Jill, Guardian reader
I read Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds in a single day and feel that I have now officially emerged from what had been a month-long reading slump. Groff writes wonderful prose, and fans of Gil Adamson’s 2007 novel The Outlander might draw some parallels, given this novel’s historical survivalist narrative. Yet Groff’s text has its own – bleaker – vibe that is compelling and original.
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Alice Kemp-Habib, arts and culture journalist
When we first meet the protagonist of Max Porter’s latest novel, he is sneaking out of a home for young offenders and heading towards a pond carrying a rucksack full of rocks on his back. Such is the starting point for Shy, which delves into the frenetic mind and memories of its teenage protagonist over a mesmerising 122 pages. During the course of one night in 1995, readers accompany Shy on a quest through the English countryside, which culminates in a surreal but utterly compelling episode. Porter’s writing is lyrical and inventive, guiding us variously through Shy’s excruciating first sexual encounter, his fanatical love of drum’n’bass, his opinions of his housemates (mostly wankers) and his strained relationship with his mum and step-dad. I savoured the book for a week, but could have easily devoured it in one sitting.
Natsumi – the central character in Meiko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo – has little in common with Shy, but for the fact that she too is grating against convention. Recently translated into English by Polly Barton and published by Fitzcarraldo, the novel follows Natsumi’s day-to-day life as she performs the roles of mother, daughter, wife and friend. I thoroughly enjoyed the prose – a ceaseless stream-of-consciousness that vividly captures the brutality and banality of domestic life – and can’t wait to read more of Kanai’s work.
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Atlas Weyland Eden, writer and poet
In September, I finally picked up Here Lies Arthur by Philip Reeve, a book I have been meaning to read for some time. The novel imagines King Arthur as a warlord in sixth-century Britain. I particularly enjoyed Merlin, known here as Myrddin, a weathered bard who spins stories around Arthur, stories that will outlast them all. It shows the way stories are born, how they grow and change, history and myth intertwining until the two become one. What’s more, the day I finished reading it, I happened to bump into Philip Reeve on Dartmoor, where I live, so I had the chance to chat about the book with the author.
As for nonfiction, I found an old copy of The Lone Samurai by William Scott Wilson, chronicling the life of Miyamoto Musashi. Having recently read a novel about Musashi, it was intriguing to learn more about his life and the many ways he’s been mythologised. I love his philosophy that a swordsman should study all the arts, from painting to pottery. Whenever I try my hand at another craft, I learn more about my writing. I think the same premises can apply to all forms of art.
Finally, I’ve been loving reading aloud The Perfect Golden Circle by Benjamin Myers to my mother. It’s a delightfully descriptive book, telling the story of two men in the south of England who create crop circles in the dead of night. Myers interweaves modernity and myth, UFOs and ancient rites. At the heart of the book is the main character’s mantra. “Fuel the myth, strive for beauty.”
• Atlas Weyland Eden won the 2023 BBC Young Writers’ award with Cambridge University for his short story The Wordsmith
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Carol Rumens, poet and critic
I love to keep company with books that give me a sense of the spaces, spices and fresh colours that poems can coax from language. Poetry is partly my work (I write the Guardian’s Poem of the week series) and it’s also a personal source of delight and nutrition. This month, I have enjoyed Scansion of the Dark, a collection by the French poet and professor, Michèle Finck. Her imagination tends towards surrealism, but her diction is also intensely physical and emotive. As a bonus, thanks to the meticulousness of Anthony Rudolf’s English translations, I’ve been able sufficiently to revive my very rusty French and to follow the beautifully harmonised originals in the parallel text.
American writer Eli Payne Mandel’s first collection, The Grid, has opened on to a wonderland of poetry and prose. It is headed by a lyric essay about Alice Kober, the long unrecognised classicist who worked on the decipherment of Linear B. This is poetry as archaeology, a beautiful rebuilding, through fragments, of still-living pasts.
Re-reading, too, can be a fresh encounter. In The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems by Thomas A Clark, the sea-washed Scottish pastoral has a moral wisdom so tactful I missed a lot of it first time around. Clark tells us how to walk, how to look. One untitled sonnet warns him “not to focus, not to bear / down heavily on the evidence / but to hover, vigilant and tender”. The climate emergency, of course, demands decisive political action. Clark reminds us that the stepping stones of eco-consciousness lie in habits of deep attentiveness.
A few days ago I unshelved a book I’d not read in years, An Invitation to Old English & Anglo-Saxon England by Bruce Mitchell. And there I lit on a wonderful tiny poem. It’s inscribed on the Franks Casket, “one of the chief treasures of Anglo-Saxon Art”. Translated by Mitchell, a version of the poem reads:
“Flood/tide lifted fish onto cliff-bank;
whale became sad where he swam on grit/sand.
(This is) whale’s bone.”
Those lines felt like an arrow shot across the centuries, direct from the conscience of the carver (the casket is made of whalebone) to my own conscience. An uneasily warm September has prompted me to begin writing a sequence about species loss: now I know I have to include that whale.
