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The finest work of narrative non-fiction to be published this year. In the process it tells you more about Japan than any conventional history. This mesmerising account of the 120-foot-high wave and its aftermath, by the Asia editor and Tokyo bureau chief of the Times, explores the uncharacteristicly fierce reaction of the dead children’s parents to official evasion. But a single school accounted for 74 of those deaths. Jonathan Cape £16.99 Of the 18,500 people who perished in the Japanese tsunami in 2011, 75 were children who died at school.
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Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone. In creating a new political taxonomy, the British journalist and founder of Prospect magazine provides a useful way to think about new cleavages in Britain and elsewhere in the West. By contrast, “Anywheres” are cosmopolitan, socially liberal, internationalist and comfortable with change. Hurst 278 pages $24.95 and £20 “Somewheres”, David Goodhart writes, are rooted, socially conservative and suspicious of the constant churn. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. Two experts at Oxford University present the first comprehensive attempt in years to rethink from first principles a system that has long been hidebound by hand-wringing and old ideas. Growing up in a refugee camp often means little education and no work. Allen Lane £20 Lost in the row over Europe’s migration crisis in 2015 were the millions of refugees who stayed in the developing world, unwilling or unable to journey to richer countries. Oxford University Press 288 pages $18.95. Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System. In this grim diagnosis Edward Luce, a Washington-based commentator, argues that the liberal order cannot be fixed without a clear view of what has gone wrong. Turmoil in Washington and London contrasts with centrist stability in Paris and (mostly) in Berlin. Little Brown £16.99 Few doubt that something big has happened in Western politics over the past two years, but nobody is sure what.