The Observer, November 2020
Juve!
Herbie Sykes
Yellow Jersey, £20, pp416
Herbie Sykes has written several fine books on cycling and Italian culture. This keen Italophile now turns his attention to the country’s biggest football team, in a glorious dissection of what Juventus FC means and says about the city of Turin (where Sykes lives) and Italy itself. That means it’s far more than a straight history of La Vecchia Signora; he makes a compelling case for a football club encapsulating the entire psyche of Italy, its capacity for greatness and calamity, ugliness and beauty.
The Heavens
Sandra Newman
Granta, £8.99, pp272
It’s a wonderfully intriguing premise: when Kate goes to sleep in early 21st-century New York (although one where the president is female), she regularly wakes in Shakespearean England, where she believes she is able to have an effect on how history is written, and therefore her present. By placing Kate at the heart of a save-the-world plot, around which she is navigating a relationship, Newman asks us all to think about how we might individually and collectively comprehend our futures in this thoughtful and genuinely gripping novel.
The Beloved Children
Tina Jackson
Fahrenheit, £9.99, pp292
In this vivid journey back into wartime London, three women, Chrysanthemum, Rose and Orange, are thrust together at Fanke’s theatre, a “glittering palace of wonders” where the Three Graces, as they become known, dance and entertain their way into everyone’s affections – unwanted or not. As they come of age, they begin to encounter spectres of bygone performers and fortune tellers, and Rose likens their life to being in a fairytale. There is some really atmospheric storytelling and joyful language at play here, with Jackson as an entertaining mistress of ceremonies.
