It’s the year 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Eccentric and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “spartan”, a “relentless searching, a yearning for pieces that fit together to make a new whole”. He spends his days making sculptures from broken pottery; the shards of his life.

During a warm winter’s day, Daniel steps outside to find that the longan tree in his garden has fallen during a storm. The tree was an heirloom of sorts – a family emblem of home and belonging for generations before him.

Mirandi Riwoe’s A Short History of Longans is not, in the straightforward sense, Daniel’s story. Indeed, as the title suggests, it’s a multigenerational story of how the longan tree got to be here, at this particular point in time. The book opens with a fictional biography: Ah Yang, a Chinese Australian bushranger, active in Queanbeyan in the 1850s. The family that branches out from under him ends with Daniel. So what of the centuries between? How is Ah Yang connected to Daniel, and to the longan tree?

As the longan dies, an immensely complex network of relationships and stories is uncovered. The roots that have carried Daniel here begin to show.

As with much of Riwoe’s previous work, including her Stella prize-shortlisted and Queensland Literary award-winning novel Stone Sky Gold Mountain, A Short History of Longans is historical fiction, though some sections reach into a near future. It’s told primarily from the perspectives of four characters across 200 years: Daniel in 2049; his aunt Wendy, suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s in the early 2000s; his great-aunt Ruby, a Chinese Australian film actor struggling to break into 1950s Hollywood; and his great-great-great-grandmother Maria, the unlikely matriarch, whose story stretches from the 1850s into the mid-20th century. There’s a particular focus on Chinese Australian experiences across time, and the nuances of race, gender and immigration are explored as each member of the family negotiates belonging and assimilation in different ways.

Initially, the book appears as though it will unfold in four seasonal movements – winter with Daniel, autumn with Wendy, summer with Ruby, spring with Maria. But then the structure begins to unfurl, loosen and accelerate. In the 1900s, minor characters step briefly into focus before disappearing again; marriages, children and relationships accumulate until the family tree – at first a static diagram – seems to become a living organism. Though these characters inhabit different times and places, we soon begin to see how they are formed by the same inheritances and how each of them, in turn, shapes the next.

Many of Riwoe’s characters are in their mid to late life and still undergoing transformation. It’s refreshing to encounter a novel so centrally interested in the ever-changing lives of older people, and so resistant to an arc of youthful self-discovery. As Wendy forgets her own life, she feels “the narrowing fragments of time bearing down upon her”. “Where does the time go?” she asks herself. We begin to see that there are some things – shame, regret, unhappiness – that she is actively choosing to leave behind.

The novel is concerned with memory and storytelling; what we cannot remember, and what we try to forget. Though they work hard at “burying the hard facts around the grey matter”, it becomes clear that every member of the family is carrying their own pain, and shame that should never have been theirs to carry. “The shame you speak of is counterfeit, my darling,” Maria tells her granddaughter. “Something manufactured by the mean and unimaginative.”

It’s in the exploration of intergeneration memory that this work particularly excels. Gabor Maté writes of family histories of trauma as “stories within stories, receding in time”. Riwoe maps this transmission with a sensitivity that brought me to tears several times.

A Short History of Longans is almost 300 pages, but I finished it in a single sitting. Riwoe’s densely descriptive prose makes for lovely reading. Even when her sentences occasionally verge on excessively long and stylised, her command of language and image are undeniable. Some segments feel simplified – Ruby’s experiences as an Oriental expert and actor, for example – but Riwoe’s ability to inhabit the minds of her characters makes even these moments entertaining.

There is a profound sense of connection and continuity at the centre of this work. But there’s also deep pain, loneliness and misunderstanding. Perhaps the great tragedy is that these things must necessarily sit side by side.

Like Daniel’s sculptures, A Short History of Longans is assembled from fragments; memories that cross time and space, each with its own sharp edges. In bringing them together, Riwoe creates a family portrait that makes two centuries of imagined history feel as though it has been lived.

Sublimation by Isabel J Kim (Picador, £18.99)
This debut novel from an award-winning Korean-American short fiction writer is a fantastical reimagining of the immigrant experience. Here, anyone who crosses a border not intending to return creates an “instance”: a duplicate self who continues life at home. Reintegration into one body is possible, but after years of separate experiences, Soyoung wonders if it might be the psychological equivalent of murder. This idea shocks her friend Yujin, who speaks with his instance in New York every day, waiting for him to be granted the dual citizenship that will allow them to share a privileged life between two countries. The story of these two pairs is told in the second person, a destabilising choice that gradually immerses the reader in a world of doppelgangers. As in our reality, travel is hedged around with bureaucratic systems designed to codify identity and control immigration. A brilliantly realised, imaginative and compelling work of literary speculative fiction.

