![]() In my stocking I want The Moviegoer by Walker Percy. It’s a novel you’ll want to sit down with on a chill and windy winter night and read all of. Here, the Booker prize winner has it all cooking: two careworn constabulary figures, now older and nicely repurposed from his previous policiers a murdered Trinity College lady professor settings stretching from the warn-torn Bavarian Alps to the cold, shadowy, secret-keeping purlieus of 1950s Dublin. Second, The Lock-Up(Faber) by John Banville. Playhouse is full of vivid characters, intriguing/interesting intellectual threadings, much riveting incident, and Bausch’s incomparable wit on the page. Bausch is one of the US’s great literary realists and possesses a storywriter’s finesse and diamond-point verbal deftness. This is a big, spacious novel you can immerse yourself in. I’ll be giving copies of Playhouse (Knopf) by Richard Bausch. If he can’t fit it in, I’ll take the great Fiona Hill’s memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here(Mariner). And if Santa’s listening and I can find an elastic-free diabetic stocking, I’d like the late Louise Glück’s Poems: 1962–2020(Penguin Classics), a reassuringly chunky book that should cover the gaps in my reading of one of the few essential poetic voices of the past 50 years. It is a parade of forgotten geniuses, mavericks and lunatics, mostly marginalised by the intensity of their own obsessive vision (or like Ruth Crawford Seeger, Peggy’s mother, the grinding mill of the patriarchy). I also loved Kate Molleson’s Sound Within Sound (Faber), her vivid, riveting account of 20th-century “outsider” composers. NB by JC (Carcanet) collects James Campbell’s fearless, gossipy, wise and brutally funny TLS columns in one handy volume, and reminds us what a lark book chat would be again if we all got off social media. The Custom of the Country (Penguin Classics) is the paperback I’d choose to receive and keep – I don’t know why I’d never read this Edith Wharton masterpiece, but it was the most satisfying reading experience of the year and made me question whether she was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century. On the opposite side of the spectrum was The Guest by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus), an eerie, miniaturist character study about a few days in the life of a female grifter drifting through the Hamptons – the simple power and pull of the novel lies in its ambiguity, its refusal to try to explain Alex – that’s the point: you can’t. ![]() A sprawling, Franzen-esque saga about the Barnes family in Ireland recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, it’s an amazing piece of realist fiction, full-bodied, multi-narrative a huge swing by Murray. Of the new novels I came across this year, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton) was the most enjoyable. From what we’ve already heard, the Covid inquiry could be one too. The Starr report into the conduct of President Clinton, including his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, was a bestseller. What I would like to receive is a bound copy of the evidence in the ongoing Covid inquiry. There are larger questions about the state of democracy but also gossip and funny individual episodes. Rory Stewart’s Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within (Vintage) is a romp through what I suspect many people of all political persuasions would agree has been a bewildering recent history in British politics. It’s funny and painful with ghosts from the past and spectres from the future. Money perhaps helped suppress the turmoil within, masking a true understanding of their world, as well as the wider one in which they live. I was impressed with Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, about a well-off Irish family that falls on hard times. Author of Everything Is Everything: A Memoir of Love, Hate & Hope (Hodder & Stoughton )
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