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One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown review

Craig Browns portrait of the band recaptures their heyday in a series of shimmering vignettes

Fifty years since their dissolution in April 1970 the Beatles live on. The bands music, their significance and their individual personalities exert a hold on the cultural consciousness that seems to tighten as their heyday recedes. But is there anything new to say? Craig Browns One Two Three Four, the latest to enter the crowded library of Beatles books, is not a biography so much as a group portrait in vignettes, a rearrangement of stories and legends whose trick is to make them gleam anew.

The subtitle, The Beatles in Time, marks out the books difference from the rest. Brown goes on Beatles jaunts around Liverpool and Hamburg, visits fan festivals, tests the strength of the industry that has agglomerated around them. So many of the clubs where they played are now lost or changed beyond recognition a memory of a memory and the fans who do the pilgrimages are simply chasing shadows.

Brown, the arch-satirist, is wry about the 1,000-plus Beatles tribute acts worldwide. At times, the slightly desperate nostalgia of International Beatle Week in Liverpool reminds him of his parents watching The Good Old Days in the 1970s, a collective delusion that the dead can be revived. But then he watches tribute band the Fab Four play She Loves You and hes transported. A double fantasy is at work for as long as they play, we are all 50 years younger, gazing in wonder at the Beatles in their prime.

The book is a social history as well as a musical one. Success came slowly at first, and then quickly, as a landslide, flattening those ahead. Cliff Richard, once the golden boy of British pop, sounds (even decades later) mightily miffed about the way the Beatles displaced him. Prime ministers were as susceptible as teenagers: Harold Wilson sought an audience with them and later arranged their MBEs.

In the US, their appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show had a seismic effect: it seemed nobody could talk about anything else. Some responded in bemusement. Cassius Clay, after a jokey photo session with the boys, asked a reporter: Who were those little sissies? The actor Eleanor Bron recalls girls screaming like starlings as the Beatles landed at Heathrow a high sighing hopeless poignant sound, unrequitable. You can almost feel the 1960s bloom from monochrome into colour as the band plays irresistibly on.

Brown is an able memoirist, with an instinct for selection that quite eludes the Beatles most exhaustive chronicler, Mark Lewisohn, whose basic principle is to include everything he knows. One Two Three Four hasnt the authority or the insight of Ian MacDonalds sacred Revolution in the Head, and lacking an index it isnt as useful as Philip Normans 1981 biography Shout! But it does an intriguing sideline in characters who were tangential to the Beatles story such as Richard and Margaret Asher, who welcomed Paul as one of the family into their Wimpole Street home when he was going out with their daughter, Jane. Or the drummer Jimmie Nicol, a Beatle-surrogate for 10 days when Ringo had tonsilitis and whose life thereafter fell through the cracks. Or the sad figure of Eric Clague, former police constable, who discovered by chance that the woman he had accidentally run down and killed years before was Julia Lennon, Johns mum.

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The Beatles in Washington DC, 1964. Photograph: Copyright Apple Corps

This is the strange paradox of the Beatles. Listening to the sound that John, Paul, George and Ringo created still plugs us right into the happiness and exhilaration that their producer, the gentlemanly George Martin, talked of. Reading about them, conversely, is quite a melancholy experience, because the end seems always in sight.

Its noticeable in this book how, once they are famous, they become prey to the most outrageous hangers-on. This vulnerability is most evident in John, the prickliest of the four, and also the neediest. He was first seduced by Magic Alex, a Greek conman whom he appointed his guru and electronics expert. Then he and George fell under the spell of the Maharishi.

Finally, and fatefully, came Yoko Ono, who John initially assured his wife Cynthia was crackers, just a weirdo artist who wants me to sponsor her. Brown reserves a particular scorn for Yoko, not because she broke up the Beatles that was inevitable but because her narcissism egged Lennon on to painful extremes of silliness and self-importance.

The saddest irony was that the Beatles once did have someone to take care of them. The Hamlets Ghost of this book is Brian Epstein, whose story Brown plots in reverse from the eclipse of his lonely suicide to the bright-eyed overtures as manager and impresario. It makes a poignant epilogue. Of course that story is nothing without the Beatles talent, but here is the reminder of how Epstein discovered it, packaged it, and sold it. Had he not taken himself down the steps of the Cavern Club one lunchtime in November 1961, the world might never have heard of the Beatles. As Lennon once admitted: Brian made it all seem real. We were in a daydream til he came along We stopped chomping at cheese rolls and jam butties onstage.

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Timeby Craig Brownis published by Fourth Estate (20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over 15

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/13/one-two-three-four-the-beatles-in-time-by-craig-brown-review

Dolly Parton pledges $1m to coronavirus vaccine research

Donation to Tennessee institute comes as country star launches bedtime story initiative to offer a welcome distraction for children

Dolly Parton has donated $1m (800,000) to research into a coronavirus vaccine, as she begins a new storytelling series for children in lockdown.

The country music star wrote on Instagram:

My longtime friend Dr Naji Abumrad, whos been involved in research at Vanderbilt for many years, informed me that they were making some exciting advancements towards that research of the coronavirus for a cure. I am making a donation of $1 million to Vanderbilt towards that research and to encourage people that can afford it to make donations.

Abumrad works at the Vanderbilt Institute for Infection, Immunology and Inflammation at Vanderbilt University hospital in Nashville, Tennessee. He and Parton became friends in 2014 after the singer was involved in a car accident and was treated at Vanderbilt. His son, Jad, subsequently interviewed Parton for the podcast Dolly Partons America.

Numerous teams are working on research into a coronavirus vaccine. US biotech firm Moderna began trials for a vaccine on 16 March, with Chinese firm CanSino Biologics launching its own trials the same day. The World Health Organization lists 52 other firms developing potential vaccines.

Parton is fighting another front of the coronavirus crisis: bored children. On Thursday she is launching Goodnight With Dolly, a bedtime story series on YouTube, beginning with a reading of The Little Engine That Could. She said she hoped the series would be a welcome distraction during a time of unrest, and inspire a love of reading and books.

Parton has long championed reading, with her charity, Imagination Library, having given more than 130m books to children.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/apr/02/dolly-parton-1m-coronavirus-vaccine-research

Fever dreams: did author Dean Koontz really predict coronavirus?

From Wuhan-400, the deadly virus invented by Dean Koontz in 1981, to the plague unleashed in Margaret Atwoods Oryx and Crake, novelists have long been fascinated by pandemics

According to an online conspiracy theory, the American author Dean Koontz predicted the coronavirus outbreak in 1981. His novel The Eyes of Darkness made reference to a killer virus called Wuhan-400 eerily predicting the Chinese city where Covid-19 would emerge. But the similarities end there: Wuhan-400 is described as having a killrate of 100%, developed in labs outside the city as the perfect biological weapon. An account with more similarities, also credited by some as predicting coronavirus, is found in the 2011 film Contagion, about a global pandemic that jumps from animals to humans and spreads arbitrarily around the globe.

But when it comes to our suffering, we want something more than arbitrariness. We want it to mean something. This is evident in our stories about illness and disease, from contemporary science fiction all the way back to Homers Iliad. Even malign actors are more reassuring than blind happenstance. Angry gods are better than no gods at all.

In Homers Iliad, the Greeks disrespect one of Apollos priests. The god manifests his displeasure by firing his arrows of contagion into their camp. The plague lasts nine days, brief by modern epidemiological standards. When the Greeks make amends and sacrifice sheep and goats to Apollo, the plague is cured.

Seven centuries later a plague struck Periclean Athens, killing a quarter of the citys population and setting the city-state on a path to military defeat at the hands of Sparta. Thucydides, the Athenian historian, has a simple explanation for the epidemic: Apollo. The Spartans had cannily supplicated the god and he in return had promised victory. Soon afterwards, Spartas enemies started dying of the plague. Hindsight suggests that Athens, under siege its population swollen with refugees, everyone living in unsanitary conditions was at risk of contagion in a way the Spartan army, free to roam the countryside outside, clearly wasnt. But this thought doesnt occur to Thucydides. It can only be the god.

Between then and now there have been prodigious advances in medical science. We understand contagious disease vastly better, and have a greater arsenal of medicine and hygiene to fight it. But in one respect we havent advanced at all. We still tend to see agency in our pandemics.

Disease has no agency. Bacteria and viruses spread blindly where they can, their pathways facilitated by our globalised world. We, meanwhile, bring to the struggle our ever-improving drugs and hygiene. With Covid-19, experts insist, your two best bets are: wash your hands often, touch your face never. But people do not warm to the existential arbitrariness of this. Just as the Peloponnesian plague was seen as evidence that the gods were angry with Athens, so HIV was seen by a deluded minority as Gods judgment on homosexuals. Of course, HIV spreads wherever it can and cares nothing for your morals or sexual orientation.

This attribution of agency is clearest in the many imaginary plagues science-fiction writers have inflicted on humanity. In place of gods we have aliens, like those in Alice Sheldons chilling and brilliant short story The Screwfly Solution (1977). A new disease provokes men to begin murdering women en masse. At the storys end we discover an alien species had introduced a brain infection so that the human race will destroy itself and the aliens can inherit the emptied planet. Its a story about what we now call toxic masculinity and it says: its not gods we have angered, but goddesses.

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A scene from The Andromeda Strain (1970), directed by Robert Wise. Photograph: Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Sometimes the alien plague is less picky. In HP Lovecrafts The Colour Out of Space (1927; recently filmed, starring Nicolas Cage) an alien infection arrives via meteorite, wastes the land and drives people mad. In Michael Crichtons The Andromeda Strain (1969) potentially world-ending contagion falls from outer space. This bug repeatedly mutates as Earths scientists try to combat it. Were doomed or would be, if it werent for the tales germus ex machina ending, in which the alien spontaneously mutates into a benign form.

