This month’s best paperbacks: Ferdia Lennon, Lemn Sissay and more

Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel, Glorious Exploits, is very much a story about the power of stories. It is 412BC, the Peloponnesian war rages, and the Sicilian city of Syracuse has been “turned inside out and on its head” by a failed Athenian invasion. Reminders of violence are everywhere – not least in the limestone quarries on the outskirts of the city, where thousands of Athenian prisoners have been left, chained, to starve out their last days under a white-hot Mediterranean sun.

Enter Lampo and Gelon, two directionless, unemployed potters, childhood friends who share a love of Homer and not much else. Together, they visit the quarry, trading mouthfuls of bread and cheese with the wasting prisoners in exchange for half-remembered snatches from the plays of Euripides – the finest of the Greek dramatists, to Gelon’s mind. Soon, their ambitions extend further. They will stage Medea for themselves, right there in the sun-baked quarry, with the prisoners as their actors.

The action takes place over just a few weeks, and the novel clips along in a tidy prose judiciously filigreed with some lovely image-making and the odd Homeric epithet. Lennon’s most significant innovation is introducing a modern Irish vernacular to his classical setting, but if you’re fine with a BCE Sicilian shop owner saying, “Sure, time flies is what it does” – and, let’s face it, who but the most tiresome of historical purists wouldn’t be? – you’ll stop noticing after a few chapters. The friends’ mysterious benefactor “from the Tin Islands” named Tuireann (an Irish variant of “Taranis”, the ancient pan-Celtic thunder god) provides a contextualising link between the Hellenic and Gaelic narrative traditions that Lennon clearly holds in equal reverence.

There’s a lot to like in the book, even when the sitcom sensibility starts to buckle under the weight of its premise. I was left wanting more, in part because I suspect Lennon can deliver it, but I have no doubt this breezy novel will win him many fans.

In 1891, as the British empire continued to expand, Rudyard Kipling put his pen in service to it with The English Flag. “And what should they know of England who only England know?” asked the poet, lamenting those of his compatriots who, having never stepped outside of England, were ignorant of the sacrifices made abroad in their name, and who, though patriotic, never embraced what he saw as the civilising mission of their empire

In Empireworld, Sathnam Sanghera investigates the discomfiting legacy of empire across the globe (along with Britain’s often wilful amnesia in this area). It’s a sequel to Empireland (2021), which looked inward at legacies of empire in Britain – from the mass migration that enabled the NHS to thrive to the popularity of Indian restaurants.

Sanghera’s new, ambitious book seeks to examine the British empire’s evolving imprint on people and places for as long as it has had an influence. The book is assiduously researched and Sanghera is brave because even though his aim is “not to incite white guilt but rather to promote understanding”, he knows that this work will not endear him to bigoted empire nostalgists.

Modern writing about imperialism has prised the stopper from the genie’s bottle, releasing malodorous truths. Empireworld makes it more difficult for revisionists whose hearts swell when reciting The English Flag to return the genie to that bottle.

Molly Roden Winter was a 35-year-old mother of two little boys in Brooklyn, who had been married to Stewart for a decade. One evening, after an argument with her husband, she “escapes from the asylum” and goes to a bar where she meets a much younger guy who is “funny, sweet, a good listener – and gorgeous”. When he asks her out, her husband encourages her to accept: “As long as you tell me everything.”

Roden Winter’s steamy, confessional and often funny book tells the story of her 10-year experiment with open marriage. Her first affair exposes a void in her life, “a need for something that marriage and motherhood cannot fill”. But when Stewart also starts having affairs, the couple realise some ground rules are needed, such as not dating a former lover and not falling in love.

Although Roden Winter wants the open marriage to work, as it brings spontaneity and adventure into her life, she struggles with her own insecurity and jealousy when Stewart talks about his affairs. A therapist helps guide her through this potentially risky territory, helping her to see herself in a new light.

