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One brief book recommendation, once every month. Fiction and non-fiction, for the casual or voracious reader.Subscribe.
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Paul Lynch – Prophet Song (2023)
APR 2024Paul Lynch was asked, during an event organised in Amsterdam, to read the first paragraph of his Booker Prize-winning novel, Prophet Song. Happily obliging, he read that first paragraph: a sprawling, vivid text spanning multiple pages, setting the stage for the totalitarian version of Ireland we're about to meet, painting a picture of the moment Eilish Stack's life starts to unravel, and introducing us to his relentless style of writing. Continue reading →
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During the pandemic I discovered the joys of reading great nature writing. With the world in lockdown, books by Robert Macfarlane and Peter Matthiessen helped me travel to faraway destinations—places that, come to think of it, I wouldn’t dare visit even if I could. Continue reading →
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Jo Ann Beard – Cheri (2023)
FEB 2024In a way, I borrowed the stories and then tried to infuse them with metaphorical meaning. I wanted to experience, as a writer, what happens when you get all the way to your moment of death and then don’t die. Or in the case of Cheri, what happens on the march towards, and through, your own certain death.
— Jo Ann Beard (The Guardian)
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Deborah Levy – August Blue (2023)
JAN 2024A blue-haired concert pianist, Elsa M. Anderson, walks off stage in the Golden Hall in Vienna. She’s gone off script and played a few minutes of her own composition, because her fingers refused to play what the conductor of the orchestra, and the many people who bought a ticket to witness her immense talent in person, so desperately wanted her to play—Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2. Continue reading →
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This month I read this book by Joan Didion for the third time. I found myself sat at a bar while on vacation, with this book in my pocket, and I read it cover-to-cover before I got up and left. It is a captivating read: a meditation on grief unlike anything I've ever read. Continue reading →