If its not aliens behind our world-threatening plague, then it is probably that other SF stalwart, the mad scientist. Dozens of zombie franchises start with a rogue scientist infecting the population with a genetically engineered bioweapon virus. In Frank Herberts The White Plague (1982) a geneticist, pushed into insanity by the murder of his family, creates a pathogen that kills all humanitys females. A cure is eventually found, but not before the worlds population balance has been shifted to leave thousands of men to every woman.

In Joanna Russs feminist masterpiece The Female Man (1975), Whileaway, a gender-specific virus has wiped out all the men, creating an effective utopia for women left behind, procreating by parthenogenesis and living in harmony. By the novels end it is hinted that the man-destroying plague was actually engineered by a female scientist. Never mind the antibacterial handwash: it is patriarchy that we need to scrub out.

So characteristic is assigning agency to pandemics in todays culture that a video game such as Plague Inc (Ndemic Creations 2012) styles its players not as doctors attempting to stop the spread of a pandemic, but as the sickness itself. The players mission is to help their plagues spread and exterminate the human race. In HG Wellss seminal War of the Worlds (1898) and in its various modern retellings, including Independence Day (1996), the virus is on our side, destroying alien invaders that lack our acquired immunity.

One of the most striking twists on this conceit is Greg Bears novel Blood Music (1985). A scientist, angry at being sacked by his lab, smuggles a virus out into the world in his own body. It infects everybody, becomes self-aware, and assimilates everybody and everything to itself: human beings and their infrastructure melt down into a planetwide sea of hyperintelligent grey goo. It sounds unpleasant, but its actually a liberation: the accumulation of concentrated consciousness, our own included, punches through a transcendent new realm. The plague becomes a kind of secular Rapture.

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The mad scientists of Channel 4s Utopia hope their germ will wipe out humanity. Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy

If on some level we still think of contagion as the gods anger, these stories become about how we have angered the god about, in other words, our guilt. When Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver planned their reboot of the Planet of the Apes franchise, they decided an agent, a neuroenhancer spliced into simian flu, would both raise the apes level of intelligence and prove fatal to humans. The resulting movie trilogy (2011-17) was more than just a commercial hit; it proved an eloquent articulation of broader environmental concerns. The few surviving humans move through the films lush rejuvenated forestscapes, compelled to confront avatars of humanitys generational contempt for the natural world.

The plague that has destroyed us has uplifted these animals, given them wisdom, and they are angry with us why wouldnt they be? Its a common genre trope. The scientist in Alistair MacLeans The Satan Bug (1965) is an environmental fundamentalist who hopes his germ will wipe out humanity. The mad scientists from Channel 4s TV drama Utopia (201314) and Margaret Atwoods Oryx and Crake trilogy are both driven by the same animus.

Having invested ourselves with the crown of all creation, coronavirus arrives to puncture our hubris. Think of the computer intelligence Agent Smith inThe Matrix (1999), played with sneering panache by Hugo Weaving: humans, he tells Laurence Fishburnes Morpheus, are incapable of developing a natural equilibrium with their environment: You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. In this telling, we are the virus.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/05/theres-something-out-there-spread-of-disease

Coming out as Dalit: how one Indian author finally embraced her identity

Raised to hide her low caste, Yashica Dutts new book traces her realisation that her history is one of oppression, not shame

Pretending not to be a Dalit took a heavy toll on the young Yashica Dutt.

Her mother, Shashi, was so determined to protect her three children from the discrimination of the Hindu caste system that relegates Dalits to the periphery of society that she pretended the family were Brahmin.

Shashi worked hard to find the money throw birthday parties, have curtains on the windows, and to follow traditional rituals correctly. But for the children it meant that one wrong word or gesture while playing with friends or buying sweets from a shopkeeper could expose the lie.

It was only after she had grown up, that Dutt, a writer and journalist, began to understand the trauma of her childhood. When she began therapy in New Delhi six years ago, she simply asked her analyst: Help me to live.

I was always second-guessing myself, wondering if I had said the right thing, asking myself would upper caste people with happier childhoods have said it better or done it differently? I had so much doubt from feeling like an imposter, she says.

Dutt recounts the story in her book, Coming Out as Dalit.It tells of her mothers ambition to overcome poverty and give her children an education, without support and with an alcoholic husband. Dutt went to boarding school and then studied at St Stephens, perhaps the most prestigious university in India. She worked as a journalist in New Delhi and pursued a masters at Columbia University in New York, where she now lives and works for an advertising agency.

In the US Dutt, 34, discovered a parallel with her own experience. She heard some lighter-skinned African Americans talk of how they used to pass as white, assuming certain habits, tastes, language and mannerisms, just as her mother had mimicked those of upper caste Hindus.

As part of her book tour, Dutt was back in India appearing at the Jaipur Literature Festival last month; when the Guardian met her in a New Delhi cafe, she cut a striking figure with her wavy hair, black leather jacket and hands flashing with chunky rings.

Guilt entered her soul early and settled into sediment, she says. First it was guilt at her mother educating her when she could not afford it. Then it was guilt at having survived and enjoyed opportunities for education that so many in her community had never had and never would.

Her parents, though poor, were educated and lived in a city (Ajmer in Rajasthan) rather than a village and that allowed the family to conceal its caste in a way that is impossible for the majority of Indias approximately 200 million Dalits who live in rural areas.

Conversely, Dutt is concerned about the absence of guilt among upper caste Indians. While some white people joined the civil rights moment in the US or the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, the upper castes are nowhere to be seen in the Dalit struggle against discrimination, she says.

On the contrary, she says, there isnt even the same kind of open discourse here of the kind you have in the US about racism, white supremacy, which is all mainstream. Instead of acknowledging discrimination, upper caste Indians, instead of taking responsibility, have deluded themselves into thinking they are already living in a post-caste society.

She marks parallels with America in the wilful innocence that James Baldwin wrote of in that white Americans failed to understand what they had done to African Americans and that the race problem was their problem.

At Columbia, she was astounded to find black, Hispanic and gay classmates openly sharing their stories of discrimination without feeling any need to hide. Their accounts did not lead to the kind of social isolation she used to fear, but rather elicited sympathy from fellow students.

Even Dutts moments of triumph as a young girl, she says, were accompanied by self-flagellation. After much imploring by Shashi, she was finally accepted by Mussoorie Public School where her mother hoped she would pick up all the remaining social markers of upper caste culture from the other girls that she would need throughout her life to blend in.

Dutt came top of her class. I felt nothing. To my mind, if someone like me could score so well, then this school couldnt be all that great, she says.

Caste haunted Dutt, who choose to work as a fashion journalist in India, eschewing politics for fear that in writing a story or expressing an opinion she might reveal her caste. The fear of being outed was a permanent cloud. If people knew, would they even sit next to me?

It was not until 2016, in New York, that Dutt felt able to come out. That year, suicide of a Dalit student, Rohith Vemula, at Hyderabad University, was a huge story in India. His last letter began: My birth is my fatal accident.

Unlike me, Rohith did nothing to bury his Dalitness. Instead, he used it to stand up for Dalit students at Hyderabad University, she writes in her book. His pride and courage despite enjoying none of her advantages prompted Dutt to write a Facebook post announcing her real caste. Vemulas death, she wrote, made me realise that my history is one of oppression, not shame.

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The mother of Dalit PhD student Rohith Vemula cradles a photograph of her son. Photograph: Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

The reaction from colleagues, friends, and acquaintances ranged from shock and dismay to support and praise. Oh, you dont look like a Dalit, was one particularly inane remark.

Dutts book is part of a wave of Dalit literature, art, music and experiences finally coming to the fore in India. Dalit film directors are making films on caste. Dalit Twitter is a vibrant platform. Social media generally has become a powerful forum for sharing experiences and presenting a counter perspective to social phenomena.

Dutt feels she is now a whole person, at home in her own skin. I have nothing to hide, she says.

Whether her mother was right in her decision to conceal her childrens caste is a question that Dutt says she still does not have sufficient objective distance from.

Right now, I believe it was the right choice. She was trying to protect us and give us a good education, she says, adding, in any case, parents always fuck up their children in one way or another, dont they?

Coming Out as Dalit is published by Aleph Book Company

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/feb/19/coming-out-as-dalit-how-one-indian-author-finally-embraced-her-identity

Malena Ernman on daughter Greta Thunberg: She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness

A new book by Greta Thunbergs mother reveals the reality of family life during her daughters transformation from bullied teenager to climate icon

Gretas father, Svante, and I are what is known in Sweden as cultural workers trained in opera, music and theatre with half a career of work in those fields behind us. When I was pregnant with Greta, and working in Germany, Svante was acting at three different theatres in Sweden simultaneously. I had several years of binding contracts ahead of me at various opera houses all over Europe. With 1,000km between us, we talked over the phone about how we could get our new reality to work.

Youre one of the best in the world at what you do, Svante said. And as for me, I am more like a bass player in the Swedish theatre and can very easily be replaced. Not to mention you earn so damned much more than I do. I protested a little half-heartedly but the choice was made.

A few weeks later we were at the premiere for Don Giovanni at the Staatsoper in Berlin and Svante explained his current professional status to Daniel Barenboim and Cecilia Bartoli.

So now Im a housewife.

We carried on like that for 12 years. It was arduous but great fun. We spent two months in each city and then moved on. Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Barcelona. Round and round. We spent the summers in Glyndebourne, Salzburg or Aix-en-Provence. As you do when youre good at singing opera and other classical music. I rehearsed 20 to 30 hours a week and the rest of the time we spent together.

Beata was born three years after Greta and we bought a Volvo V70 so wed have room for dolls houses, teddy bears and tricycles. Those were fantastic years. Our life was marvellous.

