I have read and loved
August ’24 This month I recommend a beautifully illustrated graphic novel, Alison by Lizzy Stewart (2022). It tells the story of one woman artist’s life - her first marriage when very young, her relationship with a much older artist in 1970s London, her close friendships and eventual career success - in prose as subtle and effecting as the drawings and paintings it interweaves.
I have also been drawn in by the original and unexpected narrative in the recently published The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden. Set in The Netherlands in the 1960s, this is a highly charged love story between two women, with dark secrets at its core as it examines the raw legacy of WWII.
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July ’24 Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt (2021) offers a devastating and wholly unsentimental depiction of a mother’s love for her addict daughter. Set against searing scenes where she hopes - and knows she mustn’t hope - for change, are equally beautiful and tender scenes of her care for her granddaughter. There are shocking narrative twists, and the writing style is sharp and original.
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June ‘24 Another June, another time to recommend some poetry for the summer ahead. Louise Glück is a Nobel Prize winner who died last year: it is hard to select from her various collections so I suggest buying Poems 1962-2020. Reminiscent of Emily Dickinson and T S Eliot, her voice is stark and beautiful as she addresses resonant themes of love and loss.
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May ’24 Just out this month, All Fours by Miranda July is a thrilling, tender and intimate novel about a 45 year old artist at a seminal point in her personal and working life. I loved it! Serious and honest, it is incredibly funny with genuine plot surprises throughout. July is also an actor and director, and I would recommend one of her early films Me and you and everyone we know as an interesting counterpoint to her fiction.
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April ’24 I have been wonderfully immersed in Rural Hours by Harriet Baker (2024) this month, a detailed analysis of a particular period in the lives of three writers (Rosamond Lehmann, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Virginia Woolf) when they moved to the countryside at different times between the 1910s-1940s. The pleasure lies in seeing the minutiae of their daily routines - the gardening, cooking, decorating - alongside the intensity of their romantic experiences, and how this infused their writing. It has sent me back to their novels and short stories with fresh eyes.
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March ’24 While visiting the Minack Theatre in Cornwall this month, I was reminded of how much I enjoyed reading Joanna Quinn’s The Whalebone Theatre (2022), an open-hearted family generational drama set in the West Country from 1919 through WW1 and WWII, and reminiscent of The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Both the theatre (carved from the cliffs at Porthcurno by Rowena Cade in 1931-2) and the novel it inspired are highly recommended.
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February ’24 Even if you are not interested in psychoanalysis, the first sections of Memories, Dreams, Reflections: An Autobiography by Carl Jung (Germany, 1961; UK translation 1963) offer a fascinating and original alternative memoir where chronological and objective facts are eschewed for memories and dreams, in a vital and lucid voice.
Miriam Toews is a phenomenal writer: Fight Night (2022) and All My Puny Sorrows (2014) are warm and intimate narrative-driven novels where profound tragedy is somehow wrapped up in life-affirming humour.
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January ‘24 What better way to start the year than to plunge into The Letters of Seamus Heaney (edited by Christopher Reid) (2023): such a joy to hear the voice of this wise, funny and kind man and poet over his lifetime. I felt bereft when I finished.
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December ’23 Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022) has been feted far and wide, which might put off some readers. But I read this reworking of David Copperfield over the holidays and it is an incredible example of authorial ventriloquism, as Kingsolver takes us into the dark yet exuberant life experiences of orphan Demon in 1990s Southern Appalachia, Virginia.
For anyone looking for a book about change, as another year ends, I recommend the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ short and thought-provoking exploration On Getting Better (2021).
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November ’23 The Dolphin Letters 1970-1979 Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle (2019) From the point of their separation and Lowell’s relationship with Caroline Blackwood, until Lowell’s death, this is a moving and passionate epistolary account of the turbulent and creative years in the lives of these writers. Lowell controversially used Hardwick’s letters in his sonnet sequence The Dolphin, and this, and Hardwick’s unique and kaleidoscopic novel Sleepless Nights, offer fascinating parallel reads.
Cirrus, Stratus, Cumulus, Nimbus… The Invention of Clouds by Richard Hamblyn (2001) is a wonderful book to which I often return. A riveting scientific history of the skies above us, it is also filled with romance and art in charting the life and times of Luke Howard, a pioneering inventor at the turn of the 19th century.
