What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in October

What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in October

Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month

Ian Rankin, John Self, and Guardian readers

Thu 31 Oct 2024 17.59 

Ian Rankin / Rebus, Ready for Retirement

Rebus, Ready for Retirement

Patrick Anderson

Monday, September 29, 2008

EXIT MUSIC
By Ian Rankin
Little, Brown. 421 pp. $24.99

There's a moment in "Exit Music," Ian Rankin's 17th -- and, he says, last -- novel about Detective Inspector John Rebus, when a man with a tape recorder explains, "I'm putting together a sort of soundscape of Edinburgh. From poetry readings to pub chatter, street noise, the Water of Leith at sunrise, football crowds, traffic on Princes Street, the beach at Portobello, dogs being walked in Hermitage . . . hundreds of hours of the stuff." That could be Rankin himself speaking, because in the Rebus novels he's provided a portrait of his chosen city that's as rich, detailed and loving as any that any crime writer working today has given us of any city in the world. "Exit Music" is far from the best of the Rebus novels, but if it is truly the last of them, attention must be paid: This has been one of the best police procedural series ever written.

John le Carré remembered by writers and friends / Part Three

 

John le Carré
Illustration by T.A.

John le Carré remembered by writers and friends: 'He always had a naughty twinkle in the eye' 

Part Three

Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Tom Stoppard, Ralph Fiennes, John Boorman and more pay tribute to a master who transcended the limits of spy fiction

Monday 14 December 2020

Ralph Fiennes, actor

When I was approached by [producer] Simon Channing Williams in 2003 about making The Constant Gardener, I was already an enormous fan of le Carré’s books. I loved the world he created. And then I met the man, and he was so charming and generous of spirit and immediately available for conversation about the novel and the character. I must have fired all sorts of spurious questions at him but I just remember how he was very gregarious and excited about the project.

John le Carré
Ilustración de Triunfo Arciniegas

John le Carré remembered by writers and friends: 'He always had a naughty twinkle in the eye'

Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Tom Stoppard and more pay tribute to a master who transcended the limits of spy fiction

John Banville, Tom Stoppard, Charlotte Philby, Margaret Atwood, Philippe Sands, Susanna White, Hossein Amini, Bonnie Greer, Ian Rankin, Kit de Waal, Holly Watt and Adrian McKinty
Mon 14 Dec 2020 15.54 GMT

John Banville, author

We met for lunch one rainy day at the end of last summer, in an excellent but eerily deserted restaurant in Hampstead village. He was already there when I arrived, seated foursquare at a small table with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. Inevitably it occurred to me to wonder how many empty restaurants, bars and cafes he had sat in like this, waiting and watching, in the days when he was a spy. He always played down the significance of those days, speaking of them with wry amusement, and giving the impression that in the world of espionage he had been little more than a pen-pusher. I chose to believe him.

2018, as picked by writers / Part three

 

Jon McGregor

2018, as picked by writers – part three

Surrealist artists, dogged detectives, modern lovers and spies behaving badly ... leading authors pick their best books to enjoy these holidays

Saturday 7 July 2018

Jon McGregor

People always say not to judge a book by its cover, but people are wrong. Ashleigh Young’s collection of smart, funny, insightful and unexpected essays, Can You Tolerate This? (Bloomsbury), has a bright yellow cover, making it perfect summer reading. I love it. I’ve been telling people about Lucy Wood’s short stories ever since her debut collection came out a few years ago; she’s back with another collection, The Sing of the Shore (4th Estate), and she’s better than ever. Finally, Melissa Harrison’s forthcoming All Among the Barley (Bloomsbury) is an astonishingly good evocation of rural England in the 1930s, complete with creeping fascism and the subjugation of women. It’s subtle and mesmerising and brilliantly detailed, and I’m going to lie down in a meadow and read it all over again.

Pankaj Mishra

Fiction in English from Pakistan has redeemed its promise with dazzling consistency. Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds (Bloomsbury) is a fresh marvel, describing with cool wit and steely yet tender intelligence the interlinked fates of antagonists in a forgotten war-scape – and the complicity of our own sheltered lives in remote conflicts. Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton) is a poetic and remarkably fertile exploration of the relationship between human beings and the natural environment, and what can still be done to stem its rapid deterioration.

