In brief: Powsels and Thrums; By Any Other Name; The Politics of Time – review
Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life
Alan Garner
4th Estate, £14.99, pp176
Who could resist such a title? The term derives from handloom weaving, Alan Garner’s great-grandfather’s trade, and refers to the scraps of cloth that weavers kept for themselves – an evocative metaphor for the writings collected herein. Among the poems, essays, memoir and stories are musings on topics as varied as first love, cosmology and cross-country running with Alan Turing. Published just ahead of Garner’s 90th birthday, these snippets, produced on the same magical loom, together attain a mesmerising wholeness, vibrating with life and curiosity, capturing both the pungently time-bound and the luminously eternal.
By Any Other Name
Jodi Picoult
Michael Joseph, £22, pp544
Could it be that Shakespeare’s mistress was actually his ghostwriter? So posits Jodi Picoult in this hectic, dual-stranded tale, in which the struggles of young American playwright Melina Green echo the lot of real-life Elizabethan poet Emilia Bassano, Melina’s ancestor according to internet genealogy and also, academics have mooted, the Bard’s “Dark Lady”. A commercial powerhouse, Picoult is best known for fiction that embeds hot-button topics in propulsive plots, but as a polemic against enduring misogyny in lettered circles, this latest is undermined by its own lack of subtlety.
The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty
Guy Standing
Pelican, £10.99, pp432 (paperback)
Progressive economist Guy Standing concludes his cycle of work-focused books by calling for an overhaul in how we think about and use time. Our ancestors’ lives were governed by agrarian time, then came industrial time, and today we’re in thrall to “tertiary time”, whose defining characteristic is the blurring of time-use boundaries (think weekend emails). It’s inequitable and outdated, he insists, advocating instead a return to “commoning”, an ancient way of living and labouring collaboratively. A book that’s as approachable as it is thought-provoking, it’s sure to offer clock-watchers at least temporary emancipation.
To order Powsels and Thrums: A Tapestry of a Creative Life, By Any Other Name or The Politics of Time: Gaining Control in the Age of Uncertainty go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
