THIS IS EUROPE THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
BEN JUDAH
Picador, 512pp, £22
The author of the ‘prize-nominated epic feat of reportage’ that was This is London (2016), Judah has here ‘widened his angle of vision to take in Europe itself,’ wrote Rabbi Howard Cooper in the Jewish Chronicle. ‘His latest book is a hallucinatory tour de force written with a discerning and compassionate eye, and an ear attuned to the pain, the drama, the sheer relentless unpredictability of everyday life for vast swathes of the continent's 748 million people… These are stories freighted with hardship, dislocation and loss, and yet the author's capacity to listen with empathy, tact and fine-tuned attention renders them life-affirming.’
Yuan Yuang, in the , noted that Judah is ‘known for telling tales of the unexpected, and in particular stories outside of the middle-class milieu most familiar to elite journalism: a cross-continental truck driver, a Lidl supermarket shelf stacker, an olive-packer, a housewife who joins