China Room, Sunjeev Sahota’s third novel, is a familiar, ancestral tale: the story of Mehar, living in late 1929 in rural Punjab, is narrated alongside that of her unnamed descendant in 1999, who has grown up in England. Despite the hardships endured by the book's protagonists (arranged marriage and heroin withdrawal, respectively), it is a gentle, if not particularly gripping read.

Nearly a year has passed since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police on 25 May. Nearly 200 have passed since the birth of “blackface minstrelsy” as a performance mode: white actors applying racial prosthetics to perform and make a mockery of black characters.

Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it was once called (from the French la betterave), from an earlier time when rave was a root vegetable, and a “wild rave”, instead of a techno-fuelled, all-night dance party, was a horseradish. In his novel Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Tom Robbins describes the beetroot as “the most intense of vegetables”, a “deadly serious” root whose leaking liquid resembles blood.

Music and time each dwell inside the other. And the more you attend to musical sounds, the more complex their temporal entanglements become. Time structures music, rhythmically and in its implied narratives. From outside, we place it in biographical time, whether cradle songs, serenades to a lover or wakes. Then music sits in history, yet somehow also apart from it, the latest sounds prone to evoke links between sonic effects and emotion that feel inexpressibly ancient.

Almost a year ago, in the midst of the first national lockdown, The Sunday Times broke the news that Boris Johnson had failed to attend five consecutive Cobra meetings in the lead up to the coronavirus crisis. The article went viral, reaching 24 million people in the UK and becoming the most popular online piece in the history of the paper.

Fifty Sounds is translator Polly Barton’s first novel, conceived as part of Fitzcarraldo’s annual essay prize.

“I think it happened to you, too, the first time you arrived.” So begins Andrea Bajani’s second novel (Se consideri le colpe, 2007), recently translated from Italian by Elizabeth Harris, with the narrator’s characteristic reserve. “You”, that pronoun at once intimate and confrontational. “It”, denoting an experience yet to be defined but which (tentatively) has already happened.

The idea behind Tarzan Economics is, in its essence, that “if the vine we are holding onto is withering, we can have confidence to reach out for a new one.” This thesis expounded in Will Page’s highly engaging book is that the music industry “got there first”. It may have started out by getting things badly wrong when originally faced with the challenge of digital, but it then “worked out how to pivot and thrive.” And to grow again.

"Television and I grew up together." As a baby boomer born in 1947, Susan Bordo is roughly the same age as our beloved gogglebox, which began life as a broad box with a ten-inch screen, chunky and clunky and encased in wood. With the rapid changes in technology in the years since, "television", as Bordo points out, has become estranged from its material status.

Sam Mills’s writing includes the wondrously weird novel The Quiddity of Will Self, the semi-memoir Fragments of My Father, and Chauvo-Feminism (The Indigo Press), which was released in February 2021. Chauvo-Feminism is a non-fiction long-form essay in which Mills delves into the phenomenon of men who create a feminist public persona which does not translate into their private lives.