8 hours ago
6
Paul, Guardian reader
I’ve been reading a very short book by Claire Baglin, translated by Jordan Stump, On the Clock. Set on the edge of somewhere in Brittany, all run-down blocks, dual carriageways and drive-in eateries, it’s a dark, sometimes funny story of a working-class family and a young woman starting work in a fast-food restaurant. Through a few short scenes we get a real insight into the quotidian soullessness of the work.
It’s a quick read, but although there isn’t much to celebrate in the anomie, or the false bonhomie, of the workplace, it’s full of compassion and heart. By keeping her focus so very narrow, Baglin has more to say about today’s world than a much longer story might. The two protagonists and their precarious lives feel very real. It has the touch of a handheld film: raw, immediate and with something important to say.
Francis Spufford, author
The best things I’ve read lately have been Melissa Harrison’s The Given World, nearly but not quite published yet, a novel which is both an elegy for the death of the English countryside and also a beautiful demonstration of how a piece of realist literary fiction can subtly borrow from the fantastic, weaving in threads of the mythic and the unearthly that enrich the this-worldly sense the book is making. Conversely, but adjacently, I’ve just read Kit Whitfield’s All the Hollow of the Sky, an out-and-out fantasy novel by a former star of British SFF, now gloriously returned, which demonstrates how immense emotional intelligence enriches and grounds a wholly magical story, set in an enchanted counterpart to the English countryside. Kind of bookends to each other, really.
Nonesuch by Francis Spufford is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
GJ, Guardian reader
Juice by Tim Winton is 500–plus pages of terrifying, inventive, ingenious writing, imagining a post-apocalyptic world, with its frightening similarities to our current predicament albeit without the searing temperatures that send characters underground through the summer months. I hesitated to read this; it was so far removed from his other work, of which I’m a huge fan (you can’t go wrong with Dirt Music, Cloudstreet or Breath). What was I thinking? The man can write, the message is clear and he’s seriously worried. So should we be.
Manish Chauhan, author
I recently read Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand, which depicts a day in the life of a toilet cleaner. It’s a sad and shocking book about the caste system in Indian society and, although Dickensian in its style and published in 1935, manages to feel current.
Right now I am enjoying Tash Aw’s The South, a coming-of-age story set in Malaysia in the 1990s. And between those two books I read All Fours by Miranda July, which was interesting and wild in the best ways. I was so transfixed by the heroine that I was tempted to follow in her footsteps and rock up at a hotel just so I could make one of its rooms my own.
And not to forget short stories (which I love). Recently I re-read The Management of Grief by Bharati Mukherjee, and The Ugliest Woman in the World by Olga Tokarczuk, both of which are fantastic!