Last Day of a Prior Life byAndrés Barba, translated by Lisa Dillman (Scribe, £10.99)
The latest novel by the Spanish author of Such Small Hands is a gentler, more unusual approach to the ghost story. An estate agent encounters a child in the empty house she’s trying to sell, and realises she’s met a ghost. The experience causes her to think about her closest relationships and to act in ways she never has before. Knowing it could be dangerous, she goes back to the house, determined to try to help the child from another time who is trapped there. A short, subtle, eerie tale that hides depths beneath a surface simplicity.

Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
The latest from the horror writer dips into the darker side of science fiction, imagining the development of a brain implant that allows the dead to walk. Julia has been hired to use something like a games control console to operate a man in a vegetative state, making his otherwise unresponsive body stand, walk, turn around and sit down. Her job is to conduct him from California to the east coast, supposedly so his final wishes will be honoured, and he’ll be able to legally die by his own choice. There’s nothing dignified about their jerky progress through airports and on planes, trying to avoid attracting attention to the man she calls Bernie and pretends is her stroke-disabled father walking under his own power. The creepy, dark humour in Julia’s side of the story is undercut by horror in chapters from the point of view of a man trapped in a body he cannot control, unable to remember his own name, but increasingly determined to escape and find answers. Things grow progressively more dangerous, the dread building to a mind-bending shocker of an ending.

The Carrier by Ruth Newton (Bantam, £18.99)
In this debut novel, a Carrier – always female – is someone paid to process another’s pain, relieving the customer from negative emotions such as jealousy, grief or anxiety. The mechanics don’t stand up to inspection, but as an allegory for our commercialised lives, and particularly the expectations of women’s emotional labour, it’s right on the nose. This cleverly plotted thriller shines a light on the way fortunes are made by inventing new addictions, and how easily unfair treatment may be hidden, or simply accepted. A thought-provoking read.

Time to Burn by Ellery Lloyd (Macmillan, £16.99)
In present-day London, tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank launches his latest venture: commercial time travel. Only the super-rich can afford it, and the huge amount of energy required to keep a gateway to the past open for even a few minutes is hardly eco-friendly. Also, the past is not fixed. If visitors do something that could change the course of history, in even the smallest way, no one knows how it might affect the present. Visits to the 1940s are restricted to a few hours spent within walking distance of the London site. When the third tour returns minus one tourist and with another one badly injured, characters have the unsettling feeling that certain details in their own lives don’t match up with their memories. A clever, exciting time-travel thriller, filled with unexpected twists.

When Laverne Cox was eight years old and growing up in Mobile, Alabama, she saved up her pocket money and bought herself a fan decorated with Japanese geishas. The fan became her favourite plaything, a prop to be used while dancing in imaginary music videos or recreating scenes from Gone With the Wind in which she cast herself as Scarlett O’Hara. “I lit up, animated, whenever that fan was in my hand,” she recalls in her memoir.

But when Cox, who was raised as a boy, began fanning herself with it at school, her teacher, Mrs Ridgeway, yanked her furiously out of the classroom, paraded her and her new accessory in front of the other teachers, and then phoned her mother, Gloria. When Gloria came home that evening, she exploded with fury. She said Mrs Ridgeway had told her she too had a son who had been an effeminate child who was now living on the streets of New Orleans and wearing a dress. “You want to be in a dress on the streets in New Orleans?” shouted Gloria, who would habitually call Cox a “sissy” and other homophobic slurs. She then signed her up for conversion therapy, which duly failed. It did, however, reinforce the message that there was something deeply wrong with Cox and that she was ultimately unlovable. Three years later, she tried to kill herself.

Transcendent is an immersive, eloquent and often harrowing account of the actor, presenter and LGBTQ+ campaigner’s struggles growing up gender nonconforming in the deep south. It also tells of her long and obstacle-strewn path to success. Prior to landing the role of Sophia Burset, an inmate in the prison drama Orange Is the New Black, Cox had spent more than 20 years living hand to mouth in New York while taking acting classes and attending endless auditions. Finding acceptance in an industry that habitually discriminated against women, non-binary and black people entailed dogged perseverance and many dark nights of the soul.

But the biggest battle in Transcendent plays out between Cox and her mother, whose cruel warnings about being down-and-out in New Orleans in a dress rang in her ears long into adulthood. Gloria never stopped telling Cox and her twin brother Lamar how disappointing they were, how she couldn’t afford them and they couldn’t do anything right. One day, at the end of her tether after Lamar and his friends put a stone through a neighbour’s window, she wordlessly took her children to the home of their father, who they’d never met, and dumped them in his kitchen with two suitcases. Inspecting his children, Cox Sr declared them “fucking freaks”. The following day, he had his wife deposit them at a police station from where they were transferred to an orphanage. They would stay there for a month before Gloria gave in and came to collect them.

All of this is relayed by Cox in a tone that feels less about getting even with her mother than a genuine attempt to understand and process her tyranny. We learn how Gloria endured severe financial hardship and had herself grown up in an abusive household. The author also gives her credit for agreeing to send both her children to the Alabama School of Fine Arts, where Cox specialised in dance and her brother in visual art, and which helped put both on the path to their respective careers.

