MUST READS
NOTES ON A FOREIGN COUNTRY by Suzy Hansen (Corsair £9.99, xxpp
NOTES OF A FOREIGN COUNTRY
by Suzy Hansen (Corsair £9.99, 288 pp)
In 2007, New York Times journalist Suzy Hansen won a writing fellowship that allowed her to travel abroad for two years.
‘I never thought I would leave New York. I was almost 30 and my friends were coupling off and would soon be making loads of money to support their first-born.’
Her father greeted the news that she planned to go to Istanbul with consternation: ‘Did you know that Turkey is 99 per cent Muslim? Are you out of your mind?’
Joining a long line of American writers who’ve travelled abroad, from Henry James to James Baldwin, Hansen learned as much about herself and America as she did about the places she visited.
Her award-winning memoir is a clear-sighted, moving account of what it means to be ‘an American living abroad in the era of American decline’.
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FACE TO FACE
FACE TO FACE by Professor Jim McCaul (Corgi £9.99, 320 pp)
by Professor Jim McCaul (Corgi £9.99, 320 pp)
Looking round a cafe or a bar, ‘we read faces like barcodes and we know almost instinctively which are the “attractive” and “unattractive” faces’, writes Professor McCaul.
As one of the UK’s leading maxillofacial surgeons, he has been restoring faces ravaged by illness, accident, violence or ageing for around two decades.
His ambition to become a doctor began in his early years in Glasgow, when he longed to cure the pain his mother suffered as a legacy of childhood polio.
Inspired by the pioneering work of New Zealand-born surgeon Harold Gillies with disfigured World War I soldiers, McCaul opted to specialise in maxillofacial surgery.
There was, he remarks dryly, no shortage of facial trauma for a trainee surgeon in Glasgow.
With vivid case histories, this is a compassionate and readable memoir by a man who has devoted his career to saving people’s faces
WHEN THE RIVERS RUN DRY by Fred Pearce (Granta £9.99, 336 pp)
WHEN THE RIVERS RUN DRY
by Fred Pearce (Granta £9.99, 336 pp)
The award-winning environmental journalist Fred Pearce grew up in a village in South East England where two small rivers, the Stour and the Len, begin their journey to the sea.
It inspired a lifelong fascination with rivers.
Yet, as he warns, something disturbing is happening to the world’s great waterways, many of which are drying up, and we face a global water crisis.
Pearce travelled the globe to find out why rivers die, the environmental and human consequences and how we can restore their health.
He warns that ‘nothing . . . will matter more to humanity’s future over the next century than the fate of our rivers’
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