This month’s top 5 books range across history, art and human survival; moving across continents, eras and genres. From minute-by-minute reckonings with a political crisis and a chilling first-hand account of the extremes of tyranny, to quiet acts of wartime preservation and Japanese Noir, these five books offer radically different takes on how individuals navigate moments of extreme pressure. In a world overshadowed by systemic collapse and environmental genocide, they also provide a strangely comforting form of literary schadenfreude, allowing us to process existential grief and collective anxiety.
Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas tr. Anne McLean
A documentary novel about the failed 1981 military coup in Spain, it is ‘A brilliant reconfiguring of a key event in contemporary European history. Audacious and wholly fascinating,’ William Boyd
‘Cercas writes that he originally tried to fictionalize the event and turn it into “a strange experimental version of The Three Musketeers”; that’s exactly how the book turned out and he didn’t have to fictionalise a thing,’ New Yorker
The Barman of the Ritz by Philippe Collin tr. Frank Wynne
Frank Meier is bartender at the world-famous Ritz Hotel on Place Vendôme in Paris during the World War Two Nazi Occupation (1940-44). He serves luxurious cocktails to the likes of Hermann Göring, Coco Chanel, Ernst Jünger and members of the Nazi high command occupying the Ritz, all the while hiding the fact that he is Jewish. To survive, Meier maintains a flawless facade whilst quietly helping others like him. Based on the fate of a real Austrian-born mixologist, author of the 1936 book The Artistry of Mixing Drinks, it is ‘A compelling story of entrapment and survival,’ Kirkus Reviews
Ukrainian Lessons: Art in a Time of War by Charlotte Higgins
‘Higgins never imagined she would report on a war. But in the autumn of 2022, seven months into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she travelled there to cover a literary festival. The experience would change her life. In her searing new book, she details her first-hand account of art, survival and resistance in wartime Ukraine. Drawing on two decades of cultural journalism at the Guardian, three years of reporting trips to Ukraine and her training as a classicist, she explores what artists are prepared to risk – and why culture remains worth fighting for,’ Guardian
Swallows by Natsuo Kirino tr. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
Natsuo Kirino is one of Japan’s most highly decorated authors of psychological Noir novels. Swallows takes a terrifying look at bodily exploitation. Struggling to survive on low-wage temp work in Tokyo, twenty-nine-year-old Riki agrees to become a paid surrogate for Motoi, an obsessive former ballet dancer desperate to pass on his elite genetics, and his emotionally cold wife, Yuko. As the wealthy couple attempts to micro-manage Riki’s life, body and choices, their commercial transaction spirals into a claustrophobic power struggle. Unflinching, acerbic and grounded in the realities of economic precarity, Swallows is a chilling exploration of class inequality and who gets to control a woman’s body.
‘Swallows, with its unforgiving world and heavy themes, ultimately proves a thoughtful meditation on the dehumanizing underbelly of capitalist society,’ Asian Review of Books
Conversations with an Executioner: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto by Kazimierz Moczarski tr. Sean Gasper Bye
‘This fascinating revelation of how a good little middle-class boy turns into a Nazi mass-murderer is all the more chilling for the forensic, at times witty, style in which his horrified cellmate and near-victim records it. A page-turner and must-read for understanding the workings of the Holocaust,’ Adam Zamoyski
‘Extraordinary, original, gripping, and painfully relevant to our times,’ Philippe Sands
BUY Conversations with an Executioner
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