The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Our Disappearing Fisheries by Mark Kurlansky
Cape £16.99 pp304
“If you give a man a fish, you feed him. If you teach a man to fish, he will starve.” So goes the bleak joke in Gloucester, Massachusetts, whose centuries-old fishing tradition is now as endangered as the North Atlantic fish stocks on which the town once thrived. Kurlansky traces the history of trawling on the British North Sea and the Grand Banks of Newfoundland through an exhilarating portrait of life in Gloucester, from its perilous annual pole-walking competition to its Sicilian-influenced cuisine. Geographically isolated, and close-knit, Gloucester now finds itself being transformed into an extended suburb of Boston. Across the Atlantic, Kurlansky sees its fate mirrored in Newlyn, Cornwall, where the local fish market reveals a sight that eerily encapsulates the fate of both these communities - eight buyers “furiously bidding on a box containing one lone but handsome 4lb haddock...the only one brought in that morning”.

The Last Jews of Kerala by Edna Fernandes
Portobello £16.99 pp272
The Jews of Cochin, in southwestern India's Kerala, are a dying breed. In the early 1940s, they numbered 2,000. In the following decades, with the exodus of many Keralite Jews to Israel, they dwindled to fewer than 50. In her touching, investigative account of this fast-shrinking pocket of India's Jewish diaspora, the British Indian journalist Fernandes uncovers the surprising source of the extinction faced by this population “cursed by no marriages, only funerals”. There now remain only 12 “White” Jews in Kerala, descendants of wealthy European Jews who fled the inquisition in the 16th century. By then, Cochin had also long been home to Kerala's “Black” Jews, merchant traders who settled on the Malabar coast after the sack of Jerusalem in 70AD. Now, the fate of both communities is sealed by the White Jews' refusal to intermarry with the neighbouring Black Jews. Fernandes movingly captures the sombre, embattled mood of this population in “countdown mode”, all too painfully aware that they “have already become a souvenir people”.

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