The best food books of 2015

You wait years for a decent chicken cookbook to come along, then two arrive at once: Catherine Phipps’s Chicken (Ebury) and Diana Henry’s A Bird in the Hand (Octopus). Eggs are next, apparently, with four egg cookbooks slated for 2016.

Both the chicken books are terrific, by the way. You might ask whether we should be cooking and eating so much chicken, given the horrors of intensively reared poultry. But since, vegetarians aside, we seem wedded to our chicken habit, we might as well buy the best we can and cook it better – and these books help. If you start with a whole bird and want to know how to extract every ounce of schmaltzy goodness, you may choose Phipps – a wise and practical companion. Henry, on the other hand, excels on flavours. Dull thighs and breasts are transformed into a miraculously flavoursome Persian stew; or a rich French braise with prunes and red wine; or a springlike broth with tarragon.

This chicken trend comes in a food-book market that is increasingly polarised. Most cookbooks now are promising either health or comfort. On the comfort side are the baking books. With their consoling rivers of ganache, they have an air of childish innocence. Obesity crisis? What crisis? My favourite of 2015 is Honey & Co: The Baking Book (Saltyard) by Itamar Srulovich and Sarit Packer. Honey & Co cakes – from blueberry, hazelnut and ricotta to courgette and golden raisin – are not light on sugar, but to my mind they taste better than anyone else’s.

If you are more interested in why we eat so many cakes than in actually baking them, you might prefer The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets (Oxford). A superb encyclopedia with nearly 600 entries, edited by food historian Darra Goldstein, it covers everything from Viennese cafes to gummy sweets, from Krispy Kreme doughnuts to the slave trade and sugar addiction. One of the recurring themes is that the drive for sugar has been one of the main motivating forces in human existence.

Someone who feels we are too hung up on sweetness is Jennifer McLagan. Her Bitter (Jacqui Small) is a delightful and wholly original celebration of bitter foods, with recipes: from chicory to coffee to Seville oranges to dark greens. McLagan argues that as well as adding complex notes to our meals, bitter flavours can have health benefits. “Without bitterness, we lose a way to balance sweetness.”

This is a more pragmatic approach to nutrition than “clean eating”, a bizarre vogue that shows no sign of abating. It boils down to this: eat raw vegan food and you will be able to master incredibly bendy yoga moves and look like a model. According to Nielsen Book Services, no fewer than 208 of the 1,808 food and drink titles published in the UK in 2014 were on health, dieting and wholefoods. Many of these books – virtuous with spiralised vegetables – promote a guilt-inducing view of food.

Anna Jones is a benign exception. She is a rare author who can write recipes for quinoa “goodness bowls” without making you wish you were eating doughnuts. Her A Modern Way to Cook (4th Estate), a collection of vibrant vegetarian recipes, is already one of the most loved and splattered books in my kitchen (parsnip rosti, sweetcorn fritters, butternut and sweet leek hash). As Jones comments, “wellness doesn’t come at the expense of deliciousness”.

Nigella Lawson would share this view. Her latest, Simply Nigella (Chatto & Windus), may sound like Deliciously Ella, but it begins with a welcome polemic against “clean eating”. “Food is not dirty,” she notes, “the pleasures of the flesh are essential to life and, however we eat, we are not guaranteed immortality or immunity from loss.” Lawson brings together the warring factions of comfort and health. She has embraced chia seeds and avocado toast – the book is worth buying for the toasty olive oil granola alone – but still gives us the hearty stews and cakes we know and love her for. If bundt tins sell out, we’ll know why.

Away from the clamour of “wellness”, many cooks and chefs continue to produce excellent books on the dishes they love most. Given how many superb books Nigel Slater has already written, it feels ridiculous to recommend another, but his A Year of Good Eating (4th Estate), in a sky-blue cover, is simply a joy. He packs more careful culinary observation on to a page than most authors manage in a whole book. A case in point: his sublime tempura recipe.

Another volume of understated pleasure is Kristen Miglore’s Food52 Genius Recipes (Ten Speed Press). Miglore has gathered cult recipes – such as Daniel Patterson’s eggs scrambled in water – and explained why they are so brilliant. You feel you are in the company of an inquiring kitchen mind. The same is true of Nopi: The Cookbook (Ebury) by Yotam Ottolenghi and Ramael Scully. It may not be Ottolenghi’s easiest book, but it is the most elegant, spiced with pink peppercorns and black garlic. Seven years after his first cookbook, his recipes remain the most exciting around. Who else would think to roast a whole celeriac for three hours “like a creature from outer space”?

Cookbooks allow us to travel – if not as far as space, at least to other countries. The Nordic Cookbook (Phaidon) by the Swedish chef Magnus Nilsson is a magnificent achievement. I sometimes get impatient with these vast cheffy books, too big to read in bed, but in this case the size is justified. Like Claudia Roden, Nilsson is interested in the subtle variations of home cooking – Scandinavian classics, from waffles to pickled herrings. The recipes are hearty and unpretentious (try the potato patties!), though you’ll probably want to skip the section on puffin cuisine.

Meanwhile, in Mamushka (Mitchell Beazley), the best food debut of the year, Olia Hercules takes us to her home country of Ukraine which, she points out, is not “grey and bleak”, as westerners imagine, but a sunny place an hour’s flight from Turkey. I fell for Hercules’s warm reminiscences and her recipes – for yoghurt drop scones, Armenian roast vegetables and garlicky Georgian poussins cooked in a skillet weighted down with a mortar. Mamushka offers the rare feeling that, amid this Babel of recipes, there is still something new to discover.

• Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson is published by Penguin. Save at least 30%. Browse all the critics’ choices at bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. From now until Christmas, 20p from each title you order will go to the Guardian and Observer charity appeal 2015.

