Books in brief: The Discovery of Britain, Bog Queen and We’re Alone

The Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History by Graham Robb (Picador, £22)

Having “discovered” France by bicycle to prize-winning acclaim almost 20 years ago, Graham Robb now packs his panniers for a pedal-powered journey around his native Britain. With the miles mounting, he gains a time-spanning vantage point, back some 500 million years and, tentatively, forwards to the next election. Along the way, he overturns national assumptions and reflects on geography, politics and more. Careful research is mixed with an aptly freewheeling approach, allowing the reader to experience the past as an adventure powered as much by accident as incident. Rarely does history feel so beguiling.

Bog Queen by Anna North (W&N £18.99)

It’s 2018 and in the north of England a homesick American forensic anthropologist named Agnes has been called upon to identify a woman found in a mossy bog, believed to be a 1960s murder victim. When the bones indicate that the body is in fact more than 2,000 years old, Agnes is drawn into an iron age cold case, her progress threatened by both corporate interests and environmentalists. A second narrative strand conjures the dead woman – a young druid on a dicey journey – while the moss, too, is given its own voice. To this resonant mystery, the author Anna North brings a timely exploration of power, landscape and deep time, building a mesmerising novel.

We’re Alone: Essays by Edwidge Danticat (Riverrun, £12.99)

Just eight essays make up this new collection by laurelled author Edwidge Danticat, yet they leave a vivid impression. Woven from memoir, reportage and literary appreciation, they loosely track her passage from Haitian girlhood to American adolescence, and from reader to writer, daughter to mother. She considers life, literature, migration and injustice; describes taking cover after a mass shooting alarm is raised in a Miami mall; and pays homage to those who have shaped her, among them Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Gabriel García Márquez. It all unspools with a storyteller’s enchantment – and humour as well as fury.

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