The End of Apartheid: Diary of a Revolution by Robin Renwick, book review: Murky birth pangs of the rainbow nation

It was October 1989, shortly before Namibian independence. With the ballot boxes prepared for Namibia’s first free elections, and the South African troops there confined to barracks, Renwick was urgently summoned by Pretoria’s foreign minister, Pik Botha.

Namibian forces were about to launch an uprising, he was informed. Renwick refused to believe it and, with British soldiers controlling UN communications in Namibia, proved within three hours that the report was false, stopping a retaliatory South African mobilisation.

The claim of an attack, it emerged, had been invented by rogue elements in South African military intelligence wanting to re-ignite the Border War. It is a revelation, one of many from Renwick’s time as ambassador between 1987 and 1991, which underlines how fundamental double-dealing and betrayal were to this period.

The past can too easily appear inevitable in retrospect. But as this detailed, if overly dry, account of the end of apartheid makes clear, its peaceful demise appeared far from inevitable at the time, not least as the likelihood of a coup (one former army head warns he could take-over in “an afternoon”), or the ANC controlling its “necklacing” youth, was far from clear.

Renwick clearly had extraordinary access, bouncing in and out of the offices of PW Botha, FW de Klerk, and ultimately Nelson Mandela. The Foreign Office also waived its 30-year-rule to let him draw on official records, enabling him to provide considerable detail about the person he clearly considers his story’s most unsung hero: Margaret Thatcher.

Her involvement is as murky as anything occurring on the ground. She was pilloried for refusing to extend sanctions, but Renwick is insistent that in private his heroine was a leading light in petitioning South Africa’s white leadership to dismantle apartheid. He promises that this re-evaluation of her role will be backed-up as the official communiques are made public in coming years. For that, we will have to wait and see.

But what is clear now, is that Britain’s soft approach on sanctions was exactly why Renwick was welcome at apartheid-era Tuynhuys (the Cape Town office of the President), which did mean he was able to play the role of intermediary he so desired. What is less clear is if this role actually gave him the influence he believed he had with the wily Mandela, at a time when African nations were uniformly condemning Mrs Thatcher.

Repeatedly Renwick registers disappointment that the newly-freed leader would not say in public what he – and Britain – wanted, or had been told in private, complaining that Mandela could “be forgetful of what he owed” men like De Klerk. Double-talk, it seems, may not have only been reserved for use on men like Botha, but also on British ambassadors hoping to shape history.

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Fifty Shades of Grey book now a turn-off for library users

The first instalment of the best-selling “mummy porn” trilogy by EL James has dropped out of the top 100 most-borrowed library books, plummeting from third place the previous year.

Judith Watts, senior lecturer of publishing at Kingston University and author of Writing Erotic Fiction, said the book had become so ubiquitous that it was no longer enticing to readers. “I think it’s to do with saturation, it became so widely available,” she said. “Certain charity shops won’t take it any more.”

Fifty Shades of Grey became the bestselling book in British history in 2012 when it sold more than 5.3 million copies, overtaking  Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The official library borrowing figures in which it did not make the top 100 were registered between June 2013 and June 2014.

 

The latest library lending figures, released today by the Public Lending Right scheme, show that the American thriller writer James Patterson has remained the most-borrowed author for the eighth year in a row. He had 13 novels in the top 100, with Second Honeymoon the most borrowed of his work, at No 8.

The most-borrowed book of last year was Dan Brown’s Inferno, despite its critical mauling.

Six children’s authors made the top 10 including former Children’s Laureate Julia Donaldson, the third-most-borrowed of the year, Daisy Meadows and Francesca Simon, who was behind the Horrid Henry books. 

Public Lending Right (PLR) was established by an Act of Parliament in 1979, giving authors the legal right to receive payment from government each time their book is loaned through the public library system.

This month the PLR will make £6m payments to 22,053 authors, with the rate at 6.66p per loan.

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The Lovers of Amherst by William Nicholson, book review: Parallel passion and poetry in New England, then and now

The afterlife of the secretive recluse still ripples across academic circles and the popular imagination, but it is surprising nonetheless to learn that it was only as recently as 1984 that details about the illicit love affair between Emily Dickinson’s brother and their Amherst neighbour was first brought to public attention in Polly Longsworth’s sympathetic study, Austin and Mabel. More recently, Lyndall Gordon’s 2010 revisionist biography, Lives Like Loaded Guns, explored the facts in exhaustive detail.

