I’m not particularly a war photographer. However, my reporting has taken me into the middle of war many times.

I based myself in Iraq for three years as a freelance reporter after the fall of Baghdad. During my eight years as a news photographer for Reuters News Agency, I was twice embedded with US Marines in Afghanistan and documented the uprisings in Libya and Syria during the Arab Spring. Turning freelancer in 2016, I covered the conflict between forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. I also travelled to multiple cities in Yemen to photograph the two warring factions amid the civil war.

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From my Cairo base, I have visited Yemen a few times since 2016, reporting on the civil war between its internationally recognised government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and the Houthi militia, a religious and political movement alleged to be receiving military support from Iran.

When I started to go to Yemen, I remember telling a friend, an American photographer based in Egypt, of my plan. He said, “Good luck, it’s all yours.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. Then I started to notice how only a small number of foreign journalists were keen to report on Yemen, despite the staggering scale of the war over the last decade.

Western news media call the conflict in Yemen (if they mention it at all) an ‘invisible war’ or ‘forgotten war’. I always wondered if this is because the foreign media neglected the proxy conflict on purpose, or if foreign journalists worry about being kidnapped as al-Qaeda members were still active, or because there was more attention given to other conflicts over the last decade, like the war in Syria, ISIS or, more recently, Ukraine.

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Nevertheless, I have made it my lifelong project to cover stories I’m interested in regardless of their importance worldwide. I didn’t focus on Yemen’s war-induced famine, I found even more pressing stories that had a wider impact on the people, like the landmines laid by Houthi forces that disproportionately affected civilian lives. The goal was to share the human experiences.

• Refugee wonders if it would be better to ‘stay in Yemen and die’ than go through UK asylum system
• ‘My dream is to be a photographer’: A day in Calais and Dunkirk with people waiting to cross the Channel

Women clutching children in the ruins of Barran Temple, near Marib, reputed to be the location of the Queen of Sheba’s throne and a UNESCO World Heritage Site

A government officer defuses a landmine inside the home of a Yemeni man in Taiz

Waguih (centre) sitting among pro-government forces who monitor frontline positions in Lahj City in Yemen.

Unfinished War: A Journey Through Civil War in Yemen by Asmaa Waguih is out on 15 June (Helion & Company, £25)

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Empowering teen novels to give readers a helping hand through their potentially difficult adolescent years. Teacher-turned-author Rebecca Westcott picks her top five.

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume

Reading this in 1981 was the first time I had ever encountered menstruation, bras or breasts in a book. More than half a century after publication, this coming-of-age book is still relevant.

Z For Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien

Sixteen-year-old Ann Burden has lived alone for an entire year, the last person alive in post-nuclear war America. Or so she thinks. When a scientist in a radiation suit arrives, she thinks that they can work together but things take a sinister turn, and the scientist is not who he seems. 

After The First Death by Robert Cormier

This book aimed at older readers tells the story of three very different teenagers, Miro, Kate and Ben, who are caught up in a challenging hostage situation. The teenage terrorist, the young bus driver and the general’s son – all with their own stakes in the game and all desperate to emerge alive. 

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E Lockhart

This is a brilliantly funny, thought-provoking read for anyone who wants to take back the power, announce their presence loudly and flick the bird to anyone who tells them that they can’t. 

Moxie by Jennifer Mathieu

Published in 2017 and made into a Netflix film in 2021, this is the story of Viv Carter and the power of ‘keeping your head up’ in the face of sexism, harassment, and cliques. Like my latest book, it’s about girls refusing to be put into boxes. 

Rebecca Westcott is co-author of the Can You See Me Now series

Like a Girl by Rebecca Westcott is out now (£8.99, Scholastic). These titles are available to buy or preorder from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

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In All Fours, Miranda July also draws on real-life experience for her tale of a semi-famous artist having a kind of midlife crisis in her forties and realising she can give herself permission to live differently.

The unnamed wife-and-mother narrator sets off from LA to New York, but only gets as far as a nearby suburb where she becomes besotted with Davey, a local young man. She holes up in a nearby motel and spends thousands of dollars renovating it to get close to him, all the while pretending to still be on the road to her family, only half an hour away.