On Cricket by Kevin Pietersen – digested read

I love my family and I love cricket. In that order. So let me put this on the record straight away. When those complete cu – I mean those really thoughtful and intelligent cricket strategists, Straussy and Cooky, two of the best guys you could ever hope to meet – dropped me from the international squad, I was happy to take it on the chin. Despite what people say, KP is not a cricketer with a big ego. There’s nothing I like more than just sitting at home with Jess, staring at myself in the mirror. Nor was I in any way disappointed when England surprised everyone by winning the Ashes and even Piers Morgan and Tom Holland stopped their incessant tweets demanding my recall. Because KP always has been and always will be a team player.

In cricket, as in life, we all have to move on and I think it’s time to let bygones be bygones. When I wrote my autobiography two years ago, I didn’t anticipate that slagging off every England cricketer I had ever played with might put a few people’s backs up. What I said was always intended as constructive criticism – a chance to use my genius to improve English cricket for decades to come – rather than to settle some old scores with a bunch of losers. But I see now that some people might not have been ready for that approach, so I want to put the record straight now. If I did call some of you miserable shits miserable shits, I didn’t mean it. And please, please don’t forget me. My phone hasn’t rung for days.

So I’m writing this book not to try and crawl my way back into the England team by proving that I can be as dull and boring as the rest of them, but to put the record straight. And to remind a few of those who might have forgotten who KP was just how brilliant KP is. Let me tell you this. I know I sometimes have a brash exterior that can rub people up the wrong way, but deep down KP feels just as vulnerable as those, like Matt Prior, with more cause to feel stressed. Because KP hates letting people down. That’s the trouble with setting yourself such high standards.

I would also like to correct another misimpression left by my last book. When I said I had left South Africa because the new quota system was preventing me from getting into the national team because I was white, I was actually misquoting myself. I now quite understand that some black cricketers were born with disadvantages, and the reason I came to England was to make it easier for them to get into the South African side. Because obviously it would have been very difficult for the Saffer selectors not to pick me.

One question I am almost never asked these days, because no one really cares about anything I say or do any more, is: “When did you realise you were the best batsman in the world?” The answer is quite simple. Very early on, though I would also like to say I’ve had to work very hard on my brilliance. To become quite so obnoxious and disliked by almost everyone I’ve played with is a talent that needs to be worked on every bit as my batting.

And that’s all I’ve got to say really, but as I have another 200 pages to fill I’m going to copy out a few bits from my autobiography and pad it out with some stuff you can find in any coaching manual. Playing fast bowling is very demanding so I always made sure I was awake and switched on before going out to bat. The key was to block out the good balls and try to score off the bad ones: above all I was always keen never to let a bowler dominate me. The best fast bowler I ever faced was (note to ghost writer: put in anyone as long he’s not English).

Playing spin bowling is very demanding so I always made sure I was awake and switched on before going out to bat. The key was to block out the good balls and try to score off the bad ones: above all I was always keen never to let a bowler dominate me. The best spin bowler I ever faced was (note to ghost writer: put in anyone as long he’s not English).

Have I said how difficult it is being KP? Always being under pressure to score runs, because I was the best player in the side, was never easy and I always tried to make life easy for everyone else in the dressing room. Cricket is a team game. No one should ever forget that.

Svetlana Alexievich wins 2015 Nobel prize in literature

Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian writer whose oral histories have recorded thousands of individual voices to map the implosion of the Soviet Union, has won the Nobel prize for literature.

The Swedish Academy, announcing her win, praised Alexievich’s “polyphonic writings”, describing them as a “monument to suffering and courage in our time”.

She becomes the 14th woman to win the prize since it was first awarded in 1901. The last woman to win, Canada’s Alice Munro, was handed the award in 2013.

Speaking by phone to the Swedish broadcaster SVT, Svetlana Alexievich said that the award left her with a “complicated” feeling.

“It immediately evokes such great names as [Ivan] Bunin, [Boris] Pasternak,” she said, referring to Russian writers who have won the prize. “On the one hand, it’s such a fantastic feeling, but it’s also a bit disturbing.”

The academy called while she was at home, “doing the ironing,” she said, adding that the 8m Swedish krona (£775,000) prize would “buy her freedom”.

“It takes me a long time to write my books, from five to 10 years. I have two ideas for new books so I’m pleased that I will now have the freedom to work on them.”

Alexievich was born on the 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into a family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilisation from the army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. She left school to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl.

She has written short stories, essays and reportage but says she found her voice under the influence of the Belorusian writer Ales Adamovich, who developed a genre which he variously called the “collective novel”, “novel-oratorio”, “novel-evidence”, “people talking about themselves” and the “epic chorus”.

According to Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Alexeivich is an “extraordinary” writer.

“For the past 30 or 40 years she’s been busy mapping the Soviet and post soviet individual,” Danius said, “but it’s not really about a history of events. It’s a history of emotions – what she’s offering us is really an emotional world, so these historical events she’s covering in her various books, for example the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, these are in a way just pretexts for exploring the Soviet individual and the post-Soviet individual.”

“She’s conducted thousands and thousands of interviews with children, with women and with men, and in this way she’s offering us a history of human beings about whom we didn’t know that much ... and at the same time she’s offering us a history of emotions, a history of the soul.”

In Voices From Chernobyl, Alexievich interviews hundreds of those affected by the nuclear disaster, from a woman holding her dying husband despite being told by nurses that “that’s not a person anymore, that’s a nuclear reactor” to the soldiers sent in to help, angry at being “flung ... there, like sand on the reactor”. In Zinky Boys, she gathers voices from the Afghan war: soldiers, doctors, widows and mothers.


