Simon appleby

In uncertain times, books are an escape, a comfort, and an outlet. Audiobooks, in particular, are a means to block out the noise and immerse yourself in a story. For those of us staying home, here are four audiobooks that will transport you to a different life, place, or time period. 

Let us know what audiobook is keeping you company on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, Washington Black – an eleven year-old field slave – finds himself selected as personal servant to one of these men, the eccentric Christopher ‘Titch’ Wilde.Titch’s idealistic plans are soon shattered and Washington finds himself in mortal danger. They escape the island together, but then Titch disappears and Washington must make his way alone, following the promise of freedom further than he ever dreamed possible. From the blistering cane fields of Barbados to the icy wastes of the Canadian Arctic, from the mud-drowned streets of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, Washington Black teems with all the strangeness and mystery of life. Inspired by a true story, Washington Black is the extraordinary tale of a world destroyed and made whole again.

Listen to a sample:

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The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan

A SUNDAY TIMES FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 

Herbert Powyss longs to make his mark in the field of science – something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: for seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the cellar of the manor house, fitted out with books, paintings and even a chamber organ. Meals will arrive thrice daily via a dumbwaiter. The solitude will be totally unrelieved by any social contact; the subject will keep a diary of his daily thoughts and actions. The pay? Fifty pounds per annum, for life. Only one man is desperate enough to apply for the job: John Warlow, a semi-literate labourer with a wife and six children to provide for. The experiment, a classic Enlightenment exercise gone more than a little mad, will have unforeseen consequences for all included. In this seductive tale of self-delusion and obsession, Alix Nathan has created an utterly transporting historical novel which is both elegant and unforgettably sinister. 

Listen to a sample:

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A Famished Heart by Nicola White

A SUNDAY TIMES CRIME CLUB STAR PICK

They did it to themselves, but someone was watching. 

The Macnamara sisters hadn’t been seen for months before anyone noticed. It was Father Timoney who finally broke down the door, who saw what had become of them. Berenice was sitting in her armchair, surrounded by religious tracts. Rosaleen had crawled under her own bed, her face frozen in terror. Both had starved themselves to death. Francesca Macnamara returns to Dublin after decades in the US, to find her family in ruins. Meanwhile, Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are convinced that there is more to the deaths than suicide. Because what little evidence there is, shows that someone was watching the sisters die…

Listen to a sample:

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This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill

A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 

Following the unravelling of the life of a male publisher undone by allegations of sexual impropriety and harassment, and the female friend who tries to understand, and explain, his actions,This is Pleasure looks unflinchingly at our present moment and rejects moral certainties to show us that there are many sides to every story. Mary Gaitskill has spent her whole career mining the complexity of human relationships on both an individual and societal scale with wisdom and grace. Here her insights are more piercing and timely than ever. 

Listen to a sample:

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You’ve got a huge TBR stack, some cracking titles lined up, and a bit of extra free time. But what if your brain just won’t let you read? With so much information being fed to us all day it can be hard to switch off and disappear into a book, even when you really want to. Read on for our suggestions for books to ease you back into your reading routine.

 Let us know your own suggestions on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

The novel-in-stories

James Clarke’s Hollow in the Land tells of the rich, strange lives of a community of people living in a post-industrial community in a valley in Lancashire. It’s a novel-in-stories, which means that each chapter can be read and savoured by itself.

Read a story

Download the ebook

Buy a copy

The memoir

Carmen Maria Machado’s work is always compelling, culturally relevant and thought-provoking.

Her Body & Other Parties is an acclaimed collection of gothic-influenced, feminist stories. Written in a series of vignettes, In the Dream House broke new ground for memoir writing with its unique approach to exploring domestic abuse in a queer relationship.

Read an extract from In the Dream House
Download the ebook
Buy a copy

The quick read

This short (192pp), funny and thoughtful book will whisk you away on a spontaneous trip to Japan with the hapless Gilbert. Upon arrival in Tokyo, Gilbert befriends Yosa, a young Japanese student, and together they set out on a pilgrimage to the pine islands of Matsushima.

Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands, translated by Jen Callelja, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the German Book Prize and called ‘miraculous’ by the Guardian.

Read an extract.
Download the ebook
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The novella

In a mere 96 pages, the legendary Mary Gaitskill tells the story of a #MeToo case in a publishing house from two sides: that of the perpetrator, a charming male publisher, and his close female friend.
 
This is Pleasure is an extraordinary work by one of the world’s finest writers, achieving more in 15,000 words than most full-length novels. 

Read an interview with Mary Gaitskill: ‘I don’t like the word “harassment” any more’
Download the ebook (for a price as small as its width)
Buy a copy

The correspondence

First published in 1939, this powerful story told through letters between a Jew in America and his German friend met with immediate success in English but was banned in Europe by the Nazis.

Now an international bestseller, Address Unknown was one of the earliest works of fiction to warn against the dangers of fascism in Europe. It has an unforgettable sting in its tail – and it won’t take you long to get there.

Download the ebook (again, at a price as diminutive as its 96 pages!)
Buy a copy

The short stories 

In the nine unforgettable stories of A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley explores the unseen tenderness of black men and boys: the struggle to love and be loved, the invisible ties of family and friendship, and the inescapable forces of race, class and masculinity.

The Guardian called the collection ‘near faultless’ and we agree entirely with the Observer’s view that: ‘In the end, there’s no doubt who the lucky ones are: we, the readers.’ 

