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Explore Essays and memoir

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.’

Introduction

Sigrid Rausing

‘To know love is to know (or to imagine) the loss of love.’

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.’

Labyrinth of the Heart

Mark Slouka

‘Every marriage is forged differently; some crack at a touch, others endure beyond belief, still others are tempered by events and time.’

Love in the Graveyards of Industry

Jeremy Seabrook

‘Love was no longer encoded in recognised behaviours, but became subject to private desires and idiosyncratic needs.’