Books for a better world: as chosen by Lenny Henry, Geri Halliwell-Horner, Andrew O’Hagan and others

Whenever I’ve read this book to children, a respectful hush has fallen and all fidgeting ceases. Children feel an innate appreciation when they are entrusted with the difficult topics that we try to shield them from. Rosen’s directness, his refusal to dress up sadness, grief and anger in the shroud of euphemism or metaphor, makes this book feel revolutionary, edging on dangerous. Quentin Blake’s illustrations are similarly starkly striking.

It shows the connection between anger and sadness, a concept that isn’t always obvious, even to adults, yet once understood explains so much about a lot of the suffering in the world. More importantly, it teaches empathy – something that the world is desperately in need of. A sad book, yes, but undoubtedly one that makes the world a better, more empathetic place.
Manon Steffan Ros’s The Blue Book of Nebo is published by Firefly.

Soldier Sailor by Claire Kilroy

chosen by John Boyne, novelist

The greatest contribution a person can make to the world is to be a good parent and, to achieve that, one needs the support of family, friends and wider society. Claire Kilroy’s most recent novel is the most vivid account I’ve ever read of how difficult it is to cope with the demands of an infant. Through a prism of love and despair, Kilroy’s narrator illuminates how a baby can tear away at a woman’s sense of self, as her needs disintegrate in the face of her child’s interminable demands. Soldier Sailor has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for fiction but it’s men who should read it and recognise that if a woman chooses to devote herself to ensuring her child’s wellbeing, then someone needs to take care of her too.

We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel

chosen by Andrew McMillan, poet and novelist

Books, alone, can’t make a better world. For that we need real economic investment in towns and cities, in education, in healthcare, in the arts. We need serious and intelligent and compassionate leaders. Books can be a form of witness, a form of documenting that striving towards a better world; at their best, perhaps, they are a crucible through which a new language might emerge, a new sense of who we are, of how we got here of how we might look towards different futures. One such book I return to again and again is We Want It All. In an era of rising hostility to the trans and broader queer communities, what better time to be reminded of the vital work of the 70 poets compiled within its pages?
Andrew McMillan’s Pity is published by Canongate.

Choice by Neel Mukherjee

chosen by Rose Tremain, novelist

Mukherjee’s adroit new novel captures with disconcerting force the moral confusions that curdle the brains of those who have power in the world and those who have none. Are the directors of a money-obsessed publishing house more catastrophically at fault than an editor who – haunted by dystopian visions – lies to his partner, terrifies his kids with tales from a slaughterhouse and lets his sick dog be killed on a motorway? How evil – or not – are the neoliberal philanthropists who bestow a cow on a dirt-poor Indian family without being able to imagine the ruinous physical and financial burden such a gift could be? Mukherjee’s achievement in this book is not to offer answers to these desperate questions, but to guide us to think more deeply about them, and thus about our own moral choices.
Rose Tremain’sAbsolutely and Forever is published by Chatto.

The Wounded Cormorant by Liam O’Flaherty

chosen by Blindboy Boatclub, podcaster and author

In school we studied O’Flaherty’s short story The Sniper, a tense thriller about an IRA sniper during the Irishcivil war. Our teachers framed the story as a moralistic warning to young Irish boys about the dangers of physical force republicanism.
But it’s O’Flaherty’s nature writing that I find so vital now, 100 years after it was written, in the face of biodiversity collapse. The Wounded Cormorant is a story about a goat that knocks a rock off a cliff, and it lands on a cormorant’s leg. The cormorant tries to fly away from the pain, but her leg is smashed. She attempts to rejoin her flock; the birds turn away from her, frightened that her weakness will weaken the group. She is rejected and dies. O’Flaherty writes about systems of biodiversity as a studied, observant pagan meditation. He becomes the uncaring chaos of nature. He doesn’t anthropomorphise the animals. The reader is forced to clamber for humanity in his wildlife fiction. The natural world is treated with fear: something bigger than us, rather than a resource to be exploited.
Blindboy Boatclub’s Topographia Hibernica is published by Coronet.

Unstoppable Us: How Humans Took Over the World by Yuval Noah Harari

chosen by Jeff Kinney, children’s author