Most striking of all is Cox’s sharp detailing of the loneliness and loss of freedom and trust that comes with being ostracised, mocked and physically attacked for being different. She describes the exhausting burden of being out and about as a gender non-conforming person, her senses permanently on high alert, scoping out strangers for signs of hostility. “If something felt weird,” she recalls, “I’d just start running. I didn’t need to find out what was up. I knew that my life was in danger.” Back in the safety of her apartment, that tension would quickly turn into despair.

Somehow, through all this, Laverne nurtures an inner defiance that leads her to embrace outre fashion, to begin strutting rather than scurrying down the street and, eventually, living life as a trans woman who raises awareness for others walking the same path. Hers is a story of resilience and rebellion – and that of a performer whose ultimate revenge for decades of abuse and rejection is success.

With its gods, monsters and dizzying scale, Homer’s the Odyssey is deemed by many to be unfilmable, though it hasn’t stopped directors from having a go, including Christopher Nolan, whose blockbuster adaptation comes to cinemas next week. An audiobook would seem a smart choice, allowing listeners to deploy their imaginations to conjure dark sorcery, supernatural beasts and epic storms rather than leaning on CGI.

This classic recording, first published in 2006, is based on Ian Johnston’s much-admired translation. It is narrated by the Game of Thrones actor Anton Lesser, who brings gravitas and texture to this tale of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his efforts to get home after the 10-year Trojan War. Odysseus’s journey is fraught as he encounters the wrath of the sea god Poseidon in the form of a man-eating monster and a whirlpool that swallows ships. Then comes Calypso, the beautiful goddess-nymph and daughter of Atlas who keeps him on an island for seven years in the hope that he will stay as her husband.

Back in Ithaca, Odysseus’s wife Penelope – who doesn’t know if her husband is dead or alive – is being besieged by suitors, while their adult son Telemachus, who hasn’t seen his father since he was an infant, struggles to maintain order and embarks on various sojourns to track down him down. Then we’re with the gods on Olympus as they sit around arguing about which mortals they will aid and on which they will rain down hell and damnation. Will Odysseus make it home and, if he does, will he be welcome?

Available via Naxos, 12hr 45min

Further listening

Music as Medicine
Daniel Levitin, Penguin, 12hr 17min
A paean to the healing properties of music, Levitin’s book investigates the connections between music and the human body and brain and tests the argument for the use of music as medicine. Read by the author.

Butcher
Joyce Carol Oates, 4th Estate, 13hr 11min
A cast including Edoardo Ballerini, Cassandra Campbell and Amy Shiels star in this chilling fictional biography of a doctor who experiments on the female patients of a New Jersey lunatic asylum and becomes a leading light in gyno-psychiatry.

The summer of 1976 calls to my generation of novelists. We don’t remember it, but we remember the textures of daily life in that era, and a heatwave puts daily life under the kind of pressure that fuels fiction. In Guardian journalist Charlotte Edwardes’s first novel, Trouble Was, the scene is set by that heatwave with its attendant, escalating water shortage; the escalating marital and mental health crisis of the mother of three young children; a remote farm in the West Country. Though in some ways the pace is slow– not a criticism, the pace of school holidays with nowhere to go and nothing to do is also slow – the novel’s engines thrum from the first page.

Edwardes has taken the risk of a first-person child narrator, primary-aged Frank. Such figures are necessarily precocious – there’s a reason full-length novels by nine-year-olds are rarely written and never published – and tend to make demands on our suspension of disbelief, but in this case it’s convincing and compelling from the outset. The use of past tense helps, allowing both strikingly immediate observation and the feeling that the prose is in the steady hands of a remembering adult. Through the gap between Frank and the reader’s comprehension, the book conveys what the reader needs to understand about the adults’ lives. We know that most of the adults are also adulterers, that his mother’s mental illness is hereditary as well as situational, and that her efforts to fob off social services are just about adequate.

We meet Frank and his younger siblings, four-year-old Odette and toddler Patrick, in their mother’s smelly old car, packed in “so close it made my job of looking after us easier”. They’re driving through the night to the big farmhouse of their Aunt Perry, leaving home as many times before, for reasons Frank never really understands. Their father is away in the navy, but Frank’s memories of and longing for him are complicated: an adult reliably in charge when present, but also a volatile threat to his mother’s stability. In his absence, Frank is required to step in.

But the situation is, naturally, unmanageably complex. Aunt Perry is also raising her sons mostly in the absence of their father, albeit with private schools and a large house, and she too is unable or unwilling to meet children’s basic needs. Food is erratic and inadequate, water comes from a dirty well, there are maggots in the kitchen sink, pee all over the bathroom and nothing and no one is ever washed. Frank’s cousins are casually brutalised and brutal, given attention only in the form of humiliation and inconsistent punishment that they yearn to pass on. In Frank, Patrick and especially Odette, the cousins see scapegoats and victims.