Download the ebook
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The thriller

Rumour has it that crime fiction is flying off the virtual shelves right now – and we reckon it’s books like A.S. Hatch’s This Little Dark Place that are getting people reading this genre.

Gripping from page one, this acclaimed thriller written as a series of letters. We follow he stories of a dad-to-be, Daniel, and his prison pen pal Ruby, whose lives will become dangerously intertwined…

Read an extract
Download the ebook (just £1.89 at time of writing!)
Buy a copy

The true tales

If you feel in need of a reminder that life can be full of adventure, these compelling true stories are for you.

From the makers of the blockbuster podcast of the same name, The Moth finds the best storytellers and stories, whether they’re funny, unbelievable, moving, scary. Or all of those things at once.

Listen to The Moth
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We’re so excited that Marion Poschmann’sThe Pine Islands, translated by Jen Calleja, is here in paperback. This is a wonderful, short, witty and warm novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the German Book Prize, won the Berlin Prize for Literature and is an international bestseller. It’s the perfect read if you’re looking for something uplifting and thoughtful.

About the book

When Gilbert wakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees – immediately and inexplicably – for Tokyo, where he meets a fellow lost soul: Yosa, a young Japanese student clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide. Together, Gilbert and Yosa set off on a pilgrimage to see the pine islands of Matsushima, one looking for the perfect end to his life, the other for a fresh start.

Playful and profound, The Pine Islands is a beautiful tale of friendship, transformation and acceptance in modern Japan.

Read the opening pages of The Pine Islands below

Get your copy from Amazon or Waterstones.

He’d dreamt that his wife had been cheating on him. Gilbert Silvester woke up distraught. Mathilda’s black hair lay spread out on the pillow next to him, tentacles of a malevolent pitch-black jellyfish. Thick strands of it gently stirred in time with her breathing, creeping towards him. He quietly got out of bed and went into the bathroom, where he stared aghast into the mirror. He left the house without eating breakfast. When he finished work that evening he still felt dumbfounded, almost numb. The dream hadn’t dissipated over the course of the day and hadn’t faded sufficiently for the inane expression ‘dreams are but shadows’ to be applicable. On the contrary, the night’s impressions had become steadily stronger, more conclusive. An unmistakable warning from his unconscious to his naive, unsuspecting ego.

He walked into the hallway, dropped his briefcase theatrically, and confronted his wife. She denied everything. This only confirmed his suspicions. Mathilda seemed different. Unusually fervent. Agitated. Ashamed. She accused him of slipping out early in the morning without saying goodbye. I. Was. Worried. How. Could. You. Endless accusations. A flimsy deflection tactic. As if the blame suddenly lay with him. She had gone too far. He wouldn’t allow it.

He couldn’t recall later on whether he had shouted at her (probably), struck her (surely not) or spat at her (well, really, a little spittle may very well have sprayed from his mouth while he was talking animatedly at her), he had at any rate gathered a few things together, taken his credit cards and his passport and left, walking along the pavement past the house, and when she didn’t come after him and didn’t call out his name, he carried on, somewhat slower at first and then faster, till he reached the next underground station, and disappeared down the steps, one might say in hindsight, as if sleepwalking. He travelled through the city and didn’t get out until he reached the airport.

He spent the night in Terminal B, uncomfortably sprawled across two metal chairs. He kept checking his smartphone. Mathilda hadn’t sent him any messages. His flight was leaving the next morning, the earliest intercontinental flight he could book at short notice.

In the plane en route to Tokyo he drank green tea, watched two samurai films and repeatedly reassured himself that he had not only done everything right, but that his actions had indeed been inevitable, were still inevitable, and would carry on being inevitable, not only according to his personal opinion, but according to world opinion.

He’d retreat. He wouldn’t insist on his rights. He’d make way, for whomever it was. Her boss, the head teacher, a grouchy macho kind of guy. The handsome adolescent who she was allegedly mentoring, a trainee teacher. Or one of those pushy women she teaches with. He was no match for a woman. With a man, time would potentially be on his side. He could wait and see how things developed, ride out the storm until she changed her mind. It stands to reason that the allure of what was forbidden would fade sooner or later. But up against another woman he didn’t stand a chance. Unfortunately, the dream hadn’t been completely clear on this point. Overall, however, the dream had been clear enough. Very clear. As if he had suspected it. He had essentially suspected it. For quite a while actually. Hadn’t she been in a remarkably good mood for the last few weeks? Downright cheerful? And markedly friendly towards him? A diplomatic kind of friendliness that had grown more and more unbearable as time went on, which would have become even more unbearable if he had known what was hiding behind it sooner. But this was how she had managed to lull him into a false sense of security for so long. And he had allowed himself to be lulled, a clear failure on his part. He’d dropped his guard, allowed himself to be disappointed, because his suspicion hadn’t been limitless.

For many of us reading is an escape; a way to glance away from the outside world and leap into another one. It’s heartening to see how many people are turning to literature in these strange and scary times – none more so than our Serpent’s Tail team, whose TBRs are growing every day, but also diminishing satisfyingly at the same time.

Here’s what we’ve got planned for our isolation reading. What’s on your list? Let us know on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Alia McKellar, Office Manager

Rebecca Gray, Associate Publisher

Follow @Rebecca_Gray_

Frances Ford, Finance Director

I have started the Mirror and the Light and it is lovely to find myself back in the mind of Thomas Cromwell again. He is so much cleverer than I am, which means of course that Hilary Mantel is so much cleverer than I am, and the pragmatic way in which he is trying to keep on top of events whilst knowing that they may well get on top of him rings very true. I am taking it in small steps because I know when the book finishes that will be the last of him. No coming back for Cromwell.

