Kate Mosse
Author
The key with summer reading is not to pack all those classics that you always meant to read, but to choose books you genuinely want to keep you company on holiday. Since I’ve been writing this year, and have therefore mostly been starved of reading, I’m going back to Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. I heard McBride read from the novel and it was electrifying – music, rather than words. I’m also re-acquainting myself with Daphne du Maurier (a kind of background research) and have found an old, cloth-backed edition of The Parasites in a local second-hand shop.
Good historical fiction is a joy, so I’m treating myself to the historian Kate Williams’s The Storms of War – which starts on the eve of World War I – as well as The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, by the Swiss author Joël Dicker. And, finally, having marvelled at his performance this summer as Salieri at Chichester Festival Theatre in Peter Shaffer’s 1979 masterpiece, Amadeus, I can’t wait to dip into the second volume of Rupert Everett’s autobiography, Vanished Years.
Kate Mosse is a novelist, non-fiction writer and playwright who wrote the worldwide bestseller “Labyrinth”
Iain Finlayson
Writer
Though I’ve nostalgically preserved my first ancient, dog-eared paperback copy of The Charioteer by Mary Renault, I was excited to see a new edition published a few months ago by Virago. This positively romantic, tough-mindedly non-censorious story of two servicemen who fall in love with one another during World War II was the first gay-themed novel I read when it mattered most to me as a teenager. I’ve read it often since then and I have been reading it now in remembrance of the many courageous gay men, Quakers and honourably conscientious objectors who gave their lives or were wounded in the conflicts of the 20th century.
Elsewhere, one of my constant literary heroes is T H White. I’ve therefore been deeply engrossed in H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, who subsumed the grief of her father’s death into the difficult task of training a hawk, discovering its wild mind and adapting traditional tips about hawking from White, who bestrides her lyrical, headlong, humorous memoir like an eccentric, deeply flawed colossus.
The third book I’ve read for pleasure this summer is The Road to Oxiana, a classic of travel literature by a writer who is supremely irritating, crotchety, impatient and Anglocentrically high-handed, yet brilliantly gossipy, bitchy, uproariously funny and astonishingly astute in his aesthetic appreciation of the architecture of the east. Robert Byron’s wittily anecdotal, casually conversational style, which reads almost like entries in a journal or a letter to a friend, is deceptive; the book is honed to as sharp an edge as an early novel by Evelyn Waugh.
Iain Finlayson is a biographer of James Boswell
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Historian
Having gone through a hard day battling with fragmentary evidence from the chaos of the past, I relish the comforting certainty of the classic detective story. The genre depends on the illusion that life can be kept under control, with all questions answered and justice done, and therefore has the same calming resolution of primeval disorder as hanging out the washing. Good detective fiction is also portrayal of character; the well-drawn detective can be the best of companions, particularly because her/his troubles are not one’s own. For example, Lord Peter Wimsey, the perfect husband who was a great improvement on the real thing for Dorothy L Sayers, is redeemed from terminal smugness by his traumatic memories of the First World War.
I love even the second-raters, coasting on genre clichés. The novels of Francis Beeding, joint pseudonym in the 1920s and 1930s for two writers whom I’d imagine were a gay couple, zestfully plod Inspector Watkins through interwar banalities of evil. Recently, however, I have found J K Rowling irresistible in her guise as Robert Galbraith – the second outing of the wonderfully ungracious Cormoran Strike in The Silkworm was so intricate that I had to read it twice in immediate succession.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford. His latest book is “Silence: a Christian History”
Carmen Cordero Amores
Author
A few months after Gabriel García Márquez´s death, I highly recommend his wonderful One Hundred Years of Solitude as a chance to spend a magical summer in Macondo. He takes us to his childhood and the imaginary world he had created in the Colombian jungle, with the same tone his grandmother used to tell him ghost stories. Right from the elliptical opening sentence – which finds Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad and remembering the “distant afternoon” many years earlier when “his father took him to discover ice” – One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves together the misfortunes of a family over seven generations.
Macondo represents the dream of a brave new world that America seemed to promise and that was proved illusory by the course of history. Images such as the glass city and the ice factory represent how Latin America already has its history outlined, and is therefore doomed to destruction. Macondo is a place where beliefs and metaphors become forms of fact, and where more ordinary facts become uncertain. Here ghosts live a strange existence among the living people, and a centuries-old matriarch can play dolls with the great-great-granddaughters who had completely forgotten her.
Carmen Cordero Amores is the author of “Donde de la vuelta el viento”
Dr Jennifer Ballantine Perera
Publisher/librarian
Kate Adie’s Fighting on the Home Front: the Legacy of Women in World War One is the first of two books I am reading. I’ve been saving this book since last autumn, when Katie Adie was at the Gibraltar Garrison Library for Gibraltar’s first international literary festival. I was very taken by how these women contributed to the war effort, fulfilling their roles as firefighters, window cleaners, doctors, bus conductors and ammunitions factory workers. Their efforts on the home front certainly proved the point for women at a time when the suffragettes were still fighting for equality.
The second of my summer reads is Maggie Gee’s Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2014), a wonderfully original novel about women and about writing in which Virginia Woolf is reanimated. Maggie Gee happened to finish the final draft of her book in Gibraltar; I met her later that afternoon at the library and have looked forward to reading the novel since then.
Dr Perera is the director of the Gibraltar Garrison Library and founder of Calpe Press
Commodore Bob Sanguinetti
Maritime CEO
Patrick O’Brian’s series of novels, based in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, describe with crystal clarity the rawness and hardship of life at sea for the forebears of today’s Royal Navy sailors. More generally, a favourite would be Louis de Bernières’s Birds Without Wings, which is based on a fictional town in south-western Anatolia (then part of the Ottoman empire and now part of Turkey) in the early 20th century. It describes the impact of religious intolerance and overzealous nationalism, and the wars that often result.
In the contemporary category, my first choice would have to be Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December. The story delves into topical themes for present-day London – such as personal struggles, terrorism and a sense of trying to survive in a greed-driven, consumerist rat race – but it left me satisfied that the core positive human qualities of love, faith and friendship prevail.
Nevertheless, on a lighter note, I can still be found on the beach, laughing out loud to one of Carl Hiaasen or Ben Elton’s hilarious novels.
Bob Sanguinetti is the chief executive and Captain of the Port of Gibraltar
Dominique Searle
Journalist
Amazon and Play.com, like Henry VIII, have plundered the great literary and music churches. But those bookshops that remain are wonderful, such as Foyles in London and Barnes & Noble in New York. The latter is where I bought my summer read – a gorgeous, well-sized edition of Miles Davis: the Collected Artwork. This great artist was not only an architect of jazz, he expressed his complex life in painting, too. The more I read about Miles the less I know, which is fine, as it’s his art I relish.
There’s a volume of Jack Straw, Last Man Standing, that’s been staring at me from the shelf for months (not a book to be seen holding as you walk across Convent Place in Gibraltar!), but my mood this August will decide between that and Andrew Graham-Yooll’s 1986 book A State of Fear, which was lent to me by my news editor and which tells of Graham-Yooll’s years working as a journalist in Argentina.
I am currently beginning Peaches for Monsieur le Curé by Joanne Harris, who was at the 2013 Gibraltar Literary Festival [she appears again this year]. Flowing on from the Chocolat series, its depiction of a new immigrant Moroccan community makes it gripping and locally relevant.
Dominique Searle is the editor of the Gibraltar Chronicle For more from the NS and Gibraltar media hub visit: newstatesman.com/gibraltar #NSGibraltar
Related