The plot is the painfully inevitable deterioration of this scene. Inasmuch as there’s any consistent principle, basic parenting, for both mothers, is about “toughening up”. Frank’s mum tells him in response to a rare complaint about the cousins’ bullying of Patrick, “If you want to survive in this world, you have to put up with it … put up and shut up.” She calls Odette “Pudding” and sings to her that she’s big and fat, until Odette howls and is scolded for being too sensitive. She slaps Frank for twisting his hands when he’s upset, tells him not to shake his head because “you look deranged”. Though Aunt Perry is meant to be the responsible adult when Mum can’t get out of bed or is in hospital, she punishes the children until they learn not to ask for help, whether medical attention for a convulsing toddler, information about their parents’ whereabouts or protection from predatory cousins.

Edwardes has been a war correspondent, and is excellent at the small detail that tells a terrible story. She knows when looking away is more effective than a full frontal description, and how to haunt readers without sensationalism. If all this sounds grim and disturbing, it is, not least because of the mundanity of domestic squalor and the incremental worsening of Mum’s health, the cousins’ malice and the effects of the heatwave. Like the building of a thunderstorm through a sultry day, the story makes us wait for resolution, for justice and vindication, for some kind of happy ending.

I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that as often, the commitment to realism that makes this book also makes the ending difficult to deliver. There can be no cheerful resolution for children whose carers don’t care, and Edwardes has been too true to that position to betray it for a fairytale conclusion. Her solution is, like the rest of her writing, elegant. Though the rain falls at the end, there’s no cleansing storm and you don’t get to pretend the pain is washed away. The joy here is that of good writing.

There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and that the story belong to the writer’s (and reader’s) “own day”. In Lauren Mooney’s sharply observed debut novel, Danielle lives a precarious existence as a PA at a dilettante arts charity called Hodgepodge (strapline: “for ideas”). She types emails, makes tea and increasingly finds herself running personal errands for her monstrous boss Jeannie. Jeannie seems to see no difference between working for the charity, and working for her.

After a horrible breakup, Danielle finds herself unexpectedly homeless. With no savings, no bank of Mum and Dad, and no room left in her overdraft, she winds up staying alone in Jeannie’s ancestral home, a rambling pile in the middle of nowhere. “We could do with somebody to take care of the place,” Jeannie says, as Danielle bursts into uncharacteristic tears. “You’d be doing us a huge favour.”

Westerley has obvious antecedents: Shirley Jackson’s Hill House or Susan Hill’s Eel Marsh House, with their rooms shrouded in dust sheets and locked doors with no keys. All at Westerley is, of course, not as it seems: Danielle, alone in the house and miles from anywhere, finds a fresh bowl of peaches on the sideboard; sees a face at the window; wakes to find herself somewhere – or somewhen – else entirely. She hears hobnailed boots on the stairs; finds herself reaching for a calico apron that doesn’t exist.

Danielle sleeps at first in the master bedroom, but when Jeannie arrives unexpectedly – trailing her equally appalling son, Edward – she moves, of course, into the servants’ quarters. Soon, Danielle is rising at dawn, cleaning up after Jeannie and Edward, bringing afternoon tea up to the drawing room. As past and present blur, so too do the lines between 21st-century employee and 19th-century maid­servant. Didn’t she always bring Jeannie a green tea in the office? And didn’t Jeannie, after all, ask her to “take care of the place”?

Service is resolutely a book of the present day: of the housing crisis, of the unsteady nature of a life in the arts without family backing, of broken phones and bad wifi. Yet Mooney’s timeslip of a novel makes it clear how timeless some things actually are: loneliness, poverty, aspirations, the feeling of toiling for somebody, for something, for no other reason than the order of your birth, the precariousness with which one must tiptoe between deference and degradation, the effort to retain a sense of self in the face of a world that believes you – subtly or otherwise – to be lesser.

Attempting a seduction with assault-adjacent undertones, rapacious Edward announces that he is Upstairs, Wooster and, er, Downton, whereas Danielle is Downstairs, Jeeves, and … Abbey. “It’s a joke, Jesus. You work for my mum, so you’re the staff? I was joking.” Alone in the drawing room with the young master of the house, Danielle – or, perhaps, her ghostly counterpart – has no idea what to do, or how to escape.

The hauntings of Service are genuinely chilling. And yet equally chilling is the real world in which so many Danielles have lived. How many Edwards, for how many years, carried out their “seduction” with no consequences? How many poor girls have suffered worse with the threat of homelessness and penury hanging over them? The book, in places, can feel a little heavy-handed. Mooney might have trusted the reader more – or, perhaps, her own writing. The meticulous evisceration of the class system stands by itself. The charge that drives the book, then, is how little has changed in over 100 years. Or, perhaps, how little ever changes.

