I’m deeply suspicious of people who trumpet their disdain for reading “things that are not true” in favour of non-fiction, such as biographies about billionaires who ride their own rockets into space and, shudder, self-help books.
Why do we love stories? Because they give us the chance to exercise our imagination, develop the compassion necessary to understand other people’s thoughts and emotions and teach us new ways of expressing ourselves through creative language.
Fiction teaches us meaningful lessons about the real world and about other people’s realities. Think of Colson Whitehead’s masterpiece The Underground Railroad, a track that never existed in wood and iron, but was a network of people offering shelter and aid to escaped slaves. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar remains a timeless, honest look at depression. In Watership Down by Richard Adams, we learnt that just to live is to be courageous. With that in mind, here are five books to get you through the remaining months of this winter of discontent and provide a glimpse into some of our world’s most pressing issues.
Appleseed by Matt Bell
Cli-fi has introduced readers to a creative way to understand the threat of changes in temperature and weather patterns worldwide. In Appleseed, by Matt Bell, three characters struggle to remain true to themselves in hostile worlds set centuries apart. Paying homage to Greek mythology, magical realism and American settler folklore, Bell plays on the disaster genre to create the dystopian parallel universe his characters inhabit. He deftly delves into humanity’s relentless exploitation of natural resources, and the small but powerful magic contained within every apple.
Chapman, a hybrid who is half-human, half-faun, wanders the wilderness of 18th-century Ohio with his human brother, planting apple trees that will feed future settlers. John, a billionaire in a postapocalyptic 21st-century North America, acknowledges his role in the creation of Earthtrust, the corporation that controls the world’s food supply. A thousand years from now, humanoid C-433 finds itself in a frozen wasteland; its mission, like that of its predecessors, is to search beneath a seemingly infinite glacier for enough biomass to regenerate life. Beyond the bleakness of their individual stories, the voices in Bell’s ambitious tale continually seek something beyond the imperfection of human stewardship as each one grapples with our devastating influence on the planet. By no means is this fantasy.
Radiant Fugitives by Nawaaz Ahmed
Migration and displacement are at the heart of Radiant Fugitives, the debut novel by Nawaaz Ahmed, who spent his time researching search algorithms for Yahoo before he became a writer. The story follows three generations of a Muslim Indian family.
Delving into politics, sexuality and mixed-race marriage, Ahmed gives readers a glimpse into one week in the life of the Hussein women, sisters Seema and Tahera, and their terminally ill mother, Nafeesa, who is travelling alone to California from Chennai; they have not one another for 15 years. Seema, an Oxford-educated lesbian and political activist, is nine months pregnant and estranged from the black father of her unborn son. She works as a consultant for Kamala Harris’s attorney-general campaign in San Francisco. Despite having built a good life for herself in Obama’s America, she is still struggling with her father’s decision to exile her from the family after she came out. Her devoutly religious sister Tahera is a Texas-based obstetrician and mother of two. The anticipation of the birth of a child, instead of being joyful, is upended by a reunion that unearths years of betrayal, misunderstanding and complex love. The events of the fateful week are narrated by Seema’s baby, Ishraaq, and the novel weaves together verses from Wordsworth, Keats and the Koran.
The Startup Wife by Tahmima Anam
What’s not to love about a savage satire on tech start-ups? In this wickedly funny feminist look at start-up culture and modern partnerships, Tahmina Anam delves into the not so far-fetched world of building an app that replaces religious rituals. Coding geek Asha Ray bumps into Cyrus Jones, the guy she had a crush on all through high school and who has become a humanist spirit guide. She is halfway through her PhD in computer science and already dreaming of running her own lab, but that chance meeting leads to a whirlwind romance that changes everything. Together they come up with a big, hairy audacious goal: to build a social networking app that could bring spiritual meaning to millions of soul-searchers. They call the platform WAI, pronounced “why”, an acronym for “We Are Infinite”. They move to New York, where they are given desk space at exclusive tech incubator Utopia. But this is the tech world, where the idea of the male visionary reigns supreme. While Asha creates an intuitive and inspired algorithm, Cyrus gains celebrity status as a self-styled charismatic guru. In a tale as old as time, a woman invents something, and a man takes all the credit. It is a blistering tale of ambition, standing up for yourself and start-ups. It is also funny and deeply intelligent.
There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura
Japan, the birthplace of karoshi, “death from overwork”, is known for a brutal office culture that has led to several deaths. In There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, author Kikuko Tsumura details the everyday struggles of modern life, focusing on our complicated relationships with work. Her unnamed narrator is 36 years old and single. After quitting her 14-year career due to burnout, she is forced to move in with her parents. Then her unemployment insurance runs out. She recounts her attempt to re-enter the workforce: “I’d sat down one day in front of my recruiter and informed her that I wanted a job as close as possible to my house. Ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair, overseeing the extraction of collagen for use in skincare products.” In her search for meaningless work, she goes through five jobs in one year. She checks surveillance footage in a covert smuggling scheme, writes pre-recorded ads, creates content for rice cracker packages, puts up posters in a neighbourhood and finally joins a national park’s maintenance crew. Bizarrely, each job is connected to an increasingly absurd series of events. This is a charming and quirky story that underlines the interconnectedness of all actions and the fact that there is no such thing as a simple job.
The End of Men by Christina Sweeney-Baird
Do we need another novel about a pandemic? Well, yes, because diseases are fascinating. Especially this one, which wipes out only men. The year is 2025, and an unknown virus has broken out in Scotland. Inexplicably, it only affects one gender and is 90% fatal. But when Dr Amanda MacLean reports this phenomenon, she is dismissed as hysterical. Oh, the irony. Her warnings go unheeded, the virus goes global, and we are left with an alien world — one where mostly only women exist. Though the new world is by no means a feminist utopia, there are certain upsides. In this “what if” novel, Sweeney-Baird tells her story almost entirely from the viewpoints of women. There is Catherine, who has the terrible and common experience of losing her husband and trying hopelessly to protect her son; Helen, whose husband ran for his life and is never heard from again; and Lisa, a Toronto virologist who is given a chance to develop a vaccine because all the old men in suits have left a gap for her. Blending the personal and the political, this is an entertaining story about the innumerable ways the absence of men changes society, the workforce, fertility and the meaning of family. This may sound like a Sapphic fantasy, but there is a price to pay.
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