A sweeping and deeply reported analysis of US immigration policy, in all its hypocrisy

Keldy had seen several of her brothers murdered, and narrowly escaped assassination herself, before she chose to leave Honduras with her two sons and take the migrant’s path north. This is a journey fraught with danger, but early in 2017 the family crossed the desert into New Mexico, where she flagged down a border patrol vehicle and claimed asylum. Keldy had a watertight case, or so she believed. But after a couple of nights in a cold holding cell, border agents informed her she would be separated from her children and deported. They dragged her away from her sons, who cried and tried to clutch her clothing. They would not be reunited for four years.

Keldy’s treatment at the hands of the Trump administration is one of dozens of stories detailed by Jonathan Blitzer in his vast and timely account of US migration policy, written in the colourful, muscular prose of a New Yorker staff writer. This is one of the pre-eminent political issues of our time, and Blitzer explores it in reportage of the expensive, often courageous, gumshoe kind. This is a world in which neighbourhoods are never poor when they can be “hardscrabble”, and no one, no matter how minor, comes without a large dollop of closely observed characterisation.

A Rastafari’s tale of belonging and betrayal set in 1980s England

All English language becomes fresh in the Caribbean mouth. There is nothing the enslaver has given us that we have not reimagined new, made weapon. There is no misfortune we cannot, as we say, tun our hand, mek fashion. This quicksilver sense of ingenuity and battle-worn verve born of necessity to Caribbean people is at the heart of this compelling new novel by Moses McKenzie. Fast by the Horns is a fascinating depiction of Black immigrant life and Rasta boyhood in 1980s England. With the sharp and delectable music of its dialect, the book grabs you by its teeth from the first page and never quite lets go. At its best, this is an urgent novel of ideas, constantly propelled by the narrator’s wildfire voice, written almost exclusively in beautiful Rastafari vernacular.

At the novel’s heart is a historical portrait of Britain’s Jamaican immigrant community, and its inescapable ties to its colonial legacy. Centring on St Pauls in Bristol, two Englands swiftly emerge: one for the Black immigrants who are constantly harassed by the police and face high unemployment rates and crumbling infrastructure, and one for those Britons who claim the countryside, the yards, the banks, the pigs, and eventually even the neighbourhood’s Black children.

The historian’s wide-ranging exploration of wistful reminiscence cautiously champions its benefits to society and challenges the view that it is dangerous and foolish

Agnes Arnold-Forster was once a very nostalgic child. An avid reader of Enid Blyton novels, she tells us, she unsuccessfully begged her parents to “divert me from my 1990s London primary to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall”. Although her training as an academic historian naturally taught her to be suspicious of such yearnings for an imaginary past, she has now written a book that combines wide-ranging historical analysis with a (cautious) “defence of nostalgia”.

While neuroscientists sometimes treat emotions as human universals, historians are keen to show how the words we use to describe our feelings, and indeed the feelings themselves, change with the times. “Nostalgia was one of the most studied medical conditions of the 19th century,” Arnold-Forster explains, believed to cause “palpitations and unexplained ruptures in the skin” as well as depression and disturbed sleep. It was first diagnosed among 17th-century Swiss mercenaries and referred to “a kind of pathological patriotic love, an intense and dangerous homesickness”. (Since sufferers were assumed to be missing the pure mountain air, one doctor suggested they should be put in tall towers to recuperate.) It was not until the early 20th century that homesickness and nostalgia in the current sense began to be seen as distinct.

Influencers and politicians use snappy cliches to get you on side – but you can fight fire with fire

Since the moment I learned about the concept of the “thought-terminating cliche” I’ve been seeing them everywhere I look: in televised political debates, in flouncily stencilled motivational posters, in the hashtag wisdom that clogs my social media feeds. Coined in 1961 by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, the phrase describes a catchy platitude aimed at shutting down or bypassing independent thinking and questioning. I first heard about the tactic while researching a book about the language of cult leaders, but these sayings also pervade our everyday conversations: expressions such as “It is what it is”, “Boys will be boys”, “Everything happens for a reason” and “Don’t overthink it” are familiar examples.

From populist politicians to holistic wellness influencers, anyone interested in power is able to weaponise thought-terminating cliches to dismiss followers’ dissent or rationalise flawed arguments. In his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, Lifton wrote that these semantic stop signs compress “the most far-reaching and complex of human problems … into brief, highly selective, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis.”

The Pulitzer prize-winning critic turned author identifies a polarised and unstable world and suggests solutions: embrace risk, welcome otherness and open dialogue

For more than three decades from 1983, Michiko Kakutani was the lead book critic for the New York Times. She won a Pulitzer for her “fearless and authoritative” criticism, shorthand for an unflinching ability to dismantle heady literary reputations. Novelist Nicholson Baker described being reviewed by Kakutani as “like having my liver taken out without anaesthesia”.

Kakutani put down her literary scalpel in 2017 and turned her attention instead to that alternative arena of outlandish plotlines and overbearing egos, American public life. Existential crisis in democracy was no longer only of academic interest in the books pages. In her 2018 book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, she documented the president’s first unhinged phase of wild and whirling words, and placed it in the context of postmodernism, which had undermined the authority of shared narrative viewpoints, and collapsed Enlightenment faith in the sanctity of fact. This movement in critical philosophy had, she argued, trickled down to the wider public in disturbing ways. It had led to a narcissistic relativism in the culture that “allowed [all] people to insist that their opinions were just as valid as objective truths verified by scientific evidence or serious investigative reporting”. Tinfoil hats all round.

The former New York Times journalist exposes the excesses of hyper-‘woke’ culture and the suffocating impact of groupthink in this enjoyable study of a topsy-turvy world

Morning After the Revolution by the American journalist Nellie Bowles is a wickedly enjoyable book about the madness that seemingly began to inflame the brains of a certain cohort of the liberal intelligentsia about four years ago (its author dates the fever to the pandemic, but I think – personal information! – it began some time before then). It was a delirium that took her, as it did many people, a little by surprise, not least because she in theory belonged to this subsection herself: at school, where she was for a while the only out gay person, she ran around sticking rainbows all over the place; after college she was known to go to readings at Verso Books (“my God, I bought a tote”); when her girl Hillary was “about to win” she was “drinking with I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar”. But once she’d noticed it, she couldn’t ignore it. Her instinct was to whip out a thermometer and ask a few pertinent diagnostic questions.

Asking questions, though, is (or it certainly was… things may be shifting now) verboten in the time of madness. Either you’re for the ideological buffet – every single dish – or you’re against it, and must eat at the bad restaurant where all the mean people hang out, a place that is otherwise known as “the wrong side of history”. When the insanity started, Bowles was working in Los Angeles for the New York Times, a job she’d dreamed of since childhood, and there her curiosity soon began to piss off some of her colleagues. When she went on to fall in love with a full-blown dissenter, the columnist Bari Weiss, who’s now her wife, she found herself on the outside of something, looking in. Morning After the Revolution is an account of her adventures in this topsy-turvy realm, in both the period before and after she left the NYT in 2021 (she and Weiss now run the Free Press). It comprises a series of reported colour pieces in which she touches on such things as diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) programmes, the campaign to defund the police, trans rights and (briefly) the crystal display she noticed when Meghan and Harry did pandemic Zooms from their home in Montecito.

Game-changing books that offer hope, as recommended by speakers at this year’s Hay festival, including Theresa May, Tom Holland, Helen Garner and Jon Ronson

chosen by Lenny Henry, actor and comedian