Sea Prayer
Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp48
First published on the Guardian website as an animated story, Hosseini’s heartbreaking response to the death of three-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, who drowned while attempting to reach Greece in 2015, is just as eloquent as an illustrated book. Dan Williams’s watercolours are a haunting companion to the contemplative and poetic story of a father fleeing Syria with his son. Though considerably shorter than The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns or And the Mountains Echoed, it opens up as many powerful emotions about family, survival and childhood.
Reaching for Utopia
Jason Cowley
Salt, £12.99, pp256
The subtitle for this collection of essays, profiles and interviews by New Statesman editor Jason Cowley is “making sense of an age of upheaval” and largely he succeeds. The section on politics and power is fascinating. Cowley is determined to understand antagonists, to explain the dominant individuals shaping our era. The likes of Arsène Wenger, Tiger Woods, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan are explored in the Lives and Letters collection, too, making for a well-rounded collection by a thoughtful and engaging writer.
Macbeth
Jo Nesbø
Vintage, £7.99, pp624
The latest in the Hogarth project – modern novelists taking on Shakespeare plays – seems the perfect match: crime novelist Nesbø reimagining Macbeth in a police station of a grim 1970s Scottish town. The streets need cleaning up and former drug addict Macbeth, now a Swat commander, is hired, though, of course, he is taken down dark paths by “Lady”, the owner of the town’s casino. Nesbø clearly had fun and although the language is uneven and the pacing cumbersome, it feels as if Shakespeare has been bent to Nesbø’s will. Refreshing.
To order Sea Prayer for £9.99, Reaching for Utopia for £11.04 or Macbeth for £6.79 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
