As an author and composer, writing to me is music: the flow of words across the page can sparkle like a symphony, cry like a requiem, or swagger like rock n’ roll.Places have their own kind of music: in the lilt of their language, the lift of their architecture, the beauty of their landscapes. My favorite books about those places manage to capture that particular music, singing a siren song that stirs my senses and makes me want to go there—not tomorrow, not next week, but right now. I live in Hudson, NY with my wife, actress/writer Mel Harris. Our four children live all over the place.
I wrote...
The Piazza: Stories from Piazza Santa Caterina Piccola
On a tiny piazza in an obscure Italian hilltop town in 1933 remarkable things are happening. From the window of his mother’s bakery a young boy, Niccolò, sees it all. The citizens of this unexpected and improbable place find themselves bound together by their hopes, their lies, their humanity, and their destiny, unbowed in the face of onrushing war and certain catastrophe. It’s a heartwarming, heartbreaking, fantastical love song to a time and place that no longer exist—if in fact they ever existed at all.
If you only know the movie, you’ve missed the majesty of Isak Dinesen’s rhapsodic love song to the noble creatures and intricate peoples of the African veldts. Despite its colonial overtones, written in 1937, this is a passionate and compassionate portrait of a place like no other, a portrait of the Earth before she received her name. Check out the story of Kamante and Lulu, or “the Giraffes Go To Hamburg”; they’ll break your heart. “If I know a song of Africa, does Africa know a song of me?” Dinesen writes. I read this book when I was very young and dreamed of going. Because of it, I have travelled there. Part of me has never come back.
In 1914 Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya with her husband to run a coffee-farm. Drawn to the exquisite beauty of Africa, she spent her happiest years there until the plantation failed. A poignant farewell to her beloved farm, "Out of Africa" describes her friendships with the local people, her dedication for the landscape and wildlife, and great love for the adventurer Denys Finch-Hatton.
Take everything you know about British Empire—its royal traditions, its stiff-upper-lip haughtiness, its unflappable sense of superiority—and cram it into the character of a nearly-irrelevant, self-deluded yet heartbreakingly sympatheticbutler named Stevens, whose comical misadventures lead us from an outdated British manor house across the spectacular countryside of England in his search to recapture a romance that (spoiler) may never have actually been. Kazuo Ishiguro employs the ultimate “unreliable narrator” to poke fun at the British class system; in the process he creates an opera buffo that plays against the haunting rural beauty of that sceptered isle. For my money, it’s a better taste of England than all the tea in Buckingham Palace. Just sayin’.
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available to preorder*
The Remains of the Day won the 1989 Booker Prize and cemented Kazuo Ishiguro's place as one of the world's greatest writers. David Lodge, chairman of the judges in 1989, said, it's "a cunningly structured and beautifully paced performance". This is a haunting evocation of lost causes and lost love, and an elegy for England at a time of acute change. Ishiguro's work has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Stevens, the long-serving butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on…
How far must you travel to discover your true inner self? Pretty far, for Peter Matthiessen—all the way to the slopes of Annapurna in Nepal, in search of blue sheep, the Lama of Crystal Mountain, the elusive snow leopard, and most of all, spiritual enlightenment—very big in the ’70s (trust me, I was there). It’s a journal, a travelogue, a nature study, a daredevil escapade in a setting of such unworldly grandeur that makes you long to be there, at the top of the world, where the clouds dance and the mountains sing. Lots of self-reflection, but absolutely worth signing on for the trek.
'A beautiful book, and worthy of the mountains he is among' Paul Theroux
'A delight' i Paper
This is the account of a journey to the dazzling Tibetan plateau of Dolpo in the high Himalayas. In 1973 Matthiessen made the 250-mile trek to Dolpo, as part of an expedition to study wild blue sheep. It was an arduous, sometimes dangerous, physical endeavour: exertion, blisters, blizzards, endless negotiations with sherpas, quaking cold. But it was also a 'journey of the heart' - amongst the beauty and indifference of the mountains Matthiessen was searching for solace. He was also searching for a…
Clearly, I have a soft spot for stories about small towns in foreign places, and the people who inhabit them, steeped in the deep ways of village life, bearing the consequences of their collective failures and aspirations. This story, of a small Irish village in rural County Clare facing the unexpected approach of progress, is remarkable not just for the uniqueness of its characters, but for the brilliance of William’s writing. Each sentence is a masterpiece, each surprising phrase music to the ears: hopeful, alive and forlorn. Who would not travel to this place, to be among that kind of human magic? I love this book.
Shortlisted for Best Novel in the Irish Book Awards
Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
From the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain
'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times
'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone' Irish Independent
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it…
Who wouldn’t want to travel to the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean sea south of Elba? There’s an airstrip there full of bombers—the ones that haven’t yet been shot out of the skies—plus a military barracks that’s closer to an insane asylum, and a certain Captain Yossarian, who’s fighting to keep himself, and anyone dumb enough to join him, alive until tomorrow. Not the stuff of a travel book, you say? I don’t care. This is my favorite book ever, a brilliant, brave, side-splitting, troublemaking, groundbreaking epic that redefined both the comic novel and war as well. At age 12 it made me laugh; at 40, it made me weep. So skip Pianosa and travel somewhere else; just take this book with you. I promise it’ll make your plane ride a lot more interesting.
Explosive, subversive, wild and funny, 50 years on the novel's strength is undiminished. Reading Joseph Heller's classic satire is nothing less than a rite of passage.
Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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