BOOK OF THE WEEK
Long Wave by Daisy Johnson
Motherhood and how it destabilises a person is a rich subject for authors. In 2001, Rachel Cusk notably and controversially tackled the topic in memoir form in A Life’s Work, while in fiction, novels including Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh, The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante and Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens have explored this always knotty and emotive theme. One welcome addition to the genre is Long Wave, the latest novel by Daisy Johnson, who in 2018, aged 27, became the youngest author to be shortlisted for the Booker prize for her debut, Everything Under.
Long Wave “did not come from a good place”, Johnson told me when we spoke over the phone last week. The birth of her first son was traumatic, she said, and in the aftermath, she felt “a lot of anger, red rage, despair, fear”. So the book, a hallucinatory tale of three generations of women in the same family, each coming to terms with what it means to be a mother and a daughter, “began as a scream”, Johnson added. “But the book changed as I got better, and as my son grew up, and when we had our second child and began to figure it out.”
WHAT TO READ NEXT
Data Empire by Roopika Risam and Prophecy by Carissa Véliz
“We are now in an era in which the power of data to influence our everyday lives is enormous – and most people are unaware of it,” writes Richard Ovenden in his review of two new books about how the human hunger for information shaped our past, and the extent to which we should allow surveillance capitalism to determine our future.
In Data Empire, Roopika Risam starts with prehistoric cave paintings in southern France and moves forward through time to explore the idea that humans are a “data species”. Meanwhile, philosopher Carissa Véliz’s book Prophecy describes how humans have sought to predict the future, looking at the birth of the algorithm and the growth of insurance markets in early modern Europe. They take very different approaches, but: “Both books leave the reader asking questions about what we can do to deal with the new data regimes, whether controlled by both the state or by big tech,” Ovenden writes.
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Air by Christian Kracht
If you haven’t already heard of the Swiss author Christian Kracht, whose novel Eurotrash was longlisted for the 2025 International Booker prize, you’re likely to see his name more frequently in the coming months: a stage adaptation of that book, which follows a man (to be played by Ben Whishaw) and his alcohol- and pill-addicted elderly mother on a road trip around Switzerland, is set to appear at the Young Vic in London in November.
Before then, Kracht has a new and altogether different novel out: Air. It “melds a semi-Arthurian quest in a medieval world that predicts today’s climate crisis with the very 21st-century story of a designer hired by a lifestyle magazine to paint the subterranean interior of a data centre entirely white”, writes Catherine Taylor. “These two improbable-seeming narratives are at first contrasted, then converge to make an engrossing work that is part science fiction, part parable.”
END NOTES
This month, Colin Grant travelled to Marseille to meet the American writer Claudia Rankine. Her singular and pioneering style blends poetry, essay, criticism and memoir to interrogate racial trauma and the insidious resurgence of white supremacy, themes that recur in her latest work, Triage. Here’s Grant:
“‘When was the first time you realised you were white?’ I asked a friend. She was dumbfounded and gamely tried to answer, but she had never had to think about it before. The simple question – an interrogation of the construction of whiteness – came to me through reading Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. I’m a writer, like Rankine with Jamaican heritage, and her books have become an invaluable touchstone for me; not only do they introduce new ways of seeing, they suggest new ways of revealing.
“With her latest book, Triage, a hybrid with memoir-ish sections, she challenges the notion summed up in a phrase you’ll hear in every diasporic Jamaican household: ‘Me nah like people chat my business.’ Rankine circumvents that code of self-censorship through a literary sleight of hand, making her narrator a composite character who is and isn’t Rankine. Her writing may be revelatory but it still preserves her privacy.”