This leads to an unravelling of all aspects of her life, including her art and her marriage, with a lot of experimental sex and previously forbidden desire. July has recently gone through upheavals in her own life, and there is a glorious, confused, freeing energy to All Fours, perhaps as a result of her honesty on the page. This book is brutally frank in a way that very few novels are, and the result is a shockingly original voice and a story for our times.

Doug Johnstone is an author and journalist.

All Fours by Miranda July is out now (Canongate, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

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I’m a sucker for writers who use their own personal experiences in their novels. We should never, of course, mistake the central character of a story for the storyteller, but there’s something wonderfully authentic about a novel that has its seed in real life, adding a tangible veracity to the book.

So it is with Willy Vlautin’s The Horse. American author Vlautin has a cult following of dedicated fans, and is one of my favourite writers. He writes about the underbelly of the American dream, about the disenfranchised and struggling people of everyday life, but he does so with great depth and humanity. 

He is also an acclaimed musician, having been in alt-country bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines. Strangely, The Horse is his first novel to directly tackle the world of music, but that adds great richness to this short book as a result. The story revolves around 65-year-old Al Ward, an alcoholic country singer and songwriter, who’s living alone at an abandoned mine in the high Nevada desert trying to dry out.

One day he finds an old and blind horse outside his tumbledown shack and worries about how to save it. He has no contact with the outside world and his car won’t start. The snowy weather closes in and he fears that coyotes or a mountain lion will get the beleaguered animal. Interspersed with this we’re told the story of Al’s life, his early days learning guitar and playing in casino bands, his first flirtations with booze, his endless shows and touring, some terrific highs and some real lows. He goes from being blindly optimistic with money in his pocket to trying to pawn his precious guitars, and all points in between.

Vlautin’s prose style is deceptively simple – it takes a lot of skill to write a book that is this easy to read – and there is a huge amount of heart and empathy on display here. His human and animal characters struggle against the vagaries of life, but hopefully pull through with a little help and care.

Funny, shocking and heartfelt, this is easily my book of the year so far.

Doug Johnstone is an author and journalist.

The Horse by Willy Vlautin is out now (Faber & Faber, £16.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

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Alexander McCall Smith was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, to British parents. He moved to Edinburgh to study law, before teaching at Queen’s University, Belfast. In 1981, McCall Smith co-founded the law school at the University of Botswana, where he also taught.

His first published book was The White Hippo in 1980, which kickstarted a career writing childrens’ books. His breakthrough writing novels came with the publication of The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, which became a hit in Scotland (he had settled in Edinburgh with his family in 1984) and, after the third book in the series, in the US. To date, McCall Smith has published 24 volumes in the series, which has sold over 20 million worldwide. He is also the author of the popular 44 Scotland Street novels and the Isabel Dalhousie series, as well as many standalone novels and non-fiction titles.

In 2007 he received a CBE for services to literature and in 2011 was honoured by the President of Botswana for services through literature to the country. In 2015 he received the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

Speaking to the Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Alexander McCall Smith reflects on an awkward adolescence, being in Northern Ireland during The Troubles and the growing realisation he was going to make it as a writer.

I think I was the usual 16-year-old – any time between 14 and about 18 is a really bad time if you’re a boy. You think you know everything but actually you know very little. And the world doesn’t treat you as if you know everything, so it’s a very frustrating time. The adolescent brain is very badly wired. So at 16 I took myself terrifically seriously. And no one else did. 

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I lived in a town called Bulawayo, which was in Zimbabwe. It was very remote, a colonial territory in colonial days. I was at a boys’ school. It was a very quiet existence. I was very interested in writing. I had always written as a child. I had an article published in the local paper when I was about 16, a piece about Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. I don’t know why I chose to write about him. 

I think I was a pretty typical teenager. I read quite a lot. And I had a strong imaginative life. I spent quite a lot of time in my own company, thinking. I had the idea that I would love to write one day but it was very underdeveloped. I read a lot of poetry, which was probably atypical. And I had a pile of old copies of
The Listener magazine. I used to go through those time and time again. I was very self-consciously intellectual. I regarded myself as knowing more than the other boys at school. 

