Welcome to our weekly Books Digest where we round up the new books you should and shouldn’t, be reading. This week features Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord, The Missing Cryptoqueen by Jamie Bartlett and The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer.
For more books, take a look through our Books Digest Archive.
The Missing Cryptoqueen by Jamie Bartlett (Ebury Publishing, ÂŁ11.99)
Bill Bowkett
The story of cryptocurrency OneCoin and its founder, Dr Ruja Ignatova, was first told in The Missing Cryptoqueen, one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts. Economists have called OneCoin the scam of the century — a “religious” cult that promised itself to be the “most exciting cryptocurrency in the world” but destroyed lives and enriched criminals. Now one of the podcast’s hosts, journalist Jamie Bartlett, has put pen to paper in a luminous book of the same title that “delves deeper into the story”.
The Missing Cryptoqueen does exactly that. Inside, you find out more information about OneCoin’s recruitment process, the people behind the Pozi scheme, and the human cost it brought to people in countries like Uganda. The book is ideal for readers — myself included — who are not hooked on “blockchains” and “tokens”; Bartlett skilfully navigates these concepts while presenting OneCoin’s turbulent history like a thriller.
The book ends on a cliff-hanger, with Bartlett questioning where Oxford-educated Ignatova has disappeared, along with the money. She may be residing in the Mediterranean, Bartlett claims, but appears to be “as untraceable and omnipresent as cryptocurrency itself”. OneCoin is also still in operation; “The story will doubtless change again,” Bartlett writes, “and when it does, we’ll be back there with it.”
I cannot recommend Bartlett’s book enough for anyone wanting a lesson in the dangers of this new financial frontier.
Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord (Orion Publishing, ÂŁ12.69)
Alice Crossley
I can think of very few things I would want to share less with the entire world than the gory details of heartbreak, but Annie Lord wears her heart on her sleeve and isn’t afraid to let the world see that. Best known for her Vogue dating column, Lord’s debut book, Notes on Heartbreak, is something of a prelude to the column; a love story told in reverse from the moment her boyfriend broke her heart all the way back to the start of their love story five years earlier.
Anyone who has read Lord’s column or previous work will know she is an evocative and honest writer, and after reading this book, your heart will break for her a hundred times over. Her flashbacks and breakdowns in the aftermath of her breakup are accompanied by ruminations on heartbreak and grief by other writers too, and it soon becomes clear that Lord is making sense of her splintered world through the written word. By adding her writing to the cannon of heartbreak literature, the writer is paying forward the wisdom that helped part the clouds of her seemingly never-ending misery. Notes on Heartbreak will undoubtedly be gifted to many broken hearts this summer.
The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer (Canongate Books, ÂŁ14.19)
Alastair Benn
Halfway through Geoff Dyer’s memoir-cum-essay collection, The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings, I had a sudden revelation. Dyer’s extended meditation on the ageing process (Dyer so often reminds us he has reached his sixties you gain the impression that he expects a level of frank astonishment on the part of the reader: Dyer? That youthful idealist? In his sixties? No, not him) made me realise something: I do not want to end up like Geoff Dyer in this book in my sixties.
I love Bob Dylan and Dyer loves Bob Dylan. I return to him often, as Geoff Dyer returns to him often in this book. But Dyer’s reflections on Dylan never move beyond fairly superficial territory — much of it rooted in discussion about how different periods of Dylan’s career move in and out of focus as the years pass. So much of his discussion is about how a song that once made him feel a certain way now makes him feel quite different. With respect, big deal!
As a teenager, I thought being into Dylan was a kind of badge of honour, that it made me interesting. But it didn’t and it doesn’t. If you are capable, as a writer or a critic or as a lay person, of the kind of discipline that allows you to approach Dylan as the artist he is and was, then that, to me, is interesting. The criticism inherent in the suggestion that Dylan is not quite living up to the picture of an artist you have of him is the perspective of a teenager who has not quite got over the buzz of being part of the Dylan club and is disappointed by Dylan’s insistence on being the human being that he actually is.
This is a memoir that should have been written by a young person — Dyer’s rather gauche mix of literary reference, name-dropping and intellectual wafting is the kind of thing the young just about get away with. Writers in their sixties don’t quite get the same leeway.
