Books to help you escape lockdown, chosen by Hilary Mantel, Edna O'Brien and more
Bernardine Evaristo
I’ve been making my way through New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby (2019). It’s more than 1,056 pages long and yes, I’m in it, but so are more than 200 other writers. The first incarnation of the book, Daughters of Africa (1992), is even longer and features another couple of hundred writers. Bringing together fiction, poetry, memoir and essays, both books are an incredible introduction to black women’s writing from around the world, and feature every established name you can imagine, as well those who deserve to be better known. 
Most writers have to become adept at public speaking and I’m always keen to improve my skills. To this end, I’ve also been dipping into When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches that Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins (4th Estate 2017). A former No 10 speechwriter, he’s chosen 25 major speeches, from the Romans to the Obamas, to extract, analyse and contextualise. It provides terrific insights into the ways in which language effectively communicates meaning and intention, and how when it’s done well in a speech, it might make history.
Hilary Mantel
About to fly when lockdown intervened, I went to New York via Social Creature by Tara Isabella Burton, a story you can’t help filming in your head as you read. Two poisonous party girls are on the loose, both predatory, one doomed: it’s a modern fable about soul-theft, featuring Envy, Covetousness, Lust, Greed and Instagram. If you are yearning to be in France, try Negative Capability: A Diary of Surviving, by Michèle Roberts. The novelist/poet is half-French and loves her mother country. Organised as a journal, her memoir begins when her latest novel is rejected and, feeling she has lost her identity as “writer”, she turns to nature, good food and good company to hold herself together. How truly she is a writer shows in her lush sensuous prose, as moment-by-moment pleasure triumphs over fear of the future.
Sarah Waters
My most memorable read last year was James Meek’s novel, To Calais, In Ordinary Time. It’s set at the time of the Black Death, and revisiting it during our own pandemic I’ve found it be a perfect balm for the bewildered spirit: captivating, linguistically dazzling, and full of heart and humour. Toby Green’s travel memoir Meeting the Invisible Man was first published in 2001, but has since been reissued as part of the excellent Faber Finds list. It’s an account of Green’s wanderings through west Africa in search of an invisibility gris-gris, or magic charm – a premise that sounds a bit sensational, but the book is thoughtful and evocative and endearingly odd, a fascinating meditation on belief and cultural difference. There’s also plenty of oddity and charm in Christopher Josiffe’s Gef!, a meticulous account of the poltergeist-style antics supposedly produced in a 1930s’ Isle of Man farmhouse by a talking mongoose. Entertaining and unsettling, beautifully produced by the wonderful Strange Attractor Press, it’s a quirky delight.
Yuval Noah Harari
Frans de Waal’s Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves transported me to a looking-glass animal world, which is at once very alien and embarrassingly familiar. There is plenty of comedy, tragedy, politics and ethics – but chimpanzee-style. Tim Flannery’s Europe: A Natural History took me on a sightseeing tour. The tour’s highlights include a visit to Europe when it was a tropical archipelago inhabited by dinosaurs, and a hike on foot from London to Amsterdam through ancient Doggerland – before it sank under the waves in a geological Brexit. Finally, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem starts with China’s Cultural Revolution and the Sino-American arms race, but quickly leaves such mundane affairs behind to explore what happens to the universe when you weaponize the laws of physics. If you think atom bombs are scary, wait till you read what a two-dimensional bomb does to our solar system.
Ali Smith
This isolate spring and summer we’ve gone back to the mid-14th century and Boccaccio’s The Decameron, in the translation by GH McWilliam. Ten bright young things, seven women and three men, friends and strangers, take themselves out of the plague-ridden Florence of 1348 and into the Italian countryside, where they invent a ceremonious game. On each day, one has to tell a story to the others. Ten days, 10 people, 10 stories a day results in a hundred stories, stories within stories, and a legendary abundance, life in all its kindness, treachery, wisdom, foolishness, goodness, power, corruption, love, sex, good luck, bad luck, social mores. In a massive celebration of survival there’s a simultaneous revelation of the rottenness and hypocrisy of the contemporary powermongers and establishment. The stories, nearly seven centuries old, are so cunning and wise, so full of life, so often hilarious, and have such astonishing pertinence to what we’re all living through, that every day of this grief-edged lockdown they have left us freed-up, transported, and feeling – yes – better.
