Hope
Andrew Ridker
Farrago, £10.99, pp432
After wowing American audiences in 2023, it’s taken 18 months for Ridker’s story of a dysfunctional Massachusetts-based American Jewish family to make it across the Atlantic. Still, Hope is worth the wait – the shattering of the Greenspans’ carefully curated success is tragicomic, piercingly satirical and perceptive about the American dream. Yes, the shadow of Jonathan Franzen is always present, but Ridker finds in any flaw an opportunity for renewal, and there’s something, well, hopeful in that.
Wild Chocolate
Rowan Jacobsen
Bloomsbury, £23, pp288
Forget Dairy Milk – it’s a bar made from wild Bolivian cacao you really want. In this delicious adventure, American food writer Rowan Jacobsen travels through the Amazon and Central American rainforests in search of its source. What he discovers – bean-to-bar makers, Indigenous leaders and activists kicking against “Big Chocolate” – is a wonderful blend of history, ecology, sociology and economics. This book promises to make “choconerds” out of its readers: you’ll never look at a tub of Celebrations in the same way again.
Night Watch
Jayne Anne Phillips
Fleet, £9.99, pp304 (paperback)
Night Watch won the Pulitzer prize for fiction last year, but has largely escaped the attention of readers outside North America. Maybe that’s because it’s a pretty tough and specific exploration of the American civil war, as experienced primarily through the eyes of a woman and her daughter abused and dumped in a West Virginia asylum. Phillips is uncompromising and meticulous in her depiction of a world devastated by division; the sense of the asylum as a place of sanctuary offers a modicum of optimism about an uncertain future.
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