This month’s best paperbacks: Mick Herron, Armistead Maupin and more

The Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange’s astonishing 2018 debut novel, There There, offered a kaleido­scopic portrait of urban Native American identity. Composed of an all-Native cast, it ruminated on power, storytelling, dispossession, erasure and historical memory. The novel’s off-the-wall structure placed its central event – a mass shooting at an Oakland powwow – at the book’s end, leaving its aftermath largely unattended.

Now comes an emotionally incandescent and structurally riveting second novel, Wandering Stars. A companion to There There, it brings news about Orvil Red Feather, who was hit by a bullet while dancing at the event. It tells, too, the story of Orvil’s younger brothers Loother and Lony; their great-aunt Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, in whose care they have been since losing their drug-addicted mother to suicide; and Jacquie Red Feather, Opal’s half-sister and the boys’ estranged “real grandma”, a recovering alcoholic.

Wandering Stars asks: what becomes of a person and a family when the things they inherit from their forebears are overwhelmingly the bad stuff – wounds and torments, ill luck, curses and injurious predilections? What kind of life is possible after genocide and colonisation? Toni Morrison once said: “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.” Hyperbole be damned: Orange’s work feels, to me, as vital as air.

If you’re one of the many who love Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb novels, but missed his previous series, starring the Oxford-based private investigator Zoë Boehm, never fear: the first in the sequence and Herron’s debut, Down Cemetery Road, is about to be adapted by Apple TV (starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson). Handily, it’s being reissued by its publisher and is a not-to-be-missed treat.

This novel is less about Zoë than her partner, Joe, who is called on by an Oxford housewife, Sarah, to investigate when a house on her street explodes, killing two adults. Sarah becomes obsessed with what has happened to their young daughter, as no one else seems interested, and asks Joe to help. “I won’t lie. Philip Marlowe, I’m not. But who is? Most of what I’m hired to do, I manage,” he tells her. As they dig deeper, they discover all sorts of nefarious government goings-on (this is Mick Herron, after all), and we see a side of Sarah she’d previously kept hidden. “Inside, Sarah was storms and hurricanes. Twisters. Summer madness.” Herron’s incisive portraits, of everyone from Sarah’s awful husband, Mark, to her hippy friend, Wigwam, are as pitch perfect as ever, and even if you’ve read this series before, it’s worth reminding yourself of its excellence.

There is a sense of poetic justice in seeing Diane Abbott back in parliament after the 2024 election. She is now Mother of the House – the title given to the longest serving female MP – and all those who plotted to block her from standing must watch as she receives the respect she deserves. After enduring so much racism, and at a time of few political wins for the left, we have to ask: how did Abbott end up having the last laugh?

Her autobiography offers some clues. Born to working-class Jamaican parents in 1953, she was clearly always both strong-willed and intellectually gifted. Which is not to say she didn’t have to work hard: early signs of her determination include insisting to her teachers that she apply to Cambridge, swotting up on Latin for the entrance exam, and beating considerable odds by winning a place from her state school. After graduation she entered the Home Office as part of the civil service fast stream, and made history in 1987 as the first Black woman MP.

But this book is far more than just a list of her achievements. Inside its pages are 70 years of Black British history, and four decades of political ups and downs, encompassing Thatcher, Kinnock, Blair, Brown, Corbyn, and Starmer. Among other things she recounts how the left took charge of the Greater London Council under Ken Livingstone, the New Cross house fire in 1981 and the organising across the Black community that followed, as well as resistance to the Iraq war. History, they say, is written by the victors. But as this book and Abbott’s career show – history, as written by the underdogs, can be powerfully inspiring.

Maidwell Hall school, Northamptonshire, 1972. The chief abuser is the headmaster, Jack Porch, who keeps two canes in his study, the Flick and the Switch, and patrols the school dorms at night in hope of catching pupils talking – in which case, he’ll pull any culprits over his knee and whack them with a slipper. Next comes Mr Maude, who forces boys to swim even if they can’t, with one victim – hauled from the bottom of the pool - needing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and who beats Charles Spencer with a cricket boot, its metal spikes puncturing his skin. And then there’s the hulking teacher whose signet ring draws blood when he thumps Spencer round the head, the trickles drying invisibly in the boy’s thick red hair.