But fiction has a truthful purpose, too. William Nicholson’s scrupulously researched story throws fresh light on the extraordinary love affair between Austin Dickinson, 55, and 24-year-old Mabel Todd. We cannot know for sure what they shared in the privacy of Emily Dickinson’s dining room, where they often met, or what she saw and heard, or the effect on her poetry. By interspersing his narrative with snippets of extant correspondence, diary entries, and secret notes, drawn, mostly, from Longsworth and his own research in the Sterling Memorial Archives at Yale, alongside some of Emily Dickinson’s passionate poems, Nicholson creates a solid historical base from which he imaginatively recreates the time period and personalities involved. Moreover, the physical act of researching “the very notes they sent each other with such secrecy” is an integral part of the story, adding an air of factual realism from which he speculates as plausibly as a biographer.

Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932) arrived in Amherst in 1881 with her husband, David, the new director of Amherst College Observatory. Entering into Amherst society, she first struck up a friendship with Susan, Austin’s wife, and then entertained the Dickinson household next door. By then, the “Homestead” was occupied by Austin’s sisters, Emily and Lavinia (Vinnie), and their invalid mother. Although Mabel never met Emily (she’d listen at the top of the stairs while she played piano and sang), they communicated through notes and gifts.

Running parallel to the story of Austin and Mabel is the modern-day story of Alice Dickinson (no relation) who arrives in New England to undertake background research for her screenplay about their affair. Through her lover-turned-friend, Jack Broad, Alice gets in touch with Nick Crocker, a visiting professor (with a reputation), and she accepts his offer of temporary accommodation. Alice, Jack, and Nick pull us back to previous books in Nicholson’s interconnected series: in The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life (2009) Nick has an affair with Laura Kinross (Broad), while in All the Hopeful Lovers (2010) Laura’s son, Jack, is put together with Alice through Facebook in much the same way that his response to her Facebook request for information about Emily Dickinson sends her to Nick’s door.

Rowing in Eden –

Ah, the sea!

Might I but moor tonight

In thee!

As she becomes caught up in her own affair, Alice reflects on romantic love and passion, and ponders the “I” in Dickinson’s poems, and the poet’s relationship to Mabel. “Something true and powerful is at work here. What if it’s something bigger than love? What is there that’s bigger than love?” In New England for just two weeks, her attachment to Nick is perhaps too quickly established, but it’s a necessary part of the storyline.

Emily Dickinson intrudes into the narrative: “Stand at the top of the stairs. Look down into the dark hallway below. She’s there with him, the one he loves, the one I need. A door opens. The rustle of a dress as a half-glimpsed woman passes quickly down the passage, and out of the back door.”

While fictional stage directions are a reminder of the writer of Shadowlands lurking in the background, something deeper is afoot. Alice’s problem (aside from tackling her first screenplay) is how to find a way into a story she doesn’t fully understand. With Nick, she discusses the process of storytelling; how to frame her fiction, and whether she needs to care about Mabel. The Lovers of Amherst is a rich writers’ resource.

Without Mabel Todd, we may never have known the extent of Dickinson’s creativity. It was Mabel who undertook the task of preserving the letters and poems that survive, bringing order to the 1,800 poems, and pushing forward to publication. Nicholson’s story continues on after the deaths of Emily and Austin to explore the motivations behind Mabel’s efforts. His greatest achievement, though, in The Lovers of Amherst, is to compel us to approach Emily Dickinson’s poetry with fresh eyes.

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me –

The simple News that Nature told –

With tender Majesty –

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What Nature Does for Britain by Tony Juniper, book review: The compelling economic argument for going green

In essence, this encapsulates the message of Tony Juniper’s campaigning book, timed for the run-up to the 2015 election: that it is only by putting a financial value on nature that politicians and businessmen will be persuaded to protect it. This is a direction many leading green activists are deeply sceptical about. We cannot devolve our responsibility to defend the rural landscape to those driven by the profit motive, they argue. Once it is seen as a network of “ecosystem services” that landowners and others can be paid to deliver, nature has effectively been privatised, its fate subject to the shifting winds of the market.

