In the afterglow of our sighting, surrounded by the pulse of life that marks a late Arctic summer, it’s easy to envision the grandeur of this valley in perpetuity, and equally easy to ignore the signs of change, both visible and not. As a biologist, I’m keenly aware that we’re living in an age of extinction, but here, now, I couldn’t conjure a sense of absence if I tried. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to feel anything but awe. Like the researchers I’ll soon meet—a binocular-clad cult of falcon fanatics who chase their subjects to the far ends of the globe—I’ve inadvertently become a peregrine fangirl.
The novel was inspired by Robertson’s own encounters with the British counterculture during this period, and that lived experience certainly informs every page of a novel that is brimming with finely drawn characters, astutely observed milieus and an achingly credible depiction of the dual pain of unrequited love and internalised homophobia.
The book follows three men who, in the wake of that catastrophe, are thrown together to look after a toddler. None of them is equipped for it but all are forced to rise to the challenge. In charting their separate struggles and shared responsibilities, Lamont crafts a wholly engaging and frequently affecting tale about friendship, fatherhood, family ties, and finding the ability to love unconditionally.
Kenitz crafts a terrifying modern-day villain. And he’s refined exactly what makes domestic thrillers so gut-roiling: They turn the places and people that should be safest — home and family — into something to be avoided at all costs. Kenitz turns the perfect home into a nightmare with proficiency and horrifying pizzazz.
Humans are unrealistically optimistic about the world and the future; we systematically underestimate our chances of experiencing unpleasant diseases, going through a divorce, or losing a loved one. About the only people who don’t see the world through the lens of this “optimism bias” are the clinically depressed. Depressive realism – the name given to the relative immunity of the melancholic to this illusion – suggests that we see reality clearly only at the cost of our mental health. This presents psychologists with an interesting dilemma. We are always caught between the delusion of wearing rose-tinted spectacles, and the debilitating affect of taking them off. Should we prioritise accuracy or happiness?
Sumit Paul-Choudhury comes down firmly on the side of optimism in this lively exploration of glass-half-full thinking and its relationship with social progress. What initially feels like it might be a self-help book turns into an eye-opening history of the idea of optimism, before exploring its potential to help us address social and ecological challenges. The tension in our relationship to optimism, between its motivating and its delusional possibilities, is present throughout.
Horwitz’s sudden death obliterated that idyll, and Memorial Days, Brooks’s heartbreaking new memoir, is an attempt not only to process her profound loss but to reflect on our culture’s diminishing ceremony around death and dying. Sadly, Brooks discovers that the blunt phone call from the doctor who announces Horwitz’s death and then “can’t get me off the phone fast enough” will be just the “first brutality” in a broken system.