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

I read this in my 40s and I wished I’d been able to borrow it from Dudley Library when I was a kid. Nothing I’ve read before or since has better put me in someone else’s shoes. It’s one of those books that expands your understanding of the world. Malorie gives us a reversed racial power structure, with dark-skinned Crosses holding power over light-skinned Noughts. Sephy is a Cross, the daughter of a powerful politician. She’s best friends with Callum, a Nought.

You can’t make the whole world a better place – but you can start with your garden. And once you’ve got one hopeful gardener, dragging bleary guests downstairs to experience the berserk joy of a dawn chorus, the worldThis is a serious, statistics-heavy book, but the numbers spell out something extraordinary. Which is that between 1999 and 2017, 600,000 mainly white Americans in midlife died of “despair” – by suicide or alcoholism or “accidental poisoning” .

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.

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.

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