Robert Macfarlane
I came on to Tade Thompson’s Making Wolf after finishing his Wormwood Trilogy in three hungry gulps; it’s a violent, political piece of alternative-history neo-noir, set in the fictional country of Alcacia that may or may not bear a close relationship to Nigeria, with a whip-smart, laconic narrative voice that reminded me at times of Adrian McKinty’s Duffy books. I read Making Wolf alongside Andrew George’s translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, pressed into clay tablets around 2100BC in Mesopotamia – and another tale of brutal male violence, friendship, murder and hubris. I also reread Robin Wall Kimmerer’s groundbreaking Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Here’s a glittering thought from that wise, wild book: “Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesise so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow’s edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.”
Sara Collins
In The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, light-skinned twin sisters become estranged when one of them decides to “pass” as white. You’ll gobble this book up on a sun-lounger somewhere (even if it’s only in your garden) because you’ll be addicted to the compelling story, but it’s also a timely meditation on Nell Irvin Painter’s line, quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates: “Race is an idea, not a fact.” Paul; Mendez’s Rainbow Milk is a Bildungsroman like no other, moving from the post-Windrush Black Country to 21st- century London as it recounts the pursuit of happiness by a young gay Brit. It is smart, touching and often funny, and Mendez writes so engagingly about some big tunes that you’ll come away with a cracking summer playlist. Finally, Magpie Lane by Lucy Atkins offers one of the most intriguing narrators since Barbara Covett: a nanny who may be implicated in the disappearance of her young charge. 
Mark Haddon
I’m going to send you in search of two recent graphic novels, Glass Town by Isabel Greenberg and Dragman by Steven Appleby, respectively a playful, creative scrambling of the works and lives of the Brontë siblings and a heartwarming superhero caper underpinned and given a real emotional punch by Appleby’s own trans journey. I am also going to recommend that you get hold of a copy of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin, which I have just read for the first time. It is a gripping, revealing, insightful, comprehensive biography, all qualities that Pepys richly deserves. Be warned, however. If you read it you will be in severe danger of picking up the diaries themselves and disappearing into a very deep rabbit hole. Which might be rather appealing right now.
Shoshana Zuboff
By day I’m writing about the unfolding saga of tech power, and it’s not pretty. By late evening I seek peace rummaging through the centuries for conversation, courage, wisdom, and the art of the long view. I am drawn to thinkers who imagined a more democratic world despite the overwhelming antidemocratic powers of their time and often sacrificed to create something starkly new, brave, and lasting. I’ll mention just a few. There are essays of Camus, Simone Weil, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass that feed me, and I pore over various histories of the Magna Carta. I still catch my breath to encounter that boldly unmodified clause, “To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice,” and revel in the daring miracle of this modern vision. George Orwell has long been my north star, and his letters, which I’ve read many times, now feel so urgent. The man saw straight into the future. He sacrificed his life to the completion of Nineteen Eighty-Four, because he was terrified of Anglo complacency toward the political dangers threatening democracy. Orwell’s determination to warn “the English-speaking races” that they were “not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere” drowned out every personal consideration, even the pressing need for medical care. Hannah Arendt’s essays “Lying in Politics” and “Civil Disobedience” felt important when I was at university, but now they are like oxygen. And I often return to Walt Whitman. Usually I feel heartened by his pure, unflinching exuberance for American democracy, but sometimes I want to shout at him for too much categorical belief. Occasionally, though, I catch a few bars of close conversation among the twentysomethings with whom I share my life, and in their ideals and commitments I hear the seeds of Whitman’s love.
David Lammy
The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston. Perhaps because of my Guyanese heritage I have always been fascinated by rainforests, the pre-Columbian era and myths of Latin and South America. On one hand, it’s liberating to be taken far away from the metropolitan chaos of London. On the other, I’m reminded of the innocence of the natural world that anthropogenic climate change is threatening to destroy. I’m also reading The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. A fantastic epic following the story of Cora, a 15-year-old slave who escapes from a plantation in Georgia. It’s an extraordinary take on slavery and a brutal tale of the colonial birth of the US.
