Jenny Linford's 3 favorite reads in 2023

In this beguiling, appetising, elegantly written book, food writer and journalist Fuchsia Dunlop shares her deep appreciation of Chinese cuisine. As the English author of acclaimed Chinese cookbooks, she is well-placed to do so.

Seductive descriptions of beautifully cooked Chinese meals she has enjoyed—exquisite clear soups, thrilling stir-fries, delicately cooked prawns—are an inviting strand woven together with Chinese history and insights into the skills underlying Chinese cuisine. She writes from a place of excellent knowledge with clarity, insight, and wit.

Intriguingly, she notes both the sad, over-simplified stereotyping of Chinese food in the West and how ‘European’ cuisine is misunderstood in China. The banquet Dunlop is inviting us to share as readers truly is a rich and splendid feast.

With this mesmerising biography, author Katherine Rundell sets out to share her deep love of the poet John Donne and succeeds in style. This is an enthralling book—an insight into a clever, fascinating man who led myriad lives as a poet, scholar, sea adventurer, and Dean of St Paul’s.

Rundell’s appreciation of Donne’s way with words is insightful. Aptly, her own prose is itself rich and imaginative. She has a flair for arresting images: ‘To read a full text of a Donne sermon is a bit like mounting a horse only to discover that it is an elephant: large and unfamiliar.’  

A book which reminds one of the power of language to beguile, seduce, inform and enthrall.

Zadie Smith’s first ‘historical’ novel does not disappoint. This is a wonderfully written, witty, richly imagined, characteristically idiosyncratic book.

This intriguing book is set in the nineteenth century and peopled with historical figures—the now little-known novelist William Ainsworth, his housekeeper, the fascinating Mrs. Touchet, Charles Dickens, Andrew Bogle, a man born into slavery in Jamaica, who becomes a key witness in a real-life Victorian cause celebre.

Intricately structured, at its heart one finds a powerful, compelling story within a story which gives a force to the book. The issues raised within the book—racism, colonialism, woman’s rights, populism, fake news—resonate in our times. A book to set you thinking.