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Best Book of 1891: The Birds of Manitoba

Sylvia Legris

‘During the pandemic, birds (along with many insects and wild plants) have landed in my life and poems again.’

Best Book of 1978: Who Do You Think You Are?

Emily LaBarge

‘I have read them so often that sometimes I cannot remember what is mine and what is hers’

Best Book of 1992: The English Patient

Stephanie Sy-Quia

‘I had been in England, a semi-foreign country, for a few months, and when I was asked where I was from, I had no easy answer.’

Best Book of 2019: Better Never Than Late

Ukamaka Olisakwe

‘This book is about how to navigate the thorny valley of dead dreams. Some will survive the ordeal; others will tip over the edge, irredeemable.’

Best Book of 1886: The Masterpiece

Summer Brennan

‘Zola’s characters are, in every sense of the term, art monsters.’

Best Book of 1959: Mrs Bridge

Sindya Bhanoo

‘When the book was published, my own parents were children in India, then a newly independent nation.’

Best Book of 1946: The Years of Anger

Robert Chandler

Robert Chandler on why The Years of Anger by Randall Swingler is the best book of 1946.

Best Book of 1480: MS Egerton 1821

Elvia Wilk

‘The original owners of many devotional books kissed, licked, rubbed, scratched at, and cried upon their pages.’ Elvia Wilk on the best book of 1480.

Best Book of 1998: Symbiotic Planet

Daisy Lafarge

‘Symbiogenesis is horizontal and anarchic, a frenzy of illicit fusions and mergers – energies coming together for mutual benefit.’

Daisy Lafarge on the best book of 1998.

Best Book of 1924: The Beggar

Bill Manhire

‘I still have, somewhere at the back of my head, the notion that there are real poets out there and that all the rest of us are just pretending.’

Interview

Daisy Lafarge

‘The earliest life on the planet was life without air, anaerobic bacteria that slowly died off when oxygen began to pollute the atmosphere’.

Two Poems

Jason Allen-Paisant

‘in iron lignum vitae / wind and leaves / keep memory’