Books of the month: From The Raptures to How High We Go In The Dark

Martin Chilton reviews five of January’s biggest releases for our monthly column

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For a reviewer, looking with trepidation at piles of book submissions as deadlines loom, the sight of an 800-page novel can sometimes, in truth, induce a sinking feeling. Happily, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s epic The Love Songs of WEB Du Bois is mesmerising and a very worthwhile read (full review below).

Three other (shorter) recommended novels this month are Joy Williams’s Harrow (Tuskar Rock Press), a meditation on the end of civilisation after an environmental apocalypse; Isabel Allende’s Violeta (Bloomsbury), the story of Violeta del Valle and the upheavals she endures through a long life; and Louise Welsh’s The Second Cut (Canongate), a stylish, witty detective story set in modern Glasgow. The book, a welcome follow-up to the London-born author’s 2008 debut novel The Cutting Room, again features the memorably reprobate auctioneer Rilke.

According to a statistic in Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention (Bloomsbury), the average American spends 17 minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours out of every 24 on their mobile phone. As the old joke goes, I’d be really productive if only I didn’t keep getting distracted by two things: anything and everything. The way our collective ability to pay attention is rapidly shrinking is the subject of Stolen Focus. Hari – a former journalist notorious for his plagiarism – neatly defines the problems of a social media-obsessed era. In the chapter “The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You”, he also offers an alarming account of how the tech companies are in an “arms race to manipulate human nature”.