China Miéville, Sebastian Barry, Derek Owusu and Guardian readers have shared the books they enjoyed in September, with recommendations ranging from fractured experimental fiction to classic Victorian novels.
China Miéville's picks
China Miéville was "sideswiped" by Giada Scodellaro's Ruins, Child, describing it as a brilliant, strange book that challenged him in the most exhilarating way, with its fractured language and dream-cinema visions, and the sense it bestowed of walking through a corridor full of echoes.
Echoes of a less elliptical but no-less political kind haunt Jordy Rosenberg's Night Night Fawn, which Miéville says could be called a family novel, but is at least as much about fascism as it is about the family, as well as about unsettling linkages between the two.
For horrors and rage in a nonfiction register, Miéville recommends Jonas Marvin's The Breaking of the English Working Class, an indispensable and beautifully written essay on decades of structural, economic and psychic violence. The feeling it provoked in him brought to mind John Berger's phrase "undefeated despair".
Reader and author recommendations
Linda, a Guardian reader, was totally immersed in Whale Fall by Elizabeth O'Connor, a beautifully written story describing a short time in the life of a young woman and her fishing community on an island off the coast of Wales in the 1930s. She noted that the simplicity of the tale is underpinned with intriguing moral issues when two anthropologists visit the island to study the lives and history of the islanders, calling it the most poetic book she has read in a while.
Derek Owusu named two books he now claims as favourites of all time: Beloved by Toni Morrison, which he called the perfect novel, and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, one of the founding texts of the Latin American tradition of magical realism. He also mentioned The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, which he had just finished, saying he was almost certain it would join the others as one of his favourites.
Fiona, a Guardian reader, is reading Mario Vargas Llosa by Gerald Martin, a giant book of nearly a thousand pages that will probably steer her through the remains of 2026. At night, she re-reads all of Jean Rhys around the date of her birthday, and also mentioned The Practice of Not Thinking by Ryunosuke Koike, For Now by Eileen Myles, and My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem.
Sebastian Barry's selections
Sebastian Barry recommended The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope for anyone in a mood to have their psyches calmed and their reading synapses restored, noting he was nodding his head when Marlon James said he rated Trollope above Dickens.
Barry is rereading Army Life in a Black Regiment by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, which Emerson called a masterpiece by a writer not known for writing masterpieces. The Penguin Classics reissue also contains Higginson's correspondence with Emily Dickinson and an account of his one meeting with her. Barry also admired a little book of poems by Kayleigh Jayshree called Mango and Starblush.
