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Best Book of 1971: Malina by Ingeborg Bachmann

Kevin Breathnach

‘The novel submits to an internalized discipline: it is an observation machine’

Diaries

Suzanne Brøgger

‘My habit of being a dreamer is filled with the joy of melancholy.’

Best Book of 1943: ­Love In A Fallen City­ by Eileen Chang

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

‘Eileen Chang writes perfectly for the romantic in an unromantic and unrelenting world.’

The Politics of English Forgetfulness

Madeleine Bunting

‘Brexit demonstrates one of England’s most trusted strategies of power: deliberate forgetfulness.’

Black Country

Anthony Cartwright

‘There’s a sense, I think, that what that X in the box translates as is seventeen and a half million voices that say, we’re still here.’

The Decay of Politics

Philip Ó Ceallaigh

‘Britain has made the control of borders and the free movement of people its central obsession, its fundamental national anxiety.’ Philip Ó Ceallaigh on Brexit.

Bucharest, Broken City

Philip Ó Ceallaigh

‘It is only consciousness and memory that hold together the things we sometimes see as solid.’

Best Book of 1982: Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Eleanor Chandler

‘While the terrible pain of speech is made clear, this book ultimately reminds us that we must not be silenced.’

Diary of a Gulag Prison Guard

Ivan Chistyakov

‘Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable.’

Five Things Right Now: Diane Cook

Diane Cook

Diane Cook shares five things she’s reading, watching and thinking about right now.

Coventry

Rachel Cusk

‘War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself.’

Africa’s Future Has No Space for Stupid Black Men

Pwaangulongii Dauod

‘The night was full of energy. The kind of energy that Africa needs to reinvent itself.’

Open After My Death

Linda H. Davis

‘I had become the kind of parent I never wanted to be.’