Caroline Sanderson's Reading List

"Legacy of Violence is probably the most academic book on the shortlist, but we all felt it was an extraordinary achievement, taking a massive subject and honing it. It’s a model of long-term research. It’s an incredibly topical subject, and often a very controversial one for people, too. It was impossible to ignore this book, in terms of not only the canvas, but also the adroitness with which she’s brought all her research together and presented it. It’s tremendous. One thing that this and all the books on the shortlist have in common is that they are stories on a human scale. They help us understand world events or people’s lives through individual human stories. So although this is quite a daunting book, potentially, for people to confront, it is very readable and its thesis is absolutely compelling. I don’t think it’s much of a surprise to hear that the legacy of colonialism was often one of violence. It’s about the systematic nature of that violence. Very often you hear people argue, ‘Well yes, there was violence here and there, but it wasn’t a deliberate policy.’ This book very convincingly shows that this was state-sponsored violence that happened across the board. That is something we need to know and we need to grapple with."

"I’ve read many books that tell stories of Auschwitz. It’s very sobering when you think about the number of stories that are still coming out about those times, all these many decades later. They all merit our attention. This book is extraordinary because Rudolf Vrba and a fellow inmate, Alfred Wetzler, were the first Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. Jonathan Freedland is a fiction writer too—he writes thrillers under the name Sam Bourne —so there is an element of thriller in the way that he describes this escape and the build-up to it. It is incredibly heart-in-your-mouth compelling. But it’s a bigger story than just one man’s breakout. Vrba goes on to try and put the word out about what’s going on in Auschwitz and saves many lives in the process. The book is memorializing one man’s heroism. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . One of the things that’s so terrific about this book is that it charts Rudolf Vrba’s life after the war, in America, where he went on to be a chemist. It’s about how you deal with the rest of your life, after something so extraordinary has happened to you at the age of 19. This is going to sound quite strange, but he’s very often a man who is not particularly likeable. He’s a man you have very mixed feelings about, while you’re also seeing the bigger picture. The ambivalence there is just brilliantly done. It’s a very powerful book and a Jewish friend of mine said she found it very upsetting because it’s a book that makes you think, ‘With fewer and fewer people alive to tell these stories, where, as a Jew, am I safe in the world today?’ It has all these reverberations, at the same time as being a terrific story."

"Yes. The subtitle is ‘seeking refuge on the world’s deadliest migration route’—that being the route from North Africa, across the Mediterranean, to Europe. All the books on the shortlist have a topicality and the ways in which they are topical are very varied and interesting. This is a book about events that are unfolding right now, as we’re speaking. We know they’re happening, but somehow we manage to push them away and not think about them. But migration is one of the huge issues of our time and this book really makes you feel it. It’s astonishing. The reportage really brings home—again, through individual human stories—the plight of people and the reasons they’re making these terrifying bids to cross to safety. It’s just stunning and it has a real urgency. You feel these events unfolding as you read it. I was very struck by something that Sally Hayden says in her afterword about trying to get the book published. Certain agents said it didn’t have a narrative heart or wasn’t polemical enough. It made me, personally, really want to champion the book. She’s a young journalist who is focusing on humanitarian crises and it’s a book that we all urgently need to read. They do. In that sense, it is a bit of an exposé. It really shows the ineptitude and how Europe is turning its back on these people. But that’s just not possible, because this is not going to stop anytime soon."

"That’s what we all really loved about it. You hear so much about the Civil War and the Restoration, but this republican period has a fascination all of its own and she really brings that out. I thought, ‘Why didn’t I know more about such a pivotal period in English history?’ It also gives you a very rounded view of Oliver Cromwell . He’s a figure whose name we all know, but fewer of us know what he was like or where he came from. I certainly didn’t, so I found that incredibly illuminating. It’s a terrifically researched work of history—erudite, but so brilliantly told. What Anna Keay has done is picked out the lives of fascinating people on different sides of the conflict. It’s easy to go straight to Samuel Pepys to hear about this period, but she’s done something really original. Of course, since we started judging the prize and read about Charles I and Charles II—and what happened in this restless republic between the two—we’ve now got Charles III on the throne and big debates about whether we still want a monarchy or what a monarch is for. It’s a very enjoyable work of history but, again, it has that topicality running through it. The other thing I found interesting is that within the space of just over a decade, we all thought, ‘No, we don’t want a monarch, let’s execute him.’ And then, 11 years later, ‘Yes, we do. Bring him back.’ So it’s also about how short people’s memories are. It’s terrific. I absolutely loved it."

"This is such an interesting one. It’s a companion book to A Fortunate Man , John Berger ’s book from the late 1960s about a country doctor. In that sense, you might think it’s going to be derivative, but it’s not at all. It opens with a wonderful story about how Polly Morland came upon a copy of A Fortunate Man and realized that it was set in the very same valley where she lives, which now has a female GP looking after it. I love the blend that Polly Morland achieves in the book. It’s reportage, but so creative in the way that she sets out the life and work of this country doctor. She did lots and lots of interviews with her and shadowed her and I found myself marveling at how she seems to be in the head of this woman so effectively. It’s a wonderful portrait. It’s coupled with wonderful nature writing and the descriptions of the countryside where the doctor is working. The book is also compellingly topical, because it’s about how we care for people, how the National Health Service should best operate. The GP is the closest doctor to most people. The doctor in this book builds extraordinary relationships across the community by being embedded in it herself. She is living there; she’s a close neighbor. The way she works is quite old fashioned, but I think it has so much to tell us about when medicine and caring for people is effective, and what’s needed to really make that happen. The book is just over 200 pages long and the blend is brilliant, these spare pages also broken up with fantastic photographs by Richard Baker. It’s a microcosmic gem. Yes, a country doctor but at a time when it was much more common for a GP to know their patients. Back then, the GP might have worked with generations of the same family. That’s much less common now, with shifting populations. In that sense, it’s not too typical, perhaps, but a real object lesson in what’s possible when you really know your patients and build relationships with them. Of course, for many people in the NHS that’s been made impossible."

"I’ve always loved a literary biography , but you don’t get quite so many of them now. It’s difficult, isn’t it, when you’re approaching the life of somebody? Almost always there’s been a previous biography, and it’s difficult to write one that really says something different and brings a new perspective. This one absolutely does and does so brilliantly. I love a book which then sends you on to other books. This is one where you think, ‘Right. I need to tackle John Donne’s poetry.’ We all know “No man is an island” and a few other bits but she really makes you want to go to his work—or return to it if you haven’t looked at it for a long time. It’s just wonderful. She writes brilliantly. You feel her erudition and her turn of phrase is just so unexpected and fluent. She puts forward ideas about his poetry. He’s clearly one of her passions as a writer, that comes across very strongly, and she gives all the reasons why she thinks he should be much more widely read. Donne was almost a direct contemporary of Shakespeare’s, but Shakespeare’s reputation is worldwide. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There’s a wonderful conclusion, where she’s saying why we should all read John Donne now. It’s about how death is always here and we have to confront it, but how doing so makes life absolutely fantastic. In a sense, that’s what his work was about. He was always living in the shadow of death, because of the times he lived in—the plague and the persecution of Catholics (he was born a Catholic). Later he was a man of the church. Death was ever present in those times. You don’t necessarily get life for very long, and you have to hold onto it. It’s quite a modern way of looking at it. I just love the way she writes. It’s not like anybody else, I think. She’s extraordinary, Katherine Rundell, a Renaissance woman. Part of our best books of 2022 series."