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I’ll confess my heart sank slightly at the prospect of reading David Sedaris’s new volume of essays, some of them previously published in the New Yorker, and which, relative to his earlier output, strike me as increasingly shticky and reliant on anecdotes too thin for their weight. (From the essay Little America: “Few things drive me crazier than people who put their feet up on the furniture.”) After nine previous volumes, Sedaris would seem to be suffering from a problem that comes to all writers in the end, and memoir writers in particular, which is a dearth of useable material. What can there possibly be left in the Sedaris backstory that the writer hasn’t already mined?

Well, as it turns out, there is still lots of useable stuff, as well as some an editor could have put a red line through, although Sedaris, who has sold more than 16m books, may well consider himself part of the post-editing elite. (I was reminded while reading of a line from a profile of JK Rowling several years ago in which, referring to The Casual Vacancy, Ian Parker wrote: “Some sentences cause you to picture a Little, Brown editor starting to dial Rowling’s number, then slowly putting down the handset.”) And perhaps it doesn’t matter; as long as Sedaris’s superfans keep coming, both for the books and events, why mess with the formula? For less committed followers, however, reading Sedaris is a glitchier experience than it was.

The new collection contains 28 short pieces that Sedaris has harvested from everyday experiences with his husband, Hugh, his siblings and his friends, and while in New York, England and on the road. He is continually touring and, as far as the essays are concerned, that’s where life gets in for Sedaris, guaranteeing a certain amount of material generated by chats with drivers, fleeting interactions at airports and the-general-public-say-the-funniest-things encounters with readers who have come to see him. If the scope is narrow, the Sedaris tone still charms, even as it advances to a state of crankiness that makes him look like a gay Larry David. “I’m in the hard part of getting old – the part where everything irritates you,” he writes. No kidding, and if Curb Your Enthusiasm can get away with an episode devoted to the hell of plastic packaging, then Sedaris is entitled to do the feet-on-furniture thing.

Which is to say, when it’s good it’s still good. In his essay The Hem of His Garment, he writes about people “who aren’t in show business but dazzle nevertheless”, and points for support to Ann Richards, the late governor of Texas (and mother of the late Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood), an example simultaneously so random, so absurd and yet so on the money in this context that I laughed out loud. Other laugh-out-loud moments include Sedaris’s experience at a No Kings protest against Trump, in which he finds himself baffled by his fellow protestors’ lack of focus. “Go to a protest now,” he writes, “and within seconds you’re looking at the person next to you, thinking, ‘Globalize the Intifada? I thought we were here to defend Masterpiece Theatre!’”

It’s low-hanging fruit, but I enjoyed the image of Sedaris looking around the protest in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and noting certain aesthetic similarities between the No Kings protestors and the kooks of the Tea Party circa Obama’s first term. Focusing on “a bearded man playing the accordion”, Sedaris writes that the protestors seem to offer “the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party: ‘Join us! We folk-dance!’”

Which brings us to what feels like the writer’s occasionally too rote adoption of the grumpy-old-man trope. When he makes a joke about saying “mothering person” instead of “motherfucker”, or asks, while describing someone, “are you allowed to say swarthy any more?” it’s so lame, so unfunny, so beneath a writer of Sedaris’s standing that it triggers a real are-you-kidding-me moment. Sedaris is only 69; he lives in New York and Europe and constantly travels the world; this kids-today-eh stuff is off the mark and should’ve been nixed.

The strongest sections, meanwhile, aren’t riffs on modern life but observations about people, close to him or otherwise, and in which Sedaris has always been at his shrewdest and most powerful. If one suffers a slight sense of weariness when he opens yet another sentence with the phrase, “My sister Amy”, the writing about his mother always hits hard. In the essay Cool Mom, a cascade of memories is triggered when he sees a fiftysomething woman at Denver airport in a T-shirt that reads: “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom.” What follows is Sedaris at his best, proving the point that he could write about his family for ever and never run dry: “Whatever our mother was to us, it’s too complex and momentous to ever fit onto a sweatshirt. A person would need a whole mountain, and then some.”

It is these reminiscences that send me back to his earlier books and remind me just how lasting some of Sedaris’s images are: the time his mum locked him and his siblings out of the house in the snow; the time she made him give his Halloween candy to some loser kid who came trick-or-treating on the wrong day. In the essay Ashes, from his second collection, Naked, there is that account of her death, a beautifully written piece in which his mother is smoking while contemplating her own end and none of them knows what to do.

