Best books… Will Self

Will Self, the novelist, journalist and commentator, picks five books that prove truth is stranger than fiction. His novel Phone, completing a trilogy that began with 2012’s Umbrella, is out now in paperback (Viking £8.99).

Land of Opportunity by William M. Adler, 1995 (out of print). The story of the AfricanAmerican family who brought crack cocaine to Detroit in the 1980s and made millions by running the business with Mcdonald’s-like efficiency. It’s a staggering portrayal of the ineluctable convergence between addiction and capitalism in Reagan’s America.

The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst

by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, 1970 (Hodder £9.99). Crowhurst was the British yachtsman who faked his positions during a 1968 roundthe-world yacht race and then, when discovery of his subterfuge became inevitable,

threw himself into the sea. His abandoned boat was found drifting in the Atlantic, its logbook filled with monomaniacal metaphysical speculation.

Island on the Edge of the World

by Charles Maclean, 1972 (Canongate £9.99). St Kilda is a micro-archipelago some 60 miles west of Scotland where, until a century ago, a community had lived in almost complete isolation for 2,000 years. Maclean tells its remarkable story exceptionally well.

In the Belly of the Beast

by Jack Henry Abbott, 1981 (Vintage £10.86). Abbott was the imprisoned killer Norman Mailer befriended via post, and who killed again

after he won early release. Besides the Mailer-abbott letters, this book contains an astonishing philosophical disquisition by Abbott, who absorbed quantities of Marx, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer while serving time.

The Mountain People by Colin M. Turnbull, 1972 (Touchstone £16.99). The story of the Ik, a hill tribe in Uganda whose members, in the face of resource-depleting drought, resolved to starve rather than migrate. A compelling depiction of the skull beneath the skin of all human communities, and a kind of anthropological counterpoint to Primo Levi’s

If This Is a Man.