Hey, Zoey; You Could Make This Place Beautiful; The Light Eaters – review

 

Review

In brief: Hey, Zoey; You Could Make This Place Beautiful; The Light Eaters – review 

A thoughtful meditation on love and loneliness via an AI-based sex doll; an outstanding debut memoir of infidelity’s aftermath; and a passionate and insightful botanical study

Hannah Beckerman

Sunday 19 May 2024

Sarah Crossan

Hey, Zoey

Sarah Crossan
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp320

When protagonist Dolores discovers an AI-programmed sex doll – Zoey – hidden in the garage, it spells the end of her stilted marriage. With her husband gone, Dolores finds herself talking to Zoey, an interaction that eventually forces her to question her own emotional detachment from the wider world and to confront her past traumas. Highly inventive, astute and funny, Hey, Zoey is a thought-provoking reflection on loneliness, love and the search for connection.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir

Maggie Smith
Canongate, £10.99, pp320 (paperback)

Smith is a celebrated poet (Good Bones went viral) and her outstanding debut memoir recounts the aftermath of her husband’s infidelity and her subsequent divorce. In a series of short vignettes, Smith reveals her emotional acuity and quiet wisdom on love, trust, marriage and motherhood, as well as the nature of creativity and the ramifications of success. As a chronicle of a divorce and a meditation on parenthood, it’s unflinching, insightful and exquisitely written.

The Light Eaters: The New Science of Plants

Zoë Schlanger
4th Estate, £22, pp304

As a reporter on climate science, Schlanger has a long-held fascination with plants and the complexity of their evolution. In her debut book of popular science, she provides both an overview of botanical history as well as the latest research on the way plants interact, compete and survive. Schlanger’s passion for her subject is palpable in a book teeming with fascinating and enlightening insights, from the incredible endurance of fern sperm to the ability of tomato plants to turn caterpillars into cannibals.

THE GUARDIAN

Jane Fonda / Cannes 2024

 

Jane Fonda

Cannes 2024

Alice Munro dies 92

 

Alice Munro
Illustration by David Levine

Canadian writer and Nobel prize winner Alice Munro dies at 92

BIOGRAPHY

• 
  
• 
  
• By Rachel Looker
• BBC News

14 May 2024

Canadian author Alice Munro, a 2013 Nobel Prize winner for literature, has died at the age of 92. 

Munro wrote short stories for more than 60 years, often focusing on life in rural Canada. 

She died at her care home in Port Hope, Ontario on Monday night, her family confirmed to the The Globe and Mail newspaper. 

Munro was often compared to Russian writer Anton Chekhov for the insight and compassion found in her stories.

Her first major break-through came in 1968, when her short story collection, Dance of The Happy Shades, about life in the suburbs of western Ontario, won Canada's highest literary honour, the Governor General's Award.

In 1977, the New Yorker magazine published her first story, Royal Beatings, based on punishments she received from her father when she was young, and she went on to have a long relationship with the publication. 

Munro was born in 1931 in Wingham, Ontario, and her stories are often set in the area, and chronicle the region's people, culture and the way of life. 

She said in an interview with the Guardian in 2013 that she had been "writing personal stories all my life".

"Maybe I write stories that people get very involved in, maybe it is the complexity and the lives presented in them.," she told the Guardian in 2013. "I hope they are a good read. I hope they move people."

Munro won the Man Booker Prize International Prize for lifetime achievement in 2009 before going on to win the Nobel Prize in 2013. 

In a statement at the time, the Man Booker judges said she "brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.

"To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."

Her last collection of stories, "Dear Life" was published in 2012.

BBC

My best shot

Michael Schumacher on the phone in Japan: Jon Nicholson’s best photograph

‘“What do you want me to do?” he said when we got to his trailer. I couldn’t have him just staring at me, so I said: “Maybe pick up the phone?” I don’t know if he called anyone’

Interview by Richard Williams

Wednesday 8 May 2024

Igot into photographing motor sport through my friendship with Damon Hill. When we met, 40 years ago, I had a job in the marketing department of an office supplies manufacturer and he was mostly on a motorbike, either earning his living as a dispatch rider or racing at Brands Hatch. Then he switched to racing on four wheels – his dad, Graham Hill, had been a double Formula 1 world champion. Damon is a really shy bloke and it was important to him to be with people who weren’t just fascinated by his family history. I didn’t know one end of a racing car from the other.

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Leïla Slimani / ‘Salman Rushdie’s books made me feel I could become a writer’

Leïla Slimani

The 

Books

 0f my 

life

Leïla Slimani: ‘Salman Rushdie’s books made me feel I could become a writer’

This article is more than 2 years old

The Lullaby author on identifying with Jo in Little Women, being terrified of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and why we’re still in debt to Steinbeck

Leïla Slimani
Friday 10 May 2024 10.00 BST

My earliest reading memory
Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Journey Through Sweden by Selma Lagerlöf. My grandmother, who grew up in Germany, read it to me when I was a child and then, when I was eight, she gave me a copy that I still have. I, too, dreamed of travelling and escaping, just like that little boy.

My favourite book growing up
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Because we were three girls, our mother was a doctor and my sisters and I liked to identify with the characters in the book. Of course, I was Jo!

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. It was an erotic and spiritual shock. I didn’t understand everything when I read it – I must have been 16 – but it really moved me physically, as if the words were entering me.

The writer who changed my mind
Simone de Beauvoir, whose The Second Sex I borrowed from the library when I was 16. Suddenly, I realised that there was no point in responding to injustice with anger or violence. The best way to fight, for a woman, was knowledge.

The book that made me want to be a writer
All the books by Marguerite Duras, and Écrire in particular, because her passion for literature, for freedom, for the absolute, matched everything I was looking for in life.

The book or author I came back to
John Steinbeck. I had read him at school and didn’t understand him at all. I reread The Grapes of Wrath a few years ago and it was a shock. It’s a real masterpiece, with a staggeringly modern take on capitalism, social violence and migration.

The book I reread
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I read it every year and I always find something different. It’s an unclassifiable book: part novel, part treatise on philosophy and music, part essay. I don’t think a lifetime will be enough to unravel its mystery.

The book I could never read again
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. I don’t know why, but this book terrified me and I’ve never been able to open it again.

The book I discovered later in life
Le Cahier Interdit (The Forbidden Notebook) by Alba de Céspedes. I read it recently and it moved me enormously. It’s the story of an Italian housewife who buys herself a notebook in which she writes down her thoughts and is terrified at the thought of it being found. From the moment she starts writing, she yearns more and more for freedom.

The book I am currently reading
Knife by Salman Rushdie. I’ve admired him ever since I was a child, and his books have carried me along, giving me the feeling that maybe one day I too could become a writer.

 Watch Us Dance by Leïla Slimani is published in paperback by Faber.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/10/leila-slimani-salman-rushdies-books-made-me-feel-i-could-become-a-writer

THE GUARDIAN