This month’s best paperbacks: David Szalay, Han Kang and more

Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It’s irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He’s exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a “dying” river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: “Is this thing I’m in really alive? By whose standards?”

He’s in the right place to be asking. In September 2008, Ecuador, “this small country with a vast moral imagination”, became the first nation in the world to legislate on behalf of water, “since its condition as an essential element for life makes it a necessary aspect for existence of all living beings”.

Macfarlane’s book is timely. Rivers are in crisis worldwide. They have been dammed, poisoned, reduced to servitude, erased from the map. In the UK, “a gradual, desperate calamity” has befallen them, with annual sewage dumps at despicable levels. “Generational amnesia” means that young people don’t know what clean rivers are. Macfarlane wants them to revive – and to remind us of the interconnectedness of the human and natural world, as captured in a Māori proverb: “I am the river; the river is me.”

Macfarlane is less a philosopher wrestling with notions of sentience and pan-psychism than he is a nature writer, the author of memorable books about mountains, landscape and underworlds, as well as a celebrant of words (acorn, bluebell, kingfisher, otter, etc) he fears children no longer know. He’s also a dauntless traveller and in his new book records trips to India and Canada as well as Ecuador. The battle is to save rivers as living beings. Macfarlane’s impassioned book shows the way.

In the Booker-winning Flesh, David Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat.

The novel recounts the life of István, whom we meet as a psychologically isolated and taciturn teenager and follow until he is a psychologically isolated and taciturn middle-aged man. The intervening years see István pulled along by the undertows of life; an affair with an older neighbour that ends in tragedy and violence, a stretch serving in the military, the uprooting of his life from Hungary to London, a vertiginous climb up the British class strata and, ultimately, a stoic and melancholy return to the town where he grew up.

Crucially, there is precisely nothing of the agentive, questing hero in István’s journey. Szalay has rendered a man buffeted by forces beyond his control, be they the erotic or material desires of those who surround him, the undulations of the global economy or the interventionist and racialised foreign policy of the European Union.

Before long, István seems entirely alienated from his own desires, a ghost haunting the edges of a life that he is not even sure is his. In the hands of a less skilful writer, this might seem a predictable trajectory, the incremental retrenchment of a mind and a heart in the face of pain. But instead, Szalay gives us something far more disquieting: the creeping implication that perhaps István is not engaged in an act of psychospiritual retreat, but is instead reckoning, in a clear-eyed and reasonable way, with the reality of fate’s cold indifference.

There is a temptation to pigeonhole Flesh as a novel about masculinity; its silences and its contortions, its frustrations and its codes. But while that is clearly a central concern, Szalay is also grappling with broader, knottier, more metaphysical issues. Because, at its heart, Flesh is about more than just the things that go unsaid: it is also about what is fundamentally unsayable, the ineffable things that sit at the centre of every life, hovering beyond the reach of language.

Vanishing World, Murata’s latest novel to be translated into English, is set in a speculative Tokyo where artificial insemination is ubiquitous and sex is considered “unhygienic”. The narrator, Amane, grows up with a mother who is still attached to the vanishing world of sex within marriage. Although Amane considers it a shameful secret that she was conceived via intercourse, as an adolescent she experiments beyond the passionately imagined relationships with anime characters that are more typical among her friends. Her first experience is disappointing: her friend Mizuuchi has trouble finding “the mysterious cavity” where he can insert his penis. By the time she gets married, Amane has come round to the view that marital sex is “incest”. When her husband initiates a kiss, she vomits into his mouth and reports him to the police.

Amane marries a second time to a more suitable man. She compares him to “a beloved pet”, and they both like stews. They would have a comfortable domestic life together, if it weren’t the norm to have chaste romantic relationships outside marriage. Amane, still holding on to her mother’s way of doing things, tries once again to teach one of her lovers how to have physical sex. “By trial and error,” she says, “we stimulated our sexual organs, and eventually some liquid came out of Mizuto.” Mizuto tries his best, but never finds pleasure in the “ritual”.

In Murata’s fiction, ordinary activities – drinking tea, wearing clothes, making love – seem very strange. Reading Vanishing World, I felt the profound oddness of the heterosexual family unit, with its legal, sexual and child-rearing rituals.

