BOOK CHOICE: THE PICK OF THE SEASON

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From a hermaphrodite baby to a tiger mother, Maggie Fergusson suggests eight of her recent favourites ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2011

NOVEL

Annabel by Kathleen Winter (Cape, hardback, out now)

When a hermaphrodite baby is born to Treadway and Jacinta Blake in Croydon Harbour, Labrador, their different responses threaten to destroy their marriage. Treadway is determined to mould his “son” into the kind of matey alpha male who thrives in this remote coastal outpost; Jacinta mourns the daughter she dares not quite recognise. Their child grows up isolated and confused, the target of heartbreaking peer cruelty. The story of Wayne Blake’s long journey from a society tyrannised by notions of normality to one in which insight and intelligence transcend questions of gender is beautifully paced, sometimes shocking and never prurient.

SHORT STORIES

M emory Wall by Anthony Doerr (Fourth Estate, hardback, out now)

Googling Doerr after reading this extraordinary collection, it is no surprise to discover that the New Yorker recently named him one of their “20 under 40” best fiction writers—or that he wears chainsaw ear muffs while writing. His prose is concentrated and mesmeric, so that you race from interest to involvement in his characters. These range from a couple struggling with the anguish of infertility, to the elderly lady of the title story, rummaging desperately through her mind as Alzheimer’s switches off the lights. What is memory? Doerr asks. What becomes of it when we die?

BIOGRAPHY

The Omnipotent Magician: Lancelot “Capability” Brown by Jane Brown (Chatto, hardback, out now)

Through his titanic landscapings at Stowe, Blenheim, Chatsworth and other great estates, “Capability” Brown arguably did more than anyone to change the face of England. He made 150 new lakes alone. Yet the man who emerges from this sympathetic, beautifully illustrated study is neither showy nor grandiose: a modest, energetic Northumbrian with a gift for working fast and no talent for geography. The King’s Master Gardener, he has a house at Hampton Court, but never a moment to rest there as he is forever hurtling off to install a hillock or order a coppice.

PHILOSOPHY

The Ego Trick by Julian Baggini (Granta, paper-back, out now)

Do you feel you have, at your core, some “pearl of identity”, unchanging from cradle to grave, and perhaps beyond? If so, where is it located? Peeling back layer upon layer of delusion, Julian Baggini argues that there is no such thing as the self; that we are all just fragmented bundles of perception and experience—and that we should be relieved to hear this. Baggini works on a broad canvas, citing Hume and Locke alongside the reflections of sex-change patients and victims of dementia. While leaving the ego in pieces, he gives your mind a thorough workout.

MEMOIRS

The Stranger in the Mirror by Jane Shilling (Chatto, hardback, out now)

“I don’t believe in ageing,” wrote Virginia Woolf. “I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.” Rising 50, Jane Shilling enters the no-woman’s-land
between youth and old age, and sets out to discover what this might mean for her—a single mother, whose only son is about to leave for university. She reaches no neat conclusions: looking back, she finds much to regret; looking forward, much to fear. But in squaring up to wrong turnings, she manages to wrestle hope from the future with sharp intelligence, elegance and, despite everything, an infectious appetite for life.

Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx (Fourth Estate, hardback, out now). After buying a plot in a remote part of Wyoming, Annie Proulx describes, in close detail, how she has a house designed and built there. When she devotes page after page to the staining of her kitchen floor, or the problem with her deep Japanese wooden soak-tub, some readers will despair. But for those who loved “The Shipping News” this is a fascinating study of a great writer at work, her obsession with minutiae, her magpie eye for historical fact, her joy in the fauna and flora of wilderness America.

REPORTAGE

People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman by Richard Lloyd Parry (Cape, hardback, out now)

In exploring the murder of Tokyo “hostess” Lucie Blackman in July 2000, Richard Lloyd Parry deploys a massive cast—from middle-class English girls escaping reality in sleazy Roppongi nightclubs, to conmen, psychics and sadomasochists. He’s at pains to find fellow-feeling with every one of them—even Lucie’s lisping, perverted, loner killer, Joji Obara; even her media-hungry father, who accepted £500,000 from Obara in exchange for signing a document questioning his undoubted guilt. This there-but-for-the-grace-of-God approach makes for compulsive, if chilling, reading. Futile, in this case, to say “Don’t have nightmares!” (Reviewed here in The Economist.)

PARENTING

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (Bloomsbury, hardback, out now).

If your six-year-old mucks up her piano practice, why not burn her toys? This was Amy Chua’s stick-and-stick approach with her two daughters, and, while one rebelled, the other became a concert pianist. You may have read the extracts, seen the media hoo-ha, and gasped at Chua’s ground-rules: no sleepovers, no team games, no school plays. But what you can only appreciate by reading the book is the subtlety of her arguments, the way steeliness slides into self-mockery, so that she becomes companionable, even slightly convincing. Piano practice in our house has taken a turn for the tougher.

Maggie Fergusson is Intelligent Life's literary editor and the award-winning author of "George Mackay Brown: A Life". Picture Credit: shutterhacks (via Flickr)