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October ’23 Five years after first reading Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2017) in proof form, I am blown away by it again. Feeling deep pain at the end of a love affair, and reeling after a friend suffers a debilitating injury, Nelson creates a meditation in prose fragments on the colour blue - as blue takes on the very meaning of life itself.
Another hybrid collection, written in equally limpid prose, is Natalia Ginzburg’s The Little Virtues (first published in Italy in 1962 and in the UK in 1985). Extraordinary essays on ordinary themes - writing, art, domesticity, relationships, bringing up children - the political is here made personal. Other works in Ginzburg’s oeuvre are also worth reading, but this volume encapsulates her trenchant themes in her most beautiful voice.
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September ’23 Pearl by Sian Hughes (2023) is a poignant and evocative contemporary novel set in rural Cheshire, focusing on the grief of a young girl after the disappearance of her mother, and then her growth in understanding as she becomes an artist and mother herself. While it has a beautiful elegiac tone, it is also a gripping psychological drama.
It is inspired by the medieval poem Pearl, which I also highly recommend, in Simon Armitage’s translation (2016). In an allegorical dream sequence, a grieving father finds his daughter on the other side of a river where she explains the Christian meaning of his loss.
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August ’23 I have come late to the The Lonely Londoners (1956) by Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon: a novel written from the perspective of immigrants from the Windrush generation as they begin their new lives in the unforgiving city. Extremely funny, in modernist style, with dialogue and narration in a Caribbean vernacular, this is an optimistic and subversive literary classic.
The Writing School (2023) is an unusual book, interleaving Miranda France’s witty depiction of teaching on a creative writing retreat with her more serious thoughts about memoir, in relation to her own past and the tragic death of her brother.
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July ‘23 Paul Murray’s fourth novel The Bee Sting (2023) is a totally absorbing Irish family drama set after the 2008 crash and flashing back to earlier generations. It is both extremely funny and very moving: a masterpiece of multi-layered perspectives and propulsive plot. With shades of Anne Enright and Jonathan Franzen, Murray has his own distinctively open-hearted world view.
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June ’23 For the first time on my blog I am recommending a poetry collection: The Ghost Net by Alan Jenkins (2023). These contemporary poems are visceral and moving, filled with loss and longing, and never far from water. They remind me of why I used to love reading poetry - the intensity, the timelessness - and why I must make it part of my life again.
This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright (2023) charts the author’s recovery from alcoholism in parallel with her father’s descent into Alzheimer’s. It is a hopeful and loving memoir, filled with references to Bright’s favourite and inspiring writers, and set against backdrops from Cornwall to New York to the island of Stromboli (continuing my June theme, the sea is one of the presiding sensory images).
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May ’23 Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists by Laura Freeman is published this month in a beautiful hardback edition with each chapter headed by a reproduction of a painting or object from the stunning Kettle’s Yard museum in Cambridge. The book is filled with fascinating detail about the life of the curator and the artists he championed across the 20th century, including Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Christopher Wood, Henry Moore, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Alfred Wallis. I savoured every page in this absorbing work; a peaceful reading experience despite the drama of the lives described.
Another engrossing read which places art and creativity at the heart of life is Joanna Biggs’ memoir A Life of one’s own (not to be confused with a different work with the same title in my March ’22 post!). The lives and works of nine women writers (from Mary Wollstonecraft through Zora Neale Hurston to Elena Ferrante) are sensitively and originally reframed in the light of the writer’s divorce and desire to “begin again”.
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April ’23 Set during the first year of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris (2022) is a gripping read which explores in terrifying detail this shocking time in recent history. It is also a love story: the central character is an artist who is desperate to continue her painting and find intimacy to bear the darkness of war. The legacy of this time sits at the heart of a very different recently published novel by another writer with Balkan heritage: Asylum Road by Olivia Sudjic (2021), a dark and stylish book about identity and trauma.
Denton Welch (1915-1948) was an extraordinary writer and artist who was partially paralysed after a bike accident. A Voice Through A Cloud is the intense account of his experiences in the hospital and nursing home: in Proustian detail he evokes his violently changing emotions, from despair to manic delight, as he takes hope from glimpses of nature or rhapsodises about the past. The powerful sense of his own mortality infuses the writing; he was to die aged 33 as a result of his injuries, with this unfinished book published posthumously in 1950.
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March ’23 “Eliot understood that emotional truths are more layered than linear, with deep interior dimensions. These truths prove political questions, spiritual questions, cosmic questions. Intense, subtle, tender, they must be handled with great care.” So says Clare Carlisle in her biography of George Eliot: The Marriage Question (2023). This is a fascinating, rich and philosophical look at Eliot’s life and works with a particular focus on the meaning in her closest relationships.
Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel (translated by Rosalind Harvey) (2022 in English) is a contemporary novel about the birth of a baby with a serious chromosomal abnormality, and the impact this has on her mother and her mother’s best friend who doesn’t want children. It is the crisp yet sensual prose style and the vignette structure, with many surprising twists in the emotional trajectory, which make this one of the most unusual and affecting books I have read in the last year.
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February ’23 First published in Italy in 1952, and recently translated by Ann Goldstein and published by Pushkin Press, Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Cespedes is a brilliant evocation, in diary form, of one woman’s voyage of self-discovery in post-war Rome. With profound psychological detailing, the narrator looks with fresh eyes at her husband and children and boss: the act of writing it down changes her understanding of her whole life. The results are profound and dramatic, and yet ultimately remain hidden.
I’m sorry you feel that way by Rebecca Wait (2022) is an immersive, moving and funny contemporary novel in which every character is complex and believable. While its main themes are dark - mental illness, intergenerational pain, loneliness - this is a very warm book which gets better and better as you read on.
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January ’23 “She had a unique appreciation of ‘everything that is passing, and coloured and to be enjoyed’, and a unique ability to express it” says Claire Harman of Katherine Mansfield in All Sorts of Lives (2023), her very enjoyable biography of the writer. Focusing on ten of her short stories, this is literary criticism and personal story combined, and took me back to the work with renewed pleasure.
Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley (2022) is memoir in essay form from the Canadian actor/director/screen-writer. You don’t have to know her work to feel drawn in by the (often harrowing) stories she now feels compelled to tell, while examining the very nature of memory. The title essay explores how she recovered from a traumatic brain injury by overturning everything she thought she knew about how to come through dark times.
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December ’22 I finish the year with a recommendation for an essay collection by Ann Patchett These Precious Days (2021). Personal and moving, especially the title essay about her intense friendship with a woman in her last months of life, these reflections have the page-turning quality you might expect from such a stellar novelist. Her novels are equally immersive: I particularly enjoyed Commonwealth and The Dutch House.
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November ’22 I first read Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (2001) in manuscript form when I was working for him at the Wylie Agency, and I re-read it this month. This is an extraordinary haunting novel by a profound thinker and master stylist, a wonderful man who died too young. It combines fiction, memoir and philosophy in a complex digressive style with interspersed black and white photographs.
In Gratitude by Jenny Diski (2016) is a memoir of the writer which focuses on two main strands: her teenage years spent sharing a house with a deeply unloving Doris Lessing, and her final years after her cancer diagnosis. The result is a searing narrative of high emotion and higher intelligence.
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October ’22 I can’t believe I hadn’t come across Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1932) before now! A Scottish classic, with shades of Hardy and D H Lawrence in its themes of fate and pride and rural life in all its beauty and hardship, it is striking for its complex and visceral central female character.
Maggie O’Farrell is deservedly well known for a host of wonderful contemporary novels, but I would like to draw attention to The Marriage Portrait, published this year, particularly to those readers who think they don’t like historical fiction. A resonant and page-turning novel set in Renaissance Italy, this is hard to beat for sheer reading pleasure.
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September ’22 Published earlier this year, I Used to Live Here Once by Miranda Seymour is a biography of the writer Jean Rhys: an extraordinary life evoked in glorious detail. Seymour focuses particularly on the significance of Rhys’ childhood on the Caribbean island of Dominica.
I read Crazy by Jane Feaver when it came out last year, and it has remained with me to the extent that I became drawn in to read it again this month. It is a novel, possibly auto-fiction, about a 51 year old creative writing teacher, Jane, who is still seeking to understand her relationship with her alcoholic ex-husband, while suffering significant physical pain. There is an undertow of dry humour despite the serious themes of love, self-worth, and the nature of fiction itself.
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August ‘22 First published in 1946, Back by Henry Green has been recently reissued by NYRB Classics. It is an unforgettable shimmering novel, which traces the surreal and moving journey of an amputee who returns from WWII to find his lover has died while he was away. Always extraordinary in both texture of prose and subtlety of emotion, all Henry Green’s novels are worth reading; I would also particularly recommend Loving and Party Going and Doting.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (2018) is a wholly original novel about grief, writing, and the healing power of a woman’s friendship with a dog. Totally unsentimental, and written in an intelligent, sometimes fragmentary style, this is a refreshing and thought-provoking read.
