Counterfire writers share their recommendations from a year of their reading 

Cici Washburn: Over the summer I read the novel The Gamekeeper (Penguin 1979) by Barry Hines, a wonderful book that follows George the Gamekeeper, a former steel worker, through the seasons with every detail of his thorough and intensive work to serve the Duke. It has very believable dialogue showing the tension between the workers and the aristocracy and their ideas about the whole point of it all. Reading it, you feel like you’re in that pub in Yorkshire listening to them. Another novel I enjoyed which, given the situation in South Korea, is an interesting read is Mater 2-10 (Scribe UK 2023) by Hwang Sok-yong. A former worker in a plant that has been closed to use cheaper labour elsewhere is occupying a factory tower in protest. With his comrades running the campaign on the ground and bringing him food, while up in the tower, he tells the story of his family’s lives and struggles throughout the twentieth century in Korea – primarily through their struggles working on the railways. Finally, I have just finished Clifford Odets ‘Waiting for Lefty’ and Other Plays (Grove Press 1993), powerful stories showing the struggles in people’s lives during the depression in 1930s US. 

Michael Lavalette: I’d like to recommend three books that I’ve really enjoyed this year. My novel of the year is Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (‎ Bloomsbury 2011). It tells the story of the Abulheja family through the Nakba and decades of displacement and oppression. It combines a history of Palestine over the last 76 years with a story of love, loss and the quest for freedom. My autobiography of the year is Avi Shlaim’s wonderful Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew (Oneworld Publications 2023). It covers Avi’s early years in Iraq and the role of the Israeli state in the bombing of the synagogue in Baghdad to create a climate of fear amongst the integrated Iraqi Jewish population. It then moves on to his life in Israel and latterly London and his political life as an anti-Zionist Jew. Finally, I’ve just finished Vanessa Christina Wills’s fantastic Marx’s Ethical Vision (Oxford University Press 2024). A defence of Marx’s approach to history and to key ethical questions like Marx’s attitude to human nature, alienation, freedom and rights. Thought provoking and challenging! 

Lindsey German: I picked up James Baldwin’s final novel, Just Above my Head (Penguin 1994), in the summer and found it fascinating. It is about familiar themes: a child preacher, gay sex, the brutality of the US south before civil rights, the sanctuary from racism that he found in Europe, and love. This year I also decided to read the whole of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I did by taking it in small sections as bedtime reading. So I was delighted to see Orlando Reade’s What in Me Is Dark (Penguin 2024) where he shows the many connections and influences of the poem on political figures since, including Malcolm X, Hannah Arendt, CLR James, and Reade’s own students in New Jersey jails. I went back to Portugal in the spring to mark fifty years of the revolution and reread Pereira Maintains (Canongate 2011) by Antonio Tabucchi. A real classic of one man’s reluctant resistance to fascism. 

Chris Bambery: There are few books I have enjoyed more this year than Tony Collins’s Raising the Red Flag (Haymarket 2024) . It’s an excellent history of the British far left before, during and after the First World War. The four years before that war saw a major crisis of the British state caused by three insurgencies; the Great Unrest, the 1910-1914 strike wave, the campaign of the suffragettes and the crisis around Irish home rule which, in the summer of 1914, threatened to erupt into civil war in both Britain and Ireland. Collins shows that the Marxist left pre-1914 concentrated on abstract propagandism and, at best, uncritical strike support. It gave little lead to the strikes and largely ignored the Irish and suffrage issues. Opposition to the war was largely based on pacifism, although that did not escape state repression. For those that rallied to the Bolshevik revolution, a sharp learning curve would follow in the build up to the eventual creation of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The new Communist International had to fight for it to commit to anti-imperialism, women’s liberation and a rank-and-file strategy in the unions. This is an excellent analysis of an exciting time and one with which I heartily concur. 

