The British journalist Peter Oborne’s latest book is a thorough and salient account of how the increase in lies and populist rhetoric in modern politics is jeopardising truth and democracy. Comparing postwar Britain with today, it holds Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to account and exposes the failings of the media in enabling both leaders’ ascent to power. The book, which asks difficult questions and reveals uncomfortable truths, is an urgent examination of politics today.
Simon & Schuster, 192pp, £12.99
When Nadia Owusu is seven years old, two “earthquakes” strike, one seismic – in Armenia – and one psychic: the temporary reappearance of her estranged mother. Objectively unrelated, the twin calamities inaugurate the central metaphor of this probing memoir. Her childhood is full of upheaval, both geographic – the family moves between Tanzania, England, Italy, Ethiopia, and Uganda – and emotional: her father dies when she is 13. Years later, a disturbing revelation about the alleged circumstances of his death provides one of the memoir’s more obvious “aftershocks” – “the Earth’s delayed reaction to stress”. But the psychological repercussions of loss abound in Owusu’s story which is, ultimately, a quest for a sense of home.
Hodder & Stoughton, 320pp, £16.99
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