BOOK..? ...are you reading now?

I ALWAYS have a Simenon to hand. In my youth I adored his Maigret books; nowadays I prefer his ‘hard novels’, as he called them, in which his mastery of human psychology is laid plain. The one I’m reading at the moment is called Betty.

In the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I’ve just started the only one of Svetlana Alexievich’s books I haven’t read: Last Witnesses, about the experiences of those who had been children in Soviet Belarus during World War II. Her unique method of oral history raises what could look like reportage to something much higher: rightly did she win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015.

By my bedside, I have Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike. It doesn’t matter where sleepily I dip in, usually at random, and just for a few pages: it remains a masterly telling of the novelist’s intimately connected life and work.