January 16, 2026

This month’s best paperbacks: Anne Tyler, Jason Allen-Paisant and more

Go these days to any independent bookshop or art gallery or zine fair, and you may find yourself asking: where are the humans? Title after title is devoted to clay and stone, trees and flowers, the riverine and the botanical, gardens and allotments. They share a vocabulary: care, tending, grounding, rootedness, nourishment, regeneration. Nature, however battered, is held up as an antidote to morbid modernity, its alienations, its amnesia. The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. During Jason Allen-Paisant’s early childhood there, it had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by “grung” – the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence. He talks to locals, goes on mini-treks with herbalist Rastas, pores over old maps in local archives. No clear story emerges. In its absence are riffs – on the difference between a vision and a dream, the ubiquity of tombs, the frequency with which hillside people speak about the dead, what he claims is the absence of the term “forest” in the local vernacular. Walking especially fascinates him as it allows him to smell and to hear the countryside with an almost tactile acuteness. He even remembers how his grandmother, like many who lived in the Grove, “would walk with one arm gripping the other behind her back”.