Jeremy Farrar

Director of the Wellcome Trust (@WellcomeTrust).

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Book Recommendations:

JF

Recommended by Jeremy Farrar

@normanlorrain @TimHarford @d_spiegel @anjahuja @adam_tooze @AdamJKucharski @amandaripley I think this is a great book by @AdamJKucharski https://t.co/V93HhoQeSE (from X)

For the past 500 years, gamblers-led by mathematicians and scientists-have been trying to figure out how to pull the rug out from under Lady Luck. In The Perfect Bet, mathematician and award-winning writer Adam Kucharski tells the astonishing story of how the experts have succeeded, revolutionizing mathematics and science in the process. The house can seem unbeatable. Kucharski shows us just why it isn't. Even better, he demonstrates how the search for the perfect bet has been crucial for the scientific pursuit of a better world.

JF

Recommended by Jeremy Farrar

Wonderful book (Our Riches or A Bookshop in Algiers) by Kaouther Adimi now in translation. Inspiring story & importance of bookshops.I remember on back street HCMC Viet Nam a similar tiny bookshop sustained through a turbulent history inspired by its owner https://t.co/LZZEl2vDPc (from X)

Our Riches book cover

Kaouther Adimi, Chris Andrews(you?)

The powerful English debut of a rising young French star, Our Riches is a marvelous, surprising, hybrid novel about a beloved Algerian bookshop A Library Journal Best Book of the Year Finalist for the PEN Translation Prize Winner of the French American Foundation Prize Our Riches celebrates quixotic devotion and the love of books in the person of Edmond Charlot, who at the age of twenty founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library. He more than fulfilled its motto “by the young, for the young,” discovering the twenty-four-year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties (he was hopelessly generous) and the vicissitudes of wars and revolutions, Charlot (often compared to the legendary bookseller Sylvia Beach) carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. Our Riches interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another twenty-year-old, Ryad (dispatched in 2017 to empty the old shop and repaint it). Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting brilliantly from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her swift and poignant novel. But most of all, it’s a hymn to the book and to the love of books.