The term neoliberalism provokes much choleric denial. But Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard) decisively establishes it as a coherent project, tracing it back to the political and intellectual synergies of the 1920s. Michelle Dean’s Sharp (Fleet), a portrait of 10 female writers and thinkers, is a bracing tribute to the life of the iconoclastic mind: a reminder, in our age of flashy hot takes, of the matchless power of sustained and elegant argument.

Blake Morrison

Kept from the world by a crazed fundamentalist father, cowed herbalist mother and violent misogynist brother, it’s a miracle Tara Westover escaped her childhood in rural Idaho. Her memoir Educated (Hutchinson) brilliantly recounts her journey towards knowledge and enlightenment; bravely, too – her family are still alive. With Rachel Cusk as with Karl Ove Knausgaard, you wonder what makes you keep turning the pages. But while he’s confessional, her narrator Faye lets other characters do the talking, giving little of herself away; Kudos completes a remarkable trilogy. The crepuscular, dreamlike, post-1945 London that Michael Ondaatje invents in his novel Warlight (Cape) continues to haunt you long after the plot itself.

Andrew Motion

Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan is the best first collection I’ve read for a long time: moving, technically adroit, clever in all the right ways, and full of brilliant small-scale effects as well as large achievements. Angela Leighton’s Hearing Things (Harvard) is as good as her previous book on poetic form – which is to say it’s terrific – and illuminates a great deal about the sound effects of poetry that cannot be disentangled from its page-sense. Rachel Cusk’s Kudos brings her enthralling trilogy to a well-judged conclusion, at once rounded and open.

Sarah Perry

Now that Terry Pratchett is gone, Stephen King is one of the only authors I buy in hardback on publication day. His latest, The Outsider (Hodder), is both a detective and a horror novel, and it gripped me to the point of checking under the bed before I went to sleep. It reminded me of what it was like to lie reading by torchlight late at night, when camping in the summer.

I’ve never been much of a reader of contemporary poetry, but I have been seduced by some of the brilliant young poets writing now, of whom Amy Key is perhaps my favourite. Her new collection, Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe), is playful, surreal and enchanting but also rooted in brutal emotional honesty. She is writer of a rare and strange magic.

I am lucky enough to have an advance proof of Mrs Gaskell and Me, the new book from the brilliantly gifted Nell Stevens: she describes it as a love letter to “her own very special, dear friend”, Mrs Gaskell, and I have it patiently waiting on my desk.

Michael Pollan

On my bedside at the moment: Go, Went, Gone (Granta, translated by Susan Bernofsky), a novel about the refugee crisis in Germany by Jenny Erpenbeck that is not only timely but masterful; Matt Walker’s illuminating review of the science of sleep and how we’re all doing it wrong: Why We Sleep (Allen Lane); The Overstory (Heinemann), Richard Powers’ weird and wonderful novel about the intricate relationships among trees and humans; and Carlo Rovelli’s mindbending The Order of Time.

Ian Rankin

Liz Nugent’s Skin Deep (Penguin) is the perfect holiday read for those who like their escapism on the darker side. If Patricia Highsmith were Irish she might well have come up with this tale of a scarred woman who taints all she touches while remaining as charismatic as she is enigmatic.

In The Smiling Man (Doubleday) Joseph Knox pulls off the “difficult second novel” with ease and considerable style. Labyrinthine Mancunian noir with the obligatory battered but dogged detective.

Ambrose Parry, The Way of All Flesh isn’t published until late-August, but it’s a rip-roaring tale of murder amid the medical experiments of 19th-century Edinburgh. The book brings both city and period to colourful life and is a joy to read. It’s a collaboration between seasoned novelist Chris Brookmyre and his wife, consultant anaesthetist Marisa Haetzman.

Irish lawyer Steve Cavanagh writes excellent courtroom thrillers set in the US. His latest, Thirteen (Orion), sees him at the top of his game. It features a serial killer who’s sitting on a jury. Terrific premise, and the resulting story doesn’t disappoint.

Sally Rooney

I recently read Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar (Faber, translated by Srinath Perur), a perfectly formed short novel about a family in India undergoing a rapid change in fortune. Published in translation last year, it’s an admirably slim book – you could read it in one sitting – and for me it conjured up a whole world.

