Six books to start a new month with including Margaret

All information sourced from publishers.

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, Margaret Atwood

Raised by scientifically minded parents, Margaret Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec: a vast playground for her entomologist father and independent, resourceful mother. It was an unfettered and nomadic childhood, sometimes isolated but also thrilling and beautiful.

From this unconventional start, Atwood unfolds the story of her life, linking key moments to the books that have shaped our literary landscape, from the cruel school year that would become Cat’s Eye to the unease of 1980s Berlin, where she began The Handmaid’s Tale. In pages alive with the natural world, reading and books, major political turning points and her lifelong love for the charismatic writer Graeme Gibson, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood stars and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel.

Dead and Alive: Essays, Zadie Smith

In this keenly awaited new collection, Zadie Smith brings her unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects which have captured her attention in recent years.

She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tár, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic – and the meaning of “the commons” in all our lives.

Throughout this thrilling collection, Smith shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.

Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, Andrew Graham Dixon

The paintings of Johannes Vermeer of Delft are some of the most beautiful, even sublime, in the history of art. Yet like the life of Vermeer himself, they are mysterious and have for centuries defied explanation. Following new leads and drawing on a mass of historical evidence, some of it freshly uncovered in the archives of Delft and Rotterdam, Andrew Graham-Dixon paints a dramatically new picture of Vermeer, revealing many of the painter’s hitherto unknown friendships as well as his previously undetected allegiance to a radical movement driven underground by persecution.

He also vividly evokes the world of the Dutch Republic as it was in its so-called Golden Age. This was a watery world of fortresses and flood plains, taverns rocked by argument and cities stunned by devastating attacks and explosions: all linked by a network of canals where a uniquely efficient public transport system, operated by horse-drawn passenger barge, enabled people, goods and ideas to glide effortlessly from one place to another. The author sets Vermeer firmly in the context of his time, revealing the patterns of patronage that make sense of his work, and also exposing the difficulties posed by his home life, which was dominated by his Jesuit mother-in-law and disturbed by the psychotic behaviour of her only son.

In the past Vermeer has been imagined as a remote and enigmatic figure, but he emerges from this new account as a man deeply engaged with his own society: well-travelled, a reader of books, a man personally connected to many of the most interesting people of his time, including merchants, philosophers, preachers, bankers and regents, as well as his childhood friend, a philanthropic baker named Hendrick van Buyten. Vermeer was also deeply affected by the struggles that shook his world, the Eighty Years’ War for Dutch independence and the yet more terrible Thirty Years’ War, which ravaged the neighbouring German lands and resulted in the deaths of millions. The author shows how he was moved to become a pacifist by such atrocities, and thereafter made many of his closest friends in the ranks of Europe’s first peace movement. A further revelation is that Vermeer’s closest collaborator and chief patron was a woman, as were many others in his immediate circle. These are all previously untold stories.

The many piercingly direct descriptions of Vermeer’s pictures, which are the heart of the book, shed new light on the intentions of the artist. Nearly all of his best-loved works, Graham-Dixon shows, were originally painted for a single significant location in Delft. In light of such discoveries, every one of Vermeer’s major paintings, including The Girl with a Pearl Earring, A View of Delft and The Milkmaid, is reassessed and their meanings rethought. As a result, the two great unresolved questions about Vermeer – why did he paint his pictures, and what do they mean? – are persuasively answered here for the first time.

Always Home, Always Homesick: A Love Letter to Iceland, Hannah Kent

When she was 17 years old, Hannah Kent travelled to Iceland from Australia. She’d never seen snow before, didn’t speak a word of Icelandic. All she knew was that she wanted to have an experience – to soak up something of the world.

Soon she found herself isolated in a remote part of Iceland in a dark winter. It was a gruelling experience, but she quickly fell in love with the country: with its brutally beautiful landscapes and with its people. On returning home, with images of Iceland’s towering glaciers and windswept tundras in her dreams, Hannah began to write.

Now, as a mother and a wife, she looks back on that extraordinary year in Iceland.

Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America, Irin Carmon

Journalist Irin Carmon was eight months pregnant when the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, unleashing pain and suffering for those who didn’t want to be pregnant and, shockingly to some, those who did. What was clear to Carmon from her dozen years of reporting – and from what she felt in her bones – was how incomplete the American story of reproduction had been, and how much had been unexpressed, hidden, or taken for granted, and not just by conservative justices or in red states. Whether in cosmopolitan, liberal New York City or rural Alabama, the entire system is broken.

Unbearable tells a deeper story, going beyond the headlines and any one experience or choice, and grounded in history and journalism. It introduces us to five women navigating pregnancy care – from that first positive pregnancy test through joy, loss, and the unforeseen – in a country that is at best indifferent and at worst willfully cruel, and to brave, outnumbered people fighting to make it better.

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, Jacob Silverman

In Gilded Rage, author Jacob Silverman takes us inside the surreal, high-stakes world of Silicon Valley. This is the story of the political awakening and radicalisation of a cabal of tech billionaires and their descent into ideological extremism. Flush with cash from the zero-interest era, addicted to their own mythology, these men have begun reshaping the world in their image – and it should terrify us all.

At the centre is Elon Musk, the mogul whose obsession with the “woke mind virus” has turned him from a tech innovator to an ideological crusader. But Musk is just the beginning. Silverman maps a sprawling network of radicalised elites – from Peter Thiel and JD Vance to the financiers bankrolling Donald Trump’s return – who are using their platforms and their money to ensure a political revolution that’s already underway.

This is not just a book about tech. It’s about power. We meet the billionaires funding life-extension labs and embracing apocalyptic visions of AI. We examine the populist rhetoric that is leading to the ruthless dismantling of democratic norms. And we enter the strange, darkly comic world of the tech-oligarchy where libertarian dreams meet authoritarian impulses, and where the people with the most influence over our lives are the least accountable.

Silverman travels from San Francisco to Miami, New York to DC, following a movement that’s rewriting the rules and oftentimes fighting a war against reality itself. With sharp reporting and a cast of extraordinary characters, Gilded Rage is a gripping, essential dispatch from the front lines of the billionaire revolution.