JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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Identity politics have been with us for longer than we might think
IN FORM: Koushik Banerjea
[http://koushikbanerjea.co.uk/]
MARIA DUARTE goes down a bilingual rabbit hole with an impressive Jodie Foster
DAVID HARVIE recommends a selection of Harry Cleaver’s writing that documents working-class activism and offers a method, and a way of understanding and investigating the world
DAVID YEARSLEY is fascinated by the account of four composers who transformed their experiences of the second world war and the Holocaust into deeply moving works of art
PETER MASON thrills to the sound of south London-born Yussef Dayes, and the galaxy of musicians drawn into his orbit
From post-human revolution in Puerto Rico to trans poetics and queer mythmaking, these three books that imagine new ways of being together
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by Koushik Banerjea
London Books £9.99
KOUSHIK BANERJEA’S fascinating second novel is a multilayered story of complex characters caught in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions as Britain moves into the era of Thatcherism and beyond.
Beginning in the late 1970s, it follows the fortunes of four intertwined young people: D and Conrad, who’ve grown up on the same south-east London council estate; Roxy, privately educated somewhere nearby; and Laura, a Spanish student recently arrived in England.
White, black, brown and foreign respectively, they each move chippily into adulthood unsure of who or what they want to be, often disconnected from family, looking askance at the choices of others and fervently opposed to being pigeonholed, yet struggling to fix themselves with any kind of purpose in life.
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ROGER McKENZIE draws attention to the much-neglected oral traditions of the global South that define the identity – and therefore the liberation – of its custodians
ANDY HEDGECOCK is astonished by a portrait of contemporary Greece, complete with political protest, organised crime and people trafficking, told from the point of view of — wait for it — runaway poultry
MARY CONWAY becomes impatient with the intellectual self-indulgence of Tom Stoppard in a production that is, nevertheless, total class
PETER MASON applauds a stage version of Le Carre’s novel that questions what ordinary people have to gain from high-level governmental spying