What we’re studying: writers and readers on the books they loved in October | Books

Benjamin Myers, author

Erik Satie Three Piece Suite by Ian Penman is a daring and endlessly creative portrait of the iconoclastic composer. Penman’s talent lies in his complete disregard for drained cliches and tropes of music criticism, whereas completely combining the intellectual and the lowbrow – a digression on Les Dawson exhibits why he would possibly simply be our best author on music.

The Book of Bogs, edited by Anna Chilvers and Clare Shaw, attracts collectively many environmental writers and poets – Amy Liptrot, Robert Macfarlane, Horatio Clare – in response to threats towards the Walshaw Moor peatlands of West Yorkshire that impressed writers comparable to Emily Brontë and Ted Hughes (and yours actually). Most right here agree windfarms are a very good factor; Saudi firms indiscriminately plundering richly biodiverse landscapes much less so. It’s an important celebration of one thing that when gone can by no means be recovered.

Silliness is vital in life, too, and the 1956 novel The Ascent of Rum Doodle by WE Bowman could be very foolish certainly. A satire on the machismo of mountaineering and colonial British vanity, it outdoes Monty Python earlier than it/they even existed. (Rum Doodle, by the way, is the mountain in query, measuring exactly 40,000^1/2 ft.)

A latest deep dive journey into what I can solely describe as “London rooming house novels of the 20th century” led me to key discoveries by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Emeric Pressburger, Patrick Hamilton, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Taylor, whose Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont maybe most movingly combines humour with the grim inevitability of ageing and the loneliness of town.

Jesus Christ Kinski by Benjamin Myers is revealed by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To assist the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery costs might apply.

---

Regi, Guardian reader

I’d advocate Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. The emotional intelligence displayed by the creator is profoundly shifting – you possibly can inform this man has been to remedy, even when his protagonist has not. An existential disaster has by no means seemed extra banal and complicated on the identical time. It’s a deeply human e book.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley is a really Dr Who-esque sci-fi-mystery-adventure-romance-fable. It’s half spy novel, half historic fiction, half dystopian future fantasy, and completely addictive.

The two books offered the escape for which we learn novels, whereas additionally providing examinations of humanity that improve our understanding of our psyche and sense of self. They don’t sugarcoat the human expertise, however moderately expose the shadows of this existence. There aren’t any heroes or villains, solely folks being themselves, whereby good and evil at all times reside.

---

Oyinkan Braithwaite, author

I’m not usually into horror, however Old Soul by Susan Barker was fantastically written, haunting and unyielding. I used to be pulled in immediately. In an effort to grasp what occurred to his pal, Jake approaches individuals who have been traumatised by their very own losses. Their unusual accounts all level to the presence of 1 ageless girl. Who is she? What is she? And how can she be stopped?

The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei explores the love between two sisters and the tensions that tear them aside. When the Yang household undertake younger Arin, Genevieve welcomes her with open arms. But ambition, societal stress and educational stress quickly pressure their relationship, and betrayals observe one after one other. Wei’s characters are distinct, vibrant, splendidly flawed.

skip past newsletter promotion

after publication promotion

Allow Me to Introduce Myself by Onyi Nwabineli shines a light-weight on the risks of being a baby raised within the glare of social media. Anuri has lengthy been the automobile for her stepmother’s on-line ambitions, however now she seeks to reclaim her life. But when she steps out of the highlight, she rapidly realises that her stepmother has a alternative – her youthful sister. How can she save herself and her sister?

• Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite is revealed by Atlantic (£18.99). To assist the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery costs might apply.

---

Richard, Guardian reader

The Lowlife by Alexander Baron, a not too long ago reissued “lost classic”, was an applicable learn this summer season, as I loved an prolonged keep in east London, exploring elements of town I used to be unfamiliar with.

Set in post-second world battle Hackney and environs, town Baron describes could be very completely different from the London I wandered by. Yet it additionally resonates within the current in its descriptions of the precariousness of individuals’s livelihoods.

Protagonist Harryboy Boas is a dreamer who has opted out of custom and household and left his life to destiny. He is a vastly flawed character who nonetheless good points our sympathy. As Iain Sinclair says about Harryboy’s routines in his glorious introduction, there may be “nothing to be done and he’s doing it on a daily basis”. Harryboy fills this nothingness with heavy lunches, mendacity in his room studying Zola and, particularly and ruinously, journeys to the canine monitor.

The novel provides loads of leisure in Harryboy’s adventures, his tentative strikes in direction of respectability, his close to fall into the abyss, his illicit pleasures and his confrontation with a gang of heavies, his desires and his schemes. Baron is great in his evocation of the environment of town, and of the shabby world of the boarding home during which Harryboy spends most of his time. The London of The Lowlife shouldn’t be the London I explored this summer season, but it surely feels simply as actual. Moving and infrequently extraordinarily humorous, this was a vastly gratifying novel, and one which deserves its second life.