MUST READS  – Oct 24, 2019

MELMOTH

by Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail £8.99, 288 pp)

Melmoth the Wanderer is the title of a 19th-century Gothic novel whose tragic anti-hero makes a fatal bargain with the devil.

The female Melmoth of Sarah Perry’s third novel is a weary wanderer like her namesake, a witness to human sorrow and misery. Wraithlike and lonely, she strikes dread into the hearts of those who see her — including Perry’s heroine, Helen Franklin.

Helen is a small, pale, insignificant 42-year-old, leading a threadbare existence as a translator in Prague. She learns of Melmoth from a friend, who seems strangely eager to pass on the information.

The rich Gothic imagination of Perry’s bestselling The Essex Serpent is on sparkling form here, as Melmoth wanders across centuries and continents, linking the stories of all who encounter her in a gloriously multi-layered narrative which is both chilling and redemptive.

A WOMAN IN THE POLAR NIGHT

by Christiane Ritter (Pushkin Press £9.99, 226 pp)

In 1934, Austrian painter Christiane Ritter received a letter from her husband, Hermann: ‘Leave everything as it is and follow me to the Arctic.’

Hermann had joined a scientific expedition to the Arctic island of Spitsbergen and decided to stay on.

To live there in a hut had always been his dream, but for Christiane, ‘the Arctic was just another word for freezing and forsaken solitude’. Eventually, won over by her husband’s descriptions of the wilderness, Christiane joined him.

First published in 1938, her journal is an evocative account of a year spent in a tiny hut, eating frozen seal meat, facing blizzards and celebrating New Year’s Eve with raspberry juice and surgical spirit.

Above all, it chronicles Christiane’s growing love for the austere beauty of her surroundings — ‘the frozen world [that] lies in untouched beauty, in holy quiet.

MIDNIGHT IN CHERNOBYL

by Adam Higginbotham (Corgi £8.99, 560 pp)

‘Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev loved radiation the way other men loved their wives.’ Adam Higginbotham’s searing account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is the story of a love affair with radiation whose catastrophic consequences linger to this day.

While the recent HBO drama Chernobyl charted the disaster and subsequent Soviet cover-up, Higginbotham’s book takes a forensic approach, examining in detail the events that led to the worst accident in nuclear history.

Drawing on hours of haunting eye-witness interviews, letters, memoirs and recently released archives, Higginbotham’s narrative explores in thriller-like detail the appalling human cost of an explosive combination of scientific hubris, bureaucratic incompetence and political secrecy and paranoia.

At the same time, it is a testament to innumerable individual acts of astonishing courage and self-sacrifice by ordinary men and women.