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Explore Essays and memoir

Arrival

Albino Ochero-Okello

‘As I stood in front of the immigration officer, I was already worrying about my answers to the questions he might ask’.

Aspirers

Pankaj Mishra

‘Bollywood is part of what our culture has become. We are lying to ourselves all the time.’

Baby Clutch

Adam Mars-Jones

‘Endlessly we reformulate our feelings for each other.’

Bad Nature

Javier Marías

‘I saw him slipping into belligerence, the ghost of James Dean descended upon him and sent a shiver down my spine.’

Baht ’At

Blake Morrison

‘I'd already begun to suspect that sex brought misery or death, and now I knew.’

Bell And Langley

Thomas McMahon

‘He said that new ideas only came to him between these hours, and when they did, they were like recollections of things forgotten. Sometimes he put on his hat and coat at two a. m. and walked ten miles, the way a mourner will do when he is trying to recall the sight of a beloved face.’

Best Book of 1818: The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, by E.T.A. Hoffmann

Luke Neima

‘What sets Hoffmann’s work apart is the meeting of the joint impulses of Enlightenment and Romantic thought’

Best Book of 1900: The Autobiography of Dr William Henry Johnson

Jennifer Kabat

‘Johnson is now a ghost of history; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, but I can’t let him disappear.’

Best Book of 1941: Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher

Harriet Moore

‘This book is about yearning for the Sunday nights of childhood, or dreams; it is a meditation on hunger in all its forms.’

Best Book of 1952: The Palm-Wine Drinkard

Sandra Newman

Sandra Newman on why Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard is the best book of 1952.

Best book of 1964: Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr

Lisa McInerney

‘In days of such human cruelty and pettiness and stupidity, we need reminding that we are all capable of savage compassion as well as the contagion of hatred.’

Best Book of 1965: Everything That Rises Must Converge

April Ayers Lawson

‘O’Conner has for me the effect of nailing and then blowing up one’s most casual illusions’

Best book of 1983: The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

Sophie Mackintosh

‘After 2016 I’m done with sentimentality, and it’s hard to think of a less sentimental book than The Piano Teacher, objectively a masterpiece, subjectively a book that changed my life.’

Best Book of 1993: The Smell of Apples

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene on Mark Behr’s The Smell of Apples.