![]() It’s brilliant in itself, but it also made me rethink Sophocles’s Antigone, on which it is loosely based. I just read Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (Bloomsbury). Talking of poetry, Michael O’Neill’s latest collection Return of the Gift (Arc) is wise, lucid and pitch perfect. Luke Kennard’s wit and astonishing virtuosity, so present in his poetry, have safely made the journey to his beguiling first novel The Transition (4th Estate): very funny, gimlet-eyed observation. ![]() Osborne and Chandler are a perfect match. A brilliant Raymond Chandler continuation novel with an ageing Philip Marlowe. I’m lucky enough to be reading Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne (out from Hogarth in September). Just in case it gets lost in the newer dazzle, it’s worth mentioning again Red Dirt (Head of Zeus, 2015) by EM Reapy, which won the Rooney prize, an Irish stormer set in Australia. Sally Rooney is 27 and so won’t be worrying about mortality – she entered the landscape fully fledged in the now traditional Irish manner, and with great power, – like Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen fused together – with Conversations with Friends (Faber). Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine (Granta), a very lively book about transhumanism, won the Wellcome prize. And what to read in homage to Philip Roth? Maybe American Pastoral. I’ve greatly enjoyed two group biographies: Agnès Poirier’s rich and funny Left Bank (Bloomsbury), about cold rooms and hot ideas in postwar Paris and Martin Gayford’s wise and generous Modernists and Mavericks (Thames & Hudson), about artists in London from 1945 to 1970. Seamus Heaney 100 Poems (Faber) is an essential collection, which the poet meant to make before he died, and which the Heaney family have now completed. The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli (Allen Lane, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell), hardly seems like pool-side reading, but anyone with the least interest in the science of the physical world will be by turns astonished, baffled and thrilled by what Rovelli has to say about the true nature of time, which has little in common with our everyday conception of it. Think of it as the best black and white 1940s movie you will ever encounter in print. The Long Take, by Robin Robertson (Picador), is a narrative in verse set in the immediate post-war years in America, that is at once heartbreaking and bracing. The Years by Annie Ernaux (Fitzcarraldo, translated by Alison Strayer) is a remarkable work, a truly innovative autobiography that opens new ways of remembering and recuperating the past.
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