In this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they have been reading recently. This month, recommendations include a buzzy debut novel about Victorian sexuality, a moving essay collection and a study of Charles Dickens. Tell us in the comments what you have been reading.
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Michael Donkor, author and critic
For me, this month’s reading was dominated by an excellent debut. Tom Crewe’s The New Life has generated much buzzy praise, full of comparisons to Forster and Hollinghurst. All this applause is well deserved. It’s extraordinary to think that this impeccably crafted, lyrically phrased and muscular book is Crewe’s first. Set in late 19th-century London, the narrative follows two very different men of letters who attempt to publish a bold account of male homosexuality – or “inversion” as it was pointedly referred to. Their aim is to advance entrenched public debate on the matter and to change legislation.
Very loosely based on the lives of academics Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds, The New Life upends that boring misconception about the sterility of all Victorian thought. It’s a crackling novel that contains multitudes – clandestine letters, thrillingly erotic sex scenes, a tense denouement. It is, perhaps predominately, a brilliant evocation of the radical politics of turn-of-the-century Britain. At times, even though we know decriminalisation lies decades away, the protagonists’ tremulous conviction almost makes us believe winds of social change might sweep through Crewe’s fog-wreathed London. With the characterisation of Addington, The New Life also becomes an examination of zealotry and how personal trauma can propel and undermine the most righteous of political causes. In its portrayals of domestic lives, Crewe gives nuanced insight into the negotiations – verbalised and otherwise – of marriage, too. While male sexuality and male experience are keenly centralised, readers are wise to keep a close eye on Crewe’s fascinating women: Catherine, Addington’s wife, is a complicated but decisive presence in the narrative. Angelica – a close friend of Ellis and his wife Edith – brings transformative challenge and light to the Ellises’ worlds. But perhaps it’s the novel’s earnest linking of the freedom to speak of yourself and the freedom to be yourself that will stay with me most.
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Lan Samantha Chang, author
I just finished rereading James Alan McPherson’s posthumous selected essays and nonfiction, On Becoming An American Writer. I’m moved and gently provoked by his personal meditations on US society. As described in Anthony Walton’s introduction, McPherson possessed a singular personal story: “A boy with no connections leaves a historically Black college and gets into Harvard Law, and then supports himself as a janitor before shrugging off a legal career and lighting out for Iowa City to become a writer.” Iconoclastic and deeply humble in life, McPherson didn’t believe in self-promotion. Today, he’s as under-appreciated as he is brilliant. I found this book sincere and original, deep and funny. I was especially moved by McPherson’s friendship with Ralph Ellison, his trips to Disneyland with his daughter and his recovery from meningitis.
In conversation with McPherson’s nonfiction, I’ve been rereading Yiyun Li’s hybrid of memoir and literary criticism, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Sometimes, books can be like gifts, and these ruminations about the author’s struggle with suicidal depression and her sustaining readings of William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen and Katherine Mansfield, do feel like valuable and intimate letters from a brave and honest friend.
A Russian-born co-worker and translator alerted me to Michael R Katz’s new translation of The Brothers Karamazov, which will be published in July. This book weighs about two pounds, but I found it light. The writing is good and clear; fuss has been eliminated. Katz’s lucid, unpretentious language opens up my favourite scenes, characters and even monologues.
I’m a longtime admirer of Walter Tevis’s beautiful and triumphant novel The Queen’s Gambit, but have only just now encountered his short stories in The King Is Dead. Like The Queen’s Gambit, the stories are about Tevis’s obsessions: childhood, loneliness, addiction and games. It was fascinating to read what Tevis called “a new kind of science fiction; it’s used almost entirely for a kind of psychoanalytic myth-making.” The compilation has a great introduction by novelist Kevin Brockmeier, who celebrates Tevis as a cult writer and the work as perilous and cutting, sometimes “shockingly transgressive”.
• The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang is published in paperback on 2 March by Pushkin One (£9.99).
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Lynne, Guardian reader
Recently I’ve enjoyed Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris and Precious Bane by Mary Webb, which I first read many years ago but I’m loving it as much as ever. My sight prevents me from reading print, so I depend on audiobooks from the charity Calibre Audio, BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week and Book at Bedtime. I have been going to bed every night listening to AN Wilson’s The Mystery of Charles Dickens via Calibre Audio, which is teaching me a lot, not just about Dickens but about his times.
