Best holiday reads 2017, picked by writers – part one
like gritty frontline reporting of the Egyptian “revolution” of 2011. But it is a novel through and through - felicitous, immensely perceptive and thorough in its insights, and scrupulously humane. Its portrayal of “the young”, who are committed - against insuperable odds - to the salvation of the Egyptian ideal, is a bitter history lesson coupled with a riveting human story about political innocence and passions that won’t die. Garth Greenwell Omar El Akkad’s American War (Picador) is the most impressive new novel I’ve read this year. Set in a scarily plausible future scarred by civil strife and climate change, it’s thrilling for the sheer transporting force of its storytelling. Its lasting power, though, lies in its complex account of moral disintegration, both individual and societal. Igiaba Scego’s Adua (New Vessel), newly translated from the Italian, is at the top of my pile of books to read this summer. The title character is a woman torn between Italy, her home for 40 years, and her native Somalia. One of the most brilliant writers I know, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (whose House of Stone is published next year by Atlantic), has been raving about it, and she has never steered me wrong. If you like your thrillers sexy, smart and elegant, don’t miss Christopher Bollen’s The Destroyers (Scribner). It manages to be both fast-paced and contemplative, an excellent entertainment and also something more lasting, a haunting meditation on friendship and desperation. David Hare I’ve resisted Tana French in the past, thinking that she, like James Joyce, throws too many words at too few events. But in The Trespasser (Hodder) the proportions are perfect, and her procedural thoroughness takes her deeper and deeper into a wholly convincing portrayal of Dublin police. First-rate. Joan Didion’s South and West (4th Estate) is contrastingly slim. Her diary of a trip through the southern states in the 1960s, essay-length, is so potent that you wonder how much can be evoked by so little. The Plagiarist in the Kitchen (Unbound) is hilariously grumpy, muttering at us “Don’t you bastards know anything?” You can read it purely for literary pleasure, but Jonathan Meades makes everything sound so delicious that the non-cook will be moved to cook and the bad cook will cook better.
To be continued next week