Book Worms: Autumn Political Reads

Book Worms: Autumn Political Reads
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By Joanna GillIsabel Marques da Silva
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We ask booksellers and political scientists what to read this Autumn to understand the latest trends in Europe.

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With the avalanche of information in print and online, sometimes it is good to go back to books to have a deeper understanding of what is happening in the world. Euronews went to what we should be reading this Autumn.

On Brexit, readers have a lot to choose from - in the satirical section; such as Alice in Brexitland.

But there are also the gloomy options like "Heroic failure".

"The books now tend to be more about how the Brexit has not been a successful process at all. Look at the subtitle: The politics of pain. That explains it all. So, you got either the pessimist view on Brexit or the funny view," Ronny Wellemans, bookseller, Waterstones tells Euronews.

Environmental issues are making headlines, and now they are becoming best sellers ahead of the upcoming UN Climate Summit.

"Every month Waterstones presents the new non-fiction book and this month it has chosen 'The Uninhabitable Earth'. We sold a lot of copies in the hardback cover and now the paperback came out. It is quite a gloomy but realistic picture of earth if we do not change our ways - transport wise, food wise - earth as we know it can no longer exist," says Wellemans.

At Filigranes bookshop Euronews asked a political scientist for suggested reading on migration. He chose "The welcome crisis' written by three researchers.

"The book is interesting to say that it is not in fact, an immigration crisis: the problem is not that there are too many immigrants who arrived in 2015, the problem is that it is a crisis of reception, a crisis of political institutions that are not ready or do not want to welcome immigrants," Martin Deleixhe, political scientist, University of Paris 1 Sorbonne told Euronews.

On women's rights and their role in society, Martin Deleixhe suggested two books. One is "The Testaments", the long awaited Margaret Atwood sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale.

"(The book) continues this exploration of what could be a totalitarian society completely dominated by men.It is interesting because one can try to have a counterpoint on this issue of patriarchy, and there is a book that I would like to highlight: the book of Francis Dupuis-Déri, entitled "the crisis of masculinity, autopsy of a tenacious myth", which is also in the news, and which responds to the movement Me Too, and to the kind of movement of surf, backlash that there was after Me Too,"

Published only this week, "The Testaments" was nominated in July for the famous literary Booker Prize, something unheard of.

Journalist • Isabel Marques da Silva

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