Best summer books of 2023: Critics’ picks

Roula Khalaf

ft editor

One of my favourite reads this year is about ghosts of the past and how they are remembered. In Red Memory (Faber/WW Norton), Tania Branigan profiles survivors of China’s Cultural Revolution and how they deal with the collective trauma of the violent decade. The book, as she puts it, is about “the secrets we keep, and the urge we feel to share . . . the way that politicians can manipulate our national stories but also the part that we all play.” Engaging and eloquently written, the book is based on the stories collected by Branigan when she was a foreign correspondent in China. It’s all the more haunting in the context of today’s China, where Xi Jinping is increasingly intolerant and few would dare to share their memories of the past with foreign reporters.

Janine Gibson

FT Weekend editor

You’ve finished Succession — now you’re looking for a relevant follow-up to read this summer. Unscripted (Cornerstone Press/Penguin Press) by James B Stewart and Rachel Abrams makes a worthy bid for Paramount founder Sumner Redstone to be considered Logan-worthy. The story of 90-something Sumner, his daughter and heir apparent Shari and the TV exec Les Moonves who plotted to take over the business until he was brought down by #MeToo allegations is plainly told and extremely satisfying in its detail and scope. Plus if you really miss Brian Cox et al, you can slowly flick through the archive photographs while humming a haunting piano theme.

Frederick Studemann

FT LITERARY EDITOR

Much of my reading this year has been taken up with judging a prize that involved reading over 130 books of fiction in translation — so no room for anything else on the bedside table. If you haven’t yet read Time Shelter (W&N/Liveright) by Georgi Gospodinov, winner of this year’s International Booker Prize, a treat awaits: it’s a brilliant, elegiac and darkly humorous story of memory and nostalgia that illuminates much of what is going on in the world right now. With that now behind me, I’ve been enjoying Karl Schlögel’s The Soviet Century (Princeton). In some ways it’s a good — if heavyweight — real-world historical complement to Gospodinov that works through the “lost world” of the USSR via a detailed examination of the relics of ordinary communist life. Perfect for dipping into. In a very different vein and with an eye on the weeks and months ahead, Emma Cline’s latest novel, The Guest (Chatto & Windus/Random House), a sharp, sad and sinister tale of empty lives playing out in, and on the fragile margins of, rich late summer Long Island, brought a welcome break.

Nilanjana Roy

FT COLUMNIST

The Covenant of Water (Grove Atlantic), Abraham Verghese’s fourth book, is a hefty 736-page summer blockbuster: set in Kerala, one of my favourite parts of India, the prose is as lush and resplendent as the landscape. This three-generation saga features a memorable matriarch, a family curse and enough history to make you feel smarter by association. It will also inspire you to book a trip to the backwaters immediately.

Tim Harford

FT COLUMNIST

Why do big projects go wrong so often, and are there any lessons you can use when renovating your kitchen? Bent Flyvbjerg is the “megaproject” expert and Dan Gardner brings the storytelling skills to How Big Things Get Done (Macmillan/Currency), with examples ranging from a Jimi Hendrix studio to the Sydney Opera House. Practical and readable.

Rana Foroohar

FT GLOBAL BUSINESS COLUMNIST

Education used to be a way to get ahead in America. But the defunding of public schools and the rise of private education is increasing, rather than reducing the wealth divide. In her deeply reported book, The Death of Public School (Basic Books), Cara Fitzpatrick tracks how education became a private commodity, rather than a universal good. It’s a story that has its beginnings in the segregationist south of the 1950s that went on to acquire an odd mix of supporters on both left and right.

Henry Mance

FT CHIEF FEATURES WRITER

Daniel Knowles’s Carmageddon (Abrams Press) is a punchy account of how our cities became clogged with cars, and how myopic policies keep them that way. Nice line from Mumbai: when poor people occupy land without paying, it’s called squatting; when rich people do the same, it’s called parking.

Stephen Bush

FT COLUMNIST AND ASSOCIATE EDITOR

The Story of the Forest (Virago) is the story of a family of Latvian Jews aiming for New York who hit Liverpool instead. Linda Grant’s superb book chronicles the family’s history through almost a century in a compelling narrative about growing up and the inescapable pull of family secrets. A must-read.

Summer Books 2023

All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:

Monday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Tuesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Wednesday: Fiction in translation by Ángel Gurría-Quintana
Thursday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Friday: Critics’ picks
Saturday: History by Tony Barber

Camilla Cavendish

FT COLUMNIST and CONTRIBUTING EDITOR

Time to Think (Swift Press) is a powerful investigation by the Newsnight reporter Hannah Barnes into what happened to children with gender dysphoria at London’s Tavistock Clinic. The interviews with staff and children — some who have happily transitioned and some who have not — show how complex the issues are. Not a comfortable read but meticulous and thought-provoking.

Anne-Sylvaine Chassany

FT COMPANIES EDITOR

Katja Hoyer was four when she witnessed protests in East Berlin from the top of the futuristic TV tower overlooking Alexanderplatz, too young to grasp the events that would sweep away the German Democratic Republic a month later. In Beyond the Wall (Allen Lane/Basic Books), the historian recounts individual stories about well-known or ordinary Ossis in an attempt to bring nuance to the largely dismissive narrative about the four-decade-long socialist experiment that continues to shape Germany’s political and cultural life.

Simon Schama

FT contributing editor

I don’t understand why the British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad’s work isn’t more loudly celebrated. The Parisian, which travelled between Paris and inter-war Palestine, was richly sensuous, brimming with poetic finesse. Her new novel, Enter Ghost (Jonathan Cape/Grove Atlantic), set in contemporary Haifa and the West Bank, is even better: harder, darker, sexier, brilliantly embedded (hence the title) in an Arabic production of Hamlet. It doesn’t turn its face away from the bitter conflict, but nor does it treat it with rhetorical crudeness; it is among many other things, a story of family, exile, return, assaulted but not defeated by history.

Claer Barrett

FT consumer editor

My favourite book was At My Mother’s Knee . . . And Other Low Joints (Bantam) the autobiography of Paul O’Grady (AKA Lily Savage) which was reprinted after his death in March. Growing up gay in 1960s working class Birkenhead was always going to be a fierce tale. But this is no misery memoir — and it’s the women in Paul’s life who take centre stage. Prepare to fall in love with Auntie Chrissie, whose tart put-downs mirror those of his alter ego, and his mother, who is constantly searching for her false teeth.