Amid a flood of sensationalist headlines about declining birth rates, Caroline Magennis’s Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women is a tonic: a tongue-in-cheek manual for dealing with Spanish Inquisition-style questioning about saying pass to procreation and building an enriching life beyond the nuclear family, with references to everything from Prime Suspect to Sheila Heti’s Motherhood.
Meanwhile, Lauren Oyler – whose witty, acerbic critiques reportedly caused the London Review of Books site to crash – follows her 2021 debut novel Fake Accounts with her first book of essays, No Judgement, provocatively dissecting everything from the sexist logic underpinning Brené Brown’s vulnerability cult to the increasingly pervasive false equivalence between physical disease and chronic anxiety (“as real as a tumour, but not the same kind of real”). Expect it to be the most-discussed collection by a female essayist since Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror – a book that Oyler happened to pan in one viral review.
Agnes Arnold-Forster takes a more narrow focus in the illuminating Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion, beginning with the term’s coining by a 17th-century Swiss physician and ending with its weaponisation by MAGA and Brexiteers, while in Vulture Capitalism, Grace Blakeley recasts capitalist democracies as “system[s] of pervasive unfreedom”, a thesis she backs up with excoriating case studies focused on the likes of “the Amazon Chernobyl”, which saw Texaco dump “billions of gallons of toxic waste and crude oil” into the Ecuadorian rainforest.
Shifting from the perils of free markets to the pitfalls of the People’s Republic, Yuan Yang’s Private Revolutions interweaves the stories of a quartet of women born in the wake of China’s Cultural Revolution, from Leiya, a garment factory worker in Shenzhen, to Sam, a middle-class schoolgirl turned Maoist revolutionary. The prose is as powerfully intimate as it is politically incendiary, tackling the censorship and economic voraciousness plaguing China today head on. And if Yuan Yang repudiates her native country’s present, Soas president Zeinab Badawi reclaims her home continent’s past in her sprawling An African History of Africa. Researched across more than 30 countries, it brings the dazzling civilisations of pre-colonial Africa vividly to life. A book that feels both long-overdue – and wholly worth the wait.