Murata dispenses with conventional world-building and incidental detail, focusing on the points where character and society come into conflict. Her writing is compulsive, and she has an uncanny gift for intimate observations that get under the skin.

The final stages of the plot rehearse a scenario familiar from Murata’s previous books, in which one character takes the urge to control the behaviour of others to its logical extreme. This recycling is evidence, I think, of the strength and singularity of the author’s vision. It’s also a reminder of how quickly even the strangest ideas can become convention.

According to Charlie English’s vibrant, beautifully researched and exciting The CIA Book Club, the Polish intellectual and political activist Adam Michnik read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in prison; someone had managed to get a copy to him even there, courtesy of a CIA operation codenamed QRHELPFUL – a scheme to smuggle subversive books through the iron curtain. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were probably the most popular among the dissidents the books were intended for, but a wide range of other authors including Adam Mickiewicz, Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam and even Agatha Christie also featured on the QRHELPFUL book list.

The inspiration behind the scheme was a charming-sounding CIA boss called George Minden, who believed, quite rightly, that the freedom to read good literature was as important to the imprisoned minds of the Soviet empire as any other form of freedom. During most of the 1980s the CIA was run by a rather tiresome, boisterous adventurer called Bill Casey, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1981. This was one of Casey’s more sensible efforts, and it was under him that Minden was able to pump books, photocopiers and even printing presses into the Soviet empire. They helped to keep people there in touch with precisely the kind of western culture the high priests of Marxism-Leninism wanted to block out.

This was especially true in Poland, which is English’s main focus. Poles never forgot that their country was essentially part of western Europe, and the flow of French, British and American literature in particular was an important part of keeping that awareness going. Michnik, the dissident who read Solzhenitsyn in prison, speaks for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people behind the iron curtain when he tells English: “A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad.”

As you might expect from English’s previous The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, The CIA Book Club is a real pleasure to read – a finely written page-turner full of well-researched stories of smuggling, intrigue and survival. It would make an exceptionally good series for television, and it provides a powerful reminder of the extraordinary events of Poland’s struggle for freedom.

It is October 1987 and Cora, trapped in a wretched and abusive marriage, has just had a second baby, a son. As she and her nine-year-old daughter Maia push the pram together, they talk about names. Cora’s husband Gordon has always insisted that the baby will take his name, but Cora shrinks from the prospect. It is not just that she dislikes the name Gordon. She fears that the name will force an unwelcome shape on her baby son, corrupting his innocence, locking him into a chain of violent, domineering men. Cora prefers Julian which, in her book of baby names, means sky father; she nurses the naive hope that, since the name honours Gordon’s paternity, he will find it an acceptable compromise. Meanwhile, Maia suggests Bear because it sounds “all soft and cuddly and kind … but also, brave and strong”.

At the registrar’s desk Cora must pick one – and with that the narrative neatly divides into three. First Cora thrills and terrifies herself by impetuously deciding on Bear. The second time she finds just enough courage to opt for Julian. Finally she folds and helplessly agrees to Gordon. Three names, three choices with very different consequences, and, from this point on, three distinct stories that fork away from one another down their own particular paths.

The novel spans the next 35 years. Deftly and with great tenderness Knapp explores the complex and often horrifying effects of domestic abuse. She offers no easy answers. A boy who grows up never knowing his father carries a different kind of burden from a son whose family is torn apart by violence and a different burden again from the boy who is relentlessly bullied at home, but all three are fundamentally shaped by their experience.

Knapp’s plotting is skilful, her tapestry of stories cleverly woven. The Names stands out as a compelling and original debut, a book that asks at least as many questions as it answers. In the end, this is not so much a book about the impact of our names but about the implications of our decisions, how a moment of courage or recklessness or blind terror can act like a finger on a scale, shifting the balance of a life for ever.

In her new book, British tree science consultant Harriet Rix presents trees as an awesome force of nature, a force that has, over time, “woven the world into a place of great beauty and extraordinary variety”. How have trees done this? And can they really be said to possess “genius”?

If you think of life first emerging from the sea, hundreds of millions of years ago, you might picture something like the Tiktaalik, a human-sized floppy-footed fish that hauled itself out of the shallows some time in the Late Devonian. But the evolutionary eureka moment arguably came long before that, when one lucky green alga washed up on the Cambrian shore and managed to survive the deadly UV light on land.

