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In this exclusive tale four generations of an expat Irish family share a London house, where they gossip and drink and dream as Christmas draws nearTwo Irish ladies in their high 70s sat drinking gin as they looked out to the great pall of winter: the drearier end of Kentish Town, late in the morning. There was a snap of rain on the wind, a lowering December sky.“You’re takin’ your life in your hands with them things,” said Annie. Continue reading...

You can tell a lot about a person from the food they eat. But can you match these seven writers to the things they devour?Before trying to guess which lunch belongs to whom, take a minute to meet the seven writers whose eating habits you will be interrogating…Francis SpuffordInitially a writer of nonfiction, Spufford published his first novel, Golden Hill, in 2016 and won a clutch of awards including the Ondaatje prize. His latest novel is Cahokia Jazz and he teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths. Continue reading...

From The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to Black Hearts in Battersea, Joan Aiken’s tales of plucky orphans surviving in industrial Britain are a keystone of children’s literatureThere was once a poor widow with two young children who wrote to her agent to ask what had happened to the novel she had sent him. Her husband had died, leaving nothing but debts, and matters were becoming desperate. However, she was not quite the usual aspiring author: for one thing, she was the daughter of a Pulitzer prize-winning poet; for another, she had already published two collections of short stories.It turned out that her agent had forgotten all about it. Her manuscript had been sitting on the windowsill in his office for a year, unread. Continue reading...

From Maigret to Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple, authors choose the whodunnits they love to hunker down with at this time of yearA Maigret Christmas and Other Stories by Georges Simenon Continue reading...

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The Nobel prize winner pushes at the veil between this world and the next in the immersive tale of a solitary fishermanHow should one write about death – not as experienced by those who merely witness it, but by the people doing the actual dying? Many attempts have been made, but some favourites barge to the front. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy terrifies both us and his eponymous magistrate with the “black sack” into which Ivan is being pushed by “an invisible, invincible force”. In Tobias Wolff’s Bullet in the Brain, a book critic is shot by a bank robber, triggering “a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmission” that throws up a random memory of a childhood game of baseball.Will Self, in The North London Book of the Dead, looks beyond the moment of oblivion, suggesting that when we die we move to Crouch End or Grays Thurrock. In Immortality by Milan Kundera, the “other world” is a place where Goethe, out for a stroll, can bump into Hemingway. After the two men spend a bit of time discussing the rather judicial-sounding affairs of the afterlife, Goethe remembers he is in a postmodern novel and remarks, “You know perfectly well that at this moment we are but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist who lets us say things we would probably never say on our own.” Continue reading...

Ambika Mod, Thandiwe Newton and Mackenzie Crook are among the lineup in this cinematic telling of Dickens’s classic“The sun is dead and the city mourns,” sighs the narrator at the start of this all-star adaptation of Bleak House. Executive produced by Sam Mendes, it opens with a coach and horses pulling up in London’s Piccadilly, where the air is shrouded in smog and the streets slathered in mud. There a lawyer from Kenge and Carboys solicitors is waiting to meet Esther Summerson (Ambika Mod) and accompany her to an appointment at the Court of Chancery. Meanwhile, Lady Dedlock (Thandiwe Newton) sits dolefully in her London townhouse with her maid Hortense, who tries to persuade her to share her troubles.Dickens’s novel tells the story of the Jarndyce family, a disputed fortune and a legal case that has “become so complicated no man alive knows what it means”. Connected to the lawsuit is Lady Dedlock, who endures mind-numbing updates from her lawyer, Mr Tulkinghorn, until one day she glimpses handwriting on a legal document that causes her to faint. Also connected to the case is Esther, whose godmother has recently died and whose new legal guardian has hired her as a companion for his ward, Ada, and sent them to stay at Bleak House, the Hertfordshire home owned by the Jarndyces. Continue reading...

