Float started out as a comedy of manners set in a coastal Maine town, but the more I learned about fishing and the oceans, the more the characters began to struggle with questions about their responsibility to the natural world. By the time I was finished, Float had morphed into a dark comedy about plastic in the ocean, which is not just unsightly and a killer of sea animals, it is made from fossil fuels. I have stayed active in the fight against plastics ever since, and have participated in a number of programs on the intersection of the arts and climate science.
I like a good satire and I love Ian McEwan. Set in academia, Professor Beard, with his Nobel prize in physics clutched to his chest, is offended by the idea that art might be as good a tool for curing a sick planet as his analytical facts. For all his scientific knowledge, he fails to understand that art has power. His younger colleague tries his best, explaining how images created by art bypass the modern cerebral cortex and go straight to our ancient limbic brain which controls memory and emotion, the part of the brain where we process value judgments, judgments that exert a strong influence on our behavior. This book makes the case for climate change as an important subject in literature, art, and music, because we need to touch hearts before we can create change. And it’s pretty funny on top of it.
Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.
When Beard's professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world…
Looking for a break from research, I picked this volume
up at random and found it among the funniest things I’ve ever read. In a series
of self-effacing essays, Hodgman chronicles his challenges and triumphs of
becoming a writer and a family man while moving around New York and New
England.
Offering a mixture of sardonic self-evaluation, whimsy, and understandable
bemusement at the world around him, the book will be a hoot for anyone who’s
ever had to find their way in the world, or down a boat ramp on the coast of
Maine.
“I love everything about this hilarious book except the font size.” —Jon Stewart
Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn’t seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now.
Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of…
I am a veteran novelist who believes this over all else: The opening is everything. This has been my modus operandi as a storyteller for over thirty books, as well as a half dozen screenplays. I love a great opening. It is how a reader or viewer will subconsciously decide whether they will devote themselves to a story. It is the first kiss. The first shot over the bow. The ignition, the countdown, and the launch. It is the alpha and omega… because the beginning dictates the ending. Oh my, how I love the beginning!
Donald Westlake was the consummate professional, a writer’s writer with more than a hundred novels to his credit.
Specializing in crime fiction, he created the blockbuster Parker series and was so prolific he needed a half a dozen pseudonyms just to avoid competing with himself in the marketplace. This book is his masterpiece. Period. Full stop. And if the first sentence doesn’t grab you, nothing will:
I’ve never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being.
The multi-award-winning, widely-acclaimed mystery master Donald E. Westlake delivers a masterpiece with this brilliant, laser-sharp tale of the deadly consequences of corporate downsizing.
Burke Devore is a middle-aged manager at a paper company when the cost-cutting ax falls, and he is laid off. Eighteen months later and still unemployed, he puts a new spin on his job search -- with agonizing care, Devore finds the seven men in the surrounding area who could take the job that rightfully should be his, and systematically kills them. Transforming himself from mild-mannered middle manager to ruthless murderer, he discovers skills ne never knew…
Humbert Humbert, the tortured protagonist of this timeless novel, is a repellent pedophile. What can we do but condemn the immorality of his pursuit of a twelve-year-old girl (“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul”) and eventual success in snaring the not-so-innocent girl in his deceitful web?
At the same time, Nabokov pulls out all the stops and creates in his deplorable narrator a charm and vocabulary that can't help but draw avid readers into the story. The subterfuge involved suggests also what life must have been like for gay men and women in the 1950's era, forced in many circumstances to hide their nature and pretend to be "normal."
What surprised me most upon re-reading this classic work was how funny it is, especially in the early pages when Humbert so desperately seeks to make Lolita submit to his will. If there was…
'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.'
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.
Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all…
This is a succinct, gripping novel about memory and its unreliability. It looks at the power of the narratives we construct to explain our lives and ourselves to ourselves.
Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.
Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is…
I have always been obsessed with the idea of other worlds I can’t sense but can somehow contrive to glimpse, whether with a magic amulet or some fabulous technology. As a kid growing up in the woods and devouring fantasy novels and biology texts alike, I couldn’t decide between science or writing as a way of exploring the unknown, and ultimately, I ended up doing both: becoming a writer specializing in marine and coastal environments, one of the many places in our world where the deeper we look at the senses of the creatures living there, the more we realize just how limited our own perceptions are.
I will always find an excuse to read a classic literary tome about an unreliable narrator by the British seashore, partly because I know I’m in for a gut-punch of a landscape description. Even better when it’s garnished with a few—not too many, just enough—of those ultra-evocative lines that stop you in your tracks and make you go, “That’s exactly what that’s like!” But that’s not even the best part of this five-course meal of a book.
The story becomes increasingly surreal and disturbing. At each stage, Murdoch’s descriptions of the ocean landscape shift and change with the narrative, so the water increasingly looms in the background like a living character, apparently impersonal and even more deliciously horrible for it.
Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize-a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs
Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world…
I have always had a lifelong passion for all things maritime. In the early 1980s, I crossed the Atlantic Ocean as a crew companion to the late famous Captain Ted Falcon Barker, author of The Devil’s Gold. The expedition made landfall in the Bahamas, so this area became a focus of fascination. I also have a very strong historical sense, reflected in my poetry and two of my other works of fiction, the novels Charity Amour and No Gentle Bondage.
Shiva Naipaul is a truly major Caribbean writer. He captures the volatile essence of that extremely unstable society. One added bonus is his inter-racial perspective, to which his Indian origins contributes decisively. This work ‘views a colonial world sharply with postcolonial perspectives.’ Any reader of West Indies fiction should combine a sense of history with some grasp of contemporary conditions. Although the novel was written in the 1960s, it still has a sense of contemporary relevance. Obviously, readers must keep their eyes open for younger writers in this mode. Naipaul’s works have rightly been integrated into the Educational System.
Heart-rending and darkly comic, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels, a classic that evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition features an introduction by writer Teju Cole.
Mr Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that…
I am a Wiltshire-based writer with a passion for historical and literary fiction and a fascination for the role of “memory” in the autumn of our lives. My own novel was inspired by conversations with my late grandfather in his final years. But as a journalist for more than 20 years, I had many rich opportunities to talk to the elderly members of our communities–most memorably, taking a pair of D-Day veterans back to the beaches of Normandy. In many ways, memories are the only things we can take with us throughout our lives, carrying both the burden of regrets and the consolation of those we have loved.
John Banville's 2005 novel, tells the story of a widower who returns to the seaside town of his childhood family holidays and where he fell in love for the first time.
Banville artfully weaves together the strands of the different times in Max Morden's life to create a tapestry of love and loss. He paints a haunting portrait of the beachside community and its characters.
I found the language spellbindingly descriptive and evocative of a distinctive place and time. At times, it borders on poetry. There is humour and pathos aplenty. It is a beautiful but beautifully sad novel, filled with sad people. Ultimately, this symphony of sadness crescendos to a heart-wrenching ending.
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife.
In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness…
History is my passion. I’m a graduate of medieval history from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and post-graduate of London University. Former high school history teacher, and previously held the post of assistant researcher at the Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv. I was commissioned by the Council of Zambian Jewry to research and write the history of Northern Rhodesian/Zambian Jewry. I have lectured frequently on my subjects and have contributed diverse historical articles in newspapers and journals. I have published six books, fiction, and non-fiction.
McEwan has always numbered among my favorite fiction writers, not only because he knows how to spin a tale, but I enjoy his immaculate prose. I was amazed by the way McEwan creates an exciting and brilliant story all in a one-day narrative. Unusual happenings occur in a famous neurosurgeon’s free Saturday following an exhausting week of intricate surgery. His mundane routine explodes into an unusual, complex situation when a minor car accident leads to a scene of violence and confrontation with a gang of youths. I was so drawn in to this story that I found myself almost being there and sweating in a state of anxiety.
The stunning new novel from the Booker Prize winning novelist.
Saturday, February 15, 2003 - Henry Perowne wakes before dawn to find himself already in motion, drawn to the window of his bedroom. He is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind, and proud father of two grown-up children. What troubles Perowne as he stands at his window is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the attacks on New York and Washington eighteen months before.
Later during this particular Saturday morning, Perowne…
I have a passion for the themes and moods of this list because they explore so many parts of my emotions. They rile me, they work me up into a hot frenzy, they turn me on, they fascinate me, they bruise me, they heal me. I see myself in these books, and I feel that I understand other people. I’ve enjoyed (and still enjoy) reading these books published for free on blogs online, but now I want to write more and read more than I’ve done before. This list is a starting point, and I hope you enjoy them!
“Someone has to ask you a question before you can answer it. But it’s so seldom you find anyone who’ll ask the right questions. Most people aren’t that much interested.…”
I love this book because it shines a spotlight on loneliness and isolation in a way that most books really struggle to do. It provides you with a sense of what it is to be an outsider. I love this because it balances the melancholy with warmth and hope so so well.
Isherwood's short, poignant novel is a tender and wistful love story
Celebrated as a masterpiece from its first publication, A Single Man is the story of George, an English professor in suburban California left heartbroken after the death of his lover, Jim. With devastating clarity and humour, Isherwood shows George's determination to carry on, evoking the unexpected pleasures of life as well as the soul's ability to triumph over loneliness and alienation.
'A virtuoso piece of work...courageous...powerful' Sunday Times
'This mix of humour and stoicism in the face of pent-up grief is essential Isherwood' Guardian
