When we first meet him, Leon is 8 years old, going on 9. He is in the hospital with his mother Carol, holding his baby brother, Jake, for the first time. This first scene sets up the way things are going to be: Leon holding his new brother with care, Carol going off for a cigarette before feeding Jake, and eventually the nurse leaving Leon to look after his baby brother alone.

And so it goes. Carol is unstable, dependent on prescription drugs and barely able to look after herself, never mind her two sons. Leon steps in and takes care of Jake, feeding him and changing his nappies. Eventually Carol goes into a drug-induced coma, and the neighbour calls in an ambulance and social services.

The boys are taken in by Maureen, an older woman who has fostered more than 20 children over her career. She is obviously good with children and creates a sense of security for Leon. But the boys have different fathers and therefore different fates: Leon is mixed race with a Caribbean father, and Jake is white. Jake is adopted quite quickly but social services cannot find a family to take Leon. Maureen realizes the devastating effect that breaking up the brothers is going to have on Leon but is powerless to stop it.

When Maureen has a stroke and has to go to hospital, Leon has to move again, this time to Maureen’s sister, Sylvia. He has lost so much: his mother, whom he hardly sees now, his brother and then Maureen. He develops behavioural problems: he has no friends in school, he steals and acts out his anger. The one plus he has going for him is that although Sylvia is not the maternal figure that Maureen has been, she genuinely cares about him.

Leon’s world widens when one of the social workers gives him a bike. Riding around Sylvia’s neighbourhood, he discovers an allotment near Sylvia’s house. He becomes friendly with two men there: Tufty, a Caribbean man, who introduces him to racial politics and Mr. Devlin, an Irishman, who seems a little suspect. The two men cannot stand each other but have a lot to teach him (including how to grow beans).

As you can tell from the title, Leon is the centre of the book. It is told from his point of view and he feels so real: a child trying to be an adult, dealing with abandonment and grown-ups who are not always there for him. He feels it is up to him to bring his family back together because no one else seems to want to. It’s heart-wrenching: he is so convinced he can do it, but as the reader you are aware that the world doesn’t work that way.

I spent a lot of the book dreading what was going to happen to Leon, but Kit de Waal never lets things get too fraught. Characters are drawn with a lot of empathy—none of them are saints but nor are they horrible. They’re just people, trying to do the best they can.

De Wall has advised social services on adoption and mother was a foster mother, so she obviously knows her subject. Although social services don’t always come off well, this book is not an exposé of the things can go wrong. It is a warm, empathetic book, and it’s good to be reminded of the humanity of ordinary people, especially in the current climate.

When I was a child, I loved Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, tales of how animals became what they are: how the leopard got its spots, the camel its hump and the rhinoceros its skin. But it’s a book that doesn’t age well. Kipling, after all, was part of the British Empire and believed that colonization was a force for good that helped to improve the lot of the “natives”.

So if you’re looking for an alternative version, here it is. Although I’m not sure that you could read all of these to your children, it’s a book whose time has come. Nikesh Shukla begins his foreword with a quote from Junot Diaz: “There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.”

To me, this quote not only sums up the thinking behind Not So Stories, but the way it subverts conventional thinking. The collection that David Thomas Anderson has put together is diverse, both in terms of the background of the authors—which include Australian Aborigine, Malaysian, Philippines, Iranian and Indian (disclosure: Achala Upendran, one of the authors, is the daughter of a friend, Usha Raman, who writes for this blog)—but also in terms of genre: folk tales, fantasy, horror and realism.

There is a lot to enjoy here: Cassandra Khaw’s sly tale of how Spider persuaded Man to give her venom, which he did without thinking because she was such a small harmless thing (he was in for a surprise!); Joseph E. Coles’s angry account of panther who is kidnapped and made to fight in the Roman arenas; and Achala Upendran’s upending of the traditional account about First Woman and First Man: not woman as temptress but man as oppressor. There are those who lose their roots and find them again: Wayne Santos’s Yuan Ching, whose job is to keep the ghosts of the dead from entering the city but is distracted by her English boyfriend; and Georgina Kamsike’s Nina, who rediscovers her Indian identity after her grandmother dies. And the colonizer is definitely not a force for the good—quite the opposite.

That’s just a sample. I look forward to more retold tales, to diverse voices. We all need ourselves reflected.