Juniper provides an excellent summary of the UK’s evolving ecological crisis: degradation of the soil and the loss of carbon-trapping peat bogs; the decimation of bees and other insect pollinators through the use of insecticides; the loss of marine habitats through destructive fishing practices; pollution of the water supply through phosphates. Agrochemical intervention is nothing new: 19th-century British entrepreneurs scoured the battlefield of Waterloo in search of skeletons to grind for bone meal and imported thousands of mummified cats plundered from Egyptian tombs to boost nutrients in the over-exploited soil.

Even if David Cameron has told his aides to “get rid of this green crap”, Juniper argues, he is out of step with the times: 4.5 million people in the UK belong to organisations supporting nature. With an election looming, can they be ignored?

Juniper finds heartening examples of businesses working with local communities to address environmental challenges because, like the Asian forestry tycoon, they are convinced it makes financial sense. Meanwhile, the market is shifting towards renewables as research shows that, in order to avoid catastrophic warming, two thirds of remaining fossil fuel resources should be left in the ground.

Where the market leads, politicians of a certain hue generally follow. But, despite the excellent work done by Juniper and his peers making the argument for the benefits that would follow, can they really be trusted to deliver a sustainable future?

Order for £9.49 (free p&p) from the Independent Bookshop: 08430 600 030

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Not Forgetting the Whale by John Ironmonger, book review: Now, that’s a proper crash

Joe Haak, an analyst at city traders Lane Kaufmann, has developed a piece of software that can see into the future. By combing through every piece of financial journalism, every scrap of knowledge of every last supply chain, and every piece of economic activity in recorded history, Cassie (the Computer Aided Share Selection and Investment Engine) can, apparently, look ahead by a few hours and forecast share prices.

Led by Cassie into a spectacularly disastrous trade, a terrified Joe flees to the remote Cornish fishing village of St Piran. Then, as he begins to find some peace, Cassie starts predicting the end of the world.

Ironmonger clearly enjoys the contrast between the City and St Piran, where time runs slow, and, as one character notes, “the tranquillity of the village was almost geological in its permanence”. The Cornish passages are fable-like and dreamy,  while in London, traders whoop and Louboutins click.

The narrative weaves between the past and present, London and Cornwall, creating a tension that hums beneath Joe’s attempts at settling into his new home. There’s an atmospheric encounter between the protagonist and his boss, the mysterious Lew Kaufmann, while down in St Piran’s, a whale appears in the bay. But whether it is a symbol of Hobbes’s Leviathan or of Jonah’s deliverance, well, there’s little time to find out.

When events start to unravel they’re wonderfully underplayed. I was reminded of Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, when the narrator tells us that “something like seven or seventy thousand people got killed” in a London bombing. This is human tragedy beyond scale, yet our focus is entirely on the ark that is St Piran’s. 

For all its switches in time and glimmering prose, the last third of the book offers few surprises. And while Joe Haak, Lew Kauffmann, and St Piran’s stern vicar, the Reverend Alvin Hocking, are well-drawn, the female characters feel flimsy. Joe’s love interest, Polly Hocking, is a flirt and little else, while the romantic novelist Demelza veers perilously close to cliché.

That said, this is a tremendously enjoyable book. And as the front pages crowd with headlines that grow ever more grim, Not Forgetting The Whale offers a very welcome alternative.

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The First Bad Man by Miranda July, book review: Bitter, twisted ... and surprising

Written from the first-person perspective, July carefully lets us see just what a lonely, oddball loser her middle-aged protagonist, Cheryl, is. She lives alone; she only uses one set of dishes and has perfected a “smoother living” system of housekeeping: “after days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore”. Cheryl has a globus hystericus, a hard lump in her throat that prevents her from crying. Childless, she nonetheless sees “her” baby in the eyes of strangers’ babies – a “special connection” with a child named Kubelko Bondy, endlessly reincarnated.

Cheryl also believes that the man she is infatuated with, Phillip, is a soulmate she has been married to thousands of times down the centuries; sadly, he is more keen on a 16-year-old girl .... Then, into her life walks Clee: the busty, blonde, surly, smelly 20-year-old daughter of a colleague, who needs somewhere to stay. Clee does not aid smooth living; simmering resentment rapidly builds into physical aggression, and July’s novel too takes increasingly weird swerves and slams.

Wrestling with Clee triggers a release in Cheryl: she feels “exquisite”. Her globus disappears; she becomes lighthearted. Are these “adult games” sexual? At first it seems not, but soon – July slipping things along swiftly yet always bringing the reader, wide-eyed, with her – Cheryl is consumed by sexual desire. There are pages of feverish masturbatory fantasies. Yet Cheryl, we subtly pick up, may be missing the chance that’s really in front of her.

