BOOK OF THE WEEK
The Savage Landscape by Cal Flynn and Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova
Humankind’s relationship with the natural world is full of contradictions. As Cal Flynn explores in The Savage Landscape, in countries where trophy hunting is practised, animal numbers have risen. Meanwhile Kenya, which banned hunting in 1977, has seen some of the steepest declines on the African continent.
In her review of two new books that detail our often paradoxical attempts to protect the environment from our own destructive nature, Kathleen Jamie also reads Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova, a writer originally from Bulgaria whose book concerns the glens south-west of Inverness. Kassabova describes the communism that blighted her homeland, and “believes a similarly rampant industrial exploitation is occurring in the Highlands now, at the expense of wild land and indigenous culture”, Kathleen writes. “Green energy for Kassabova means only private profiteering and destruction, often by absentee landowners, backed by government.”
Read the review | Order The Savage Landscape and Borrowed Land
WHAT TO READ NEXT
On Memoir by Blake Morrison
“Memoir comes in for a rough time of it, culturally, not least because nobody can agree what it is,” writes Megan Nolan this week. “Its detractors dismiss it as the genre of misery-porn opportunists and incurable narcissists, while its defenders point to Nabokov and Maya Angelou for proof of its potential greatness.”
Whatever side you’re on, you can’t deny it: memoir and all that goes into it continues to intrigue. In On Memoir, Blake Morrison, the author of And When Did You Last See Your Father?, offers an A to Z of short entries exploring the practice of using one’s own life as material. “His own work is referenced,” writes Megan, “but so are dozens of other exceptional memoirs; anyone who is, like me, unquenchably thirsty for them would do well to read this simply to glean new recommendations.”
Prestige Drama by Séamas O’Reilly
Trauma porn, “the Hollywood-ification of Northern Ireland and the rise of Troubles tourism” are the main ingredients in the savagely funny debut novel by regular Observer writer Séamas O’Reilly, writes Olivia Ovenden.
Prestige Drama follows Monica Logue, an American actor and soon-to-be star of a TV series set in the 1970s, who arrives in Derry to research her part – before going missing. In the hullabaloo that follows, O’Reilly captures how the golden era of prestige television has given way to something much darker. The author “has a gift for capturing strange behaviour and the comedy in all of our ugly humanity”, says Olivia.
END NOTES
Yassmin Abdel-Magied was just 20 when she started working on offshore oil rigs, becoming the first woman to be hired by her department in Australia. The experience – a very particular form of outsiderism, given how far away from civilisation her workplaces were – has informed her first novel for adults, At Sea.
In the book, protagonist Zainab comes up against many macho colleagues and their misogynistic behaviour. Many of the novel’s early readers have been horrified by what Zainab faces, Abdel-Magied said on a video call from Toronto, where she is appearing at events for the book’s launch. “I’ve had lots of people [say] ‘I can’t believe that she has to deal with this all the time, it blows my mind.’” But not everyone was shocked by Zainab’s story. “People from other [workplaces], maybe in the emergency room, or surgeons, or people from male-dominated industries, have been like, ‘You really hit on something,’” even telling her that At Sea has given them techniques to cope with being a woman in a male-dominated workplace that they will now put into practice themselves.
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