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“Hard-boiled” fiction focuses on anti-hero detectives dealing with the violence of organised crime and mystery cases from femme fatales with a shady past. What do you call a series where the protagonist is a 67-year-old retired forensic accountant who lives on a bus called The Unsalted Hash? Cory Doctorow has written a lightly-poached thriller and that is by no means an insult.

Red Team Blues – the putative first instalment in a Martin Hench series (Hench is our super-smart, tech-savvy forensic accountant) – takes its name from the idea of a “red team” (hackers, coders, and yes, forensic accounters) vs the “blue team” (the massed ranks of scammers, crooks and organised crime groups). It’s a book for tech cynics – the kind of people who are highly online but also sceptical about how technology is deployed and exploited by venture capital-backed startups and the planet-crushing tech giants like Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Google (the so called FANG companies).

The first book in a thriller or crime series is often the weakest because the writer needs to introduce the characters and setting; it can end up feeling a lot like throat-clearing. It’s the case with Slow Horses (the first book in Mick Herron’s Slough House series, now an Apple TV show) and Ian Rankin’s original John Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses.

Doctorow doesn’t entirely fall into that trap. It seems like he has to begin with: the opening section of the book will be heavy going for anyone unfamiliar with the world of cryptocurrency – digital currencies with their own fans, pros, cons, and scandals – as the characters download a lot of details and explanations in conversations that sound nothing like how human beings talk.

Get through that necessary but rather medicinal start (“Open wide and take your explanation of the operation of a ‘trusted execution environment’! No, I won’t explain it here. You’ll have to read the book.”) and the thrilling part of thriller starts to arrive.

Hench is a good character; he’s in his late-60s and he acts like it. Doctorow totally avoids putting his lead into “Roger Moore tightening his truss to play Bond” territory. He’s hired by an old friend to save his cryptocurrency project and the laptop containing the keys to all that digital wealth becomes the book’s Maltese Falcon, a MacGuffin driving the plot forward.

There are lots of enjoyable barbed comments about Silicon Valley and social media – Doctorow is both tech enthusiast and big tech cynic – and he manages to integrate tech detail as part of the story rather than its entire point. The story has a central spine – the pursuit of the stolen MacGuffin – but Red Team Blues does feel highly episodic. Perhaps Apple TV will pay attention and bring the Hench novels to your TV screen too. A pacey tech thriller with a cynical but smart worldview should be picked up by a streamer, though given Doctorow’s position on “big tech”, I’m not sure he’d want that.

Mic Wright is a journalist based in London. He writes about technology, g author of the bestselling psychological thrillers Before I Go To Sleep, Second Life and Final Cut. Follow him on Twitter at @sj_watson

Don’t be alarmed by the title. Fans of Linda Grant’s work will know her as an eminently urban writer: Liverpool, Soho, Tel Aviv, that kind of thing. And though an actual forest does make an appearance in her new novel, it quickly acknowledges its primary role as a metaphor, a folk tale motif, a way of looking at life. A young girl goes into the forest in Latvia in “the olden times”, 1913, looking for mushrooms, and finding boys. Bolshevik boys! One kiss, and life is upended. Her brother rescues her, the family is split, and nothing is the same again. Many are the forests facing the different members of the family as the generations move through the next hundred years. Who it is that comes out of the forest, having once been in?

We are in such good hands here, as we are sashayed from Latvia to Liverpool, to Gaza, to London and on. The cast is wide, and the affection and knowledge the author has for these people allow her the blessing of being able to take the mickey while understanding the pain, appreciating the virtues while observing the weaknesses. In Grant’s taut, tender writing – the language and dialogue are immaculate – every action, every tchotchke, bears witness and carries meaning: the walnut radiogram, the diamanté clips (she is SO good at clothes), the refusal of a bite of cake, a taste for the pre-Raphaelites.

Worlds are created, because people in diaspora need and lose worlds. In Brownlow Hill Jewish immigrants to Liverpool (half of them hoping, intending to move on to the golden world of America) made a world that in time gave way, as prosperity worked for them and dreams of elsewhere faded, to the respectable suburbs. London – a gloomy alternative to golden, shining New York – called, luring in the ambitious. Paula, who as a bridesmaid hates her “terrible dress, baby pink, a length of flounce and frilling, huge puff sleeves, satin shoes with a Louis heel, garland of artificial flowers pinned to her hair,” and tells a cousin who asks her to foxtrot to shove off, attempts London. But London spits people out.

Wars and communism, poverty and prosperity, send people this way and that, making their decisions, living with their consequences, forgetting who did what, or even that they did. Family legends are family legends after all. In an afterword Grant writes of mentioning a story she’d been told as truth by another relative: “Who told you that?” scoffed the cousin she was talking to. “Your brother!” she replied.

