ON MY BEDSIDE TABLE Olivia Williams
The Man Booker Prize is awarded this month. We asked judge – and award-winning actress – Olivia Williams to share five books she’s read recently and loved. ◆ The setting of MISLAID – a poet’s strange house by an artificial lake that is draining away to leave a muddy hole – creates an uncomfortable nest in which domestic miseries unfold, but author NELL ZINK has a dry satire and utterly convincing characterisation that hold you in their thrall. ◆ AN OFFICER AND A SPY is about the famous Dreyfus affair, where a Jewish officer in the French army was accused of spying and tortured. ROBERT HARRIS is a brilliant storyteller who triumphs in honing a library’s worth of facts into a sharp, thrilling, humane story. ◆ I am married to a writer, and ERASURE by PERCIVAL EVERETT, a satire on publishing, is dark, hilarious and alarmingly true. Thelonius ‘Monk’ Ellison is a middle-class African American who wants to write historical novels but is forced to pen the kind of ghetto literature expected of him. The faux novel makes hilarious reading, and the subsequent dilemmas are excruciating. ◆ THE GOLDFINCH divided many, but I loved it. DONNA TARTT’S tale of a boy cut loose in America by the death of his mother is full of character, a sense of place and isolation, and the search for something that might act as a family. ◆ IRIS ORIGO was the daughter of an Irish aristocrat and an American heiress raised in Florence at the turn of the last century. WAR IN VAL D’ORCIA is the diary of the year when the valley where she and her husband lived fell under Fascist, then Nazi, control.