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Why I chose to write about cold climates: I spent nearly seven years living in the North of Norway in the Sámi reindeer herding village called Guovdageaidnu, or Kautokeino in Norwegian. I cherish my time in that part of the world.
Perhaps one of the most classic Arctic memoirs, this book is Ritter’s account of the year she spent in the remote Arctic wilderness of Spitsbergen in the 1930s.
The nature writing is exquisite, and you can’t help but be transported to the time in place in which she lived, replete with polar bears and long, cold, (and dark) Arctic nights.
"Conjures the rasp of the skin runner, the scent of burning blubber and the rippling iridescence of the Northern Lights..." Sara Wheeler, author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica
"Ritter manages to articulate all the terrible beauty and elemental power of a polar winter" Gavin Francis, author of Empire Antarctica
In 1934, the painter Christiane Ritter leaves her comfortable life in Austria and travels to the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen, to spend a year there with her husband. She thinks it will be a relaxing trip, a chance to "read thick books in the remote quiet and, not least,…
Growing up in the sub-tropics of Brisbane, there was a magic in the heat. It was one that spoke to me from a really young age, and I’d daydream about finding portals to secret worlds in the stutter of a sprinkler’s spray, or the ooze of a monster in mid-afternoon sweat. There was no way I couldn’t find a story in the oppressive swelter of year-round summers, and in my head, I’d cast roles for my family and my friends. Over the years, that bred into a love of writing and reading stories about strange families finding their own sorts of magic with each other and their environments, and the ways that little taste of the uncanny can reveal and conceal in equal measure.
Okay, this is a little bit of a cheat, as there’s no magical realism exactly in Karen Joy Fowler’s novel, but there’s certainly the uncanny. This story of two sisters separated during childhood trying to find each other in adulthood is wry and funny, but also immensely heartfelt and dramatic, and the twist at the halfway mark (which I won’t spoil for you!) makes this one a personal favourite.
The New York Times bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club introduces a middle-class American family that is ordinary in every way but one in this novel that won the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and Rosemary, who begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she explains. “I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my sister. But until Fern’s expulsion...she was my twin, my funhouse…
When I was at school in 1991, the terrible news came out that Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, had died of HIV/AIDS. At the time, this virus was fatal in nearly everyone it infected. And yet, only 30 years later, we now have drugs that completely prevent the disease. This amazing breakthrough is just one of the many success stories that inspired my passion for infectious diseases, the way our immune system can fight them off, and how science can help us fight infections. The list of books goes from fiction about when infections go wrong and to popular science about how scientists ensure the nightmare scenario never happens.
I loved this book because it gives a dark vision of what could go wrong if we fail to control pandemics. I read this book in 2019–just before the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave it a terrifying reality!
I am a lab scientist, and my work can focus on somewhat abstract ideas about infection, but this book inspired me to think about the (huge) human impact.
'Best novel. The big one . . . stands above all the others' - George R.R. Martin, author of Game of Thrones
Now an HBO Max original TV series
The New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction National Book Awards Finalist PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.
One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in…
As a frequent writer of science fiction, I focus not on real or imagined science, on aliens or other worlds, but on the impacts those things have on individuals, groups, and societies. Similarly, as a reader, I enjoy visiting places, cultures, and ideas with which I am unfamiliar, particularly when unveiled with elevated artistic expression. In my writing, often in the Star Trekuniverse, I attempt to avoid feeding the perception that media-tie-in writing is less-than, instead working to weave complex tales exploring the human condition. I don’t know if my reading tastes follow from my writing, or if the converse is true, but the two go hand in hand.
Khaled Hosseini won acclaim for his debut novel, The Kite Runner, and with good reason. Opening up a place and culture I knew virtually nothing about, Mr. Hosseini’s story takes place almost entirely in Afghanistan. The same is true of this follow-up novel, which adds to the complexity by featuring a female protagonist, a significant complication in that part of the world. I was drawn in by the eloquence of his language and held fast by the compelling story.
Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.
In my years on the crime beat, I often met good people who did bad things and criminals with good intentions and good hearts. We tend to draw a line between good and evil, putting ourselves on the good side. From that perspective, we sit in judgment, believing we are incapable of evil because it’s “over there.” Inaccessible. Unfathomable. But that line is fictional. We redraw it constantly to feel good about ourselves and avoid empathizing with the worst of human nature. What I love about these five novels is that they expose that truth. The twists remind me that even my own line is blurred and ever-shifting.
This book is on my list of all-time favorites. I read it more than a decade ago, but I still can’t get the ending out of my head. The book is intriguing and fast-paced, and I found the characters so relatable–normal, middle-class people, much like my own family.
Maybe that is why the ending hit me so hard. I didn’t see it coming, but I should have. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it could happen or even consider the possibility. Who would? What a twist. All the evidence is there. The motive is there. It is the only ending that makes sense. It’s perfect.
If your son was on trial for murder, what would you do?
Andy Barber's job is to put killers behind bars. And when a boy from his son Jacob's school is found stabbed to death, Andy is doubly determined to find and prosecute the perpetrator.
Until a crucial piece of evidence turns up linking Jacob to the murder. And suddenly Andy and his wife find their son accused of being a cold-blooded killer.
In the face of every parent's worst nightmare, they will do anything to defend their child. Because, deep down, they know him better than anyone.
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
This novel has everything I love – a narrator who’s definitely not telling us everything, newly arrived in a remote house by a lake in Norway that is so clearly drawn I can see and feel it in my bones.
