BOOKS, GLORIOUS BOOKS
A new season means a fresh selection of must-reads to devour. Jennifer McShane recommends the tomes she’s most looking forward to this autumn.
New-season reads to add to your list
Hugo Huerta Marin: Portrait of an Artist – Conversations with Trailblazing Creative Women (Prestel, approx €30, out September 7) is a new book bringing you face to face with an incredible selection of pioneering women, all of whom have reshaped their respective creative industries.
This beautiful edition features world-famous women all photographed and interviewed by Mexican artist Hugo Huerta Marin, who spent several years capturing the faces and stories of these women at their most comfortable. Each interview, from English singer-songwriter FKA Twigs to award-winning French actress Isabelle Huppert, will be published with unseen candid images for the rst time.
“[ This] is a project inspired by remarkable female artists that shifted the culture by shaking the structures of established belief systems,” explained Huerta Marin. “And their voices should resonate throughout new generations of artists.”
From legendary visual artists Yoko Ono and Tracey Emin to musicians Annie Lennox and Debbie Harry, and fashion giants Miuccia Prada and Diane von Furstenberg, this collection of original interviews and Polaroid photographs of almost 30 women spans creative industries, nationalities and generations together for the rst time. It’s a collection intended to give readers intimate access to some of the most fascinating women working in the arts.
The topics of discussion are as varied as their subjects; Cate Blanchett re ects on the di erences between acting on stage and in lm, Marina Abramović discusses her most radical piece of performance art, and Carrie Mae Weems discusses the relationship between race and photography.
In Elizabeth Day’s Magpie (4th Estate, €14.99, out September 2), we meet 28-year-old Marisa. Not yet 30, she’s keen to settle down and start a family. So when Jake, a decade her senior, walks into her life, it all clicks; he wants what she wants and soon, she falls pregnant. Sure, it’s all happening fast, but everything is, finally, falling into place as it should. They move in together and decide, financially speaking, taking in a lodger is the best thing to do. It starts well until Marisa grows increasingly uncomfortable around Kate, an attractive and friendly thirtysomething who works in the film industry. It feels like she’s making herself a little too comfortable; cooking for Jake, using their bathroom. Worryingly, Jake sees little wrong. And then the twists kick in. You’ll be surprised right until the end. An exhilarating read.
Nanny, Ma, & Me by Kathleen, Dominique and Jade Jordan (Hachette Ireland, €14.99, out September 2) is an engaging multi-generational memoir, in which Kathleen, Dominique and her daughter Jade each get to tell their story. It starts with Kathleen; when she left Dublin for England in the 1950s to train as a nurse, she never imagined that she would fall in love with a Jamaican man and go on to have three children with him. But when she decided to return to Ireland, she found that she was returning to a place where the colour of her children’s skin made them dierent. Her daughter Dominique was uprooted; forced to try and fit in as a black teenager. Eventually she gave birth to her daughter Jade, who is growing up in 21st century Ireland, and together, all three women shed an illuminating light on life as a Irish family of colour.
Few do noirish mysteries like bestselling author Liane Moriarty, and in her new novel Apples Never Fall (Michael Joseph, €23, out September 14), she’s at her very best. The Delaneys are fixtures in their community. The parents, Stan and Joy, are the envy of all of their friends. They’re killers on the tennis court, and after 50 years of marriage, they’ve finally sold their famed tennis academy and are ready to start what should be the golden years of their lives. But nothing is as it seems and when Joy suddenly goes missing, the Delaney children are forced to confront everything they didn’t know about their parents’ marriage. What does it have to do with the stranger who turned up on their doorstep months before? A twisted, and completely irresistible thriller.
In this beautiful Irish read, A Cloud Where the Birds Rise: A Book about Love and Belonging (Hachette Ireland, €18.99, out October 14), author and playwright Michael Harding and Donegal illustrator Jacob Stack have joined creative forces. This has resulted in a unique collection of quotes and observations from Harding, one of Ireland’s best-loved memoirists, with evocative illustrations from Stack sitting perfectly alongside them. In what is a stunning collaboration, Harding’s stories and words throughout the years are markedly brought to life by their accompanying illustrations, intended to capture ordinary layers of Irish life, from moments of belonging, solitude, love, loss and healing to the sweeping landscape of Ireland. The collection is varied from the everyday; the beauty of falling snow, to the moments which have resonated deeply during the pandemic – the pain and love in goodbyes, to the shared lives and deaths of neighbours. It asks the question, what does it mean to live, love and experience loss as we do in everyday moments?
A must-have for any bedside table.
MUST READ HISTORICAL FICTION From the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Edge of the World comes a rich history of Antwerp in Antwerp: The Glory Years by Michael Pye (Allen Lane, €19.99, out now). As with his former works, Pye is a novelist, journalist and historian as he explains that before Amsterdam, another North Sea city was the hub of the known world: Antwerp. Rich in history, it was a place of trade, bringing in food, diamonds and silver, and one of scandal, acting as an escape route for Jews facing the Inquisition in Portugal, and full of heretics too. Pye has done a phenomenal amount of research to reconstruct the city through novels, paintings and schoolbooks, as well as archives from Venice to London to the Medici. Antwerp had a hidden story to tell, which he deftly uncovers throughout. A vivid, slow burn of historical fiction.