonists’ lives. These loosely linked stories are mostly set in Southall, west London, among a close-knit British-Punjabi community, with multiple perspectives introduced that shed light on recurring scenes. Characters reappear across stories to create new beginnings and to change endings and readers’ expectations. Johal writes about relationships with the assuredness of Akhil Sharma, as untranslated Hindi, Punjabi and Marathi words and idioms sit confidently on the page. Leave to Remain is less about crossing political borders and more about traversing personal thresholds. The Red River is less about assimilation and more about finding a room of one’s own. Strange Attractor and Haven Green explore such elusive concepts as serendipity and destiny. In the fourth story, Chatpata: Kaam, Jagmeet remembers reading an interview with his chef daughter, Aman, about her restaurant in Brooklyn, which is called Ambrosia. In the interview, she talks about what it means to make comforting “chatpata” food – that balanced mixture of spiciness, sourness and sweetness central to many Indian cuisines. Aman is still coming to terms with people saying that her food – indeed, all her “Indian identity” – is “too much”. She desperately wants to overcome westerners’ “mango-fetish” (“You only had to wait so long when reading a western story about India to come across a mango, a railway or a spiritual awakening”). As a collection, We Move similarly challenges cultural stereotypes and expectations through its understated and surprising stories. Johal’s stories – one only two pages long – are not dissimilar to the deconstructed pakoras Aman serves at Ambrosia, complete with Coke-flavoured, charcoal-coloured foam: bite-size offerings, but rich with complexity, history, and the memory of a childhood meal full of flavour and fizz. In the same interview, Aman says that her aim is to “hold both the future and the past on the plate”. With We Move, Johal has arguably overcome fetishes of the past – that sense of “too muchness” – but he also brings fresh ingredients to the future of Indian writing from the diaspora. With a gentle stir, situations change before our eyes, or perhaps it’s our perspective that changes. Everything tastes spicy and sour and sweet all at once. Sana Goyal £7.64 (RRP £8.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Preventable Devi Sridhar A resolutely global view of Covid Professor Nabila Sadiq was only 38 when she died of Covid-19. Unable to find a hospital bed in her native India, which had been overwhelmed by the virulent new Delta variant, her heart-rending Twitter messages pleading for help were picked up around the world. The story clearly hit home with the Scottish public health expert Professor Devi Sridhar, who is around the age Sadiq was and whose family are of Indian heritage. As she writes poignantly in her new book: “She would have lived had she been in Scotland, like me”. Accidents of geography are arguably a key theme of Sridhar’s book, an ambitiously wide-ranging study of a global pandemic with the emphasis firmly on the global. As she points out, individuals’ fates were too often determined by where they happened to have been born: living through the pandemic in Vietnam or Kerala was not like living through it in Britain. The refreshing twist in her tale, however, is that often it was countries from whom we are not used to taking public health lessons that got it right while a complacent west messed up. The book’s strength is its resolutely unparochial and distinctively millennial’s eye view of the pandemic, keenly alert to all the inequalities and asymmetries of power exposed. In the end, wealth sadly became “the best shielding strategy not only from Covid-19 but from the response to it as well”, she writes, with rich countries gobbling up vaccine stocks at the expense of poor ones, and rich individuals weathering lockdown more comfortably than poor ones. Lessons must be learned, she argues, for future pandemics. But there is another lesson to be drawn from the first wave, when the west could arguably have saved itself much heartache by recognising that it wasn’t always money that talked. For Asian countries drawing on experience of previous coronaviruses, or African countries with fragile healthcare systems who recognised they couldn’t afford to be complacent, in the early days “competence not wealth” mattered. The moral of the sto