Trond has secrets and this is where he’s going to live now. There’s a man down the track whose window he can see when it falls dark. A river flows fast beyond the trees. Petterson’s beautiful, spare writing creates a filmic atmosphere in which past mysteries unfold as Trond begins to learn to live alone with his past.
Stunning story-telling, wonderful place-setting, and a character utterly unlike me that I loved reading in his solitude.
A bestseller and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, now in paperback from Graywolf Press for the first time
We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and oneof the first days of July.
Trond's friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on "borrowed" horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance…
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
Neil Ansell is such an honest writer. I came to this book because I loved his other writing about nature and followed him back through time to the five years he spent living alone up a Welsh mountain, seeing no one for weeks on end, exploring and working in the woods and hills around him.
It’s a rich and deep description of place, but more than that, it’s a gradual unfurling of Ansell’s sense of self. In a later book, he writes of that time of prolonged solitude, ‘You slough off the skin of self, all self-awareness, and are left with pure sensation. Nothing has a name; it is only itself.’
Ansell is a slow-burning writer who I trust completely to take me, however slowly, to a new understanding.
Deep Country is Neil Ansell's account of five years spent alone in a hillside cottage in Wales.
'I lived alone in this cottage for five years, summer and winter, with no transport, no phone. This is the story of those five years, where I lived and how I lived. It is the story of what it means to live in a place so remote that you may not see another soul for weeks on end. And it is the story of the hidden places that I came to call my own, and the wild creatures that became my society.'
In life and writing I’m torn between a desire for solitude and for connection with people. As a young woman I lived in a cottage miles from friends, working from home while my husband was at work, bringing up our first child. No email, no texting, few visitors. It was idyllic, and I was desperately lonely; that’s when I began to write. We moved, I found friends. But still I dream of solitude. Could I handle it now? It’s surely why I found myself writing a novel about a young woman who finds herself suddenly alone in the wild, with no friends – doesn’t everyone write about the things they fear?
This is one of the most beautiful novels of solitude I’ve ever read.
Conti immerses us in the strange, shifting world of the Paraná Delta in Argentina where Boga lives on a sandbank until the old man he used to fish with dies. Boga finally has the solitude he has craved for so long and sets off in his small boat.
This wondrous book carries us with Boga floating with the currents and tides, following fish, drifting. Though Boga’s chosen life feels aimless, we’re swept with him in the world of the delta and its people, where every storm, every encounter builds towards an unforgettable climax.
I read it four years ago, and I’m still there in the boat with Boga: it’s a quiet masterpiece.
'Neither the old man nor Boga ever said more than was needed. And yet they understood each other perfectly.' Over the course of a season, Boga and the old man work side by side on the sandbanks of the Parana Delta, cutting reeds to sell to local basketweavers. But when the old man falls sick and dies, Boga abandons himself entirely to the river and the life of solitary drifting he has long yearned for. Echoes of John Berger sound throughout the evocative prose of this great Argentinian writer. A twentieth-century classic, Southeaster is a central work in Haroldo Conti's…
I was born in the suburbs to the east of London and moved to California for adventure, only to end up living in the suburbs to the east of Los Angeles. Perhaps it’s because life is ultimately cyclical, or maybe I’m fated to live life inside a white picket fence. I suspect the real reason I’m here is because I secretly love it. Renegade sprinkler settings, trash day meltdowns, neighbor drama. For a writer, it’s all rich pickings. So far, the burbs have been where I’ve set all my novels and it’s also been fertile soil for the authors below.
In England, we have the Queen who opens Parliament and then we have the Queen of Domestic Suspense and that is Lisa Jewell. Lisa has written a slew of phenomenal novels but The House We Grew Up In always comes first to mind whenever I think of her work. The quality of descriptive detail in this book means that years after I first read it, I can still picture every room inside the Bird house and recall every twist and turn in Lorelei Bird’s journey as she transitions from a normal mother in a messy home to a toothless hoarder living out of a depilated den. A fascinating read packed around secrets and lies and an examination of family dynamics. All that glitters isn’t foil-wrapped gold in this one.
When I was fourteen years old, my family moved from Texas to London for a year, and I started going to a little second-hand book shop around the corner. It was run by a long-haired Canadian, who always smoked a pipe. There were only three or four aisles, plus a cluttered backroom. You could pick up a 19th-century edition of the complete works of Shelley, with uncut pages, for two pounds. One volume led to another, in the same way that one friendship can lead to another, or introduce you to a new circle of people. Twenty-odd years later, I decided to write a novel about some of these writers.
Daphne is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl when her brother’s university friend (and secret lover) comes to visit, the minor poet Cecil Valance, modelled loosely on Rupert Brooke.
Daphne develops a crush and Cecil drunkenly kisses her, an event that means little in itself, except that his death in the First World War puts everything he did in his short life under the intense microscope of fame. As the novel shifts to subsequent generations, that brief visit starts to mean many different things to different people.
Hollinghurst explores the way that secrets, about love, and money, and sexuality, change shape over time. The events of our youth seem more vivid and real than anything that comes later, but that doesn’t mean we understand them better – or even that what really happened matters in comparison to how we make use of those memories. A beautiful book.
A century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.
With an introduction by Anthony Quinn.
The Stranger's Child was a Sunday Times Novel of the Year.
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for everyone, but it is on George's sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact. As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance…
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