“Plants learning to survive and use UV light was a thunderbolt,” writes Rix. It “allowed a whole new chemistry to emerge, root and branch, in a whole new place: dry land … Safe from predators, who for the moment were left in the sea behind them, these photosynthesising cells started on a path that led to the amazing complexity of trees.”

Viewed on cosmic fast forward, as part of “a strange, apparently accelerated world, in which continents drift around like rubber ducks, bumping into one another”, trees seem almost godlike, using their biochemical wizardry to transform the Earth from a stony, storm-ravaged wasteland into a place where life could thrive. They broke barren rock into soil, canalised flood waters into rivers, pumped oxygen into the atmosphere, and turned the desert green.

Element by element, trees have learned to control water, air, fire and the ground beneath us, as well as fungi, plants, animals, and even people, shaping them according to their own “tree-ish” agenda. Some fairly knotty chunks of biochemistry and evolutionary history are smoothed by lush descriptions of contemporary habitats as Rix travels the world, from the cloud forests of La Gomera to the junipers of Balochistan. She is an intrepid and erudite guide.

Saraswati’s characters are the descendants of a proscribed intercaste marriage in 19th-century Punjab. Sejal and Jugaad have seven children, each of whom they name for a river. A century and a half later, their descendants include a Canadian rock musician, a Kenyan archaeology professor and a Mauritian entomologist who specialises in yellow crazy ant removal. Beginning and ending in a near-future version of India, the narrative takes us to Svalbard, Tibet, rural British Columbia and the Chagos Islands. Brief interludes after each section tell the family origin story through a series of “qisse” – Punjabi folktales, passed on orally.

“Saraswati” was the name of Sejal and Jugaad’s seventh child. It is also the name of a mythical river that, as any Indian will tell you, meets – in a sacred rather than geographical sense – the Ganga and Yamuna at the Triveni Sangam in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad). Saraswati derives its title, and its plot, from a theory that claims that the Saraswati was a real river that originated at Mount Kailash in Tibet and flowed to the Arabian Sea.

The novel opens with water returning to a dry well on the Hakra farm: once Sejal and Jugaad’s home, now inherited by a young Londoner called Satnam. The water is a sign not of the workings of heaven but of the melting of Himalayan glaciers. But it is soon seized upon as the former – by frauds as well as true believers, and then by India’s newly elected Hindu nationalist government, which embarks upon a nationwide scheme to revive the ancient Saraswati, in part by abrogating the Indus Waters Treaty (a magnificent bit of novelistic prescience; after the book went to press, India did in fact revoke the treaty in response to a terror attack in Kashmir).

Johal’s imaginative sympathy is undercut by the homogenising evenness of his prose – every character speaks and thinks in the same register, that of London journalism – and by the heavy-handedness of his attempts at symbolism and satire.

The very best writers have had difficulty following up a debut collection with a novel (Johal’s first book We Move was published in 2022). One reviewer of Philip Roth’s first novel, Letting Go, suggested that writers “should solve the second book problem the way architects solve the 13th floor problem”, namely by going straight from the first book to the third. The disappointments of Saraswati, if anything, reassure for their indication of a willingness to try but fail. Gurnaik Johal is just getting started.

There are books in a writer’s life that gather all their previous themes and explorations in a great act of creative culmination, which both surpasses what had gone before and makes it more clear. We Do Not Part is one of those books. Published in 2024 in Swedish translation, it helped to secure Korean writer Han Kang the Nobel prize in literature that year.

After a small, searing accident, Kyungha’s friend Inseon asks her to travel to her home on Jeju Island to save her pet bird Ama from starvation. Kyungha, who lives a lonely life, immediately undertakes this tiny, sacred mission. She travels through a snowstorm, as the power grid fails and the transport system shuts down. So extreme is the journey that, as she arrives at Inseon’s house, she seems to cross into a different reality, a world of shadows and of ghosts.

The facts that are so unsparingly uncovered in this shamanistic space concern the aftermath of the 1948 uprising on Jeju Island when 30,000 civilians were killed by anti-communist troops during the search for what Han describes as “one hundred guerrillas in the hills”. This was followed, she writes, by the murder of “two hundred thousand people” on the mainland the next summer, in a series of “exterminations” in the lead-up to the Korean war.

