Books of the month: From Brown Girls to The Colony

In his monthly column, Martin Chilton reviews six of the best books from February

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Joseph Stalin would have made a pungent book critic. The Soviet leader, who claimed “journalist” as one of his “special skills”, included his verdicts in the margins of many of the 25,000 books and manuscripts held in his private library. In Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and his Books (Yale University Press), author Geoffrey Roberts includes some of Stalin’s choicest insults about books and writers, including “gibberish”, “haha”, “nonsense”, “fool” and “scumbag”. Alas, we are not told which book prompted him to write the simple critique “piss off”.

When Stalin liked something, incidentally, he wrote “spot on” or “yes-yes” – terms that could apply to several novels coming out this month, including Joel Agee’s The Stone World (Melville), a gentle, graceful novel in which the son of acclaimed writer James Agee tells a fictionalised version of his childhood in Mexico. I also enjoyed Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds (Hamish Hamilton), a spooky love story set in modern Trinidad, and Samuel Fisher’s unsettling fable-like Wivenhoe (Corsair), set in an Essex village, in an alternate present where the world is blanketed by snow.

For a time in the 1960s, Merle Haggard was the biggest-selling country music star in the world. In The Hag: The Life, Times, and Music of Merle Haggard (Hachette Books), Marc Eliot looks at the controversial life of the man who wrote classics such as “Workin’ Man Blues” and “Okie From Muskogee”. Haggard was a bizarre man, evident in his creepy behaviour towards Dolly Parton and his aggression towards touring partner Bob Dylan. The book also contains a graphic account of Haggard’s three years as a prisoner at San Quentin jail, where he was sent in 1958, aged just 20. He witnessed horrendous racism, including a black inmate being boiled alive. Perhaps it’s no surprise that he went on to write gritty songs.