Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers – part one

A plagiarist in a kitchen and a horse walking into a bar; Dublin crimes and Washington misdemeanours; relationships, revolutions and relaxations … leading writers reveal their summer recommendations By Julian Barnes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Hare, Mark Lawson, Pankaj Mishra, George Monbiot, Sarah Perry, Ahdaf Soueif, Colm Tóibín and others   Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie A […]

A plagiarist in a kitchen and a horse walking into a bar; Dublin crimes and Washington misdemeanours; relationships, revolutions and relaxations … leading writers reveal their summer recommendations

By Julian Barnes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, David Hare, Mark Lawson, Pankaj Mishra, George Monbiot, Sarah Perry, Ahdaf Soueif, Colm Tóibín and others

 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A book I absolutely loved was Margo Jefferson’s Negroland (Granta), a memoir of her life as part of the African American economically privileged class. It is a sharply honest, biting, reflective look at America, and a useful guide on how race and class do not merely intersect, but race becomes class. I’m looking forward to reading Salt Houses (Hutchinson), a novel by Hala Alyan, which feels very promising. The Big Stick (Basic) by Eliot Cohen has been on my to-read pile for a while and I plan to get to it this summer. And House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a new poetry collection, by Ishion Hutchinson.

Julian Barnes

Svetlana Alexievich’s first book, The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), finally arrives in English (Penguin): as with her others, terrifying documentation meets great artfulness of construction. Marie Darrieussecq’s Being Here: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker (Text) recounts a brief, powerful artistic life that went painfully unrewarded – until after the painter’s death. And an autumn book: I was lucky to see an advance proof of Nathan Englander’s Dinner at the Centre of the Earth (Weidenfeld), a subtle, nuanced, fierce novel about Israel/Palestine, which should usefully stir things up.

William Boyd

In the 1960s and 70s my parental home was in Ibadan, western Nigeria. From there I used to visit Lagos regularly – even then an unruly, exciting place. The unruly factor and the excitement factor are now off the dial – not to mention the stress factor, the population factor and the danger factor. This heady ambience is perfectly caught in Chibundu Onuzo’s tremendous second novel Welcome to Lagos (Faber). Nigerian novelists appear to be energising the form these days, and on this showing Onuzo is leading the charge. Useful Verses by Richard Osmond (Picador) is a remarkable first collection: great precision of language married to a uniquely informed and focused view of the natural world. Finally, if you want a clear-eyed, subversive take on the strange world that is Donald Trump’s American dystopia take out a subscription to the Baffler (thebaffler.com) – a chunky quarterly magazine with superbly wry, dry, intelligent (and funny) writing.

In the summer of Brexit, I find myself drawn to fiction in translation, as a challenge to personal, as well as political, solipsism. Alvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death (Vintage) recently beguiled a long transatlantic flight with his fanciful, erudite, hilarious tale of a tennis duel between Caravaggio and Francisco de Quevedo, played out against the backdrop of the Spanish conquest of South America and the Counter-Reformation. Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (Fitzcarraldo) is described as a meditation on movement, and involves tales across history, including the journey made by Chopin’s heart from Paris to Warsaw. As someone who loved Laurent Binet’s HHhH, and had to read a lot of Roland Barthes as a postgraduate student, I am also greatly looking forward to The 7th Function of Language (Harvill Secker), in which Binet has a 1980s detective investigating the accidental death of Barthes: French postmodern high-jinks will be a welcome respite from political realities. And David Grossman’s Man Booker International prize-winning A Horse Walks into a Bar (Vintage) sounds like the perfect antidote to Trump.

William Dalrymple

Summer for me is coming back from the blistering Indian heat to the cool and cloudy skies of Scotland. This year I am packing Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry (HarperCollins) to read at Seacliff, the world’s most beautiful beach, which lies directly opposite one of the places Nicolson writes about: the Bass Rock, the world’s biggest gannetry, with 150,000 resident seabirds. Nicolson writes that they sound like “a regiment of Cossacks cheering ‘Ura, Ura, Ura’ ”. Maya Jasanoff’s masterpiece The Dawn Watch (William Collins) will take us rather further afield – up the Congo in Conrad’s footsteps. Judging by the opening chapters, this is one of the most important books on colonialism to be written in our time, and by one of our most brilliant young historians. Finally, I’m looking forward to finishing The Epic City (Bloomsbury), a beautifully observed and even more beautifully written new study of Calcutta. In its author, Kushanava Choudhury, we clearly have an important new talent.

Richard Ford

If you’re interested in Dublin, or if you’re interested in the novelist John Banville, or if you’re just interested in radiantly superb sentences about whatever – I’m all three – then Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir (Hachette Ireland) is a book you’ll not be able to put down. Banville walks the streets of his adopted hometown – both sides of the Liffey – giving us history (his, in some instances), wry anecdote, cultural commentary, architecture, famous personages and savages, ultimately providing a privileged glimpse into what makes this rambunctious old hodge-podge a genius disguised as a town. Take it along on your holiday. The City Always Wins (Faber), Omar Robert Hamilton’s vivid debut novel, reads at times like gritty frontline reporting of the Egyptian “revolution” of 2011. But it is a novel through and through – felicitous, immensely perceptive and thorough in its insights, and scrupulously humane. Its portrayal of “the young”, who are committed – against insuperable odds – to the salvation of the Egyptian ideal, is a bitter history lesson coupled with a riveting human story about political innocence and passions that won’t die.

Garth Greenwell

Omar El Akkad’s American War (Picador) is the most impressive new novel I’ve read this year. Set in a scarily plausible future scarred by civil strife and climate change, it’s thrilling for the sheer transporting force of its storytelling. Its lasting power, though, lies in its complex account of moral disintegration, both individual and societal. Igiaba Scego’s Adua (New Vessel), newly translated from the Italian, is at the top of my pile of books to read this summer. The title character is a woman torn between Italy, her home for 40 years, and her native Somalia. One of the most brilliant writers I know, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (whose House of Stone is published next year by Atlantic), has been raving about it, and she has never steered me wrong. If you like your thrillers sexy, smart and elegant, don’t miss Christopher Bollen’s The Destroyers (Scribner). It manages to be both fast-paced and contemplative, an excellent entertainment and also something more lasting, a haunting meditation on friendship and desperation.

David Hare

I’ve resisted Tana French in the past, thinking that she, like James Joyce, throws too many words at too few events. But in The Trespasser (Hodder) the proportions are perfect, and her procedural thoroughness takes her deeper and deeper into a wholly convincing portrayal of Dublin police. First-rate. Joan Didion’s South and West (4th Estate) is contrastingly slim. Her diary of a trip through the southern states in the 1960s, essay-length, is so potent that you wonder how much can be evoked by so little. The Plagiarist in the Kitchen (Unbound) is hilariously grumpy, muttering at us “Don’t you bastards know anything?” You can read it purely for literary pleasure, but Jonathan Meades makes everything sound so delicious that the non-cook will be moved to cook and the bad cook will cook better.

To be continued next week

Source: Theguardian.com