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July ’22 Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy, who died earlier this year, takes us on the journey she made on her bike “Roz" in 1963 from Ireland to India via Iran and Afghanistan and across the Himalayas. Her hilarious and often extremely dangerous adventures are infused with her wonderfully optimistic spirit, revealing the complex histories and sympathies between people and places now lost.
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry (2022) is a visceral portrayal of grief and guilt as a fictionalised Thomas Hardy reflects on what he sacrificed in his life for his art.
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June 2022 O Caledonia is Elspeth Barker’s only novel, first published in 1991 when she was 51 years old, and recently reissued. It evokes the intensity of an eccentric childhood in a Scottish castle, where books, animals and wild nature allow the young protagonist to forge her identity against an unloving backdrop. A vivid and sensory read, filled with joy as well as darkness, this is for readers who love the Cazalet Chronicles and the works of Molly Keane.
“If we knew, as all the old songs always say, if we knew, if we could bear to know (but of course we do know and we risk it every time), how terrible it is to lose someone, we would never love. The human bargain. Love in exchange for death.” Alison Light from A Radical Romance: A Memoir of Love, Grief and Consolation (2019), the passionate story of her marriage to radical social historian Raphael Samuel, twenty years her senior, and their unconventional life in an 18th century house in Spitalfields before his untimely death.
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May 2022 Trespasses by Louise Kennedy is a recently published debut novel set in Belfast during the Troubles of the 1970s. A tender evocation of passionate, illicit love as well as a page-turning depiction of a violent, fractured community, this is old-fashioned story-telling at its best.
Spring Cannot be Cancelled (2021) is a series of conversations between David Hockney and his ‘Boswell’, the art historian Martin Gayford. Lavishly illustrated throughout with Hockney’s work and work from artists who inspire him, this is an uplifting book about the power of art with fascinating historical commentary, pithy philosophical reflections and comic asides.
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April 2022 Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul (2022) The contemporary artist Celia Paul writes letters to Gwen John (1876-1939), finding connections in their lives as artists, lovers, muses, siblings, solitary thinkers and exiles. A stunning form to create a memoir and a biography in one, with beautiful reproductions of their works throughout.
Every family has a story: how we inherit love and loss by Julia Samuel (2022) The power of story-telling and trans-generational pain comes through in these eight case studies. Samuel has great sensitivity and intelligence so my pleasure in reading about other people’s lives felt compassionate rather than voyeuristic.
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March 2022 This is Happiness by Niall Williams (2019) is a coming of age story set in a rural Irish parish. It is heart-breaking and life-affirming, with the most beautiful use of the past tense to show the gap between then and now for the elderly narrator. A gripping novel despite its seeming lack of plot.
A life of one’s own by Marion Milner (first published 1934): The psychoanalyst Marion Milner is a revelation to me and I recommend all her books! This memoir explores her journey to finding happiness by observing her reactions to daily activities. It offers a very particular sense of one woman’s life in the 1920s and ‘30s while speaking loudly to all of us right now in an age when mental health is supposedly taken more seriously.
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February 2022 Real Estate by Deborah Levy (2021) is the third of Levy’s living autobiographies and focuses on the notions of home and ownership. She is brilliant at moving from the domestic and precise (her visceral pleasure in objects and sensations) to bigger questions of love and freedom.
Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig: I came to this novel after reading Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday (which has also been recently reissued by Pushkin Press) and was struck by the difference in tone. Set in 1913 as the Austro-Hungarian empire is crumbling, it is a devastating story of emotional blackmail and guilt, which moves from a jaunty lightness to a terrifying conclusion. It was first published in 1939 when Zweig was in exile; he was to commit suicide in 1942.
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January 2022 A Touch of Mistletoe by Barbara Comyns is a strange and extraordinary novel, first published in 1967 and reissued last year, exploring the life and loves of a young woman from the desperate poverty of the 1930s through her eccentric jobs and bohemian relationships in the ‘40s and ‘50s, often blighted by madness - the “mistletoe” of the title. Comyns’ extraordinary style, full of humour and pathos, is wholly original. A great book to read aloud.
Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence by Frances Wilson (2021) uses a riveting and page-turning form, focusing on the psycho-drama of Lawrence’s complex relationships and his often tortured times in Cornwall, Italy and New Mexico. It is the energy in Wilson’s writing that makes this such a vibrant read.