The Booker-winning novelist on her teenage crush on Winston Graham’s character, the beauty of CS Lewis and how Hermann Hesse changed her lifeMy earliest reading memoryGoodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian. This book will always stay with me; it was perhaps the first one I read on my own that disturbed me, and presented me with a world in which there was pain, neglect and suffering, and also towering kindness. The older I get the more grateful I am to my parents for filling my early life with books – for the joy of them, and also an understanding that life is out there.The book that changed me as a teenagerIt’s weird how voraciously you read as a teenager and how books arrow into you. I remember reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and there began my dabbling with ideas of Buddhism and taking myself off to silent retreats; it also seeded my decision to study philosophy, and got me interested in ideas-led fiction. So, life-changing in some ways. (Thank you, Hermann Hesse.) Continue reading...

A widower sets out to understand his wife’s death in this tale of memory, trauma and German reunification, from the author of The ReaderBernhard Schlink is best known for his 1995 novel The Reader, which has become a classic of Holocaust literature. It tells the story of a 15-year-old boy, living in postwar Germany, who falls into a passionate love affair with an older woman. Later he discovers that his former lover was a guard in a Nazi concentration camp.Since then, Schlink has published two short story collections and a series of novels: some literary fiction and some crime. Like The Reader, most of these books explore the difficulties of trying to lay the past to rest. This new novel returns again to themes of memory, trauma and the impossibility of reconciliation. However, this time his subject is German reunification and the legacy of the German Democratic Republic. Continue reading...

A rich and vivid history of the Plantagenet cousins and rivals for the English throne‘Richard II tried first being a Good King and then a Bad King without enjoying either very much. Then being told he was unbalanced, he got off the throne whereupon his cousin Lancaster (spelt Bolingbroke) quickly mounted the throne and said he was Henry IV, Part 1.” This, anyway, is how it goes in 1066 and All That, the classic parody of garbled schoolroom rote-learning. And while Helen Castor, a historian of great nuance and meticulous scholarship, would not put it quite so baldly, this remains pretty much the through-line of her luminous 600-page study of the Plantagenet cousins who between them generated the plots for three of Shakespeare’s history plays.The Hart of Castor’s title is Richard II, who came to the throne at the age of 10 in 1377 and never stood a chance. His early accession was a consequence of his father’s death the previous year. Edward, the Black Prince, had led England to its first big win in the hundred years war at the Battle of Crécy, after which France gave up a third of itself to England. And now in his magnificent place came this thin-skinned, spoilt, effeminate boy. Harts – male deers – are generally depicted in heraldry as beefy, bulky, russety animals with a forest of antlers. But Richard chose a white hart as his personal emblem instead and commissioned artwork, which features on Castor’s cover, showing a pale animal, as slender as a greyhound, tethered to the ground by a heavy golden chain. Continue reading...

The leftwing intellectual may be a master of self-justification, but in this book he is clever, cultured and good companyOne afternoon in the early 1980s, Tariq Ali, wearing only a towel, leapt into a room in Private Eye’s Soho offices. His mission was to liberate the magazine’s editor, Richard Ingrams, from a tiresome interview with Daily Mail hack Lynda-Lee Potter. “Mr Ingrosse, sir,” said Ali, posing as an Indian guru, “Time for meditation. Please remove all clothes.”It’s a terrible shame Potter is dead because I’d love to have heard her side of the story. Did she, as Ali reports, nearly faint before making her excuses and leaving? Was she taken in by the ruse that concluded with Ingrams and Ali giggling over pastries in the nearby Maison Bertaux? Or did she, as seems more likely, immediately recognise Britain’s foremost Lahore-born, Oxford-educated Trotskyist intellectual, after whom the Rolling Stones reportedly named their song Street Fighting Man – if only from his fabulous moustache? We will never know.You Can’t Please All by Tariq Ali (Verso Books, £35). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Continue reading...

Shortlisted for the Booker, passed among families and picked up by Cillian Murphy for the big screen, the Irish writer’s razor-sharp fiction leaves you wanting moreClaire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2022, is a fitting December read – a quiet yet powerful book set in the lead-up to Christmas which is short enough to read in snatched moments between festivities. Once you’ve read it, you can also go and see its newly released film adaptation, produced by and starring Cillian Murphy. And if you can’t get enough of Keegan’s razor-sharp fiction after that, there are plenty of other stories by the acclaimed Irish author to try. Novelist Megan Nolan suggests some good places to begin.*** Continue reading...