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Brexit’s second anniversary - a reading list

On 31 January 2020, the United Kingdom officially left the European Union. New regulations, agreed upon by both parties took effect on 1 January 2021. What impact did Brexit have politically? Do British and European citizens now have different opinions of one another? And why did the Brits want to leave the EU in the first place? The books in this reading list may provide some answers to these difficult questions.

Six years ago, the British government of the Conservative but pro-European Union prime minister David Cameron held the now (in)famous referendum on continued EU membership. By a rather narrow margin of 51.9 per cent of the vote share, UK voters chose to leave the EU. Cameron, apparently much surprised by the outcome, resigned. Within the UK, the decision to leave the EU was highly controversial and deeply divided both the political and public spheres. Within the EU, Brexit boosted Eurosceptic parties and governments, increasing tensions within and between member states. Only after extensive negotiations between the two polities, an agreement was reached.

Leiden University Libraries (UBL) holds a large collection of academic and literary works on (the history of) British and European politics. All books in the list below are available for loan by following the link under the title or by searching our Catalogue.

Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Continental Drift: Britain and Europe from the End of Empire to the Rise of Euroscepticism

2017

Before diving into reading about the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, you might first want to catch  up to speed with the long saga of UK relations with European and European integration. And quite a saga it has been! Starting his book in the 1930s, Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon leaves few stones unturned in his detailed history of the UK’s awkward relationship with European integration. In an intriguing way, the author first reconstructs how the decline of the British Empire led to Britain’s turn to Europe, after which imperial nostalgia fueled Britain’s turn away from the whole European project. Clocking in at 470 pages, Grob-Fitzgibbon takes you from Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee up to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. A book that is sure to quench your historical thirst while taking you up to the doorstep of the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Lee McGowan, Preparing for Brexit: Actors, Negotiations and Consequences

2017

This book is a good starting point for those who want to understand why a majority of UK voters chose to leave the EU. The puzzle that the authors set out to solve is in equal parts arrestingly simple and enticing: in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, the vast majority of commentators and experts predicted that citizens would choose ‘remain’. They evidently did not, so what did the referendum-watchers get wrong? To answer this question, the authors systematically dissect the ‘leave’ vote, drawing on longitudinal public opinion data on measures of support for the EU, attitudes towards the UK political system, the attitudes of UKIP members and much more. The result is a holistic picture that offers no single explanation for Brexit. Instead, the authors show how various issues influence each other. Most importantly, the attitudes and motivations that they argue partly explain why people chose ‘leave’ were already apparent more than a decade before the referendum ever took place.

Marius Guderjan, Hugh Mackay and Gesa Stedman (eds), Contested Britain: Brexit, Austerity and Agency

2020

A sovereign member state leaving the EU. That was surely an unprecedented event. It turns out, a precedent did exist. Did you know that there were other states that withdrew from the EU’s precursor, the European Community? In 1962 and 1985, first Algeria and then Greenland exited the European Community. In this recently translated version of his 2017 book “Projekt Europa”, Kiran Klaus Patel uses these cases to challenge some widely accepted narratives in European Union studies. ‘The EU’s crisis today appears uniquely deep’, he writes, ‘but is the situation really so unusual?’ Reading Patel’s analysis of the Greenland case, one cannot help but see a striking parallel with Brexit: questions about fisheries were a bone of contention in Greenland’s leave campaigns; other heads of governments looked worryingly at Greenland’s desire to leave the EC, fearing centrifugal tendencies; and given the Cold War context, some governments feared a weakening of the West if the EC were to start losing members. Even if Patel’s analysis does not discuss Brexit itself, the bigger picture that he provides should be of interest to all those who seek a more critical look at commonly accepted European integration narratives.

Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Whiteley, Brexit: Why Britain voted to leave the European Union

2017

This book is a good starting point for those who want to understand why a majority of UK voters chose to leave the EU. The puzzle that the authors set out to solve is in equal parts arrestingly simple and enticing: in the run-up to the Brexit referendum the vast majority of commentators and experts predicted that citizens would choose ‘remain’. They evidently did not, so what did the referendum-watchers get wrong? To answer this question, the authors systematically dissect the ‘leave’ vote, drawing on longitudinal public opinion data on measures of support for the EU, attitudes towards the UK political system, the attitudes of UKIP members and much more. The result is a holistic picture that offers no single explanation for Brexit. Instead, the authors show how various issues influence each other. Most importantly, the attitudes and motivations that they argue partly explain why people chose ‘leave’ were already apparent more than a decade before the referendum ever took place.

