In Progress: A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea, geographer Samuel Miller McDonald takes a wrecking ball to one of the modern era’s most cherished beliefs: that progress is inherently good. Drawing from history, philosophy, anthropology and environmental science, McDonald tracks how the idea of progress evolved from early myths like The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Book of Genesis, through religious conquest and industrial capitalism, to today’s tech-driven neoliberalism. What emerges is a provocative account of how the drive for “more” — more growth, more extraction, more control — has led not only to wealth and innovation, but to inequality, ecocide and looming collapse.
McDonald argues that humanity’s shift from egalitarian societies to hierarchical, extractive ones was not inevitable but ideological, and dangerously so. He contends that the narrative of progress has blinded us to its costs, from the climate crisis to democratic backsliding. While the book’s tone occasionally veers into doom-laden prophecy, it’s also an impassioned and deeply researched call to rethink our assumptions about the future.
This is not a straightforward polemic. McDonald takes aim at familiar targets such as Steven Pinker, while also scrutinising leftist darlings such as David Graeber and David Wengrow. The result is a challenging, often unsettling read that positions itself as both history lesson and warning.
For readers of Jared Diamond, Graeber and Naomi Klein, Progress offers a bracing reassessment of how we got here and what must change if we hope to have a liveable future. It’s not comfortable reading, but that’s precisely the point.
Leaving America might be the new American dream
In People Like Us, Jason Mott builds on the territory he explored in Hell of a Book, which won the National Book Award in 2021. Race, fame, violence and mental strain sit at the heart of this sharp, unpredictable novel about two black American writers on parallel journeys across the US and Europe.
The first narrator, Soot, is a mid-career author from North Carolina who travels to a university shortly after a mass shooting. Despite giving talks about gun control, he carries a concealed weapon and is burdened by grief and a long personal history of violence. The second character, only named once and often blacked out in the text, jokingly refers to himself as “Not Coates”. After achieving literary success, he flees to Europe to escape a surreal figure called Remus who stalks him without warning.
The novel blends satire and emotional depth with bursts of absurdity. Mott’s storytelling style is fragmented and experimental, shifting between realism and exaggeration. Both writers encounter people, situations, memories and threats that reflect the instability of their inner and outer worlds. Remus, in particular, becomes a stand-in for a broader sense of fear and vulnerability.
People Like Us picks up the threads of race, identity, survival and perception that made Hell of a Book so distinctive. It’s less polished than its predecessor but equally ambitious. Mott invites readers to question the stories they are told, and the ones they tell themselves to keep going.
Bold debut takes on war and storytelling
Maria Reva’s Endling is a daring and darkly comic debut novel that defies genre expectations. Best known for her acclaimed short story collection Good Citizens Need Not Fear, which portrayed life in Soviet-era Ukraine, Reva now turns her attention to the present-day crisis and the impossibility of writing about it from afar.
The story starts with Yeva, a quirky biologist roaming Ukraine in a rusted RV, trying to save the last known member of a rare snail species. To fund her research, she moonlights at a mail-order bride agency, where she crosses paths with two sisters whose radical feminist mother has gone missing. Together they hatch a bizarre PR stunt involving the kidnapping of a group of Western bachelors. Then the war breaks out.
At this point, the novel flips. Reva inserts herself as a character, a writer in Vancouver grappling with guilt and doubt over writing about her homeland as bombs fall. What follows is a metafictional kaleidoscope of imagined interviews, grant applications, and biting commentary on the ethics of art in wartime.
While the second half veers into experimental territory, Endling never loses its emotional core. It’s as much about extinction — of species, peace, and hope, and belief in narrative control — as it is about survival. Like her influences (Percival Everett, Dana Spiotta, and even Octavia Butler), Reva manages to be funny, sharp and heartbreaking, sometimes all on the same page.
This is not a tidy novel. But it’s a vital, inventive one, a book that questions the purpose of writing itself while insisting that stories still matter.
The life Fitzgerald never wrote
In Fonseca, Jessica Francis Kane reimagines a curious episode in the life of celebrated English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald. The year is 1952. Fitzgerald is pregnant, her husband is a struggling alcoholic and their literary journal is on the brink. When a letter arrives from two elderly Mexican relatives promising a possible inheritance linked to a silver mine, she sees a chance for salvation, both financial and creative.
With her young son Valpy in tow, Fitzgerald travels from London to New York and then by bus deep into northern Mexico, to a town called Fonseca. What she finds is far from straightforward. The household she enters is crowded with the competing agendas of eccentric relatives, opportunistic Americans, artists such as Edward Hopper and his wife, and even a stranger claiming to be a long-lost heir.
Over the course of three surreal months, from Day of the Dead to Candlemas, Fitzgerald must hold her ground, care for her son, and make her way in a world that is by turns absurd, hostile and strangely inspiring. Kane blends fiction with biography, inserting undated letters from Fitzgerald’s real children and imagining the emotional and psychological texture of a woman at a pivotal crossroads.
Much more than historical fiction, Fonseca is a thrilling portrait of maternal resilience, creative drive, and the fine line between myth and memory. It’s a novel of dry wit and luminous detail — just the kind Fitzgerald herself might have written, had she told this story.
A fierce descent into ambition and academic Hell
RF Kuang’s Katabasis is a dark academia fantasy that sends two rival graduate students on a mission to Hell. Alice Law has sacrificed everything to rise through the ranks of Cambridge’s department of analytic magick. But when her supervisor, the powerful and feared Prof Grimes, dies in a magical accident — possibly her fault — she decides to go after him. His recommendation could still shape her future, even from beyond the grave.
Peter Murdoch, Alice’s academic nemesis and ex, also wants to bring Grimes back. Together, they descend into a version of Hell that looks a lot like a dysfunctional university, full of smug undergrads, endless lectures, pretentiousness and bureaucratic mazes. Each of the Eight Courts they pass through challenges them with questions about morality, memory, ambition and truth.
Kuang draws from classical mythology, Eastern and Western religious traditions and modern university culture to build a world that feels fantastical and uncomfortably familiar. The novel critiques the culture of academia — its competitiveness, pretence, and emotional toll — while also exploring the messy relationships between its flawed characters.
Katabasis follows Kuang’s breakout fantasy trilogy The Poppy War, her best-selling historical fantasy Babel, and her sharp satire of the publishing world Yellowface. This latest novel is slower, more philosophical, and arguably her most ambitious. It’s packed with sharp dialogue, complex ideas, and emotional tension. Readers who enjoy books that ask difficult questions will find plenty to think about.
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