During summer holidays, not much beats hitting the beach with a good book. Ahead of this year’s holiday season, a range of leading writers were asked what books they would recommend readers take with them on their break. From recent releases to classic literature, here are their tips.
Julian Barnes
I recently reread Anita Brookner’s first novel
A Start in Life (Penguin), and it left me thinking that maybe all novelists should be forbidden from publishing until they are 53; that way they would already have a finished style and a mature, cogent, individual view of the world. This nearly faultless novel also reflects on the competing truthfulness of Balzac versus Dickens. (Balzac died at 51, so the Brookner rule can’t apply to him.) But for the moment I am engrossed in Svetlana Alexievich’s extraordinary
Second-Hand Time (Fitzcarraldo), an oral tapestry of post-Soviet Russia.
Sara Baume
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Tramp) is the monologue of an ordinary man which – skilfully, gradually, tenderly – discredits the meaning of ordinariness. A novel without a single full stop, it is easily the most all-consuming and splendid sentence I have ever read. Mia Gallagher is another Irish writer who deserves greater attention from overseas. Her second novel is as rich in texture as it is vast in reach.
Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland (New Island) is made up of several voices, from an elderly woman’s memories of Bohemian life in the 1940s to a troubled transsexual in contemporary Dublin.
Cynthia Bond