Karishma Jobanputra, intern

Now that I have a bit more time, I thought I’d finally take the plunge and crack open War and Peace. I’m only thirty pages in but it’s already brilliantly funny, immersive, and the metaphors are blowing my mind. I’m reading it as part of a virtual book club with A Public Space (which is holding me to account!) led by Yiyun Li, and could not agree with her more when she says the more uncertain life is, the more solidity and structure Tolstoy’s novels provide.

Louisa Dunnigan, Editor

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Helen Conford, Publisher 

I’m at home with my children, aged 2 and 5. This offers a lot of opportunity for learning from children’s books themselves – full of adventures at home and often helping children to make sense of things that are strange and big and not in their control – but also to read Katherine Rundell’s “Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise”, a short, wonderful argument for the intelligence and importance of children’s literature (and the places, particularly libraries) where we find them. 

Ed Lake, Editorial Director 

It’s finally time to have a crack at Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, a nice fat novel sequence about a young civilian couple trying to outrun the Nazis through eastern Europe. A good book for an unsettled moment, if offers lethal character studies and a seedy, Graham Greenish atmosphere. Probably not what one is meant to take from it, but the idea of riding trains now feels oddly luxurious.

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Cecily Gayford, Editorial Director

I can’t be the only person who thought it would be a great opportunity to catch up on all those big, difficult books you just never seem to get around to – but have ended up going back to old favourites. So I’ve been bingeing on Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham, all quaint postcards from a time when the biggest of your worries was an inconvenient body on the library carpet. When I’m feeling a little bit braver I’ll work my way up to David Jackson’s terrifying The Resident (and then spend the rest of quarantine hiding under my bed).

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Elizabeth Hitti, Publicity & Marketing Assistant

Between making a new cushion and catching up with friends on video calls, I’ve been reading Alix Nathan’s extraordinary The Warlow Experiment. A book about solitude, humanity and resilience, it is fascinating and unsettling as it vividly transports the reader to a different London and a different form of isolation.  

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Andrew Franklin, M.D.

The book I have now reread twice (it is very short – only takes an hour) that continues to haunt me is Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressman Taylor.  This is the most important unknown classic of the 20^th century with a universal message for our times.  I have given countless copies as presents and I wish everyone would read it. It proves the adage that books change things.

The novella is the story of two great friends, both German, one Jewish, one not in the late 1930s.  The non-Jew decides to return to Germany with utterly devastating consequences.  I can’t commend it too highly.

Peter Jones, Publishing Director, Profile Editions

Just finished Adam Sisman’s The Professor and the Parson and now on to Robert Walser’s strange but fascinating Jakob von Gunten.

Also reading Giorgio Bassani’s Novel of Ferrara, which includes the wonderful Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The sense of the world closing in seems particularly relevant at the moment.

Kate McFarlan, Publishing Operations Director

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
(A) it’s very long (830pp)
(B) recommended by several people whose reading choice I admire and always mean to emulate
(C) 1942 in Russia and conditions in Stalingrad make Covid-19 self-isolating Britain seem like a walk in the park ( which we can for now still do)

Niamh Murray, Marketing Director

This book couldn’t be more timely if it tried: women are overwhelmingly the majority in the self-employed / part-time / zero hours contracts sectors of the economy. Women have known this forever: this book shows the data to back up the anecdata. This inequality is the result of poor childcare and maternity provision: women are also overrepresented as primary carers of children, those with additional needs and the elderly. They also tend to do the hands on work in the caring professions in higher numbers than men. And so this week I’m reading Caroline Criado Perez’s INVISIBLE WOMEN and thinking of all those women struggling at the moment, unable to work and without the safety net of a PAYE employer – protected by government compensation schemes – to fall back on, and thinking of ways to personally contribute – through donations to food banks, refugee charities, local food collections and more. 

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MIranda Jewess, Senior Commissioning Editor, Viper Books

I’m reading How to Argue With a Racist by Adam Rutherford. Thought-provoking science, exploring racism and cultural bias through accessible genetics and evolutionary theory. Plus some brilliant debunking.

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Catherine Clohessy-McCarthy, Royalties Manager

Flora Willis, Senior Marketing Manager

OK, I will admit I’ve already read this book, but since it’s out this week I want to recommend it to anyone looking for something a bit different. Hollow in the Land grabbed me from its opening line: ‘On the moor overlooking the valley was a wind farm.’ Moors, valleys, wind farms – yes, please transport me to a wild and windswept landscape, to a place that feels close and far away at the same time, to people that are at once familiar and rarely see in in fiction. In this novel, James Clarke tells the stories of a community whose home is a post-industrial Lancashire valley. Intimate and compelling, this book offers so many windows into rich, tumultuous, loud and quiet lives.

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‘Smart and raw’ Washington Post
‘Blisteringly current’ Esquire
‘Radically honest’ EW
‘Sally Rooney-esque’ New York Times
‘Brilliant, thoughtful and compelling’ Daily Mail

This is a story that unfurls through a series of conversations – in private with friends, late at night at parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, cynicism, envy and intimacy. From the coast of the Adriatic to the salt spray of Santa Barbara, the narrator of Topics of Conversation maps out her life through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation.

Here, Miranda Popkey tells us the story behind the book.