I decided that I would study law. So I went to Edinburgh university. Then I was offered the chance to study for a PhD. And in the course of that I was offered a job at Queen’s University of Belfast. So I went off to Belfast at a very difficult time. The Troubles were in a very serious state. It was a really significant time, living through a period of great sadness in a society that was torn by terrible divisions and basically a low-grade civil war. You heard explosions, you heard gunfire. But you just lived with it. There were moments when the situation was highly intriguing, and then there were other times when it was just tragic. I shall never forget that time. I was there for about a year and a half. And then I was offered a job back at Edinburgh. 

I started to write a bit more in Belfast and when I came back to Edinburgh the next major development in my writing life came. I entered a writing competition and was lucky enough to win the children’s fiction section. I then approached an agent in London and over the next few years I wrote a number of children’s books, which started to be published. And so that’s how I started. All the while I had the day job, and I ended up as professor of medical law at Edinburgh. I had a very interesting and satisfying career and was on a lot of government committees.  

And then I wrote the first novel, The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. When that took off in a big way internationally, I felt that I was under great pressure to do all sorts of things. So I thought I’d take a leave of absence of three years unpaid to concentrate on my writing. And after a while I realised the books had become all-consuming. 

I went back to Botswana in 1981 to set up a law school in the university. And I continued to have a close connection with Botswana over the years. Then in 1996 I sat down and wrote what I thought would be a single story – how wrong I was – I’ve just finished the 25th volume of… Detective Agency (which is set in Botswana). I was asked to write a sequel then a sequel to the sequel. Then the books were imported by Columbia University Press in New York. And very big publishers, Random House, said, Oh, we want to put these out in America. And then they took off in a pretty dramatic way. 

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I remember the moment I knew my life was going to change. I’d gone over to New York to meet my new editor. I went into their office thinking that I’d have a cup of coffee and then be shown the door. But they had a whole restaurant booked for lunch, and they had all these PR people there. And I remember going out of their office that afternoon thinking, my goodness, something is really happening here. I went out on Park Avenue, and I looked up at the sky, in the glittering canyon of the New York streets and I realised that life was going to be different. 

I’ve written about 75 books since then and I’m very grateful for how my life has gone. I’ve lived a total writer’s dream and I’m very conscious of my great fortune. 

If my younger self met me now and I told him what I had done he’d say, ‘Oh, my goodness. Is that true?’ The teenager would look at me and say, do you mean to say that you go all over the world and do these things? Because the sort of life I had as a teenager was very simple. I think he’d be rather overwhelmed. My job enables me to travel a lot. But usually where I really want to be is at home in Edinburgh. But I do know I’ve had experiences that I would otherwise never have had.

I didn’t think about being a dad when I was younger [he has two daughters with his wife Elizabeth]. There may be an interesting difference there between men and women. I think if you asked an 18-year-old woman she might say one day she’d like to be a mother. I think the maternal instinct is a very strong one, stronger than the paternal instinct. Women are much better carers. Women are much more inclined to nurture things and be concerned about others. Women keep friendships going much better than men do. Women are more concerned about the welfare of the broader family. Men just have an instinct to provide. 

I’d tell my younger self, try to think more about other people’s feelings and what they’re thinking. Be more aware of the feelings and sensitivities of others. I would also say very specifically, go talk to people much older than yourself. And listen to what they’ve got to say. That’s something I think we all suddenly realise. I think back to people, and I wish I’d gone to sit with a tape recorder and spoken to them about their experiences. 

I remember I occasionally bumped into the famous Hamish Henderson, who was a great folklorist. I used to be on a committee with Peter Higgs, the Nobel-winning physicist of Higgs boson fame. I had a great uncle who had been a doctor in the Battle of the Somme. I didn’t talk to any of them enough. 

If I could relive one moment it would probably be a conversation with my agent, when the writing really did begin to take off. I remember one conversation with one of the agents in London when I was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed. And she said, sit back and enjoy it. You’re about to have a really good experience. 

But actually, the absolute best conversation was probably when I was told my first book was accepted for publication. That’s it. Because never again do you get to have that thrill. 

The Conditions of Unconditional Love (Isabel Dalhousie book 27) by Alexander McCall Smith is out on 6 June (Abacus, £18.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

Alexander McCall Smith will be at Borders Book Festival on Saturday 15 June at 3.45pm, and on Sunday 16 June at 5.15pm in a joint event with Alistair Moffat.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy! If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue or give a gift subscription. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play

Ahead of the release of his debut novel Going Home, Tom Lamont picks his favourite child characters in novels.