Jacqueline Mulhallen: I enjoyed reading Bill V Mullen’s political biography of one of the greatest writers and activists of the twentieth century, James Baldwin: Living with Fire, Pluto, 2019). Mullen details his inspiring teachers, many leftwing, and his early political commitment and activity, and provides a good background. He examines Baldwin’s contribution to the civil-rights campaign, his ability to get to the heart of the Israel/Palestine conflict or feminist and gay rights issues. There is no substitute for reading Baldwin’s own novels and essays, of course! Peter Radford’s They Run with surprising Swiftness (University of Virginia Press, 2023) traces women’s participation in sport from the original ancient Greek Olympics through football matches in the Middle Ages and fighting, riding horses and running races during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the last a particularly popular activity in Britain. Women’s sporting activities were discouraged during the nineteenth century and the impression given that women never took part in sport. But they did! Blood, Sweat and Tears (Artworker Books 1985), a book of magnificent photographs marking the anniversary of the great miners’ strike, inspires both those who remember it and people who weren’t born then. An excellent present. Get it from www.minersstrike.com. 

Chris Nineham: It is a largely ignored fact that the last few decades have seen an explosion of mass protest around the world. Journalist Vincent Bevins has written an exceptional account of some of these mass movements in If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (Hachette 2023). That rare thing, a successful journalist with a social conscience, Bevins participated in some of the protests he describes and interviewed hundreds of activists. As a result, this gripping book focuses on the politics and strategy of the activists involved and asks; why hasn’t this explosion of protest led to permanent social change? I didn’t agree with all of Enzo Traverso’s conclusions, but in The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (Verso 2019) he makes a number of crucial and suggestive arguments. He shows how anti-political moods in society are to be blamed on those in the political centre who have hollowed out politics, and how the discussion of populism betrays the ‘aristocratic gaze’ of the centrists. He explains how the right have weaponised identity politics and how and why Islamophobia has become its organising principle. His assessment of the ‘post-fascist’ nature of today’s far right is too sanguine in my opinion, but this is an important contribution. Looking back at some of the history of the Vietnam War, I came across Viet Thanh Nguyen’s brilliant novel The Sympathizer (Grove Press 2015) which manages to extract dark humour from the experiences of a Vietnamese Communist double agent. Troubling and entertaining at the same time, The Sympathizer provides multiple insights into the politics of war. 

Shabbir Lakha: Marx and Engels’ famous maxim in The Communist Manifesto, ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ is aptly demonstrated in A People’s History of London (Verso 2012). Lindsey German and John Rees concisely document how the London we know today was shaped by the battles between oppressed and oppressor. Largely ignored in ‘official’ history, the streets of London are bursting with a radical and revolutionary past. In a year characterised by sustained mass protest for Palestine, A People’s History of London is a fascinating read and a thread that connects our movements to those that came before. The Autobiography of Malcolm X is as much a biography of black America from the 20s to the 60s as it is about Malcolm’s own extraordinary life. Malcolm’s story details American racism, deeply rooted in its structures and expressed in extreme violence, and the resistance to it. My biggest takeaway, apart from being inspired by Malcolm’s revolutionary fervour, is how ideas change in the heat of struggle. A great accompanying book is Kevin Ovenden’s very short Malcolm X: Socialism and Black Nationalism (Bookmarks 1995), which highlights the leftward shift in Malcolm’s politics in the last year of his life and the legacy he left behind. This is a great time to read or re-read the autobiography ahead of the centenary of Malcolm’s birth next year. 

Lucy Nichols: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Fitzcarraldo Editions), by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, was released in 2009 but translated into English in 2018 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. It is an intriguing noir, incorporating elements of magical realism, murder mystery and thriller. There is an existential element to the book, which covers themes of loneliness, animal rights, corruption and memory. There is an array of quirky characters, whose lives and personalities are slowly untwined by the main character Janina Duszejko, who narrates the novel. Initially controversial after its release in Poland, Tokarczuk was attacked by the Polish right for criticising hunting in the book, which also seeks to expose Polish corruption. Drive Your Plow is an instant favourite, and certainly one of my favourite novels. Though not overtly socialist, Tokarczuk’s novel is clearly left wing and made an interesting read for a socialist. 

