Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures / Part eight

 

Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures – part eight

From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer

Sun 8 Jul 2018 09.00 BST

Hera Lindsay Bird

This summer I’m going to Krakow for a residency and I’m taking The Idiot (Vintage) by Elif Batuman, a brain-meltingly funny Bildungsroman about communication breakdowns in the dawn of the internet era. I’ve already read it twice, but can’t bear to be without it. I’ll also be taking See What Can Be Done (Faber) by Lorrie Moore, my favourite short-story writer’s collected nonfiction, and The New Animals (Victoria University Press) by Pip Adam, the breakthrough New Zealand novel of 2017, which is about the generational divide, the fashion industry – and I can’t say more or I’ll ruin the ending. It’s ambitious, compulsive and strange as all hell.

Liv Little

I’m going to New York and Lisbon this summer and I’m going to reread Maya Angelou’s The Heart of a Woman (Virago). I like these simple stories of people’s lives and experiences. The book gives you an insight into the intelligent, passionate woman that Angelou undoubtedly is. I will also take Edith Jackson (Puffin) by Rosa Guy. I have a really old library copy. It’s a story documenting the life of one girl in America with more than her share of life’s challenges. Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun (Oneworld) was the first Jamaica-set book I read. As a Jamaican woman, that was really exciting. It follows three women: two sisters and their mum. The older sister is navigating sexuality and being a queer woman, the younger is battling identity, being a darker-skinned girl, bleaching. It’s really addictive.

Sunny Singh

I’m heading to Savoie in the French Alps. I’m taking South Atlantic Requiem (Arcadia) by Edward Wilson, one of my favourite spy novelists, and I Hid My Voice (Abacus, translated by Sanam Kalantari) by Parinoush Saniee, an Iranian novelist, which is about a patriarchal family that is symbolic of the Iranian regime. I’m rereading George F Kennan’s Realities of American Foreign Policy (WW Norton). Written in 1954, it feels relevant again, given what’s happening now between the US and Russia. I’d also recommend Princess Bari (Periscope, translated by Sora Kim-Russell) by South Korean author Hwang Sok-yong and Thinner Than Skin (Jacaranda) by Uzma Aslam Khan, a Pakistani-American novelist. Both are wonderful in so many ways.

Alex Preston

I’m just back from the inspirational Worlds festival at the National Centre for Writing, Norwich. I came away laden with books and have already finished three of them. The Swan Book (Constable) by Alexis Wright is a devastating dystopian vision of a future Australia. I thought Behold, America (Bloomsbury) by Sarah Churchwell both brilliant and painfully timely, while Panashe Chigumadzi’s These Bones Will Rise Again (Indigo) is an extraordinary and thrilling history of Zimbabwe, culminating in the overthrow of Robert Mugabe. If you holiday anywhere near water, do take along the newly reissued edition of Charles Sprawson’s classic Haunts of the Black Masseur (Vintage). I’ll be rereading it between swims in Hydra in Greece.

Sharon Olds

Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home (Faber), Ian Brown’s The Boy in the Moon and Zadie Smith’s essays Feel Free (Hamish Hamilton) would all make perfect holiday reading. Meanwhile, my own stack of summer books include The Unaccompanied (Faber) by Simon Armitage, Untitled (Mainstream) by Carol Ann Duffy, The Bonniest Companie (Picador) by Kathleen Jamie, Jackself (Picador) by Jacob Polley and Don’t Call Us Dead (Chatto & Windus) by Danez Smith. I’ll be carrying these gorgeous volumes back and forth between my New York City apartment and my old farmhouse upstate.

James Graham

Anyone who has the slightest interest in politics has to read Tim Shipman’s Fallout (William Collins), the follow-up to his thrilling referendum account, All Out War. Holidays may be about escapism, but this fly-on-the-wall unravelling of the 2017 election is car-crash exhilarating. For a made-up thriller, though, I enjoyed returning to the world of George Smiley in John Le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (Penguin) in an age when the global distrust of the cold war feels unnervingly prescient. I’ve also been deeply moved and inspired by Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims (Allen Lane, translated by Michael Lucey), having missed the stage adaptation at the Manchester international festival last year. It’s an autobiographical account of the young gay author’s journey back to his working-class, industrial French town.

