Anne EnrightĪfter Kathy Acker Bluets Midwinter Break Smith’s idiosyncratic gaze and keen, supple prose transform and elevate everything she touches. Tracing the evolution of a childhood friendship into adulthood, she bracingly portrays the compromises and bargains we all eventually make. Female friendship has become a literary focus in recent years, and Zadie Smith’s take on the subject in Swing Time (Hamish Hamilton) is my favourite. The novel made me feel intimate with Lincoln, and that particular moment of history, in a way I never had before. Abraham Lincoln’s visit to his young son’s grave becomes the locus of a whirl of dialogue from around the cemetery: a puzzling, hilarious vortex of invention that only Saunders could pull off. In Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders has somehow managed to write a historical novel that hews deeply and movingly to archival fact while also being an all-out crazy spectacle of his own invention. Bystanders (Santa Fe Writers Project) is a spooky, quirky collection reminiscent of Roald Dahl: a mash-up of Hitchcockian suspense and campfire-tale chills. Short story and thriller tend to be incompatible genres, but not in the hands of Tara Laskowski. To Die in Spring Anything is Possible Reservoir 13 And Branko Milanović’s much underestimated Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard), now being published in many languages, tells us more than any other recent book about the state of the world we live in and, at a time when hope is so urgently needed, offers us thought-provoking insights into the world we could become. In autobiography, Nelson Mandela’s Dare Not Linger (with Mandla Langa, Macmillan) cannot rival Long Walk to Freedom – he died with it unfinished – but it reveals the struggles, setbacks and frustrations that to this very day thwart the progress of Africa. In fiction, I was impressed but challenged by the originality and scope of George Saunders’s Booker-winning story of grief and empathy, Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury) and enjoyed Ali Smith’s Autumn (Hamish Hamilton) (and now look forward to her Winter), but I would opt for John le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Viking), not least for Smiley’s dramatic and surprising closing revelation of his reason for a life-time of spying – and lying. Spending much of the year writing a book of my own has left me with a deeper and more personal understanding – and sympathy for – the challenges confronting authors.
Lincoln in the Bardo Autumn A Legacy of Spies Dare Not Linger She is the British MFK Fisher – there can be no higher praise in literary/culinary circles. This book will establish Gray as a wonderfully eccentric and visionary one-off. Her rackety, reclusive life is brilliantly realised in Fasting and Feasting by Adam Federman (Chelsea Green). Patience Gray (1917-2005) is the great original British cook and food writer. It’s hard to imagine anything that will do Bowie better justice. David Bowie: A Life (Preface) suits the shape-shifting, beguiling, enigmatic complexities of its subject perfectly. Dylan Jones made absolutely the right decision to frame his superb life of David Bowie as a multi-voiced oral biography. Here they are – not random narcoleptic scribblings but direct pellucid access to the great man’s unconscious. Over a period of a few weeks in 1964 Nabokov wrote down his dreams, nightly. Insomniac Diaries David Bowie: A Life Fasting and FeastingĪs a Vladimir Nabokov completist, I could not resist Insomniac Diaries: Experiments with Time (ed. This truly is one of the best books I’ve read in years: funny, outrageous, touching, intimate, glorious. Iranian-born, German-bred, Muslim novelist/intellectual Kermani travels the globe looking at significant (and not so significant) Christian artworks. Navid Kermani’s Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity (Polity). Top highlights: when Goldie’s boa constrictor decides to try to eat him after he staggers home from the pub smelling like a kebab and when his favourite piece of custom-made jewellery is stolen – right from under his nose – by dodgy Russian airport officials. A fabulous, whirling kaleidoscope of music, memory and trauma. He’s an amazing storyteller, a gorgeous writer, a great, generous, compassionate thinker, and – quite rightly – one of the world’s most influential mental healthcare practitioners. When Yalom publishes something – anything – I buy it, and he never disappoints.
Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir (Piatkus) by Irvin D Yalom.
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