Sarah Moss
I read Sharks in the Time of Saviours by Kawai Strong Washburn on my last journey in March, and it adjusted my understanding of the world. It follows the lives of a young family growing up in and then leaving Hawaii, navigating hardship, tradition and ambition between cultures. I’d never read a novel set in Hawaii before, but more importantly I’d never read a novel that so stylishly overcame my resistance to elements of fantasy. It’s beautifully written and completely absorbing. I’ve had trouble convincing friends to read Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse, but it’s not depressing because it’s written with a rare combination of analytical intelligence and real kindness. O’Connell travels the world (those were the days) to spend time with people hoping to survive the collapse of civilisation, and while he sees the limits and context of their thinking he’s also acutely aware of the limits and context of his own responses. Generosity and critical thinking are better than escapism this year. (That said, The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett never fails to console; 19-century coastal Maine, summer, the architecture of successful community.)
Ian Rankin
John Niven’s The F*ck-it List has a similar setup to the film Falling Down, but with a dodgy president running a dodgier US at its core. It’s sharp, funny and unlikely to see its author invited to many Republican party golf tourneys. I also enjoyed The Last Crossing by Brian McGilloway – a novel about the Troubles that’s actually a love story played out across decades. Three one-time Republicans meet up to locate the body of a man they buried years before. All carry secrets; none knows whom he can trust. Think Bernard MacLaverty – yes, it’s that good.
Edna O’Brien
I have been dipping into John Carey’s masterly A Little History of Poetry, where old and new wines are mixed to great effect. Two very gifted Irish writers have also had novels published this year – different in theme and style, Mary Costello’s The River Capture and Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier.
William Boyd
During these strange and destabilising times I console myself with the thought that at least we’re not living through the second world war, a comparison stimulated by the fact that I seem to have been reading a lot about that conflict recently. Notably, Love in the Blitz, by Eileen Alexander, is an astonishing, recently discovered cache of love letters between a young woman stuck in perilous London and her absent lover. And, another discovery, Fred Majdalany’s tremendous short novel Patrol, just republished in the Imperial War Museum’s Wartime Classics series, a powerful microcosm of the desert war set in 1943. Don Winslow’s Stygianly dark and terse collection of novellas, Broken, could be succinctly be described as American noir. “Hard-boiled” takes on new meaning. All these books put one’s mundane travails in reassuring perspective.
Stuart Turton
For two weeks this summer, A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson managed to block out nearly every crummy thing that was happening. Set in the counterculture idyll of Hydra in the 1960s, it tells the story of a young woman who falls into the company of a group of artists, including a young Leonard Cohen. It’s sleazy, evocative, beautiful and entertaining. My daughter has taken to lockdown with the even-tempered good nature you’d expect of a two-year-old. Gregory Goose Is on the Loose! At the Fair, by Hilary Robinson and Mandy Stanley, has helped end at least 948 tantrums.
Colm Tóibín
Katherine Anne Porter’s long story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” transports us to the flu pandemic of 1918, as the first world war is coming to an end. It is told from the point of view of Miranda, a young journalist in Denver, Colorado, who is in love with Adam, a young soldier. The love scenes between them are as sharply created and convincing as the scenes in which Miranda goes through the delirium of illness. Love Notes from a German Building Site, Adrian Duncan’s first novel, is written with such thrilling precision, such attention to detail, such care in the evocation of sensibility that you are fully transported into the world of a Berlin building site. In my lockdown, I am awaiting delivery of Duncan’s second novel, recently published, A Sabbatical in Leipzig. 
Sarah Perry
You might think that living through a catastrophe that has altered our way of life, perhaps forever, might make me disinclined to read science-fiction, but in fact it has whetted my appetite. So the great treat awaiting me this summer is The City We Became, by NK Jemisin, in which Lovecraftian monsters erupt through the fabric of New York. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series marks her out as probably the greatest speculative fiction writer of her generation, so I expect to be thoroughly captivated. The best fiction can immerse the reader entirely in a life experience which is nothing like their own, and Derek Owusu’s deeply moving debut, That Reminds Me – about a young black British boy, vulnerable, sensitive and clever – is so immersive that I am going to read it again. I have also been pressing Lucy Atkins’s Magpie Lane on anyone who will listen: it is a stylish, gothic-inflected mystery narrated by an untrustworthy bluestocking, and has the power to coax any mind away to an old Oxford house and its inhabitants.