Celeste Ng

The stories in Neel Patel’s If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi (Flatiron) are perfect bitesize morsels for the beach, travel legs or quiet moments. Mackenzi Lee’s Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue (Harper Collins)is a giddy whirlwind romp of a love story; I can’t wait for the forthcoming sequel. Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark (Canongate) is an argument for continuing to take action, even when everything feels uncertain, and will send you back home from holiday ready to carry on. I’m going to London with my family, and bringing Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (Text), Justina Ireland’s Dread Nation (Balzer & Bray) – zombies plus the American civil war plus a fierce female fighter – and an advance copy of Edward Carey’s forthcoming Little (Aardvark Bureau), about the girl who grows up to become Madame Tussaud.

Jackie Kay

I’d recommend the recently republished Faces in the Water (Virago) by Janet Frame. She’s a true original, her work is a joy to return to, and it never ages. Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Oneworld) is a great, big, roaring Ugandan epic that follows the trials and tribulations of the Kintu clan from the 1750s to today. I’m taking poetry, too: it travels light and packs a punch. I’ll include Us (Faber) by Zaffar Kunial, a poet whose work thrills me, who makes you return to the origins of things, places, language and people again and again. He’s a poet who takes traditions seriously but makes of them something entirely new – a must. I’m taking Gerda Stevenson’s fabulous Quines (Luath) – the old Aberdonian word for women – which takes us through a vivid, moving history of outstanding Scottish women in poetry. It’s a groundbreaker of a book, rich and resonant, strong of voice. I’m going to go back to Eigg, an inspiring island run by its own people, and I’ll daytrip to Muck and Canna just cos I canny not.

Maria Balshaw

My first recommendation is The Wood: The Life and Times of Cockshutt Wood (Doubleday) by John Lewis Stempel. It is a glorious evocation of the rhythm and dynamism of an English woodland, connecting us to a much longer timeframe: a needed balance to the working, urban lives most of us have. My second is Audre Lorde’s Your Silence Will Not Protect You (Silver), the collected essays of this important poet, writer and intersectional feminist. It is a book of our times, not least because it reminds us that current issues of gender, race and power have been being contested, here in incandescent and penetrating prose and poetry, since the 1960s.

I will be spending my summer break being very quiet indeed in the Kent countryside. I shall take a pile of books including Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (Penguin), the posthumous memoir by this vital cultural theorist; Colm Tóibín’s The House of Names (Viking); Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (Canongate); and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (Fourth Estate). I’ll also be remembering Manchester, my home until last year, with Dave Haslam’s wonderful biography, Sonic Youth Slept on My Floor (Constable), and rereading Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Gollancz) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage), to feel again their potent, timely power.

Olivia Laing

The Stopping Places: A Journey Through Gypsy Britain (Chatto & Windus) by Damian Le Bas is the perfect accompaniment to any holiday in the British Isles. It maps a secret world, and made me want to live outdoors, at least for a summer. I’m going to Folegandros in August, and I plan to take Lara Pawson’s jagged, stunning meditation on war, violence and love, This Is the Place to Be (CB Editions). I’ve read it once and it was like drinking lightning; I can’t wait to rip through it again.

Guy Gunaratne

This summer I’m staying home so I’ll be reading around current erratic obsessions, mostly translated fiction and Trump. The recently published Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi sounds mad and tricksy. Moroccan writer and film-maker Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital, a short hallucinatory novel is appearing for the first time in English translation by Lara Vergnaud. Also, Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider, which deals with class and race post-Trump, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting new translations of Brazilian writer Machado de Assis. A new complete collection will be published later this month translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson.

THE GUARDIAN

 

BOOK OF THE DAY

In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne review – grime-infused tinderbox debut

Desire, desperation, fear and the slashed rhythms of Wiley and Skepta run through this tale of three young men in a jagged London suburb

Shahidha Bari
Fri 13 Apr 2018 07.29 BST

Early on in Guy Gunaratne’s novel, a group of young men gather for a game of football in a dilapidated outdoor sports court, the players taking their places, emerging like a constellation of stars. They drift over from every corner of the Stones estate as word of the game spreads: the gang of “Serbian kids from down Cricklewood”, the “Somali boys”, then Wayne, Dan, Younes and Nico, who “brings his dog”. It’s an unremarkable scene, doggedly ordinary even, but Gunaratne meticulously details their greetings (that slightly awry “side-hug and a palm on the back”), their small acknowledgments and terse exchanges. Beneath it all are the quiet crosscurrents of schoolboy loyalties and the unspoken fellowship that comes of growing up in a place with limited opportunities for escape. And so the football match in the caged court makes for a moment of peace in a city simmering with social tensions.

