JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
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The global class war in five novels
MARK STEVEN, author of Class War: A Literary History, recommends five contemporary novels that convey a vision of liberating combat against the exploiters and the expropriators
The bard joins the Carnival Against Fascism, which summer fun sends him down Memory Lane
FIONA O’CONNOR is bowled over by a stunning Welsh language drama
MARIA DUARTE and MICHAL BONCZA review Virginia Woolf’s Night & Day, Familiar Touch, Nino, and Toy Story 5
MATTHEW HAWKINS explores the initiatives proposed by HEALING ARTS SCOTLAND
ALEX HALL welcomes an analysis of how modern capitalism is deeply intertwined with emotions, and their manipulation
Iron Council
by China Mieville (Pan, £8.99)
THIS is the final book in China Mieville’s Bas-Lag trilogy, three sprawling dark fantasy novels all set in what the author describes as “an early industrial capitalist world of a fairly grubby, police statey kind!”
By the time I arrived at book three, I was already infatuated with the unholy city at the heart of the trilogy, with its arcane geography and its nightmare monstrosities, because Mieville’s language does so much to golem the whole thing into feverish existence, with a vocabulary that feels as overgrown and mutant as the city it describes.
But this finale is also uniquely captivating in its dramatisation of militancy as enacted and experienced by individual characters and the collectives they become.
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BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
On the centenary of the birth of the anti-colonial thinker and activist Frantz Fanon, JENNY FARRELL assesses his enduring influence
MANJEET RIDON relishes a novel that explores the guilty repressions – and sexual awakenings – of a post-war Dutch bourgeois family