Such was life in the private boarding school to which Spencer was admitted at the age of eight and which was so traumatising that it has taken him till now, after years of therapy, to record the damage. The tone is fervid. He has talked to many other Maidwell ex-pupils who still bear the scars of their years in an upper-class prison camp staffed by bullying paedophiles.

Charles Spencer was one of the Queen’s godchildren and there may be readers who assume that the world he describes (servants, country houses, deep pockets) must have cushioned the impact of his traumas. If so, they’re wrong. Abuse is abuse wherever it happens. And if you didn’t already think it obscene for children as young as eight to be banished from home for two-thirds of the year, you will after finishing this account.

This is the third memoir by Xiaolu Guo, who grew up beside the East China Sea where her grandfather was a fisherman. When she inherited some money from the sale of her parents’ house in China after they both died of cancer, Guo begins looking for a place to live and work on the South Coast of England. Having lived in London, she missed “the salty wind, the contour of shorelines, and the ceaseless changing waves in the viewfinder of my eyes”.

Guo eventually settled on “rain-stained dilapidated” Hastings, which she describes as “a cursed place but, at the same time, sexy, mysterious and somehow quintessentially English”. Her modest requirements are a “sea view and a tub” in which “to soak my body in the endless cold English evenings”. She moves into the tiny top-floor flat in December 2021.

Divided into the four seasons, the book is an account Guo’s first year in a run-down part of the seaside town. Discovering a copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in a second-hand bookshop, she also buries herself in the ancient history of the area. Aware that the locals seem uninterested in their city’s remote past, she wonders why she, “a Chinese immigrant to Europe, a woman with neither power not any Western ancestry”, should care about the fate of King Harold or the invasion of the Normans in 1066. After visiting a re-enactment of the Battle of Hastings (“a strange and wonderful idea”), she concludes that a country that is able to view a great defeat from its past as an entertainment for families, reveals a detachment from its history that would be unimaginable in China: “I must admit that this is one of the good qualities the British have.”

As well as exploring Anglo-Saxon history, Guo describes the challenges of her new life, such as renovating the cold and damp flat, as well as the pleasures, including walks in the countryside to gather wild garlic for cooking and visits from her partner and 9-year-old child, Moon, who collects shells on the beach. Her chronicle of life in Hastings with its “loudly crying seagulls” becomes a wonderfully evocative meditation on migration, history, war (two months after she moves in, Putin invades Ukraine, which she compares to the Norman Conquest), and politics (after the third prime minister in a year, she concludes “the country which I have adopted as my home cannot be saved”). Guo’s delightfully frank and often moving memoir is also a poignant exploration of identity and belonging. At one point she memorably compares herself to a jasmine seed blown in the wind: “we drift and then we land somewhere, we try to grow in its soil…We either germinate or turn into dust.”

What’s in the box? That’s the question almost everyone that Madhumita Murgia speaks to seems to be asking. If the “black box” of the algorithm is going to make critical decisions about our health, education or human rights, it would be nice to know exactly what it contains. So long as it remains a mystery, what can you do if you find your child added to a list of potential future criminals based on flawed, even racist, data, as happened to hundreds of families in the Netherlands in the late 2010s?

It’s these Kafkaesque absurdities, and how they play out on a human level, that interest Murgia, the Financial Times’s first artificial intelligence editor. Code, she reminds us several times in this troubling book, is not neutral.

This book, shortlisted for the Women's Prize for nonfiction 2024, isn’t a story about ChatGPT and the other large language models and their looming impact on everything from Hollywood to homework, though there is a bit of that. Instead, it’s an account of how the everyday algorithms we have already learned to live beside are changing us.