I’d also recommend Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Portobello, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori), an exhilaratingly weird and funny Japanese novel about a long-term convenience store employee. Unsettling and totally unpredictable – my copy is now heavily underlined.

Finally, I don’t think I’ll ever forget the day I spent reading Olivia Laing’s Crudo (Picador). I couldn’t put it down, and then it overwhelmed me so much I had to put it down, and then I had to pick it back up again. A beautiful, strange, intelligent novel.

Katherine Rundell

My favourite book for adults this year, by some margin, has been Fifteen Dogs (Serpent’s Tail) by André Alexis. It opens with two gods having a quiet drink at The Wheat Sheaf in Toronto and debating whether, if animals had human intelligence, they would be only as unhappy, or more unhappy, than humans. It’s unhinged, wise, sharp, witty and daring. I’ve also fallen in love with Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy; her work is staggering.

In the world of children’s books, I can’t wait to read Hilary McKay’s The Skylarks’ War (Macmillan), set in the approaching shadow of the first world war. McKay couples warmth and grace with wry humour like nobody else out there.

Salman Rushdie

My recent (re-)reading includes Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Speak, Memory, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, all books that don’t need me to recommend them. I have, however, immensely enjoyed David Grossman’s A Horse Walks into a Bar (Cape) for its pitch-perfect black comedy and Jeet Thayil’s The Book of Chocolate Saints (Faber), easily the most original and formally inventive novel to come out of India in years.

THE GUARDIAN

Best books of 2017 / Part two

 

Best books of 2017

Part two

‘Funny, outrageous, touching, intimate, gorgeous’ … writers from George Saunders to Ali Smith pick their favourite reads of the past year

Sat 25 Nov 2017 07.00 GMT

Mark Lawson

Ma’am Darling; How Not to Be a Boy; Little Me; This Is Going to Hurt

It is intended entirely as a compliment to say that Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (4th Estate) is astonishingly odd – a cross between biography and satire that perfectly displays Brown’s rare skills as journalist and parodist. A notoriously erratic genre – the comedian’s memoir – yielded two unusually classy examples: How Not to Be a Boy (Canongate) by Robert Webb and Little Me (Canongate) by Matt Lucas. Each writer found an elegant structural alternative to the usual cradle-to-Bafta-award trot-through, and, in examining deep miseries (the death of Webb’s mother, the imprison-ment of Lucas’s father), explored the transformation of pain into comic creativity in a way far beyond the stereotype of the melancholy clown. This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay (Picador) is so clinically funny and politically important for supporters of the NHS that it should be given out on prescription.

Robert Macfarlane

Wind Resistance; Thoreau and the Language of Trees; Mural

Karine Polwart’s Wind Resistance is unlike anything else I’ve read or heard this year: a new form or forms altogether, really, for it exists as an “immersive musical essay” published by Faber Drama; an album of songs called A Pocket of Wind Resistance with Pippa Murphy; and, formerly, a solo stage show at the Lyceum theatre in Edinburgh. Its subjects include motherhood, geese, moorland, gneiss, migration and deep time, and it manages to make a politics of protest out of its phenomena, as well as a poetics of beauty. It’s extraordinary work. I was also differently fascinated by Richard Higgins’s Thoreau and the Language of Trees (University of California) and Mural, the translation of two of Mahmoud Darwish’s great, long, later poems by Rema Hammami and John Berger (Verso).

Val McDermid

Days Without End; The Long Drop; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The book that has left the most profound impression on me this year is Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (Faber). It’s a love story, a profound dissection of the horrors of war and a lesson in the hidden side of history, but its impact comes from the dense, rich, imaginative use of language. Absolutely captivating. Another writer whose narrative style elevates her work is Denise Mina, whose The Long Drop (Harvill Secker) revisits a dark episode in Glasgow’s past through the lens of one long drunken night when two men – one a killer, one a bereaved husband and father – confront what lies between them. Mina navigates the uneasy territory between fact and fiction with consummate grace. With Muriel Spark’s centenary on the horizon, I’ve been revisiting her work, and the third book of the year for me is unquestionably The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin Modern Classics). It has all the Spark trademarks: dark humour, a non-linear time frame, a sardonic and bleak view of human nature, and a talent to entertain.