Tilda in Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald

Six-year-old Tilda lives on a canal boat with her mother Nenna and her sister Martha in 1960s London. Fitzgerald gives the little girl a sailor’s memory for tide times, an antiquer’s eye and an emotional perceptiveness far greater than many of the adults in the story.

James in Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann

Seven-year-old James plays a small supporting role in this novel about the coming-of-age of his older sister, Olivia, in 1920s England. Even so, he steals every scene he’s in. 

Leo in The Go-Between by LP Hartley

Eager and over-credulous Victorian 12-year-old Leo finds himself spending the whole boiling hot summer of 1900 as a messenger between the adults in a sexy, doomed love triangle.

Lila and Elena in My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein

Ferrante portrays an utterly real and full friendship between two six-year-olds. Everything about their shared world rings true, their fears and superstitions, their small pleasures and their big dreams.

Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Six-year-old Scout, the narrator of the story, is Mockingbird’s soul. But her best friend Dill is its heart. You love Dill forever from about page 60, when he starts “hatching one” — that is, another of his famous tall tales. My favourite of Dill’s fibs comes in chapter four, when he tells Scout about his father being “president of the L&N Railroad. ‘I helped the engineer for a while,’ said Dill, yawning.” That yawn!

Tom Lamont’s debut novel Going Home is out on 6 June (Sceptre, £16.99). These titles are available to buy or preorder from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

To support our work buy a copy! If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member.
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Fifty years ago this summer, the island of Cyprus was divided by conflict. The crisis began on 15 July 1974, when soldiers backed by the Greek military dictatorship staged a coup, turning up in tanks to depose the democratically elected President of Cyprus, Archbishop Makarios III. In the ensuing chaos, the Turkish army invaded from the north. A third of the population had to flee their homes, and still haven’t returned. There is still no official peace agreement, only a ceasefire.

This state of division feels like a sign of the times we are living through now, with bitter conflicts playing out in eastern Europe and the Levant. In fact, Cyprus has always been a microcosm for whatever is happening across the region, standing as it does at the crossroads of three continents. Through Cyprus you can take in the whole history of the Mediterranean: the rise and fall of great powers, the vast trading networks that link Europe with Asia, and the birth of the modern age.

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Among early civilisations, Cyprus was responsible for a string of firsts. The dry island had the world’s first water wells, the first pet cat (take that Egypt!) and the first recorded sea battle (against the Hittites of Anatolia). It was Cypriots who first developed the smelting that ushered in the Iron Age, and some scholars think it was on Cyprus that the European alphabet was created, as Greeks mingled freely with literate Phoenicians. Later, Cyprus took part in the famous Persian Wars, gave Alexander the Great his favourite sword and hosted some of the first Christians. (You can still visit the tomb of Lazarus, who moved to Larnaca after Jesus raised him from the dead.)

On the very edge of the Byzantine empire, Cyprus already had Muslim influence and inhabitants just one generation after the death of the Prophet Muhammed. Richard the Lionheart conquered the island almost by accident on his way to fight for Jerusalem, and for centuries it became a Crusader stronghold. Then, the rising merchant empire of Venice took control, but not for long: the Ottomans besieged the city of Famagusta for almost a whole year. The fall of Famagusta prompted the Battle of Lepanto, an epic sea battle between the Ottomans and the Christian Holy League, where the Spanish writer Cervantes lost the use of his left hand “for the greater glory of [his] right”.

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For the past 150 years, Cyprus’s fate has been tied up with the British Empire and its interests in the Middle East. Prime minister Benjamin Disraeli made a deal in 1878 to protect the Ottomans from Russia in exchange for Cyprus. Since then, it has been a key military base, protecting Suez and, later, hosting nuclear bombers that could reach deep into Soviet territory. The island was granted independence after a five-year guerrilla war in the ’50s, but the administration kept 3% of the island as ‘sovereign territory’, meaning there are places on the island where you are technically in Britain. These days, if British aid is to be transported to Gaza, or an Iranian drone shot down over Israel, the base of operations is Cyprus, which acts like “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” in the words of the old Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.

