Work Town by David Hall
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £9.99)
Nella Last’s famous wartime diaries were just one of the fruits of the Mass Observation project, which provided a valuable resource for information on the lives of ordinary people during and after The Second World War. But the story behind the people who set it up is fascinating in its own right, and highly revealing of the prevailing attitudes of the time. Here, David Hall relates how mass observation was brought into being by two very different men: the dedicated anthropologist Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, a communist intellectual who was preoccupied with surrealism but not so hot on methodology. Although coming from opposite directions, both were equally interested in finding out what the people of Britain really thought. Hall has written a thorough and absorbing account of their first project, a year-long study of working-class Bolton in every conceivable detail, lifting the lid on a pioneering team who took over a terraced house and basically learnt as they went along.
The Trout by Peter Cunningham
(Sandstone, £8.99)
Alex Smyth, a retired teacher living by a Canadian lake, is receiving mysterious letters, his wife is seemingly being menaced by a stranger and the couple are starting to wonder if one of their friends is really who he claims to be. What’s more, Alex is tortured by guilt, and shadowy memories of events from his childhood in Ireland half a century earlier involving his domineering father and a sinister priest. Realising his long state of denial has to end, he is drawn back to Ireland to try to make peace with his elderly father and piece together what really happened all those years ago, and is dismayed to see how little his homeland has changed. Although it builds slowly and gracefully into a psychological thriller, The Trout’s main concern is coming to terms with one’s past, both as an individual and a society. Cunningham tells his tale with great economy, in steady, measured prose that treads implacably towards terrible revelations.
Thirty Days by Annelies Verbeke
(World Editions, £11.99)
Originally from Senegal, Alphonse is working as a painter, decorator and odd-job man in the Flemish countryside, near the French border. The job suits him, and he fits well into this new environment. He’s naturally helpful, and people feel they can confide in him. However, tensions mount when he and his girlfriend Cat begin to help a group of Afghans and Syrians at a refugee camp. Alphonse’s blackness, originally welcomed by the locals as exotic and novel, begins to single him out as an outsider. Dutch readers voted this their favourite novel of 2015, and Liz Waters’s elegant translation conveys the warmth and gentle humour of Alphonse’s initial interactions with the local people, the chilly distrust that lurks under the surface and the complexity of his relationship with Cat. Before the chill sets in, though, are encounters with some delightful eccentrics, including a critic who defecates on an author’s carpet and a thief who keeps stolen butterflies in a phone.
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