Best of Friends

Staff share their current reading favourites.

Best of Friends by Kamila Shamsie Another winner from Kamila Shamsie! Just like Home Fire, this book deals with current issues occurring in the world – this time, racism, immigration and cyber bullying – but mostly it is about a strong, long lasting friendship between two girls, growing up in Karachi and moving to London to pursue successful careers. Beautifully written and unputdownable. – Victoria

The Hurting Kind by Ada Limón . Limón, recently appointed the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States, is a writer of great power. Her poetry grounds us in elemental relationships with the world around us, singing up those human and more-than-human connections that make life both liveable and worth living. I had high expectations after her scintillating 2018 collection The Carrying (2018), and somehow she has surpassed them. This is a masterful collection, deeply felt and exquisitely observed. It arrives at an auspicious moment too, when the necessity of cultivating better ways of living on this planet, and of holding fast to our capacities for love and care, have never felt more urgent. I see the tree above the grave and think, ‘I’m wearing/my heart on my leaves. My heart on my leaves’./Love ends. But what if it doesn’t? – Zak

The Island by Victoria Hislop The title refers to Spinalonga Island off the coast of Crete. It was, until the 1950’s, Greece’s last leper colony. Hislop has created a beautifully evocative, moving and thought-provoking work, which in its first ten years of publication, has become a best-seller and readers’ favourite. It works on so many levels: as a family saga, as a war-time political thriller and as a tale of lost love and devotion. The Island has rightly become a modern-day classic.  – Nick

Late Night at the Telegraph Club: Lily is on the cusp of adulthood in 1954 — an aspiring rocket scientist feeling alienated from her peers, she befriends the only other girl in her maths class, Kath. The two become fast friends, and something more begins to develop. When Lily comes across an ad for a male impersonator’s performance at a local club, she begins to question her heteronormative upbringing in San Francisco’s Chinatown. All the while, Lily’s father is facing deportation under allegations of involvement with communists. This is a heartwarming tale of first love, queer history, and the second generation immigrant experience. – Ange

The Perfect Golden Circle: A quiet, heartfelt novel. A series of snapshots into a friendship between two wounded and brilliant men. Their ventures into the landscape explore their connection to nature, each other, and the history under their feet. They talk of art and philosophy, pressing a new mysterious narrative in the landscape of English farmland. – Tilda

A Witness of Fact by Drew Rooke: A precise and shocking account of what can go wrong in the background of our legal systems. Colin Manock (South Australia’s chief forensic pathologist from 1968 to 1995) was not appropriately qualified to hold this role. In fact, a number of individuals who worked under and alongside Manock felt that he was not applying pathological techniques correctly, and his decisions were regularly scrutinised and found to be highly concerning. Nevertheless, he held onto his status and position for a long time, whilst confidently brushing off any naysayers. The implications of his work are still being unravelled now, with many convictions and acquittals having been tainted. The clarity with which the information is presented by Rooke allows you to feel as though you are following Manock
through his problematic career at the author’s side. – Isabel

Warmth “The more I addressed you on the page, the more I came to feel responsible for your existence beyond it. I realised that if I was going to start a family then I’d owe you an honest account of why. Not because I didn’t love you but precisely because I did, because I do.” An open letter to a hoped-for family, Warmth considers our uncertain future with deep intelligence, passion and self-doubt. I’m thankful for its humanity – and eagerness to look without flinching. Wholly absorbing. – Jack

Bear Woman is an astonishing novel from one of Sweden’s leading feminists. It parallels an autofictional account of motherhood and being an author with the true story of a young woman who was abandoned on an island off the coast of Canada in the 1540s for “adultery,” hunting bears and other animals with a primitive rifle and crossbow to survive — the Bjornkvinnan of the Swedish title. It ends up being something like a meditation on the misrepresentation and erasure of women in history and culture, and a celebration of the survival of this forgotten bear woman. Fascinating. – Jonathon

Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh Here is one for Moshfegh’s fans! I was enthralled by this weird and monstrous medieval fable. I love that she keeps telling us new kinds of stories while retaining her distinct sense of the body and the grotesque, and her unique take on human frailties, motivations and anxieties. I also felt that she was talking about the inequality, erasures and casual unkindness that permeate our society — perhaps particularly the USA of liberalism, Trump and Covid. She spellbinds you right to the end, never surrendering to the conventions of heroic storytelling, as Lapvona drives toward a grim oblivion. – – Jonathon