And two more great holiday reads, both humorous mystery thrillers. Sweet Thames set in the sewers and slums of 1849 London; and The Proof of My Innocence, set of all places in the right-wing back rooms of Liz Truss’s premiership. Yep, still hard to believe that happened.

A couple of page-turning satires to kick the holidays off. The Trees, a ghoulish and gory revenge blood-fest, with Mississippi racists getting what’s coming to them. The Unfolding, a Bonfire of the Vanities for the MAGA era, as the white elitist American Dream falls apart, but plots its re-boot.

What an indictment of decades of US federal, state and municipal action that deliberately segregated housing, denying generations of African Americans the opportunity of social mobility, and creating the economic inequality and injustice of today. The case for reparations, right here.

Written in 2017 after Tr*mp’s first presidential win, this short manifesto is more pertinent and compelling now, than ever, as tyranny cranks through the motions.

Another wonderful move on the Vietnamese experience of war, a multi-generational epic from the pain and hunger of earlier Communist land reform and strife, through the loss and division caused by the American war.

An extraordinary novel on the experience of The American War, as the Vietnamese call it. Brutality, horror, chaos, loss, trauma, the nostalgia of lost love. Bao Ninh was the only survivor from his unit of 500 men. His book was banned for undermining the glory of war.

Absolutely. The idea of the special dialect for use in front of white people, to illustrate how marginalised people have to navigate codes to fit in, is genius. Enjoy your break - beach is looking good!

50 years since unification and Vietnam is still defined largely by the war with the US. Good to have got a broader picture of the place - a history of multiple peoples, and Viet as well as French, communist and American imperial ambitions.

Beggars belief. I think reasons to find another home for my vote have reached tipping point.

Finished Orbital in a metal tube at 38,000 feet, somewhere over Siberia, which I guess is apt; sunlight out of the right windows, darkness the left.

Breath-taking, I thought. A gentle but compelling meditation on existence, insignificance and meaning.

Hard on its heels, Richard Wright’s moving memoir of growing up black, poor and hungry in 1920s Tennessee, and escaping the oppression of the South first in books, then on a train to Chicago. As the saying goes, survival is resistance.