Explore Essays and memoir
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Best Book of 2010: Mr Chartwell, by Rebecca Hunt
Emma Jane Unsworth
‘Hunt writes with brio, the visceral often blooming into the mystical.’
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’
Best Book of 1766: Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling
Dave Haysom
Dave Haysom on why Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio by Pu Songling is the best book of 1766.
Best Book of 1900: The Autobiography of Dr William Henry Johnson
Jennifer Kabat
‘Johnson is now a ghost of history; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page, but I can’t let him disappear.’
Best Book of 2008: To the End of the Land, by David Grossman
Lily Dunn
‘David Grossman is a writer who speaks to the heart, and this is his masterpiece.’
Sweet William: A Memoir of Old Horse, by John Hawkes | Best Book of 1993
Linda H. Davis
‘Plunged inside the skin of the horse, I felt his sensory burdens, sufferings and fears: his keen sensitivity to sound, smell and touch (even the weight of a saddle)’
Best Book of 2000: The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
Anne Meadows
‘It is the novel I have read which best expresses the honest and sad truth of art: that it is often produced in precarity and performed in near silence, but that it can also redeem a life.’
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 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.’
Best Book of 1967: Ice by Anna Kavan
Eli Goldstone
‘What a writer, and what a vision. What a perfect book to read in preparation for the end of the world.’
Best Book of 1941: Consider the Oyster by M.F.K. Fisher
Harriet Moore
‘This book is about yearning for the Sunday nights of childhood, or dreams; it is a meditation on hunger in all its forms.’
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.’