Jon McGregor

Too Much and Not the Mood; The White Book; There are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé

One of the great pleasures and surprises of our digital reading age has been the resurgence of the essay. Who predicted that, in all those Computers Are Killing Literature thinkpieces we’ve had to endure? There have been some excellent essay collections this year, many of which carry pieces that started life online, and I’ve been learning new ways to think about the world, and to write about it, from such wonderful writers as Yiyun Li, Reni Eddo-Lodge and especially from Durga Chew-Bose in her collection Too Much and Not the Mood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). I’ve barely started reading The White Book by Han Kang (Portobello, translated by Deborah Smith), but I can already tell it will be one of my books of the year. Delicate and thoughtful and concise and dense and strong; this is the kind of writing I like to read slowly. A man (of course) recently claimed that 2017 had been “a thin year” for poetry; this has certainly not been the experience of attentive readers. As well as new collections from the likes of Sinéad Morrissey, Emily Berry, Maria Apichella and the very thrilling Ocean Vuong, I have particularly enjoyed getting my head around the playful rhythms and deadpans of Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Corsair).

Hollie McNish

The Things I Would Tell You; Daemon Voices

The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write (Saqi), edited by Sabrina Mahfouz. I did not choose this book because it was written by women or Muslim women or minority voices. I chose it because the first story I read moved me to tears by the second page, the second story almost made me vomit, the poems made me up my game and the essays were a much needed education. Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling (David Fickling), by Philip Pullman. Reading these essays feels almost naughty to me – as if I’m sneaking into a year of lectures and classes with one of the masters of this art that I really should be paying a lot to attend. Here, Pullman shares advice, secrets, thoughts in such a down-to-earth, friendly manner, it almost makes me want to weep. I wondered if it would be too formal, overly intellectualised reading – and I was so happily, pleasantly excited it wasn’t.

Pankaj Mishra

Women and Power; Sex and Secularism; Sour Heart; Swimmer Among the Stars; New People

In the first annus horribilis of Trump, I found myself reading more periodicals than books – and small magazines rather than the mainstream journals. Gauging the political and cultural earthquakes of our time, such shoestring publications as n+1, the Point, the Baffler, Dissent and Jacobin seemed far more intellectually agile and resourceful than their rich cousins. Mary Beard’s Women and Power (Profile) and Joan Wallach Scott’s Sex and Secularism (Princeton) offer a series of bracing and illuminating reflections on a whole culture of oppression that ought to have been exposed much earlier. Other insidious hierarchies are revealed by Jenny Zhang’s collection of stories, Sour Heart (Bloomsbury Circus), which deliciously subverts conventions of “immigrant literature”. I greatly admired the imaginative range and adventurousness of Kanishk Tharoor’s stories in Swimmer Among the Stars (Picador), and I also very much enjoyed Danzy Senna’s New People (Riverhead), a witty and stylish novel about the allure and perils of racial belonging.

Blake Morrison

Ghosts of the Tsunami; Mayhem; Between Them; Anything is Possible; The Unaccompanied

When a giant quake and wave hit Japan in 2011, almost all the children who died came from one primary school. Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami (Cape) describes the errors that led to the tragedy and the efforts of bereaved parents to uncover the truth. Sigrid Rausing’s taut, scrupulous, self-accusing memoir Mayhem (Hamish Hamilton) recounts the story of her sister-in-law’s death from a drug overdose: instead of tabloid sensationalism, we watch a family tragedy unfold. Richard Ford’s Between Them (Bloomsbury) is a loving, late-life tribute to his father Parker (a travelling salesman) and mother Edna: concise, contemplative and evocative of a lost America. The linked stories in Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible (Viking) are among the best fiction I’ve read this year, and the poems in Simon Armitage’s The Unaccompanied (Faber) the best verse.

