Love in Five Acts

Daniela Krien (trans by Jamie Bulloch)
MacLehose Press, £14.99, pp288

Through five interweaving stories, the German author Daniela Krien explores the many identities each of her protagonists inhabit, as mothers, daughters, wives, lovers, friends and career women. Bookseller Paula is grieving the loss of her child. Judith is searching for love and the perfect horse. Brida is desperate to create space to write. Malika yearns for parental approbation, while her pregnant sister, Jorinde, worries about life as a single parent. Written in unsentimental, affecting prose, this is an intelligent study of female desire, ambition and frailty.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth

Michael Spitzer
Bloomsbury, £30, pp480

In his extraordinarily wide-ranging study, Spitzer, a professor of music at Liverpool University, traces nothing less than the history of music over the past 165 million years, from global differences in tonality and structure to music’s relationship with religion, focusing on instruments such as the Chinese qin, a seven-stringed device used privately for spiritual meditation, and the fundamental role that music plays in all human life.

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils

David Farrier
Fourth Estate, £9.99, pp320 (paperback)

In this latest contribution to climate crisis literature, Farrier, professor of literature and the environment at Edinburgh University, asks us to imagine the fossil record of the future: what we as humans will leave behind. From plastics and radioactive waste, to roads, cities and the destruction of coral reefs, Farrier makes a convincing, impassioned argument for us to re-examine the way we live our lives.

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