Do oldies hate fiction?

Many recently published books make depressing – even harrowing – reading, from books about war to historic miscarriages of justice. However, some new books on the Holocaust relate inspiring stories of courage and love. And there is some heart-warming fiction emerging from the RussiaUkraine conflict.

History reviews range from Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld to books on Teddy Boys and Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire. There are books about cities, crime, film and money, including Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite about Sam Bankman-fried’s astonishing rise and fall. And Sam Leith rounds up the best books on threats to our planet, like AI and climate change.

Aside from Gill Johnson’s beautifully observed Love from Venice, reviewed in the April issue, memoirs and biographies that caught reviewers’ eyes included Hardy Women (about those in Thomas Hardy’s life) and Lisa St. Aubain de Terán’s long-awaited new memoir, Better Broken than New.

On the fiction front, the experimental Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel by Margaret Atwood with others, was seized upon with mixed feelings by reviewers. Fiction as a category makes slim pickings and, as a keen reader myself, I’ve learnt that few oldies, particularly men, enjoy it.

Why? Much recent fiction is by women, which led me to wonder if men have rather given up on writing it. It’s 70 years since Lucky Jim was published. Michael Barber compares Kingsley Amis with Evelyn Waugh and finds the two literary giants equally curmudgeonly. However unpleasant as characters, though, there are few male novelists to rival them today. The last four Booker Prize winners have been men, but how many men have read the winning entries? The best thing about rounding up book reviews is the questions the process throws up about our reading habits. I hope the books we’ve chosen to include here will appeal a wide range of them.

Charlotte Metcalf