“I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age,” Alexievich writes in the introduction to Second-hand Time, which is due from independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2016. “Music, dances, hairstyles. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story.

“It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths … History is only interested in facts; emotions are excluded from its realm of interest. It’s considered improper to admit them into history. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people.”

Danius pointed new readers towards her first book U vojny ne ženskoe lico (War’s Unwomanly Face), based on interviews with hundreds of women who participated in the second world war.

“It’s an exploration of the second world war from a perspective that was, before that book, almost completely unknown,” she said. “It tells the story of the hundreds and hundreds of women who were at the front in the second world war. Almost one million Soviet women participated in the war, and it’s a largely unknown history. It was a huge success in the Soviet Union union when published, and sold more than 2m copies. It’s a touching document and at the same time brings you very close to every individual, and in a few years they all will be gone.”
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According to her close friend, the Belarusian opposition leader Andrei Sannikov, Alexeivich writes about “the history of the Red Man”.

“She claims he is not gone,” Sannikov said. “She argues that this man is inside us, inside every Soviet person. Her last book, Second-hand Time, is dedicated to this problem.” Alexeivich is “wonderful at interviewing” he continued. “She doesn’t avoid difficult issues or questions. Mostly she writes about human tragedy. She lets it go through her and writes with surgical precision about what’s going on within human nature.”

Bela Shayevich, who is currently translating Alexievich into English for Fitzcarraldo, also paid tribute to her skills as an interviewer which leave her work “resounding with nothing but the truth”.
“The truth of life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia is not an easy thing to swallow,” Shayevich said. “I’m thrilled that this win will mean that more readers will be exposed to the metaphysical dimensions of her subjects’ survival and despair through the tragedies of Soviet history. I hope that in reading her, more people see the ways that suffering – even suffering brought on by geopolitical circumstances foreign to many readers – is also something that can bring people closer to one another if they are willing to take a risk and listen.”

Although Alexievich is widely translated into German, French and Swedish, winning a range of major prizes for her work, English editions of her work are sparse. Fitzcarraldo editor Jacques Testard came across her work in French a few years ago.

“It’s an oral history, as are all her books, about nostalgia for the Soviet Union,” said Testard. “She went around Russia interviewing people after the fall of the Soviet Union, in an attempt to surmise what the collective post Soviet psyche is. As with all her books, it’s really harrowing – a story about loss of identity, about finding yourself in a country which you don’t recognise any more. It’s a micro-historical survey of Russia in the second half of the 20th century, and it goes up to the Putin years.”

“She’s been a big deal in Europe for a long time, but she’s never really been picked up in England,” he said.

“Her books are very unusual and difficult to categorise. They’re technically non-fiction, but English and American publishers are loath to take risks on a book just because it’s good, without something like a Nobel prize.”

Alexievich led the odds for the 2015 award, ahead of Japan’s Haruki Murakami, Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse.

Man Booker shortlist 2015: is this the most diverse lineup ever?

So a panel that, as Booker tradition requires, contains three middle-aged white males – chairman Michael Wood, John Burnside and Sam Leith – have come up with a shortlist that includes only one novelist who mirrors them. Like Edward St Aubyn in 2006 and Will Self in 2012, Tom McCarthy is the last MAWM left standing; he is also the sole mid-career author and previous shortlistee. After a brutal cull of eminent entrants, past winners among them, in their 40s, 50s and 60s at the longlist and shortlist stages, there is a striking disparity in experience between Anne Tyler, shortlisted for her 20th and possibly last book, and the remaining four finalists with eight novels between them.

Whatever the explanation of this slaughter of the seasoned – did the old guard all underperform, or was there a bias towards new faces and fiction? – the result could well be, in terms of ethnicity and age-range at least, the most diverse shortlist ever. Marlon James is the Booker’s first Jamaican shortlistee and would be the first African-Caribbean winner. Chigozie Obioma, 28 (with Eleanor Catton, the joint youngest finalist), would be the first Nigerian winner since Ben Okri in 1991 and joins another short list: in a prize that has been scandalously reluctant to appoint non-white judges – Ellah Wakatama Allfrey this year appears to be only the fourth – just four black authors from sub-Saharan Africa have reached this stage before him.

Derby-born Sunjeev Sahota would be the first UK-native British winner from any ethnic minority (VS Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, in contrast, were born abroad), and the first maths graduate to triumph since JM Coetzee. The short-odds favourite Hanya Yanagihara would be the first author of east Asian heritage to win since Kazuo Ishiguro in 1989, and she or Tyler would of course be the first American winner (as a magazine journalist, she would arguably be also the first winner with a “real”, non-literary job since Roddy Doyle, unless Arundhati Roy’s aerobics teaching qualifies). At 73, Tyler would probably be the venerable award’s oldest winner, as even the Dumbledore-esque William Golding was a mere 69 when he saw off a furious Anthony Burgess in 1980.

However, the shortlist’s rainbow-like appearance is somewhat deceptive, since (as Philip Hensher noted on Twitter, grumpily adding “told you so”) “four out of six of Booker shortlist American or America-residing novelists” – James and Obioma both have US academic posts, joining the two women – while the other pair are Brits. And if you take away the 70s Jamaica of A Brief History of Seven Killings and the 90s Nigeria of The Fishermen, plus The Year of the Runaways’ Indian flashbacks, what’s left suddenly looks distinctly narrow in focus and familiar: a 200-mile stretch of the US east coast (Tyler’s Baltimore, Yanagihara’s New York) and two cities in England’s eastern half (McCarthy’s London, Sahota’s Sheffield) linked by 180 miles of the M1.

• To buy any of these books, or the full shortlist for £60 (RRP £80.94), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

Secret Garden Coloring Book Sells 3M Copies in China

Johanna Basford’s popular adult coloring book, Secret Garden, has sold more than three million copies in China alone in less than three months, the publisher Laurence King Publishing revealed this week.