One evening in the autumn of 2014, Svante and I sat slumped on our bathroom floor in Stockholm. It was late, the children were asleep. Everything was starting to fall apart around us. Greta was 11, had just started fifth grade, and was not doing well. She cried at night when she should be sleeping. She cried on her way to school. She cried in her classes and during her breaks, and the teachers called home almost every day. Svante had to run off and bring her home to Moses, our golden retriever. She sat with him for hours, petting him and stroking his fur. She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And she stopped eating.

We sat there on the hard mosaic floor, knowing exactly what we would do. We would change everything. We would find the way back to Greta, no matter the cost. The situation called for more than words and feelings. A closing of accounts. A clean break.

How are you feeling? Svante asked. Do you want to keep going?

No.

OK. Fuck this. No more, he said. Well cancel everything. Every last contract, Svante went on. Madrid, Zurich, Vienna, Brussels. Everything.

One Saturday soon afterwards, we decide were going to bake buns, all four of us, the whole family, and were determined to make this work. It has to. If we can bake our buns as usual, in peace and quiet, Greta will be able to eat them as usual, and then everything will be resolved, fixed. Its going to be easy as pie. Baking buns is after all our favourite activity. So we bake, dancing around in the kitchen so as to create the most positive, happiest bun-baking party in human history.

But once the buns are out of the oven the party stops in its tracks. Greta picks up a bun and sniffs it. She sits there holding it, tries to open her mouth, but cant. We see that this isnt going to work.

Please eat, Svante and I say in chorus. Calmly, at first. And then more firmly. Then with every ounce of pent-up frustration and powerlessness. Until finally we scream, letting out all our fear and hopelessness. Eat! You have to eat, dont you understand? You have to eat now, otherwise youll die!

Then Greta has her first panic attack. She makes a sound weve never heard before, ever. She lets out an abysmal howl that lasts for over 40 minutes. We havent heard her scream since she was an infant.

I cradle her in my arms, and Moses lies alongside her, his moist nose pressed to her head. Greta asks, Am I going to get well again?

Of course you are, I reply.

When am I going to get well?

I dont know. Soon.

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Malena Ernman and Svante Thunberg with their daughters, newborn Beata and Greta aged three, 2005. Photograph: Lizzie Larsson/TT/PA Images

On a white sheet of paper fixed to the wall we note down everything Greta eats and how long it takes for her to eat it. The amounts are small. And it takes a long time. But the emergency unit at the Stockholm Centre for Eating Disorders says that this method has a good long-term success rate. You write down what you eat meal by meal, then you list everything you can eat, things you wish you could eat and things you want to be able to eat further down the line.

Its a short list. Rice, avocados and gnocchi.

School starts in five minutes. But there isnt going to be any school today. There isnt going to be any school at all this week. Yesterday Svante and I got another email from the school expressing their concern about Gretas lack of attendance, despite the fact that they were in possession of several letters from both doctors and psychologists explaining her situation.

Again, I inform the school office of our situation and they reply with an email saying that they hope Greta will come to school as usual on Monday so this problem can be dealt with. But Greta wont be in school on Monday. Because unless a sudden dramatic change occurs shes going to be admitted to Sachsska childrens hospital next week.

Svante is boiling gnocchi. It is extremely important that the consistency is perfect, otherwise it wont be eaten. We set a specific number of gnocchi on her plate. Its a delicate balancing act; if we offer too many our daughter wont eat anything and if we offer too few she wont get enough. Whatever she ingests is obviously too little, but every little bite counts and we cant afford to waste a single one.

Then Greta sits there sorting the gnocchi. She turns each one over, presses on them and then does it again. And again. After 20 minutes she starts eating. She licks and sucks and chews: tiny, tiny bites. It takes for ever.

Im full, she says suddenly. I cant eat any more.

Svante and I avoid looking at each other. We have to hold back our frustration, because weve started to realise that this is the only thing that works. Weve explored all other tactics. Every other conceivable way. Weve ordered her sternly. Weve screamed, laughed, threatened, begged, pleaded, cried and offered every imaginable bribe. But this seems to be what works the best.

Svante goes up to the sheet of paper on the wall and writes:

Lunch: 5 gnocchi. Time: 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Not eating can mean many things. The question is what. The question is why. Svante and I look for answers. I spend the evenings reading everything I can find on the internet about anorexia and eating disorders. Were sure its not anorexia. But, we keep hearing that anorexia is a very cunning disorder and will do anything to evade discovery. So we keep that door wide open.

I speak endlessly to the childrens psychiatry service (BUP), the healthcare information service, doctors, psychologists and every conceivable acquaintance who may be able to offer the least bit of knowledge or guidance.

At Gretas school theres a psychologist who is experienced with autism. She talks with both of us on the phone and says that a careful investigation must still be conducted, but in her eyes and off the record Greta shows clear signs of being on the autism spectrum. High-functioning Aspergers, she says.

Meeting after meeting follows where we repeat our story and explore our options. We talk away while Greta sits silently. She has stopped speaking with anyone except me, Svante and Beata. Everyone really wants to offer all the help they can but its as if theres no help to be had. Not yet, at least. Were fumbling in the dark.

After two months of not eating Greta has lost almost 10kg, which is a lot when you are rather small to begin with. Her body temperature is low and her pulse and blood pressure clearly indicate signs of starvation. She no longer has the energy to take the stairs and her scores on the depression tests she takes are sky high. We explain to our daughter that we have to start preparing ourselves for a stay at the hospital, where its possible to get nutrition and food without eating, with tubes and drips.

In mid-November theres a big meeting at BUP. Greta sits silently. As usual. Im crying. As usual. If there are no developments after the weekend then well have to admit you to the hospital, the doctor says.

On the stairs down to the lobby Greta turns round. I want to start eating again. All three of us burst into tears and we go home and Greta eats a whole green apple. But nothing more will go down. As it turns out, its a little harder than you think to just start eating again. We take a few careful, trial steps and it works. We inch forward. She eats tiny amounts of rice, avocado and bananas. We take our time. And we start on sertraline, an antidepressant.

Do they always look at you that way?

Dont know. Think so.

Svante and Greta have been at the end-of-term ceremony at school where they tried to make themselves invisible in the corridors and stairwells. When students openly point and laugh at you even though youre walking alongside your parent then things have gone too far. Way too far.

At home in the kitchen, Svante explains to me what theyve just experienced while Greta eats her rice and avocado. I get so angry at what I hear that I could tear down half the street we live on with my bare hands, but our daughter has a different reaction. Shes happy its in the open.

She devotes the whole Christmas break to telling us about unspeakably awful incidents. Its like a movie montage featuring every imaginable bullying scenario. Stories about being pushed over in the playground, wrestled to the ground, or lured into strange places, the systematic shunning and the safe space in the girls toilets where she sometimes manages to hide and cry before the break monitors force her out into the playground again. For a full year, the stories keep coming. Svante and I inform the school, but the school isnt sympathetic. Their understanding of the situation is different. Its Gretas own fault, the school thinks; several children have said repeatedly that Greta has behaved strangely and spoken too softly and never says hello. The latter they write in an email.

They write worse things than that, which is lucky for us, because when we report the school to the Swedish schools inspectorate were on a firm footing and theres no doubt that the inspectorate will rule in our favour.

I explain to Greta that shell have friends again, later. But her response is always the same. I dont want to have a friend. Friends are children and all children are mean.

Gretas pulse rate gets stronger and finally the weight curve turns upwards strongly enough for a neuropsychiatric investigation to begin.

Our daughter has Aspergers, high-functioning autism and OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder. We could formally diagnose her with selective mutism, too, but that often goes away on its own with time, the doctor tells us. We arent surprised. Basically, this was the conclusion we drew several months ago.

On the way out, Beata calls to tell us shes having dinner with a friend, and I feel a sting of guilt. Soon well take care of you too, darling, I promise her in my mind, but first Greta has to get well.

Summer is coming, and we walk the whole way home. We almost dont even need to ration the burning of calories any more.

Six months after Greta received her diagnosis, life has levelled out into something that resembles an everyday routine. She has started at a new school. Ive cleared my calendar and put work on the back burner. But while were full up with taking care of Greta, Beatas having more and more of a tough time. In school everything is ticking along. But at home she falls apart, crashes. She cant stand being with us at all any more. Everything Svante and I do upsets her and in our company she can lose control. She is clearly is not feeling well.

One day near her 11th birthday I find her standing in the living room, hurling DVDs from the bookshelf down the spiral staircase to the kitchen. You only care about Greta. Never about me. I hate you, Mum. You are the worst bloody mother in the whole world, you bloody fucking bitch, she screams as Jasper the Penguin hits me on the forehead.

Its autumn 2015 when Beata undergoes an evaluation for various neurodevelopmental disorders. She is diagnosed with ADHD, with elements of Aspergers, OCD and ODD [oppositional defiant disorder]. Now that she has the diagnosis it feels like a fresh start for her, an explanation, a redress, a remedy. At school she has marvellous teachers who make everything work. She doesnt have to do homework. We drop all activities. We avoid anything that may be stressful. And it works. Whatever happens we must never meet anger with anger, because that, pretty much always, does more harm than good. We adapt and we plan, with rigorous routines and rituals. Hour by hour. We try to find habits that work.

Greta
Outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm, August 2018. Photograph: Anders Hellberg

The fact that our children finally got help was due to a great many factors. In part it was about existing care, proven methods, advice and medication. It was also thanks to our own toil, patience, time and luck that Greta and Beata found their way back on their feet. However, what happened to Greta in particular cant be explained simply by a psychiatric label. In the end, she simply couldnt reconcile the contradictions of modern life. Things simply didnt add up. We, who live in an age of historic abundance, who have access to huge shared resources, cant afford to help vulnerable people in flight from war and terror people like you and me, but who have lost everything.

