Books in brief: Havoc, The Lines We Draw and Technology is Not the Problem

Havoc by Rebecca Wait (Riverrun, £16.99)

Sixteen-year-old Ida Campbell has fled family shame on a remote Scottish island and enrolled at a failing boarding school on the south English coast, only to discover she has exchanged one chaotic environment for another. From the arrival of a new teacher with a dark past to a mysterious illness affecting numerous pupils, Rebecca Wait’s fifth book perfectly balances dark humour with a sense of encroaching threat. Her keen ear for dialogue and astute social observations make for a highly enjoyable and multi-layered novel.

The Lines We Draw: The Journalist, the Jew and an Argument About Identity by Tim Franks (Bloomsbury, £20)

BBC journalist Tim Franks embarks on a powerful investigation both into his own heritage and the question of Jewish identity. “Ours was a pollarded family tree,” Franks writes: despite being raised a practising Jew, there was little extended family, and during his childhood in Birmingham in the 1970s, Jews were a minority and antisemitism was rife. Tracing his family history back to the early 18th century, he discovers an international lineage of risk-takers and storytellers, from leading rabbis to fellow journalists.

Technology is Not the Problem by Timandra Harkness (HQ, £10.99)

Examining societal panic about technology’s control of our personal data, Timandra Harkness asks how we arrived at a state of dependence on tech – both psychologically and practically – and questions where we go from here. She does not lay the blame on technology but on us, suggesting that our obsession with ourselves and our need for self-validation is what’s driving an ever-increasing reliance on smartphones and social media.

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