Benjamin Myers, writer
Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman is a daring and endlessly inventive portrait of the iconoclastic composer. Penman’s skill lies in his total disregard for tired cliches and tropes of music criticism, while perfectly combining the highbrow and the lowbrow – a digression on Les Dawson shows why he might just be our greatest writer on music.
The Book of Bogs, edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw, draws together many environmental writers and poets – Amy Liptrot, Robert Macfarlane, Horatio Clare – in response to threats against the Walshaw Moor peatlands of West Yorkshire that inspired writers such as Emily Brontë and Ted Hughes (and yours truly). Most here agree windfarms are a good thing; Saudi companies indiscriminately plundering richly biodiverse landscapes less so. It’s an essential celebration of something that once gone can never be recovered.
Silliness is important in life, too, and the 1956 novel The Ascent of Rum Doodle by WE Bowman is very silly indeed. A satire on the machismo of mountaineering and colonial British arrogance, it outdoes Monty Python before it/they even existed. (Rum Doodle, incidentally, is the mountain in question, measuring precisely 40,0001/2 ft.)
A recent deep dive journey into what I can only describe as “London rooming house novels of the 20th century” led me to key discoveries by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Emeric Pressburger, Patrick Hamilton, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Taylor, whose Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont perhaps most movingly combines humour with the grim inevitability of ageing and the loneliness of the city.
• Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
***
Regi, Guardian reader
I’d recommend Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. The emotional intelligence displayed by the author is profoundly moving – you can tell this man has been to therapy, even if his protagonist has not. An existential crisis has never looked more banal and complex at the same time. It’s a deeply human book.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is a very Dr Who-esque sci-fi-mystery-adventure-romance-fable. It’s part spy novel, part historical fiction, part dystopian future fantasy, and totally addictive.
The two books provided the escape for which we read novels, while also offering examinations of humanity that enhance our understanding of our psyche and sense of self. They do not sugarcoat the human experience, but rather expose the shadows of this existence. There are no heroes or villains, only people being themselves, wherein good and evil always reside.
***
Oyinkan Braithwaite, writer
I am not generally into horror, but Old Soul by Susan Barker was beautifully written, haunting and unyielding. I was pulled in instantly. In an effort to understand what happened to his friend, Jake approaches people who have been traumatised by their own losses. Their strange accounts all point to the presence of one ageless woman. Who is she? What is she? And how can she be stopped?
The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei explores the love between two sisters and the tensions that tear them apart. When the Yang family adopt young Arin, Genevieve welcomes her with open arms. But ambition, societal pressure and academic stress soon strain their relationship, and betrayals follow one after another. Wei’s characters are distinct, colourful, wonderfully flawed.
Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli shines a light on the dangers of being a child raised in the glare of social media. Anuri has long been the vehicle for her stepmother’s online ambitions, but now she seeks to reclaim her life. But when she steps out of the spotlight, she quickly realises that her stepmother has a replacement – her younger sister. How can she save herself and her sister?
Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite is published by Atlantic (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
***
Richard, Guardian reader
The Lowlife by Alexander Baron, a recently reissued “lost classic”, was an appropriate read this summer, as I enjoyed an extended stay in east London, exploring parts of the city I was unfamiliar with.
Set in post-second world war Hackney and environs, the city Baron describes is very different from the London I wandered through. Yet it also resonates in the present in its descriptions of the precariousness of people’s livelihoods.
Protagonist Harryboy Boas is a dreamer who has opted out of tradition and family and left his life to fate. He is a hugely flawed character who nonetheless gains our sympathy. As Iain Sinclair says about Harryboy’s routines in his excellent introduction, there is “nothing to be done and he’s doing it on a daily basis”. Harryboy fills this nothingness with heavy lunches, lying in his room reading Zola and, especially and ruinously, trips to the dog track.
The novel offers plenty of entertainment in Harryboy’s adventures, his tentative moves towards respectability, his near fall into the abyss, his illicit pleasures and his confrontation with a gang of heavies, his dreams and his schemes. Baron is wonderful in his evocation of the atmosphere of the city, and of the shabby world of the boarding house in which Harryboy spends most of his time. The London of The Lowlife is not the London I explored this summer, but it feels just as real. Moving and often extremely funny, this was a hugely enjoyable novel, and one that deserves its second life.
