The best new books: May 2022

By Madeleine Feeny on 3/5/2022

It’s that time of year again: double bank holiday equals double reading time, and warmer weather (we’re manifesting it) means it can be done outside, with wine and a picnic. And if you’re feeling a little too attached to the Great Indoors, our top pick this month, Look Here, will lure you outside, to soak up the great theatre of city life.
We’re also excited about rummaging through Jarvis Cocker’s loft, travelling back in time to 1990s Harvard, and visiting Fire Island through the eyes of the many famous writers and artists who’ve been drawn to this haven, a symbol of sexual freedom and gay community. We’re also devouring a personal exploration of mixed heritage identity and British Empire in the Middle East, from London-based writer and performer Sabrina Mahfouz, and the first novel by essayist Emilie Pine, set in contemporary Dublin.

Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City, by Ana Kinsella

A must-read for Londoners, this book takes a joyful meander through our city’s past and present. Ana Kinsella, the former fashion journalist behind The London Review of Looks, the popular newsletter about street style and strangers, channels Virginia Woolf and Vivian Gornick in this uplifting and perceptive non-fiction debut. Blending history, memoir and urbanism, Look Here celebrates the everyday pleasures of city life. Dublin-raised Kinsella maps her formative experiences onto London’s neighbourhoods – arriving to study fashion in her early twenties, making the city her home – while contemplating issues such as identity, anonymity, community, freedom, public and private space. To reflect the multiplicity of urban life, she interweaves personal vignettes with interviews with a variety of Londoners, from a TFL employee to a photographer. If you enjoyed Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, this is the book for you.

(Daunt Books, 26 May)

Either/Or, by Elif Batuman

If you know, you know. Elif Batuman’s fans have been avidly awaiting the sequel to her 2017 semiautobiographical novel The Idiot, a Pulitzer Prize and Women’s Prize finalist, which centred on the ambiguous email relationship between Selin, a sheltered American-Turkish Harvard freshman with an idiosyncratic worldview, and Ivan, her unavailable crush. In Either/Or it’s 1996 and Selin’s starting her second year of college, pining hopelessly for Ivan, and throwing herself into the uncharted territory of parties, alcohol and sex by way of distraction. She then broadens her search for self-discovery by travelling to her Turkish motherland, where she grapples with her cultural identity and continues her sexual awakening. Throughout it all, she looks to writers, from Kierkegaard to Pushkin, to illuminate the mysteries of ‘the human condition’. A literary coming-of-age novel that manages to be at once profound, unpretentious, and very funny.

(Jonathan Cape, 26 May)

Good Pop, Bad Pop: Not a life story, but a loft story, by Jarvis Cocker

‘The idea that a culture could reveal more of itself through its throwaway items than through its supposedly revered artefacts was fascinating to me. Still is.’ The Pulp frontman is cleaning out his loft and taking us along for the ride. That’s the idea, anyway – and obviously it’s delightful. This illustrated trawl through the flotsam and jetsam of Jarvis Cocker’s life charts his artistic coming-of-age, from his adolescence in 1970s Sheffield – a lost world of jumble sales, punk rock, and smutty mags – through to pop stardom and parenthood. With his trademark wit, Cocker steers us into the dustiest corners of memory lane, unearthing the dogeared exercise books in which he laid out ‘the Pulp Master Plan’ and tracing the genesis of the Pulp aesthetic: ‘using second-hand items to tell a brand-new story’. In so doing, he sheds light on his creative process – writing, musicianship, performance and stagecraft – demonstrating how realising ambitions is as much a matter of attitude as ability.

(Jonathan Cape, 26 May)

Fire Island: Love, Loss and Liberation in an American Paradise, by Jack Parlett

This beautifully written social history of Fire Island, the storied gay utopia just off Long Island, is also a history of queer liberation and community – from the late 19th century through the post-Stonewall disco era and the AIDS crisis to the present day. When Jack Parlett moved to New York to research his PhD, the city became the backdrop against which he forged his identity as a gay man, and the poetry of Frank O’Hara lured him on to Fire Island. This hedonistic idyll, a refuge from antigay oppression, has been a magnet to generations of artists, writers and revellers, including Oscar Wilde, W. H. Auden, Truman Capote, James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith. However, its legacy is far from straightforward, representing a narrow vision of queerness that feels exclusionary to many today. Illuminating the wider historical context, Parlett evocatively captures the magic of bygone heydays, reminding us of ‘the vital need for inclusive queer spaces of our own.’

(Granta, 26 May)

These Bodies of Water, by Sabrina Mahfouz

Sabrina Mahfouz attended an English grammar school, where she felt shame for being an outsider. After university, she was accepted into the Civil Service Fast Stream, where she was ‘the only female Arab, the only Middle Easterner, the only mixed Muslim heritage graduate from a lower socio-economic background’ in a group of a thousand young people. It was an experience that would shift her perspective forever. Blending history, politics, memoir and poetry, this powerful polemic traces the coastlines and waterways that were key to the British Empire asserting dominance in the Middle East, the geopolitical consequences of which are still reverberating today. With fierce honesty and lyricism, Mahfouz maps out the story of British colonialism in the Arab world, grappling with the dark foundations of her privilege and challenging the lie of meritocracy on which modern Britain is built.

(Tinder Press, 12 May)

Ruth & Pen, by Emilie Pine

From the author of the bestselling essay collection Notes to Self comes an intimate, poignant debut novel that intersects the interior and exterior lives of two women in Dublin on a single day in 2019, unremarkable to most but momentous to them. They don’t know each other, but are asking themselves similar questions: how to be with others, and how, when the world won't make space for you, to be with yourself? Ruth is a therapist whose marriage to Aidan may be falling apart. Pen is a teenager who wants her friend Alice to love her. Yet both are struggling to find the right words. As the ordinary and extraordinary coexist in the unfolding day – fertility, grief, catching the bus – Pine weaves a devastating tale of love, loss and missed connections: a work of rare economy and depth of feeling.

(Hamish Hamilton, 5 May)