Showing posts with label Benjamin Wood. Show all posts

Sunday, June 21, 2026

70 brilliant books for the summer

A person sits reading by a pond, with another person visible in the background among lush green trees

From dynamite debuts to must-read memoirs and magical children’s fiction, here’s our selection of this year’s hottest holiday reads

70 brilliant books for the summer

Leading authors Mark Haddon, Samantha Harvey, Zadie Smith select their favourites

Justine Jordan, David Shariatmadari, Imogen Russell Williams and Guardian staff
Sat 13 Jun 2026

Fiction

Transcription

Ben Lerner

A middle-aged writer returns to his college townto record the final interview with his 90-year-old intellectual mentor. But he’s broken his phone, and doesn’t seem able to confess that it’s not recording … this anxiety dream of a beginning leads us into a series of sharp insights into family, memory, inheritance and storytelling – all that it means to be human, and how smartphones are changing our sense of the world at every level.

Review / Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

Seascraper

by Benjamin Wood

You don’t think you need a novella about a folk-singing shrimp fisher living with his mother on a fictional stretch of isolated coast until you read Benjamin Wood’s Booker-longlisted fifth novel, Seascraper. Wood conjures wonders from this unlikely material in a tale so richly atmospheric you can almost taste the tang of brine and inhale the sea fog.

The Director to Flesh / The 25 best books of 2025

Random House, Penguin Group The book covers of Will There Ever Be Another You; Big Kiss, Bye-Bye; What We Can Know (Credit: Random House/ Penguin Group)

Random House, Penguin Group

From a "richly atmospheric" novella to a "virtuosic" debut – this is the very best fiction of the year, as chosen by BBC journalists.

The Director to Flesh: The 25 best books of 2025

12 December 2025

Rebecca Laurence and Lindsay Baker

Simon and Schuster, Scribner, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Credit: Simon and Schuster, Scribner, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group)

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann

This part-fictionalised historical novel from the bestselling German-language novelist and playwright Kehlmann explores themes of art, power and complicity through the complex life of one of the great Austrian film-makers of the Weimer era, GW Pabst. Pabst flees the Nazi regime to LA, then fails to find success amid Hollywood's Golden Age (Kehlmann imagines that he is ghosted by Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks, actresses he discovered). Upon Pabst's return to his homeland, he is hired by Goebbels to make films for the Reich's Ministry of Propaganda. "The crux of The Director is whether it's weakness or necessity that makes Pabst compromise", writes the LRB. "A book about dreams and of dreams within dreams…", writes The New York Times, "The Director itself is a marvellous performance – not only supple, horrifying and mordantly droll, but fluidly translated and absolutely convincing." (RL)

Benjamin Wood / ‘John Fowles’s The Magus was so frustrating I threw it at the wall’

Benjamin Wood
Photo by Marc Sethi

The

Books

0f my

life

Benjamin Wood: ‘John Fowles’s The Magus was so frustrating I threw it at the wall’

The author on the Steinbeck novel that moved him to tears, how becoming a father inspired him to reread Marilynne Robinson, and the culinary comforts of James M Cain

Benjamin Wood

27 March 2026

My earliest reading memory
When I was eight, my mother bought me Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson. I grew up thinking he was the same Bob Wilson who played in goal for Arsenal and presented sport on ITV. That wasn’t true, but it has never dampened my appreciation of this brilliant rhyming picture book, which ought to be reissued to inspire more kids to read. My sons adore it.

My hero / Jeff Buckley by Benjamin Wood

Jeff Buckley in Atlanta, in August 1994 Photograph: David Tonge

My hero: Jeff Buckley by Benjamin Wood

I never had the chance to see Buckley perform but his matchless gift remains an inspiration and a medicine – when I feel estranged, the sureness of his voice in “What Will You Say” is what I return to

Benjamin Wood
Sat 11 Jul 2015 12.00 BST

here is a moment, six minutes 45 seconds into Jeff Buckley’s live recording of the song “What Will You Say”, that leaves splinters in my blood. The melodic tension that’s been simmering in the verse and chorus escalates into a jagged instrumental break, with Buckley jouncing his guitar strings till they squeal and blur. And then, as if punching through a door to strangle you, the song reaches a crisis point: “Father, do you hear me?” Buckley screams. “Do you know me? / Did you even care? / What will you say / when you take my place? // Well, it’s so funny now, / I just don’t feel like I’m a man / What will you say?” These last four words he sings in an octave so high that ordinary vocal cords would snap under the strain. The purity of the note he hits seems as impossible today as it did the first time I encountered it. Against the context of Jeff’s childhood (he barely knew his father, the cult folk singer Tim Buckley, from whom he inherited an extraordinary vocal range), these few seconds of his music resonate with agony and beauty, as only great art can.

I never had the chance to see him perform this song or any other. He drowned in Wolf River Harbor, Memphis, in 1997, a year before I’d even heard his name, when a friend gave me his album, Grace, and said: “Thank me later.” I was 17 then, writing heartfelt songs of my own, and struggling (as my friend intuited) with the aftermath of my parents’ separation. After Grace, I did not so much wish to be Buckley as I hoped to wander in his shadow and have some fleck of his talent fall on me. He had a matchless gift that remains an inspiration and a medicine. When I feel estranged, it’s the sureness of his voice in “What Will You Say” that I return to.

• Benjamin Wood’s second novel, The Ecliptic, is published by Scribner

THE GUARDIAN