MUST READS
In his scathing account, Bullough compares the UK to Wodehouse's inscrutable butler, Jeeves
MUST READS
BUTLER TO THE WORLD
by Oliver Bullough (Profile £10.99, 304 pp)
In his scathing account, Bullough compares the UK to Wodehouse's inscrutable butler, Jeeves.
Just as Jeeves tirelessly helps the 'quarter-witted posho Bertie Wooster evade the consequences of [his] misbehaviour, Britain helps the world's financial criminals and tax dodgers . . . enjoy the fruits of their crimes free of scrutiny'.
In January 2022, Lord Agnew of Oulton, the minister in charge of combating fraud, resigned, citing 'arrogance, indolence and ignorance' within government.
A month later, Russia's invasion meant that political promises to deal with oligarchs were hastily remembered.
Yet underfunded and demoralised law enforcement bodies face an unequal battle. Bullough's highly readable account of the UK's role in facilitating global financial wrongdoing is a call to action.
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Sams's young women are discovering relationships and their feelings about who they are and what they want
SEND NUDES
by Saba Sams (Bloomsbury £9.99, 224 pp)
The women in Saba Sams's debut collection are doing their best to navigate a world that seems unpredictable and sometimes down- right hostile.
In grimy pubs, on buses and in damp tents at festivals, Sams's young women are discovering relationships and their feelings about who they are and what they want.
In the title story, a woman finds joyful acceptance of her body after being pressured by a stranger to send a naked photo. In Tinderloin, a motherless 16-year-old loses her virginity to a much older man and, in Snakebite, a university student is exploited by her glamorous new friend.
While Sams's women are vulnerable, they are never victims: her writing, like her heroines, is observant, intelligent and funny.
Schulz writes movingly of the unpredictability of grief
LOST & FOUND
by Kathryn Schulz (Picador £9.99, 256 pp)
In the space of 18 months, Kathryn Schulz met the love of her life and lost her father, Isaac. Her memoir weaves together her experiences of love and death with reflections on these universal events.
Isaac was a brilliant lawyer whose life had been framed by loss. Kathryn suggests that her father's lifelong habit of misplacing things may have been 'the comic-opera version of the tragic series of losses that shaped his childhood'. Those included the deaths in Auschwitz of almost all his mother's family.
Isaac was ill for years, but his loss was no less shocking. Schulz writes movingly of the unpredictability of grief. But she also describes the joy of meeting her partner when she had almost abandoned the search for love. Grief and joy are beautifully entwined in this memoir.
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