Three books for humans
03 Thursday Apr 2025
Tags
THREE BOOKS FOR HUMANS
It’s not easy to find an entertaining book about the way we live now, climate change and politics. Even the words seem so off-putting. But I’ve just discovered three that are great reads in totally different ways. Page-turning, sad, moving, thought-provoking, shocking and at times laugh-out-loud funny.
With everyone talking about how AI is going to write novels in the future, these three could only have been written by human beings.
If you want to turn up books that surprise and entertain you, read on.
The Overstory
If you like trees, you’ll love Richard Powers’ twelfth novel, The Overstory. There’s at least one tree mentioned on every single page, I kid you not.
Actually, I’ll rephrase that, if you like people who love trees, you’ll be entranced by this book, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the $75,000 2019 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
It may seem to be about trees, and of course is about trees, but like all good novels it’s really about people, their loves and hates, and what good people can be driven to do when they have to.
At its heart are nine Americans whose lives interweave across many generations.
We start with the Hoel family in the mid-1800s, as Jørgen Hoel plants six chestnuts on his Iowa farm. And end in the present day, with a researcher who’s ridiculed for her theories of how trees interconnect, a computer programmer who recreates ecosystems and eco-terrorists.
Underpinning the whole, rather like a forest with its interconnections, are very human stories.
But beneath the stories is a powerful rage at the sheer stupidity of destroying the largest and oldest living organisms on the planet, each filled with thousands of dependent living creatures.
At one point, one of the characters drives along a forest freeway, only to realise that faceless corporations have cut down almost every tree, so that all that’s left is a narrow strip either side of the road to give drivers the impression that the forest is still thriving.
You will never look at trees in the same way again.
Venomous Lumpsucker
Ned Beauman’s fifth novel could hardly be more different. And yet this too is fired by a fierce love for the living world and sharp satire for those corporations who would twist any rule to make money out of destruction.
The lumpsucker of the title is a threatened species of fish that is neither pretty nor cuddly, so easily forgotten.
In fact it’s extremely ugly and, thanks to climate change, forced to live in one small area of the Baltic where it can find the conditions it needs to survive.
Unfortunately, a mining robot might have accidentally destroyed the lumpsucker’s only habitat.
This would not normally be a problem, because international agreements mean that a company only has to pay a nominal sum for each species it annihilates. As long as the species isn’t too intelligent.
Except one rogue researcher is about to declare the lumpsucker the most intelligent fish on the planet.
And a desperate hunt begins to find if any lumpsuckers have been left alive.
With an acid-tipped wit to die for, Beauman skewers all the complacent politicians and corporations who believe they can negotiate their way out of climate change through fiddling their sums.
His inventiveness is breath-taking. But also his emotional empathy. These are not just characters to laugh at but also to care about.
Precipice
Robert Harris has been much in the media news this year as the film adaptation of his Vatican novel Conclave has been scooping up nominations and awards.
I’ve just finished his latest – Precipice. Another novel that takes political machinations and makes them engrossing and human.
Precipice follows Prime Minister Herbert Asquith as he faces one of the most dangerous periods in British history.
It’s 1914 and an assassination of an obscure archduke in Serbia threatens to bring the horrors of war across Europe.
But is Asquith fully focused, or is he more interested in pursuing an affair with a much younger woman?
Harris is brilliant at building novels from real life. While some characters and events are invented, Asquiths’ actions, based on historical fact, are jaw-dropping.
In my view, one mark of a good novel is if the characters stay with you afterwards, running around your mind. These characters – real people who played an important role in some of the most vital events in recent history – have certainly stayed with me.
Precipice may not have the gripping tension of Conclave, but it is constantly engrossing. A true story has to shock you with the realisation that these events really took place, these people really existed. And while of course some events and characters have been invented, the key events did take place. The people really lived.
And still have the power to shock.
Tell people what you think