The book has been quite successful around the globe, but the Chinese success is unparalleled. The Guardian has the scoop:

As the Beijing international book fair takes place this week, Laurence King Publishing said that Secret Garden had sold 6.8m copies around the world, with 3m of these sales in China, where it was published on 1 June. The title has also been a major hit in Brazil, where it has sold just over 1.1m copies, said Laurence King, with 650,421 copies sold in the US, half a million in South Korea, and 477,658 in the UK to date.

Edge of the World by Michael Powell – a gripping voyage into the past

It starts, as great voyages perhaps should always do, with a ship crawling through the thick fog. “Where bound, Captain?” comes the deep voice of the Aberdeen harbour-master across the water.

“Lerwick,” replies the captain of the Vedra through his megaphone. The man standing next to him, a then-unknown British film director called Michael Powell, grabs the megaphone and shouts, “AND THE ISLAND OF FOULA!” Below decks, in the ship’s saloon, a film crew lounges around looking, as Powell puts it with a director’s eye “like a scene from one of those American films where the whole cast is catching the Last Express from Shanghai”.

Adventure story ... a still from The Edge of the World (1937). Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock

It had all started six years earlier in 1930, when Powell had stumbled across a short article in the Observer about the then-ongoing evacuation of St Kilda and decided it was the perfect subject for the film to make his name. He was, of course, destined to become one of the titans of postwar British film, with classics such as A Matter of Life and Death and Peeping Tom. But this account of the making of his first major film, also called The Edge of the World, is something else entirely – an inadvertently fresh and racy portrait of prewar Britain.

The poignant story of the Scottish island of St Kilda – stranded dozens of miles west of the Scottish mainland – would, alone, fill several books (indeed it has). The islanders lived in virtual isolation for centuries until the military arrived during the first world war, forcing them to accept that that their world was obsolete, and eventually prompting their migration. The dramatic potential of the story itself is obvious – but Powell’s book about the obstacles he faced to get the film made, many of which would have overwhelmed a less resourceful and determined person, has its own gripping hold.

Powell’s plan, in 1936, when he was finally ready to make his film, was to shoot on St Kilda itself, and his script was designed to accommodate the dramatic landscape and buildings. He duly assembled his cast and crew, only to have the island’s owner – terrified of the effect a film crew might have on the place – withdraw permission at the last minute. Faced with finding another location within 24 hours or abandoning the film, Powell was pointed towards another possible candidate: an island to the west of Shetland called Foula. Having adapted his script and reassembled his crew, Powell and his gang set off on what turned out to be as much an adventure as a film shoot.

Powell’s tale really gets going in the second part, when the crew is finally ensconced in Shetland and ready to film. Offering glimpses of what would make him such an innovative film-maker during his later collaborations with Emeric Pressburger, Powell eschews the customary dictatorial role of director and inaugurates a democratic “parliament” in the camp. His tale of living and working together, an embryonic version of the “castaway”-style reality shows, is magical, and there’s even a final-act real-life drama to round things off.

Nobody would accuse Powell, on the strength of this book, of being a literary stylist, but the fog-bound world he conjures up, and the wonderful cast of characters he encounters, from grumpy landowners to enterprising journalists, makes for a gripping portrait of another time and place.

The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens review – the man behind the novels

Charles Dickens, who burned thousands of his letters. Photograph: AP

On 19 April 1842, while in Cincinnati, Charles Dickens wrote a brief note to Rebecca Nichols, thanking her for her letter about The Old Curiosity Shop. It goes, in full:

    My Dear Madam,
    I am very much obliged to you for your beautiful lines on the death of Nell, which I have read with great interest and pleasure.
    Believe me
    Faithfully Yours
    CHARLES DICKENS.

The footnote gives us the context:

    Rebecca Nichols (1819-1903), poet and newspaper editor, then living in Cincinnati. Her poem, commemorating Nell in spring, summer and autumn, began: “Spring, with breezes cool and airy, / Opened on a little fairy.”

In those few lines we can see what a good editor Professor Jenny Hartley is. First, she has included Dickens’s letter, which does not, on the face of it, look interesting at all, except perhaps as an indication of his politeness to his public. Second, she has looked up the poem that occasioned the reply. This isn’t hard to do, thanks to the digitising efforts of the Library of Congress, but she could still have thought her time better spent elsewhere. And third: she quotes all she has to of the poem, without comment. (It goes on in the same vein, but those opening lines are, you will agree, special; the guffaw that exploded from me as I read them made me think of Oscar Wilde’s famous remark that one must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.) Then you imagine Dickens himself reading this rubbish and realising he was going to have to say something nice about it; and then, perhaps, rolling his eyes before putting pen to paper. While we’re at it, we can pause to reflect on Nichols’s world, and her delight in receiving a note from the great man, unless a corner of her mind registered the faint possibility of sarcasm (“believe me”).

Extracting this much from six lines isn’t bad going, and when you think that Hartley had to plough through the 12 huge volumes of Dickens’s surviving letters to make her selection (he burned thousands more, but in an age when Londoners could expect a reply from a letter within two hours, inevitably many escaped the bonfire), your admiration for her grows deeper and deeper.

The letter I quoted is not, of course, representative. There are others that are less ambiguous or formal. It’s hard to say which are my favourites: they are all, in their way, good. Dickens was not known for his restraint in his exploration of the rhetorical potential of the English language, and reading this book is like listening to the work of an already uninhibited court maestro who has been let further off the leash.

