Books tackling Brexit may not qualify as escapist literature, yet a slew of new writing, fiction and non-fiction is proving British readers are looking in greater numbers for ways to understand the causes and outcomes of the country’s current strategic impasse.
Titles such as Fintan O’Toole’s Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, Tim Shipman’s Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem, and How to be Right … in a World Gone Wrong, the bestseller from radio presenter James O’Brien, are all confounding bleak consumer trends, as are novels such as Jonathan Coe’s Middle England. And coming soon is a long-anticipated follow-up to the popular 1982 novel A Very British Coup that will tackle the impact of Brexit head-on. Writer Chris Mullin’s sequel, to be published on 28 March – the day before the Brexit deadline – is called The Friends of Harry Perkins and is billed by publishers Scribner as “the definitive post-Brexit thriller”.
The original novel by the former Labour MP and Foreign Office minister was adapted for television twice, first in 1988, under the same title, and then in 2012 as Secret State. That book told of the landslide general election victory of a hard-left politician called Harry Perkins, a steelworker and trade unionist from Sheffield.
Mullin, 71, started writing a sequel some time ago and went back to a neglected 5,000-word manuscript once Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader began to reflect the start of Perkins’s fictional path to power. His finished novel focuses on the handling of Brexit.
Luckily for Mullin, the appetite for reading about Brexit is not waning. A series of analytical approaches to the subject that has divided the British public over the past two and a half years are selling well, despite a harsh trading environment this winter.
Apollo, publishers of O’Toole’s book, said that more than 17,000 copies of Heroic Failure had been sold in the first four weeks after publication. O’Brien’s book, from Ebury, is similarly performing well.
Also out there, doing better than predicted, are Isabel Hardman’s wider analysis of the scene, Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, winner of a parliamentary book of the year award; Tony Connelly’s Brexit and Ireland; last year’s Brexit: What the Hell Happens Now? by Ian Dunt; and, out two months ago, Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin’s National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Another fictional Brexit mystery, Accidental Agent, is on the way in March from spy thriller writer Alan Judd.
In uncertain times it seems that wary consumers are finding solace in the solidity of a book. And when much of the sense of political and economic doubt centres on the Brexit conundrum, then it is books about Brexit that offer most help.
