The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash (Faber & Faber, £12.99)
Ella May Wiggins was a real person, a balladeer who became the public face of the 1929 Loray Mill strike and was murdered for her involvement. She’s the sympathetically-written central character of Cash’s fictionalised account of the strike. A 28-year-old North Carolina mill worker abandoned by her husband with four children and another on the way, Ella May has every reason to agitate for better working conditions, or else “me and these babies are going to die”, and she defies anti-communist hostility to join the National Textile Workers Union and tell her story at a rally. The bitter struggle that claimed her life is told both from her perspective and those of people who knew her, with the author taking pains to represent the various sides of the dispute. Cash believes that this compassionate and respectful book is the best he’ll ever write, and it’s not hard to understand why: he’s turned fact into compelling fiction without doing a disservice to either.
Built On Bodies by Brenna Hassett (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
Today, more than half of the Earth’s population lives in cities, but they have only existed for a tiny proportion of humanity’s history. Was urban living the logical next step for the human race, or has it been a regrettable dead end? Why did so many hunter-gatherers decide to adopt this new lifestyle, and would they have done so if they’d known where it would lead? Brenna Hassett examines how human beings shaped cities and how cities reshaped human beings, describing how settling down encouraged people to work together and paved the way for communities to plan and organise, but also how denser populations led to the growth of inequality and the spread of disease. Hassett, a bio-archaeologist who works at the Natural History Museum, has the skills to trace the spread of syphilis, worsening wisdom teeth problems and decreasing stature, and does so informally and accessibly, largely unhampered by a steady stream of jokes which frequently fall flat.
Homesick For Another World by Ottessa Moshfegh (Vintage, £9.99)
Born in Boston of mixed Croatian and Iranian descent, Moshfegh was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for her novel Eileen. The 14 stories collected here show that she’s no less adept or impressive in the short story format. These are tales of people living on the fringes in some way, stuck in lives they can’t figure a way out of, held back by self-destructive habits or delusions and often physically marked or disfigured in some way. The book’s physicality is one of its hallmarks: Moshfegh rarely passes up an opportunity to describe a bodily function, rash or smell, and characters are repeatedly depicted picking at scabs or squeezing spots. While she invariably denies her readers the resolutions and epiphanies they might feel they have a right to expect, these are nevertheless brilliantly crafted stories from an author at the peak of her powers – the kind of stories that make readers wonder if they’d come across any less weird and maladjusted themselves.
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