From Fidel Castro to Germaine Greer, Philip Roth to Alice Sebold, The Observer's literary team pick this autumn's top 10 must-reads
Robert McCrum, Alex Clark and Emily StokesSunday August 26, 2007
Observer
Philip Roth, Exit GhostJonathan Cape £16.99, 6 October
The haunting title, a stage direction from Hamlet, seems to say it all. Philip Roth's first Nathan Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer, was published in 1979; now, almost three decades later and after a series that has encompassed such breathtaking works as American Pastoral and The Human Stain, Roth's alter ego makes what sounds very much like his final appearance. This time, Zuckerman returns to New York after 10 years' seclusion on an isolated mountainside and, almost immediately, finds himself sucked into the worldliness from which he has been in flight. Revolving around encounters with a beautiful but fading woman, once the muse of Roth's mentor, the now dead EI Lonoff, a young couple keen to escape post-9/11 Manhattan and a rapacious literary biographer, Exit Ghost conjures a man raging against the dying of the light, in a characteristically Rothian meditation on the nature of artistic endeavour, creative rivalry, inspiration and, naturally, the imminence of the end.
We say
'For a decade now, we have lived with the glory of late Philip Roth. To punctuate his last four indelible novels of America and their discontents at the turn of the century, Roth has developed a periodic habit of making a sharp inward turn, an unblinking memento mori, as if to stir in himself the urgency for another major assault on his times.' - The Observer
Meg Rosoff, What I Was
Puffin £10.99, 30 August
By the author of How I Live Now, which won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 2004, and Just in Case, which won the Carnegie Medal in 2007, What I Was is a tale for both young teenagers and adults with a plot that is at once thrilling and sensitively told. The young protagonist, a self-conscious and awkward troublemaker, is running cross-country on the cliffs of East Anglia when he discovers Finn, who lives in a solitary hut by the sea, as if having fallen 'through a small tear in the universe'. Told by a man who is 'a century old' and set in a nostalgic childhood world that is, like the coastline, crumbling away, this is a memorable rites-of-passage novella about the intensity of first love.
They say
'She could persuade me to believe almost anything.' - Mark Haddon on How I Live Now
Robert Harris, The Ghost
Hutchinson £18.99, 4 October
Robert Harris, formerly political editor of this newspaper, burst into popular consciousness with his bestselling thriller Fatherland in 1992. More recently, he has devoted his energies to historical fiction set in the ancient world (Pompeii, Imperium), exploring the glories of Rome as a metaphor for the pax Americana. In The Ghost, he reportedly returns to his thriller-writing and political commentating roots in a tale of the literary skulduggery surrounding the memoirs of a recently retired British Prime Minister. Set in the out-of-season paradise of Martha's Vineyard, it describes how ex-PM Adam Lang attempts to explain his career to his ghost writer and set the record straight. Harris is adamant that the similarities with Tony Blair are matched by the dissimilarities, but there's no doubt that this thriller, published to coincide with the Labour party conference, will be read as a roman a clef of New Labour's end-of-term travails. Written at top speed for the autumn season, copies have yet to be released for review, but Harris has form as a master of political narrative and it's safe to predict this will be a must-read for the political class this autumn.
He says
'I take the Arnold Bennett view. Every time he finished a novel, he bought a yacht, which meant he had to write another novel.'
Fidel Castro, My Life
Edited by Ignacio Ramonet
Allen Lane £25, 4 October
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has told readers that his friend Fidel is a 'fantastic reader' and that, on Marquez's recommendation, he had read Dracula one night rather than important state documents. But, save these literary revelations, for years the closest many readers have come to learning about the personal life of Fidel Castro is through news stories of his fading health. But now Ignacio Ramonet, well-known activist and editor of Le Monde diplomatique, presents us with a series of probing interviews in which the elusive leader describes his life from the 1950s to the present day. He reportedly discusses his parents, his earliest influences and his friendship with Che Guevara, as well as recounting his interpretations of political events, such as the beginning of the revolution, the Bay of Pigs, the Carter years and Cuban migration to the US.
He says
'I began a revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I'd do it with 10 or 15 of absolute faith. It does not matter how small you are if you have faith or a plan of action.'
Jonathan Coe, The Rain Before It Falls
Viking £17.99, 6 September
Jonathan Coe has surprised readers with his eighth novel by abandoning the satirical style of works such as What a Carve Up!, Bollinger winner The Rotters' Club and its sequel The Closed Circle. Whereas the social and political settings of these novels were painted with stylised flair - the Thatcherite Britain of What a Carve Up! or the Seventies Birmingham of The Rotters' Club - Coe's new novel is about time itself, stretching over 65 years and three generations, and split between the present and the past.
The tragic narrative of mothers and daughters is spoken by elderly Rosamund as she sits in her Shropshire home and records her voice on to four cassette tapes for Imogen, a blind girl.
It is divided not into chapters, but into photographs, which are described with such vivid nostalgia as to blur real history and personal fiction, the physical and the conjectured. This is not only Coe's answer to the criticism that his previous novels have lacked visual images; it is a deeply metaphorical novel told with a purposely self-conscious pace, about the power of description to illuminate the past and about the ghostly effect of other people's imagination and memory on our own sense of self. The Rain Before It Falls revolves with the sometimes overly heavy momentum of the tragic, but narrates childhood episodes with such truth that they might be remembered as one's own.