Kiran Klaus Patel, Project Europe: A History

2020

A sovereign member state leaving the EU. That was surely an unprecedented event. It turns out, a precedent did exist. Did you know that there were other states that withdrew from the EU’s precursor, the European Community? In 1962 and 1985, first Algeria and then Greenland exited the European Community. In this recently translated version of his 2017 book “Projekt Europa”, Kiran Klaus Patel uses these cases to challenge some widely accepted narratives in European Union studies. ‘The EU’s crisis today appears uniquely deep’, he writes, ‘but is the situation really so unusual?’ Reading Patel’s analysis of the Greenland case, one cannot help but see a striking parallel with Brexit: questions about fisheries were a bone of contention in Greenland’s leave campaigns; other heads of governments looked worryingly at Greenland’s desire to leave the EC, fearing centrifugal tendencies; and given the Cold War context, some governments feared a weakening of the West if the EC were to start losing members. Even if Patel’s analysis does not discuss Brexit itself, the bigger picture that he provides should be of interest to all those who seek a more critical look at commonly accepted European integration narratives.

Ali Smith, Autumn

2016

By common consent, Ali Smith’s Autumn (1916) is the first serious post-Brexit novel. Autumn is the first instalment of Smith’s Seasonal quartet, four novels written on tight publication schedules so that they are as close to contemporaneous as possible. In the autumn of 2016, centenarian Daniel lies in his care home, and is visited by 32-year-old Elisabeth, a lifelong friend who lived next door to him when she was a child. Opening with the Brexit vote of June 2016, Autumn moves backwards and forwards in time, combining Daniel’s dreams, Elisabeth’s memories, and political events, past and present. The opening pages also introduce what would be a hallmark of the whole series, namely, a conscious appropriation of British culture through its many references to, among others, Shakespeare, female artists, pop, and in this case Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. Smith here uses her Victorian predecessor to present the division of British society that gave birth to Brexit: “All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won.”

Anthony Cartwright, The Cut

2017

The Cut by Anthony Cartwright is a novel commissioned by Peirene Press. Published on the first anniversary of the EU referendum in June 2017, it explores the forces that split Britain apart. It dramatizes the referendum’s opposing ideological standpoints via a man and a woman from very different class backgrounds, who both try but eventually fail to understand the other. He, Cairo Jukes, is an ex-boxer trying to survive on a zero-hour contract labour digging up copper pipes from the Black Country’s lost industrial order. She, Grace Trevithick, is a documentary maker from Hampstead, wanting to interview Cairo and his friends. Both slowly become attracted to each other, causing them both to re-evaluate their stances on Brexit along the way. It is a slender novel, that manages to avoid stereotypical representations.

Jonathan Coe, Middle England

2018

It’s fitting that some of the responses to Brexit in fiction have been comic, given the great British tradition of the satirical novel that already started in the 18th century. One of the practitioners of the genre is Jonathan Coe, who in the  symbolically titled novel Middle England (2018) exposes his characters to the State of England just before, during and after the Brexit vote. Set in the Midlands and London between 2010 and 2018, the novel depicts a great variety of characters at a time of immense change and disruption in Britain. As such it includes a wonderful description of the 2012 London Olympics, maybe the last time all of England still felt united, before rage, heated political discussions, and bewilderment took over. With compassion and humour, Coe depicts how Brexit tears apart marriages, relationships, and families, such as the couple Sophie and Ian who disagree about the future of Britain and as such the future of their relationship; we meet the politician Ronald Culpepper who seems modelled after Jacob Rees Mogg; Doug Anderton, a progressive political commentator, who starts an affair with a Remain-supporting Tory MP who is relentlessly targeted by trolls on Twitter, while Doug’s daughter joins the group called “Students for Corbyn”. And in depicting the entanglement of all these characters, Coe writes the story of England, lost somewhere between a nostalgia for a past that never was and a dream of a future that will never happen.

Ian McEwan, The Cockroach

2019

Given the impact of Brexit, it is perhaps not surprising that one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, Ian McEwan, was tempted to write his own Brexit novel, the not entirely successful The Cockroach (2019). McEwan’s novel adapts Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis in describing how Jim Sams wakes from uneasy dreams one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic cockroach, who just happens to have inhabited the body of the UK Prime Minister. In his previous life Jim was rather ignored or loathed, but now he has become the most powerful man in Britain, and as such he will stop at nothing to carry out the will of the people. McEwan also introduces the notion of Reversalism thought up by the government to overcome the possible consequences of economic decline: instead of employers paying the workers, they now have to pay their employers, but they in turn will be paid for shopping; exporters now will pay Britain to take their goods; and Britain will pay other countries to imports its products. Unfortunately, the only country willing to agree to this scheme is St Kitts and Nevis.

Kristian Shaw, Brexlit

2021

Finally, the first academic in-depth study to centralize ‘Brexlit’ or the representation of Brexit in fiction is Kristian Shaw’s Brexlit: British Literature and the European Project (Bloomsbury 2021). In his monograph, Shaw explores how the forces that erupted at the Brexit vote, such as Euroscepticism, fear of mass immigration, and post-truth narrative and ‘fake news’, were already some time permeating British society. This book offers readings of dozens of authors such as the ones mentioned above, but Shaw casts his net wide to include popular fiction as well, and as such this monograph is a good starting-point for any serious study of post-Brexit British fiction.

Contact us

Is a book missing on this list, or would you like to ask the UBL to purchase a book about Brexit? Contact your subject librarian via Ask a Librarian

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