Best books… Michael Frayn
The award-winning novelist and playwright chooses his five favourite books. His new book of 35 short comic pieces, Magic Mobile – “tremendously inventive and enjoyable” (Times) – is published by Faber at £12.99
Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, 2020 (riverrun £18.99). To put our present miseries in perspective try this new novel, set in the Europe of the Thirty Years’ War. The plague, of course – but also the unfocused confusion of slaughter and destruction, the starvation, the torture, the systematic unreason – all given intense physical reality in language of wonderful ironic lightness.
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, 1901 (Vintage £11.99). One of the greatest things a novel can do is to create a world – and this is one of the most richly evoked and inhabited of all, seen through the chronicles of a Lübeck merchant dynasty, as it declines from comfortable wealth and self-assurance over four decades of the 19th century.
Nutshell by Ian McEwan, 2016 (Vintage £8.99). A crime story visualised and told by a very clever but still unborn foetus. The first time you read it you’re swept onwards by the irresistible tide of the narrative; you have to read it again to appreciate the cunning of the construction and the richness of the writing.
A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, 2002 (Vintage £9.99). Another unfamiliar and magically recreated world: Jerusalem under the British Mandate. Oz’s account of his childhood is often very funny – and then profoundly moving, as he circles slowly round to confront the intolerable pain at the heart of it.
Nonsense by Christopher Reid, 2012 (Faber £9.99). This collection of Reid’s verse includes a long narrative poem, Professor Winterthorn’s
Journey, about travelling the airways to a distant city. It’s a delight to escape our imprisonment, and to recapture an experience that once seemed banal, and have it made more vividly and deliciously real than it ever was.
Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop on theweekbookshop.co.uk. For out-of-print books visit biblio.co.uk