There is a little optimism. Murgia – a former Wired writer – is alive to the potential of AI to improve health outcomes. And we meet people such as Hiba, whose family, refugees from Falluja, in Iraq, used their work as data labourers to fund a new life in Bulgaria. There are also cheering stories of how frustration at being exploited has led to gig economy workers quietly organising – even in China – to regain some of the autonomy they have sacrificed at “the altar of the algorithm”.

But the bass note here is pessimistic. We are way past the techno-boosterism of the early 00s, and, for every government official wondering how AI can help them streamline health and welfare services, there are thousands of people asking whether it will allow them to continue making a living. Worse than that, as in the Chinese government’s facial recognition systems and pre-emptive detention lists in Xinjiang, it’s the story of a dystopia we are already living in.

A decade ago, Armistead Maupin boldly declared that it was over. The Days of Anna Madrigal, the ninth in his illustrious queer novel cycle Tales of the City, was, he claimed, the last outing for the residents of 28 Barbary Lane. But ever since the first of the Tales was published in 1978, the lure of the “logical family” has proved irresistible. Maupin is back with a tenth instalment. How tuneful is this unexpected encore?

This iteration of the Tales is set in the early 1990s, and helmed by Anna Madrigal’s daughter Mona Roughton (previously Mona Ramsey). She has inherited Easley House in the Cotswolds – based on the real Stanway House in Gloucestershire – after the death of her gay husband Lord Teddy Roughton. Domineering Mona is a riff on the eccentric lord of the manor figure: a weed-smoking, fiery-haired diva who, by her own admission, “tends to bring a water cannon to a gunfight”. While Mona and her mother share the same kindness, self-possession and generosity of spirit, Mona is a much larger than life incarnation of these traits.

For all its colourful ribaldry and appealing warmth, some aspects of the narrative are less successful. I found the fleeting treatment of significant plot moments odd, and the tendency for set pieces to be heavily prefaced is puzzling. The ending, too, falls curiously flat, with the long-trailed high drama of the midsummer party fizzling out within a few pages.

But perhaps that’s taking this knowingly unserious novel too seriously? Good-natured and entertaining enough, intent as it is on highlighting the importance of pleasure, Mona of the Manor is really an extra little gift for Maupin’s fans – and it will delight them.

Why the plural? There’s only one Munich in David Peace’s new novel, and we see very little of it: the slushy runway where British European Airways flight 609 crashes on February 6, 1958; the hotel room where two survivors spend their first bewildered night; the hospital where their fellow passengers recover – or don’t. This is surely the story of one accident, one time, one team: the air crash that killed 23 out of 44 passengers, including eight of Manchester United’s players, three of its staff, and eight journalists.

But Peace’s reasoning becomes clear over the several hundred pages of this relentless, electrifying, harrowing novel. The Munich Air Disaster, so integral a part of how the football club developed, and which had such a profound impact on the city, the north of England, the sporting community and the country as a whole, might easily not have happened had takeoff been aborted. And what would the world look like then?

Like much of Peace’s work, Munichs is an obsessional study in hauntology; not merely the idea that the past lives with us, but that multiple futures do, too. In extremis, time may seem to stop, but in reality, it judders on regardless, bringing with it, in this case, a grotesque juxtaposition of funerals and fixtures.

Peace has explained that Munichs was written after the death of his father, who had suggested he pay attention to the events of February 1958. Born in 1967, Peace experienced these events and their wider context only as memory and retelling, to which he has now, valuably and valiantly, added his own.

Akwaeke Emezi’s singularly menacing new novel opens with an ending – that of Aima and Kalu’s relationship. Now, it is “all small talk, nothing she could hold with both hands, meaningless chatter that avoided the truth of what they had both become”. Little Rot, like all Emezi’s books – from their debut novel Freshwater to their memoir Dear Senthuran – measures the difficult push and pull between the self and the world.

