We asked our Author of the Month, Carol Topolski, author of Monster Love, to recommend 3 books to our readers.
BEING DEAD by Jim Crace
This is a writer who seems to be able to reinvent the wheel every time he writes. Mostly there's a discernible authorial style in a writer's work, but Crace eludes any simple grip and jumps out from behind literary doors going, 'surprise!' every time he produces another book. He looks at decay in this one, both the decaying of a relationship and the physiological decay of bodies (the research! the research!) - and given what I write about, I admire his capacity to look unflinchingly at the gruesome while being curious about meanings.
SILK by Alessandro Baricco
This is an exercise in literary economy of a marvellous sort. Baricco tells a lyrical story set along the old routes to the mysterious East in the 19th century in search of disease free silk worms. Hardly a promising premise for a love story one might think, but the main protagonist is forced to confront his local world and its matrix of relationships, when he falls - wordlessly - in love with a woman in Japan. One could probably read it in about an hour, but then would want to start again, like tasting the most exquisite dish and savouring it again and again in memory.
TRUTH AND BEAUTY by Ann Patchett
This is a non fiction account by a novelist of a friendship she had over twenty years with another writer, and is utterly - sometimes appallingly - bold in its look at what brings two people together in a relationship and what keeps the link intact in the face of extreme tensions and furies. It is as much an examination of her own desires and motivations as a frank look at her friend, who is physically and psychologically damaged, and she brings her novelist's gift for language and imagination to a piece of personal history.
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Author interviews
We asked our Author of the Month, Carol Topolski, author of 
