Explore Essays and memoir
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Ariel’s Song
Romesh Gunesekera
‘It is to Shakespeare’s pages I return whenever I feel I am sinking. There I can be sure to find a lifeline.’
Bad Faith
Ken Follett
‘Every sect needs jargon. We did not have churches, we had halls; services were called meetings; the congregation was the assembly; elders were overseers’
Best Book of 1766: Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling
Dave Haysom
Dave Haysom on why Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling is the best book of 1766.
Best book of 1947: L’Écume des Jours by Boris Vian
Xiaolu Guo
‘In those spring nights, I sat by barbecue stalls in the streets of Beijing, reading this novel under dim streetlights while eating lamb skewers.’
Best Book of 1967: Ice by Anna Kavan
Eli Goldstone
‘What a writer, and what a vision. What a perfect book to read in preparation for the end of the world.’
Best Book of 1993: Written on the Body
Melissa Febos
‘Influences imprint themselves on our consciousness as light does a photograph, or trauma the psyche’
Blue Hills and Chalk Bones
Sinéad Gleeson
‘One day, something changes; a corporeal blip. For me, it happened in the months after turning thirteen: the synovial fluid in my left hip began to evaporate like rain.’
Crocodiles and Fairy Dust
Janice Galloway
‘I admit the sneaking feeling, just now and then, that those who govern us think we’re the problem.’
First Sentence: Eliza Griswold
Eliza Griswold
‘This, of course, was years before anyone knew or cared who Boko Haram was.’