Beneath the whimsy, there has always been a savage side to Sedaris, and an even more deeply buried layer of sentiment. In that same piece, Cool Mom, one sees where Sedaris’s writing voice comes from. Referring to the culture of the family he grew up in, he writes: “Nothing got made fun of more than sincerity.” And yet, as with so many pro curmudgeons, the impression one gets of Sedaris after reading him is of someone who feels things deeply and is probably, at root, a soppy guy. I love the piece about his oldest and closest friend, Dawn, who, he writes, “dresses like a Swiss person” and “smells like a cardboard box”. (I laughed out loud at that, too.) Or the piece in which Sedaris learns of the death of a boyhood pal he hadn’t seen or thought of for decades. “I am 67. This is my life, but different now, diminished, because Dan Thompson, who was there at the start of it and who made it so very worthwhile, has died.”

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In the essay A Long Way Home, Sedaris and Hugh give a stranger a lift back to the city from Maine after their flight has been cancelled, an account of a seven-hour drive with a woman called Susan Du that I found unaccountably moving. “Hugh and I, 10 blocks now from our own apartment, waited with the engine running until she was safely through her building’s front door and well on her way to the elevator.” If these essays can sometimes feel slight, here is a moment in which the strange poignancy of a glancing encounter, like someone seen through a lighted window and for some reason always remembered, finds its perfect expression.

At the heart of this strange, perhaps rather poignant, book is the biblical question: “What must I do to be saved?” Not in the crude sense of how to secure a place in heaven, but as an urgent challenge to a whole repertoire of destructive assumptions and habits endorsed by the majority culture. Vance’s famous first book, Hillbilly Elegy, chronicled, among other things, the impact of substance abuse on generations of the rural poor. It is not too much of a stretch to see this book as a vision of the modern west through the lens of addiction and its generational effects. Except, this time, it is the norms and expectations of elite modernity that are as lethal for the ambitious young professional as fentanyl is for the less privileged.

Vance offers a diagnosis that is not particularly original, but derives its force from the intensity of the personal questioning he undertook to arrive at it. The US vice president describes with clarity the pervasive mechanisms, in education and the professional and political worlds, that induct us into wanting what others want – not what we regard as inherently desirable. Most of us instinctively desire emotional security, meaningful work and, perhaps above all, hope and joy in nurturing the next generation, introducing them to a world of value and promise. One of the most telling moments in the book is the spectacularly successful young Vance’s painful bafflement when faced with the challenge of becoming a parent: “I knew exactly how to help my kid get into a good college but was woefully underprepared to make him a good man.”

Wanting what others want enslaves us to patterns of work that are inhumanly feverish and that wreak havoc with family life. They also corrupt our intellectual life, producing a hyper-anxious conformity of moral opinion. Vance refers to his experience at Yale law school, where, he says, progressive orthodoxies exercised an iron grip; to express scepticism about the absolute moral obviousness of a pro-choice position was to invite instant excommunication from the inner circle of the elect. And this kind of ostracism was practised by left and right alike: for both, the ultimate goal was simply to be as fully assimilated as possible into an administrative aristocracy that allowed you maximal personal liberty – imagined as maximal personal income and status.

Vance’s return to Christian faith was shaped by two basic insights. The first he expresses provocatively in the statement, “I found liberation in guilt”. To be both honest and compassionate we need a language (and a ritual) of repentance and renewal. What draws Vance towards a specifically Catholic identity is the need to see grace as being absorbed and assimilated over and over again in a long history of learning and growing – in contrast to the quick spiritual fixes he sees in the evangelical world of his childhood. The beginning of Christian wisdom is possible only through candour about your own failures and the resulting capacity to respond to the failures of others, not with collusive tolerance, but with mercy and hope.

The Catholic perspective is compelling also because of its history of social analysis that goes beyond the narrow polarisations of modern politics. The social vision classically articulated in the late 19th century by Pope Leo XIII stresses that economic life must enable rather than subvert the dignity of persons and families, the sense of meaningful ownership in regard to one’s labour and its conditions – and this provides a powerful foundation for union activism and the demand for just wages. Vance gives a scathing account of a conversation with a critic of the US administration’s immigration policy who argues that abundant migrant labour absolves employers from paying a higher wage to American citizens and so guarantees better profits. We are brought back to the emptiness and toxicity of the addictive cycle of profit- and status-driven activity that Vance has already depicted.

Despite the very loose structure of the book, this seems to be the thread of the argument. It rehearses in some respects a view of modernity – and specifically of US modernity – that has been set out more elaborately in the works of a series of American scholars and commentators from Robert Bellah to David Brooks. This is a perspective that focuses on the anxiety and isolation produced by individualistic hopes and desires, expresses a renewed concern for “character”, and urges the rediscovery of resources that enable us to raise the next generation into a good life. It is not too far from what “Blue Labour” and “Red Toryism” have foregrounded on this side of the Atlantic. The importance of the Christian vision here is not so much that of a system of specific ethical absolutes – though they are undoubtedly there – as of an attitude that allows us to acknowledge failure without despair , to approach one another with generosity, and ultimately to know that our deepest desires point towards being at home with what is most real: the unconditional love that made us.