Both Roden Winter and her husband use dating websites, and on one occasion she finds that her top match for a partner is Stewart which, she admits wryly, is “reassuring, I suppose”. Though she begins to trust Stewart more, she continues to struggle with jealousy and self-doubt: “I don’t want to lose Stewart. And I don’t want to lose myself, either.” Indeed, despite her many relationships, it is the depth of Roden Winter and her husband’s love for each other that lies at the heart of this revealing book and that makes it such a wonderfully life-affirming read.

By the end of the memoir, Roden Winter has grown as a person and is “taking care of parts of myself I’ve neglected since the kids were born”. She has formed a musical duo with a friend from guitar school and has taken up boxing. Importantly, she feels that for the first time she’s not trying to please others in relationships: “It’s all for me.” Open marriage teaches Rosen Winter that being happy with another man makes her love Stewart more, not less: “love begets love. The more you love, the more love you have to give.”

During a particularly memorable scene in Night Watch, which is set around the American civil war, a little girl is lowered headfirst into an open grave by her mother in order to pull a rifle off a fresh corpse. That this harrowing exploit ultimately proves pointless – the protection offered by the retrieved weapon is insufficient for the danger they face – is emblematic of the book’s unsparing vision.

This is Jayne Anne Phillips’s sixth novel, and her third, after Machine Dreams and Lark and Termite, to take up the cost of war for combatants and non-combatants alike. She is unusually well placed, then, to probe the civil war, a brutal four-year conflagration that killed more than 700,000 people, devastated the lives of many more and sent aftershocks of violence and division rippling all the way through to the present.

Though it contains numerous vivid characters – including John O’Shea, a disfigured night-watchman who gives the book its title, an Irish healer named Dearbhla and a wild orphan boy called Weed – the novel is largely the story of the little girl, ConaLee, who was lowered into the grave, and of her mother, Eliza, who did the lowering. Set mostly in West Virginia and Virginia during the war and at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum some 10 years afterwards, Night Watch depicts the horrors the two confront in the wake of ConaLee’s father’s enlistment, as the US begins to tear itself apart.

Night Watch is tough reading, even excruciating at times, but far from unrelentingly bleak; small notes of grace appear throughout the novel, especially, albeit briefly, at the end. If at one juncture ConaLee remarks grimly “I’d not seen the war except in what it ruined”, she and some of those around her at the asylum are also offered a glimpse of what might, with time and care, be restored. “Much of [the civil war] is encrusted in myth or still unexplored,” the late Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic, wrote in 2010. With this excellent novel, Phillips has brought a little more of this foundational American episode into the light.

Readers familiar with Colin Barrett’s work will immediately recognise the world of Wild Houses. Small-time County Mayo crooks Gabe and Sketch abduct Doll English, the younger brother of a local lad who owes them a few grand in drug debts. They all hole up for the weekend with Dev, a troubled and introverted soul whose remote farmhouse doubles as a convenient location to keep a hostage. From here we follow Doll’s girlfriend Nicky as she attempts to uncover what has happened and to bring Doll back home unharmed. In essence, the novel is a caper, the heaviness of the criminality undercut by bungles and incompetence. On the face of it the story is slight, but what elevates Wild Houses is the deftness of its telling. Barrett leans heavily on a type of proleptic plotting, flashing forward to points of crisis and then rolling the clock back to allow the reader to discover how things ended up that way. A genre convention most commonly used in thrillers, it’s executed here with an impressive lightness of touch.

Barrett’s handling of dialogue is so consistently witty and inventive that one struggles to think of recent novels that could stand up to comparison. When Doll’s mother complains in the car that “That’s how I know there’s a migraine in the post. The aura comes over me,” Doll replies, with “more unsolicited tuppencing from the back”, that there is “an awful mystical bent to mother’s suffering these days”. Exchanges like this – droll, linguistically inventive, poignant – are emblematic of Wild Houses, a novel which proves that, in the right hands, fine lines can fill a canvas as effectively as the boldest of brushstrokes.