The reason Dickens tended to burn his letters was, he said, because they captured him at unguarded moments – and they are all the better for it. We get an anonymously written letter about the exploitation of women and children by mine-owners prior to the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842, for publication in the Morning Chronicle, which has lines you could quote today that would shame our government with their articulate fury. There’s a letter in which he describes being visited in a dream by the “Spirit” of his dead daughter, Mary, and asking her which is the true religion, or whether they are all true (the right religion for Dickens, he is told, is Catholicism, which made me raise an eyebrow). Another describes him taking round water in his hat and brandy from his flask to the injured and dying victims of the 1865 Staplehurst train crash, which he was in with his mistress, Ellen Ternan, and her mother. There are musings about works that have been sidelined (such as Master Humphrey’s Clock, a weekly periodical written entirely by Dickens for a year and a half), and also about whether to murder Chapman and Hall, his publishers. In short, the whole book bursts with the author’s energy, and you will love him and know him better after reading even a few of these letters. If you don’t buy it now, or put it on your Christmas list, it can only be because you already have a copy.

• To order The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea review – a symphony out of historical silence

A few families possess paper records stretching back through the centuries, but for most of us, family history is handed down from mouth to ear. These stories illuminate the past with a particular, fitful brilliance, but much is left in the dark. This darkness is both a gift to a novelist and a daunting responsibility. When a writer claims to speak for an illiterate woman who lived in the mid-19th century, to what extent will he overlay her story with his own preconceptions?

Although Gavin McCrea’s first novel is set in the circles of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, this is not their story, and it does not flatter them. Engels and Marx left copious records behind them, but were unable to describe how they themselves might appear to a member of the working class, still less to a woman of that class. Nor did they tell the history of two sisters born in Manchester of Irish descent, Mary and Lizzie (Lydia) Burns, although both women were closely connected with Engels and Marx for many years. Neither sister left any account of their lives, but in Mrs Engels they step forward to dominate the narrative.

Stepping out of the shadows of time … Lizzie Burns c1865 

McCrea’s narrator is the younger, Lizzie (pictured), who was born in 1827. According to Marx’s daughter Eleanor, Lizzie “was illiterate and could not read or write but she was true, honest and in some ways as fine-souled a woman as you could meet”. Like her elder sister Mary, Lizzie worked in a cotton mill. Mary met Engels when he was sent to work at the family firm of Engels & Ermen in Manchester, and she entered into a relationship with him which lasted until her death at the age of 40. Some historians detect her influence on Engels’ The Condition of the English Working Class, which deals with the industrial working class of Manchester and Liverpool and describes in some detail the district of Manchester known as Little Ireland. The Burns sisters knew about poverty, child labour and slum housing from the inside, and would have made valuable guides for a middle-class son of a factory owner. “Some 4,000 people, mostly Irish, inhabit this slum ... Heaps of refuse, offal and sickening filth are everywhere interspersed with pools of stagnant liquid. The atmosphere is polluted by the stench and is darkened by the thick smoke of a dozen factory chimneys.”

Mrs Engels moves back and forwards in time, between the earlier days in Manchester and the later years after Mary’s death, when Lizzie becomes Engels’s partner in her sister’s stead and moves with him to Primrose Hill. From the outside, she appears secure, but inside she is torn, even tormented by the contradictions of her life. The Engels and Marx menages are funded by reserves of family money. Refugees from the French Commune pack the drawing room, swallowing fine wines faster than they can be brought up from the cellar. The Marxes’ servant, Nim, is the single mother of a child whose father Lizzie believes to be Engels. Jenny Marx, with three surviving children out of seven born, is obsessed with the future marriages of her girls. Meanwhile, Lizzie is in contact with the Fenian movement through a former lover. This whirlwind of politics and personalities might become dizzying were it not stabilised by Lizzie’s unmistakable voice. She begins life by grabbing what she needs in order to survive; she ends it having achieved deep self-knowledge. She tells her own story with a fierce wit and trenchancy, shot through with poetry.

The historical Lizzie tells us nothing. Was she, as McCrea suggests, made infertile after infection with syphilis, or did she make sure, in one way or another, that no children were born to her? Did she hold on to enough of her faith to see, at the closing of the coffin that held her sister’s body, “how her hollowness and ash turned to a radiance that the oils and the candles couldn’t fully explain”? No one will ever know, but McCrea’s fictional speculation makes a fine symphony out of the silence that surrounds Lizzie Burns.

The Not-Dead and the Saved review – Kate Clanchy’s wide-ranging short stories

Family ties, especially motherhood, take centre stage in many of the 16 stories in Kate Clanchy’s first collection. Irene is something of a prose companion to Newborn (Clanchy’s poetry collection about parenthood), skilfully juxtaposing the disorientation – “Post-partum, that’s what they call it. In parts. Parted from yourself” – with the protagonist’s flourishing sense of maternal solidarity with other women. There are also some curveballs thrown in for good measure, like the clever Brunty Country, which imagines the Brontës as a contemporary slush-pile discovery of a literary agent: “Maybe, just maybe, WH isn’t really the eternal masterpiece we’re all making out? Maybe it’s just a small press novel that got really, really, lucky? You know, warm wind from Twilight, warmer one from Charlotte, the public in a hot mood for incest and cheap ebooks.” Moving swiftly between the comic and the tragic, Clanchy has an eager eye for each and every detail in between.

