BOOK CHOICE: SUMMER READING

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Maggie Fergusson, secretary of the Royal Society of Literature, chooses the books of the season, from a life of Pearl Buck to a love from William Trevor ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2010

BIOGRAPHY

Burying the Bones: Pearl Buck in China by Hilary Spurling (Profile, hardback, out now)

The daughter of American missionaries in Imperial China, Pearl Buck spent her childhood gathering, and burying, the remains of baby girls. She saw at first hand the sexual bondage, despair and suicide of Chinese women. When she poured her memories into a novel, “The Good Earth” (1931), it was an overnight sensation, opening Western eyes to the realities of Chinese life, and making her the first American woman to win the Nobel prize in literature. This tale, which Hilary Spurling has waited 30 years to tell, is a triumph of intellectual and human sympathy, exploring the frontiers between reality and imagination, between goodness and madness. At 279 pages, it is also a welcome antidote to biographical bloat. (Reviewed by The Economist here.)

NOVELS

I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson (Chatto, hardback, June 24th)

Eight years after “I Don’t Know How She Does It”, Pearson returns with the tale of a group of Welsh girls growing up in the 1970s, consumed with love for David Cassidy. Watching her plumb the psychology of the 13-year-old is like having jump-leads fixed to your memory. It all comes flooding back: the desperate passion for unreachable, androgynous idols; the power of teen magazines to make you question every aspect of yourself; the quaking uncertainty about who “yourself” actually is. If her characters become less compelling as they age, Pearson carries on combining minute scrutiny of human foible with a kindly eye, so the book is both acute and heartwarming. (Pearson also wrote about the Musée Rodin for our Authors on Museums series.)

Love and Summer by William Trevor (Viking, paperback, out now)

One June in the 1950s, a stranger cycles into Rathmoye, an Irish country town sunk so deep in quotidian monotony that this alone is enough to set it quivering. Defying her convent upbringing, a farmer’s wife falls for the man, and through the hot summer it seems that her husband will be driven to despair. Trevor writes with a mysterious grace, loading everyday details with significance and foreboding, and twisting his tale into a bitter-sweet triumph of compassion.

SHORT STORIES

In-Flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson (Cape, hardback, out now)

Why, with time so scarce, do we not buy more short stories? It’s one of those imponderables, like why kamikaze pilots wore crash helmets. Helen Simpson can weave more thought and feeling into a thousand words than some achieve in as many pages. She is a shrewd observer with a gift for nerds and jerks: the tetchy businessman on a long-haul flight, the entrepreneur setting up as a “carbon coach”, the management consultant ditching his girlfriend when he’s posted to New York. She makes you laugh on one level while you squirm on another.

MEMOIRS

Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man by Bill Clegg (Cape, hardback, out now)

In the mid-1990s, as a 30-something literary agent, Clegg appeared to have everything: a Fifth Avenue apartment, a devoted partner, a thriving business. Inside, he felt “like a rigged show, one loose cable away from collapse”. Haunted by boyhood humiliations that left him flirting with death, he escaped by bingeing on crack cocaine and riding its “kinetic, sexual, euphoric” highs, before crashing into paranoid despair. This narrative of addiction is itself addictive, and strangely beautiful.

Red Dust Road by Jackie Kay (Picador, hardback, out now)

If you had been a child in 1960s Glasgow, would you rather have been black, gay or adopted? Kay was all three, and although her race and sexuality brought jaw-dropping abuse, it was ignorance of her birth parents that hurt the most, leaving “a windy place” in her heart. This account of her pilgrimage into her “pea-souper” past is hilarious, tender and shocking. It leads her to a mother crippled with guilt and dementia; a crazy, born-again-Christian, quack-doctor father; and the healing discovery that “you cannot find yourself in two strangers who share your genes”.

ESSAYS

A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel (Yale, hardback, out now)

Manguel not only writes beautifully, he is a master of the art of reading. In this wide-ranging, single-minded collection, he empowers fellow book lovers. Citing Homer and the Book of Jonah, “Don Quixote” and “Alice”, he ruminates on the nature of translation, the history of the page and the invention of the full stop. An Argentine-born Canadian, he tempts you to explore new avenues and sends you hurrying back to old favourites. He is humane, but also challenging: what line should you take if you discover, as he did, that the teacher who most inspired you sent your classmates to their deaths?

HISTORY

Family Britain (Bloomsbury, paperback, out now) and WG’s Birthday Party by David Kynaston (Bloomsbury, hardback, out now)

Reading Kynaston is like settling down for a long gossip with the past. The second volume of his “New Jerusalem” trilogy, covering 1951-57, is driven by vignettes: Churchill at the Festival of Britain, entranced by his first encounter with an escalator; young Bill Wyman (né Perks) playing “Heartbreak Hotel” so often that the vinyl wears through; a competition to find the typical British family, in which the finalists include the parents of John Prescott, later a bumbling deputy prime minister. But if 700+ pages seem daunting, turn to the slim new edition of “WG’s Birthday Party”, to the world’s first sporting superstar, the golden age of shamateurism, and one extraordinary week in July 1898.

Picture Credit: felipe_gabaldon (via Flickr)

(Maggie Fergusson won four prizes for her life of George Mackay Brown, published by John Murray. She is secretary of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first Book Choice column was published in the spring issue of Intelligent Life.)