‘No holiday has attained this level of perfection’: authors on their favourite fictional escapes
From Anita Brookner’s wistful sojourn in France to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s family stay by the sea, Geoff Dyer, Lissa Evans, Joe Dunthorne and more pick the most memorable fictional breaks
Geoff Dyer; Lissa Evans; Joe Dunthorne; Ore Agbaje-Williams; Ella Risbridger; Jacqueline Crooks; Jonathan Coe
Sat 5 Aug 2023 09.00 BST
Geoff Dyer
I had the pleasure of gorging, earlier this year, on Anita Brookner’s first nine novels, one after the other.A summer holiday for the typical Brooknerian heroine means one of two things: not having one and languishing in a mansion block in London, simultaneously looking forward to and dreading the return of a few friends who will tell her what she’s missed out on; or going away alone and coming home early because it proves unendurable. In her first novel, A Start in Life, Ruth, a Balzac scholar, has a life-affirming romantic holiday planned. Pinning all her expectations on what will happen, she travels to France, each day awaiting the call from her on-off lover confirming the date of his arrival. (It should be added that any attractiveness Brookner’s blokes once possessed – by their blazers shall ye know them! – has since faded from the spectrum of plausible desire.)
Geoff Dyer with John Berger in Turin, 2004. Photograph: Jean Mohr
John Berger remembered
by Geoff Dyer
Friday 6 January 2017
There is a long and distinguished tradition of aspiring writers meeting the writer they most revere only to discover that he or she has feet of clay. Sometimes it doesn’t stop at the feet – it can be legs, chest and head too – so that the disillusionment taints one’s feelings about the work, even about the trade itself. I count it one of my life’s blessings that the first great writer I ever met – the writer I admired above all others – turned out to be an exemplary human being. Nothing that has happened in the 30-odd years since then has diminished my love of the books or of the man who wrote them.
Bob Parent/Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesOrnette Coleman with Don Cherry at the 5 Spot Cafe, New York City, November 17, 1959
Torrential, Gut-Bucket Jazz
Geoff Dyer
June 20, 2015
It happened that on the day the great saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman died I was watching a preview of a recently salvaged film by Sydney Pollack of the making of Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace. The album was recorded live at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, the city where, in the late 1950s, Ornette and his collaborators, Charlie Haden (bass), Don Cherry (trumpet), and Ed Blackwell or Billy Higgins (drums) had formed the quartet that would soon declare the shape of jazz to come. The idea for Amazing Grace was that Aretha would record an album of the gospel music she’d grown up hearing and singing in her father’s church in Detroit. This was in 1972. John Coltrane had died in 1967, Albert Ayler—the tenor saxophonist who, along with Ornette, had played at Coltrane’s funeral—in 1970. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been dead for four years. The unifying grace of the civil rights era had given way to the fractured militancy of Black Power and revolutionary struggle.
Guy Le Querrec/Magnum PhotosA television showing John Coltrane, Equatorial Guinea, 1990
Catastrophic Coltrane
Geoff Dyer
October 4, 2014
Offering: Live at Temple University offers further evidence of the catastrophe of the last phase of John Coltrane’s work. “Last” rather than “late” because he became ill and died too suddenly (on July 17, 1967), too early, to have properly entered a late period. He was forty. In any other field of activity that would be a desperately short life. Only in jazz could it be considered broadly in line with actuarial norms. So there’s no late phase in the accepted sense of Beethoven having arrived at a late style, only a sudden ceasing of the unceasing torrent of sound.
Over the past two decades, Geoff Dyer has set up camp in so many sections of the bookstore as to merit special recognition, something that could serve as a reward for such valiant commercial self-sabotage. His books vary in genre from music, war, photography, and travel, to fiction and literary biography. No single zone of interest towers above the others—he’s not the poet who also wrote a curious little volume on marine biology, or the critic who took a stab at memoir. Dyer’s singular sensibility unites this body of work; one that incorporates his frustration with the writing process into the narrative, and does so with humour, irreverence, and insight.
Geoff Dyer’s most recent book is Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, a novel in two parts. He was part of the Authors at Harbourfront Centre series in Toronto in April 2009.
Teodoro: The protagonist in Jeff in Venice claims that interviews work better if the interviewer pretends to be a complete numbskull. I don’t know that I’ve ever tried that technique. I wonder if I should try saying something really stupid about now.
Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures – part six
From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer
Sun 8 Jul 2018 09.00 BST
Patrick Gale
Anyone who endured their teens in the 1970s as I did will devour Nina Stibbe’s sequel to the equally delicious Man at the Helm. Funny, subversive and unexpectedly touching, Paradise Lodge(Penguin), just out in paperback, follows her heroine’s adventures when she bunks off school to work in an old people’s home ripe for Thatcherite reforms. I’m always banging on about the need to read more dead authors – they have nobody marketing their work and they’re cheap and usually brilliant. Please discover Sylvia Townsend Warner this summer. Her The Flint Anchor and The Corner That Held Them (Virago) are neglected comic masterpieces whose evocations of chilly East Anglian landscapes are the perfect balm for sunburn. I’ll get no holiday as I’ve a new novel out, but on my train journeys I’ll be reading Anne Enright in preparation for interviewing her at the North Cornwall book festival.
Geoff Dyer
I’ll be in Berlin for most of July, heading there via – or at least in the company of – Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 (Viking). Always worried that I have a book too few, I’ll also be lugging Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry (Granta), Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (Fitzcarraldo) and Iris Origo’s Tuscan diaries, War in Val D’Orcia (Pushkin). In the second world war, the Germans used 2.7m horses, of which 1.8m died. This is just one of many moving statistics in Ulrich Raulff’s unusual and stimulating history of – and elegy for – the last 100 years of our relationship with the equine world, Farewell to the Horse (Penguin, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp).
Curtis Sittenfeld
Who Is Rich? (Fourth Estate) by Matthew Klam is a terrific summer read – a cartoonist at an ocean-side artists’ conference ponders creativity, infidelity and his own existential purpose, and the results are hilarious and bracingly intelligent. A similarly artsy but more sober read is the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner) by Alexander Chee. Chee’s insights about writing, love and activism are hard-won, honest and incredibly wise. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new novel When Katie Met Cassidy (Piatkus) by Camille Perri. I’ve heard it’s sexy, entertaining and subversive, and doesn’t that sound like a magnificent combination? I plan to read it while visiting my sister in Providence, Rhode Island.
Kerry Hudson
This summer I’m fulfilling a long-held ambition to explore the mountains and cities of the Republic of Georgia by their marshrutka countrywide minibus network. On a trip that is mainly travel, I want books that will inspire me, that are humane and thought-provoking. After reading the first outstanding story, I’ve been impatiently hoarding Glen James Brown’s debut, Ironopolis (Parthian), a series of interconnected tales set on a dilapidated Middlesbrough council estate. Likewise, Mary O’Hara’s Austerity Bites (Policy Press), which reports on the frontline of austerity cuts, a book sadly as relevant today as when it was first published four years ago.
Ocean Vuong
The Wilderness (WW Norton) by Sandra Lim is a knife blade fashioned into a magnifying glass. Oscillating between bold declarations and restrained, seething fury, the poems slowly build to a storm in the psyche. The book is a masterclass in line-making and metaphor. It lifts me, like the best books, higher into myself. “When I come to the right place, I believe I’ll paint a door on it and / walk right through.” I’ve also been struck by Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book (Tyrant). It is the epitome of autofiction – and advances the tradition to include images and photographs. But more than that, it is the first book I’ve read in a while that faithfully enacts Kafka’s truism that a book must be an axe that shatters the frozen seas inside us. Brutal and unforgiving, it explores a crumbling marriage and its ensuing existential crisis through the lens of the West Virginian working class. A classic of urgent, American storytelling.
Josie Rourke
Sally Rooney’s award-winning novel, Conversations With Friends (Faber), is one of the best debuts I’ve encountered. It’s a witty and entrancing read, perfect for a summer’s day spent doing nothing else. I’m hoping to visit friends in the Hudson Valley this summer; I first need to finish editing my film Mary Queen of Scots – which is based on John Guy’s biography of Mary Stuart, My Heart Is My Own(Harper). For my summer reading I will dive into Stephen Greenblatt’s new book, Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics (WW Norton). I love his mission to invigorate settled ideas, and it’s good preparation for the next play I’m directing, Measure for Measure at the Donmar, London.
Sebastian Faulks
I have enjoyed The Incurable Romantic (Little, Brown), in which psychotherapist Frank Tallis opens his casebook. There have been quite a few such books recently, most of them overpraised and not as well written as their admirers claim. But Tallis writes with clarity and wit about the morbid condition of love, which emerges here as a kind of mental disorder. I have some misgivings about patient confidentiality and exaggeration and/or light fictionalisation in places (Tallis has form as a horror novelist), but this is undoubtedly riveting stuff.
