N. Alderman, The Power (2016)
J.D. Carr, The Hollow Man (1935)
D. Coyle, GDP: A brief but affectionate history (2014)
B. Duffy, The perils of perception (2018)
G. E. Mitchell, H. P. Schmitz, and T. Bruno-van Vijfeijken, Between power and irrelevance (2019)
V.T. Nguyen, The sympathizer (2016)
D.L. Sayers, Clouds of witness (1926)
D.L. Sayers, Unnatural death (1926)
E. Waugh, The ordeal of Gilbert Penfold (1957)
C. Wolmar, Are trams socialist? (2016)
Let's face it. I'm a sucker for the travel literature of the 1950s (and building on what had gone before). To me, it is the golden age, when encounters with the fringes of the European world were still exotic enough to be interesting (this is Spain, but it could happily be the middle east - the cultural distance was less then), and the writing suffused by the historical and cultural bedrock that we have now lost. This is part of that flowering. I also very much liked Duffy's book on misperception, but it was too long, and The Sympathizer, which I thought was excellent, even if you could see the ending a mile off. But they didn't have passages that begin by suggesting that the hotel was 'as commercial as the cave of Ali Baba.' I'm very fond of Lee generally, and this one was no exception. I accept happily that this will be niche; other people should probably read the Vietnamese Pulitzer winner.
