Books of the Month: What to read this July, from a dark satire on war journalism to a memoir told in verse

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a day ago

Summer holidays are a good time to try out new novels, and among the recommended fiction out this month is Connor Hutchinson's sharp debut, Dead Lucky (Corsair), which is set in Openshaw, Manchester. In it, Hutchinson tells the story of an embalmer at a funeral home who is drawn into the addictive world of gambling to pay his debts.
The reliably accomplished John Niven's latest novel is The Fathers (Canongate), a witty account of parenthood and masculinity, while Alexander Starritt's enjoyable Drayton and Mackenzie (Swift) is a tale of two old acquaintances who reunite by chance to form an unusual alliance.
If you are looking for a twisty crime thriller, try Gregory Galloway's All We Trust (Melville House), a gripping story about hardware store-owning brothers who launder money. Their family squabble quickly escalates into a war between crime cartels.
Meanwhile, it seems an apt time to contemplate the plea for sanity contained in Takashi Nagai's The Bells of Nagasaki (Vintage Classics). This slim memoir was written just before his death from leukaemia in 1951. The Japanese physician was there at the moment the atomic bomb was dropped from an American B-29. He describes the flash as looking 'like a huge lantern wrapped in cotton'. Although it's wretched to read a witness account of the 'world of the dead' caused by the nuclear fallout, the book is essentially an urgent call for the bell of peace to sound. And that's something we all need in the demented, dangerous landscape of 2025.
My choices for the novel, memoir and non-fiction book of the month are reviewed in full below:
A 'vulture' journalist is one who chooses to spend their lives 'in the world's most f***ed-up places', making a living from death and disaster. Sara Bryne, a 'stringer' (freelance reporter) for a British broadsheet newspaper, has decided that Gaza in 2012 is a land of opportunity for an ambitious young journalist. 'This war is there for the taking,' she boasts. The compelling protagonist of Phoebe Greenwood's debut novel is, unfortunately, a dysfunctional, walking chaos zone.
Greenwood, who covered the Middle East in the early Noughties for The Telegraph and The Guardian, gives a visceral account of being a war reporter, as she neatly skewers rude news editors, sexually anarchic photographers, and all the minor oddball journalists (including a blogger in a maroon beret) attracted to Gaza's 'mind-bending dimension of misery'. Vulture lays bare how the cynical modern war news industry fails the people whose tragedies fuel it. As we see today, war remains a booming business for the media.
Greenwood seems to be even-handed about the culpability of Hamas and the Israelis in the ongoing conflict. When a ceasefire was announced in late 2012, there was still some last-minute bombing. A fictional (perhaps) Israeli general tells Sara that it is 'their last chance to mow the lawn' – a callous remark that seems to sum up how the horror of daily life in Gaza is normalised.
The novel contains spiky flashback scenes to explain Sara's background – and wry verbal sparring with her mother. There is a witty line about Dulwich being 'the most aggressively mediocre of London's suburbs'.
As Sara's life spirals out of control – not helped by hallucinations and the toxic effects of (gulp) ulcerated genital herpes sores – she makes a dangerous choice that brings on tragedy for others. Vulture is a dark satire with real claws.
'Vulture' by Phoebe Greenwood is published by Europa Editions on 3 July, £16.99
One of the chapters in Mandy Haggith's The Lost Elms is titled 'Death: Elms in the Arts'. Haggith, a writer who is also described as a 'forest activist', states that poems about elms are often poems of grief. Among the novelists who also come into this section are Eugene O'Neill, EM Forster, and Tana French.
Gloomy old Thomas Hardy is in there, too, for The Woodlanders. Hardy's character John South is convinced the elm outside his house will be the end of him: 'There he stands, threatening my life every minute that the wind do blow. He'll come down upon us, and squat us dead.' In fact, it is the elm tree itself in danger of being 'squatted dead', a result of the Dutch elm disease that has wiped out millions of trees across the world.
Haggith's captivating book is full of personal reflections and anecdotes. It is engagingly written and has important things to say about globalisation, the threat of climate change and the value of biosecurity.
The elm, it seems, offers hopeful lessons for how we can save other species.
'The Lost Elms: A Love Letter to Our Vanished Trees – and the Fight to Save Them' by Mandy Haggith is published by Wildfire on 3 July, £22
Although poet and playwright Amanda Quaid does not mention in her memoir that she hails from a famous family – her father is actor Randy Quaid, her uncle Dennis Quaid – there is an oblique reference to her heritage within the witty poem 'Mystery Pain'. In it, she recounts a visit to a male proctologist, stating drolly: 'With his finger in me, told me how much he loved my dad in Independence Day and also I didn't have a rectal tumor.'
Very unusually, No Obvious Distress is a memoir in verse. The poems are funny, moving, wise and constantly surprising, as in 'The Curse', where a random stranger on a flight tells her, 'You're nice, but you're unlucky.' These scary words of foreshadowing come just before her diagnosis for mesenchymal chondrosarcoma – a rare and aggressive malignant tumour that originates in bone or soft tissue. Happily, No Obvious Distress concludes with the poems dealing with the diagnosis that her cancer may be gone following 'the scorch of radiation'.
Quaid deploys a range of poetry styles – there is even a nifty limerick – and makes clever 'poems' from her redacted medical chart notes. I especially enjoyed the heart-rending 'Telling My Mother' and the deftly tragicomic 'The Oncologist Sexologist'. Anyone who has ever undergone a brain scan will recognise the scary beauty in Quaid's three-line 'Haiku':
'In the MRI
I know how the woodpecker
must sound to the tree'
'No Obvious Distress' by Amanda Quaid is published by JM Originals on 24 July, £14.99