Convulsively readable, with a sideways wit, July’s novel is confidently out-there – and yet emotionally convincing. You yearn for a better life for Cheryl, who repulses and attracts the reader in the same way she repulses and attracts Clee. Then July swerves. Again. Clee becomes pregnant, and the birth changes things entirely. Not only does the plot blossom, but the tone does too.

Being pacily readable, The First Bad Man does not feel like a large book – but July’s writing actually covers a lot of ground. Relationships rapidly morph, and yet remain believable. The writing is tightly controlled, as it unabashedly peels back the layers of Cheryl’s oddness to serve up the beating heart within. The First Bad Man becomes a warm book – not a sentimental, tied-up-with-a-bow one, but a humane one.

July has a rare ability to pin down people’s faults, frailties, and eccentric compulsions, rather than squirm from them – and then to make us love them anyway.

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Invisible ink no 263: The strange case of solar pons

The nation went into mourning when it heard that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not planning to write any more Holmes adventures, so the young American August Derleth wrote to Conan Doyle and rather cheekily asked if he could take over the series. Holmes’s creator declined the offer, but the undeterred Derleth set about writing his own version, and assonantly christened him Solar Pons.

Derleth had built his reputation by being the first publisher of H P Lovecraft, and himself added to Cthulhu Mythos (that writer’s fictional universe), founding the publisher Arkham House, but he was also a fine pasticheur. His Holmes parodies were blatant swipes. Dr Watson was replaced by Dr Parker, Mrs Hudson by Mrs Johnson, Mycroft by Bancroft, and instead of residing at 221b Baker Street, Pons was based at 7B Praed Street. But Derleth cleverly added a detail that prevented his series from being a straight steal of another author’s work; Pons existed in Holmes’ world. Pons knew all about Holmes, and was not his exact contemporary, operating in a later time frame. The Pons stories also crossed over with plot devices from other authors including William Hope Hodgson, Lovecraft, and Sax Rohmer, creating a tangle of literary tropes in the way that authors Alan Moore, Kim Newman, and the TV series Penny Dreadful use now. Derleth tackled Conan Doyle’s mentioned-but-missing cases and went on to add other star sleuths, including Hercule Poirot, The Saint, and W Somerset Maugham’s agent Ashenden. He also wrote many more stories with his detective than Conan Doyle managed.

When Derleth died in 1971, his Pons character was in turn picked up by another author, Basil Copper (who explored Pons’s “missing cases” just as Derleth had done with Holmes, as well as adding his own original tales) so that we have pastiches of pastiches. He also rearranged the stories into correct chronology and removed glaring Americanisms that were the result of Derleth not having visited London. Several societies and magazines, including the Praed Street Irregulars and the Solar Pons Gazette, were dedicated to the memory of the pastiche sleuth, and further Pons tales were written by yet other authors, so that this strange homage continues to infinity.

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Between the covers: What’s really going on in the world of books

The novel is set in San Francisco in the 1890s, where “great fortunes are being made and family dynasties established as new money erases the often unsavoury pasts and shady dealings of their founders”. Its publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes it as having “the dark bits of Tim Burton and the shiny bits of Wes Anderson”, while the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Michael Chabon said that Fowler “re-creates a lost world so thrillingly, with such intelligence, trickery, and art, that when you at last put the book down and look up from the page it all seems to linger, shimmering, around you, like the residue of a marvellous dream”.

Good news, too, for fans of Ian Rankin’s famous DI Rebus, after the author (above) implied on Twitter that the retired detective will make a comeback (his fourth) in the novel he is currently writing. After a series of teasing tweets about the book, one follower asked: “Dare I ask if it is a Rebus?” Rankin replied, “Yes”. Between the Covers first met Rankin in 2008, when he seemed happy to have retired the character and written the first, post-Rebus book, Doors Open.

Then again in 2009, to talk about The Complaints, when a fan approached him to say: “If you’re writing another book, please can we have Rebus back in it? I couldn’t get to grips with that last one.” Rankin replied, with remarkable patience: “Don’t make your mind up just yet. I’ve got a new book out in September [Dark Entries]. It’s got an Edinburgh cop in it ....” Nonetheless, Rebus returned in 2012’s Standing in Another Man’s Grave, 2013’s Saints of the Shadow Bible and last year’s short story collection, The Beat Goes On. Rebus proves to be as bad at retiring as Rankin himself, then.

