This month’s best paperbacks: Anne Tyler, Jason Allen-Paisant and more

Go these days to any independent bookshop or art gallery or zine fair, and you may find yourself asking: where are the humans? Title after title is devoted to clay and stone, trees and flowers, the riverine and the botanical, gardens and allotments. They share a vocabulary: care, tending, grounding, rootedness, nourishment, regeneration. Nature, however battered, is held up as an antidote to morbid modernity, its alienations, its amnesia.

The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. During Jason Allen-Paisant’s early childhood there, it had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by “grung” – the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence.

He talks to locals, goes on mini-treks with herbalist Rastas, pores over old maps in local archives. No clear story emerges. In its absence are riffs – on the difference between a vision and a dream, the ubiquity of tombs, the frequency with which hillside people speak about the dead, what he claims is the absence of the term “forest” in the local vernacular. Walking especially fascinates him as it allows him to smell and to hear the countryside with an almost tactile acuteness. He even remembers how his grandmother, like many who lived in the Grove, “would walk with one arm gripping the other behind her back”.

There’s a scene near the end of Anne Tyler’s new novel, Three Days in June, where the two main characters, a divorced middle-aged couple named Gail and Max, compare their lives to the movie Groundhog Day, “where people live through the same day over and over until they get it right”, Gail reminds him. “Wouldn’t it be great if the world worked that way?” says Max. Instead, Tyler’s novels are records of the numerous ways people get things wrong and learn to live with it, and how the wrong things have a sneaky habit, eventually, of turning out to be right.

Tyler gets much gentle comedy from the way Gail is both irritated by and drawn to her ex-husband, who nibbles at everything in the fridge, parks his car too close to hers and leaves the front door open, but also helps her negotiate what turns out to be a rocky few days as a bombshell strikes: news of a recent infidelity rocks the bride-to-be on the eve of her wedding. Form follows emotional function, as always in Tyler’s books. A hiccup in the wedding plans of their daughter proves the perfect place for all the unresolved feelings around Gail and Max’s own abruptly truncated marriage to pool.

Three Days in June takes two days to read, but it envelops you just the same, her characters so alive they could be sitting next to you telling you what happened to them last Tuesday – and the ending is a beauty.

Bregman begins from the deep and corrosive anomie experienced by so many gifted young professionals who find themselves making substantial sums of money in exhausting and (at best) morally compromising jobs. The “moral ambition” of the title is about recognising that serious financial, organisational, technological and analytical skills – the kind that in the US will get you through, say, law school with a secure ticket to prosperity – can be used to make tangible improvements in the lives of human and nonhuman neighbours.

This is more than a self-help manual. It may be more optimistic than current global trends seem to warrant; it may be a bit thin on how you sustain imaginatively, even spiritually, the moral ambition it prescribes. But at its best it offers a bracingly hopeful perspective, insisting on the necessity of doing all you can to allow yourself to be sensitised and resensitised to that which eats away at the dignity not only of humanity but (an important element in Bregman’s argument) of the entire living environment. And, as he notes at the very end of the book, believing that individuals can’t make a difference is paradoxically a deeply individualistic conviction, a refusal to see the interwovenness of human agency. Oversimplified? Perhaps. But calls to arms often have to be.

That great music can be uplifting, transportive, transcendent – and conversely sorrowful or deeply unsettling – is a given, but its power to heal in the medicinal sense strikes me as a much more difficult proposition to prove. In Music As Medicine, Daniel Levitin makes a valiant attempt to do just that.

A neuroscientist and cognitive psychologist who trained at Stanford, he is now a professor of behavioural neuroscience and music at McGill University in Montreal. He temporarily forsook science for music in the 1970s, playing in various bands before becoming a music consultant and sound engineer for, among others, Santana, Steely Dan and Stevie Wonder. This unique dual perspective underpins his bestselling volume of 2006 – This Is Your Brain on Music, in which he explored the often complex ways we mentally process and emotionally respond to music, how and why we find some songs profoundly affecting, while others leave us cold.