In school one day, Gretas class watches a film about how much rubbish there is in the oceans. An island of plastic, larger than Mexico, is floating around in the South Pacific. Greta cries throughout the film. Her classmates are also clearly moved. Before the lesson is over the teacher announces that on Monday there will be a substitute teaching the class, because shes going to a wedding over the weekend, in Connecticut, right outside of New York. Wow, lucky you, the pupils say. Out in the corridor the trash island off the coast of Chile is already forgotten. New iPhones are taken out of fur-trimmed down jackets, and everyone who has been to New York talks about how great it is, with all those shops, and Barcelona has amazing shopping too, and in Thailand everything is so cheap, and someone is going with her mother to Vietnam over the Easter break, and Greta cant reconcile any of this with any of what she has just seen.

She saw what the rest of us did not want to see. It was as if she could see our CO2 emissions with her naked eye. The invisible, colourless, scentless, soundless abyss that our generation has chosen to ignore. She saw all of it not literally, of course, but nonetheless she saw the greenhouse gases streaming out of our chimneys, wafting upwards with the winds and transforming the atmosphere into a gigantic, invisible garbage dump.

She was the child, we were the emperor. And we were all naked.

You celebrities are basically to the environment what anti immigrant politicians are to multicultural society, Greta says at the breakfast table early in 2016. I guess its true. Not just of celebrities, but of the vast majority of people. Everyone wants to be successful, and nothing conveys success and prosperity better than luxury, abundance and travel, travel, travel.

Greta scrolls through my Instagram feed. Shes angry. Name a single celebrity whos standing up for the climate! Name a single celebrity who is prepared to sacrifice the luxury of flying around the world!

I was a part of the problem myself. Only recently I had been posting sun-drenched selfies from Japan. One Good morning from Tokyo and tens of thousands of likes rolled in to my brand-new iPhone. Something started to ache inside of me. Something Id previously called travel anxiety or fear of flying but which was now taking on another, clearer form. On 6 March 2016 I flew home from a concert in Vienna, and not long after that I decided to stay on the ground for good.

A few months later we walked home from the airport shuttle having met Svante and Beata off a flight from Rome.You just released 2.7 tonnes of CO2, Greta says to Svante. And that corresponds to the annual emissions of five people in Senegal. I hear what youre saying, Svante says, nodding. Ill try to stay on the ground from now on, too.

Fridays
Fridays For Future climate change protest, Stockholm, November 2018. Photograph: IBL/Shutterstock

Greta started planning her school strike over the summer of 2018. Svante has promised to take her to a building suppliers to buy a scrap piece of wood that she can paint white and make a sign out of. School Strike for the Climate, it will say. And although more than anything we want her to drop the whole idea of going on strike from school we support her. Because we see that she feels good as she draws up her plans better than she has felt in many years. Better than ever before, in fact.

On the morning of 20 August 2018, Greta gets up an hour earlier than on a regular school day. She has her breakfast. Fills a backpack with schoolbooks, a lunchbox, utensils, a water bottle, a cushion and an extra sweater. She has printed out 100 flyers with facts and source references about the climate and sustainability crisis.

She walks her white bicycle out of the garage and rolls off to parliament. Svante cycles a few metres behind her, with her home-made sign under his right arm The weather is rather lovely. The sun is rising behind the old town and there is little chance of rain. The cycle paths and pavements are filled with people on their way to work and school.

Outside the prime ministers office, Greta stops and gets off her bicycle. Svante helps her take a picture before they lock the bicycles. Then she nods an almost invisible goodbye to Dad and, with the sign in her arms, staggers around the corner towards the government block where she stops and leans the sign against the greyish-red granite wall. Sets out her flyers. Settles down.

She asks a passerby to take another picture with her phone and posts both pictures on social media. After a few minutes the first sharing on Twitter starts. The political scientist Staffan Lindberg retweets her post. Then come another two retweets. And a few more. The meteorologist Pr Holmgren. The singer-songwriter Stefan Sundstrm. After that, it accelerates. She has fewer than 20 followers on Instagram and not many more on Twitter. But thats already changing.

Now there is no way back.

A documentary film crew shows up. Svante calls and tells her that the newspaper Dagens ETC has been in touch with him and are on their way. Right after that [another daily newspaper] Aftonbladet shows up and Greta is surprised that everything is moving so fast. Happy and surprised. She wasnt expecting this.

Ivan and Fanny from Greenpeace show up and ask Greta if everything is OK. Can we help with anything? they ask. Do you have a police permit? Ivan asks. She doesnt. She didnt think a permit would be needed. But evidently it is. I can help you, Ivan says.

Greenpeace is far from alone in offering its support. Everyone wants to do their utmost to help out. But Greta doesnt need any help. She manages all by herself. She is interviewed by one newspaper after the next. The simple fact that she is talking to strangers without feeling unwell is an unexpected joy for us parents. Everything else is a bonus.

The first haters start to attack, and Greta is openly mocked on social media. She is mocked by anonymous troll accounts, by rightwing extremists. And she is mocked by members of parliament. But thats no surprise.

Gretas
Gretas Christmas 2018 Instagram post: Happy holidays from me and my family! Photograph: Courtesy Greta Thunberg via instagram

Svante stops by to make sure that everything is OK. He does this a couple of times every day. Greta stands by the wall and there are a dozen people around her. She looks stressed. The journalist from [newspaper] Dagens Nyheter asks whether its OK if they film an interview, and Svante sees out of the corner of his eye that something is wrong. Wait, let me check, he says, and takes Greta behind a pillar under the arch. Her whole body is tense. She is breathing heavily, and Svante says that theres nothing to worry about. Lets go home now, he says. OK? Greta shakes her head. Shes crying.

You dont need to do any of this. Lets forget about this and get out of here. But Greta doesnt want to go home. She stands perfectly still for a few seconds. Breathes. Then she walks around in a little circle and somehow pushes away all that panic and fear that she has been carrying inside her for as long as she can remember. After that she stops, and stares straight ahead. Her breathing is still agitated and tears are running down her cheeks. No, she says. Im doing this.

We monitor how Greta is feeling as closely as we can. But we cant see any signs that shes feeling anything but good. She sets the alarm clock for 6.15am and shes happy when she gets out of bed. Shes happy as she cycles off to parliament, and shes happy when she comes home in the afternoon. During the afternoons she catches up on schoolwork and checks social media. She goes to bed on time, falls asleep right away and sleeps peacefully the whole night long. Eating, on the other hand, is not going well.

There are too many people and I dont have time. Everyone wants to talk all the time.

You have to eat, Svante says. Greta doesnt say anything. Food is a sensitive topic. The most difficult one. But on the third day something else happens. Ivan from Greenpeace stops by again. Hes holding a white plastic bag. Are you hungry, Greta? Its noodles. Thai, he says. Vegan. Would you like some?

He holds out the bag and Greta leans forward and reaches for the food container. She opens the lid and smells it a few times. Then she takes a little bite. And another. No one reacts to whats happening. Why would they? Why would it be remarkable for a child to be sitting with a bunch of people eating vegan pad thai? Greta keeps eating. Not just a few bites but almost the whole serving.

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Greta Thunberg: the speeches that helped spark a climate movement video

Gretas energy is exploding. There doesnt seem to be any outer limit, and even if we try to hold her back she just keeps going. By herself.

Beata sits with Greta one day in front of parliament. But this is Gretas thing. Not hers. The sudden fuss over her big sister is not easy to handle. Beata sees that Greta suddenly has 10,000 followers on Instagram, and we all think thats crazy. But Beata handles it well. Even when her own feed is filled with comments about Greta, and can you tell her this and that. All everyone suddenly cares about is Greta, Greta and Greta. Its nuts, Beata says one afternoon after school. Its exactly like Beyonc and Jay-Z, she states, with an acerbic emphasis. Greta is Beyonc. And Im Jay-Z.

We get death threats on social media, excrement through the letter box, and social services report that they have received a great number of complaints against us as Gretas parents. But at the same time they state in the letter that they do NOT intend to take any action. We think of the capital letters as a little love note from an anonymous official. And it warms us.

More and more people are keeping Greta company in front of parliament. Children, adults, teachers, retirees. One day an entire class of elementary-school pupils stops and wants to talk, and Greta has to walk away for a bit. Feels mild panic. She steps aside and starts crying. She cant help it. But after a while she calms herself down and goes back and greets the children. Afterwards she explains that she has a hard time associating with children sometimes because she has had such bad experiences. Ive never met a group of children that hasnt been mean to me. And wherever Ive been Ive been bullied because Im different.

Several times a day people come up and say that they have stopped flying, parked the car or become vegans thanks to her. To be able to influence so many people in such a short time is bewildering in a good way. The phenomenon keeps growing. Faster and faster by the hour. In the run-up to the end of the strike, Greta is being followed by TV crews from the BBC, German ARD and Danish TV2.

Altogether 1,000 children and adults sit with Greta on the last day of the school strike. And media from several different countries report live from Mynttorget Square. She has succeeded. Some say that she alone has done more for the climate than politicians and the mass media have in years. But Greta doesnt agree. Nothing has changed, she says. The emissions continue to increase and there is no change in sight.

At three oclock Svante comes and picks her up and they walk together over to the bicycles outside Rosenbad.

Are you satisfied? Svante asks.

No, she says, with her gaze fixed on the bridge back towards the old town. Im going to continue.

Swedish
Swedish activist Greta Thunberg leads a Fridays For Future rally in Turin, December 2019. Photograph: Alessandro Di Marco/EPA

The next day is Saturday 8 September. Its the day before the Swedish parliamentary elections and Greta is going to speak at the Peoples Climate March in Stockholm. She has only given one speech before at a small event. Prior to that shed never spoken in front of more people than fit in a classroom, and on those few occasions she had not exactly seemed at ease.

There are a lot of people in the park for the march and the rally. Almost 2,000 have crowded together at the stage and more are on their way. Somehow theres a different feeling about this protest. It doesnt feel the same as usual. It feels as if something might happen. Soon. Its no longer just the familiar faces. The regulars. The activists. The Greenpeace volunteers in polar-bear suits. Here, suddenly, are all conceivable kinds of people and characters. People who might have all sorts of jobs. This is my first demonstration, states a well-dressed man in his 40s. Mine too, a woman next to him says, with a laugh.