Also in that 2009 interview, Rankin revealed that he was planning on retiring as soon as Dark Entries was published. “I’m contractually obliged to write one more book,” he said, and then he planned to jack it all in and go travelling when he turned 50. He’s now 54, and still going strong. Long may he, and Rebus, continue.

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Like a Bomb Going Off: Leonid Yakobson and Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia by Janice Ross, book review

In Soviet Russia, daring and controversy were dangerous, with choreographers among the artists who were sidelined and silenced. Yakobson was unique in the way he managed to keep going, fighting to get his risky works on stage.

That fight is the subject of Janice Ross's Like a Bomb Going Off. Though it's roughly chronological, her book is a study rather than a biography, with the focus always on choreography and politics. It's an approach that works best with Yakobson's post-war work, where her research uncovers the bitter battle between artistry and labyrinthine state control. Earlier on, a stronger narrative of Yakobson's life, and fewer academic buzzwords, would have given the book more grounding. Yakobson was born in 1904. At 14, he was evacuated from post-revolutionary Petrograd to a children's colony, which collapsed in the civil war. Ross pieces together the extraordinary aftermath: the surviving children were found and supported by the American Red Cross, which eventually brought them home via America. With Russia in chaos, it was easier to travel round the world than to cross the country.

Back home, Yakobson started his dance training very late, which made him more suited to character roles than virtuoso leads. His own dances would explore character, often with elements of the grotesque and extreme. The 1920s, when he started his career, was a period of often radical experiment, which ended brutally in the 1930s, with Joseph Stalin in power. Ross underplays this contrast, stressing the repression of the USSR from the start.

She spends as much time on theoretical frameworks for understanding Yakobson as she does on the immediate historical context: some knowledge of the revolution is assumed. Ross is much subtler in the post-war period, when she explores how changes in the political climate could create moments of opportunity for artists.

Where writers and composers could work in secret, choreographers need public performance to create. Each shift – a rise in anti-Semitism, a moment of thaw – changed what was possible for Yakobson. At the same time, Ross shows, he became skilled at burying different meanings within his dances, hints that could be read underneath the Soviet-friendly surface.

She's particularly good on Yakobson's Jewish heritage, unpacking the way he fleetingly evokes Jewish imagery and performance traditions in his steps and style. Her own writing opens up, too, as she follows the drama of the state's cat-and-mouse games. Even now, some of Yakobson's supporters choose to speak anonymously, still nervous of repercussions for past activism.

Many of Yakobson's ballets were lost. He's little known in the West, where touring performances of his ballets were poorly received. Ross is a passionate advocate, ardently evoking his surviving ballets and why his work, and his courage, meant so much to Soviet audiences.

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Paperback reviews: Beneath the Heart of the Sea, Malice, White Beech, The Rise of Islamic State, The Poetry of Sex

Owen Chase was first mate on the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship that was sunk by an enraged sperm whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in 1820. Cast adrift in tiny lifeboats, Chase and his fellow survivors considered their options. To the west lay the Marquesas Islands, which they feared were inhabited by cannibal tribes; to the east, much farther away, the coast of Chile. The sailors chose the latter, but headwinds blew them off course and they spent months at sea with little food or water. In a tragic irony, they were forced to resort to cannibalism themselves before they were rescued by a passing American vessel.

Chase wrote about his harrowing experiences in this memoir, first published in 1821. It has been reissued to tie in with Ron Howard’s film version, out later this year; both the book and the movie are being marketed as “the true story that inspired Moby-Dick”. Chase was, in fact, only one among many sources for Herman Melville’s great novel (although, to be fair, a big-screen adaptation of, say, Thomas Beale’s The Natural History of the Sperm Whale would probably have struggled to get the Hollywood green light).

Melville charitably called Chase’s book a “plain and faithful narrative,” but it’s rather awkwardly written; you can find more dramatic renditions of the Essex story in Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael (1947) and Nathaniel Philbrick’s National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea (2000) – the latter draws on other survivors’ accounts and forms the basis of Howard’s film. Nevertheless, Chase’s original is worth reading for the small, poignant details that reveal the depths of the hunger that led him to transgress that terrible taboo: when flying fish land in the bottom of Chase’s boat, the sailors gobble them down raw, “scales, wings and all”.

