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| Illustration: Jennifer Tapias Derch |
Lara Feigel
This is a brilliant summer for books by women: novels, memoirs and poems that address the difficult questions in women’s lives from an intimate perspective, but also with an unsentimental, distancing acuity and a preparedness to invent new forms for writing and for living. Three that seem to speak to each other in this respect are Deborah Levy’s game-changing The Cost of Living (Hamish Hamilton), Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (Faber) and Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (Harvill Secker). I also love Kathyrn Maris’s new poetry collection The House With Only an Attic and a Basement (Penguin), which tackles motherhood and family life with a comic thoughtfulness that’s unusually open to cruelty and that can rise and fall easily between the heroic and the bathetic. And right now, the book that’s really gripping me, and making me start again in thinking about many things, is Silver Press’s reprint of Nell Dunn’s 1965 Talking to Women, a series of artfully transcribed conversations with 10 of her friends. What’s striking, reading this, is how much has changed but also how little. And, unusually, the lack of change doesn’t feel depressing, reading these interviews, because there’s a pleasure in feeling so connected to these women across the decades. Also, there’s a kind of satisfaction in feeling that it’s just as important to keep asking the questions she asked about how we live, and why, and it makes me grateful that we have Cusk and Heti and Levy and Maris still asking them.
Aminatta Forna
In Calypso (Little, Brown), David Sedaris’s essays marry meditations on family, suicide, grief and mortality with the hazards of bodily functions and frequent travel for his massively popular public readings. Sedaris is as much standup comic as writer, making this a great audio and one for the car journey. I’m currently reading The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer, highly relevant in this fourth wave feminism moment and quietly gripping. I shall also be packing What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky (Tinder) by Lesley Nneka Arimah, whose New Yorker short stories I have enjoyed. Tsitsi Dangaremba’s This Mournable Body (Graywolf) isn’t out until August, but I shall read it before summer’s end.
Mohsin Hamid
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile (Penguin) really made me think about how I think. I am also rereading Homer’s Iliad (the Robert Fitzgerald translation) and making my way through Susan Wise Bauer’s History of the Ancient World (Norton).
Yuval Noah Harari
The Road to Unfreedom (Bodley Head) by Timothy Snyder is a brilliant and disturbing analysis of the rise of authoritarianism in Russia, Europe and the US in the second decade of the 21st century. Essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the political crisis currently engulfing the world.
In Enlightenment Now (Allen Lane), Steven Pinker extols the amazing achievements of modernity, and demonstrates that humankind has never been so peaceful, healthy and prosperous. There is of course much to argue about, but that’s what makes this book so interesting.
Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, will be published on 30 August by Jonathan Cape.
David Hare
I’m sure Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room is going to be great – at least if The Flamethrowers is anything to go by. In Ma’am Darling, 99 Excerpts from the Life of Princess Margaret (4th Estate), Craig Brown achieves the impossible by finding a tone in which to write about monarchy. Not bitchy, not snide, not angry, but not fawning nor deferential either. Just funny.
Jess Kidd
I am rollicking through Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin, which is one of the funniest, most twisted and freshest things I’ve read in a long time. It follows the fortunes of Mona, who cleans houses and falls for a man she calls Mr Disgusting. Beagin combines deep compassion and irreverent humour to create characters with nasty, wonderful, human flaws. Helen Barrell’s Fatal Evidence, Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor and the Dawn of Forensic Science is an engrossing read. It follows the career of Taylor, a remarkable scientist who gave evidence at the trial of William Palmer, “The Rugeley Poisoner”, pioneered the study of forensic medicine and let Charles Dickens nose around his laboratory. Barrell explores Taylor’s (occassionally bizarre) cases, his public and private persona and his wide-ranging interests, which included geology and photography. Her description of the ways in which forensic experiments evolved is as fascinating as the courtroom dramas they accompanied.
Deborah Levy
Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Silver) collects Audre Lorde’s essays and poems together for the first time in the UK. I look forward to getting stuck in to Talking to Women, Nell Dunn’s 1964 conversation about sex, money, work and art with a group of friends – including the writer Ann Quin and pop artist Pauline Boty.
My love affair with the explosive, erotic, modernist poetry of Apollinaire is the one enduring passion in my life. Many of his best poems were written when he was a soldier fighting on the front lines in WW1. It was Apollinaire who invented the word, Surrealist. In Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire (NYRB), Ron Padgett’s translation from the French (Padgett wrote the poems for the bus driver poet in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson) is pitch perfect and dazzling.
I will also reread four books I initially read very fast, mostly because the skill of the writing itself is the main event in all of them: The Years by Annie Ernaux, Kudos by Rachel Cusk, The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg (Daunt, translated by Dick Davis) and Three Poems by Hannah Sullivan (Faber).
Hilary Mantel
If you have not already met The Secret Barrister (Macmillan), he or she makes an entertaining and acerbic holiday companion for those who don’t switch off their brains in summer; it seems our resource-starved legal system is poised on the brink of not working at all. Tessa Hadley’s short stories, Bad Dreams (Cape), are simple and artful and leave you wanting more. Didier Eribon’s memoir Returning to Reims (Allen Lane, translated by Michael Lucey) is a haunting book, fiercely political and deeply personal; I shall be thinking about it this summer and for many seasons to come.
Paul Mason
Chantal Mouffe’s For a Left Populism (Verso) is influencing left parties as they enter government, from Greece to Portugal to Mexico. It is a beach-sized introduction to a major left thinker of the 21st century. Mike Davis’s Old Gods, New Enigmas (Verso) is a challenging re-exploration of Marx in the light of the atomisation of class struggle, the climate crisis and the centrality of cities to social justice struggles. Patrick Langley’s debut novel Arkady comes beautifully presented by Fitzcarraldo. What’s not to like about a book where revolutionaries take over a city in the north of England?
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