I’ve not been recommending enough American authors, so here’s one to redress the balance a little. Karen Fowler isn’t only a resident of the United States, she lives in my home town of Santa Cruz ( although that’s as close as our acquaintance gets.) That and her writing. I read We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves after hearing it discussed on Radio 4’s A Good Read. I don’t recommend reading, or listening to, any reviews of this book before reading it (except this one of co

Midnight’s Children is a collage of liberated India in all its brilliance and messiness

Disbelieved: Skin and Bone CSIs is YA (young adult) fiction, young adult being a euphemism for older children. But children’s books make great reading for adults who want some light relief, or a thumping good adventure without a whole slew of sex and violence.

I almost hesitate to recommend Birds Without Wings, it’s so long and stuffed full of so much history. But then I could say it’s...

The setting is Oxford and the year 1976. A magnet for me. I was living in Oxford during the long, hot summer of 1976. Recently I came...

In Piranesi you plunge into an alternative world through the journals of a character of such innocence you just want to hug him.

‘ “Where are you from?” Elif Shafak asked herself in a 2020 Vanity Fair article. “I am from multiple places. I come from memories and...

In this book you will meet the last sultan of Granada, the first ruler of the Ottoman empire and the Medici popes, and you will be glad it is Hasan who actually meets them and not you. Despite his trials and tribulations, his losses and compromises, Hasan survives to tell his tale. You might not have been so lucky.

In 2012 a friend persuaded me to apply for the Tin House writers’ conference, because Paul Harding was leading a class on novel writing....

Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett

I’ve recommended a number of different books in this newsletter so far and they’ve had one thing in common, they were fiction. Safe,...

If you’ve read the Iliad, and I know some of you have, you are going to enjoy this book. I can say that unreservedly. This is not Cliff...