Buy your copy from Waterstones, Amazon or Hive

Topics of Conversation began life as a Word document titled, improbably enough, “Pudding Cup.” For months that document contained perhaps thirty words. Little more than an opening sentence (“A friend of mine got divorced and then, for a while, she went to live with my parents”—a sentence that survived almost unchanged until a very late draft, the first-born darling I was most loathe to kill), and, appropriately, a simile involving a pudding cup. (The pudding cup remains—the reader is invited to amuse herself by trying to find it.)
 
Somewhere in those thirty odd words was also my narrator’s voice. I mean this literally: I could hear her speaking the lines in my head. She had a distinct phrasing, a particular style: on the surface, cool and witty, even cutting; beneath that, vulnerable and furious about it. Her anger was the key, what made the appalling things I even then suspected she would think and say understandable; her anger that concealed, as it inevitably does, pain.
 
Since Topics has been published in the US, not a few readers have suggested that my narrator is unlikeable. I can’t argue with them—though, for the record, I quite like her, prickly creature that she is. What I can say is that in the months, in the years before I opened that Word document, I myself had been quite angry, and had been struggling to express this anger, both in person and on the page. In conversation, over text, sure, I could get—let’s say snippy. But even then I quickly found myself pivoting to humor; it seemed like at the very least bad manners (and at the worst potentially quite frightening) to unleash the full force of my fury on an unsuspecting friend over beers on the back porch. And on the page—well, on the page the best my female narrators could do is speak calmly and act purposelessly strange. Alas, it’s no use telling your readers that your protagonist is crashing her car into a tree because she’s angry if that isn’t already apparent. And then, suddenly, this new narrator. Now here was a woman who wasn’t afraid to articulate her rage, even if only to herself.
 
If she can seem unlikable, I think it’s not only because her anger makes her do unkind things, but also because its source is mysterious—as the source of my own anger was and is. In a way that’s the point. The anger I feel, the anger she feels, is too large to have any discrete reason or reasons. It’s the existential anger of being a thinking female human animal, right now—and by right now I mean this century, and the last, and the one before that and so on. It’s the anger of swimming, your arms ever heavier, in a pool where others are drowning. And hey, is that a group of people on inflatable mattresses in the deep end? It’s the anger of Stevie Smith’s poem, “Not Waving but Drowning.” Of knowing the little waves you’re making, with all your flopping around, are also, slowly, pushing someone else under.
 
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In celebration of International Women’s Day (8th March) we’re sharing the amazing books by women we’ve read in the last year. From Nina Renata Aron’s memoir of co-dependency to Hallie Rubenhold’s study of the lives of the five victims of Jack the Ripper, Tayari Jones’ Women’s Prize-winner and Carmen Maria Machado’s National Book Award-shortlisted collection of short stories, here are some (a very tiny fraction!) of the women authors who have thrilled us with their writing recently.

Join us on Twitter & Instagram and let us know what you’re reading this International Women’s Day.

Act of Grace and Olive, Again 

Niamh Murray, Marketing Director

Act of Grace by Anna Krien (coming soon from Serpent’s Tail). A brilliantly plotted literary novel set in Australia and Iraq about trauma, friendship and human connection. Krien’s ability to grapple with the big issues while building really present characters reminded me a bit of Kamila Shamsie’s writing.

Olive, Again. I adored this. Elizabeth Strout’s books keep getting better and with each, she gets closer to the heart of what it is to be human – vulnerable, brittle, inconsistent, learning, failing. A book I found myself slowing down for, the writing is that incredible.

Three Poems, Flèche and Her Body & Other Parties

Helen Conford, Publisher (Profile Books) 

I’ve been reading two works by poets, Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan and Flèche by Mary Jean Chan, alongside Carmen Maria Machado’s collection of short stories, Her Body & Other Parties. All three felt to me like they’d been written by great talents staking new ground in how stories are told, what form they take and who gets to write them. They’re formally ingenious, sensuous and vital, with women’s experience at the heart of serious forms. All kinds of exhilarating.

 

 

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Department of Speculation

Karishma Jobanputra, Intern

Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation is a daring and vivid exploration of what it feels like to live inside a failing marriage and the distinct nature of parenthood. Told in the form of short, poetic fragments that ask the reader to draw their own conclusions and connections, the novel reads as a thoughtful, funny and brilliantly clever series of meditations on daily life, the roles we play and the tension that comes from being an artist but also a woman, wife and mother. Short, poignant and exceptionally easy to hurtle through in one sitting.

 

 

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The Five

Louisa Dunnigan, Editor

I loved The Five by Hallie Rubenhold – the lives of the victims of Jack the 

She didn’t know if she loved her baby… but did she kill her?

A bestselling true crime writer, Nell tells other people’s stories. But there is one story she won’t tell. Ten years ago, she was a teenage mother with a four-year-old she found desperately hard to love. Then the little girl disappeared.

As Nell begins to interview the subject of her next book, a woman convicted of murdering her twin sister, it becomes clear that someone has uncovered her true identity. And they know that Nell didn’t tell the truth about the day her daughter vanished…

Get your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive.

 
Ren Richards: I have ALWAYS loved psychological thrillers. I was reading Kiss the Girls, Silence of the Lambs, and any Stephen King novel I could get my hands on during long family road trips in high school. There are so many different types of stories I’d like to write, and it just came to be that young adult was first in line. But I’m trying to make room for more genres now.
 
MJ: Your main character, Nell, is a true-crime writer. Do you read or watch a lot of true crime? Do you have any favourites?
 
