I’m a Professor of Creative Writing at York St John’s University in York, UK. I’ve been published as a poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. My list reflects perhaps some eclectic tastes, but what unites these books is a fascination with engaging with the world in a way that de-centers the human, and I have done this throughout my writing career. I love the natural world, growing plants, and watching the seasons change. I am also curious about time and memory and how we perceive these. I am drawn towards science fiction, but more the speculative end of that spectrum, where writers explore otherness and possible worlds.
Vandermeer is well known for his science fiction ‘southern reach’ trilogy, particularly Annihilation. This extraordinary novel is set in the same universe, but I found it quite different.
I loved the female narrator, who lives in a blasted, mysteriously bleak world with her companion, Wick. She comes across Borne, a strange, plant-like creature she cares for. Borne develops the ability to communicate and has a delicate, alien intelligence. As he grows and evolves, so does our understanding of Rachel and her past.
This book was a revelation to me because although it’s a wild and alien world, its heart is about maternal kindness and nurturing. Borne is a quirky and lovable creature (Vandermeer said his cat partly inspired it), but also mysterious and other. The novel questions this idea of otherness and what it means to be human.
The dark, dangerous, funny and uplifting new novel from the author of Annihilation, the inspiration for the major motion picture directed by Alex Garland.
'Neither of us had control of our monsters anymore'
In a ruined city of the future, Rachel scavenges a strange creature from the fur of a despotic bear.
She names him Borne.
He reminds her of her homeland lost to rising seas, but her lover Wick is intent on rendering him down as raw material for the special drugs he sells. Nothing is quite what it seems, and if…
Another alien novel, but one of the strangest and most profound I’ve read. Isserly drives around in her van in the wilds of Scotland, picking up hitchhikers. But she is no ordinary woman; in fact, she isn’t human at all, but a modified alien tasked with finding humans to be turned into fast food for an alien world.
It is a darkly ironic, strange, and disturbing novel that asks questions about how we treat animals, cleverly reversing its language to refer to humans as aliens and aliens as humans. It felt to me that this book was able to touch on many of the evils of capitalism, not just mass farming but also the treatment of women and women’s bodies. But it doesn’t do this in an obvious way.
It’s an alien novel that’s low on overt science fiction; it’s gritty and real, emotional and lonely. I wasn’t the same after reading it.
Tasha and the Biologist is the second book in the "A Better Man" series. It's a contemporary romance about second chances, two lonely birders, and the healing power of love.
Tasha Moore is a visiting nurse with a family secret. She just went through a bad breakup. Caleb Drexel is…
This is an amazing nonfiction book about how octopuses have evolved in parallel with humans but along a very different evolutionary path. I’m so interested in the idea of ‘otherness.’ The notion is that there could be alien life forms that are hugely intelligent. Still, their bodies and their perceptual organs are so different that we can’t fully communicate with them and appreciate that intelligence.
The most fascinating aliens are right here on Earth, in the oceans, and can teach us profound lessons about consciousness. Octopus arms can sense and perceive independently, like multiple brains. Octopuses can’t perceive color but can change color to both camouflage and communicate. A book like this de-centers the human, and I love being knocked off my axis.
'Brilliant' Guardian
'Fascinating and often delightful' The Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 ROYAL SOCIETY SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE
What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?
In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself - a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared.
Tracking the mind's fitful development from unruly clumps of seaborne cells to…
I’ve always been interested in physics, but I have no talent for maths, and like lots of creative types, I find science tough. But not with the engaging voice of Italian physicist Rovelli. This blew my mind and blew the lid off of the universe.
Rovelli explains the fundamentals of physical laws beautifully but then introduces the quantum realm, where time and space are not at all what you thought they were. This isn’t unsettling to me, but it is profoundly beautiful. Time may not be linear at all, we simply have no other way of perceiving it, which means moments in time I felt were lost, are not at all if you look at them another way.
But it also reinforces the idea we must exist in the moment and savor it, as, in a sense, that’s all we have.
INDEPENDENT, ECONOMIST, TELEGRAPH, GUARDIAN, NEW SCIENTIST, EVENING STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
Everything you need to know about modern physics, the universe and our place in the world in seven enlightening lessons
'Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking'
These seven short lessons guide us, with simplicity and clarity, through the scientific revolution that shook physics in the twentieth century and still continues to shake us today. In this beautiful and mind-bending introduction to…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of…
After I first visited the extraordinary coastal landscape of Dungeness, I sought out this book. This is a nature journal. Artist and director Derek Jarman lived in Dungeness on the Kent coast (UK) in an old fisherman’s cottage painted black with striking yellow windows.
In the late 1980s, he wrote a journal in the salt breezes and shadows of two nuclear power stations. This journal charted his cultivation of the cottage’s salvaged garden, his battle with AIDS, and his reflections on the culture at the time.
What drew me into this book is its beautifully engaging voice and its sensitivity to the changing seasons. The garden itself, which I have visited several times, has no fences or boundaries, and this blends into the landscape. This lack of distinction and separation typifies Jarman’s generous artistic spirit.
Derek Jarman tells the story of his discovery that he is HIV+ and, in a series of flashbacks, looks at his life - his difficult relationship with his father, his discovery of his homosexuality and the dramatic exposure of his first homosexual relationship, his university days and his coming out at art school in the company of contemporaries such as David Hockney and Patrick Proctor. He goes on to describe his early work as a stage designer , his affair with Robert Mapplethorpe and his early encouragement of David Lynch. The cast list also includes Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Kenneth…
A novel about the dark gifts of grief, what it means to belong, and the possibility that time and space may not be what we think they are. It is 1987 after a devastating hurricane on England’s south coast. Artist Dolores is walking the beach of the Headland when she discovers something alive in a piece of driftwood. Both beguiling and terrifying, Violet seems neither human nor animal; has she been created by the twin forces of storm and atomic fallout? Or is she from somewhere else entirely?
Decades later, after her death, Dolores’s son Morgan returns to the Headland and finds a journal she wrote before his birth. As he reads, Morgan’s own experiences of the Headland become increasingly inexplicable.
As a young doctor, Carl Holman has experienced the horrors of World War I and the death of his lover, a fellow officer. Back home after the War, he befriends a young jazz musician who he hopes will become a companion he can share his life with. But this is…
Cleo Cooper, a cross-cultural psychology professor, is living the dream on the Big Island of Hawaii. With ocean-dipping weekends, she enjoys her dog, her job, and her boyfriend Ben - until the day she’s on a research vessel and a dead body is caught in the dragline.
