Selected Poems

Kathleen Jamie

Picador, £14.99

A Selected Poems is always a good opportunity to trace a poet’s

trajectory over the years. Jamie is now renowned – justly – as one of

our best poets of Scotland’s landscape and nature. Her poems on

birds – ospreys, swifts, geese, ravens – are alone worth the cover

price. Her earlier books, Black Spiders (1982), The Way We Live (1987)

and The Autonomous Region (1993) show we shouldn’t be so narrow in

categorising her work. The poems – written with fine precision – move

around from Scotland to Istanbul, Jerusalem, Tibet, and the Karakorum

mountains of India and Pakistan. It is no wonder she has such a sharp

eye for the particularities of place. The Bonniest Companie (2015),

her most recent collection, contains poems written during the year of

the Scottish Independence Referendum. There are some excellent

selections, including poems that cast a backward glance at childhood -

the superb The Girls is a treat - and that explore Scottish identity

within the natural world.

Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win The White House

Luke Harding

Faber, £8.99

Between June and December 2016, Richard Steele, an ex-MI6 intelligence

officer, wrote a dossier that examined allegations Donald Trump had a

compromised relationship with Russia and the Kremlin. Steele found

that senior figures in the Kremlin had been “cultivating and

supporting US Republican candidate, Donald Trump for at least five

years.” In this insightful and thorough book, Harding - an expert on

Russian spycraft - uses this dossier as a template to trace the

connections between the Russian secret service, lawyers, oligarchs,

and Trump’s campaign team, some of whom would serve in his cabinet.

Harding goes through the main cast - including Paul Manafort, Michael

Flynn, Jared Kushner - analysing who these people are and what motives

they had for helping Trump get into office. It’s an unnerving story,

full of intrigue, political corruption and dirty money. Moreover,

Harding shows that Trump’s presidency, far from being

anti-establishment, is the murky side of the establishment stepping

out under the spotlight of power.

Tropic of Violence

Nathacha Appanah

Head of Zeus, £11.99

Marie is a nurse who lives on the island of Mayotte, a French

département in the Mozambique Channel. After she struggles to become

pregnant, she adopts a baby called Moïse, given to her by a refugee in

hospital. When Moïse finds out that Marie is not his biological

mother, he starts to resent her and finds a home among a gang of

teenagers in the island’s largest slum, Gaza. Then Marie dies. Moïse

is left wholly alone and becomes embroiled in horrendous violence and

destitution. The novel is narrated from several different voices -

Marie, talking from a state of limbo, a gang leader called Bruce, a

police officer called Olivier, and a Moïse himself – which re-tread

the same ground. Although Appanah’s general style is otherworldly and

poetic, and her control of perspective is brilliant, the novel does

want for a credible distinction between the different narrative

voices. Nevertheless, this is a poignant and terrifying portrait of a

peculiar island.

NICK MAJOR