Attica Locke
I’ve just put down The Kiss Quotient (Atlantic) by Helen Hoang and I loved it so much I want to hand it out to strangers on the street. It’s a beautiful love story and a peek inside the life and heart of a woman who has Asperger’s or high-functioning autism. I was mesmerised by this book, which manages to be steamy hot and sweet at the same time. An American Marriage (Algonquin) by Tayari Jones is another incredible love story, though fraught with greater challenges for the couple at the centre, which makes the story all the more moving. Jones’s prose is chock-full of lyricism, grace and wisdom. You will never forget the story of Celestial and Roy. Unfortunately, there are no grand travel plans for me this season. My summer “holiday” will be stolen moments in my favourite reading chair.
Sabrina Mahfouz
I read The One Who Wrote Destiny (Atlantic) by Nikesh Shukla, a beautiful, brilliant modern classic, cover to cover on one long-haul flight – take tissues! And Mr Loverman (Hamish Hamilton) by Bernardine Evaristo is the funniest book I’ve read this year, but also one of the saddest. Every character makes a perfect holiday companion. My summer travels are all work-related this year – Wales, Suffolk, Edinburgh and Cairo – so to see me through the trains, planes and buses, I’ll be packing When I Hit You (Atlantic) by Meena Kandasamy, Grime Kids (Orion) by DJ Target, Elsewhere, Home (Telegram) by Leila Aboulela and Things Bright and Beautiful(Penguin) by Anbara Salam.
Carol Morley
Sara Baume’s A Line Made By Walking (Windmill), about Frankie, who retreats from urban life and connects with nature, really made an impression on me this year. A fun and breezy read was Charlotte Bingham’s memoir MI5 and Me: A Coronet Among the Spooks (Bloomsbury), an account of her discovery that her father was a spy and of her own “inactive” service. Go Went Gone (Granta, translated by Susan Bernofsky) by Jenny Erpenbeck, looking at the plight of asylum seekers as told through a retired university professor, I found very moving. My dream holiday reads include The Overstory (William Heinemann) by Richard Powers, an eco epic, with trees at the heart of the storytelling, and Ling Ma’s Severance(Macmillan), a brilliant-sounding post-apocalyptic novel, centring on the end times of late capitalism. I’ve been learning to swim this year, and while I’m in Paxos practising my strokes, I’ve accumulated some books with swimmers on the covers, and top of the pile to read is Turning: Lessons from Swimming Berlin’s Lakes (Virago) by Jessica J Lee.
From moving memoirs to far-reaching fiction, the wonders of science and the lessons of history, novelists, poets and critics pick their best reads of the year
Sat 26 Nov 2017
Damian Barr
Winter; As Kingfishers Catch Fire
Ali Smith’s Winter (Hamish Hamilton) is no cosy, comfort read. It’s a brisk frosty walk under skies that could open at any moment revealing anything but snow. I’ll be unpicking it for months. As Kingfishers Catch Fire (Little, Brown) is a memoir/gallimaufry of ornithological obsession by Alex Preston. He watches birds in the sky and on the page darting between myths, stories and memoir like a swift. The characterful illustrations by Neil Gower add a whole new dimension to this gorgeous book.
Frances Hardinge
Things a Bright Girl Can Do; We Come Apart; The Island at the End of Everything
Photograph: PR Company Handout
Things a Bright Girl Can Do by Sally Nicholls (Andersen Press) follows three fallible yet formidable teenage girls caught up in the fight for women’s votes. We’re shown the intricacies of this turbulent period in a vivid, hard-hitting, funny and emotionally compelling way. We Come Apart, (Bloomsbury) co-written by Sarah Crossan and Brian Conaghan, recounts the romance of two maltreated teens through sparse, grittily powerful verse. Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s The Island at the End of Everything (Chicken House) is a beautiful, haunting tale of leprosy, lepidoptery and loyalty.
