The Island of Missing Trees
Elif Shafak
Viking, £14.99, pp368
Sixteen-year-old Ada is mourning the recent loss of her mother and remains disturbed by her parents’ refusal to talk about their Cypriot heritage. Interspersed with Ada’s story is that of her parents’ courtship, set against the backdrop of the 1974 conflict. Narrated in part by a wise fig tree, Shafak explores love, grief, war and transgenerational trauma in an elegiac and powerfully rendered novel.
Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berlin Wall
Helena Merriman
Hodder, £20, pp336
Based on the successful BBC podcast, Merriman tells the story of a group of East German engineering students who, in 1962, built a secret tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall and helped 29 people escape to the west. Focusing on one student in particular, Joachim Rudolph, it’s an audacious and compelling tale, told with narrative tension and novelistic drive, creating a fascinating portrayal of life in Berlin in the early days of the wall.
Vesper Flights
Helen Macdonald
Vintage, £9.99, pp272 (paperback)
The Costa Book award-winner’s collection of essays should, she says, be treated as a Wunderkammer: a collection of curiosities, idiosyncratically compiled. There are essays on a fascination with birds’ nests that she developed in childhood, on the visceral experience of witnessing a total eclipse and on birdwatching from the top of the Empire State Building. Macdonald has a wonderful gift for exploring the intersection between nature and our experience of it, in writing that is both lyrical and impassioned.
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