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“I have been a political reporter for almost three decades,” writes Peter Oborne in his new book, “and I have never encountered a senior British politician who lies and fabricates so regularly, so shamelessly and so systematically as Boris Johnson.” Oborne, a Fleet Street veteran, has long been interested in political mendacity, said Michael Burleigh in the Literary Review. His previous books include
The Rise of Political Lying, in which he catalogued the distortions of the Blair era.
The Assault on Truth sets out to examine “how, under Boris Johnson and his soulmate Donald Trump, lying has become endemic in political culture”.
Shalom Auslander’s last novel,
Hope: A Tragedy, featured a “foul-mouthed and geriatric Anne Frank” among its characters, said Sam Leith in The Guardian. In his latest work, he again risks offending readers with a satire about cannibals being a “persecuted minority”. Seventh Seltzer is a New York publisher who belongs to a dwindling band of “Cannibal-Americans”. Having “married out” of his tribe, he no longer participates in family rituals. Yet when his mother summons him to her deathbed, hoping he’ll give her the traditional send-off – for which she has been fattening herself up – his cannibalistic instincts reassert themselves.