Book reviews: 2020 - A Novel, by Kenneth Steven and The End We Start From, by Megan Hunter

In his “Motto to the Svendborg Poems,” composed in exile in Denmark in the 1930s, Bertolt Brecht wrote: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.” Clearly darkness is relative, and the challenges of the early 21st century pale into insignificance when compared with the chaos that had begun to engulf Europe when Brecht fled Nazi Germany. Still, there is something about the current decade, a sense of the deckchairs beginning to slide, that has caused various media commentators to liken it to the 1930s; and just as Brecht foretold, this sense of impending disaster also seems to be seeping its way into our literature.