“This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything. Never cheated on my taxes or at cards. … I’ve never burgled a house. Held up a liquor store. … But here I am, in the cavernous chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States, my car illegally and somewhat ironically parked on Constitution Avenue, my hands cuffed and crossed behind my back, my right to remain silent long since waived and said goodbye to as I sit in a thickly padded chair that, much like this country, isn’t quite as comfortable as it looks.”

The narrator is Me, son of F.U. Me, a psychologist who home-schooled him, reading him academic papers instead of bedtime stories. The Mes are descended from the Kentucky Mees, one of the first black families to settle in southwest Los Angeles (his father dropped the second “e” from the name). Me is in court is because he has tried to reintroduce segregation to Dickens, the majority black-Latino agrarian ghetto he calls home. Dickens is so run-down that, to save Los Angeles embarrassment, it has been wiped off the map. Segregation is Me’s way of trying to put Dickens back on the map.

It starts with a sign posted in the local bus driven by Marpessa, the unrequited love of Me’s life. The sign says PRIORITY SEATING FOR SENIORS, DISABLED AND WHITES and is a birthday present from Me to his good friend Hominy. Finding that people start behaving better on the bus, Me follows it up with a billboard opposite the local school announcing a new academy for whites only, which results in higher test scores in the school.

This is a delightfully subversive book that turns racism in the US on its head. I found myself squirming and laughing out loud at the same time. Paul Beatty has a wicked sense of humour, and everything—and everyone—is fair game. Me describes his trip to Washington: “Yesterday afternoon, like some sandal-shoed Ethiop from the sticks of the darkest of the Los Angeles jungle, I ventured from the hotel and joined the hajj of blue-jeaned yokels that paraded slowly and patriotically past the empire’s historic landmarks.” When the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals—a group of black intellectuals established by his father—suggest that Me take his father’s place as leader of the group, Me mocks it as “The Kim Jong-un of ghetto conceptualism”. And there is the delightful reworking of The Charge of the Light Brigade: “The Charge of the Light-Skinned Spade”.

But there is so much here that I feel I have only skimmed the surface. Like the best comedy, Beatty uses the humour to make some serious points, including about the mass appeal of racial stereotypes in entertainment. Hominy was once a child actor in Little Rascals, the popular TV series about a group of kids of different ethnicities. Hominy is proud of his work, in spite of the fact that the show used racial stereotypes for humour.

The Sellout, by subverting racism, raises questions about the civil rights movement, the US Constitution and racial equality. I can see why it won the Man Booker Prize—it is original and thought-provoking.

A woman in a hospital in New York turns from the window to find her estranged mother sitting by her bed. Over the next five days they talk, remembering people they both knew and reestablishing forgotten connections. Then as abruptly as she came, the mother leaves.

The book is narrated by the daughter, Lucy Barton, a writer trying to find her voice. This is a book that does not spill all its secrets: mother and daughter find it hard to express their love for each other but they do not need to—they know. Lucy has obviously had a difficult childhood: her family were very poor, and her father suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after coming back from the war. There is some trauma in Lucy’s own childhood but we never find out what it is, just that it exists.

Lucy has made her life in New York with a husband and two children. She doesn’t go back home and hardly speaks to her family. Until one day when she finds her mother sitting by her bed, bringing with her memories of the past.

Reading this is like listening to Lucy’s thoughts moving back and forth in time. Sarah Payne, a writer who taught her, tells her that we all have one story that we tell in different ways. And that is what this book is really about: our memories, both the ones we return to and those we keep firmly locked away, the stories we tell and how we tell them.

My Name is Lucy Barton is beautifully written, with a deep understanding of how people deal with emotional pain. Elizabeth Strout has a way of using language to capture moments, whether it is a feeling or a physical scene. Lucy remarks how once in a while, she hears a child cry, not from tiredness but “with the deepest of desperation”, as she did when she was a child. “I feel almost, then, that I can hear within me the sound of my own heart breaking, the way you can hear outside in the open air—when the conditions were exactly right—the corn growing in the fields of my youth.” I love the thought that a breaking heart or growing corn has a sound.

This book is a pleasure to read, both because of quality of the language and its insights into people. Strout doesn’t strike a false note. The story is moving without ever becoming sentimental; a clear-eyed look at how we deal—or don’t—with all the baggage we carry. The hurts of childhood run deep: “I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”

I’ll end with a description about night falling in the cornfields which, like the best photographs, encapsulates a mood: “the sun setting behind you, the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again as though it could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the cover crops already turned, the sky lingering, lingering and then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments.”