The host introduces Greta and she walks slowly but steadily into the middle of the stage. The audience cheers. Svante, on the other hand, is scared out of his wits. What will happen now? Will she start crying? Is she going to run away? He feels like an awful parent for not putting his foot down and saying No from the start. All this is starting to feel too big and unreal.

But Greta is as calm as can be. She takes the speech out of her pocket and looks out over the sea of people. Then she grasps the microphone and starts speaking. Hi, my name is Greta, she says in Swedish. I am going to speak in English now. And I want you to take out your phones and film what Im saying. Then you can post it on your social media.

My name is Greta Thunberg and I am 15 years old. And I have schoolstriked for the climate for the last three weeks. Yesterday was the last day. But She pauses. We will go on with the school strike. Every Friday, as from now, we will sit outside the Swedish parliament until Sweden is in line with the Paris agreement. The crowd cheers.

Greta continues. I urge all of you to do the same. Sit outside your parliament or local government, wherever you are, until your country is on a safe pathway to a below-two-degree warming target. Time is much shorter than we think. Failure means disaster.

Her voice is steady and there are no signs of nervousness. She appears to be at ease up there. She even smiles sometimes.

The changes required are enormous and we must all contribute in every part of our everyday life. Especially us in the rich countries, where no nation is doing nearly enough.

The audience stands up. Shouting, applauding. The ovation doesnt stop. And Greta is smiling the most beautiful smile I have ever seen her smile. Im watching everything from a live stream on my phone in the hallway outside the dressing rooms at the Oscarsteatern. The tears keep coming.

This is an edited extract from Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis by Malena and Beata Ernman, Greta and Svante Thunberg, published by Penguin on 5 March (16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over 15

Greta
Greta Thunberg with her dogs at home in Stockholm. Photograph: Malin Hoelstad/SvD/TT/TT News Agency/PA Images

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/23/great-thunberg-malena-ernman-our-house-is-on-fire-memoir-extract

‘Love, loss and longing’: the best books on migration, chosen by writers

Amid the American Dirt controversy, we asked authors of our favorite books about migration for their recommendations

Not all writers think of migrants as a faceless brown mass. Indeed, if there is one thing that readers should take away from the ill-fated release of the over-hyped American Dirt, it is that the stories of migrants and refugees have been and are continuing to be told by writers around the world, richly, with nuance, and without relying on trite stereotypes.

We asked the authors of some of our favorite novels about immigrants and migration to recommend an alternative reading list to American Dirt. Here are their selections.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

Viet
Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees. Photograph: AP

Luis Alberto Urreas The House of Broken Angels is the Latinx novel that Oprah should have picked for her book club. The novel has it all humor, history, politics, emotions, all packaged into a highly readable account of a Mexican American family that straddles the border of the United States and Mexico. This is the Great American Novel, if by American we mean the greater America that is both north and south of the border. Urrea is an expert on the border and migration, having spent years and many books exploring these topics. He combines that intimate knowledge with a master novelists flair to pull us into a family whose struggles have historical roots but whose feelings are ones that we all know love, loss and longing.

Elaine Castillos America is Not the Heart has a special place in my heart because its set in the 408 the area code for the south bay of the Bay Area. The Bay is dominated by San Francisco, but the 408 is the less than glamorous land of bedroom communities including Castillos Milpitas and my San Jose. Castillo, of Filipina descent herself, focuses on the lives of documented and undocumented Filipina/os and traces their origins to the impact of American colonization in the Philippines and the US support for the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos. While politics and revolution form the background of the novel, the foreground is all about the power, pleasure and peril of kinship and romance, set in a beautifully, intimately drawn portrait of the Filipino American community. Plus lots of hot queer sex.

Luis Alberto Urrea

Luis
Luis Alberto Urrea. Photograph: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images

The crisis of representation and appropriation ignited by American Dirt has made my mind turn to scores of worthy books in every genre about this issue. It would be nearly impossible for me to suggest *the book* on this subject. But one of the books that weighs on my mind is this moving work of witness by Tim Hernandez, All They Will Call You. He tells a forgotten story about the fate of a group of migrants, deported by the US government in 1948, who died in the worst airplane disaster in California history. The thing that haunts me is his care for the stories of the dead, his refusal to allow those human beings to be forgotten. It is a quintessential migrant story, which makes it a truly American story.

  • Urrea is the author of 17 books, including Nguyens top pick above, the short story collection The Water Museum, The Devils Highway, a Pulitzer finalist in non-fiction, and several volumes of poetry.

Angie Cruz

Author
Author Angie Cruz. Photograph: Erika Morillo / The Shipman Agency

I highly recommend Bang by Daniel Pea, Butterfly Boy by Rigoberto Gonzlez, Mean by Myriam Gurba and The Moths and Other Stories by Helena Mara Viramontes, all of which are by Chicano writers who have dedicated themselves to researching, exploring and writing about and around the border and immigration. I read Viramontes as an undergrad. Her work was being taught in a sociology class. In my creative writing and lit classes I was taught writers like Simpson, Gaitskill and Atwood. All of whom were writers in the same generation as Viramontes but stocked on different shelves in the bookstores. And this is obviously a problem because Viramontes stories are innovative, acute and beautifully written and if published today, one hopes her collection wouldnt have had to include a long academic introduction to create context and validity for her work and instead would have been reviewed and celebrated in mainstream literary spaces for the explosive content, the nuanced characters and her singular literary style.

Another work Im excited about by a storyteller who works for the stage is Andrea Thomes Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes). If you are in NYC you dont want to miss the show that tells the story of undocumented immigrants coming together for a fandango on the evening of an Ice raid in New York City, as they wait for a loved one to arrive from Honduras. Inspired by interviews with undocumented immigrants from Latin America living in New York, the piece will be a community celebration where stories are brought to life through live performance, music and dance.

  • Cruz is the author of three novels, including Dominicana, about a child forced to marry in order to secure her familys future in America.

Mohsin Hamid

Author
Author Mohsin Hamid on Anarkali Street in Lahore, Pakistan. Photograph: Ed Kashi/VII/Corbis

I would like to suggest two very different books.

Tayeb Salihs Season of Migration to the North is a novel about a young man going from Sudan to Europe. He studies, immerses himself in a different culture, and comes back changed, both angry and anger-inducing, but also perplexed and deeply unsettled. Its a seminal text, not of the migrant who assimilates and achieves the so-called dream, but of the migrant who goes and comes back. Theres a very strong awareness in this book about the sexualisation of the migrant and the self-exoticisation that occurs, but also about the impossibility of return. You can go back to where you come from but the person who goes back is no longer the person who left. That is a theme we see echoing again and again across migrant fiction. Its important to remember that we need antidotes to the idea that migrant fiction is simply people going north or going west. Very often, its people who willingly or unwillingly have to return, altered, to where they began.

Julie Otsukas The Buddha in the Attic is an incredible work on multiple levels. It tells the story of a generation of women, a shipload of Japanese wives who head to California, employing a first person plural, which is very unusual. We sometimes hear about the danger in fiction of a writer depicting a group as a faceless mass, or of presuming to speak for an entire group through underhanded means. Otsukas book is remarkable: it does speak for a group but uses form to subvert and interrogate that critique. The narrative voice that emerges is of a group of people with constantly individualized particulars. Thats a very difficult task to pull off but I think Otsuka succeeds magnificently. I would suggest this book as an antidote to the limited imaginings of what we think a narrative can be and as a reminder of the power of literary fiction to unlock some of those puzzles. Its truly a unique and awe-inspiring book.

  • Hamid is the author of four novels, including The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West.

Matt de la Pea

Author
Author Matt de la Pea. Photograph: Heather Waraksa / Penguin

Ill never forget the visceral experience I had the first time I read Luis Alberto Urreas powerful The Devils Highway. I was living in Brooklyn, NY, and my wife and I were expecting our first child. Back then I was reading a lot of books set on the Mexican border. Having grown up in a border community myself, I think it was my way of staying connected to home. We used to make the short drive into Tijuana frequently when I was young, to visit family, and I remember staring outside the windows of our Volkswagen Vanagon, fascinated by how drastically everything changed the second we officially left San Diego and entered Mexico. But it was The Devils Highway that woke me up to the political travesties surrounding this barrier between the two countries. I was so shaken by Urreas brutal account of 26 men and their passage across the border, into the Arizona desert, that as soon as I finished, I started again. This time I listened to the audiobook, read by Urrea himself, as I pushed my sleeping newborn around Prospect Park in a stroller. It was on these walks, listening to The Devils Highway, staring at my baby girl, that I realized all writing is political writing. And my own work was forever changed.

  • De la Peas books for young adults include Mexican WhiteBoy and We Were Here. He has also written several books for younger readers, including the Newbery Medal-winning Last Stop on Market Street.

Dina Nayeri

Author
Author Dina Nayeri. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. Hannah Arendt wrote these words in the 1943 essay We Refugees.

I think of these words when I read immigrant stories to remind myself of what an honest story owes to the reader. Has the author struggled over these private and subtle calculations? Does she understand these specific indignities? Or does she want to portray the drama for the entertainment of others? The books below impressed me because they understood deeper truths about displaced lives. They honored immigrants even in humiliating moments, instead of exploiting their stories.

Years ago, I read Dinaw Mengestus novels The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, and All Our Namesin quick succession. Both are stories of Ethiopian men struggling to make a new life in DC and Chicago, to find companionship and love, despite poverty, the heartbreak of a ravaged home, and so much American hostility. Both novels show well-meaning American women who, as they try to help, trample on the mens dignity, safety and much else.

