Books like The Quest for Corvo — picked by fans

First, because it’s incredibly funny. Geoff Dyer set out—he says—to write a sober, serious study of D. H. Lawrence, but life, travel arrangements, random people and his own inertia kept getting in the way. The story of his odyssey doesn’t just evoke all the things about writing that we’ve always suspected (that it’s hard; that it’s easy; that we often wonder why on earth we do it; that we never question that we want to do it). It also, by stealth, evokes and explains an amazing amount about Lawrence, and why he’s a writer that so many people love—or hate—so passionately. 

In my secret heart of hearts, I wrote my most recent book, Unspeakable, for an audience of one: Janet Malcolm. All her prose is sharp, but her anti-biography of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes is spectacular in its exploration of the question: is it even possible to write a truthful biography?

Through sheer magic, Lisa Cohen manages to combine three lives that defy biography into a beautifully written group portrait of mid-century lesbian modernism. Although Cohen writes that “every biography is a disappointment of some kind,” her book about Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta, and Madge Garland thrilled me from start to finish.

I haven’t recovered yet from the way Hartman recovers the lives of young Black women through historical photographs. The images were made to rob these women of their individuality, make them fit “types,” letting them say Nothing about themselves.

But Hartman writes like she’s talking to them, and they’re wonderful. She messes with categories used by authorities who thought they “knew” these women by their transgressions. I was utterly transfixed by how she imagined these women’s lives and loves in the ordinary stairways and back alleys they called home.

The photos are gorgeous. You could talk about them for days and still have more to think about—like how when it comes to women being framed for doing something wrong, maybe Nothing has changed.

I love books like this one that push you to examine what you would do in a similar situation.

In this story, choices in loyalty, selflessness, and bravery challenge the friendship of two boys from culturally different backgrounds. Books about life choices can be life-changing, as was this one for me.

When I came across this book, I was on the point of giving up reading modern novels. Everything I had read recently was such a let-down at the end that sometimes I threw the book across the room in reader rage.

At last, in Rushdie, I found someone who did not disappoint. As I approached the end, I became breathless, worrying that the story was going to sink like a soufflé, but it didn’t. It just kept on rising.

Once upon a time in Fairgrounds, there was a contraption called the Hammer and Bell. It was a test of strength to see if you could make the bell ring. Most couldn’t. Most got the marker some way up the calibrated column only to see it hesitate, then begin its descent. Midnight’s Children made it to the top.

What makes a good ending? For me, it is some transcendent statement of… show more.

I am fascinated by extraordinary lives, especially lives that cross borders and cultures. I also enjoy biographies set against major historical events, all the more so when an individual life is used to show an apparently familiar era of history in a new light. Tom Reiss’s book manages all this superbly. 

This book reconstructs the life of Lev Nussimbaum, who was born in Kiev in what is now Ukraine but was then imperial Russia. But he spent a good part of his life in Baku when that cosmopolitan Russian imperial port was the center of the world’s first great oil boom. Having traveled myself in the Caucasus region, as well as other former parts of the Russian Empire (and Soviet Union), I found Reiss’s account of that collapsing imperial culture quite fascinating. But it is the story of Lev—or, as he twice reinvented himself, Essad Bey and Kurban… show more.

This is a book about the collision of worlds and ideologies, told through the life of a single woman. This is a biography of Margaret Marcus, a small-town Jewish girl in midcentury America who converted to Islam, emigrated to Pakistan, and became a student of the Islamist political theorist Abul Ala Mawdudi. Under the name Maryam Jameelah, Margaret wrote many books condemning the corruption of Western capitalist society. And then came September 11… 

I found this book absolutely gripping and no less absorbing—and unsettling—in its moral power. Deborah Baker is a truly extraordinary biographer, and I admire her artistry, research, and instinct for an important life history in equal measure. Even though I have traveled extensively across Pakistan myself and written about many of the themes Baker explores, I still learned a great deal from this deeply serious but no less spellbinding biography. 

It’s not Hadrian’s love affair with the beautiful boy Antinous that swept me off my feet, nor the way Hadrian makes him a god after his mysterious death and builds a city dedicated to worshiping him.

That’s only a small part of a book overflowing with the emperor’s interior life, his fears and doubts and dreams. Yourcenar spent most of her life on and off writing this book, her life’s work. Filled with the exhilaration and perplexity of achieving absolute power and then holding onto it, we experience Hadrian as a profoundly paradoxical genius from the inside out. 

A non-fiction book with the same title as my novel, well why not? Alistair Moffat is an old friend and fellow Borderer who grew up not so far north of Hadrian’s Wall and has an abiding passion for history, language and place. What I love about The Wall is the way it manages to encompass the grand theme of the Romans in Britain and at the same time shine a spotlight on the fascinating minutiae of life in those ancient times. Thus we learn about the games the Roman soldiers played, the food they consumed and the building techniques they used to construct the Wall. Fair enough, you say, but … where else would we discover that the historian Suetonius, whose Life of the Twelve Caesars helped inform several of my earlier novels, was sacked by the Emperor Hadrian. That WH Auden wrote a poem called ‘Roman Wall Blues’. Or… show more.