BOOK OF THE WEEK
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
“There are news bombs on every page of Regime Change but what I relish most is Haberman and Swan’s reporting on the outer ring of what they describe as Trumpworld’s schemers, moochers and pedlars of media malignance.” So writes Tina Brown in her review of a new book on the Trump presidency that “brings the past 18 months back like a bad dream”.
One of Brown’s favourite such characters is the “Truth Social custodian Natalie Harp, Maga’s very own Unity Mitford (the delusional aristocrat sister of Jessica and Nancy who hung around Munich tea rooms to catch Hitler’s eye). Harp is said to leave Trump worshipful notes and feed him shit-stirring content and conspiracy theories for his nocturnal postings.”
Brown concludes that the book is “a flabbergasting feat of political reporting” – a must-read that brings “cool coherence to the inferno of our times”.
WHAT TO READ NEXT
First of December by Karen Jennings
The new novel from the South African author Karen Jennings is a real departure from her previous works, which include the Booker-longlisted An Island (2021) and the Women’s prize-longlisted Crooked Seeds (2024). Firstly, its setting is historical, taking place in the week before 1 December 1838, when slaves in the Cape Colony (what is now South Africa) were fully emancipated. Secondly, its narrative is largely internal, built out of the rolling thoughts of three central characters: James Kendrick, an Englishman abroad in the Cape Colony; his wife, Caroline; and a soon-released enslaved woman, who is given no name.
“What hasn’t changed from the previous books is that Jennings’s characters remain complex and embattled – their greatest conflicts being with themselves – and as a result they feel real,” writes John Self.
You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor
Images of death and destruction are inevitable in this new collection of recent work by 30 poets from Gaza and four from the West Bank.
“If the work is remarkable, so was the manner of its transmission,” writes Chris Power in his review. Because, as editors and translators Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor explain in their introduction, the poets sent in their submissions as text messages and social media posts. It was only after they edited the collection that they realised that whenever someone’s phone connected to a satellite in order to send or receive a message, “they became a potential target”.
“That the poets were willing to take this risk tells of the desperate urgency of the situation,” Chris writes, adding all the more pertinence to this important collection.
FURTHER READING
For this week’s Q&A, I interviewed Emma-Lee Moss, best known as the indie-pop musician Emmy the Great, a stage name she retired in 2023. Moss is now an author: her first book, My Cantopop Nights, is a memoir told through song. We spoke about her childhood in Hong Kong, her teenage years in Sussex, and how her relationship with Cantonese pop holds the secrets to solving her crisis of identity.
How would Moss describe Cantopop, for someone who doesn’t know the genre? “It is a mixture of western pop and Cantonese opera,” she said. Moss went into further depth in this comment, which didn’t make the final cut of the interview:
“When I was tracing [the music’s] origins, I found that you could pinpoint the day the Beatles came to Hong Kong as a starting point. After that, all these young people started western rock bands, including Cantonese-speaking local people who would sing in English. But, gradually, people had more money to spend on records and so people who spoke Cantonese started having a choice in what they bought, and the culture turned towards Cantonese. So all these people who had started western-style rock bands started experimenting with Cantonese, and Cantorock was born. After that it became a free-for-all.”
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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