They say
'With his hyper-lucid prose and eye for the whimsical, the absurd and the quintessentially human, Jonathan Coe is Britain's best contemporary fictional chronicler' - Will Self
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise Of Capitalism
Allen Lane £25, 20 September
In this landmark history of the past three decades, the award-winning journalist, theorist, film-maker and author of No Logo attempts to explode the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Based on new historical research and four years of reporting in disaster zones, the book's premise is simple: America's 'free market' policies dominate the world through the exploitation of people and countries which have been 'disaster-shocked' - disorientated by wars, terrorist attacks or natural disasters. Klein gives a freshness to examples that feel familiar - US oil companies in Iraq, tourist resorts in tsunami-destroyed beaches, privatisation after hurricane Katrina - by placing them in a wider context that includes Pinochet's coup in Chile in 1973 and the Falklands conflict in 1982.
They say
'Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial and scary as hell' - John le Carre
Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife
Bloomsbury £20, 3 September
The tone of this literary-historical study, marketed as 'Germaine Greer's most contentious work since The Female Eunuch', is argumentative from the start, as Greer collates what she sees as the unfairly prejudiced attitudes towards Anne Hathaway presented by (male) literary historians from Theobald in 1752 to Stephen Greenblatt in 2004.The 'Shakespeare wallahs' have, writes Greer, created a Bard 'in their own image, that is to say, incapable of relating to women'.
A readable and likably humane book, which straddles scholarly research and imagination with some shaky but often entertaining results.
We say
'Greer is ... worth reading as much for her deliberately contentious and wrong-headed arguments as when she is right, and probably more enjoyable' - The Observer
Zadie Smith (editor), The Book Of Other People
Hamish Hamilton £16.99, 1 November
Anthologies of new fiction brought together under the editorship of a practising novelist can often suffer from diverse voices being yoked to one another under the aegis of an ill-defined or constricting manifesto. Zadie Smith makes it clear that this is the last thing she wanted; although she asked her charges to write a story named for, and based on, one fictional character, her aim was not to impose any other rules. The likes of David Mitchell, Nick Hornby, AM Homes and Aleksandr Hemon duly complied. Also here is Smith's regular artistic sidekick Dave Eggers, whose creative-writing charity 826NYC is the book's beneficiary.
She says
'The [aim was] a lively demonstration of the fact that there are as many ways to create "character" (or deny the possibility of "character") as there are writers.'
Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon
Picador £16.99, 16 October
Alice Sebold, the bestselling American author of Amazon cult title The Lovely Bones, knows how to hook her readers into her fevered, imaginative world. 'When all is said and done,' The Almost Moon begins, 'killing my mother came easily.' In the course of the next 24 hours, both reader and protagonist will discover that killing never comes 'easily', as Sebold subjects her audience to a macabre descent into hell. Transgression is Sebold's default setting, derived perhaps from her rape at the age of 18. The Almost Moon narrates the life of an averagely sensual woman who crosses the line of suburban normality into scarcely imaginable horror. A highly commercial new fiction, this will be welcomed by admirers of Sebold's dirty realism, quasi-poetic style and helter-skelter storytelling gifts. Amazingly, she manages to make her gothic tale as moving as it is unquestionably gripping.
She says
'I've always been weird, but I'm very happy with my weirdness.'
Charlie Higson, Hurricane Gold
Puffin £12.99, 6 September
The fourth in Higson's Young Bond series, this latest instalment promises to give 007 enthusiasts in short trousers all the thrills and suspense of previous adventures (Silverfin, Blood Fever and Double or Die). After a nervous start, Higson has got into his stride with this series and Hurricane Gold will supply more action, more demented crime and more flesh-crawling deaths than ever before. Set far from Bond's alma mater (Eton) on the island of Lagrimas Negras, a safe haven for the most deviant crims, Bond finds himself negotiating his way past a sequence of deadly obstacles. It succeeds, though Fleming would probably raise an eyebrow at its length.
We say
'Charlie Higson's task is unenviable, but he's well equipped. Bond was his specialist subject on Celebrity Mastermind.' - The Observer
Best of the rest
1. Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
(Profile £10.99) 6 Sept
The charming tale of a librarian who awakens in Her Majesty such a great passion for reading that her public duties begin to suffer.
2. Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River
(Chatto & Windus £25) 6 Sept
History of the river from source to sea, covering the literature, architecture, trade and mythology that it has borne.
3. David Thewlis, The Late Hector Kipling
(Picador £16.99) 7 Sept
Satirical first novel by stage actor-turned-promising writer, about competitive London artist Hector Kipling, whose life begins to unravel into chaos.
4. Caryl Phillips, Foreigners
(Harvill Secker £16.99) 13 Sept
A brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction and fact that tells the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak of the place and role of the outsider in English society.
5. Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
(Bloomsbury £17.99) 17 Sept
An intimate novel about love, loss, memory and family stretches across time and generations from northern California to rural France.
6. Peter Conrad, Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins
(Thames & Hudson £24.95) 17 Sept
The Observer critic takes us on a dazzling exploration of the origins of creativity and the imagination.
7. Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
(Hamish Hamilton £16.99) 27 Sept
Polemical 'interplanetary' love story in which humans and robots plan to inhabit a fresh, new planet, having destroyed their own.
8. Joanna Bourke, Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present
(Virago £25) 4 Oct
Professor Bourke analyses what drives the perpetrators of sexual violence.
9. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: Volume III: The Triumphant Years, 1917-32
(Jonathan Cape £30) 1 Nov
Penultimate volume in this Whitbread Prize-winning series by art historian Richardson.
10. Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy
(Heinemann £20) 1 Nov
A survey of the movement that extended from Baudelaire to Beckett - and beyond.
