New Year book reviews: With

Medina Bookshop New Year book reviews

Hand-selected by the team at Medina Bookshop, these ‘must-read’ books will set the tone for 2021: showing us how we can transform failure into success, appreciate the beauty in adversity, and process the world through the magic of photography

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Fiction) A raw and moving story of the dark shadow war can leave on a family, years and even generations after the event. A boy nicknamed Little Dog, now in his late twenties, recounts his childhood in a cathartic letter to his illiterate mother, Rose. Little Dog tells a backstory of stark contrast. Pain mixed with the effort to forge a new future in North-East America, all while desperately trying to escape the impact of the Vietnam War on his family. You can’t help but compulsively savour Vuong’s words; this book is beautifully written. Failosophy: A Handbook for When Things Go Wrong by Elizabeth Day (Non-Fiction) ‘Learning how we fail actually means learning how to succeed better.’ This is the ultimate pocket-sized guide for hard times. Drawing upon her bestselling memoir and award-winning podcast, Elizabeth Day distils failure into seven key principles to refer to when life goes wrong. She believes that most failures are lessons that can teach us something about ourselves. Day understands her position of privilege and acknowledges that some ‘failures’ are tragedy and need to be processed in a person’s own way. She writes about the subject with eloquence and uses influential podcast guests’ own words to further illustrate her points. Everyone can take something away from this book, whatever their opinion of positive thinking. Light and Love: The Extraordinary Developments of Julia Margaret Cameron and Mary Hillier by Kirsty Stonell Walker (Isle of Wight) Fans of Victorian photography will be familiar with the name Julia Margaret Cameron. And whilst there are a number of biographies about her already on the market, this one is different in that it couples her trailblazing photography with her muse, Mary Hillier. Hillier began as Cameron’s parlour maid and went on to become one of her most significant models. Told over the course of 140 years, Kirsty Stonell Walker weaves an original, well-researched story of their unlikely partnership together and how it shaped both of their lives.