Geoff Dyer
The Unwomanly Face of War; The Sparsholt Affair
Nothing can quite prepare the reader for the shattering force of The Unwomanly Face of War (Penguin), Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of Soviet women in the second world war. In the midst of such colossal suffering hundreds of little details stick in the mind, like the trail of blood left as a group of women march to – not from – the front because they are so poorly equipped, none have sanitary wear. I had the distinct sense, on finishing Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel, that I might have read next year’s Booker-winner before this year’s had even been announced. The Sparsholt Affair (Picador) is a sweeping and intimate masterpiece, full of sensual pleasures and observational wisdom.
Paula Hawkins
Little Fires Everywhere; The Fact of a Body; Reservoir 13
Beginning with a house fire set by a teenager, the flames quickly spread across Celeste Ng’s suburban idyll in Little Fires Everywhere (Little, Brown), a sharp and nuanced tale of race and family in 1990s America. The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (Macmillan) is part memoir, part true crime, wholly brilliant. Bleak subject matter is expertly handled as Marzano-Lesnevich challenges us to see both perpetrators and victims from every possible angle. Perfectly paced and beautifully observed, Jon McGregor defies expectations in Reservoir 13 (4th Estate), his graceful and compelling portrait of a community coming to terms with tragedy.
Lucy Davies
Cove; The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter; The Sellout; A Life of My Own; Falling Awake; Syria: Recipes from Home
Books that have made my heart race, or swell, with their brilliance this year include Cynan Jones’s beautiful landscape writing of the spirit and the sea in Cove (Granta); the sublime craft and fearless ambition in Kia Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (Seven Stories); Paul Beatty’s blazing The Sellout (Oneworld); Claire Tomalin’s ambushingly poignant A Life of My Own (Viking); and Alice Oswald’s Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape) which I go back to and back to. I read a lot of cookbooks – a beautiful highlight was Syria: Recipes from Home by Itab Azzam and Dina Mousawi (Orion).
Lara Feigel
The Idiot; Conversations With Friends; All the Beloved Ghosts; Mrs Osmond
I’ve been particularly impressed by two conversational novels about intelligent, self-conscious young women: Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (Jonathan Cape) and Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends (Faber). Both created worlds and characters you live with and talk to and miss after finishing the book. I don’t usually read much short fiction but I loved Alison MacLeod’s All the Beloved Ghosts (Bloomsbury). MacLeod is dazzlingly good at evoking a whole life through a single snapshot and at bending and stretching her prose as she moves between an impressive range of narrative personae. More recently, I’ve just read John Banville’s Mrs Osmond (Viking), an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism that is so successful it felt like discovering a new Henry James novel.
Alex Preston
The Lost Words; The Sparsholt Affair; The Book of Dust volume One: La Belle Sauvage
Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris have made a thing of astonishing beauty in their The Lost Words (Hamish Hamilton). It’s a book to gift and to treasure – generous, luminous, profound. I was glad George Saunders won the Man Booker and for next year’s prize it’s hard to look beyond Alan Hollinghurst’s masterful The Sparsholt Affair (Picador), which I found thrillingly stylish and gripping. It’d be good to see Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, Volume One: La Belle Sauvage (Random House) on the list – a brilliant novel whether you’re nine or 90.
Katharine Norbury
La Belle Sauvage; The Bedlam Stacks; A New Map of Wonders
Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust, Volume One: La Belle Sauvage (Random House) creaks with mystery and burns with passion and the thrill of what it is to be human. Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks (Bloomsbury) is an immense treat for lovers of both historical fiction and the surreal. And Caspar Henderson has created A New Map of Wonders (Granta) that reveals the sublime from his garden shed and had me weeping with relief that wonder is so close at hand.
Chris Mullin
Life After Life; Called to Account
By far the best book I have read this year is Life After Life (Gill Books), the autobiography of Paddy Armstrong, one of four innocent people convicted of the Guildford and Woolwich pub bombings. Ghosted by Irish journalist Mary Elaine Tynan, a beautifully written account of extraordinary events. My other favourite is Called to Account (Little, Brown), by former chair of the public accounts committee, Margaret Hodge. A shocking exposé of corporate misbehaviour and government waste, it has not had the attention it deserves.
Sally Rooney
The Idiot; To Be a Machine; The Ambassadors
This year I read and loved Elif Batuman’s The Idiot (Jonathan Cape) – which apart from its intellectual heft is page-for-page one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read. In nonfiction, this was the year of Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine (Granta), a profoundly unsettling and brilliant account of technology and human life. Though it wasn’t published in 2017 (more like 1903), Henry James’s lively novel The Ambassadors (available from Arcturus) was one of my favourite literary discoveries this year.