RR: Some people unwind after a long day by listening to some soothing music, or cranking up a rainstorm app on their phone. I turn on true crime shows. Here in America we have a channel called Investigation Discovery – I believe there’s also a UK version as well. They cover everything from murderous spouses to cult leaders to suspicious neighbors. I’ll watch anything they air.
 
MJ: The character of the little lost girl, Reina, is so heartbreaking and complex, and one might say a serial killer in the making! How did you come up with her? Is she based on a child you’ve met?
 
RR: Thankfully, she’s not based on a child I’ve met! On social media, I’m constantly surrounded by my friends’ birth announcements and happy family photos. But then I’ll turn on the news and see that someone has just committed a heinous crime. That criminal started out as a baby, too. That’s always been something I wondered about. I wondered what it would be like for a parent to have a baby, give that baby all the love in the world, and somehow know that their baby isn’t like all the others. What would it be like to have that nettling fear that one day that baby would grow up to do something horrible? This was Nell’s reality. She was constantly wrestling with her desire to love her daughter, while at the same time being terrified of her. She felt a lot of guilt knowing that her life would have been a more peaceful place if she gave her child away, but she still had that sort of hope that her love would be enough. It just never was.
 
MJ: Do you have a favourite crime novel that you wish that you’d written yourself?
 
I don’t know that I could pick a favorite. I’m always very haunted by true crime, like The Darkest Night by Ron Franscell, or Because You Loved Me by M. William Phelps. There’s a really fine balance between telling the story but also trying to honor the real people who were affected by what’s happened. That’s something I respect about true crime authors, and something I wanted to give to Nell. I wouldn’t want to change any of these books by writing them myself. It’s just my hope that I can enter the scene and offer something that readers of all my favorite books will enjoy too.

Follow @mirandajewess on Twitter.

Victor Tuchman – father to two children and husband to Barbra – is finally on his deathbed. His daughter Alex is desperate to unearth the secrets of who he really was . She travels back to New Orleans – mostly to interrogate her tight-lipped mother, Barbra. As Barbra fends off Alex’s questions, she reflects on her tumultuous married life.

Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is frantically buying make up in drug stores and bursting into crying fits. As each family member grapples with their relationship to Victor, they must figure out how to move forward.

* The Washington Post Top Ten Books * Vanity Fair Fall’s best new fiction * People Magazine Book of the Week * Time Magazine Must-Read* BBC Culture Must-read *People Best Books of Fall 2019* Amazon, October Pick * Entertainment Weekly Must-read Books * Refinery29 Favourite Books of October * Vulture Best and Biggest Books to Read This Fall* New York Observer Must-read * USA Today Must-Read * Salon Must-read *

Read the opening below

Buy your copy from Amazon, Waterstones or Hive

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He was an angry man, and he was an ugly man, and he was tall, and he was pacing. Not much space for it in the new home, just a few rooms lined up in a row, underneath a series of slow-moving ceiling fans, an array of antique clocks ticking on one wall. He made it from one end of the apartment to the other in no time at all—his speed a failure as much as it was a success—then it was back to the beginning, flipping on his heel, grinding himself against the floor, the earth, this world.

The pacing came after the cigar and the Scotch. Both had been unsatisfactory. The bottle of Scotch had been sitting too close to the window for months, and the afternoon sun had destroyed it, a fact he had only now just realized, the flavor of the Scotch so bitter he had to spit it out. And he had coughed his way through his cigar, the smoke tonight tickling his throat vindictively. All the things he loved to do, smoking, drinking, walking off his frustrations, those pleasures were gone. He’d been at the casino earlier, hanging with the young bucks. Trying to keep up with them. But even then, he’d blown through that pleasure fast. A thousand bucks gone, a visit to the bathroom stall. What was the point of it? He had so little left to give him joy, or the approximation of it. Release, that was always how he had thought of it. A release from the grip of life.

His wife, Barbra, sat on the couch, her posture tepid, shoulders loose, head slouched, no acknowledgment of his existence. But she glanced at him now as he paused in front of her, and then she dropped her head back down again. Her hair dyed black, chin limping slightly into her neck, but still, at sixty-eight years old, as petite and wide-eyed as ever. Once she had been the grand prize. He had won her, he thought, like a stuffed animal at a sideshow alley. She flipped through an Architectural Digest. Those days are gone, sweetheart, he thought. Those objects are unavailable to you. Their lives had become a disgrace.

Now would have been an excellent time to admit he had been wrong all those years, to confess his missteps in full, to apologize for his actions. To whom? To her. To his children. To the rest of them. This would have been the precise moment to acknowledge the crimes of his life that had put them in that exact location. His flaws hovered and rotated, kaleidoscope-like, in front of his gaze, multicolored, living, breathing shards of guilt in motion. If only he could put together the bits and pieces into a larger vision, to create an understanding of his choices, how he had landed on the wrong side, perhaps always had. And always would.

Instead he was angry about the taste of a bottle of Scotch, and suggested to his wife that if she kept a better home, none of this would have happened, and also would she please stop fucking around with the thermostat and leave the temperature just as he liked. And she had flipped another page, bored with his Scotch, bored with his complaints.

“The guy downstairs said something again,” she said. “About this.” She motioned to his legs. The pacing, they could hear it through the floor.

“I can walk in my own home,” he said.

“Sure,” she said. “Maybe don’t do it so late at night, though.”

