|
William Boyd
The two books I'd like to recommend come out of my current obsession with things Russian. I've been re-reading Chekov the last year or so and Chekov we think of as a playwright but in Russia he's actually revered as a writer of short stories. It's his fiction that gives him his huge reputation and standing. There's a wonderful selection of Chekov's stories, 20 of them or so, called The Chekov Omnibus [Everyman, £7.99] which is edited by a man called Donald Rayfield, it's the old translation by Constance Garnet which he has corrected because she made lots of mistakes. These are the stories I've been reading and they're fantastic, they're amazing stories. To think that they were written at the end of the 19th century the beginning of the 20th - they're so much of the beginning of the 21st century as well. The other novel I'd recommend is by another Russian, Vladimir Nabokov, not perhaps his most famous novel which was probably Lolita, which is wonderful, but a novel he wrote called Pale Fire [Penguin, £7.99]. I think you can say that it is unique, nobody has ever written a novel like it and you'll probably never read a novel like it. It's fantastically funny, fantastically clever, and it just shows how generous the novel form is, you can do absolutely anything in it, and Pale Fire is perhaps pushing it as far as it can possibly go.
Debbie Taylor
You've probably all read Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, Helen Dunmore's The Siege and Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone. So I want to recommend a couple of gems you might not have come across yet. The first is Blackbird: A Childhood Lost by Jennifer Lauck (Abacus), an extraordinary memoir of a girl made to grow up long before her time. Insightful, brave and completely lacking in self-pity, it doesn't put a foot wrong. I put it down thinking I probably wouldn't read a better book this year. (Oprah liked it too, but don't let that put you off!) My second choice is The Seal Wife by Kathryn Harrison (Fourth Estate), a strange novel about a man who becomes obsessed with a nameless Aleut woman in Alaska. It's the underlying philosophy that's special in this book; the Zen-like quality of the woman, the slow unfolding of the story. As in Blackbird, the writing is precise and crafted. If you haven't discovered them yet, I really envy you! You have such a treat in store.
Elizabeth Buchan
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (Fourth Estate, £6.99) an astonishing piece of autobiography. Bitter Fame: a Life of Sylvia Plath by Anne Stevenson (Penguin, £9.99), a fascinating and totally absorbing interpretation of her life and work.
Julia Darling
Birds Of America by Lorrie Moore, Faber & Faber, £6.99
A True Story Based On Lies by Jennifer Clement, Cannongate Books, £6.99
Julie Otsuka
Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, Farrar Straus & Giroux
Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Appelfeld, Quartet Books
Nick Hornby
The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon Two of my favourite novels of the last ten years, and not well known enough in the UK.
Caro Fraser
On holiday - which is when I manage to find time to read a piece of fiction from start to finish - I read a lovely book called The Priory by Dorothy Whipple [Persephone Books]. It's a reprint, and is set in pre-war England. Reading it was rather like watching an old black-and-white movie. It was a joy, and gives fascinating insights into family life and class structures in the period just before the Second World War. I would also recommend The Peppered Moth by Margaret Drabble [Penguin £6.99]. She is such a luminous writer, and this book deals beautifully with relationships between families and between generations.
|
Author interviews