Sebastian Barry
A statue that once stood on top of a 44ft-high pillar at Birr Castle, of the Duke of Cumberland, AKA the Butcher of Culloden, was modelled on a statue of Marcus Aurelius (the great philosopher of plague times) in Rome. It disappeared, some said toppled by vengeful Scottish soldiers stationed nearby, but in fact removed in 1913 by the urban district council because a crack appeared in it. This noble column with no one on top appears in a delicious book by Turtle Bunbury, a stirring atlas of Irishness, Ireland’s Forgotten Past: A History of the Overlooked and Disremembered. The further you go back, the nearer to the present you get, a feeling strongly endorsed by two less recent books, but raging with meaning at the moment: Reflections in Black by Deborah Willis and the incredibly affecting Envisioning Emancipation, Black Americans and the End of Slavery, again by Deborah Willis, with Barbara Krauthamer.
Diana Evans
I have been beguiled recently by Carmen Maria Machado’s genre-splintering short story collection Her Body & Other Parties – otherworldly journeys into the viscera of harrowed female psychologies, dangerous relationships, queer identities, patriarchal containment and haunted dresses in shopping malls. Her writing is fine and magical and the stories take brave turns into the unexpected in a way that is incredibly satisfying and somehow replenishing. Before I try to write I usually read some poetry and I have at last come to Roger Robinson’s deservedly lauded collection A Portable Paradise, which in the current climate transmits as prophetic, painfully so: “When police place knees / at your throat, you may not live / to tell of choking.” (That poem is called “Beware”.) It’s a mighty collection, sumptuously voiced and electric. Meanwhile I have also been taken away on sea voyages and heavenwards by Homer’s The Odyssey, written from deep within the genesis of the patriarchy but nevertheless full of wonder.
Katherine Rundell
Early in lockdown, when concentrating on anything looked as impossible as flying, I read Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood, a memoir so clever and funny that you feel you might die of it. Its wit is galvanic – like being kick-started. For children, I have loved The Star Outside My Window, by Onjali Q Raúf. The story is told by 10-year-old Aniyah, who has just been taken into foster care; it acknowledges the aftermath of domestic violence for children, while also being an adventure with joy shot through it; Raúf’s writing is a bright and shining thing.  
Nicola Sturgeon
Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, a fictional account of the death of Shakespeare’s son that suggests he created Hamlet in tribute, is beautifully written and absorbing. Even though the dark presence of the plague permeates the novel and perhaps limited its ability to transport me away from current events, it gave me a welcome sense of perspective.
George Aligiah
When chemo gets really tough my wife Fran reads to me – right now it’s David Nicholls’s coming of age story, Sweet Sorrow. Sixteen-year-old Charlie Lewis is facing a bleak future but then he meets Fran. A summer of love follows. A devastatingly honest exploration of first love, razor-sharp reflections on friendship – oh and some snort out loud funny moments. Were it not for the c-virus we would have been driving along California’s Pacific Coast Highway. Instead I’m reading Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur. Kerouac’s alter ego, Jack Duluoz, looks to nature to cure a troubled mind. Lockdown has been an ideal time to forage through our bookshelves. Jan Morris’s Conundrum is a poignant memoir charting her transition from James to Jan.
Jennifer Egan
In solidarity with the protests for racial justice now taking place in the US, I recommend two page-turning classics by African American women: Passing by Nella Larsen (1929), a fascinating inquiry into the nature of race (and a window into the Harlem Renaissance) catalysed by a chance meeting between two childhood friends, one of whom has spent her adult life “passing” as white; and The Street, by Ann Petry (1946), a harrowing tale of single motherhood in Harlem during the second world war, in which the double pressures of racism and sexism provoke a violent result. As for living writers, please read Erica Dawson’s mindblowing epic poem, When Rap Spoke Straight to God, and Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn, whose fragmentary vision of Brooklyn girlhood can also be shared with young readers. 
Robert Webb
In Humankind: A Hopeful History Dutch historian Rutger Bregman makes the argument that human beings are fundamentally caring, collaborative and decent. Not an easy sell at the moment but a very welcome one. I’ve also been reading Cultural Amnesia by Clive James. James has a talent for making his readers feel smart and he’s at his witty, wise and erudite best in this collection of essays about 20th century cultural figures.