The literary world is no stranger to the infinite possibilities of speculative fiction. However, Shlomo Avineri’s latest addition to the mountain of books devoted to life and work of Karl Marx belongs to a new and ignominious genre — speculative biography.
Eliza Gearty’s debut novel is vivid and utterly engaging, grabbing you from the very first page and pulling you up and down Glasgow’s sandstone tenement flats, into living rooms filled with clouds of tobacco and along the city’s iconic streets.
The book is loosely based on Gearty’s own experiences as a door-to-door fundraiser, and is told through the character, Emma. Emma works for a homelessness charity and, like many fundraisers, and until only recently, a sharply rising number of the population, is employed on a zero-hour contract.
This book of photographs is linked to a documentary of the same name. It tells some of the stories of the Troubles in Northern Ireland using the photographs and memories of seven photographers: Stanley Matchett, Trevor Dickson, Alan Lewis, Martin Nangle, Crispin Rodwell and Paul Faith.
They each have their own chapter where they explain something of their own professional lives before providing a commentary on their photographs, which span from the 1960s until the early noughties.
My sex education, like many of my peers, was limited. Conversations were hushed, lessons were focused on contraception and how to prevent pregnancy, and there was little discussion about sexuality, gender and the importance of giving consent.
Natalie Fiennes provides a daring and radical, if at times somewhat jumbled, overview of how sex education is “outdated and ripe for transformation”, confirming what many have said for too long.
There’s much to be recommended in this account about the legendary, postwar, anti-fascist 43 Group, containing as it does terrific exploits and anecdotes from Group veterans that encapsulate masterful resistance to fascism.
Leaning on participant Morris Beckman’s classic book, The 43 Group, Sonabend illuminates the petty bourgeois nature of fascist organisation and the twin practice of its electoral and street operations. He also chronicles various fascist formations that grew in 1946, capturing internal tensions within the extreme right and the nature of wannabe Führers.
A few weeks ago, we started the Biology unit in science. My teacher gave us a brief on the topic we would focusing on: Maintaining Biodiversity. She warned us that this was the topic that people scored lowest on in exams, which drew my attention to parallels outside of school, in the real world (shock!).
This book is a searing account of the effects of Tory immigration policy, introduced with the support of their LibDem partners, and designed to make it impossible for irregular migrants to survive in the UK.
With laws introduced in 2014 and 2016, Home Office officials systematically set about destroying the lives of thousands of West Indians who had arrived in the UK in the 1960s and 70s.
For 20 years Naomi Klein has been one of the foremost activists, journalists and writers within the anti-capitalist and environmental movements. From No-Logo, a book that epitomised the anti-capitalist politics of the Seattle generation, to This Changes Everything, a polemic that put the blame for the climate crisis squarely on capitalism, her books are powerful critiques of a world that puts profit before people and planet.
This is a powerful book, an indictment of a system where borders are used to divide people. After 9/11 “the war on terror” was used to justify a massive growth in the security industry and the strengthening of borders. Yet Todd argues borders are above all to stop the world’s poor from moving into countries where global wealth resides.
John F Weeks sets out to demonstrate how there is an alternative to austerity, effectively exposing the Machiavellian machinations of Conservative policies along the way.
Austerity myths were constructed carefully over time and the author is at pains to systematically demolish the lot. His sleuthing is done with relish and enthusiasm as he urges us to “change the rules and drive ourselves”.