What to read this week, from Richard Dawkins to the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge

BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

“How often is the author of a book still around to mark its 50th anniversary? It’s a disturbing question, not least for the author. But then, how many science books even have a 50th anniversary edition?”

So begins Richard Dawkins in a new essay on AI and human life to mark the 50th anniversary of The Selfish Gene, his groundbreaking, gene-centred treatise on evolution. The book is still being read by new readers in many languages today. This timelessness may well be down to the fact that it “could have been written 100 not 50 years ago”, he writes, as well as the fact that it – or at least its main message – “could be published on any planet in the universe where life exists”. 

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WHAT TO READ NEXT

There Is No Meant to Be by Jarred McGinnis

In 1997, on the day before his 21st birthday, Jarred McGinnis was in a traffic accident that left him unable to walk and rendered him paraplegic. The incident changed the trajectory of his life, but his new book is not about coping with trauma or living with a disability, but is instead an exploration of how to lead a commendable life. The result, There Is No Meant to Be, is a “profoundly moving and philosophical book that approximates memoir but resists the limits of that genre”, writes Colin Grant in his review.

Indeed, the book’s final part takes an “abrupt literary detour down a road as imaginative as it is surprising”, Colin adds. “McGinnis’s daring prose style, with its accounts of visions, deja vu and dreams, has been preparing the reader for this breach of form.”

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Wash by Erica Wagner

In 2017, The Observer’s Erica Wagner published Chief Engineer, a biography of Washington Roebling, the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge. Her fascination with Roebling has endured, and she has now written a novel about him that, according to reviewer Stephanie Merritt, allows her to “begin at that place where biography reaches its limits”.

The novel form allows Wagner to explore Roebling’s supporting characters, including his wife, Emily, who partway through the book takes on the narrative – much like how she took on the burden of her husband’s work on the bridge during the years he was ill. “It might be argued that the test of a historical novel is whether it lives for the reader independently of their familiarity with the known facts, and in this regard Wagner has succeeded admirably,” says Stephanie.

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END NOTES

For this week’s Q&A, I interviewed Tahmima Anam, author of the Bengal trilogy, whose new novel, Uprising, is set on an island in Bangladesh where women live as sex workers – until a new arrival, Kusum, plots to overthrow the cruel madam who controls them. A protest spirit runs through the novel, as it does through Anam’s family, she told me. I asked whether there are collective movements for change that inspire her today. 

“I can’t say there are, but I have to believe that this is going to be another moment of collective action,” she said. “When I was growing up, my mother, who was a feminist raised under colonialism, would say to me: ‘The structures of power will be different in your life than they were in mine. That’s why I have marched on the streets.’ I don’t know if I can say that to my child. That sense of a movement towards equality that we had all agreed on – I feel like that has been stolen, and it must then precipitate action.”

Does that mean you feel hopeful, I asked.

“Mostly I feel angry,” Anam responded. “But people don’t feel angry unless they think things will change. I don’t know if ‘hope’ is the right word, but let’s say I feel agitated.”

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Illustration by Charlotte Durance