Islands by Mark Easton
Early in Easton’s thoughtful exploration of the personal and political boundaries shorelines have thrown up across time, the BBC Home Editor introduces us to his muse. It’s a replica statuette he calls Pangaea, taken everywhere from Malta to Canvey. It’s a lovely device to frame this quest to understand both island history and what living in places where isolation meets connectedness actually means. His conclusion? That island syndrome shapes us all – but real fulfilment comes from going beyond our personal shorelines, to take risks – as he has done with this book.
The Fugitives by Jamal Mahjoub
This engaging tale of an old Khartoum jazz band who reform to play a gig in America was somewhat curiously overlooked on its hardback release last year. The Fugitives often reads like a screenplay for a grown-up Sing, the young Rushdy and his idealistic friend Hisham battling to recreate the Kamanga Kings as a means of geographical, psychological and musical escape. The sections when they get to America are less convincing, but Mahjoub does weave in some interesting political and ethnic themes, amid some lovely writing about friendship and music.
Ghost Music by An Yu
The first chapter of An Yu’s follow-up to the similarly other-worldly Braised Pork finds our troubled narrator having a conversation with a mushroom. But Ghost Music is far from fanciful; this is a melancholic, mysterious exploration of a young Beijing pianist grappling with family secrets, a distant husband and the meaning of music and expression. The tone and prose is as minimalist as the surrealism, and although Song Yan’s frequent moments of clarity trip between pompous and pop psychology, she remains an intriguing hero in her restrained, calm acceptance of her lot.
