Few foods can compete with olive oil. Its salubrious properties have turned it into one of the most recognisable symbols of healthy living as well as a sign of tacit resistance to the industrialisation of food and loss of authentic flavours. Its rich history, stretching back to the Greeks, Egyptians and Babylonians, plays an enormous part in its ongoing symbolic associations. Across a range of Mediterranean cultures, olive oil has been an inordinately versatile and useful product, even regarded as a means of connecting with the divine. Today, it sells in pricy green bottles that promise a ‘Mediterranean’ lifestyle. And yet, the distinctive flavour of extra virgin olive oil is a modern invention. The trail of its peppery note leads straight to the core of the Industrial Revolution and the reinvention of olive oil as a global commodity.
Because the temperature of the sand incubating a sea turtle’s egg will determine the hatchling’s sex, exactly where on the island a given egg ends up has intergenerational repercussions. Eggs laid on Ascension’s white sand beaches may grow up male or female, depending on air temperature, rainfall, and other variables. But those laid on the island’s stretch of black sand beach—which soaks up the tropical sun’s heat and holds it—will always hatch female. Those females will grow up, mate, and return to the same beach to nest—and their offspring will be female, too. Historic temperature reconstructions suggest that “in the last 150 years, there wouldn’t have been a single male turtle produced” on the black beach, says Graeme C. Hays, a sea turtle biologist at Deakin University in Geelong, Australia. “It was just so hot.”
The Old Neighborhood deserves attention. It gives voice to Edgewater’s past, most of which—the streets, the homes, the lake—remain unchanged despite the partial facelift it has undergone. The geography has a story, along with those who lived there. The novel makes this real.
It can be disheartening to consider the fight for women’s rights from more than a century ago may have progressed so little today, but it’s not all hopeless. Ham balances moments of joy with the challenges of the day, and Molly teaches us never to give up in the face of setbacks, becoming more resilient and taking the future into her own hands.
Revolving around the murder of an investigative journalist at TrueCon, a rightwing conference held in a crumbling stately home in the early days of Liz Truss’s premiership, it features an exploration of how and why things fell apart, a deft tracing of the history of American conservatism and its arrival in the UK, and a white-haired, hard-drinking detective called Pru Freeborne (or, of course, Proof Reborn).