In Our Mad and Furious City is Gunaratne’s debut and it is a tinderbox of a novel. It asks what constitutes a community, knowing all the while how fragile communities are and how febrile they can feel. Unfolding over the course of 48 hours, the story focuses on three young men – Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf – living in a surburban north London housing estate during a summer of unrest. The brutal murder of an off-duty soldier by a black man, city riots, and anxieties about radicalised Muslim youths form the shadowy backdrop to the book, locating it in a recognisably recent past. This is that uneasy kind of fiction, heightened in tension, that hovers on the fringes of real events.

What makes this world bearable are friendships, and Gunaratne ensures that they feel precious. Selvon, Yusuf and Ardan are, in his telling phrase, “close without touch”. He grants them all the desire, desperation and fear of youth. Selvon – named, in a nice nod, after Sam Selvon, author of The Lonely Londoners – lives on the boundaries of the estate, lusts after the delectable “Missy”, and expertly spits through his teeth. Yusuf is more vulnerable, inwardly and outwardly: “always looks cold, always with his hands in his pockets, using his elbows to point”. The ambling Ardan absently dreams of making grime music, forming “bars” in his head, his thoughts mingling with rhymes.

Gunaratne writes their world as though he were holding his breath, afraid it might crack open and come apart at any moment. The book is a tense read about young men with foreclosed futures, the dread of violence and the sense of alienation they feel, written from the inside. He has a sure sense of the outside, too: the jagged surburban edges of London that are weatherbeaten, cluttered, towering and damp, “full of absent people stuck between bus stops and bookies”. He can delineate the particulars of a place while making it seem like a neighbourhood you might know, if only seen in passing.

Selvon, Yusuf and Ardan's interior monologues are vividly punctuated by 'ennet', 'nuttan' and 'yuno's'

When Selvon, an amateur athlete, runs his route through the estate, it is as though he is beating out the claustrophobic bounds of the novel, noting the tower blocks, the market, the balconies crowded with satellite dishes. It’s a smart device and has the effect of sealing us into this closed world. The narrative, too, passes like a baton between five different estate residents, their lives increasingly overlapping, connections emerging. Alongside Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf are Caroline, an Irish immigrant single mother still haunted by home, and ageing Nelson, born in Montserrat, who is frail but whose failing memory holds images of Teddy boys and Mosley marches. They are, all of them, “those with elsewhere in their blood”, in Gunaratne’s economical phrase.

He isn’t always convincing in voicing the older narrators – Caroline is too prone to an Irish “aye”, and Nelson’s thoughts are too frequently punctuated with a lamenting West Indian “Lord …” Gunaratne’s ear is better tuned to the language in which Selvon, Yusuf and Ardan live. Their interior monologues are vividly punctuated by “ennet”, “nuttan” and “yuno”s. (They joke about “bants”, too, so it’s disappointing that Gunaratne’s relentlessly sober range never reaches to humour.) The phrase “allow it”, in particular, runs through the book like a refrain, as though it were an expression of self-pacification, a kind of counselling to let things pass, awful as they may be.

We are never outside this language as Gunaratne keeps us resolutely in his characters’ idiom. It makes his prose choppy, sometimes pounding with a kind of systolic-diastolic pressure. This makes sense because, as Ardan explains, “Grime is our thing”. The slashed and striated rhythms of Wiley and Skepta are the novel’s natural soundtrack, and make themselves heard in the characters’ compulsively present-tense self-narrating style. “I look out over the view,” Ardan tells us. “The morning tempo is changing and the sky is greying up.” The book captures a feeling of foreboding, the sense of a future that is uncertain and volatile. Gazing out across the city, Ardan finds a fleeting kind of peace. Gunaratne, too, seems to be searching for redemption amid the ruins.

• In Our Mad and Furious City is published by Headline. 

THE GUARDIAN