The paperback has always been the most intimate of literary objects. It is the book you stuff in a bag, the book whose spine you crack, the book that accompanies you on a journey. But what if the journey is not one of escapism, but of deep, sometimes uncomfortable, introspection? Creativitys.UK will tell you about a remarkable slate of paperbacks released this July, a collection that, taken as a whole, seems less interested in helping us escape our world and more invested in examining the very architecture of it. These are books about stories. They are about the magnificent, necessary, and often dangerous fictions we build to make sense of our lives, our histories, and our volatile present.
From the murky world of espionage to the charged landscapes of personal memory, these authors are acting as cartographers of the narrative, mapping the ways we invent ourselves, our relationships, and our nations. They are a powerful reminder that the most fundamental human act is not to live, but to tell the story of our living.
The architecture of the self
How do we become who we are? According to psychologist Lucy Foulkes in her eye-opening guide, Coming of Age, we narrate ourselves into being. Her book is a profound exploration of adolescence, not as a hormonal storm, but as the period where we first begin to construct the autobiographical story that will define us. Through a series of funny, sad, and startlingly potent interviews, Foulkes demonstrates that these early narrative choices – the stories we tell ourselves about first loves, failures, and traumas – reverberate for decades. It is a wise, revelatory work that suggests that while we can get stuck in these stories, we also possess the power to revise them.
This act of self-invention is the central obsession of Deborah Levy’s exquisite essay collection, The Position of Spoons. Levy, a writer who thinks “as deeply as it is possible to think without dying of pain,” examines the artists who have inspired her, particularly women. She understands that for a female artist, creativity is inextricably linked to the performance of self. Artists like Lee Miller and Francesca Woodman, she argues, invent not just their art, but themselves, playing a complex game of self-presentation and self-effacement. Levy’s prose plunges into the depths of what it costs to make a life and make art, and how we must sometimes remove our own eyes and see the world through another’s just to survive.
A stranger, more visceral exploration of the inner narrative comes in Gillian Anderson’s audacious collection, Want. A compilation of anonymous sexual fantasies from women around the world, the book is a stunning testament to a vivid, imaginative hinterland that mainstream culture rarely acknowledges. From a tryst with a Hogwarts potion master to a longing for an office doorknob, these are the secret stories women tell themselves. More compelling than the often shocking scenarios are the glimpses into the real worlds they provide a portal away from: the loneliness, the grief, the quiet desperation. It is a book that gives you privileged, painful access to the most truthful corners of a hidden life.
The fictions of power
If the self is a fiction, then what of the lives we build within the larger fictions of society and politics? Rachel Kushner’s Booker-shortlisted novel, Creation Lake, is a thrilling, intellectually dazzling exploration of this very question. She dispatches Sadie Smith, a freelance American spy-cop, to infiltrate a post-Debordian eco-commune in rural France with the aim of provoking them into an act of terrorism. Sadie is a triumph of character, a woman living a life of profound, professional falsehood. Kushner uses this high-stakes scenario to ask a fundamental question: how does an individual’s raw, sensory experience of the world interface with rigid ideology? Sadie, a walking, talking, thinking fiction, is perhaps both the question and the answer.
A different kind of porous boundary, between memory and fantasy, is explored in Anita Desai’s haunted, riddling late-career gift, Rosarita. A young Indian woman in Mexico is approached by a mysterious stranger who claims to have known her dead mother. The stranger’s stories conjure a version of her mother – an artist, a traveller – that she simply does not recognise, forcing her to question the very foundations of her own memory. Written in the second person, the novel is a sly, lyrical interrogation of the gulf that can exist between a parent and child, and whether one person can ever truly imagine and understand the life of another.
This theme of competing narratives finds its apotheosis in Lili Anolik’s juicy dual biography, Didion & Babitz. A “provocation” rather than a straight history, the book examines the friendship and rivalry between the two great chroniclers of 1960s California. Joan Didion, the serious literary titan, and Eve Babitz, the free-spirited artist whose reputation Anolik herself helped to restore. Using an unsent, excoriating letter from Babitz to Didion as its catalyst, the book gallops through their entangled lives, showing how two brilliant women constructed two very different, and often conflicting, public fictions from the same raw material of Los Angeles life.
Rewriting history’s script
Beyond the personal, this month’s paperbacks also engage in the urgent, necessary work of rewriting and correcting the grand narratives of history. Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa is a vital, ambitious, and refreshing corrective to the genre of African history written by “old Africa hands.” As lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina, this genre traditionally reveres the continent’s landscape while patronising its people. Badawi, by contrast, tells the continent’s story from an African perspective, informed by interviews with African scholars and cultural custodians. The book is a powerful assertion of dignity, a reclamation of a narrative that has for too long been told by others.
This act of reclamation is echoed in Biyi Bándélé’s posthumous novel, Yorùbá Boy Running. Inspired by the history of his own great-grandfather, Bándélé gives a voice to Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a formerly enslaved man who became a historic figure. While not perfectly polished, the novel is a glorious and important bookend to a truncated career, a fictional act of running back into the past to give voice to those whose stories were erased by the violence of slavery.
And then there is the terrifying, speculative narrative of Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War. In a minute-by-minute account of a frighteningly realistic scenario, Jacobsen tells the story of a future we must desperately avoid. It is a work of non-fiction that reads like the most gripping thriller, a narrative designed to shock us out of our complacency about the apocalyptic legacy of the Cold War.
Stories for a broken world
Finally, a number of these books grapple with creating new stories in a world that feels increasingly broken. Tim Winton, a master of Australian realism, turns his hand to speculative fiction in Juice. Set centuries from now, it is a post-apocalyptic road novel worthy of the Mad Max franchise, a story of survival in a landscape blackened by the ashes of climate chaos. It is a bleak, powerful, and utterly unforgettable narrative for our anxious times.
A non-fiction counterpoint is offered by Rob Jackson’s Into the Clear Blue Sky. A professor of environmental sciences, Jackson makes a compelling case for methane removal as a way to rewrite our climate future. His book is a lucid, powerful, and ultimately hopeful message that a different story is still possible. And in Bad Diaspora Poems, the former Young People’s Poet Laureate for London, Momtaza Mehri, forges a dazzling new poetic language to navigate the fragmented, complex, and often painful story of diaspora, proving that even from brokenness, new and vital narratives can emerge.
In their glorious diversity, these books are a potent reminder of our fundamental need for stories. They challenge the narratives we have been given, and they inspire us with the courage to imagine new ones. In a grim world, they suggest that the most hopeful act of all is to insist on telling a different, better, and more truthful story.