He marched into their bedroom, stomping loudly, and plummeted headfirst onto their bed. Nobody loves me, he thought. Not that I care. He had believed, briefly, he could find love again, even now, as an old man, but he had been wrong. Loveless, fine, he thought. He closed his eyes and allowed himself one last series of thoughts: a beach, sand bleached an impenetrable white, a motionless blue sky, the sound of birds nearby, a thigh, his finger running along it. No one’s thigh in particular. Just whatever was available from a pool of bodies in his memory. His imaginary hand squeezed the imaginary thigh. It was meant to cause pain. He waited for his moment of arousal, but instead he began to gasp for air. His heart seized. Release me, he thought. But he couldn’t move, face-down in the pillow, a muffled noise. A freshly laundered scent. A field of lavender, the liquid cool color of the flower, interrupted by bright spasms of green. Release me. Those days are over.

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What is the shape of a life? Is it the things that happen to us? Or is it the stories we tell about the things that happen to us?

From the coast of the Adriatic to the salt spray of Santa Barbara, the narrator of Topics of Conversation maps out her life through two decades of bad relationships, motherhood, crisis and consolation. The novel unfurls through a series of conversations – in private with friends, late at night at parties with acquaintances, with strangers in hotel rooms, in moments of revelation, shame, cynicism, envy and intimacy. Sizzling with enigmatic desire, Miranda Popkey’s debut novel is a seductive exploration of life as a woman in the modern world, of the stories we tell ourselves and of the things we reveal only to strangers.

‘Smart and raw’ Washington Post
‘Blisteringly current’ Esquire
‘Radically honest’ EW
‘Sally Rooney-esque’ New York Times
‘Brilliant, thoughtful and compelling’ Daily Mail

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Read the opening below. Buy your copy from Waterstones, Hive or Amazon (or your local bookshop)

Italy, 2000

From the shore, the sea in three pieces like an abstract painting in gentle motion. Closest to the sand, liquid the pale green of a fer­tile lake. Then a swath of aquamarine, the color you imagine reading the word: aqua as in water, marine as in sea. Finally, a deep blue, the color of pigment, paint squirting fresh from a tin tube. Sylvia Plath, writing in her journal the month she met Ted Hughes, the day, no, the day before: “What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat, luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configura­tion of branches?” No matter the snow, the black trees. The sea was that color, the color of what word blue.

I was reading Plath’s journals that summer because I was twenty-one and daffy with sensation, drunk with it. And for the kind of person who goes straight from a major in English to a graduate pro­gram for study of same—that is, for me—The Jour­nals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962, republished that year, unabridged, counts as pleasure reading. They met, Sylvia and Ted did, in February, and were married in June, on the sixteenth, Bloomsday. That was on purpose. On purpose and a dead giveaway—that they shouldn’t have done it I mean, get married. The youthful symbolism of it. Or one of, anyway. One of the dead giveaways. This was, I was, in Otranto, in August. The sea was three shades of what might have been called blue and I was both on vacation and not.

Camila’s parents were Argentinian psychoana­lysts and I was on vacation in that they had paid for my flight from New York to London and from London to Rome and from Rome to Brindisi and for the train from Brindisi to Otranto and also for the resort at which we were staying, which was tiered and terraced, smooth-walled and all-inclusive and so theoretically I could order, from the lounge chairs, whitewashed and wooden-slatted, as many drinks as I wanted. Though practically I couldn’t because the reason the flights and the train and the room had been paid for, the reason I was with Camila and her parents at all, was that Camila had twin broth­ers, seven years old, and it was my job to mind them. Matteo and Tomás, Tomás smaller and fairer and Matteo, his torso tanned, his hair dark and curly, always getting mistaken for a local. Because of the name, too—Artemisia’s father was Italian, hence the spelling. They lived on the Upper West Side, Artemisia and the boys and her husband, Pablo, they were of Argentinian extraction. Camila and I were friends, was another point in the vacation column.

The first two weeks were the hardest. The boys had a nanny back in New York, also Argentinian, but August was her month off, too, and with me at first they had mutinied, as children will do when surren­dered to new authority. They couldn’t have known precisely why I was reluctant to run from their room to their parents’ room, double-checking what it was they were and weren’t supposed to be eating and watching, how late they were or weren’t supposed to stay up, but they must have sensed it, my reluctance. My all-encompassing apprehension. Artemisia had given me only parameters—not too many sweets; keep an eye on your wine, they’ll try to tip it into their Coca-Cola—and a different woman would have understood this as license, a different woman would have known, from Artemisia’s eye makeup, from the long shift dresses she wore, sleeveless, from the bracelets that busied her arm, slender and golden, from her sunglasses and scarves, from the fact that Pablo had only ever spoken to me directly three times and never about the children, that the rules were mine to make. But I was an uncertain girl, weak of will and ego, and I wanted Artemisia and Pablo to like me, Artemisia in particular because it was imme­diately obvious, from her shift dresses and her brace­lets and also from the way Pablo angled his head when he spoke to me, so that his eyes, and he was already short, were looking not quite at my face, that her approval would be the harder won. I lived in fear, those first few weeks, that Tomás and Matteo, Teo we called him, so that they were Tom and Teo, the o in Tom narrow, closed, so that it sounded not at all like an abbreviation for the American Thomas, would run to their parents and tell them their new nanny was just awful and couldn’t they send her away. Like I was in some knockoff Henry James novel, some knockoff Merchant Ivory adaptation of same.

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Open Up is a book that explores how our bank balance affects everything from our personal lives to our professional lives, and shows us how the power of conversation can ultimately change our relationship with money. Our intern Tamara Southward delves into some of Alex Holder’s most important points to keep in mind when it comes to finances.