***

Malice by Keigo Higashino (trs by Alexander o Smith) (Abacus £8.99)

It may seem strange from the country that gave us Hello Kitty, but cats often get a raw deal in Japanese literature. In the work of Yukio Mishima and Haruki Murakami, moggie-murder is a recurring trope – it’s often used as shorthand to suggest a character’s criminal psychosis.

Cat-killing is also a major plot device in this superb mystery-thriller from the Japanese novelist Keigo Higashino. The book centres on the murder of a famous writer, Hidaka– a crime that may or may not have something to do with his tendency to poison the neighbourhood kittens. The chief suspect is another writer, Nonoguchi, whose unreliable testimony forms the bulk of the narrative; we also hear from Kaga, the workaholic detective assigned to the case.

To reveal any more would be to risk spoiling this novel’s revelatory pleasures. Suffice it to say that the story has more twists and turns than the Tokyo metro – and proves that Higashino is a master of the form.

****

White Beech by Germaine Greer (Bloomsbury £9.99)

In 2001, Germaine Greer bought a run-down dairy farm in Queensland. This memoir tells the story of how she teamed up with her botanist sister to turn the land into a forest reserve, a haven for birds and beasts and rare white beech trees. Greer’s writing about nature is truly wonderful: a bird’s “fanned brick-red tail is edged with a white so bright it seems to leave tracks in the sunlit air”; “emus loped beside me … my ears tuned to the electric sizzle of the finches’ song”. Indeed, to fulfil her stated goal of “conveying the deep joy that rebuilding wild nature can bring” Greer might have given freer rein to this poetic impulse, and submitted the more academic parts of the book to a bit of pruning.

****

The Rise of Islamic State by Patrick Cockburn (Verso £9.99)

Veteran Independent on Sunday journalist Patrick Cockburn is one of our foremost experts on the Middle East, and this book, which addresses the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), is essential reading. Cockburn describes how the militant jihadi group has taken advantage of the weakness of the Iraqi government and the Syrian civil war to win a huge swathe of territory. Cockburn examines and analyses very recent Isis assaults and also takes a step back to explore how these events reflect wider trends, including the conflict between Sunni and Shi’a, and the resurgent Cold War between the US and Russia. Cockburn’s conclusion is chastening: “A new and terrifying state has been born that will not easily disappear.”

*****

The Poetry of Sex, edited by Sophie Hannah (Penguin £9.99)

Whether you’re loved up after Valentine’s Day, or sick of the whole shebang, this collection of poetry about sex will have something for you. Sophie Hannah’s excellent selection ranges over centuries, from Ovid to Carol Ann Duffy. The tone moves from the ecstatically sensual (Michelle McGrane’s “If You Are Lucky”: “the hot-breathed arrival of desire/the frenzied coupling/as you opened soundlessly/and the world flooded into you”) to the playful (E E Cummings’s “May I Feel”: “may i touch said he/how much said she/ a lot said he/why not said she”). You also get no fewer than two lust-drenched poems about the James Bond actor Daniel Craig for your money, if he’s your thing.

****

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Girl in a Band: A memoir by Kim Gordon, book review: Notes from the bass line

Nevertheless, it’s a question that she answers at length in her frank and bittersweet memoir. Along with chronicling her early life in the California suburbs, her art school days and her parallel careers as a visual artist, Gordon addresses head-on the demands foisted upon female musicians working in a largely male domain.

These demands came as much from Gordon herself as from others. What did people see when they saw her on stage? Should she be feminine or androgynous? Should she move centre-stage or lurk in the shadows? These were things that both irritated and intrigued her, and it’s this alertness that gives Girl in a Band its power.

It’s also, at times, stingingly funny. She doesn’t mince her words as she recalls working with Courtney Love and compares the singer’s narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies to those of her own brother, Keller, a paranoid schizophrenic who taunted Gordon as a child. She is properly hilarious about Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan whom she writes off as “a crybaby”.

Elsewhere, there’s a flavour of Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids in Gordon’s early years as a struggling visual artist in late Seventies New York. For a while she slept on Cindy Sherman’s floor and later sub-let a loft from Jenny Holzer. Like Smith, she took jobs in bookstores and diners to survive. Later came a receptionist’s job at an art gallery, which led to her moving in the same social circles as Julian Schnabel and Jeff Koons. Unlike many of her musical contemporaries, Gordon believed that art could encapsulate anything, whether dance, clothes, painting, or music. It’s this open-mindedness that yielded the colourful life recounted here.