We Do Not Part is both an act of witness and a beautiful poetic object. There are repeated images of birds, candle flame, trees. Even as family relationships become tangled or undone, the novel is bound together by a secret web of lines, of nerves “like silk” and cotton threads, and this lacework expresses the theme of connection in the title.

In the newspaper clippings and research files she finds in the Jeju house, Kyungha senses “something oozing from the page”. Blood runs “beneath the numbers” of the dead. A presence “like the faintest of voices” emanates from the text. This last made the hair stand up on the back of my neck: I thought for a moment that the book in my hand was haunted. It is a rare privilege to read a masterpiece so recently crafted, to know that the new prose you are reading (too fast!) will endure. We Do Not Part is an astonishing book.

As medicine has become more sophisticated and we have developed more sensitive tests and treatments, so more and more people have acquired diagnostic labels. As Suzanne O’Sullivan, who has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, argues in The Age of Diagnosis, this can be a good thing if the diagnosis leads to greater understanding and improved treatments, but not if the diagnosis is not as definitive as we think and risks medicalising people without long-term benefits to their health.

For example, as many as half a million people in Australia are reported to have Lyme disease, even though the Lyme-carrying ticks are not present in Australia. Worldwide, the condition has an estimated 85% overdiagnosis rate. Or consider autism. Fifty years ago, autism was said to affect four in 10,000 people. Today, the worldwide prevalence is one in 100 and in the UK diagnoses of autism increased 787% between 1998 and 2018. Similarly, the proportion of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses, a term first coined in 1987 to describe fidgety children who had trouble concentrating, doubled in boys and tripled in girls between 2000 and 2018 and today the diagnosis is also increasingly being applied to adults.

But what if these reported increases do not reflect an actual increase in the prevalence of these conditions but are examples of “diagnosis creep”? As O’Sullivan writes: “It could be that borderline medical problems are becoming ironclad diagnoses and that normal differences are being pathologised… In other words: we are not getting sicker – we are attributing more to sickness.”

O’Sullivan concludes The Age of Diagnosis by reminding us that a physician’s first duty is to “do no harm”. Her principal concern is that we have become so enamoured of the latest technologies and cutting-edge diagnoses that we haven’t taken time to properly weigh their potential harms. That is why before reaching for the latest technological solution, she argues, doctors need to listen closely to their patients. By the same token, patients should recognise that good health is not a constant, that it is unrealistic to expect doctors to provide a solution for all that ails them, and that medicine is not a sticking plaster for every behavioural and social problem.

Abigail Dean’s The Death of Us opens not with a crime, but with news of an arrest. A serial killer who terrorised south London for decades has been caught, and Isabel, one of his victims many years ago, has been told of the arrest. “He’s called Nigel,” she says, sardonically, to her former partner, Edward, who was in bed beside her when their home was invaded by the killer. “What were you expecting? Adolf?” he answers.

Dean previously told the story of a daughter’s escape from the family home where her father had chained her up in Girl A, and of a school shooting in Day One, both excellent and disturbing novels. She is out this time to explore a series of sadistic crimes, but also the impact they have had on the survivors. A love story too, that of Isabel and Edward, who meet as students. But how does any romance survive after the violence and cruelty of what they go through? Dean cleverly weaves together past and present for maximum impact, moving from the courtroom where a series of victims are explaining how Nigel Wood ripped their lives apart, to the burgeoning lives of Isabel and Edward inching inexorably towards their meeting with a killer. This is a classy, elegant thriller – just like its protagonist, the enjoyably prickly Isabel.

McBride’s new novel, The City Changes Its Face, is a stand-alone sequel to her second book, 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians, which was told by teenage drama student Eily, who comes to London from Ireland in the mid-90s and falls for Stephen, an actor 20 years her senior, with an estranged daughter Eily’s age, living overseas after her mother couldn’t hack Stephen sleeping around – a snag for Eily, too.