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1. Don’t make money a bigger beast than it needs to be. You are not your salary, your last pay rise, or where you can and can’t afford to go on holiday. Those numbers aren’t so shaming that they must never be known by anyone, and like a woman’s age or someone’s weight, by bottling them in we make them more shameful.

2. Don’t ignore your debt. Work it out, categorise it, and figure out what is costing you the most. Whilst the emotional burden that comes with debt can at times surpass the financial burden, any debt issue is solvable with a plan, by opening up to someone close to you, and by coming to the realisation that you have the ability to get yourself out.

3. Topics that fall into what Holder refers to as a “gauche conversation pile” are the ones we can actually learn from. We often have conversations that feel inauthentic, due to money-related aspects that are obviously missing. Talking to each other can teach us what to do, what not to do, and how to better understand our relationship with money.

4. Being honest with yourself and with others is the first step to overcoming embarrassment and not letting money negatively impact personal relationships and life choices. If you can’t afford a certain restaurant, you need to communicate that to your friends.

5. …and speaking of embarrassment, by being more open about money, we harbour less shame. Shame is typically something we go through alone, and opening up about your finances can prevent it from gnawing away at you. If we can gradually lift the stigma off mental health, then we can lift the stigma off money

6. “Awkwardness stands in the way of knowledge and possible liberation.” The more we share our stories and situations with one another, the more we learn. In a society where there is an evident lack of public conversation about money, the best we can do is start with personal conversations.

Holder aims to begin an imperative dialogue that isn’t happening enough in real life, and encourages us to tackle financial issues together by shedding light on what has long been an elephant in the room.

Her head was bowed, and the hands braced on the chair arms were not like hands at all, but the dry dark claws of a bird…

The Macnamara sisters hadn’t been seen for months before anyone noticed. It was Father Timoney who finally broke down the door, who saw what had become of them. Berenice was sitting in her armchair, surrounded by religious tracts. Rosaleen had crawled under her own bed, her face frozen in terror. Both had starved themselves to death.

Francesca Macnamara returns to Dublin after decades in the US, to find her family in ruins. Meanwhile, Detectives Vincent Swan and Gina Considine are convinced that there is more to the deaths than suicide. Because what little evidence there is, shows that someone was watching the sisters die…

Poignant and haunting, A Famished Heart is the first in a powerful new trilogy set in 1980’s Dublin, exploring the power of the Catholic Church and the powerlessness of unmarried women.

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Nicola White won the Scottish Book Trust New Writer Award in 2008 and in 2012 was Leverhulme Writer in Residence at Edinburgh University. Her novel The Rosary Garden won the Dundee International Book Prize, was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Prize, and selected as one of the four best debuts by Val McDermid at Harrogate. She grew up in Dublin and New York, and now lives in the Scottish Highlands.

MJ: In writing about the deaths in A Famished Heart, how much inspiration did you take from real life?

NW: Each of the books takes a real-life case as its starting point – not in the sense of retelling those stories, but of taking elements from those circumstances to create something new. A Famished Heart is embedded in the real story of a family who starved themselves to death in a small suburban house in Dublin in 2000, but also has echoes of the murder of Angelika Kluk in a church in Glasgow in 2006. Certain true stories seem to stick in me, like thorns, until I find a way to remake them as fiction.
 
MJ: What have you found the hardest part about writing a crime novel? And the most enjoyable? 

NW: I think the biggest challenge is how much to reveal, and how much to conceal. I don’t want to bamboozle a reader, but I don’t want to bore them either with obvious signposting. The bit I enjoy best is the view from those sunny foothills before you even start to get anything down; the delicious distractions of research and the conviction that this time – yes THIS time – you are going to write something astonishingly perfect.
 
MJ: Which character do you think readers will most respond to? 

NW: Am I allowed to say all of them? Too greedy? The book is told through the eyes of three different characters – the melancholy detective Vincent Swan, the hard-nosed actress Francesca Macnamara, reluctantly dragged back to Ireland by her family’s tragedy, and the hapless, bullied priest Father Timoney. I love their every flaw.
 
MJ: Which crime writers most inspire you?

NW: I read a lot of Simenon’s Maigret books as a teenager, which gave me a taste for atmosphere and Gitanes. Patricia Highsmith was the first writer who seduced me into cheering for the murderer, which blew my mind, and of contemporary writers I particularly enjoy the spookiness and depth of Tana French and the emotional power of Denise Mina. But ask me on another day and I’ll name a different line-up. There’s an intimidating amount of talent out there.
 
MJ: Tell us a little bit about your next book, The Rosary Garden.

NW: The next book is set two years on from the first, in 1984, a particularly volatile time in Ireland’s social history. The story open with the discovery of a murdered newborn in the grounds of an exclusive convent school, and leads Swan down a labyrinthine path involving an earlier case of infanticide.

Follow @mirandajewess and @whiteheadednic on Twitter.

‘Hypnotic … a bold feminist novel’ @tls
‘Arrestingly self-assured … hard to resist’ @guardian 

Now longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso has bewitched a hoard of readers since its hardback publication a year ago. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Zorka. She had eyebrows like her name.

1980s Prague. For Jana, childhood means ration queues and the smell of boiled potatoes on the grey winter air. But just before Jana’s seventh birthday, a raven-haired girl named Zorka moves into her building.

As the first cracks appear in the communist regime, Zorka teaches Jana to look beyond their building, beyond Prague, beyond Czechoslovakia … and then, Zorka disappears. Jana, now an interpreter in Paris for a Czech medical supply company, hasn’t seen her in a decade.

