An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

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As he says at one point, “If there is one thing my Soviet childhood taught me, it’s that subscribing to someone else’s ideology will always inevitably mean having to suspend your own judgment about right and wrong to appease your tribe. Many of his interviewees are immigrants who came to the UK dreaming of a better life, and ended up draining buckets of bleach.

Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard: A Life (Faber, October) will come out while Stoppard’s latest play, Leopoldstadt, is still stalled by Covid-19.Estate, October), edited by Yomi Adegoke and Elizabeth Uviebinené, the authors of hit book and podcast Slay in Your Lane, ranges from Marvel’s Black Panther to “how we can teach our daughters to own their voices”. He goes on to skewer the purveyors of news and opinion for their blatant failures (confidently and incorrectly predicting the outcomes of both Brexit and the 2016 U. Essex Girls: A Defence of Profane and Opinionated Women Everywhere by Sarah Perry (Profile, October) is a polemic that makes room for both Kim Kardashian and Harriet Martineau. For regular listeners of the Triggernometry YouTube podcast, much of the content and tone of co-host Konstantin Kisin’s just-published nonfiction book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, will come as no surprise. There, with his co-host Francis Foster, he has interviewed scientists, authors, politicians and others, including the present reviewer.

There was a specific effort by the KGB to engage in psychological warfare of a seemingly subtle kind. The political leadership class comes in for its fair share of criticism as well, with many high-profile failures highlighted: the hypocrisy on adherence to COVID guidance, flip-flops on the efficacy of mask-wearing, and the sudden reversal of social-distancing rules when people wanted to gather en masse to protest preferred causes. As he says at one point in a plea to journalists, “The media … is not yours to co-opt or use to spread propaganda.The memoir by punk poet John Cooper Clarke, Bard of Salford, entitled I Wanna Be Yours (Picador, October), is perhaps one of very few books to feature both Nico and Bernard Manning. SF guru Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent fiction has focused on climate change; in The Ministry for the Future (Orbit, October) he imagines the tumultuous decades to come. Cinema is also at the centre of William Boyd’s Trio (Viking, October), which goes back to the summer of 68 for a love triangle at a time of incendiary global politics. Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance by Stella Dadzie (Verso, October) considers the multiple ways women were involved in slave resistance. The stories are meaningful and often delivered with Kisin’s signature humor: “My mum would pick apples in the university gardens and cook them with rice, which was a typical family meal.

A long aside on the ubiquity of slavery across cultures and regions throughout history, while somewhat edifying, seems out of place; perhaps in a different context it would seem more appropriate or valuable, but in this book it places undue emphasis on a topic that could have been dispatched with a couple of sentences. Another form of “invisible labour” is uncovered in Nick Duerden’s Dishing the Dirt: The Hidden Lives of House Cleaners (Canbury, September). Two comic chroniclers of romance offer new perspectives on the complications of love: Nick Hornby’s Just Like You (Viking, September) features an age-gap, opposites-attract relationship between a divorced teacher and an aspiring DJ, while Roddy Doyle’s Love (Cape, October) reveals an old secret. Two noteworthy celebrations of books are Dear Reader: The Comfort and Joy of Books by Cathy Rentzenbrink (Picador, September) and Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread by Michiko Kakutani (William Collins, October).

Coming a decade after the mega-selling How to Be a Woman, this mid-life book follows, with Moran’s irresistible comic candour, a day in the life of a woman in her early 40s as she deals with ageing parents, divorcing friends, teenagers having “micro-breakdowns”, greying hair, “maintenance shags” and the tyranny of the to-do list. Despite being a very funny man, he also has what so many Russians have: what Miguel de Unamuno described as “the tragic sense of life”.

For he has, all his life in the West, seen around him people who are used to their luck, expect it, take it for granted and – in some cases – end up spitting on it. In this way, the memoir is a pleasant and welcome read for those inclined to agree with Kisin’s classical liberal, pro-West, centrist vision of the world. First up in the flood of autumn fiction are the last two unpublished novels from the Booker longlist: Gabriel Krauze’s Who They Was (4th Estate), a hard-hitting debut set amid London gang culture, and US author Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness(Oneworld), in which a mother and child escape a polluted metropolis for a dangerous experiment in living. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury, September) performs a very different kind of magic from her beloved Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell: austere, otherworldly and profound, it’s best embarked on absolutely fresh.

Other big-name political books include What Is at Stake Now by Mikhail Gorbachev (Polity, September), an exploration of global instability and renewed threats to peace, and Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump by former British ambassador to the US Kim Darroch (William Collins, September).