Before the British colonial administration agreed to give up most of Cyprus, officials intentionally stoked tensions between ‘Greek’ and ‘Turkish’ Cypriots (terms that weren’t used before the 1950s). In my book, Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean, I call this tactic ‘divide and run’, because once the island’s two main communities broke into open conflict, just as in other ex-colonies, the British administration had no real plan except to get out and wash their hands of the problem. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new Cypriot government quickly collapsed as distrust and sectarian violence escalated, leading to the unfolding tragedies of 1974.

For the past 50 years, Muslim and Christian Cypriots who were once fond neighbours have lived largely separate lives. It seems to be one of the tragedies of the modern world, that once-thriving communities can end up hopelessly divided by ethnic or religious conflict. But I also believe that learning Cyprus’s history shows us a way through such conflicts. Pessimists speak as if our history is something that has been chopped up into a queasy salad of clashing civilisations. I think it is much easier to see a hopeful future when we choose to view each new cultural influence not as something that attempts to replace what came before, but as a new layer that adds richness and complexity, in the same way you make baklava. I’d like to think we can all agree on that. After all, who doesn’t like baklava?

Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean by Alex Christofi is out now (Bloomsbury, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue or give a gift subscription. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play.

When people think of Rome, images flash into the mind. Julius Caesar? No paintings remain, just statues – and the Asterix books. We have an image of a stern, wiry man aged about 50, wearing a wreath.

The truth is trickier. Caesar went bald fairly early on, though he made sure all his statues had hair. Otherwise, the image is about right. His name, pronounced ‘ka-azer’, came to mean ‘king’ in nations as far apart as the czars of Russia or kaisers in Germany.

After Julius came his great-nephew, Octavian, known as Augustus. He ruled for 50 years and made an adopted son emperor after him: Tiberius – the Jimmy Savile of ancient Rome. I always thought giving Star Trek’s Captain Kirk the middle name of ‘Tiberius’ was a bit odd. It’s like calling your hero ‘John Hitler Jones’. The details of Tiberius’ death are tricky to pin down, but he was probably smothered in his own rooms.

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Julius, Augustus, Tiberius… Caligula, real name Gaius Caesar. ‘Caligula’ meant little boot, for the miniature legionary uniform he wore as a kid. Caligula spent time on Capri with Tiberius – and returned so damaged that he terrified Rome. 

He ruled for just four years, with such savagery it left a stain on history. Do we have an image for him in our minds? I think so. A young and cruel face, with large eyes.

When Caligula’s guards finally stabbed him to death, they made his uncle Claudius emperor. He was a safe choice, a scholar with a stutter. Oh, Claudius killed a few who had mocked him, but nothing like Caligula’s excesses. Claudius invaded Britain, divorced his first wife and married… a woman who would destroy him.

Agrippina was Caligula’s sister. She already had a son, after a violent first marriage of her own. 

Agrippina persuaded Claudius to adopt her son as his heir – and when he changed his mind, the emperor suddenly died of poison. Bad luck, really.

It meant Agrippina’s son would be emperor – taking the name Nero. She thought she could rule through him, that he would obey her. Mothers of teen boys will all know how very, very wrong she was.

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At 16, Nero was given the world. He loved chariot racing and gladiators. He also loved acting, poetry and music, winning prizes at the Olympics. He didn’t want to rule! He just wanted to perform. His tutors hated the idea. Yet like his ancestor Julius, the people loved Nero. It might have been because he was insanely generous. He drove the senate mad with his spending and wild ideas.

There were crises and struggles, certainly. Nero became convinced his mother was moving against him. She probably was, but his plan for a boat with a trick deck to drown her is like something a Bond villain would come up with. Nero had no talent for gathering allies, not like his ancestors. He just wanted to act the great parts, sing the great songs and live a life of luxury. He spent too long away from Rome and in his absence, plotters moved to replace him. Do we have an image for Nero? The fat face, thick neck and tightly curled hair, perhaps. He certainly never grew old. They came for him at 30 and he took his own life – a tragic ending, with all his friends abandoning him.

History is written by victors. The worst gossip about Nero’s reign is all about sexual excess. It reads like a National Enquirer ‘10 In A Bed Roman Romp!’ headline, or a footballers’ wives’ scandal. Some of it rings true, while some is obviously a hatchet job by the historian Suetonius. 

As Suetonius is often the only source, we can’t dismiss it. Yet he wrote to please later emperors, to make them look better in comparison.

