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Roula Khalaf
Editor FT
There are several excellent books to recommend to readers this summer, including John Preston’s Drop, the fascinating story of the rise and fall of Robert Maxwell, and The world for sale, in which Javier Blas and Jack Farchy tell the captivating stories of powerful commodity traders and mysterious market players and geopolitics. My best selection is a story that everyone should read when we get out of the coronavirus devastation. Michael Lewis Premonition is the story of a group of dedicated American scientists and medical professionals who spent years preparing for a Covid-like pandemic, but were only frustrated at every turn by politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a Lewis vintage, terribly appealing and creepy, condemning the failure of institutions. Right now I’m reading Leila Slimani’s The land of others, the lively and multifaceted beginning of a post-1945 trilogy by the Franco-Moroccan author that will be published in English in August as The country of others.
Frederick Studemann
Literary editor FT
With travel off the agenda, many of us need to do our exploration closer to home. In Deep Time Notes Helen Gordon invites us to look at the worlds beneath our feet, taking us back for billions of years as the Earth was created, modeled, and changed, literally the tropical beaches beneath the pavements. Going back to more recent times, I really liked that of Alaa al-Aswany The Republic of False Truths a compelling account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, with all its hopes shattered and cynical repression. A powerful reminder of why fiction is usually the best way to convey reality. Similarly, that of Sergei Lebedev Unable to track set in a world of poisoned dissidents, conflicting morals and Kremlin power politics, it is a sinister thriller that endures. Like many FT readers, the blockage has led me to explore the world of audiobooks, catching up with some gems, including Jonathan Keeble’s reading of Danial Kehlmann’s brilliant work Tul. A wonderfully playful mix of facts, fiction and ideas against the backdrop of the horror and agitation of the Thirty Years ’War. A great listen.
Alec Russell
FT Weekend Editor
This year I’ve read more enduring books than any year I can remember, and yet it’s easily highlighted: The passenger. Its protagonist is a German Jewish businessman who crosses his homeland by train, first bewildered and then terrified after Kristallnacht. It’s a startling reflection on humanity’s weakness, an agonizing graphic of how quickly decency can implode, a thriller, a heartbreaking view of Nazi Germany. The author, 23-year-old German Jew Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, wrote it at breakneck speed in exile in 1938. Its fate and the story of the discovery of the manuscript two years ago are remarkable stories in themselves. His novel has been cited alongside that of Hans Fallada, deservedly.
Camilla Cavendish
Collaborating editor of FT
In Doom: The politics of catastrophe, Niall Ferguson provides a resounding walk through disasters from the eruption of Vesuvius to the upcoming Cold War ll. Still, despite the litany of tragedies described, I found it strangely uplifting. Ferguson adopts Amartya Sen’s legendary analysis that famines are usually man-made, unnatural (think Stalin’s policy of collectivization) and extend the argument to pandemics. The plagues are natural, but the U.S. responded much more effectively to the Asian flu in 1957, in his opinion, than to Covid-19. It launches bureaucratic failures and offers reflections on everything from death to science fiction. Magisterial.
Simon Schama
Collaborating editor of FT
If you don’t have the time or patience for non-fiction, it just works as communication; the plod of platitudes plucked with lead; if you have a set of languages that act poetically, philosophically, visually, musically, then the writer for you (and certainly for me) is Philip Hoare who Albert and the whale, is practically a masterpiece, but also for your summer pleasure, a riot, a meditation, a lighting and, no doubt, for reasons that will manifest when you live in its pages, a day at the beach. Ostensibly on Dürer, the drawings of the hare, the wing of the blue roller and the impressive watercolor of the large piece of grass, Hoare also shares communion with, among others, Erwin Panofsky, Thomas Mann, Marianne Moore, WH Auden and no less he: swimming, but never drowned, in the tidal flow of his free associations and learned analogies. Oh yes, you also get cetaceans with all their exciting, profound and prophetic immensity.
Enuma Okoro
FT Life & Arts columnist
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest novel, Places, written in her Italian language adopted and self-translated into English, remains the narrator in whose hands we can always hope to find the sacredness of the ordinary and the grace of the mundane constantly revealed. We follow the meditative meanders of an unnamed woman who pays attention to her life. As he watches the people there, as he reflects on his thoughts, as he moves through the doors, up the stairs, down the corridors, and down the streets of his corner of the world, he reminds us how our own lives. with small narratives that traverse the range of the human condition.