Ian Rankin

The Intrusions; The Dry; The Long Drop

The Intrusions by Stav Sherez (Faber). This talented British author of intelligent crime novels has been under the radar too long. His latest is a Silence of the Lambs for the internet age as a serial killer stalks his prey online, entering and controlling their lives. Chilling and utterly convincing. The Dry by Jane Harper (Abacus). A cop heads home to the drought-stricken Australian outback when an old schoolfriend takes their own life. A mystery from their shared past comes to the fore and enmities (and relationships) are rekindled in a book that has atmosphere to spare, as well as a pleasing number of twists and turns. Elegant and gripping. The Long Drop by Denise Mina. The ever-reliable Mina deserves all the awards she has already won for this, her latest novel. It details one tense night shared by a murderer and the man whose wife and daughter he killed. Games are being played as the two drink their way around late-1950s Glasgow. Remarkably, it is taken from the true story of Peter Manuel, one of the last men to be hanged in Scotland. Absorbing and filled with insights, this is a bravura performance, a true original.

George Saunders

The Locals; Reservoir 13; Kill All Normies; How to Behave in a Crowd

The Locals by Jonathan Dee (Corsair). A compassionate look at the American middle class and what is happening to it and the ways, right and wrong, in which it is responding. Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor. An original and very moving tour de force, in which the author manages to simultaneously speed time up and slow it down, while also gently outing our readerly hunger for drama, violence and (too) simple closure. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle (Zero). This short head-butt of a book taught me more about recent political events in a single rich evening of reading than I’ve learned in this entire last and very unpleasant year of obsessively monitoring cable TV, and confirmed for me something I’ve been feeling for a while now, namely that social media is a toxin we are gleefully and cluelessly injecting into ourselves, even as we ask, “Why are we getting so mean and stupid?” How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas (Tim Duggan). I read this book early in the year, and have carried it around in my mind like a talisman during a busy period of travelling and not-writing, as a reminder of a simple truth, for when I get back to work: good writing is joyful and exists for the purpose of making enjoyment and fun for the reader.

Kamila Shamsie

The Story of a Brief Marriage; The Unwomanly Face of War

Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage (Granta) is a devastating novel. Set over 24 hours in the middle of a war zone, focused almost entirely on the thoughts and experiences of a man who knows death is coming for him, it’s unlike anything else I’ve read. Sticking with the theme of war, Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War (Penguin) is an oral history of women who fought in the second world war. And it’s brilliant.

Ali Smith

East West Street; Days Without End; Home Fire; Tell Me How it Ends

What a year. I started it with Philippe Sands’s East West Street (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), which examines the meaning and importance of law, of the words that go to make it and of life lived well versus life lived foully. It does this personally, universally, locally and internationally with an eye to what unites and protects us from the power-madness of a divide-and-rule mentality that’s once more, right now, courting catastrophe. I think it’s one of the finest books I’ve yet read. Then there’s Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury Circus). Occasionally you know that one of the writers alive at the same time as you has written the book they were born to write. With Barry, it’s as if every book he writes is a bit like this – and then there’s this novel. It’s a masterpiece. Barry writes warmth so that warmth is a form of truth. Home Fire has lit a light that’ll never go out; Shamsie’s version of Antigone reveals the ancient tragedy we’re living right now. Plus, Valeria Luiselli, can I just shout her name out? A novelist of a rare vitality, whose latest work, Tell Me How It Ends (4th Estate), is an essay about humanity with its back up against the border wall, and is so true and moving that it filled me with hopeless hope.

Jeanette Winterson

Testosterone Rex; Women and Power; Still Life with Feeding Snake; The Lost Words

Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds by Cordelia Fine (Icon). This is a barnstormer! Rightful winner of the Royal Society science book prize. It’s time to stop blaming stone-age brains and testosterone for gender differences, and look at patriarchy. A polemic with all the facts, figures and research papers any feminist or male essentialist will ever need. And it’s funny. Women and Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard. I have just read this one and had to include it. From the Greeks to Hillary Clinton, 115 rocket-fuelled pages on how power structures at every level exclude and silence women. History helps us to realise we’re not crazy feminists. It’s time to change the world. Still Life with Feeding Snake by John Burnside (Cape). The world is such a mess. These poems concentrate on still-ness, on time that isn’t haste. They deliver a zen remedy of calm alert. The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris (Hamish Hamilton). Gorgeous to look at and to read. Give it to a child to bring back the magic of language – and its scope. Written as a thumbs down to the Oxford Junior Dictionary – that dismal Gradgrind publication of utility without beauty or imagination – The Lost Words is a kingfisher of a book – coloured, soaring, in flight, and with a fish in its mouth.

THE GUARDIAN