Claire
Lowdon
Claire is one
of our fiction
critics and the
author of the
novel Left of
the BangRemember the first time you
ordered a martini without
understanding that it’s
essentially neat gin? And then,
not wanting to admit your
ignorance, you drank your
way through it, eyes watering.
Reading Acts of Desperation
by Megan Nolan (Cape) was
a comparable experience.
Ostensibly, it’s about a failed
relationship with a cruelly
indifferent man, but Nolan’s
real subject is something
much more potent: the dirty,
shameful ways we delude
ourselves for love. The prose
is double-proof; I had to keep
putting the book down to
take a breather. By the end
I was intoxicated. This is
(definitely) a grown-up drink.India Knight
The columnist’s
novel Darling,
a 21st-century
homage to
The Pursuit of
Love, is due
out in 2022I reviewed my two books of theCastle gone badly wrong, in
a very good way.Robert Harris
The critic and
novelist’s next
book, Act
of Oblivion, is
due out next
SeptemberPatricia Highsmith: Her
Diaries and Notebooks
1941-1995 (Liveright) takes
us inside the mind of one of
the great postwar American
novelists. To see a youngwriter in her mid-twenties
overcoming discouragements
and gradually finding her
voice, to follow her through
her passionate love affairs with
other women, to share her
loneliness and quirkiness
(collecting snails?) and to read
her bracing exhortations to
herself (“Take nothing
seriously and refuse to be
sad”) was my most memorable
literary experience of 2020.James
McConnachie
James started
writing for
these pages
after being
shortlisted for
the Sunday
Times Young Writer of the Year
award in 2008The hapless Belgian crew in
Julian Sancton’s Madhouse at
the End of the Earth (WH
Allen) were the first to
overwinter in the Antarctic,
after their captain wilfully
steamed into the pack ice in- The book is a classic
extreme polar narrative, with
its deaths, gothic breakdowns
and final escape, but it’s also a
serious piece of history. Part
of me is still trapped there, in
the ice and darkness, with the
stinking seal lamps and
creeping paranoia.
Victoria
Segal
Victoria has
written about
books, music
and TV
since she won
a Melody
Maker competition as a teenagerIn childhood Michelle Zauner
learnt to impress her Korean
mother with her adventurous
appetite, earning praise on
a trip to Seoul for eating
still-writhing octopus
tentacles. That’s not all that’s
slippery in her wonderful
memoir, Crying in H Mart
(Picador), as she tries to
grasp family ties, cultural
identity and, as her mother
falls terminally ill, the
disorientations of grief. The
writing about Korean food
is gorgeous — a silky yolk,
milky-white pine nut porridge
— but as a brilliant kimchi-
related metaphor shows,
Zauner’s deepest concern is
the ferment, and delicacy, of
complicated lives. cyear on these pages — Sorrow
and Bliss by Meg Mason
(Weidenfeld) and Early
Morning Riser by Katherine
Heiny (4th Estate), and I will
passionately recommend both
for evermore. But I can’t keep
repeating myself, so I’m going
to pick a reprint, which is
O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker
(Orion). It’s a gothic coming-of-
age novel that is dark — Janet,
the poor heroine, is murdered
on the first page — completely
original, written with exquisite
precision and wit, and brilliant,
among other things, at
conveying the frigid isolation
of the Scottish landscape, and
of a certain kind of Scottishness
generally. Like I Capture theRelax Girl Reading, c 1890,
by Pierre Auguste RenoirAlAmy. AuthoR PhotoGRAPhs: DAviD hARtley/shutteRstock, PeteR tARRy,ADRiAn sheRRAtt, victoRiA ADAmson, sunDAy times PhotoGRAPheR RichARD Pohle, GAReth iwAn Jones, lARA PAnnAck, DAviD levenson/Getty imAGes19 December 2021 31