Like that book, Music As Medicine merges research, theory and intriguing anecdotes about his interactions with musicians as well as patients to provide evidence of his contention that music not only functions as a temporary uplift or soothing balm in times of trouble, but possesses a much deeper restorative quality.

It will certainly make you think more deeply about music’s healing properties, particularly for those who perform. As Levitin says, “when we play an instrument (including singing), we are engaging more mental facilities that almost any other activity: motor systems, motor planning, imagining, sensory auditory processing, and – if we’re inspired – creativity, spirituality, pro-social feelings and, possibly, a state of heightened awareness coupled with calm known as the flow state.”

This intensely nostalgic debut novel from film-maker Edward Burns, best known for writing and directing The Brothers McMullen, begins with a well-attended wake in 1970s New York. At the service, “old Irish biddies dressed in black” pray over their rosary beads; afterwards, drinking buddies of the deceased, a labourer named Pop McSweeney, trade stories at the bar.

Then the narrator, Pop’s young grandson, introduces us to his Long Island home turf where many of the neighbours – O’Neils, Murphys, Dillons – have double-digit families. His dad loves to “play the ponies”; his mother suffers bouts of melancholy. He attends a Catholic school called St Joes run by sadistic nuns. If there’s a more Irish-American novel published this year, it’ll be something to behold.

The narrator remains nameless but his background is markedly similar to the author’s own – indeed, photos from the Burns family album crop up at the back showing forebears who inspired some of the characters in the book. As well as Pop, there’s a paternal great-grandfather who started a trucking company in Hell’s Kitchen, and his abusive drunk of a son who was gunned down outside a tavern on 11th Avenue – the narrator’s father visits the spot every year with his kids to raise a celebratory glass.

There is a keenly felt sense in the novel, which may have prompted its writing, of the past fading away or being demolished. The narrator’s mother gets a sadness in her eyes whenever she passes a monument of her youth that’s fallen into disrepair. She’s even more upset by the prospect of losing her two sons to adulthood. The narrator’s older brother, Tommy, turned into an “asshole” when he became a teenager – surly, delinquent, dismissive of his family. Now as the narrator turns 13, he worries he’ll go the same way.

Before this dreaded transformation occurs – and there are twinges of it whenever his mother holds his hand in the street or his dad tries to foist Hemingway on him – he sets about documenting his life using a typewriter inherited from his grandfather. He records recent fishing trips and neighbourhood baseball games alongside older childhood memories and family anecdotes going back decades. The layers of nostalgia threaten to become overbearing at times but Burns’s plain, unfussy style keeps a lid on it. We’re left with a vivid snapshot of a time that’s already receding into the distant past – a tender-hearted complement to the Irish-American stories that Burns captures in his films.

Joe Biden mistook his victory in 2020 for a sweeping, FDR-like mandate. Officially, that was before age and decay caught up. Horrifically, for Democrats, in June 2024 a debacle of a debate against Donald Trump confirmed what Washington insiders had only dared whisper but what most voters had known: Biden should not have sought re-election. Tapper and Thompson concur. Over 350 engrossing pages, they deliver a stinging judgment, trenchantly written and well-sourced.

Original Sin begins with a bang. Its first chapter is titled “He Fucked Us”, from an on-record quote by David Plouffe, senior adviser to the Harris campaign, before that manager of Barack Obama’s 2008 winning effort. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” Plouffe says. Harris was a “great soldier”, but the race was “a fucking nightmare. … And it’s all Biden”.

“The Bidens’ greatest strength is living in their own reality,” a source tells Tapper and Thompson. “And Biden himself is gifted at creating it: Beau isn’t going to die. Hunter’s sobriety is stable … Joe always tells the truth. Joe cares more about his family than his own ambition … They stick to the narrative and repeat it.”

