Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers (II)

Last week, we brought to you some top books recommended by writers during this season and today we bring you the concluding part. Find these books, read them and enjoy. Kazuo Ishiguro Universal Harvester (Scribe), John Darnielle’s novel set amid the cornfields and small communities of Iowa, starts like a spooky thriller, then opens out […]

Last week, we brought to you some top books recommended by writers during this season and today we bring you the concluding part. Find these books, read them and enjoy.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Universal Harvester (Scribe), John Darnielle’s novel set amid the cornfields and small communities of Iowa, starts like a spooky thriller, then opens out into a moving, beautifully etched picture of America’s lost and profoundly lonely. Both Evan Davis and Matthew d’Ancona recently published excellent books on our so-called post-truth era, but I’d like to highlight James Ball’s Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World (Biteback) for its vivid analysis of how the business models and incentives currently prevailing in digital media render decent discourse all but inaudible. Many people tell me the emergence of young Irish novelist Sally Rooney is a moment of real significance, so I’m going to read her Conversations with Friends (Faber) to find out if they’re right.

Mark Lawson

At a time when either a vacation or a staycation is likely to find the reader in a country recently subject to an unexpected election result, I’m looking forward to the explanation of maverick candidates offered by a fine political commentator, Steve Richards, in The Rise of the Outsiders: How Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way (Atlantic). Among the small squad of good novels about football, A Natural by Ross Raisin (Cape) is said by reliable scouts to be well worth its purchase fee. And, after being impressed by how Susie Steiner managed to find fresh ground in the police procedural with last year’s Missing, Presumed, I’m keen to team up with her intriguing cop, DS Manon Bradshaw, again in Persons Unknown (Borough).

Robert Macfarlane

In Ravilious & Co: The Pattern of Friendship (Thames & Hudson), Andy Friend seems to have opened new vistas on to the lives, loves and connections of this mesmerising and migrant artist – right up to his last, fatal flight off Iceland in 1942. I’ve been saving Paul Scraton’s Ghosts on the Shore: Travels Along Germany’s Baltic Coast (Influx) until I had time to take its journeys properly, so I look forward to page-walking that unsettled and unsettling coastline with him. I also want to read, properly, Denise Riley’s collection Say Something Back (Picador), which includes her heart-piercing elegy to her son Jacob, “A Part Song”: the most powerful contemporary poem I’ve read in years. Not everyone’s choice of summer reading, I admit … but it is mine!

Paul Mason

Bitch Doctrine (Bloomsbury) by Laurie Penny, one of the most accomplished and acerbic of the new, young journalists emerging from the protest movements of the 2010s, takes you to the front trench of the gender war and keeps you there longer than anyone should really stay. In No Is Not Enough (Allen Lane), Naomi Klein anatomises the roots of Trump in the already dystopian world of corporate-ruled America and predicts the “end run around democracy”. A clear and readable guide to action, if it is action you are contemplating. This year will see an avalanche of reactionary bullshit written by the patrician chroniclers of Soviet Russia. Get your retaliation in by flaunting China Miéville’s October (Verso) on the beach as the yachting fraternity sashays by.

Eimear McBride

Not many writers can straddle short and long form fiction as well as Sarah Hall. This summer she has her short story hat on and if the rest of the stories are as good as “Evie” I’m betting Madame Zero (Faber) will be superb. The excellent bookseller Katia Wengraf, from the excellent Review Bookshop in Peckham, recently gave me a copy of Sphinx (Deep Vellum) by Anne Garréta by a friend who said I’d like it. Best described as It’s a genderless love story and written by one of the few female members of the Oulipo writers’ group, and I think she’ll probably be right. Modernism might not be making Will Self a millionaire but it’s certainly helping him prove what a great writer he is. I’m still thinking about Umbrella and Shark, so I can’t wait to read Phone (Viking), the final instalment of the trilogy. Self is one of the few writers whose language and ideas are at constant war with the easy-access tonelessness churned out by many – though not all – of today’s “creative writing” industries. He has a brilliant mind, is a master of the compound pun and never writes for idiots; what’s not to adore?

Pankaj Mishra

Writers from Russia and Eastern Europe remain the most eloquent witnesses to the insidious appeal of authoritarianism and demagoguery, especially as it goes global. In Miłosz: A Biography (Harvard) Andrzej Franaszek’s life of Czesław Miłosz, we see a profound sensibility living through, and grasping, the inherent nihilism of three very different promises of power and wealth: nazism, Stalinism and Americanism. Ivan Krastev’s After Europe (Pennsylvania), a sober reckoning with the challenges to Europe, defines the dangers that will outlast, and may even be aggravated by, Emmanuel Macron’s triumph. I am only half-way through Masha Gessen’s The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Riverhead), but it already seems indispensable. I was very struck by The Story of a Brief Marriage (Granta), a novel by Anuk Arudpragasam. With its unflinchingly account of the suffering of war, it reminds you of Andre Malraux’s novel set in China’s civil war in the 1930s La condition humaine; but with its intense physicality it renders intimate what is often seen as the remote struggles for humanity of those caught up in large-scale violence. I also much admired The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin), André Naffis-Sahely’s sharp meditations on our vast but remarkably homogeneous global landscape.

George Monbiot

I’ve started reading Roman Krznaric’s Carpe Diem Regained: The Vanishing Art of Seizing the Day (Unbound) – and it’s brilliant. One of those rare books that forces you to ask what the hell you’re doing with your life. Jane Mayer’s Dark Money (Scribe) is a terrifying insight into how 21st-century politics works, and a great lesson in how to write non-fiction. But my book of the year so far is Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger (Allen Lane): a fascinating explanation of the roots of terrorism.

