This week, non-fiction triumphed with new titles from renowned writers Robert Macfarlane, Rob Cowen and Lamorna Ash.
Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? (Hamish Hamilton) was selected as the Guardian’s book of the day by Blake Morrison. Morrison called Macfarlane’s latest a “timely” book that “remind[s] us of the interconnectedness of the human and the natural world”. Morrison observed: “His prose aspires to poetry throughout.” He concluded: “The battle is to save rivers as living beings. Macfarlane’s impassioned book shows the way, ending on a riskily lyrical high with his arrival as a waterbody complete: ‘I am rivered.’” Philippe Sands, writing for the Financial Times, also reviewed Is a River Alive?: “With crystalline clarity and force, Macfarlane confronts the gross failure of our existing laws to protect rivers from harm.” Sands continued: “Macfarlane offers the power and timeliness of the natural world, in a style familiar to his many readers but now adopting a more overtly political tone, with a call for a new direction.” In an interview with Macfarlane, The Bookseller’s Caroline Sanderson called Is a River Alive? a “captivating” new work from the renowned nature writer.
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Cowen “takes a psycho-geographical approach, combined with history, fiction and autobiography” to his new book The North Road (Hutchinson Heinemann), which explores the A1 as a “metaphor for many things: time, the unity or disunity of Britain, the course of a human life”. Andrew Martin at the Observer selected The North Road as the book of the week, declaring it a “beautifully written book, often giving the purely visual pleasure of a road movie”. The New Statesman’s Kathleen Jamie hailed The North Road as a “wonderful achievement”. She added: “Enchantment is restored. And in doing that, Cowen has perhaps found his country’s elusive sense of identity. It resides not in landscape or football or a National Trust garden, but in an ever-changing, ever-active, thundering dual carriageway.”
Ash’s Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion (Bloomsbury Circus) sees the author travel “the country visiting silent Jesuit retreats, mass baptisms and Quaker meetings, uncovering the ways that young people express their faith”. The Sunday Times’ Laura Hackett noted that Ash’s book “builds to a moving personal conclusion”. She continued: “It is not only a fascinating sociological study and religious memoir but a profound look at the power of ritual and communion with others.” Catherine Pepinster, writing for the Telegraph, called Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever a “Pilgrim’s Progress for our time, with its Sloughs of Despond and Vanity Fairs”.
Open, Heaven (Jonathan Cape), the debut novel from poet Seán Hewitt, was called “sensuous and decadent” by Miriam Balanescu at the Financial Times. The story follows “nostalgic librarian” James who looks back on “one formative summer when he was a teenager”. Balanescu noted that “the propulsive, hormone-addled events of the novel play out against the intoxicating, often cloying atmosphere of an unspoilt English village”. She concluded: “Hewitt’s wistful, reverie-like writing captures the painful queer experience of confusing friendship for romantic love.” Sarah Perry, writing for the Guardian, called Open, Heaven a “tender, skilled and epiphanic work”, adding that “in both his poetry and prose, Hewitt seems to me to be working, with immense fidelity and skill, towards a singular vision, in which profound sincerity of feeling – and the treatment of sexual desire as something close to sacred – is matched with an almost reckless beauty of expression”.
