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PUBLICATION DAY!
We Need New Stories is out in paperback today and has had a reception I never dreamed of with extremely generous reviews in, among others, the FT, the Irish Times, The Observer, TWO in the Paris Review(!), and a listing as one of Prospect's Books of the Year https://twitter.com/NesrineMalik/status/1288453502642139137
We Need New Stories is out in paperback today and has had a reception I never dreamed of with extremely generous reviews in, among others, the FT, the Irish Times, The Observer, TWO in the Paris Review(!), and a listing as one of Prospect's Books of the Year https://twitter.com/NesrineMalik/status/1288453502642139137
When I started writing it I had a hunch that we were headed for some breaking point. I followed that instinct, and less than a year after my first draft, a pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement revealed all the myths that had been rotting our society from within.
Those myths are all variations on one lie – that our deeply unequal society is not in need of reform. Our 'narrators' who spread that lie in politics and the media claim that they unbiased, reliable and know what they are doing. They aren't and they don't.
I pick apart these lies; how freedom of speech is used against the vulnerable, how fears of 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture' are the result of an organised campaign, and how the fear of 'identity politics' obscures the biggest threat of all – white terrorism.
I wanted to expose these lies, but also prove that an establishment that thrives on inequality has to depend on lies because it is dying. Brexit and our frenzied glamorising of a fictional virtual colonial past are the last gasps of a vision of Britain that no longer works.
COVID-19 couldn't be fought with Churchillian speeches. The artificial accounts of our history were rejected as those excluded from power imposed their own narrative and felled slave owner statues. The world has been forced to wake up to a new movement for social justice.
The book shows how this movement's time has come, but also how to fight the resistance that will surely come its way. As I write in the last sentence of the book, for much of the racist, sexist, stuck-in-the-past establishment, it's already too late - they will be hearing from us
