Bad Nature
Ariel Courage
Chatto & Windus, £16.99, pp304
Diagnosed with terminal cancer on her 40th birthday, Manhattan lawyer Hester has just one item on her bucket list: drive to California and kill her estranged father, then herself. She gets only as far as Pennsylvania before picking up hitchhiker John, a young eco-activist whose own mission complicates Hester’s as they travel from five-star hotels to cult-like communes and Vegas casinos. She’s clever, caustic company; cynical as well, but not, it turns out, irredeemably so. Funny and moving, this is a road-trip novel for the here and now, intent on mapping a way forward even when the end might seem to be nigh.
Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships
Tiffany Watt Smith
Faber, £18.99, pp336
Like so many other aspects of womanhood, female friendship has long been patrolled and controlled, enshrouded in myths of perfection. With an eye trained irresistibly on her own friend-centred longings and failures, cultural historian Watt Smith disentangles our thinking about this most vital of relationships, roaming across the past 100 years and more to consider 1900s boarding school pashes and 1950s mum cliques, “work wives” (office gossips too) and AI chatbots. Questioning the roles played by identity, power and trust, she dispels nostalgic fantasies and idealised expectations to arrive at a more realistic and sustaining sense of friendship’s meaning. A generous, timely book.
The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Butterflies
Ben Masters
Granta, £10.99, pp384 (paperback)
The bar is set high for hybrids of grief memoir and nature writing, but Masters brings a disarming reluctance to his initial outings as a lepidopterist, undertaken on behalf of his father, housebound with inoperable cancer, during the pandemic summer of 2020. In boyhood, Masters was profoundly indifferent to gifts of binoculars and books about the natural world. Now a new dad himself, he heads off into the fields and woodlands of his native Northamptonshire, ever hungrier for flutter-by sightings of fritillaries, admirals and hairstreaks. Meditations on masculinity, metamorphosis and endangerment deepen a poignant tribute to the father-son bond.
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