Kalu drops Aima at the airport on a Friday evening. Their four-year relationship is over and they choose to go their separate ways: Aima to a high-society nightclub with her best friend, and Kalu to his childhood friend Ahmed’s exclusive sex party. Two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur and a celebrity pastor known as Daddy O enter the storyline, upending everything. What unspools is a dizzying, harrowing and entertaining journey as the characters’ fates collide. Mistakes are made, morals are questioned. Did their relationship ever have a solid foundation or was it resting on shaky ground? The stakes are high and the consequences are serious. In this world, everything comes at a price, and there’s a price to pay for every choice.

Little Rot is about hypocrisy, toxic masculinity and sexual cruelty. It is a novel oozing with dirty secrets and ugly reveals. The deliberately outrageous tone is not for the faint-hearted: enter at your own peril. Emezi is here to shred the facade of society, to unsettle and subvert rules and beliefs.

On Island City, which may be, or may once have been, Manhattan, in a once-luxurious apartment block called The Morningside, an 11-year-old girl watches and learns about the community she lives in while yearning to discover more about the community she comes from.

Silvia and her family – her mother and her aunt, Ena, the superintendent of the block – are refugees from an unnamed country whose traditions and myths they carry with them in revealingly different ways. Ena treasures the past and revisits it, preserving artefacts and telling folk tales from the old country, while Silvia’s mother, who has her own reasons to want to leave everything behind, is against reminiscing and discourages her daughter’s questions about her father, her family and life in the old country.

As Obreht draws them, aunt and mother represent the two ways of navigating exile, holding on and letting go: “If the past had previously felt like a forbidden room briefly glimpsed as my mother was shutting its door, here was Ena, holding the door wide.” But because Obreht’s characters are so vibrant and individualised, they are never ciphers for particular ways of being. In this novel, letting go and holding on have more in common than we – and the characters – think.

Obreht is a novelist of great skill and warmth, for whom the ancient forms of storytelling – folk tales, myths and legends – retain all their capacity to explain and mystify, soothe and terrify.

In this remarkable study, Nicolas Mathevon – a professor of neurosciences and animal behavior at the University of Saint-Etienne – explores the voices of the natural world, from crocodile calls and bird song, to the “tchik-tchik-tchik” of cicadas. His specialism is bioacoustics, which attempts to understand how animals make and hear sounds, as well as what information these sounds contain and what this is used for. It’s challenging for the general reader to understand the subject, as our vocabulary for describing the biophonic world is less rich than it is for the visual world. But Mathevon succeeds brilliantly in bringing his subject vividly alive, using a mix of evocative writing and lucid scientific explanation. His website also provides helpful recordings of the animal sounds and the book itself is charmingly illustrated by his father.

Each chapter explores a different soundscape and the animals that contribute to it, revealing how their voices have evolved to help them survive in that environment as part of “the great concert of life”. From Mediterranean scrubland and rainforests, to the extremes of the Arctic (“the most hostile environment I’ve ever been in”), animals use the sound-transmitting properties of air or water to communicate, in order “to find a partner, to defend a territory, to signal the presence of a predator or food source, to collaborate in hunting, and to recognize and interact with members of the group”.

He shows that their communications are comparable to our own, though our articulated language reveals an extraordinary complexity, reflecting the unprecedented range of our social interactions. Nevertheless, he argues that animal communications can indeed be described as a language, albeit not a single one: there are, he says, as many languages as there are animals using sounds to exchange information.

Mathevon’s book reveals the often-ground-breaking experiments he and his fellow bioacousticians have conducted to decipher the meanings of the signals in animal sounds and how this relates to their behaviour. One of these experiments involved working in a Brazilian swamp to study the communications between jacaré caiman mothers and their young, research which involved catching a newborn caiman. However, Mathevon is seemingly unfazed by the risks he took for this experiment, noting drily: “we made it out in one piece and got good recordings”. His survey of this intriguing field offers a fascinating insight into the dedication and ceaseless curiosity of the scientific mind, and Mathevon’s enthusiasm for the “worlds of sound” that surround us is certainly contagious.