An Immigrant's Love Letter to the West

Product Information

Now more than ever before, we need to look long and hard at how we view and interact with the natural world. We’re living through the world’s sixth great extinction, one caused by us.” Helen Macdonald, introducing the essays in Vesper Flights (Cape), conveys one reason nature writing continues to flourish in nonfiction lists: every book in its way engages not only with how we live and balance our lives but with environmental crisis. Her previous work H is for Hawk established Macdonald as a brilliant practitioner of nature-memoir; this new book cautions against viewing the natural world as a ‘mirror of ourselves, reflecting our own world-view and our own needs, thoughts and hopes’. It collects together light, lovely, personal essays, many of which recall the author’s discovery of birds and plants in childhood. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures (Bodley Head) has already been hailed as a fascinating breakthrough in natural history. David Attenborough reflects on the environmental emergency in A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and Vision for the Future (Ebury, October), while in The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism (Verso, October), Grace Blakeley asserts the need for Covid-19 to be a global wake-up call, and makes the case for a Green New Deal.

Helen Macdonald, author of Vesper Flights, at her home in Hawkedon. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The GuardianIt is unclear to what degree Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife: Inside and Outside Power (Little, Brown, September) is an act of rebellion but it is, by all accounts, amusing, indiscreet and causing some consternation in parliament. A journalist and parliamentary researcher, Swire has for over 20 years been married to Hugo Swire, who was the Conservative MP for East Devon from 2001 to 2019. During these two decades, she has also been keeping a secret diary about life as a political plus-one, with lots of details of mansplaining and mixing with Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and David Cameron. In more writerly vein, the novelist and critic Anthony Quinn has written a love-letter to the Premier League title winners in Klopp: My Liverpool Romance (Faber, November). Mary Gaitskill’s sharpness and singular honesty are in evidence in Lost Cat (Daunt, November), a book-length essay about loss, safety and fear that centres on her fostering of two siblings. Orwell prize winner Kate Clanchy has written How to Grow Your Own Poem(Picador, September), an encouragement to write verse; in similar vein, Clive James’s last book The Fire of Joy(Picador, October) is a set of personal, quintessentially Jamesian commentaries on 80 of his favourite poems.

An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West is Kisin’s first book, and it has evolved from his career as a comedian and podcast host. Much of it has grown out of discussions he and Foster have had with their guests, and it seems from the book that as he has spoken to other people he has developed his own thinking. There is some interesting lane-switching from Sarah Crossan, known for her brilliant YA verse novels: Here is the Beehive (Bloomsbury) brings the same form to an adult tale of love, betrayal and loss. Michel Faber, meanwhile, branches out into children’s fiction with Narnia-esque fable D: A Tale of Two Worlds (Doubleday, September). Philip Pullman’s Serpentine (Penguin, October), a previously unseen story of Lyra in the Arctic written before his current trilogy, will be gobbled up by fans. For regular listeners of the Triggernometry YouTube podcast, much of the content and tone of co-host Konstantin Kisin’s just-published nonfiction book, An Immigrant’s Love Letter to the West, will come as no surprise. Part memoir and part cultural commentary, the book recounts the arc of Kisin’s family story as it ranges from the gulags of the Soviet Union to the present-day United Kingdom, recounting how the family’s experiences shaped the author’s appreciation for the virtues of the Western world as opposed to the actual “lived experience” of communism. He interlaces the stories of these personal and family experiences with critiques of the contemporary Western progressivism that seeks to denigrate its own culture (as being, say, uniquely racist) while simultaneously proposing and implementing oppressive “solutions” (e.g., suppression of speech) to perceived shortcomings.

I began writing the novel in 2018, long before the current pandemic,” Don DeLillo has said of The Silence (Picador, October). “I started with a vision of empty streets in Manhattan …” Covid-19 casts extra resonance on this slim disquisition on catastrophe, in which a group gathers in a New York apartment to watch the 2022 Super Bowl – and then the world goes dark. In this way, the memoir is a pleasant and welcome read for those inclined to agree with Kisin’s classical liberal, pro-West, centrist vision of the world. That said, those familiar with Kisin’s viewpoint and work will find little new here—anyone looking for deep dives into the philosophical or moral roots of capitalism and democracy will instead find a recap of some of the more comical or extreme progressive and media offenses of the past several years. Like many other things expected here, he found that precisely such principles were up for grabs. Kisin himself has made headlines in the past when he was asked to sign a form before a comedy gig promising that he wouldn’t say anything that might upset anyone in the crowd: almost a definition of how not to entertain an audience. Groupthink is another of the things which Kisin found in the West without expecting to. As he says at one point, “If there is one thing my Soviet childhood taught me, it’s that subscribing to someone else’s ideology will always inevitably mean having to suspend your own judgment about right and wrong to appease your tribe. I refuse to do so.”