To quote Lewis Carroll: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.” Tapper and Thompson lay bare a sense of betrayal. For now, Trump is the exception that proves the rule: America is no country for old presidents.

Florence, 1557. A painter is murdered with a hammer blow to the head and a chisel to the heart. It looks as though someone has painted over a section of the frescoes he has been labouring on for years at the church of San Lorenzo. But who could have killed old Jacopo da Pontormo, and why?

So begins this historical epistolary detective novel, stuffed with real-life Renaissance artists behaving badly. As the investigation proceeds we learn of secret passages, a missing pornographic painting, international intrigues and an annoying group of nuns who moan about not being given enough wine. The star of the show, however, is Benvenuto Cellini, goldsmith, sculptor, adventurer and author (his autobiography in real life is much admired): in Binet’s ventriloquism he is brave, catty and absurdly conceited, and gets to hide in cupboards and evade guards with irrepressible elan.

The novel was originally published in France with the title Perspective(s), which makes more obvious the fact that, as well as its crowd of characters with their own points of view, it is also about the artistic technique of foreshortening. There is a very funny scene in which one artist manages to shoot an assassin with a crossbow because, as he explains in needless detail, his understanding of perspective helps him aim properly; while others speak in more serious tones about the way the vanishing point in a composition can make “infinity” visible to mortal man.

In all, Perspectives aims, modestly and with thorough success, to be a dazzling romp.

In this, Edmund White’s sixth memoir, the American novelist and critic observes that a universal prudishness about sex sits alongside the fact that it is constantly on our minds.

Transcribing the vocabulary of sex – especially sex between men – has been White’s lifelong literary project, most famously in the semi-autobiographical 1982 novel A Boy’s Own Story. Loves of My Life approaches the task with refreshing candour. The result is something like an erotic almanac, charting the shifting sexual mores and conventions of gay life through seven decades, from the “oppression of the 1950s” to the “brewing storm in the 2020s against everything labelled ‘woke’”.

Passages on two seismic events in modern gay history are invaluable, here, for their unsentimental frankness, a perspective only afforded to someone who actually lived through them. The Stonewall uprising is both the moment that gay men began “thinking we were a minority” and the victory that “permitted us to put our creative energies into something other than simply enduring”. The Aids crisis is portrayed through several thumbnail sketches of brief flings, each closing with five staccato syllables – “he got Aids and died” – that land with the force of a bludgeon.

White is so clearly in complete control of his powers, switching between coquetry and high seriousness, weaving a rich tapestry of cultural references (Jean Genet to Hello Kitty, Stendhal to Sontag) while carefully deploying his unique ability, as Alan Hollinghurst put it, to “translate libido into style” through metaphor. Which is to say, he is also a poet. How else to describe a writer who sees, in the eyebrows and unsmiling, closed mouth of a man, a “Morse code of male beauty”, or even better, “the oblong pitches in a medieval hymnal”?

The risk of a book called The Bright Side is that it evokes the farcical good cheer of Eric Idle’s character at the close of The Life of Brian, leading a trivial little sing song among a group of people who have been crucified. This is always a problem when seeking to promote optimism in the face of significant geopolitical and ethical challenges. It can seem perverse, amid ongoing suffering and uncertainty, to maintain that things will go well.

Paul-Choudhury is a science journalist and a man who has borne the premature loss of his wife to ovarian cancer. He is serious about optimism, but he is never glib or Pollyannaish. His book is as much a careful examination of the misuses of optimism as its uses. Here ideas are picked up, explored, and critiqued. Different perspectives are presented, and what unfolds is a convincing case that, while we might frequently feel we have grounds for pessimism, a particular form of optimism is the only morally serious choice.

This comes clearly to the fore when Paul-Choudhury is paraphrasing a prison letter of Gramsci’s; for “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” he suggests “the ability to see the world for what it is and press on anyway. That seems like a skill worth cultivating. But can we cultivate it?”

He presents a fascinating and wide-ranging argument that is hopeful but never trite or self satisfied.