Explore Essays and memoir
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Best Book of 1989: A House with Four Rooms
Esther Rutter
Esther Rutter on why A House with Four Rooms by Rumer Godden is the best book of 1989.
Best Book of 1990: Anecdotes of Modern Art
Natalie Shapero
‘If I tell you a book is an encyclopedic and fast-paced tour of the interrelationship of making art and being in pain, need I say more?’
Best Book of 1993: To Live
Jianan Qian
Jianan Qian on why Yu Hua’s To Live is the best book of 1993.
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’
Big Dome
Will Self
‘I began to conceive of the city itself as a kind of loving parent, vast but womb-like and surmounted by an overarching dome.’
Blind Rage
Henry John Reid
‘I was born in Dundee on 3 April 1951, of a mother who was not meant to bear more children and a father who had long before disappeared.’
Bolivia, 1990
Ferdinando Scianna
‘Photographing these people I came to realize that their lives are dominated by fear: fear of old galleries falling, of dynamite, of the spirits trapped in the mine, of tuberculosis, of the disappearance of veta (the wolfram seam), of the future.’
Bomb Gone
Owen Sheers
‘We had been driving along the Bay of Wrecks on the eastern coast of Christmas Island for over an hour and a half when we saw the flock of terns.’