As Jana and Zorka’s stories slowly circle across the past and present, 1980s Prague, the suburbs of 1990s Wisconsin and the lesbian bars of present-day Paris, they lead inexorably to a mysterious door on the Rue de Prague …

Follow Yelena Moskovich on Twitter and Instagram

THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 

The longlist for the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize has been revealed, featuring an international collection of young, experimental writers offering platforms for under-represented voices and exploring pressing social and world themes across identity, culture and power.

Celebrating the prize’s 15th anniversary, acclaimed Indian feminist writer and novelist Meena Kandasamy, Hong Kong born LGBTQ+ poet Mary Jean Chan, Ukrainian-born artist and writer Yelena Moskovich, Brazilian-British début novelist Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Vietnamese-American novelist Ocean Vuong, and Belgrade-born Orange Prize-winner Téa Obreht are among the 12 authors on the longlist for the £30,000 prize. This year’s longlist comprises seven novels, three poetry collections and two short story collections.
 
Surge by Jay Bernard (Chatto & Windus); Flèche by Mary Jean Chan (Faber & Faber); Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy (Atlantic Books) are in the running alongside Things we say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan (Harvell Secker, Vintage); Black Car Burning by Helen Mort (Chatto & Windus) and Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich (Serpent’s Tail). 

Inland by Téa Obreht (Weidenfeld & Nicolson); Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues Fowler (Fleet) and If All the World and Love were Young by Stephen Sexton (Penguin Random House) have also been longlisted. 

The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay (Atlantic Books); On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Jonathan Cape, Vintage) and Lot by Bryan Washington (Atlantic Books) complete the list. 
 
Worth £30,000, it is one of the UK’s most prestigious literary prizes as well as the world’s largest literary prize for young writers. Awarded for the best published literary work in the English language, written by an author aged 39 or under, the Prize celebrates the international world of fiction in all its forms including poetry, novels, short stories and drama.

The 12 longlisted titles will be judged by a bumper guest panel chaired by Swansea University’s professor Dai Smith CBE, including annual judge professor Kurt Heinzelman, the award-winning writer and founder of Jaipur Literature Festival Namita Gokhale, acclaimed writer and 2011 winner of the Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize  Lucy Caldwell, the British-Ghanaian writer, poet and critic Bridget Minamore, celebrated writer and presenter of BBC Radio 3: The Verb Ian McMillan, and national arts and culture journalist Max Liu.

Guy Gunaratne won the prize in 2029 for his début novel In Our Mad and Furious City (Tinder Press). He said: “Dylan Thomas has always meant a lot to me, he’s a writer I’ve always turned to for inspiration. And after winning this prize, my mind just goes to all the other writers, or aspiring writers, who are writing from a place like where I began. A place like Neasden, somewhere I always thought was a nowhere place. But to make art out of the world, the language, the voices I grew up around I always felt was important.”
 
The shortlist will be announced on 7th April, followed by a British Library Event, London on the 13th May and Winner’s Ceremony held in Swansea on International Dylan Thomas Day, 14th May

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.

Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

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 Dream House as Overture

I never read prologues. I find them tedious. If what the author has to say is so important, why relegate it to the paratext? What are they trying to hide?

Dream House as Prologue

In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the “violence of the archive.” This concept—also called “archival silence”—illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.

The word archive, Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion, “the house of the ruler.” When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted house stories, I’m a sucker for architecture metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it’s a parent deciding what’s worth recording of a child’s early life or—like Europe and its Stolpersteine, its “stumbling blocks”—a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death.

Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive—it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve. Sometimes there is a deliberate act of destruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, especially considering what wasn’t burned. (“I’m getting so hungry to see you.”)1

The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. . . . When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence. 

The complete archive is mythological, possible only in theory; somewhere in Jorge Luis Borges’s Total Library, perhaps, buried under the detailed history of the future and his dreams and half dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934. But we can try. “How does one tell impossible stories?” Hartman asks, and she suggests many avenues: “advancing a series of speculative arguments,” “exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities),” writing history “with and against the archive,” “imagining what cannot be verified.”

The abused woman has certainly been around as long as human beings have been capable of psychological manipulation and interpersonal violence, but as a generally understood concept it—and she—did not exist until about fifty years ago. The conversation about domestic abuse within queer communities is even newer, and even more shadowed. As we consider the forms intimate violence takes today, each new concept—the male victim, the female perpetrator, queer abusers, and the queer abused—reveals itself as another ghost that has always been here, haunting the ruler’s house. Modern academics, writers, and thinkers have new tools to delve back into the archives in the same way that historians and scholars have made their understanding of contemporary queer sexuality reverberate through the past. Consider: What is the topography of these holes? Where do the lacunae live? How do we move toward wholeness? How do we do right by the wronged people of the past 
without physical evidence of their suffering? How do we direct our record keeping toward justice? The memoir is, at its core, an act of resurrection. Memoirists re-create the past, reconstruct dialogue. They summon meaning from events that have long been dormant. They braid the clays of memory and essay and fact and perception together, smash them into a ball, roll them flat. They manipulate time; resuscitate the dead. They put themselves, and others, into necessary context.

I enter into the archive that domestic abuse between partners who share a gender identity is both possible and not uncommon, and that it can look something like this. I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice; measure the emptiness by its small sound.

1 Eleanor Roosevelt to Lorena Hickock, November 17, 1933.

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