Daljit Nagra

Unnerved by the despicable state of the world, I shall be flogging myself with the following books to help me understand and interpret it: Teju Cole’s essays, Known and Strange Things (Faber), because I love a writer such as Cole who says: “When I cannot sleep, I rise from bed and watch Jacques Derrida talk.” Hannah Arendt’s critique The Origins of Totalitarianism (Penguin) is a highly readable discussion about the advent of racism and its links to power. Arendt is particularly good on the insidious methods by which power is achieved for its own means. Beauty and terror, pain and forgiveness, and the healing of a breadfruit; music has no finer tune, no gravitas more earned than The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (Faber).

Sarah Perry

It would be a pretty paltry sort of summer without a pile of crime novels, and the one I’m most excited about is Dark Water (Bloomsbury) by Parker Bilal. These are wonderfully written, compelling thrillers that give an exhilarating depiction of contemporary Egypt. Private Investigator Makana is everything you could want in a detective hero: brilliant, bruised and melancholy – and he lives on a dilapidated houseboat on the Nile. Short stories are perfect summer reading, especially when the heat makes one indolent, and nothing could be more fitting than Attrib. and Other Stories (Influx) by Eley Williams. She is a writer for whom one struggles to find comparison, because she has arrived in a class of her own: witty, melancholy, occasionally sensual, occasionally mordant, elegantly droll without the kind of hipster quirkiness that makes me want to hurl books at the wall. She has in common with George Saunders the ability to be both playful and profound, and we are lucky to have her. I’ll be spending a little time in the Peak District, so I plan on doing some themed reading and taking with me Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (HarperCollins). I haven’t read this since the scene involving an escape down a rabbit-hole gave me a lifetime of mild claustrophobia, and ever since I have been haunted by faint memories of a tear-shaped stone on a bracelet, shape-shifting sorcerers, and ordinary children plunged into peril. I’m hoping it will do what the very best children’s fiction has always done: offer promise of hope and heroism in a world which seems to offer none.

Philippe Sands

History and memoir offer insights into other times and lives that make Britain’s current miserable travails marginally more tolerable. The Greatest Comeback (Biteback) by David Bolchover is astonishing, not least for its unlikely melding of football and mass murder, two of my daily passions; there is no escape from the continuing powerful embrace of Hisham Matar’s The Return (Penguin), recently awarded a Pulitzer prize even as President Trump would, no doubt, if he possibly could, ban the author from setting foot in the US; and Han Kang’s Human Acts (Granta) offers a gripping Korean perspective on the human consequences of abuses of power. Three extraordinary stories.

Nikesh Shukla

I’m looking forward to reading Olumide Popoola’s When We Speak of Nothing (Cassava Republic), a debut novel about race, London, the riots and being black and queer, which sounds fantastic. I’m also really excited about Sympathy (One) by Olivia Sudjic. Having written a novel about the internet/social media myself, I can’t wait to see how this one deals with it. Finally, the poetry of Kayo Chingonyi (Kumukanda, Chatto) and Ocean Vuong (Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Cape) demand revisiting, and both their collections currently come with me everywhere.

Ahdaf Soueif

I know William Sutcliffe’s We See Everything (Bloomsbury) is for young adults but I read a couple of pages, where people were living in the underground stacks of the British Library after London had been turned into The Strip, and I was gripped. Then there’s Pankaj Mishra’s Age of Anger. I love his angles and analyses, his links between past and present. And then I, finally, will get round to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (Europa) – after everyone else in the world has finished it.

 Francis Spufford

I just chanced on Eleanor Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal (Granta), the one she wrote before the Man Booker winner The Luminaries, and it looks very promisingly disconcerting: a book about the ironies of adulthood’s appetite for youth and vice versa. That’s definitely going on the heap for summer, and so is China Miéville’s October, both because friends I trust tell me it may complicate my present sense that the October Revolution was a straightforward catastrophe for 20th-century socialism, and because I really want to see what happens when a brilliant fantasist turns to narrative history. And I’ll be working my way on backwards through George Saunders, having been hooked conclusively by Lincoln in the Bardo (Bloomsbury), tonal whimsies and all. I’m presently on Tenth of December (Bloomsbury), but I expect to have reached The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by the time we go on holiday.

Colm Tóibín

The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam is set at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. During the shelling and the mayhem, Dinesh is asked to marry a young woman. The story, written with slow tenderness and real emotional precision, is an intimate portrait of what happens over a day and a half, and the study of a sensibility under pressure. It is the best novel I have read in ages. Miłosz: A Biography by Andrzej Franaszek is a fascinating account of the life of the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. The chapters about surviving as a poet in Warsaw during the second world war are especially interesting, as are the pages about the years in exile. In The Rule of the Land (Faber), Garrett Carr walks along the Irish border. This is great writing about landscape and history, essential also for anyone who needs to know about hard and soft borders after Brexit.

Sarah Waters

There are three books I’ve been recommending like mad recently. The first is Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises (Canongate), an astute, elegant, blackly funny novel about ageing, dying and taking stock. The second is Diary of a Wartime Affair (Viking) by Doreen Bates, a previously unpublished journal from the 1930s and ‘40s which chronicles, in frank and fascinating detail, the turbulent romance between a female civil servant and her married male colleague. And the third is Neel Mukherjee’s A State of Freedom (Chatto). Set in contemporary India, technically daring, deeply compassionate, it’s a powerful, pertinent novel about migration and social injustice.

Concluded

Source: Theguardian.com