’TIS THE SEASON for broadsheet newspapers to make their summer book recommendations. But don’t get too excited. If the Guardian’s seasonal suggestions are anything to go by, it’s a largely predictable, anodyne exercise, generally highlighting books that are already heavily promoted by the big bookshops and through large publicity campaigns.  

Last month, the liberal newspaper plugged 25 new novels in their “selection for the summer season.” By my calculations, 84 per cent are published by one of the Big Five publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan), and just 16 per cent by smaller publishers.

Their paperback summer reading recommendations included bestsellers such as Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, James by Percival Everett, and You Are Here by David Nicholls.  

The vast majority of the fiction suggestions are what is termed literary fiction, with genre fiction such as thrillers, sci-fi, fantasy and romance barely getting a look in.  

The dominance of the Big Five is not as strong in the Guardian’s non-fiction summer recommendations, with 64 per cent published by the five corporate giants, and 36 per cent published by other publishers.

But, with a couple of exceptions, it’s a depressing list for anyone who is interested in left-wing or radical ideas, with many of the books written by already established (and broadly Establishment-friendly) authors and public figures (Jacinda Ardern and Cher).  

I should say, I’ve read several of the Guardian’s fiction book recommendations and think they are very good, and Ash Sarkar and Rebecca Solnit are included in the non-fiction suggestions. But what this quick survey shows is the Guardian, by and large, promotes a relatively narrow selection of fiction and non-fiction.

Can it really be the case that out of the tens of thousands of English language books published each year, most of the best books, according to the Guardian, just happen to be the same books heavily promoted by the Big Five and corporate bookstores?  

While the summer reading recommendations from the Financial Times has an economic focus, it’s a similar story to the Guardian. As I’m sure it will be at the Times, New Statesman, Prospect magazine, etc.  

More broadly, regular readers of the Guardian and other broadsheet newspapers will be aware that similar biases are evident in terms of which books are reviewed and which books are positively reviewed.  

So what’s going on? In an attempt to get an insight into how books end up on the Guardian’s summer reading list and being reviewed in the Guardian, I emailed both the deputy literary editor and the non-fiction books editor, asking if I could send them some questions about this.  

I received a positive reply back from the deputy literary editor to my initial email. However, when I sent through my questions, all I got was tumbleweed for over two weeks, before the joint editor of Guardian Review and head of books replied with the following bland statement:

“As editors, we strive to offer readers a broad selection of books across genres and subjects, through a combination of wide reading, contact with both major and independent publishers and suggestions from critics and others. While we can only cover a small proportion of published titles, we aim for breadth and diversity.”  

As a sometime reviewer of non-fiction for smaller publications such as the Morning Star and Peace News, I’m aware there is a whole world of left-wing and radical books out there that are never, or rarely, reviewed by mainstream press. If you don’t believe me, just have a browse in one of Britain’s radical bookshops such as Housmans in London.

Books on grassroots activism, social movements — their history and how to build them, political philosophy such as anarchism, socialism, communism and anti-imperialism, and nonviolent struggle — all are rarely, if ever, covered by the Guardian and other broadsheets.  

Here, for example, are just a few of the hugely important, largely media-ignored, books I’ve reviewed in recent years: Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know by Professor Erica Chenoweth, the books of climate philosopher Emeritus Professor Rupert Read, including This Civilisation Is Finished, Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East by Christopher Davidson, the books published by media analysis website Media Lens, Media, Propaganda and the Politics of Intervention by Dr Florian Zollmann, Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief by Professor Greg Philo et al., and Capitalism’s Conscience: 200 Years of the Guardian edited by Professor Des Freedman.  

The last book would very obviously be of great interest to Guardian readers, but from what I can tell, it wasn’t reviewed by the paper.  

The mainstream media’s gatekeeping goes beyond individual authors and books. It’s clear that whole publishers, such as the radical Pluto Press and O/R Books, have been effectively shut out of the Big Five-dominated books pages of the broadsheet press.  

David Edwards, one half of Media Lens, tells me about the reception their books received from the mainstream press. “We initially got short, scathing reviews; now, we get no reviews at all,” he explains.

“The basic problem: airlines don’t place adverts next to reports of air crashes. From the perspective of the editors piloting the Guardian, Observer and Independent, books like our ‘Guardians of Power’ and ‘Propaganda Blitz’ are the equivalent of air crashes. As we all know, corporations don’t permit criticism of the company’s product in front of customers.”  

He continues: “Imagine the fate of a Guardian reviewer who applauded our exposure of the Guardian’s role in smearing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party leadership to political destruction and in propagandising for Perpetual War!

“As internet-based media have become a genuine challenge and threat to traditional media, the latter have become less and less tolerant. Where, before, they patronised, insulted and sneered, they now maintain strict silence.”  

Read tells me that while his 2019 primer on the climate and ecological crisis, This Civilisation Is Finished, is his most popular book, having sold tens of thousands of copies, it has never been reviewed in any major English-speaking outlet.

In contrast, it was very positively reviewed in the national German newspaper Die Zeit, leading to good sales of the German translation. “This would be the equivalent of my book being reviewed positively in the main pages of the Times in this country, something basically impossible to conceive of ever happening,” he notes.  

As these testimonies suggest, there seem to be two main ways the mainstream press responds to some of the more radical authors and books. Often, they simply ignore the book, something writers such as Media Lens, Read, British historian Mark Curtis, and US dissident Noam Chomsky have lots of experience with.

Or, if more radical books are covered, often they are reviewed by a broadly hostile reviewer. Both Media Lens and investigative journalists received testy reviews in the Guardian from Steven Poole, as has Chomsky from Rafael Behr, Peter Beaumont and John Gray.  

Frustratingly, this impoverishment of our reading and political culture is rarely discussed in the mainstream media and wider literary community.  

The Guardian’s literary staff are unlikely to publicly speak critically about the corporate influence on their own books coverage. Ditto the non-literary journalists at the Guardian, as Owen Jones has previously highlighted, there is a rule at the Guardian that journalists are not allowed to criticise other Guardian journalists.

Which also seems to apply to criticism of the paper itself. Successful authors are unlikely to want to publicly criticise the system that they have done so well out of. And unpublished authors, or authors who haven’t had a big-selling book, are also unlikely to want to put their head above the parapet, understandably concerned they may endanger any chance they have of getting reviewed in the future.  

With Britain (and the wider world) facing a number of interlinked, extremely serious crises, including a poverty crisis, a housing crisis, several deadly conflicts around the world and, most importantly of all, an existential climate crisis, this is a Really Big Problem. Because all of these crises require radical action if they are to be successfully addressed.

In short, at the very time we are in desperate need of radical thinking and root and branch change, we have a press that that promotes an ideologically narrow range of books and authors, while marginalising many of the books, authors and arguments that arguably give the public the most accurate understanding of the world and the best suggestions for changing it for the better.  

Follow Ian Sinclair on X @IanJSinclair.