What better way to get to know a prospective editor than to see what books they read?
Given that I specialise in non-fiction editing, this first blog post presents an opportunity to share some of the non-fiction books I’ve read and enjoyed over the years, both in the course of my time as an academic researcher and as an interested reader. As an academic I read a lot of research articles and monographs. However, I was always looking for different viewpoints and ideas written from outside of the academe, and so have read, both for research and leisure, a huge range on non-fiction writing from a variety of cultural and authorial perspectives.
In this post I have collated some of my favourite non-fiction books that look at the landscapes, pathways, gardens, and heritage sites of Great Britain, all with an eye on how these spaces have been mapped and cultivated along lines of division, be these colonial, racial, or classist. This was a central theme of my research into the Hostile Environment, looking at the ways that space and place are entangled with history on both personal and national levels. These texts – all utilising memoir, first-person storytelling, and creative responses in various ways – charge their reader to rethink their understanding of the very ground they walk on.
A Flat Place, by Noreen Masud
Having been generally drawn to hillside and mountaintop walking (at the behest of my parents), I had never much thought of the UK’s flatter environs and the unique spatial perspective they have to offer the walker, with their unerring horizons. A Flat Place proves to be an arresting, deeply personal memoir that shifts between Masud’s childhood memories in Pakistan and distinctly flat British landscapes that she draws with vivid attention to sensorial detail. At turns, claustrophobia, emancipatory, and literarily.
I Belong Here, by Anita Sethi
Following a race-based hate crime, experienced by Sethi when aboard a train travelling the width of the Pennines, she sets out to walk this northen English route. Immersing herself in this borderland space, she navigates memory and belonging. The writing is meditative and politically astute, and beautifully captures the rythmn of Sethi’s conjoined acts of walking and resistance.
Uprooting, by Marchelle Farrell
My research into the UK’s Hostile Environment policies led me to consider what different environs were at stake which, I found in Farrell’s gorgeously written book, included the garden. In the midst of the Covid pandemic and the BLM movement, Farrell looks to the garden of her new house in the English countryside. In Farrell’s words, the garden and gardening as anything but mundane. Cultivating plant beds in Somerset while recalling the gardens of her youth in Trinidad and Tobago, Farrell reflects on where and what home is.
The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing 🎧
Deftly researched and experiential, Laing traces the roots of the garden she works to restore in Suffolk. This book translated fabulously to an audiobook, and I found myself captivated again and again by Laing’s labyrinthine narrative of her garden, its history, and the biographies of the various people who have entered it (or places like it). With her words, the garden comes to represent far more than mere design, but encapsulates the intricacies of class, the violence of colonialism and war, and the dangers of the climate crisis.
Green Unpleasant Land and Our Island Stories, by Corinne Fowler
Both of Fowler’s books delve into Britain’s countryside entanglements with colonialism and empire. In both, research is born out of moments of creativity and storytelling and grounded in space and time. Green Unpleasant Land details the colonial links of manor houses, woodlands, and other rural markers with intricacy and care, but I especially love Our Island Stories, which recounts such histories during the act of walking. In this book, Fowler’s walks with various companions, including Sathnam Sanghera and Zakia Sewell (whose book, Finding Albion, incidentally, I am listening to at the moment), re-routing well-trodden pathways with lesser-known narratives of Britain’s colonial roots.
Reading non-fiction is a genuine pleasure, but it also presents an opportunity for continued professional development. Part of how I learned to write academically (and successfully published research articles and a monograph) was through extensively reading non-fiction. So, too, reading non-fiction from the perspective of an editor helps me to become more attuned to the nuances of this genre’s expansive and nuanced writerly craft.
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