Echoing through the book like a low siren are the lost: the brothers and sisters, uncles and grandparents who fell by the wayside, or ended up in Israel, or Treblinka, or god knows where – how would you ever find out? “Some people don’t make it out of their times,” Paula observes. And on the same page: “The doors, she thought, were all closed now, and always would be.”

Grant has created a hymn to these worlds, to the people who made them, lived in them, lost them, forgot them, remembered them. In putting it all back together, and tracing these lives through, she has produced a pungent piece of history as well as a phenomenal novel. 

This posthumous collection of essays, the bulk never before published, including many written by the author in the months before his death in 2020, marks a crowning celebration of his literary legacy and a timely reaffirmation of the need to bear witness to change in this chaotic era. Lopez, who Robert Macfarlane called “the most important living writer about wilderness”, was a peripatetic American essayist, journalist, and fiction writer whose 50-year career took him to more than 80 countries. Best known for the National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986), Lopez was drawn to the farthest reaches of the planet, “finding a path to the periphery” in his words, seeking the esoteric knowledge of scientists and Indigenous peoples operating on the frontiers of environmental change. He dove under Antarctic ice with biologists, hunted walrus over sea ice with Yupik hunters in Alaska, and walked with Native peoples in Australia, Africa, and the remotest Americas.

Here, he offers deep reflections on his life as a writer documenting the worst abuses of colonialism and the ongoing pillaging of the global environment. He also offers a wide-ranging look into his personal history: his childhood in California and New York, family trials and divorces, long distance moves, and the revelation of the sexual abuse he suffered for four and a half years as a young boy. None of it detracts from the urgency of his larger message. In the introduction Rebecca Solnit writes: “The sheer generosity of recognising how unexceptional his ordeal was, of weaving it into a broader recognition of the suffering of others and of what is redemptive and beautiful in the world around us,” showed her “how the intensely personal and the larger world could be spoken of together in the same breath.”

In his reporting and research, Lopez always proceeded slowly, paying close attention to the subtleties and often the dangers of a situation, trying to see through the eyes – and most importantly, the language – of those he saw as his teachers, not his subjects. He noted how Indigenous peoples especially framed events differently than those in the West: how they paid “more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects”, and set the “temporal boundaries” of events not at the discrete moments of encounters but as longer unfoldings, as in, not “meeting a bear” – a subject noun – but “bearing”, a verb gerund describing what takes place before, during, and after the encounter. He came to believe that this difference accounted for the greater capacity for perceiving changes and balances in their environments among Native people than Westerners: “they’re more attentive, more patient, less willing to say what they know, to collapse mystery into language.”

Lopez learned from Indigenous people, like the Warlpiri of Australia, that “to prefer to live a metaphorical life – that is, to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance – as opposed to living a literal life where most things mean in only one way,” is a toolkit for resilience in a world in which humans, despite the overweening technological confidence of the West, in reality control little.

In part through enduring the constant shifts and painful challenges of his own life, Lopez grasped that letting go of our need for certainty, for believing in the solid ground beneath our feet, is the key: “To survive what’s headed our way – global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments – and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will have to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.”

Jolyon Maughan infuriates those in power. This book, part autobiography and part polemic, is a forceful rebuke to Fleet Street and Westminster.

Maugham wears the moniker of “activist lawyer” proudly. It’s a point on which we disagree. I don’t think lawyers should act like campaigners. Our job is to win the case or, failing that, give objective advice. We can’t do that if we get too emotionally evolved. Maugham is alive to this risk. A tax lawyer, he instructs other barristers to argue his campaigning cases (including, for the sake of transparency, me).

Law is essential to democracy because it is (in theory) a great equaliser. That’s why “populist” authoritarians attack lawyers and judges. The law ensures that ministers obey the will of parliament and the powerful to play by the same rules of everyone else. A beggar should stand in court on the same level as a king. But it doesn’t work like that today. Successive governments have so restricted access to justice that only the rich can afford the protection of the law and the state and the powerful can break it with impunity. As a parliamentary inquiry (to which I acted as counsel) revealed, ministers have made unprecedented attacks on judges and lawyers, even inciting violence.

Maugham’s Good Law Project has stepped into this democratic lacuna by crowdfunding cases against the government and powerful. It’s no exaggeration to say that without Maugham’s efforts (chronicled in this book), Uber may have got away with avoiding £1.5bn in VAT, the police would never have investigated the pandemic parties in Downing Street, and ministers would have covered up much of the PPE scandal. The Prime Minister conveniently forgot to mention this when he accused Maugham of “wasting” public money by bringing cases (and threatened judges who ruled in his favour with punitive legislation).
It’s unsurprising, then, that this book has received a somewhat hostile reaction from reviewers, particularly those connected to organisations that the GLP has sued (or their supporters). Maugham’s prose has been mocked online. While this book has flaws, and Maugham is not Hemingway (I don’t think he was trying to be), it’s clear the critical response has been far from objective. Maughan is continually attacked by the state and its allies. His account is harrowing, including doxxing, harassment of his colleagues (forcing him to leave his chambers), hundreds of spurious complaints to his professional regulator, and violent threats so numerous and severe that the police advised him to buy a stab vest and hire private security.

