Explore Essays and memoir
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Best Book of 1868: Dostoevsky’s The Idiot
Laurie Sheck
‘The beauty of The Idiot lies in its opposition to closed systems.’
Best Book of 1950: A Natural History of Trees by Donald Culross Peattie
James Pogue
‘Now more than ever environmentalists need to remember what it’s like to write for that real world.’
Best Book of 1970: Moominvalley in November
Aleksi Pöyry
‘This is a book I always return to for its melancholy tone, warm humour and psychological insight.’
Best Book of 1994: The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller
Eliza Robertson
‘You'd have to have lived through that bleakness. You'd have to know with your body, your hands, your eyes, your mouth, the weight of that fear – how it’s not strictly describable.’
Best Book of 2008: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
Mika Taylor
‘Rivka Galchen’s debut novel is one of my favourites from the last few years.’
Best Book of 2013: When the World Became White by Dalia Betolin-Sherman
Mira Rashty
‘New poetic expressions can still emerge and evolve in Hebrew – an ancient and almost prehistoric language, with its grumbling sound’
First Sentence: Mika Taylor
Mika Taylor
‘I didn’t want reality to overwrite the story that was forming in my head.’
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby: Best Book of 1995
Ted Robinson
‘It was a story about music and relationships.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘But Ireland is Ireland. It resists and relishes its own national images in equal measure.’
Introduction
Sigrid Rausing
‘What future youth movement might capture them, those international participants in virtual hunts?’
Introduction: No Man’s Land
Sigrid Rausing
‘We tangle and project, in exile; we make it up as we go along.’