Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney
English is a West Germanic language and the Romance languages, including French and Spanish, are the daughters of Latin, but where did Latin come from? Laura Spinney’s refreshing and lively Proto will take the reader on an unlikely historical odyssey, diving into the mother of many tongues, both dead and alive, whose echoes can be heard from Scotland to China.
Through historical multilingualism that mixes archaeology, science and philology, researchers have been able to map when mass migration occurred and how that impacted the languages that inevitably developed with it. We know that the Roma people picked up Persian loanwords in their 1,000-year exodus from India, but must have moved on from Persia by the time it was conquered by Muslims in the 7th century because Romani contains no Arabic loans. Similarly, we can learn how the Latin “p” became English “f” in a shift from pater to father.
Proto is a rich and well-researched study of language development across thousands of miles and tens of thousands of years. But most importantly, it shows that we are more connected than we might have been led to believe.
By Zuzanna Lachendro
William Collins, 352pp, £22. Buy the book
One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
For every generation, journalist and novelist Omar El Akkad writes, there comes a terrible realisation that our belief that “no matter the day-to-day disappointments or political opportunism or corruption… there is something solid holding the whole endeavour together” is false. For El Akkad, that moment came in October 2023, with the start of the war on Gaza. He conceives of that devastation not as a rupture of the rules-based order, but as evidence it has always been a lie.
In a series of essays, El Akkad blends the polemical with the personal: his first memory of war – the First Gulf War, observed from a distance in his birth country, Egypt – his family’s experiences as immigrants, and his work as a journalist, in Afghanistan in 2007, and in the military court at Guantanamo Bay. He calls out the many hypocrisies of the West: that it’s easy to be outraged at atrocity once it is safely in the past; that we talk about freedom and justice, but our ruling classes work for the wealthy and the powerful; that journalists should be agitators but, restrained by neutrality, can become quietly complicit. One Day is an angry, graphic, elegant, shocking howl of a book that, in the deafening silence that follows, makes you wonder: what now?
By Pippa Bailey
Canongate, 208pp, £16.99. Buy the book
Mythica by Emily Hauser
Classics lovers are used to the stories of ancient women being reimagined with a more female-centric focus than Greek and Roman writers usually managed. Now Emily Hauser is going one step further. As a classical historian, she is interested not just in giving the (often silent) heroines of the Iliad and Odyssey back their voices – she wants to find out who they really were. And thanks to new scientific and archaeological breakthroughs, that challenge is not as impossible as it might seem.
Mythica, which begins with the Homeric-like invocation, “Muse: tell me about a woman,” is an effort to span the centuries since the Bronze Age and bring to life the real women hidden in the Greek text. DNA studies and AI reconstruction techniques unveil the face of a Mycenaean queen akin to the legendary Helen. Linear B tablets reveal the lived reality of captured slave girls like Briseis, over whom the drama of the Iliad kicks off. A female skeleton buried with her swords adds credence to the myth of the Amazonian warrior Penthesilea. Homer’s women may not have existed in the literal sense, but the societies recalled in the poems did, and Hauser offers a way to see them in a new light.
By Rachel Cunliffe
Doubleday, 496pp, £25. Buy the book
Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt
The British-Irish writer Seán Hewitt has won awards and acclaim for his first two collections of poetry. Now, he publishes a mature and complete debut novel. Open, Heaven is set “right up the spine of the country”, in the moss-dank mellifluity of a fictional northern English village called Thornsmere. To James, an adolescent homosexual, Thornsmere’s gentle, traditional way offers no outright cruelty but also no capable comfort, and the air is lonely in a way frustrating to all. The long inexperience means that when the chance of full connection does appear – with the arrival of a boy from a troubled home to a farm on James’s morning milk round – its outcome will be with James for life.
It is a sore and delicate love story, to which Hewitt shows fast commitment. He denies obvious climax; after James’s sexuality comes out at his school, for instance, he hides in the bathrooms to avoid not the familiar slur-slinging bullies but the heartbreaking, impersonal uncertainty of his classmates. Hewitt’s poetic facility makes easy music of his atmosphere. The central relationship occurs by light, sensitive touch, and reaches arresting emotional depths.
By George Monaghan
Jonathan Cape, 240pp, £16.99. Buy the book
[See also: Joan Didion without her style]
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This article appears in the 23 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Divide and Conquer