BOOK OF THE WEEK
Bonfire of the Murdochs by Gabriel Sherman
Reading the story of how Rupert Murdoch pitted his children against each other in the battle to inherit his media empire, it is impossible not to think of Jesse Armstrong’s inspired HBO show Succession. In fact, as Tina Brown reminds us in her review of Gabriel Sherman’s Bonfire of the Murdochs, Succession had so many elements of the real-life narrative that Murdoch’s ex-wife, Jerry Hall, had to agree in their divorce settlement not to help the showrunners with plot points. Sherman’s book is full of high drama, boardroom coups and familial treachery worthy of Logan Roy and co, though there is a key difference between the two protagonists: Murdoch spends less time on profanity, and more on profit.
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WHAT TO READ NEXT
Glyph by Ali Smith
In 2024, Ali Smith published the near-future dystopia, Gliff. Today the companion piece, Glyph, arrives. It’s no surprise that a novelist fond of doubles and pairs – her 2014 novel How to Be Both was published in two versions, beginning with different halves of the same story – would populate this twinned novel with two sisters named Petra and Patricia. But among all the wit and pleasure of Smith’s punning, tricksy language, writes the novelist and critic Sarah Moss, there is a powerful meditation on childhood, innocence and man’s inhumanity to man.
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Trip to the Moon: Understanding the True Power of Story by John Yorke
A common complaint about Keir Starmer is that he lacks a “story”. But what does the word actually mean when it’s out in the wilds of the real world, beyond the fictional universes of literature and film? The fascinating new book by the screenwriter John Yorke, reviewed by Basia Cummings, attempts to show how story is not just capable of capturing emotional truths or offering escape but, when handled correctly, can transform the world – or destroy it.
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ENDNOTES
"My language is completely impure”
In 2022, Geetanjali Shree became the first Indian writer to win the International Booker prize, for her novel Tomb of Sand – which, in a double record, was the first book in Hindi to win the award. Her third novel, The Roof Beneath Their Feet, is about to appear in English for the first time. To mark the occasion she spoke to Ellen Peirson-Hagger about how the prize changed her life, what we get wrong about the domestic in fiction, and – in the passage below – why she made the moon female:
“India was colonised by the British for so long, so English was my formal medium for education. But your mother tongue – in my case Hindi – never leaves you. Informally, that’s the language in which you are living. The writers who use English are mostly younger than me, and there is a difference between their generation and mine. In some ways, their English is an Indian language. They are using it in their own way, turning English on its head, which is fantastic. But a lot of them are more cut off from their mother tongue than children of my generation. We belong to the time that came immediately after independence, when there was a lot of idealism about India… I have serious critics saying that my language is not Hindi because it is so eclectic and doesn’t always fulfil the expectations of correct grammar usage. I coin a lot of words, and I’ve often quite happily changed the gender of certain words – somewhere I turned “moon”, which is male, female, because I like the moon. I’m proud of that eclecticism. I think there’s something limited in [the critics’] way of seeing, their notion of purity. I’m absolutely against purity. My language is completely impure.”
Illustration by Charlotte Durance
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