99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Jan Kochai is so well rooted in the Afghan narrators voice and experience, it goes beyond empathy, transporting the reader. It ignores the western gaze and tells the story the way its subjects need it to be told. The result is funny and sharp and devastating. One chapter, a private family story, is written in Pashto because it isnt meant for everyone.

Catherine Chungs Forgotten Country is gorgeously written and full of heart. And thats another way to honor the subject matter: write it well. Bother to learn the craft (as many have failed to do). Chungs book is about sisters, family loyalty and war. It is illuminating and sensory and the characters come alive in the care of a precise and compassionate author who has made a lifelong study of her craft.

  • Nayeri is the author of two novels, Refuge and A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea, as well as the memoir The Ungrateful Refugee.

Aida Salazar

Aida
Aida Salazar, the author of The Moon Within. Photograph: Photo by Lluvia Higuera

These recently published or upcoming books for children and young adults are part of a larger dialogue about immigrant realities and migrant justice that was taking place before the American Dirt fiasco. It must be acknowledged that there is no one definitive migrant story but many and must include not only Mexican voices but the many voices of migrants to the United States.

Picture books: My Shoes and I by Ren Colato Lanez; Where Are You From? by Yamile Saied Mndez; Dreamers by Yuyi Morales.

Middle grade: Gaby, Lost and Found by Angela Cervantes; Front Desk by Kelly Yang; Other Words For Home by Jasmine Warga; Efrn Divided by Ernesto Cisneros and my book, Land of the Cranes.

Young adult: All the Stars Denied by Guadalupe Garcia McCall; Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer by Alberto Ledesma; The Distance Between Us by Reyna Grande; American Street by Ibi Zoboi; Illegal by Francisco X Stork; The Grief Keeper by Alexandra Villasante; We Are Not From Here by Jenny Torres Sanchez; Lobizona by Romina Russell; Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland; Indivisible by Daniel Aleman.

  • Salazar is the author of The Moon Within.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/05/migration-book-recommendations-american-dirt

John le Carr on Brexit: Its breaking my heart

This week the novelist received the Olof Palme prize for achievement in the spirit of the assassinated Swedish statesman. He reflects on how a lack of leadership today has allowed us to sleepwalk into Brexit

A range of emotions, not all of them beautiful, passed through my head at the moment when I was offered the Olof Palme prize.

I am not a hero. I am a fraud. I am being offered a medal for another mans gallantry. Decline.

I am not a frontline advocate for truth or human rights. I have not suffered for my writing. I have been handsomely rewarded for it.

Neither did I feel myself the equal of any of the three writers who have preceded me at this rostrum: Vclav Havel, whom I briefly knew and revered, and the intrepid Roberto Saviano, both of whom in separate ways became martyrs to their work. And Carsten Jensen, writer on world conflict and sharer of its anguish.

If I wanted further proof of my inadequacy, I had only to listen to Daniel Ellsbergs moving speech at this same rostrum just a year ago. Why didnt I ever copy secret documents and stop a war?

It was only when I set out to explore the life and work of Olof Palme, and entered his spell, and discovered that same affinity with him that Ellsberg had so eloquently described, that it seemed just possible I might not be quite such a bad fit after all.

Reading and thinking about Palme makes you wonder who you are. And who you might have been, but werent. And where your moral courage went when it was needed. You ask yourself what power drove him golden boy, aristocratic family, brilliant scion of the best schools and the best cavalry regiment to embrace from the outset of his career the cause of the exploited, the deprived, the undervalued and the unheard?

Was there, somewhere in his early life, as there is in the lives of other men and women of his calibre, some defining moment of inner anger and silent purpose? As a child he was sickly, and partly educated at home. He has the feel of a loner. Did his school peers get under his skin: their sense of entitlement, their contempt for the lower orders, their noise, their vulgarity and artlessness? Mine did. And no one is easier to hate than a contemptible version of oneself.

Graham Greene remarked that a novelist needed a chip of ice in his heart. Was there a chip of ice in Palmes heart? He may not have been a novelist, but there was art in him, and a bit of the actor. He knew that you cant make great causes stick without political power. And for political power, you definitely need a chip or two of ice.

Olof
Olof Palme was assassinated in 1986. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

The United States did not take lightly in those days, any more than it does now, being held to account by a nation it dismisses as tin-pot. And Sweden was a particularly irritating tin-pot nation, because it was European, articulate, cultured, rich, and white. But Palme loved being the irritant. Relished it. Relished being the outsider voice, the one that refuses to be categorised, the one that shouldnt be in the room at all. It brought out the best in him.

And now and then, I have to say, it does the same for me.

Its a long time since my post box contained estate agents brochures for deep shelters in the Nevada desert. You entered by way of a tumbledown shack, designed to look like an abandoned outside loo. An elevator swept you 200ft underground to a luxury apartment where you could hold out till Armageddon was safely over and normal services were resumed. And when the all clear was sounded and you came up the escalator, the only people left would be your rich friends and the Swiss.

So why isnt the threat of nuclear war today as present or terrifying to us as it was in Palmes day? Is it simply that the nuclear threat is so ubiquitous, so diffuse and irrational? North Korea? Isis? Iran? Russia? China? Or todays White House with its born-again evangelists dreaming of the Rapture? Better to invest our existential fears in things we understand: bushfires, melting icebergs, and the uncomfortable truths of Greta Thunberg.

But the cold war was anything but irrational. It was two players facing each other across a nuclear chessboard. And for all their clever spying, neither knew the first thing about the other.

John
John le Carr at a pro-EU rally, Parliament Square, London, in October 2019. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

I try to imagine how it was for Palme in those times: the shuttle diplomacy, the tireless reasoning with people locked into their positions and scared of their superiors. I was the lowest form of spy life, but even I got wind of contingency plans for outright nuclear war. If you are in Berlin or Bonn when the Russian tanks sweep over you, be sure to destroy your files first. First? What was second? And I doubt whether your chances would have been much rosier in Stockholm.

In Berlin, in August 1961, I look on as coils of Russian barbed wire are unrolled across the Friedrichstrasse checkpoint, otherwise known as Checkpoint Charlie. Intermittently, in the days that follow, I watch the Wall go up, one concrete block at a time. Do I lift a finger? No one did. And maybe that was the worst part of it: the oppressive sense of your own irrelevance.

But Palme refused to be irrelevant. He would make himself heard if it killed him, and perhaps in the end it did.

Its October 1962 and Cuban crisis time. I am a junior diplomat at the British embassy in Bonn and I have just moved into a new hiring beside the river Rhine. German decorators are painting the walls. Its a sunny autumn and I think I must have been on leave because I am sitting in the garden writing.

The blare of the builders transistor radio is drowned by the din of passing barges, until suddenly it is belting out the news of Kennedys ultimatum to Khrushchev: Turn back your missiles, Mr Chairman, or your country and mine will be at war or words to that effect. The painters politely excuse themselves, wash their brushes, and go home to be with their families at worlds end. I drive to the embassy in case theres work to be done. There isnt. So I drive home again and continue writing The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Richard
Richard Burton in the film of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). Photograph: Collectin Christophel/Alamy

So what was Palme doing while the Soviet fleet continued on its way to Cuba and the world waited dry-mouthed to see who blinked first? Until I knew better, I pictured him sitting head in hands in some lonely place, despairing. I am a failed peacemaker. My mediations have been in vain. If the world ends, its all my fault.

But he had no time for that stuff. He was in Stockholm, pressing for educational reform, bumping up Swedens international aid budget and picking up the pieces after Stig Wennerstrm, a senior Swedish air force officer, was exposed as a Soviet spy. And thats something thats too easy to forget about Palme the diplomat for world peace and nuclear disarmament: he had a country to run.

Spying? Palme? Theres been a lot of talk about it. As a young intern in Swedish intelligence, he had acquired an early taste for the black arts and it stayed with him for the rest of his political life. And who can blame him? When youre defending yourself on half a dozen home fronts; when youre sitting out the night on tedious committees; when a far right mob of hooligans is burning your effigy in the street and chucking darts at pictures of your face, what greater relief than to settle down comfortably with your spies and give yourself over to the consolations of intrigue?

And I am not at all surprised that in the midst of excoriating the Americans for the Vietnam war, Palme the pragmatist was reading secret American intelligence reports. After all, he had a country to protect.

Palme never saw the cold war end, but he experienced its worst years. And by the close of his life they had left their mark: testiness, distraction, impatience, battle fatigue. You only have to look at the last photographs to read the signs. You only have to hear the barely controlled anger breaking through his voice when he reads his statement on the bombing of Hanoi. I hear nervous advisers begging him not to use the forbidden G-word, genocide.

They wore you out, those American nuclear warriors. I have a particularly unpleasant memory and maybe so had Palme of the US governments twenty-something defence analysts who lived on rock music and Coca-Cola while they calculated to the last half-million or so how many of us would be turned to ash in a first strike.

It was their air of superiority that got to me, the we know better than you do about how youre going to die. I just couldnt warm to them. Did Palme have business with their Russian counterparts? I guess they were much the same.

And sometimes it was the sheer decency and good manners of Washingtons top warriors that wore you down. Good family men, I remember. Really decent people: touch football with their kids on Saturdays, church on Sundays. I met a few. And so, Im sure, did Palme. Well, theyd concede, they did do insomnia a bit. A nervous breakdown here and there, the odd broken marriage. And kids traumatised by what they picked up from the table talk, but that was just parental carelessness.

And Palme the determined non-combatant walked among them. Politely. Lawyer to lawyer. Man to man. And be sure never to mention the G-word, genocide.

As I continue to read and think my way through Palmes life, my sense of kinship becomes possessive. I want a Palme for my country, which in my lifetime hasnt produced a single statesman of his stamp. I want him now. Im not just a remainer. Im a European through and through, and the rats have taken over the ship, I want to tell him. Its breaking my heart and I want it to break yours. We need your voice to wake us from our sleepwalk, and save us from this wanton act of political and economic self-harm. But youre too late.

