Travelling While Black
By Nanjala Nyabola
Hurst, £14.99
Nanjala Nyabola is a highly self-aware guide in this personal investigation into race, travel and migration in the 21st century. She describes experiences many Irish readers would find familiar, exploring them with depth and insight and a bright alertness to difference. She arrives in post-earthquake Haiti as the only black member of a group of law students; she battles altitude sickness and racism on the trek to Everest base camp. Although her voice is that of an educated and cosmopolitan world traveller, Nyabola draws attention to the contrast of that learned voice with her frequently stigmatised body: young, female, with black skin and a Kenyan passport. Often beautifully written, the book rewards on many levels, especially when the personal and political are brought together. – Carol Ballantine
The Midlife Mind: Literature and the Art of Ageing
By Ben Hutchinson
Reaktion Books, £20
Ben Hutchinson has reached middle age (43) and uses his own experience of ageing and what some famous writers have said about midlife to explore its meaning. He first sets the cultural context (it turns out that the "midlife crisis", like Philip Larkin's "sexual intercourse", began as a concept in the 1960s), drawing on philosophers ancient and modern but especially on Michel de Montaigne, who withdrew from political and social life at the ripe old age of 38 to compose his famous essays. Hutchinson then skilfully invokes a wide range of creative writers, including Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, George Eliot, Henry James, TS Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, for their experiences and views. It consoles him that some of the finest works of art have been produced in middle age. – Brian Maye
Border Wars: The Conflicts of Tomorrow
By Klaus Dodds
Ebury Press, £20
Dodds looks at numerous future conflicts in this engaging and informative study: borders shifting because of landscape and environmental change; regions at an impasse; unrecognised borders; borders evolving due to technological innovation, such as those in space and under water being covertly marked by some countries. And viral borders, something we are all too aware of now. In this context, Dodds thinks the Covid-19 pandemic could see a sharp decline in international co-operation and openness, especially if "sovereignty geopolitics" takes hold. Yet he remains optimistic for future relations between nations, who may have their hands forced by new border emergencies resulting from climate change as much as from war/persecution. Somewhat ominously, and presciently, he notes there is no international legal recognition of the category "climate-change refugee". – NJ McGarrigle