Baddies in books: Captain Blicero in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon’s Captain Blicero appears to be an archetypal baddie: a sadomasochistic, sexually indiscriminate pederast Nazi and the source of the mysterious 00000 V-2 rocket that is the white whale of Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow.
Blicero made his first appearance in Pynchon’s 1963 debut, V, as Lieutenant Weissman, a decadent German army officer stranded in the former South-West Africa seven years after it ceased to be a German colony. In this earlier novel, he is a mysterious, occasionally transvestite figure who appears to be engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with the German agent Vera Merovering. He is sneaky too, potentially drugging and then stealing from another character, Kurt Mondaugen. More droll than disquieting, he is not yet a fully-fledged bad guy.
By the time he crops up again in Gravity’s Rainbow, 20 years later, he has metamorphosed into something quite different. Now an SS major, he is the commander of a V-2 rocket battery in the Netherlands, where he has imprisoned a young Dutch woman and a German boy. Blicero is a shocking figure; the prisoners are his sex slaves and when he first appears in the action he is “in high drag” and in the act of having sex with the young German, Gottfried. When it is revealed that his hostages are playing roles in a skewed Hansel and Gretel fantasy, in which he is the witch trying to lure the children into his Kinderofen, things do not get any less bizarre.
Over the course of the novel’s dense and plentiful pages, Blicero/Weissman is revealed to have first been the lover of a young Herero male in colonised South-West Africa, and later to have been a key figure in the Nazi rocket-building programme, during which he tortured a technician into designing a customised V-2 rocket for his own ends. With his penchant for quoting his favourite poet, Rilke, Weissman cuts a singular figure. He is described as both “balding, scholarly, peering up … through eyeglass lenses thick as bottles” and as “a brand new military type, part salesman, part scientist”. He is brutal: “the sadist [with the] responsibility for coming up with new game variations building towards a maximum cruelty.”
There is little doubt that Weissman is death-obsessed. He even takes the name Dominus Blicero as his SS codename because it was a Teutonic nickname for death himself. In the novel’s penultimate section, we see him “in his final madness” as he abandons humanity altogether and embraces the ultimate destructiveness of the rocket. He has mutated into “another animal … a werewolf … but with no humanity left in its eyes”.
As long-time readers and viewers of the recent Inherent Vice adaptation can attest, Pynchon can never be accused of stinting on his creations. He is often criticised for creating cartoonish characters, and Weissman at first seems to fit this mould. But his African partner’s description of the early Weissman casts him in a more wistful light. He was, Enzian says, “a young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance”, but at the same time his “thirst for guilt was as insatiable as the desert’s for water”. He is human after all: another son of empire who is ultimately corrupted by its “mission to propagate death”.
Despite the satirical and ridiculous nature of Blicero, he embodies an important real-world point. He is a composite of the fears and prejudices of the post-Cuban missile crisis era in which this 1973 novel was composed. Perverse and unsettling, he represents the unabashed wickedness that lies at the heart of man’s romance with deadly technologies. His corrupted idealism is meant to bring to mind the Nazi rocket scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who were transplanted from Germany to Texas immediately after the war to work on the American space programme.
Many of those scientists were exonerated of crimes they committed or were privy to, and became fixtures of American public life. Thus the anger in the line: “If you’re wondering where he has gone, look among the successful academics, the presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost certainly there. Look high, not low.” For all his preposterousness, an uncanny undercurrent of history underpins this baddie. Pynchon characterises evil in such a way as to confront us with history’s complacent attitude to the baddies of the real world.

Shami Chakrabarti reveals Baileys women’s prize for fiction longlist

The women’s prize for fiction, established to redress the tendency by literary awards to overlook writing by women, is now in its 20th year, but chair of this year’s judges Shami Chakrabarti believes we are “still nowhere near where we should be” when it comes to literary recognition for women.
Announcing a longlist of 20 titles for the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, which runs the gamut from literary works by the likes of Ali Smith, Anne Tyler, Kamila Shamsie, Sarah Waters and Rachel Cusk to dystopian science fiction and thrillers, the Liberty director was adamant that there is still a place for a literary award focusing on women’s fiction.

“I think we do need to keep celebrating women’s fiction. We need to celebrate women generally and there’s nothing more powerful than stories,” said Chakrabarti. “We need to celebrate stories by women, for women, as just one more way to redress gender injustice.”
Gender injustice, said the campaigner, is “the greatest human rights violation in the world ... like an apartheid. It’s global in reach and millennial in duration. It’s certainly not a time to be doing anything less.”
The women’s prize for fiction was launched in the wake of the judges’ failure to shortlist a single female author for the Booker prize of 1991. Literary figures led by the author Kate Mosse discovered that “by 1992, only 10% of novelists shortlisted for the Booker prize had been women”; by 1996, their plan to launch an award solely for women had come to fruition. After years of sponsorship by Orange, the 2013 award was privately funded by sponsors including Cherie Blair and Joanna Trollope. The prize is now sponsored by Baileys.
“We are still nowhere near where we should be,” said Chakrabarti. “I also don’t think women are getting their due in other literary prizes. I am still surprised at some of the lists and comments made by judges and chairs of judges elsewhere, so I don’t think it’s time to end a women’s prize.”
According to Guardian analysis, since 1996 there have been 12 male winners of the Man Booker prize and seven female winners, which is just over 35%, but when you look at the shortlists the ratio drops to 25%, with 23 women, as against 70 men.
“Literature ought to be further on than it is, given how long women have been writing brilliant stuff,” said Chakrabarti. “It’s just hilarious to me that we should target a women’s book prize ... at a time when women are so much further back then they should be, not just in publishing but in politics, economics, health care ... I think there is still work to do and there’s an ocean of talent to be discussed and shared and celebrated, and this is one way of doing it.”
Chakrabarti was joined on the judging panel for this year’s award by Laura Bates, founder of The Everyday Sexism Project, columnist Grace Dent, novelist Helen Dunmore and presenter Cathy Newman. They read a total of 165 books to come up with their longlist of 20 novels for the £30,000 award, a lineup which the Liberty director called a list “to be proud of – with its mix of genres and styles, first-timers and well-known names from around the world”.
American veteran Tyler is longlisted for her 20th novel, the story of three generations of a family A Spool of Blue Thread, alongside Smith’s dual narrative How to Be Both, which twines together the stories of a renaissance artist of the 1460s and a modern teenager, and which has already won the Goldsmiths prize and the Costa novel award. Waters, chosen this time for her historical novel The Paying Guests, has been shortlisted twice before for the award, as has Tyler.
Five debut writers also made the cut, from Emma Healey’s bestselling and Costa-winning first novel Elizabeth Is Missing, narrated by an elderly woman with dementia, to Laline Paull, whose The Bees is a dystopia set in a beehive.
Tiny UK publisher Legend Press has two first novelists on the longlist, Jemma Wayne for After Before, in which three women reach crisis point during a cold British winter, and PP Wong for The Life of a Banana, narrated by Xing Li, “what some Chinese people call a banana – yellow on the outside and white on the inside”.
Emily St John Mandel’s tale of a world wiped out by the flu, Station Eleven, and Sandra Newman’s dystopian The Country of Ice Cream Star, were also chosen by judges.
The award is open to novels written in English by women from anywhere in the world, provided they are published in the UK, and is intended to reward “excellence, originality and accessibility in writing”. Chakrabarti said there had been a “very strong showing of UK writers”, on this year’s longlist.
The winner will be announced on 3 June, following the unveiling of the shortlist on 13 April. The award has previously honoured writers including Eimear McBride, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy. Dunmore, on the judging panel this year, took the inaugural prize for her novel A Spell of Winter, in 1996.