If Johnson and his Brexiteers had their way, it would be declared St Brexits Day. Church bells across the land would peal out the gladsome tidings from every tower. And good men of England would pause their stride and doff their caps in memory of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, Trafalgar, and mourn the loss of our great British empire. Empires dont die just because theyre dead.

We Brits are all nationalists now. Or so Johnson would have us believe. But to be a nationalist you need enemies and the shabbiest trick in the Brexiteers box was to make an enemy of Europe. Take back control! they cried, with the unspoken subtext: and hand it to Donald Trump, along with our foreign policy, our economic policy, our health service and, if they can get away with it, our BBC.

So Boris Johnson with our blessing has taken his place beside two other accomplished liars of our time: Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. If Palme were trying to get the truth out of them, which of the three would he turn to? Or none of the above?

One day somebody will explain to me why it is that, at a time when science has never been wiser, or the truth more stark, or human knowledge more available, populists and liars are in such pressing demand.

But dont blame the Tories for their great victory. It was Jeremy Corbyns Labour party, with its un-policy on Brexit, its antisemitism and student-level Marxism-Leninism that alienated traditional Labour voters and left them nowhere to go. They looked to the left and didnt recognise their leader. They looked to the centre and there was nobody there. They were sick of Brexit and sick of politics, and probably as sick of Johnsons voice as I was. So they pinched their noses and voted for the least worst option. And actually, who can blame them?

Palme hated war, but I dont know how much of it he actually saw. A little goes a long way. Or it did for me.

My first cautious glimpse came when I visited Cambodia shortly before the American defeat. Forty years earlier, Palme had toured Southeast Asia and seen for himself the disastrous effect of French, British and American colonialism. By the time I got there, the disaster was wholly American-owned.

Phnom Penh is encircled. The taxi driver charges $30 to take you to the frontline. You want shooting? he asks. Yes, please, I want shooting. He parks, you walk the rest of the way. You get shot at and return to your taxi. On the road back through town to the hotel, children sit on the pavement selling bottles of petrol siphoned from abandoned cars.

At the edge of Phnom Penh an artillery battery is providing covering fire for an infantry attack against the invisible jungle enemy. Deafened by gunfire, children huddle round the guns, each waiting for his father to come back. They know that if he doesnt, his commanding officer will pocket his pay instead of reporting him dead.

Im in Sidon, South Lebanon, house guest of the Palestinian chief of fighters, Salah Tamari. He takes me on a tour of the childrens hospital. A boy with his legs blown off gives me the thumbs up. Another dreams of going to university in Havana once hes got his eyesight back. Palme had three sons, I had four. Maybe we had the same nightmares.

Which reminds me. As things stand, one of the first acts of Johnsons post-Brexit government will be to deny child refugees the right to be reunited with their parents in Britain.

How would Palme have responded to todays Orwellian lie machines that would have made Joseph Goebbels blush as they wear down our decency, our common sense, and drive us to question incontestable truths?

The last splinters of Jamal Khashoggi have, we assume, been swept under the carpet of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The culprits have freely confessed that they acted on impulse. They just went a bit wild, the way boys do. The Crown Prince is shocked. The rest is fake news. No bone saw, no screams, no Khashoggi lookalike walking out of the consulate wearing the wrong shoes.

So heres a question. If Palme were Swedens prime minister today, and Sweden had a fat arms deal running with Saudi Arabia, which way would he jump? Would he take a sensible, relaxed British view and say, look here, for heavens sake, lets stop moaning and get on with the next shipment, theyre Arabs and theyve got a war to feed? Or would he as I want to believe tell his arms industry: whatever it costs, just bloody well stop.

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Alec Guinness as George Smiley: Smiley and I have history together. Sixty years of it. Photograph: BBC

I dont know whether Palme read me youd be amazed how many people havent. What I do know is that, quite soon after I began reading my way through his life, and the causes that inspired him, it seemed to me that every book I had written was some sort of unconscious footstep along his path.

My leading character, and the one I am best known for, is George Smiley. Smiley was recruited to the Secret Service in his early youth, as I was, and for all his earnest excursions into 17th-century German literature, at heart he knew no other world than the secret one. Throughout his long professional life he was besieged by moral doubt. When I was asked to draw a picture of him, I drew a lonely man carrying his horse uphill an image that might have won a weary smile of recognition from Palme.

Smiley and I have history together. Sixty years of it. When I took a new direction, Smiley followed me. And sometimes Smiley knew the way better than I did and I followed him, which is what happens when you invent a character who is smarter than you are.

Here is Smiley in 1979, when the cold war looked as though it would last forever. With exemplary tradecraft, he has lured his Soviet adversary, codename Karla, across the Berlin Wall. He has done this by exploiting a character defect, as we liked to call it, in this otherwise impenetrable communist diehard. The character defect in question is love: a fathers love for his mentally sick daughter. In defiance of every rule in the KGB handbook, Karla has spirited his beloved daughter to a Swiss sanatorium under a false name, and Smiley has used this knowledge to blackmail him. And now here Karla comes, Soviet zealot, loving father, defector, across the Glienicke Bridge from East to West Berlin.

George, you won, says Peter Guillam, Smileys loyal disciple.

Did I? Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did, Smiley replies.

Palme would have shared his self-disgust.

When the cold war ended and the western world was still congratulating itself, Smiley felt betrayed, and so did I. And Palme would have felt betrayed, if he had lived long enough. Where was the promised peace we had all been waiting for? Where was the Great Vision? The reconciliation? The nuclear disarmament treaty that Palme had been tirelessly working for? Where was the Marshall Plan that would pull battered nations off their knees? And above all, where was the voice of hope and renewal? Is it too fanciful to imagine that, had he lived, Palme might have supplied that voice?

Here is Smiley in 1990, one year after the Wall came down and four years after Palmes death: One day, history may tell us who really won. If a democratic Russia emerges why, then Russia will have been the winner. And if the West chokes on its own materialism, then the West may still turn out to be the loser.

I see Palme nodding.

And here is Smiley in great age he was always older than me, a father figure still hunting for the answer to a question that has haunted him all his life: did I compromise my humanity to the point where I lost it altogether?

We were not pitiless, Peter, he insists to his same disciple. We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity. Arguably it was misplaced. Certainly it was futile. We know that now. But we did not know it then.

But in my imagination I hear Palme vigorously object: That is an unsound, self-serving argument that could equally well apply to any monstrous act perpetrated in the name of democracy.

I see a sharp, swift face. Restless eyes, sometimes hooded. Smiles real and forced. A face that struggles for forbearance in the presence of lesser minds, vulnerable, watchful, and precious in the way we imagine young poets to be. The precise voice barely falters even when its owner is on fire. I feel an unbearable impatience burning in him, caused by seeing and feeling more clearly and faster than anybody else in the room.

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Le Carr in 1965. Photograph: Cine Text/Sportsphoto/Allstar

I would have been nervous to engage him in argument because he would have made rings round me even when I was right. But I never met him. I can only hear him and watch him and read him. The rest is catch-up.

The last speech of his life was to the United Nations in 1985: an unsuccessful appeal to ban the use of nuclear weapons under international law. Thirty years on, the Swedish government voted for just such a ban. Now called upon to reaffirm their vote, they have postponed their decision under American pressure. The issue is back on the table. We shall see.

How would Palme wish to be remembered? Well, by this for a start. For his life, not his death. For his humanism, courage, and the breadth and completeness of his humanist vision. As the voice of truth in a world hell-bent on distorting it. By the inspiring, inventive enterprises undertaken yearly by young people in his name.

Is there anything I would like to add to his epitaph? A line by May Sarton that he would have enjoyed: One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

And how would I like to be remembered? As the man who won the 2019 Olof Palme prize will do me just fine.

David Cornwell, January 2020. This speech was given at the Olof Palme prize ceremony in Stockholm on 30 January.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/01/john-le-carre-breaking-heart-brexit

Joan Didion’s The White Album review kaleidoscopic view of the 60s brought to stage

Eerily beautiful show reveals frustrating fragmentation of writers classic essay

First published in 1979, The White Album, Joan Didions collection of essays and journalism about the 1960s, has become a modern classic of New Journalism.

Didion uses a highly stylised cadence and a fragmented, mosaic style of storytelling to illustrate the times. But her voice is also a metaphor: language breaks down, the world is breaking down, shes having a breakdown.

This is the second of Didions landmark works to be taken to the stage, the first being The Year of Magical Thinking a memoir about the death of her husband which opened on Broadway in 2007.

The White Album is a tougher proposition. While the theme of Didions book is the search for and failure to find a narrative, on the stage, this failure of narrative can be disorienting and unsatisfying for theatregoers.

Which is perhaps the point.

The director Lars Jan and the Early Morning Opera have brought The White Album to the stage after almost eight years of trying to obtain the rights. They eventually secured them with the promise to Didion that the text of the books first, eponymous essay would be performed in its entirety. We promised to do every word. We werent going to cut anything we were going to start with the first word and end with the last, Jan said in an interview.

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The fragmented scenes take a form like chapters and cover Didions perspective on key moments during the late 60s. Photograph: Lars Jan/Sydney festival

The first words of that essay We tell ourselves stories in order to live have become famous in their own right and, when delivered on stage by the actor and co-creator Mia Barron, they produce chills.

The fragmented scenes take a form like chapters and cover Didions perspective on key moments during the late 60s the trial of Huey Newton, a Doors recording session, the San Francisco State College student protests and the Manson murders as well as her own psychiatric assessment and the packing list she uses when shes on assignment.

It is essentially a monologue Barron reciting the wordy text from memory broken up with asides or quotes from a Greek chorus of hippies, protesters, musicians and activists, played in large part by members of the audience, led by surreptitious instructions fed through earpieces, who volunteered beforehand to be part of the show. Jan has also previously said that it was not necessary for Barron to actually embody Didion: She is using the words of the text to create a character, to speak those words instinctively, he said.

