The bottom has fallen out of my world several times now, but it’s much worse watching disaster strike someone you love. When my husband suffered a near-fatal stroke, it was inevitable I’d end up writing about his road to rehab. Grit and humour were what they said he’d need, and Scousers like me laugh at anything. We also cry and argue a lot. I’m on a mission to cheer people on and hand them arms as they battle through hard times. A life, or a state of mind, can change in a moment, and that’s what I read and write about.
Joe Faber is a funny guy, good with his hands, and great with words – until the stroke which leaves him severely disabled. But this is more than his story. His wife draws up a manifesto and decides to act like an optimist. Their daughter turns trouble into music. Her fiancé, innocent, positive and daft, and will do his best to keep them all on target. Artist Joe is a close observer of the world, but how does the world see him now? Will Fran have to give up the job she loves? And wedding plans are fraught.
There’s heartbreak and absurdity along the way; but humour is the family’s greatest asset in the drive to get Joe back on his own two feet.
I was hungry for a great piece of comic writing when a friend handed me this book, and it delivered so much more than laughter.
Once I’d tuned in to the language, I ended up shambling through 30s London alongside impecunious painter Gulley Jimson. A humble man, driven by a holy need to make the sort of art which, it turns out, nobody wants, he encounters a world of squalor and beauty, both physical and moral.
I grew to love him and his daily observations on the play of weather and light on the Thames, which form a sort of sketchbook. As Jimson’s physical health declines, he grips beauty wherever he finds it. Theroux, Lessing, and Updike all rated this author.
The Horse's Mouth, famously filmed with Alec Guinness in the central role, is a searing portrait of the artistic temperament.
Gulley Jimson is the charming, impoverished painter who cares little about the conventional values of his day. His unfailing belief that he must live and paint according to his intuition without regard for the cost to himself or to others, makes him a man of great, if sometimes flawed, vision.
But with an admirable drive for creation comes an astonishing hunger for destruction. Is he a great artist? A has-been? Or an exhausted, drunken ne'er-do-well?
I’m a sucker for a pun, and this is another witty book about a serious subject, so it’s right up my street. Milton it ain’t—I
romped through it at a time when I was desperate for entertainment. Aging is explored with a sense of freshness and fun as a teenager goes
to work in an old people’s home.
A convincing voice, well observed, and ultimately poignant as our protagonist gets closer to understanding age and the elderly—whilst growing up herself. I love the fact that the jokes are never laboured. It’s coming to us all…
Working in a care home is not really a suitable job for a schoolgirl but 15-year-old Lizzie Vogel went for it. It just seemed too exhausting to commit to being a full-time girlfriend or a punk (it is the 1970s after all), plus she has some knowledge of old people. They're not suited to granary bread, and you mustn't compare them to toddlers, but she doesn't know there's…
This took me way outside my own experience. I’m drawn to books that bring together different areas of knowledge, and here, a memoir about bereavement intertwines with the training of a goshawk and a preoccupation with the writer T E White.
I admired its rhythm as one strand was plaited over the next. It meant that a book which talks a lot about patience, pain, and stillness never lost its momentum, and I kept reading. I knew nothing about falconry, with its ancient history and medieval-sounding language, so it ticked my ‘new vocabulary’ box, too.
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)
The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of…
I love the delightful daftness, the sheer infantile silliness of this autobiography; it’s proof you can preserve your inner child well into maturity. Words are like Play-Doh to our Bob.
The comedian’s early years were marked by sadness, but he celebrates the power of having a laugh and hanging out with your mates. It made perfect sense to me to learn that the book came about because of a brush with heart failure.
It’s one of those books I dip into for a quick fix.
This classic satire gripped me even though I only half-understood it.
Whatever disaster befell my family, my mother used to assert it was
surely for the best; so when, as an eye-rolling teenager, I found this
on the reading list—Mum’s philosophy, tested in the real world—I was hooked.
Voltaire
drags his dopey characters, led by the philosopher Pangloss, through
every type of horror, war, famine, and earthquake. World events now keep
driving me back to his conclusion: in an age of folly and random
misfortune, the best you can do is to dig your garden. Tend your own
patch.
OK, the eighteenth century was racist, sexist, and colonial… but
perspective is what Voltaire is all about. Didn’t quite cure me of
optimism, btw.
In Candide, Voltaire threw down an audacious challenge to the philosophical views of the Enlightenment to create one of the most glorious satires of the eighteenth century. His eponymous hero is an innocent young man whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own fortune. As he and his various companions roam over the world, an outrageous series of disasters - earthquakes, syphilis, the Inquisition - sorely test…
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.
Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? A dizzying ride between past and present, the novel unravels these mysteries, just as Eddie has decided to return to society after two decades on the streets, with the help of Jane, a woman whose intelligence and integrity rival his own. Will he succeed, or is it too late?
In the tradition of Graham Greene, this is a book about love, betrayal, and life’s heavenly music
“Crazy Eddie” is a homeless man who inhabits two squares of pavement in front of a bank in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. In this makeshift office, he panhandles and dispenses his peerless wisdom. Well-educated, fiercely intelligent with a passionate interest in philosophy and a profound love of nature, Eddie is an enigma for the locals. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? Though rumors abound, none capture the unique worldview and singular character that led him to withdraw from the perfidy and corruption of human beings. Just as Eddie has…
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