The Pact We Made

Layla AlAmmar
The Borough Press, £12.99, pp288
Billed as a Kuwaiti #MeToo novel, this fascinating debut is a lot more nuanced and understanding of contemporary Arab life than that might suggest. Dahlia’s 30th birthday is fast approaching but she, much to her parents’ concern, is still unmarried and living at home, beset by anxiety attacks. She has a good job and supportive friends, but dreams of escape - a bit difficult when she can’t leave the country without her father’s consent. The ending might surprise western readers, but it celebrates the choices Dahlia can and does make.

Transcription

Kate Atkinson
Black Swan, £8.99, pp416 (paperback)

With its depictions of trilby-wearing fake Gestapo agents and ice-cool femmes fatales, Atkinson’s spy novel seems to both salute and mock the genre. Juliet Armstrong is a wartime MI5 agent who goes undercover to entrap Nazi sympathisers in Britain. We first meet her in the 1980s – looking back at her past deceptions, it becomes clear she is not entirely sure what to make of her own identity. It results in a wry, enjoyable thriller, with its warning that the lies we tell about ourselves have consequences.

Hiking With Nietzsche

John Kaag
Granta, £14.99, pp272

When American philosopher John Kaag was 19, he nearly killed himself in the Swiss Alps in an attempt to ape Nietzsche and imagine himself above the “self- imposed constraints that quietly govern modern life”. Actually, he argues now, Nietzschean ideas are better suited to the conundrums of middle age, and Kaag reassesses them while pondering his own life journey. A thoughtful mix of biography and memoir, it confronts the predictability of adult life head-on.

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