Don’t get me wrong – I have a 16-year-old son. If someone gave him limitless power, he’d probably go wrong in the worst possible way. I certainly would have at that age. Yet there’s a spite in the record that doesn’t match the man who spent years on the road in Greece, going from festival to festival – to sing and act and play music. Not a band on the run, but an emperor on the run from responsibilities.

Other historians from the period like Tacitus show a more thoughtful man. But all we remember will be orgies, setting Christians on fire and starting fights on the streets of Rome. Nero was more complicated than that. He certainly hated Christians, blaming them for the great fire in Rome. Yet perhaps he deserves forgiveness even so. 

He was emperor at just 16. Which of us would have done better?

Nero by Conn Iggulden is out now  (Penguin Michael Joseph, £22). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy!

If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue or give a gift subscription. You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play

When Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan was 21, he almost drowned. Trapped in his kayak he had to hold his body taut to prevent the raging waters of the Franklin River filling his mouth. That’s what reading his memoir, Question 7, is like: stories, ideas, snatches of memory cascade; language rains down in torrents, leaving you dizzy, struggling for breath.

His title is from a Chekhov short story, which poses a maths equation about a train leaving station A for station B, but finishes: “Who loves longer, a man or a woman?” “Who?” Flanagan continues: “You, me, a Hiroshima resident or a slave labourer? And why do we do what we do to each other?”

The slave labourer is Flanagan’s father: a POW in a Japanese coal mine. He would have died of exhaustion had the US not ordered the nuclear attacks. That he survived while the lives of others were instantaneously snuffed out is part of a moral calculus of war: the what-actually-happened versus the what-ifs. We know (roughly speaking) what dropping the atomic bombs cost, we can never know what the cost of not dropping them would have been.

The war they ended was founded on genocide. So too was Tasmania, its aboriginal inhabitants almost wiped out by the colonisers, who also oppressed its new convict population. Flanagan explores the impact of degradation on their descendants, including his grandmother – turned brittle by shame – and his father, who moves like a ghost through his children’s lives. All this is set against the butterfly effect of HG Wells’ first encounter with Rebecca West. If Wells had not tried to sublimate his desire – Flanagan theorises – he would not have written The World Set Free, in which he foresees the creation of the atomic bomb. If the physicist Leo Szilard had not read it, he wouldn’t have understood the significance of his epiphany about a nuclear chain reaction, or the consequences if Germany had worked out how to harness its power first. If he hadn’t understood that, he would not have persuaded Einstein to petition Roosevelt, and Roosevelt might never have authorised the Manhattan Project.

On such coincidences does the world turn. But, as Chekhov divined, life’s mysteries cannot be understood through the lens of facts. Words are Flanagan’s salvation: he strings them together to make mesmerising sentences, and yet he understands their limitations. 

The book’s epigraph is from a review of Moby Dick. “The question is put,” the reviewer says, “but where is the answer?” That Flanagan won’t resolve Chekhov’s metaphysical conundrum is a given. But accompanying him on his literary quest is a transformative experience. 

Dani Garavelli is a journalist and broadcaster.

Question 7 by Richard Flanagan (Chatto & Windus, £18.99) is out 30 May. You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine. If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member.

You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play.

In The Great White Bard, Farah Karim-Cooper explores the co-opting of Shakespeare as a symbol of English exceptionalism and reclaims his “gloriously diverse, discomforting and capacious store of words” for all ethnicities.

Karim-Cooper’s ambivalence towards the playwright began when, as a young Pakistani-American, she recognised in Romeo and Juliet something of the Pakistani experience, yet wondered why being white as “a snowy dove” was essential to Juliet’s beauty. Analysing works such as Othello, she shows how Shakespeare absorbed and perpetuated stereotypes of blackness, while also often undermining them through his multi-layered characterisation.

Her book is a love letter of sorts and a rallying cry for theatre productions which challenge exclusive white ownership of his canon.

Dani Garavelli is a journalist and broadcaster.

The Great White Bard by Farah Karim-Cooper is out now (Oneworld Publications, £10.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine. If you cannot reach your local vendor, you can still click HERE to subscribe to The Big Issue today or give a gift subscription to a friend or family member.

You can also purchase one-off issues from The Big Issue Shop or The Big Issue app, available now from the App Store or Google Play.