Biographies of Philip Roth and DH Lawrence, the curious death of Robert Maxwell, and dispatches from the Covid frontline
Publishing can feel slow, even stately, at times, and not only because good books take a long time to write. But in 2021, speed will be the order of the day. Whether we’re talking about Black Lives Matter or Covid-19, a lot of the new nonfiction coming our way will speak insistently to the present moment – to the point where some readers, fighting unease, may welcome the relative tranquillity of a fat life of the artist Francis Bacon, in the form of Revelations, Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s 880-page biography (William Collins, January); or, rather more genteel, The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne (William Collins, April).
It will also be much more diverse – which is where we’ll begin. In January, Chatto publishes Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today, in which Eddie S Glaude Jr, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, tries to fathom how the author of Go Tell It On the Mountain managed, against the odds, to keep faith in the idea of a more just future. A bestseller in the US, this urgent, deeply interesting book will be followed by Three Mothers (William Collins, February), in which Anna Malaika Tubbs looks at how the women who raised Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and (again) James Baldwin helped to shape America; Raceless, by Georgina Lawton (Sphere, February), a memoir of growing up black in a white Anglo-Irish family; and Musa Okwonga’s One of Them (Unbound, April), an account of the author’s experiences as a black boy at Eton. Also hotly anticipated is Empireland (Viking, January), a meticulous look at the effects of imperialism on British life and history from Sathnam Sanghera, best known for his memoir The Boy with the Topknot.
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