Baileys women’s prize for fiction longlist 2015

Outline by Rachel Cusk (Faber and Faber) – British – 8th novel
Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans (Doubleday) – British – 4th novel
Aren’t We Sisters? by Patricia Ferguson (Penguin) – British – 8th novel
I Am China by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto & Windus) – Chinese/ British – 6th novel
Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape) – British - 3rd novel
Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey (Viking) – British – 1st novel
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel (Picado) – Canadian – 4th novel
The Offering by Grace McCleen (Sceptre) – British – 3rd novel
The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman (Chatto & Windus) – British/American – 3rd novel
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill (Quercus) – Canadian – 2nd novel
The Bees by Laline Paull (Fourth Estate) – British - 1st novel
The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips (Jonathan Cape) – British – 2nd Novel
The Walk Home by Rachel Seiffert (Virago) – British – 3rd novel
A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury) – Pakistani/British – 6th novel
How to be Both by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton) - British – 6th novel
The Shore by Sara Taylor (William Heinemann) – American – 1st novel
A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus) – American – 20th novel
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters (Virago) – British – 6th novel
After Before by Jemma Wayne (Legend Press) – British – 1st novel
The Life of a Banana by PP Wong (Legend Press) – British – 1st novel

The top 10 novels featuring works of art

A work of art can fire my imagination like nothing else. If I’m feeling stuck during the writing process, I look at a painting from the period I’m writing about and it’s usually enough to help me: a way into another place and time.

Looking at paintings was a central part of the research for my second book, The Widow’s Confession, a murder mystery set in a Kent seaside resort in 1851 – and not just because one of the characters is a painter. Ramsgate Sands (Life at the Seaside) by William Powell Frith was an influence during the genesis of the book, with its depiction of Victorian holidaymakers at play. But a range of paintings helped throughout the writing process: the seas and skies of Turner’s work for atmosphere; the detailed crowd scenes by Frith for costume and Victorian spectacle; and the beautiful but empty-eyed pre-Raphaelite stunners for ideals of feminine beauty.
Writing and art have been intertwined since time immemorial, but even as separate disciplines, they are natural kindling for each other: whether a work of art is the creative jump-start for a novel, a research source or a structural element in the plot.
Here’s my selection of novels that have drawn on works of art – some real, some imaginary – for fuel.
1. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
Wilde’s fin de siècle novel about a beautiful young man whose portrait grows old in a locked room while he stays young is a glorious indulgence of a read. When a besotted Basil Hallward paints the beautiful Dorian Gray, he fears that he has put too much of his own soul into the portrait. But it is Dorian, influenced by the fascinating sensualist, Lord Henry, who has gifted the painting something of himself. As the portrait ages, but Dorian does not, he becomes “a face without a heart”, seeking sensation and pleasure at any cost. Wilde’s depiction of the brittle, hedonistic world of eternal youth drips with decadence. The wittiest horror story ever written.
2. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness meditation on life, love and the nature of memory is also a story about the uncertainty and struggle of creativity. In a summer when various guests come to stay with the Ramsays and their children, one guest, Lily Briscoe, begins a painting featuring Mrs Ramsay, who is the focus of her guests’ adoration. Ten years later, after Mrs Ramsay’s death, Lily returns and completes the painting, as the remainder of the family travels to the lighthouse. In the process she finds a way back into her memories of that summer, and her realisation that her beloved Mrs Ramsay had a way of drawing moments of revelation out of everyday life; she could make “life stand still” as an artist does.
3. Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier (1999)
The book that inspired a play, a film and thousands of mini-breaks to The Hague. Looking at the Vermeer painting of the same name, Chevalier was inspired by the latent intensity of the sitter’s gaze as it meets the viewer/artist. From this she creates the story of Griet, a servant girl who, through her interest in art, becomes close to her employer, Johannes Vermeer. The influence of Netherlandish art is clear in Chevalier’s luminous version of Delft and her subtle portrait of love and loss, as coolly lit as one of Vermeer’s paintings.
4. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)
Theo Decker’s mother shows him her favourite painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and is killed moments later by an explosion. Theo survives, and is urged to take the painting – The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius – by a dying man. As the years pass, Theo secretly keeps it with him, a symbol of purity and a link with his mother, in a troubled life. Tartt’s story of the power of a single painting, and of art as a whole, is delivered in dense, crackling prose.
5. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Erdağ Göknar (1998; translated 2001)
A vivid, multi-voiced story of 16th-century Istanbul centring around the murder of a miniaturist who is working on a secret book for the sultan. But this is no straightforward murder mystery; Pamuk explores death, love and the nature of Islamic art with immediacy and an awareness of its cultural resonance. A book which, like the best art, can be read on many levels.
6. The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham (1919)
Charles Strickland, a stockbroker, deserts his wife and children to become a painter in Paris and Tahiti. Maugham’s writer-narrator observes Strickland’s story with puzzled bewilderment as he destroys the lives of those around him without qualms. Influenced by the life and work of Gauguin, this is a portrayal of the artist as monster, fuelled by a quasi-religious obsession to paint no matter what the consequences. Best read with a shot of absinthe.
7. Headlong by Michael Frayn (1999)
Following a single glance at an unidentified painting at his country neighbour’s house, Martin Clay believes he has discovered a lost painting by Bruegel the Elder. His machinations and expectations grow more grandiose, sending his life and marriage into disarray. Formidable art-historical research wrapped up in comedy.
8. Girl Reading by Katie Ward (2011)
This debut novel is comprised of seven sections, each based on a separate woman and her portrait. Ward spans six centuries and proves a deft creator of atmosphere, establishing each of her seven scenarios in moments with precision and sensitivity. Exploring art, reading and what it means to be a woman in the past, present and future, this is a haunting read.
9. The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey (1951)
“I can’t remember any murderer … who looked like him.” So says Alan Grant, a police inspector recovering from an operation in hospital, who is given a pile of portraits by a friend to keep him occupied. Grant considers himself an expert on faces, and is intrigued by one particular portrait, soliciting opinions from his doctor, nurses and visitors. When he discovers that the face belongs to Richard III, he decides to research the mystery of the princes in the Tower. This most unconventional of detective stories is enthralling and, for the record, I agree with him about that portrait.
10. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
One of our most treasured love stories, Pride and Prejudice is not a novel saturated with art, but a portrait provides one of its most important moments. When Elizabeth Bennet visits Pemberley (arguably a work of art in its own right, which may have been based on Chatsworth House) she begins to change her mind about Mr Darcy, the suitor she has previously spurned. A pivotal moment comes when she sees his portrait in the gallery. “She stood several minutes before the picture in earnest contemplation.” Possibly the moment she falls in love, which just goes to show that art changes lives in all kinds of ways.

