A Person Is a Prayer

Ammar Kalia
Oldcastle, £18.99, pp288

In Kalia’s afterword to this book, he says the only way he could fully understand his family as they moved across continents and decades was through the imaginative process of a novel. This rich debut, about that family’s journey from Kenya to India and then to England, has poignancy and focus. Telling the story over the course of three single days spanning six decades, he interrogates the fundamental question of what makes a life happy through characters all striving for a better future.

Warming Up

Madeleine Orr
Bloomsbury, £20, pp320

The evidence is overwhelming. When play is suspended at the Australian Open because of extreme heat and bushfire smoke, or when winter sports are becoming ever more difficult to hold with actual snow, climate change is changing sport. Orr provides a timely overview of how sporting activity at any level, and therefore our health, is being affected. But she also recommends action that everyone involved in sport should heed.

The Seventh Son

Sebastian Faulks
Penguin, £9.99, pp368 (paperback)

This is Faulks’s first journey into speculative fiction, and this slightly brainy thriller suggests he has quite enjoyed it. Surrogate mother Talissa is impregnated at a strange Silicon Valley tech clinic that is manipulating genetic research and ethics – meaning that her child has a very different outlook and approach to life. Faulks just about pulls off this juggle of science, anthropology and a melancholy but effortlessly readable story about human consciousness – even if all the strands are a little too neatly interwoven.

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