Mick Herron, Britain's latest spy thriller writer phenomenon, is less patrician than Le Carre and more real world than Lee Child. He manages to put his finger on the irregular, failing pulse of the post Brexit decline and venality UK politics and affairs. News from a broken dysfunctional political system has rarely been so entertaining.,
Scoop is, as the title promises, an incisive look at the absurdity of tabloid journalism and how it may do more damage than good. Written in 1938, it's never been more pertinent than today, with a mass media unable or unwilling to call out the fundamental challenges we face, instead fighting for ratings and holding up our collective intellectual adherence to the status quo. He does so with great wit and a penchant for absurdity. Can't think of a better book about the vacuity of mainstream reporting.
Evelyn Waugh's brilliantly irreverent satire of Fleet Street, now in a beautiful hardback edition with a new Introduction by Alexander Waugh
Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of The Daily Beast, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder, however, and may in a moment of weakness make another. Acting on a dinner party tip from Mrs Algernon Stitch, he feels convinced that he has hit on just the chap to cover a promising little war in the African Republic of Ishmaelia. But for,…
Imperium by Swiss writer Christian Kracht is a novel about colonialism. It follows the travails of a young German vegetarian and nudist who buys an island in Papua New Guinea to set up a utopian society. It's a book about the white man's hubris and predicts the rise of fascism in Germany by shining a light on the way the German colonizers lived in Asia. .
In 1902, a radical vegetarian and nudist from Nuremberg named August Engelhardt set sail for what was then called the Bismarck Archipelago. His destination: the island Kabakon. His goal: to found a colony based on worship of the sun and coconuts. His malnourished body was found on the beach on Kabakon in 1919; he was forty-three years old. In his first novel to be translated into English, internationally bestselling author Christian Krachht uses the outlandish details of Engelhardt's life to craft a fable about the allure of extremism and its fundamental foolishness. Playing with the tropes of classic adventure tales…
In 1992, mechanic Peter Hauser and two friends bought three old cars and set off from southern Germany to cross the Sahara and drive to Togo, where they planned to sell their vehicles.
They never reached their destination. The young, free-wheeling adventurers were ambushed by Tuareg bandits on the Algeria-Mali border, kidnapped and disappeared into the vast nothingness of the desert.
Thirty years later, Peter Hauser lives in a tent between jungle and ocean on a remote archipelago in Southern Thailand. Every day, Peter heads out into the deep blue to swim with tiger sharks, apex predators and masters over life and death, to find out what fear means to all of us.