Families in literature: The Lisbons in The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

There is a photo of me at my second Christmas. I am somewhere between a baby and toddler, and still my parents’ only child, a title I would keep for another three precious years. Around me is so much swag that some of it towers above me, while an array of smaller boxes make me a little Godzilla, stomping around my city of gifts. I like to tease my parents about this photo. You ruined me for real life, I tell them. The Lisbon sisters of The Virgin Suicides don’t share this problem. Parental overindulgence is not something Mary, Therese, Bonnie, Cecila and Lux experience in their short lives, which we encounter through lovingly collated pieces of evidence by a group of boys from their suburban Michigan community. Their mother is an unfeeling, stifling disciplinarian, their father is weak and adrift in the sea of women around him. Over the course of a year, the book’s narrator and his friends bear witness as four Lisbon girls attempt to survive the suicide of Cecila, and its effect on the already startlingly spartan rule of their mother. As the girls try to integrate into normal life, the boys collect the pieces of information that will make up a lifelong investigation: reports from the orthodontist that Mary visits in the hope of fixing her teeth, inventories of mysterious feminine toiletries found during reconnaissance, memories of touch and conversation archived like rare historical documents.
The Virgin Suicides cleverly fakes being a book about teen suicide, but its real exploration is into the delicate dynamics that keep a family together. Before Cecilia, the “weird” sister, makes the swan dive into the yard that sparks off the suicides, the Lisbon family is at least a whole unit; their house is odd, ugly, but still functional. After the suicide, the parents lose hold of the children, and the girls lose their small freedoms. Mr Lisbon begins to see children as “only strangers you agreed to live with”, and the family home becomes an extension of its occupants’ relationships, emitting toxic smells, of “bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film … the singed smell of drilled teeth”, or as one of the boys quips, “the smell of trapped beaver”. Meanwhile, adding a dreamlike, echoing quality to the Lisbon tragedy, the town’s beloved elms become diseased, and men arrive to cut them down. It’s hard not to note the symbolism as tree after tree is decapitated and torn out, infested with the virus from the first sick tree. What’s unclear, in the Lisbons’ case, is who carries the virus first – Cecilia, the mother, or generations of ancestors carrying a gene for depression.
While they live, the Lisbon sisters are observed in lots of ways, all of which reinforce their isolation. They are five copies of the same girl, or living myths, like the Kennedys. Sometimes they are five adjacent solitudes with cartoon-like personal quirks, like a bleak sibling version of the Spice Girls (the pretty one, the smart one, the weird one, the oldest, “mean one, pulling my hair …”). It’s no wonder the girls have no comfort but each other, and in the familiar pattern of their five, then four-starred, constellation. Anyone with siblings will recognise the casual way in which the Lisbons know, irritate and protect each other, and the wordless way in which they communicate. And it’s difficult to begrudge their togetherness in the end, even if we can’t understand their actions.
When my brother and sister arrived, I was humiliated, then suddenly their existence was impossible to live without. When I re-read The Virgin Suicides, as I often do, the thing that comes across is always this idea of sibling love, and the way it can be your source of understanding the generation above you, and the world. My love for my siblings is now bigger than a pile of presents, and more important than the most generous harvest of presents I ever had. I think it’s the thing that keeps me returning to this magical book.