Terina Hine: This year I read both The Wager (Doubleday 2023) and The Killers of the Flower Moon (Doubleday 2017) by American historian David Grann. Both are easy reads which focus on historical controversies. The Wager is an account of a fateful voyage by the eponymous ship in the 1740s on an imperial quest to plunder gold from a Spanish galleon. The Wager, the name of the ship, was part of a fleet engaged in the bizarrely named War of Jenkin’s Ear. Imperial rivalry is at the heart of this seafaring tale, although its focus is on the plight of the sailors who faced disaster on top of disaster. Grann draws a picture of the horror of life onboard, replete with a cabin reserved for amputation, the  ‘dead reckoning’ system used to navigate and the navy’s ludicrous codes of honour. It’s an incredible tale of survival against the odds, with the added intrigue of a court battle at the end. Grann weaves in references to epic seafaring poems (Coleridge and Byron), and the men on board, familiar with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, dream they will be heroes. Just like Crusoe, their survival depended on the assistance of local indigenous people who the castaways fail to see as anything other than savages. Unlike previous accounts of similar voyages, Grann does not dwell on notions of imperial adventure and never shies away from the cruelty, indifference and racism of the British imperial project. I went on to read Grann’s earlier and more famous book, Killers of the Flower Moon, which was made into a successful film of the same name. This book takes the form of a detective story as Grann investigates a spate of murders in the 1920s of the Osage people of Oklahoma. It is a tale of racism, murder and corruption and the birth of the FBI and shows the injustice and discrimination faced by the indigenous people of America. With the Native American protests against oil pipelines today, it is a story that continues to resonate.  

John Westmorland: I would strongly recommend Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (Penguin 2023) to anyone wanting to understand imperialist violence and the ideological contortions that support it. Caroline Elkins has written an extensive account of how the British Empire grew to dominate the world, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. Elkins demonstrates how the politicians representing the British ruling class invented excuses, generated false information, shut down the voices of those they oppressed, and glorified the butchery that imperialist war and domination entailed. Reading this book may well make you angry, but you will be better informed and armed to confront the monsters that excuse genocide and the proliferation of nuclear weaponry today. Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep (Hutchinson) came out in paperback in 2022, but it is a thought-provoking novel that I thoroughly enjoyed. It is a cleverly constructed combination of a futurist and historical novel. The construction is of a post-apocalypse Britain that has reverted to the dogmatic authoritarianism of a Tudor-like state. The tale is set in a village in the wilds of Exmoor and it is a compelling tale of a priest in search of the truth about what happened to bring this strange world into existence. It will make the reader think about the sort of crisis capitalism might be heading towards and is also a fascinating detective novel. It would make a good present or a good personal treat. 

John Rees: New novels from Walter Mosley are always an event. This year I read his new book, Farewell, Amethystine (Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2024), a story featuring the detective that made Mosley famous, Easy Rawlins, and 2023’s Every Man A King (Wiedenfeld & Nicholson). Mosley’s books certainly work as thrillers, but what they really are is an exploration of black American experience. His lead characters are almost universally from poor backgrounds, always articulate, very often self-taught book readers and intellectuals. Like Mosley, they are also often political radicals. You can learn more about racism in America from Mosley than from whole libraries of academic tracts, and a lot more enjoyably. I spoke about the Battle of Cropredy Bridge back in the summer on its 380th anniversary on the very spot where it took place. I found Nick Lipscombe’s The English Civil War, An Atlas and Concise History of the War in Three Kingdoms (Osprey, 2020) invaluable. If you like maps, military history, and the English Revolution, or all three, this is a beautifully produced large-scale book with detailed maps and descriptions of the most historically consequential war ever fought on English soil. It is both an ornament and a pleasure whether you browse its pages or read in detail. I reread E H Carr’s What is History? (Penguin, 1961/2018) this year, and I probably got more from it than on my first reading years ago. Whether or not you’ve read it before, you should pick it up and read it now. Carr was a brilliant historian in his own right as his massive fourteen-volume History of Soviet Russia bears witness, unpopular as it is with academia since the end of the Cold War. Carr was a crystal-clear writer and this introduction to the problems of historical analysis is a masterpiece. You don’t have to agree with all of it to find it stimulating and informative, indeed, in a class of its own on the issue.