And so to the looming question that the book leaves us with: what on earth has any of this to do with the administration of which JD Vance is a leading member? And perhaps the subsidiary question of who is his audience: this is not a book calculated to appeal to the Maga hardcore; nor is it going to win plaudits from either the technophile billionaires who control the digital world, about which Vance has hard things to say (despite a rather grating tribute to Elon Musk as a creator of American jobs), or traditional free-market capitalists. At the same time, it is unlikely to win any friends on the left. Although his treatment of the abortion issue is more nuanced and sensitive than much conservative writing on this topic, this alone will put him beyond the pale as far as most progressives are concerned.

What he does not tell us (despite suggesting at a couple of points that he is going to) is why he was ready to hitch his wagon to the Trump cause. He dismisses much of the early criticism of Trump as simply an elite fastidiousness about the president’s “style”, and he insists on the “success” of the first Trump administration, without doing much to connect it with the values implied in these pages. But how are we to take seriously a book that ignores the rampant corruption of the Trumpian ruling class, the disgraceful verbal bullying that has become normalised in the president’s online and offline tirades, the recklessly arbitrary foreign policies (Vance’s carefully expressed reservations here about the funding of military support for Ukraine would apply with far more force to the fiasco of the Iran war), and the murderous brutality of the implementation of new immigration controls?

The book has already been slated because of its author rather than its content. That content is in fact by no means as vacuous or vicious as some have assumed – though there are some bad moments of shaky argument about traditional gender roles, or about how “rising racial conflict and gender division” are the direct result of de-Christianisation (a claim rather hard to square with the record of Christian nationalism in America’s past and present). But it does nothing to resolve the enigma of what makes the vice president tick. At one point, he quotes approvingly a pastor saying to an addict in jail, “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future”. Well, yes: back to the opening question about what you must do to be saved. “Look at the company you keep” might be a start.

How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two or three every 100,000 words. He was being generous.

Florence Hazrat notes that the Nazis loved exclamation marks, with Goebbels pencilling in triplets of them into a speech for Hitler. The modern German linguist Konrad Ehlich is described here as believing that “slapping exclamation marks on to the end of statements turns all utterance into shouting, and all thinking into order”. At the same time she derides male scholars who have complained about previous editors inserting exclamation marks into the speech of Beowulf on the grounds that it feminises the hero.

What Hazrat really believes about exclamation marks, alas, may be inferred from her ultra-liberal use of them. “No such thing as binge-reading the Bible for an early-medieval monk!” runs one joke-badged parenthesis. “Let nobody claim punctuation wasn’t sexy!” “The mind and the hand of the pope – you couldn’t get much higher in the Renaissance!” To be fair, this is a nice observation: “All Shakespearean tragedies have at least one exclamation mark, while the six comedies and two history plays don’t have any at all. It’s not farfetched to conclude that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, exclamations were an expression of intense distress, rather than ‘screechy’ hysteria.” If the reader is supposed to experience intense distress on encountering Hazrat’s own exclamation marks, then they work as intended.

The happy corollary to the author’s exclamatory incontinence is that this book is no mere wacky usage guide of the Eats, Shoots & Leaves sort; it is an appealing, lavishly researched scholarly inquiry into punctuation over the centuries. After a brief prehistory about “interpuncts” (dots between words in ancient languages) and the like, we observe a great Renaissance flourishing of innovative marks designed to guide people through the rhythm and tone, and so the sense, of what they were reading. The semicolon, for example, was created by a Venetian master printer named Aldo Manuzio, who hung a sign on his door that read: “Whoever you are, Aldo asks you again and again what it is you want from him. State your business briefly, and then immediately go away.” Hashtag life goals.

Writers themselves, of course, have always guarded their own punctuation ferociously. (“I absolutely insist on this comma,” wrote Baudelaire, putting a removed one back in on a page proof of Les Fleurs du Mal.) Editors remove commas or dashes at their peril; equally, Hazrat shows neatly how, in adding a ton of commas to Jack Kerouac’s draft of On the Road, his first editor did violence to the breathless dynamism of the prose. This is all evidence for her admirable insistence that punctuation is part of writing itself, an essential component of style and of the architecture of thought.

The book ends in the all-too-liquid present, when “it is tech giants who choose our writing tools”, and when ending a text message with a full stop comes off as rude. Emoji are not a language, Hazrat correctly observes, but perhaps they are a form of punctuation, an expansion of affective possibilities at the end of a sentence. Most interestingly, she presents Donald Trump as a master of the rhetorical strategies afforded by punctuation, with his Goebbels-like addiction to exclamation marks and his creative use of scare quotes either to imply that Obama was not really the president or to draw attention to his own ridiculous euphemisms (his war was “our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran”).

