ANGUS REID, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review On The Sea, A Useful Ghost, Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, and Pinocchio Unstrung
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Dystopia now
Rachel Kushner's new novel bucks the trend of apocalyptic near-future fiction in the US, says CALUM BARNES
RON JACOBS enjoys a great tale, told by a US communist, of the lives of working-class New Yorkers
BRENT CUTLER searches a new history of contemporary Iran for an understanding of the Islamic Republic, finding both interesting detail and glaring omissions
MARIA DUARTE recommends the true story of the remarkable woman who sued Donald Trump for sexual assault not once, but twice
KENNY MacASKILL is disappointed by a polemical, rather than factual, account of the Lone Star State and its political path since the civil war
PAUL DONOVAN is fascinated by the lives of Charles and Mary Bagot, and the insight this biography shines on the morals of pre-Victorian society
GORDON PARSONS appreciates fine performances and a feel for ambiguity, but misses the music of the dialogue
The Mars Room
by Rachel Kushner
(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
IN HER previous work Rachel Kushner's focus was on colonial exploitation and the fraying of Fordism and now, in The Mars Room, she turns a novelist's eye on the carceral capitalism of the early 21st century United States.
Unlike the dystopian turn of much US writing in the Trump era, best crystallised in the success of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kushner’s novel serves as a rejoinder to this trend. It rudely reminds us that dystopia is here already.
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