I’m Okri
NOVELIST AND POET
In At night All Blood is Black David Diop deploys the file griot narrative tradition to tell the terrible story of Africans in the First World War. Diop reverses a narrative imperative that gives rise to emotions and realities that would have been stifled in any other narrative, revealing that the mode of telling is the mode of experimenting. A vital decolonization of the narrative tyranny of the Great War.
Nilanjana Roy
FT columnist
I’ve been burned too often with the “book everyone is talking about,” so I approached Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The other black girl with skepticism – The Devil Wears Prada they meet To go out, really? The novel begins as an office drama: Nella, 26, gets excited when Hazel joins Wagner Books, hoping to befriend “the other black girl” from a white publishing house. of liberal Manhattan, but plunges into bolder, darker terrain. Harris, who worked at Penguin Random House, presents a scandalous thriller, sourly amusing in its sending of racism to the publication and the forced void of diversity councils, and approaches the horror in this cautionary tale of ‘a naive woman who wanders. too confident in the forest of friendship. The other black girl it will make you laugh until you cry; my perfect summer read.
Tim Harford
FT columnist
Whether we are defending our own arguments or not overthrowing our enemies, our metaphors reveal the way we defend our beliefs as soldiers, says Julia Galef in The listening mentality: Why some people see things clearly and others don’t. In a sharp and original book, she advocates a better metaphor: we should be like explorers, trying to trace and clarify an uncertain world. And it makes a reflective case of why the exploratory mindset not only helps us to be right, but helps us to be happy.
Tell us what you think
What are your favorites from this list and what books have we missed? Tell us in the comments below
frog Foroohar
FT Global Business columnist
In Everything he wore: The journey of Ashley’s sack, a black memory of the family, Harvard Professor Tiya Miles it brings a remarkable kind of erudition to a tale that runs out of a simple cotton sack that tells the story of a people. The words that embroider it are his own kind of art:
My great-grandmother Rose
Ashley’s mother gave him this sack when
It was sold at age 9 in South Carolina
He had a torn 3-handed suit
pecans a braid of rose hair. He told him
It is always filled with my love
He never saw her again
Ashley is my grandmother
Ruth Middleton
1921
If you want to open a window to what it has meant to be black in America for two centuries, read this.
Gillian Tett
PRESIDENCY OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD OF FT AND EDITOR WITH GREAT
If you want a book that doesn’t just provide you with powerful information on why and how racism today is a scourge in the United States, but it also raises a way of thinking in a more positive (even optimistic) sense for the future, Heather McGhee‘s The sum of us it should be read. While it focuses on the African American community and the messages of Black Lives Matter, McGhee’s ideas can be transplanted anywhere. Better yet, read this with Teaching by Isabel Wilkinson Caste, to get a powerful perspective on an issue that now faces (almost) everyone who works in business and finance today.
Susie Boyt
Novelist and collaborator of FT
I loved Helen Garner’s comrade Yellow notebook, volume one of his diaries, which contains occasional observations of the highest caliber, along with the recurring threads of a marriage that dissolves with pain, fierce mother-daughter love, hearings of new suitors, professional triumphs and disasters: ““ It makes me wrong to do so. . . It’s you at your best. ” Acute readings of literary works are related to the acute readings of life, all subscribed to by a brand of creative, rigorous, and stimulating zeal, often in a fearful, sometimes contemptuous spirit. He knows how to live, admire the pajamas of a dying man or make himself a calico pillowcase after drinking three glasses of Chablis, just to prove that he is not drunk.
Jemima Kelly
FT Alphaville Reporter
My summer reading routine usually involves crawling around strong tomatoes whose pages fade and shrink with the sun over the weeks I find it hard to pass them. When the good weather finally arrived this year, I felt inclined to look for something a little lighter. Melissa Broder Feeded milk it was just something poignant, poignant, but also hilarious, erotic and deliciously eccentric, of a young Jew obsessed with food she didn’t practice, with an embarrassed mother who falls in love with a much older Orthodox woman she knows in a frozen yogurt. living room. A book that I devoured as quickly and enthusiastically as the protagonist devours the rainbow splashes.
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