More depressingly, Hazrat also analyses the addiction of AI language models to the em dash. Perhaps, she surmises, “the models have deliberately been trained to seem human by imitating the spontaneity of voice – precisely why dashes were so interesting to Renaissance playwrights like Ben Jonson”. Does their ubiquity now herald an imminent “near-total abandon of thinking work”? If it’s a choice between chatbots and Trump, I choose the orange human.

Cafés by Holly Pester (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
Beginning with a sequence of prose poems in which the speaker embarks on an anti-epic quest to open her own cafe, Pester’s second collection builds into a meditation on the nature of desire and disappointment. Comic timing remains a strength, as does her linguistic flexibility, wielding language as a weapon in the face of exploitative working conditions, endless monthly direct debits (“Even my egg subscription is a disaster”) and an intensifying cost-of-living crisis. Juggling the demands of caring for an ageing parent, the excited desperation of a love affair, the “fudgy ordeal” of work and the possibility of parenthood, Pester’s speaker discovers solace in the third space of the cafe, both a meeting point and melting pot. “Here begins inspiration, here begins drama,” she suggests. “I order another coffee in honour of circumstantial life.” Ambitious and inviting, this confident collection confirms Fitzcarraldo’s entry in the arena of contemporary poetry.

The Acrobat by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh (Faber, £12.99)
A slimline selection of Szymborska’s work, showcasing intimate and immediate poems that explore themes of endurance and astonishment. Reflecting the turbulent history of Poland in the 20th century, Szymborska describes life both during and after conflict, documenting the violence of war alongside moments of resilience and poignant domesticity. “After every war / somebody has to tidy up,” she reminds us. “Someone has to shove / the rubble to the roadsides / so the carts loaded with corpses / can get by.” With plainspoken wisdom and deadpan humour, these poems celebrate the ordinary in extraordinary times. Rooted in the pains and joys of everyday human experience, Szymborska’s poetry proves “The commonplace miracle: / that so many common miracles take place.” The book ends with her 1996 Nobel acceptance speech, in which she praises the inexhaustible wonder of the world: “It looks as though poets will always have their work cut out for them.”

Volvelle by Rachael Boast (Picador, £12.99)
Named for a rotating paper chart designed to calculate the cycles of sun and moon, Boast’s fifth collection offers a pleasingly varied series of poems on themes of selfhood and the orientation of the body in time and space. The collection is bookended by a pair of poems reflecting on the slippage and mutations of the body – “body as climate – the otherness of bodies – / body image – body double – body of water” – that speak to an era of fragmentation and acceleration. Several poems are punctuated by images of “senseless war”, lamenting the hourly news cycle footage of “buildings that look like bone” and “crowds / fleeing uncontrolled explosions”. Boast finds reprieve in community, particularly the other artists, poets and film-makers whose work is woven through the fabric of her writing. For Boast, the role of the poet is one of repair: “things fall softly apart / and have to be mended”. Throughout this collection, restoration is achieved through sustained acts of care and attentiveness, just “as a deer in the furrows / might stand to listen // for the world as a whole”.

Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang (Corsair, £16.99)
Chang’s latest collection continues her engagement with visual art. While not straightforwardly ekphrastic, these poems respond to works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Mitchell and Hilma af Klint, among others, creating space for Chang to meditate on language, grief and our relationship to history. The poems are haunted by the image of a eucalyptus tree cut down on the poet’s street, leaving a poignant absence. “I learned that when grief abandons its body, / what’s left isn’t what was there before”, writes Chang, whose new poems are formed of evocative couplets that “balance the living / and the dead”. The collection is punctuated by archival photographs depicting scenes from Chinese American life during the 19th and early 20th centuries, each stitched with coloured thread; like the poems they accompany, they reflect “the desire // to connect dead things to make a new thing”. One such success is the long central poem, which relates the expulsion of 263 Chinese Americans from Eureka, California, in 1885, an ethereal piece that appears to answer one of Chang’s most pressing questions: “What am I to do with // all these seams. History that keeps growing back.”

Talk a Blue Streak by Lila Matsumoto (Monitor, £15)
Through a series of episodic prose poems, Matsumoto’s third collection tells a coming-of-age story set in the USA during the 1990s. The speaker is a new arrival, finding herself suddenly “living on a movie set called America”, surrounded by “synthetic luxury I didn’t get the wow of”. Matsumoto relishes the substance of off-kilter language, chewing on the strangeness of unfamiliar words and phrases: “Riding shotgun, passing the buck, shooting the breeze.” While her musicality and playfulness are obvious rewards, she also offers a delicate meditation on themes of identity and artifice, asking questions about how the self is formed both in response and resistance to the culture that surrounds it. “Around this time I was increasingly experiencing life as a series of point-and-click computer games I played as a child,” she writes, a persistent sense of dislocation that permeates these poems. Eventually, the speaker takes a naturalisation test in order to become a US citizen, evidence that the clearest vision of a culture comes from someone on the outside, looking in: “Now that I had renounced prostitution, communism, and genocide, I was, at last, an American.”