Clare

With Parliament still in the grip of deadlock over Brexit, a book with the title ‘Why We Get the Wrong Politicians’ might sound particularly timely. However, even Isabel Hardman admits that the provocative title is slightly misleading

‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama is already one of the bestselling memoirs of all time selling nearly 10 million copies just four months after it was first published towards the end of 2018. Rebecca, Laura and I optimistically attempted to get tickets for the former First Lady’s sell-out talk with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Southbank Centre in December along with a mere 44,000 other people

Gender is a notable theme on this year’s Wellcome Book Prize longlist and two of the books shortlisted this year (by the official judges and by the shadow panel) look at the lives and experiences of transgender individuals. ‘Amateur’ by Thomas Page McBee was also shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction last year and is an exploration of modern masculinity told through McBee’s training as the first trans man to fight in a charity boxing match at Madison Square Garden. The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster’ by Sarah Krasnostein is a biography of Sandra Pankhurst, a transgender trauma cleaner and former prostitute. The structure of the book reveals the many layers and contradictions of Sandra gradually and there is an added layer of intrigue in that she is probably the most unreliable witness of her own life you could possibly imagine – great swathes of her memory have either been repressed through trauma or lost through brain damage from years of drug and alcohol addiction.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh From what we have read between us so far, the shadow panel has also come up with our own shortlist of seven titles (due to a tie on a couple), four of which overlap with the official shortlist: Murmur by Will I probably won’t read ‘Polio’ by Thomas Abraham, partly because of lack of time and partly because I read three books about vaccines last year (The Health of Nations, The Vaccine Race and Pale Rider) and I don’t particularly want to read another one just yet. It’s unlikely that I would ever have picked up Astroturf by Matthew Sperling – a short comic novel about a 30-year-old web developer who is dissatisfied with life and starts taking steroids – if it hadn’t been longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. Although it didn’t make the cut for the Wellcome Book Prize shortlist, I could see Emezi’s debut novel being a strong contender for the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist instead.