LITERARY DIARY
MADELEINE KEANE
I’M often asked to recommend books, so here’s a handful of titles — old and new — which have lit up my summer. I adore Noah Hawley’s novels (Before the Fall and The Good Father) and marking time at an airport recently I came across The Punch (Hodder), his hilarious portrait of a deeply dysfunctional family. Prolific storyteller John Boyne has another novel next month: A Ladder to the Sky (Doubleday) is the riveting story of plagiarist Maurice Swift. From Curtis Sittenfeld comes a beguiling collection of short stories You Think It, I’ll Say It (Doubleday) and in the same vein Lionel Shriver’s Property (Borough Press) glitters with some gems.
Vacations are also time for those you haven’t got round to and I was delighted to read Mothering Sunday (Scribner), Graham Swift’s beautifully constructed novella which takes place over one intense day in 1924. Ditto Solar Bones (Tramp Press), Mike McCormack’s single sentence tour de force. Casting around a pal’s house in upstate New York for something to take me through the flight home, I came across The Devil in the White City (Vintage), Erik Larson’s absorbing account of the World Fair which was built in Chicago in 1893. Staying with non-fiction, I admired Matchstick Man (Head of Zeus), Julia Kelly’s unsparing account of coping with her husband’s Alzheimer’s and — due out soon — Notes to Self, (Tramp Press), UCD academic Emilie Pine’s take on addiction, infertility, sexual violence and the rest in an astonishingly honest and visceral collection of essays.
********************* TALKING of the latter, a new prize commemorating the great Irish writer and humanitarian Hubert Butler, was launched last week. The Hubert Butler Essay Prize, intended to encourage the art of essay writing with a European dimension, was organised by the new charity HEART London, which promotes the best of European liberal values in the arts.
The inaugural subject is ‘What happened to Europe without frontiers?’ The chair of the judges is Professor Roy Foster of Oxford University. The winner will receive £1,000, and the two runners-up £500 each at an awards ceremony at the Irish Embassy, London on October 24. Entry details: hubertbutleressayprize.com.