John Carey
John has been
our chief
literary critic
for more than
40 years and is
the author of
seminal workson Dickens, Donne and more
The book I’ve most enjoyed is
The Wood Age: How One
Material Shaped the Whole
of Human History by Roland
Ennos (Wm Collins). The apes,
Ennos argues, that were skilful
enough to reach the fruit-
bearing branches on trees grew
bigger brains than leaf-eaters
and evolved into us. What
allowed us to come down from
the trees was fire, a wood
product no other animal has
mastered. So Ennos goes on,
brilliant and speculative, to
modern times, showing how, at
every stage, wood, not stone or
iron, has made us what we are.
Christina
Patterson
Christina’s
memoir,
Outside, the
Sky Is Blue, is
published in
FebruaryI had never heard of Elizabeth
Strout when I was asked to
review her novel The Burgess
Boys for these pages. That was
eight years ago, and I’ve since
read almost everything she has
written. The Pulitzer-winning
writer is often described as
a “writer’s writer”, but there’s
nothing inaccessible about
her prose. Her new novel, Oh
William! (Viking), has the same
protagonist, Lucy Barton, as
two of her previous novels. It
also has the usual Strout mix:
of blazing compassion, singing
simplicity and observations
that are so precise they make
you gasp. It’s so good it gave
me goose bumps.Max Hastings
A former
newspaper
editor, Max is
now Britain’s
foremost
military
historianLucy Kellaway’s Re-educated:
How I Changed My Job,
My Home, My Husband
and My Hair (Ebury)
captured the imaginations
of me and my wife in quick
succession. The personal
narrative is remarkable,
describing how, aged 57 in
2016, she abandoned a career
as a successful Financial
Times columnist to retrain as
a teacher. She explains how
hard it is to teach, to secure
respect from pupils after
decades of taking professional
respect for granted. She
became a co-founder of NowTeach, a charity to encourage
others to embrace education
as a second career, and helps
to explain some of the reasons
why British education is
struggling. So many of us lead
essentially selfish lives that it is
moving to read an account of
a talented woman striving,
with mixed success, to do
something decent, important
and unselfish.Johanna
Thomas-Corr
Johanna is
one of our
fiction critics
and was a
judge for
this year’s
Goldsmiths fiction prizeI read Meg Mason’s Sorrow
and Bliss (Weidenfeld) on
a slightly ill-fated break to
Lisbon, where I spent more
time on planes and trains than
on holiday. It was so deliciously
honest and absorbing that it
took the sting out of all the
niggly airport transfers.
Mason’s story revolves
around a clever, attractive
journalist called Martha Friel,
who at 40 seems to be having
an entirely self-inflicted
midlife crisis. The book opens
with Martha pushing her
marriage to breaking point
and then goes back in time
to reveal why she sabotages
everything. It broadens out tostrongest impression on me
this year is Sea State by
Tabitha Lasley (4th Estate).
It is a breathtaking memoir.
After leaving a bad
relationship and quitting her
job at a women’s magazine,
Lasley moves to Aberdeen
to explore the offshore oil
industry. The plan is to
interview the men who work
there and turn this into
a book. Instead she enters
into a relationship with
a married worker, and the
book becomes not only a
meditation about offshore oil,
but also about masculinity,
desire and loneliness. The
prose is stunning: gimlet-eyed
and brutal.My favourite
read of the year
Literary critics rarely have time to indulge, but
which books has our team most enjoyed this year?
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become an achingly sad but
also very funny story about
mental health and midlife
frustrations. I always love
a noisy ensemble cast, so
I relished Mason’s mix of
chaotic cousins, whose adult
lives are still overshadowed
by wilful mothers harbouring
their own regrets.Tomiwa
Owolade
Tomiwa has
won the RSL
Giles St Aubyn
award for his
book This Is
Not AmericaThe book that has made the30 19 December 2021