The action resumes here in 1995, yo-yoing between the recent past – in particular, a momentous visit by said daughter, Grace – and a narrative here and now in which Eily hasn’t been leaving the house after a breakdown and Stephen is in a West End show, kissing his female co-lead on stage, something Eily’s sort-of not-quite OK with. McBride’s cutting between time frames repeatedly leaves us poised on one ticklish moment only to switch to another – whether Stephen has returned from work to find Eily and Grace drunkenly quizzing each other, or he’s just been left bloodied by a shattered jar of piccalilli during a row with Eily at home, where innocuous-sounding exchanges about sandwiches and tea can’t mask the volcanic undertow bubbling up from the individual miseries of their past (addiction, abuse, self-harm). What unfolds is a two-for-one trauma plot involving love between bruised souls who aren’t walking on eggshells so much as tiptoeing blindfold across a tripwired minefield.

The novel’s drama lies ultimately in the dance of Eily’s thoughts as she decodes Stephen’s words, calibrates her own, watching his gestures, craving, ultimately, for the validation she finds in his desire. And while the end of the book leaves us hanging, the ceaseless friction to its central relationship means it carries far more oomph than McBride’s previous novel, 2020’s unsatisfyingly wafty Strange Hotel. You sense that in revisiting The Lesser Bohemians she’s continuing a project that’s far from done, and this reader, at least, would be glad if she decides the life of Eily is the place to be.

There are lines in When the Going Was Good, Graydon Carter’s memoir of his swashbuckling career as an editor during the heyday of magazines, that will make any journalist laugh (bitterly) out loud. “There was a bar at the end of each corridor,” writes Carter of his first job at Time magazine in the mid-1970s, where expense accounts were huge, oversight relaxed and, “I went five years without ever turning on my oven”. At Vanity Fair, where Carter took over the editorship in 1992, “the budget had no ceiling. I could send anybody anywhere for as long as I wanted.” For a commission on the collapse of Lloyd’s of London, one Vanity Fair hack ran up expenses of $180,000 – and the piece didn’t run.

These are the details most readers will come for and Carter, who at 75 remains a symbol of magazine glamour and excess – a fact somehow vested in the whimsy and extravagance of his comic-book hair – doesn’t short-change us. His years at Vanity Fair entailed as much sucking up to the worlds of Hollywood and fashion as it did publishing great journalism, and this book reminds us that, like all hacks, he is a gossip at heart; casting an eye back on his life, he can’t help but dish the dirt.

Let’s cut to the chase: what did he really think of Anna Wintour? The Vogue editor is, writes Carter, someone who “tends to greet me either like her long lost friend or like the car attendant”, a woman of such awesome bad manners that, he recalls, she would demand the check at a restaurant the minute she finished her food even if her dining companions were still eating. Pioneering magazine editor Clay Felker? A snake. Legendary newspaperman Harry Evans? Also a snake. Like all good memoirs, When the Going Was Good includes a disastrous encounter with Princess Margaret. And there are long, satisfying sections on, for example, the extraordinarily bad behaviour of Hollywood stars trying to crash the Vanity Fair Oscars party. Meanwhile, Carter is so affable, so genial, so disarmingly honest about his own shortcomings – he refers to himself as “a beta male”, who hates negotiating and has to fight “inherent laziness” – you hardly notice the knife going in.

A Room Above a Shop opens in south Wales in the late 1980s, where a young man, B, is feeling excited, about to make a big decision. It will take him away from the sense of provisionality that’s embodied by his council house with its “doors with weightless cardboard interiors and hollow aluminium handles”. He’s going to meet an older man, M, to view the sun from a hill on New Year’s Eve.

But he’s not really going for the sun. “He’ll go to hell for what he wants, but still he climbs.” M and B edge closer to each other, certain and uncertain at the same time, heading towards an intimacy they can’t speak aloud. “The hunger for another body, for a person to know, to see what he knows, to share.” Over time, M, who owns the local hardware shop, gives B a job there and invites him to stay in the room above the shop.

Thus, mutely expressed, begins an affecting love story that picks up force as it progresses. The challenge is to find a language that expresses B and M’s inability to articulate their own feelings. Shapland does this with brevity, and a style intimate and impersonal at the same time. There’s a shaking of syntax to reflect the men’s head-spun emotions but also to slow the reader down and make the descriptions sink deeper. “Tense, the flex and judder, and seaweed smells of semen and spit and blood and food all capsize as they slump and sink sleep-deep.”

The atmosphere conjured by the language means that when the plot’s payoff comes, it hits hard, sending the reader reeling. A Room Above a Shop is a sticky book: memorable, striking, dark, beautiful and one of the best debuts I’ve read in years.