The Human Kind by Alexander Baron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I found this by accident, had never heard of the author, and then it turned into one of the most wonderful discoveries I have made in a bookshop for quite some time. The Human Kind is a a collection of short stories “based on the author’s actual experience of war” and it really is excellent. If you like Graham Greene or Ernest Hemingway, you’ll like this and if you’re into good writing, craft and clarity in your prose, then you’ll like this. It’s so, so good.
The stories (vignettes? recollections? Snapshots?) are a handful of pages long at the most and reflect moments from across the war. The war in question here is the Second World War but in a way, this could be about almost any war because this is about people. The Human Kind of the title. It’s such a deceptively complex book and one which makes you think about it in a thousand different ways. For me, I kept thinking back to ideas like “#bekind” (a … particular sentiment at best but now! is! not! the! place!) and then I started to think about humans and how we fit into the world and how we don’t fit and that is the gift of books like this because you start in one place and then you end up somewhere quite different and you never quite know how or why you got there but you know that it is good that you did.
One of the great strengths of Baron’s work here is his trust in himself. He gives you just enough and lets you fill in the gaps. The page is bare at points (I do not mean here that it is literally blank but rather that it is not stuffed full of superfluous detail) and the speech tags will fade away (quite right too) and everything just kind of starts to hinge on the moment. It’s not necessarily a good moment either. Sometimes it’s pretty horrific. But Baron gives you that moment and sort of makes his point very clearly in the giving.
I have added pretty much his entire back catalogue to my list of ‘things to read next’ and I am very glad of it. What a good, smart, clever thing this is.
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Daisy May Johnson 
Not an author I’d heard of before either! But I miss those kinds of covers – realistic or at least authentic-looking which seems out of favour with publishers now – I gravitated towards these in my late pre-teen and early teen years as titles that took me seriously as a young reader, as this one implies.
YES to these covers! I think we’ve moved a long way away from people like this and a little bit of me does sort of want them back 🙂