Should publishers’ nonfiction lists offer us a snapshot of the state we’re in, or a means of escape from it? Ideally, of course, they should attempt to do both. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in 2020 grimness will be a feature of new nonfiction. When it comes to the so-called zeitgeist, even those books whose titles strive hardest for positivity – The Power of Bad and How to Overcome It by John Tierney and Roy F Baumeister (Allen Lane, January); How to Argue With a Racist by Adam Rutherford (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, February) – ultimately only serve to remind us that we live in extremely anxiety-inducing and fractious times.
Get ready, then, for lots of books about our ever-increasing failure fully to communicate with one another – and on what we might do to improve our mental health, damaged as it may be by this emotional isolation. In You’re Not Listening (Harvill Secker, January), the American journalist Kate Murphy aims to restore the art of listening to its rightful place by revealing what we’re missing when curiosity and patience fail us; in Strangers by Joe Keohane (October, Viking), the author makes the case for talking to those we don’t know by showing how such interactions can boost our happiness. In The Well-Gardened Mind (William Collins, April), meanwhile, the psychiatrist and psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith carefully deploys a mix of neuroscience and psychology to investigate the powerful effects of gardening on our health and wellbeing.
Still, if you do want (or need) to block out the din and take refuge in other people’s lives, several excellent memoirs are coming our way. In Motherwell: A Girlhood by Deborah Orr (Weidenfeld, January), the late and much-loved journalist, tells the story of her relationship with her mother, Win, and along the way captures a certain slice of social history, while in The Hungover Games, Sophie Heawood (Cape, July) writes with warmth and wit about life as a single mother. Those who love Samantha Harvey’s fiction will find the prospect of her memoir of insomnia, The Shapeless Unease (Cape, January), utterly irresistible. But I feel myself that it is unlikely to grip quite like Wild Game (Chatto, January), Adrienne Brodeur’s eye-popping memoir of her mother’s love affair and her own childhood role as confidante-in-chief. As books about families, sex and complicity go, this one’s right up there. And I am looking forward to Hadley Freeman’s timely House of Glass: The Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family (4th Estate, March), a book that follows the various journeys of her grandmother and great-uncles; she writes so well. Also worth a look: A Bite of the Apple (OUP, February), Lennie Goodings’s account of life at the feminist publisher Virago, which she joined as a wide-eyed girl newly arrived from Canada in 1978.
In biography, we can look forward to The Poet Who Changed the World (William Collins, May), Jonathan Bate’s new life of William Wordsworth, published to mark the poet’s 250th birthday; to Warhol: A Life As Art (Allen Lane, February) by Blake Gopnik, which promises to be definitive; and to Fall: The Last Days of Robert Maxwell (Viking, July) by John Preston, the author of A Very English Scandal (though I do think he should have called the new book Splash). In Oh Happy Day: Those Times and These Times (Cape, May), Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago, traces the history of her impoverished British ancestors, beginning with her great-great-grandmother, a Leicestershire stocking-frame worker, to draw parallels with the way the poor are treated by society even now.
The group biography – a tricky form – continues to be a thing. In Square Haunting (Faber, January), Francesca Wade looks at the lives of five women in London between the wars (its already much-written about subjects include the novelist Dorothy L Sayers and the poet HD). In Difficult Women (Cape, February), the brilliant, free-thinking Helen Lewis gives us a history of feminism in 11 fights.
When it comes to travel and/or place, I like the sound of Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession (Canongate, May), in which Gavin Francis explores our fascination with islands; and of Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish Fishing Town (Bloomsbury, April), in which, among other things, Lamorna Ash goes out with the trawlermen of Newlyn (this is her first book; her author biography informs us, quite delightfully, that Ash “can gut most kinds of fish, quite slowly”). Fans of Tim Dee, of whom I’m one, also have a new book from him to look forward to. In Greenery: Journeys in Springtime (Cape, March), Dee follows the season of buds and blossoms as it moves north from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa to northern Scandinavia. Here, as you would expect from Dee, are swallows, storks and all manner of other birds. But here, too, are DH Lawrence, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and an Egyptian cab driver. It sounds … lush.
Finally, I want to make special mention of Rachel Clarke’s Dear Life (Little, Brown, January). Though a new medical memoir seems to come along every five minutes just now, this one is special. Clarke, a doctor who works in palliative medicine, inhabits a world most people cannot bear to think about unless they have to. She knows what matters to a person in their last weeks, and she has ideas about how that time may be made more bearable: an understanding that only deepened in 2017, when her own father was diagnosed with cancer. Now she has written a book, beautiful and blessedly un-mawkish, about her experiences. Among its pages are true horrors for those involved, but also a numinous beauty. Her words are brimful of love, grace and kindness – and by being so, put the place where this piece began firmly in perspective.