Decolonisation, cultural restitution and repatriation are increasingly hot topics, dividing the world of culture and politics. From the Benin bronzes to the Koh-i-Noor diamond, books such as Dan Hicks’s The Brutish Museums and Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland have studied extractive colonialism and questioned how cultural artefacts have travelled to, and been curated within, collections in western museums – often alongside distorted versions of their origin stories, or without credit where it’s due.

American author Tania James’s entertaining and erudite third novel Loot imagines the roots and routes of one such object: the automaton Tipu’s Tiger, one of the most contentious displays in the Victoria and Albert Museum. It foregrounds the stories and journeys of individuals and objects that are frequently mere footnotes in the history of empire.

Set at the turn of the 18th century, opening in Mysore in southern India, then crossing seas to a small town in France and a big estate in England, this expertly researched and intricately crafted story follows a poor woodcarver and toymaker named Abbas. When the 17-year-old gets unwittingly involved in a plot against Tipu, the Sultan of Mysore, a French clockmaker at Tipu’s court called Lucien Du Leze notices his skill. Abbas’s life is spared and soon he becomes Du Leze’s apprentice, tasked with co-creating a mechanical tiger in six weeks.

What follows is a cinematic love story, adventure story and heist story. In the west, Abbas is presumed to be a con artist; he is too ordinary – too low-born, too brown – to have created something as extraordinary as Tipu’s Tiger. Through transporting prose, and with wit and charm, Loot asks who gets written out of history and why.

Colourful stories about India had reached Europe as far back as the fifth century BCE, followed later by ones about the Far East. As well as its material riches, including gold, jewels, spices and silk, there were tales of marvels, such as giant burrowing ants that brought gold dust to the surface, howling dog-headed men and the fantastical Skyapods (shadow-feet), “one-legged people who deployed their enormous feet as a sunshade”.

One of the first Greeks to write about elephants was Aristotle, and his pupil Alexander the Great went into battle against these awesome beasts during his brief time in India in 326 BCE. Stories of Alexander’s adventures in India also mentioned the so-called “naked philosophers” (“gymnosophists”), ascetics who lived according to the four Vedas, sacred Sanskrit texts dating back to at least 1500 BCE. As Christopher Harding’s remarkable and wide-ranging study shows, although the West’s fascination with the East grew from the trade in exotic goods such as pepper and silk, ultimately it was the flow of ideas that was transformative, profoundly enriching Western culture.

In the 17th century, trading ships arrived in Europe laden with “chaa”, together with distinctive white and blue “China-ware” (later abbreviated to “china”), from which English and Dutch elites enjoyed this new beverage. At the same time, missionaries travelled to the East, and many were deeply impressed by the ancient religious and philosophical traditions they found there. They were men like Roberto de Nobili, who from 1605 adopted the lifestyle of an ascetic in India, dwelling in a mud hut and eating a vegetarian diet while studying the Vedas. Later he communicated “the impressive depth and complexity” of Brahminical thought to European readers, helping to spread the fascination with Asian wisdom to later generations of intellectuals.

In 1879, the British journalist Edwin Arnold’s epic poem The Light of Asia about Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, attempted to introduce Buddhism to the West. It was, says Harding, “a phenomenal success”, selling a million copies up to the 1950s, and was read by Yeats and TS Eliot. In the 20th century, figures such as Alan Watts, who became a “West Coast guru” in the 1960s, and Bede Griffiths, who combined the cosmic unity of Advaita Vedānta with Christianity to form what he termed “a new vision of reality”, sowed the seeds of the New Age movement. Such thinkers were motivated by a feeling that the material success of Western societies had damaged people’s souls: “They had become like a garden left untended: dried out and weed-infested, its original pattern and glory obscured.”

Harding’s ambitious book traces the West’s fascination with the East across two and a half millennia, from the ancient Greeks to the Beatles and mindfulness. The result is a work of remarkable breadth and erudition, that is immensely readable and filled with brilliant insights into “the intense, even salvific allure of Asian philosophy and spirituality”.