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Andrew O’Hagan, writer
I am really excited by Namanlagh, the first poetry collection in 10 years from the great Tom Paulin. A tone-perfect meditation on illness and recovery, partnership and writing, violence and historical neglect, it is an absolute cracker. There are subtle nods to Derek Mahon and Seamus Heaney, and many of the poems are filled with a sense of late style and unfinished business.
Political memoirs are usually terrible, often screeds of self-justification and revenge, but Nicola Sturgeon’s Frankly rewrites the rules. She’s a proper writer, for a start, and knows how to consort with self-doubt, ambivalence, regret, love and kindness, openness to change, and many of the things that actually make people. I look forward to what she writes next.
I found a new writer – new to me, though beloved of Norwegians for years. He is the late Dag Solstad and I devoured his novel Shyness and Dignity in two sittings. It tells the story of a literature teacher of 25 years’ standing who suddenly loses his head while trying to deal with a broken umbrella. He is having a crisis and the novel charts it in an illuminating, unfussy way, creating something beautiful.
I want to offer more freshly baked goods to my friends. Soon, I’m going to run a coffee morning from a kitchen table covered with homemade croissants, tattie scones, sourdough bread and mad cakes. I’m hoping to be helped in this quest by Helen Goh’s Baking and the Meaning of Life.
On Friendship by Andrew O’Hagan will be published by Faber on 9 October. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Penny, Guardian reader
Climate Capitalism: Winning the Global Race to Zero Emissions by Akshat Rathi was published in 2023. Each chapter details a success story in the capitalist transition from the fossil fuel economy to renewable energy and climate solutions, focusing on individuals who have made a huge difference. There is plenty of detail and information I hadn’t come across before, despite my intensive reading around the subject.
Although some issues are contentious, such as carbon capture and storage – and Bill Gates has proved to be less of a climate solutions man than is claimed in the book, with his fossil fuel investments – on the whole, the developments described give a tremendous amount of hope. They show that certain governments have worked in tandem with private enterprise and are already heading in the right direction, while the new technology is developing apace. The scientific explanations are excellent, too. I had no idea how solar panels worked, for example.
Patricia Lockwood, writer
Elaine Kraf’s Find Him! is being reissued in November, so it’s the perfect time to read it, or reread her shimmery, paisley-printed The Princess of 72nd Street.
Down Below by Leonora Carrington is a classic. It’s not the direct model for my latest novel, Will There Ever Be Another You, but I remember reading it on a park bench in summer of 2020 and thinking: this is what is happening to me. Also, it contains the closest approximation you can get to a diagram of God’s perineum.
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Another major event – Airless Spaces by Shulamith Firestone was originally published in 1998, a decade after the author’s schizophrenia diagnosis and retreat from public life. She was a towering figure, already somewhat remote to feminists of my generation, but these vignettes, which deal with her hospitalisations, feel immediate, close, defiant.
Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood is published by Bloomsbury. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
Andrew, Guardian reader
Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter provides a subtle and quiet layered read. It’s set in the stark winter of 1962-63 and follows the lives of two couples who live opposite each other across a field in the West Country. Closed in in their surroundings, the protagonists – Eric and Irene, Rita and Bill – wrestle with their past and present, heading towards an unravelling. This is a beautifully written book that again marks out Miller as one of Britain’s finest writers of the human condition.
