WAR AND PEACE

Martin Chilton shares his July reading highlights, from a dark satire on conflict reporting to a memoir told entirely in verse

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Summer holidays are a good time to try out new novels, and among the recommended fiction out this month is Connor Hutchinson’s sharp debut, Dead Lucky (Corsair), which is set in Openshaw, Manchester. In it, Hutchinson tells the story of an embalmer at a funeral home who is drawn into the addictive world of gambling to pay his debts. The reliably accomplished John Niven’s latest novel is The Fathers (Canongate), a witty account of parenthood and masculinity, while Alexander Starritt’s enjoyable Drayton and Mackenzie (Swift) is a tale of two old acquaintances who reunite by chance to form an unusual alliance.

If you are looking for a twisty crime thriller, try Gregory Galloway’s All We Trust (Melville House), a gripping story about hardware store-owning brothers who launder money. Their family squabble quickly escalates into a war between crime cartels.

Meanwhile, it seems an apt time to contemplate the plea for sanity contained in Takashi Nagai’s The Bells of Nagasaki (Vintage Classics). This slim memoir was written just before his death from leukaemia in 1951. The Japanese physician was there at the moment the atomic bomb was dropped from an American B-29. He describes the flash as looking “like a huge lantern wrapped in cotton”. Although it’s wretched to read a witness account of the “world of the dead” caused by the nuclear fallout, the book is essentially an urgent call for the bell of peace to sound. And that’s something we all need in the demented, dangerous landscape of 2025.

My choices for the novel, memoir and nonfiction book of the month are reviewed in full below:

Novel of the Month: Vulture by Phoebe Greenwood

★★★★☆ The compelling protagonist of Phoebe Greenwood’s debut novel is a dysfunctional, walking chaos zone (Europa)