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Mia Barron, second from left, inside the glass house. Photograph: Reed Hutchinson/Sydney festival

But it can take a bit to reset expectations about character. Didions writing like her persona can be aloof (she is famously described as a cool customer by a hospital social worker in The Year of Magical Thinking). When I met her once in New York, she exuded a frostiness and imperviousness that was highly intimidating, an effect heightened perhaps because she is so physically slight.

Barrons narrator is a more substantial, earthy presence, appearing more relatable and solid than the real-life Didion, who in the text is in the process of a crack-up; in her perpetual motion between New York, California, Hawaii and reporting trips to various cities, she is herself yet another metaphor for a country in which the centre cannot hold.

The music and stagecraft of this production enhance the apocalyptic late 60s vibe. A stark, modular, literal glass house dominates the stage. Designed by P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S architectural firm, it is a stand-in for the recording studio in which Didion met the Doors; her house on Franklin Avenue, Hollywood; student campuses; and finally, a bloody shootout. But despite the eerie beauty of the staging, seeing one of my favourite essays performed in this way revealed flaws I had not seen in the text before.

Didion is the master of cadence, creating a lyrical power in her mesmerising arrangement of words, but she has no discipline or focus. Characters slide in and out, and stories that would have enriched our understanding of the times remain, frustratingly, only partly told. The fragments when performed together do not make a whole, and she is its unstable centre.

Then there are the times we are living through now. During the performance, I couldnt help but contrast Didions times with now. From within, our times seem to be even more chaotic, fragmentary and evil than Didions 60s. Weve lost any illusion we had of a centre not least, of a centre that can hold. Weve long been without a narrative. Perhaps, if Didion is right, there never was a narrative to begin with.

Joan Didions The White Album is at Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney, as part of Sydney festival until 12 January

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/jan/09/joan-didions-the-white-album-review-kaleidoscopic-view-of-the-60s-brought-to-stage

TS Eliot prize-winner Roger Robinson: I want these poems to help people to practise empathy

From a lament for the victims of Grenfell Tower to snapshots of Windrush arrivals activist, musician and poet Roger Robinson discusses the inspiration behind his prizewinning collection

Since I was 19 Ive been living in England and thinking Id go home, but there was a point, around six years go, when I realised Im here now: Im black British. So says Roger Robinson, who this week won the TS Eliot prize for A Portable Paradise, a poetry collection born of this realisation.

Furious laments for the victims of Grenfell Tower are followed by a crisp snapshot of idealistic young Jamaicans disembarking from the Empire Windrush in 1948, and a didactic sequence about the legacy of slavery today. A moody evocation of riot brewing on the south London streets sits alongside a love song to the National Health Service, which saved the life of his own prematurely born son.

It was the arrival of this baby just the 1kg of him / all big head, bulging eyes and blue veins that prompted both his acceptance that he was here to stay, and his investigation of the possibility that paradise might be portable. I thought Id look at the utopian idea of paradise, which is so important in this country, and then it began to mean a lot of different things hope for my son, and the paradise that was denied to the people of Grenfell who had come looking to build theirs here and died because they werent in a position to do so, he says.

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A musician and cultural activist as well as a poet, Robinson is no stranger to public interventions. In 2018, he launched a Twitter appeal for 100 poems protesting about the mistreatment of the Windrush generation. He also recorded an eight-minute music track for BBC Radio 3, Survivor (For the Grenfell Survivors). Ive lived in tower blocks so I know what its like to live there and the community who do, he says. Theyre not all immigrants and not all poor, but theyre all trying to build a better life and get out of there. It wasnt that I was poor, I just didnt have lots of housing opportunities. So when Grenfell happened I felt it viscerally.

Robinsons own relationship with England doesnt follow an obvious narrative. Now 52, he was born to Trinidadian parents in the east London borough of Hackney due to the system of opportunistic parents who always had a plan for you to go to university here, he chuckles. When he was three years old, they returned to Trinidad, where his father became a PR executive for an oil company one of the first black men to rise that high and his mother worked as a nurse. His father encouraged him with comic book versions of the classics, while his mother is an incredible storyteller. To a certain extent my poetry came out of her storytelling at the dinner table.

He went to one of Trinidads top schools, where expectations were high and his teachers included the playwright and later government minister Ralph Maraj. Its impossible to make a living as an artist in Trinidad because its so small, so a lot of the teachers were artists who had returned from studying abroad. At 19 he returned to the UK, initially to live with his grandmother in Ilford, Essex. Now that was a real culture shock. I couldnt feel at home there. He soon found that Brixton was more congenial, forming a bond with the south London district that remains strong, even since he has forsaken its tower blocks for a three-bedroom house in Northampton, where he lives with his wife and their six-year-old son.

Beware these hot nights in Brixton, opens one observational poem, which is charged with the threat of urban unrest. Ashes to Fire was partly inspired by a night in 2011 when Robinson was dropped off in Brixton on his way home from a gig just as the London riots were starting. In a collection notable for its tonal and generic variety, this poem stands at one extreme a thrumming reminder that he started out as a dub poet, and that dub is the poetry of working-class suffering and protest. He has also released five albums, and is the lead vocalist for his band, King Midas Sound, for which surprisingly, given his rich bass speaking voice he often sings in a high tenor that spills into falsetto.

He began to make his name on the London poetry scene in the 1990s, eking out a living by doing workshops in London schools. It was a time when many schools were thinking about role modelling, he says. I was trying to convince kids mostly young black boys who were not doing well at school that poetry could touch their lives and reading could be useful to them. He looks momentarily bashful behind his grizzled beard then adds, I dress relatively decently now but I used to be a bit more urban swaggering.

His belief in mentoring was rooted in his own experience. I have had many mentors and one of them was [Booker prize-winner and poet] Bernardine Evaristo , who said: Youve got talent but you need to hone your craft. By his mid 20s he knew that he wanted to be an artist, and that if he was going to succeed he would have to live frugally. My mentors taught me that if you control your economics you can control your output.

Evaristo was working for the writers support agency Spread the Word and, crucially, offered him the chance to attend free workshops, which he snapped up. During one, he met the poet Kwame Dawes, who urged him to broaden his reading. He introduced me to Chinese and Russian and European poets. At the time I was only reading what I liked. They werent all black poets I was into Seamus Heaney but I was reading for culture; he made me read for craft, and think about why things worked.

Dawes also told him: If you get less than 36 rejections dont come to me and say its not working. On about my 37th attempt I got published. His first two pamphlets, Suitcase (2004) and Suckle (2009), were put out by another of his mentors, Nii Ayikwei Parkes. Portable Paradise is his fourth collection and, he says, it began to shape itself in a way that was beyond my authorial control, coming together so quickly that he was adding and removing poems until the day it went to press. (Even some of the poems in the ebook version didnt make the printed book.)

Beneath the idea of paradise lies the concept of prayer, whether this involves the refusal of an Afghan immigrant to accept the substitute of therapy If it is Allahs will, who is he to unload his burden on someone else? or Robinsons own fervent prayers for his newborn son to be spared. The collections two dominant impulses, observation and entreaty, come together in fortuitous ways, and never more so than in the name of the nurse who cradled his son in neonatal intensive care, which becomes the title of the most overtly moving poem, Grace. Was she really called that? Yes, yes, he insists. He occasionally spots her driving around, though he has heard she has recently retired.

Which brings us to the question of his own faith. I am Christian. I say prayers, but I dont get to church much, he says. Faith, for Robinson, is tied up with an idea of community and service. So many people came up to me after the [TS Eliot prize] readings and said: My child was premature, you expressed exactly what I felt. I want these poems to be useful and to help people to practise empathy. Demonstrating how a prayer might work to achieve this, he quickly improvises one that could also be a standalone poem: If you want people to understand the power of prayer in a time of trauma, let this book spread.

A Portable Paradise is published by Peepal Tree (9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over 15.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/16/ts-eliot-prize-winner-roger-robinson

People Are Sharing Library Hacks That Are Useful, Free And Theres No Reason Not To Use Them

It seems like most of the news we hear about libraries lately is discouraging, with usage declining and funding being denied. Most people’s first assumption would be that it’s an expected consequence of how people use technology. As e-books and apps that let people obtain them in seconds spread, public libraries fall by the wayside as a way to access media. Right?

Not quite! It’s actually more likely than you think that you can do all of those things—check out e-books, audiobooks, graphic novels, and other media⁠—not by giving more of your money to Amazon for a subscription, but by using your library card, a public service that your taxes are already paying for, to sign into the many apps that public libraries themselves use. You get a wealth of information and entertainment, and library use statistics go up. If you haven’t checked whether you can sign in to these services with your local library card, this is your reminder to do so.

People are trying to get the word out about free library apps

Image credits: Stewart Butterfield

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Image credits: vornietom

Maybe you’ve heard tips for using apps like Audible “like a library”—that is, returning audiobooks for a refund. But authors who list their books with the service aren’t a fan of people using it that way, as some have complained after reporting being fined by Audible for user returns. If you already use the app and you’re worried about returns, bigger publishers aren’t likely to notice if they’re hit by these fees, but think twice before you return indie authors’ releases.

An author shared why trying to play Audible isn’t a good idea

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Instead, try using all of these free apps that are the real deal

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If you get embarrassed when people ask you when was the last time you read a book, and your New Year’s resolution is to change that, don’t let lack of time or money stop you. Studies once found that while at least 90% of libraries in the US offered e-book lending, over a third of respondents either didn’t know whether their local library did, or thought that it didn’t. We hope that statistic is going down, because librarians’ dedication to giving everyone free access to information certainly isn’t any time soon!

Commenters gave their reviews of library apps, and other tips

Read more: http://www.boredpanda.com/people-share-library-hacks-audio-books/