Maugham is an imperfect champion. His recent campaign – where barristers refuse to act for fossil fuel companies or prosecute climate protestors – has drawn criticism from the bar. To his credit, this book is forthright about his mistakes (not least those involving foxes and kimonos). But, unlike so many in public life, Maugham is admirable for using his privilege to empower those less fortunate.

The book begins with an account of Maugham’s often brutal childhood. His perspective, as simultaneously an “outsider” (spending his teens battling poverty and neglect) and an “insider” (now a senior member of a typically “establishment” profession with ready access to the press, politics, power) gives him a unique perspective. When Maugham applies this insight to challenge social and political shibboleths, the book is brave and vital. He argues for diversification of the judiciary, questions the mantra “it is better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent man to be convicted” in the light of Britain’s rape crisis, exposes how our “democratic” parliament often acts in an authoritarian and even criminal manner towards “outsiders” like colonised peoples and minorities, and eviscerates the absurd doctrine that courts should not rule against ministers if it will prove politically embarrassing.

It is a shame that Maugham drifts away from this polemic in the second half of the book, turning instead to accounts of the GLP’s cases. These lack the immediacy of similar works by Michael Mansfield, Geoffrey Robertson, or the Secret Barrister (who were trial counsel in the cases they recount). Without an overarching analysis, the book slightly loses its way towards the end.

That is, however, a very minor quibble with what is a brave, interesting and, most of all, important book.

After reading Deborah Levy’s three volumes of first-person “living autobiography”, it proves difficult not to hear the same “I” in this first-person fiction, speaking to us again of European capitals and coffee and identity. Though an advantage in an author, an unmistakable, strong and beautiful voice can have pitfalls.

But the “I” here is not Levy. This “I”, Elsa M (for Miracle) Anderson, is 30 years younger, a virtuoso concert pianist, a former child prodigy adopted by a demanding teacher. She recently dyed her hair blue and wandered off course (and off stage) while performing Rachmaninoff’s 2nd piano concerto in Vienna. Now, when we meet her, she is staring at her own doppelganger in a market in Athens, craving the pair of mechanical horses that her other self is just snapping up, under her nose.

As usual, I am bemused, clarified and enchanted by reading Deborah Levy. August Blue is only 42,000-odd words long, but when the lace woven from and between them is so interesting, it hardly matters. It comes out at around 2p a word. Or is it o.2p? Or 20p? Rishi Sunak would know.
Under some stage of Covid restrictions (though it’s not clear to us, or to her, what) Elsa pinballs about Europe – Athens, Poros, Paris, London – with both ease and difficulty. She visits friends and potential lovers and the students she is reduced to taking on. (Or is she? Or is she choosing to think herself so?). Levy, with equivalent ease and trouble, moves Elsa and the reader through time, between planes of psychological existence, moods, formative experiences and, almost, bodies.

Images and ideas appear and glide away and reappear, almost musical in their patterns: horses, buckles, stabbing with forks, longing and movement, vehicles and passengers, performance and who is in charge of it. Mothers, and other women, we feel we might be, and fear being. Fathers, who they are, how they make themselves known, or don’t. Natural things becoming mechanical. Nature wanting to reclaim itself. Women’s creativity, mocked.

It is held together by underlying tensions concerning ignorance and knowledge, the constraint and release between them, and who has power over that. A belt is pulled tight about a waist. A shoe buckle is loosened. A strict teacher is brought low. A mechanical horse’s tail is lifted high, to unleash dancing. Rachmaninoff is deserted mid-performance, and instead a woman starts to play something half formed in her mind. Everybody is very angry and upset – but what was it really? Was it losing her nerve and messing up? Or was it a moment where creative freedom simply lifted the reins out of the hands of the strict teacher, the dead composer, the disrespectful conductor? All three of whom, NB, Elsa respected and in the first two cases loved. What might have happened, had anyone supported that freedom?

Elsa follows herself around, lying in wait for herself, her doppelganger, her mother, the dancing horses who we are beginning to think might be extra doppelgangers. Periodically she is rewarded by slivers of Levy’s delightful wisdom: “We should never over-estimate a person’s strength just because it suits us to do so.”  “In a way, courage was my problem. Not lack of it. The way courage silenced everything else.” “It was the longing for magic and flight that was the instrument.”

The ultimate knowledge, of course, must be about her parents. The novel takes us there, very satisfactorily, while leaving us wondering: what of her freedom and creativity now?

One final thing. We are often (including in this book) told that Rachmaninoff never smiled. I say unto you: look online for “Rachmaninoff filmed on one of his journeys on a ship.” The last moment is utterly beautiful.