Book reviews: Celebrations of human spirit and optimism that drives our evolution

In his selection from 2023 Jack Power looks at three books that celebrate human resilience, love, and the lessons we might learn from this world’s cycles of inhumanity and the atrocities they always bring

London 1980 from 'I Could Read the Sky' by Timothy O’Grady with pictures by Steve Pyke.

This is an arbitrary selection, one obviously enough confined to the books that have come my way this year. 

Unlike, thankfully, one of those Booker judges whose reading obligations are delivered by the container-load, I enjoy the indulgence of an empathetic editor who provides accordingly.