It’s also a life recounted through the lens of her most significant relationship – that with her bandmate Thurston Moore. The disintegration of their 30-year marriage in 2011 also signalled the end of Sonic Youth, so it’s no wonder that anger and heartbreak spill from the pages. “I did feel some compassion for Thurston,” she notes in a devastating final chapter on his infidelity. “I was sorry for the way he had lost his marriage, his band, his daughter, his family, our life together – and himself. But that is a lot different from forgiveness.”

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'The Girl on the Train' roars to No. 1

A look at what's new on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list...
Speeding 'Train': The book everybody is calling the next Gone Girl has powered its way to No. 1 on USA TODAY's list much more quickly than Gillian Flynn's hit did. The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins' debut psychological thriller about bad marriages and murder, hits the top spot in its fourth week on the list, after three straight weeks at No. 2. It knocks Chris Kyle's American Sniper, which was No. 1 for three consecutive weeks, to the second spot. (USA TODAY's full best-seller list will publish on Thursday.) Train was released on Jan. 13 with lots of advance buzz, but its success is still phenomenal for an unknown author. Publisher Riverhead reports more than half a million copies sold. (The initial print run was 40,000 copies. Digital sales outpace print, according to USA TODAY's data.)
Gone Girl was a hit out of the gate: It landed at No. 7 in June 2012 and remained a hot seller. But it wasn't until last October, nearly 2½ years later, that Flynn's thriller finally made it to No. 1, as the movie adaptation arrived in theaters. (It's No. 7 this week.) Hawkins is back in England after wrapping up a U.S. book tour. Riverhead editor in chief Sarah McGrath says readers are recommending Train to friends – "the word of mouth is spreading like wildfire." The novel, she says, has a "great hook, one that connects immediately with anyone who is a commuter or people-watcher."
Classic gets boost: Not surprisingly, Harper Lee's 55-year-old Southern classic To Kill a Mockingbird soars to its highest ranking ever, No. 4. (USA TODAY's list began in 1993.) The novel's previous peak was No. 10, in July 2010, during its 50th anniversary year. Mockingbird received a big boost with the news that a recently discovered sequel of sorts, Go Set a Watchman, will be published on July 14. Since then, preorders have made Watchman, written in the 1950s before Mockingbird, No. 1 on amazon.com. A first printing of 2 million hardcover copies is planned for Watchman, and there will be an e-book. Mockingbird, a classroom staple, has been on USA TODAY's list a total of 872 weeks.
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James Dawson is Queen of Teen books

James Dawson has fought hard to win the title Queen of Teen 2014. And now he has been crowned.

All rise for his majesty the queen as James Dawson, the author of Hollow Pike and Say Her Name, becomes the first male winner of the Queen of Teen award for his latest book, Cruel Summer.

After a vigorous social media campaign, Dawson topped a shortlist entirely nominated by teens (Cathy Cassidy, Beth Reekles, Holly Smale, Cassandra Clare, Veronica Roth, John Green, S.C. Ransom, Tonya Hurley, and Natasha Farrant) to join an illustrious cast of previous winners including Louise Rennison, Cathy Cassidy and Maureen Johnson.

Watch out for our report from the awards ceremony and interview with James by site member Alannahbee coming up!

Cruel Summer is a psychological thriller focusing on a group of teens who, one year on from the suicide of one of their friends, try to get over it by going away to a holiday villa in the Mediterranean. But when a new guest, claiming to have evidence that the suicide was actually a murder, is herself found dead, it's clear that one of them must be the killer…

Helloitsheath called it the "perfect balance of murder mystery, teen fiction and horror movie', which at the same time 'manages to be funny, heartwarming and – murder aside – ­easy for teenage audiences to relate to".

While XoXo Bookworm_98 gushed, "there were SO many times I just HAD to put the book down to take a breather, so that I could process what had just happened – there were just about a million twists that you will Never. See. Coming".

Dawson has been a vocal supporter of LGBT rights (including supporting Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst) and XoXo Boomworm_98 noted that "the LGBT aspect of the book was so different from others I've read, and was a vital, beautiful, heart wrenching part of the tale".

Buy Cruel Summer at the Guardian Bookshop or join the site to get your copy to review!

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The literary World Cup: readers' best all-time teams

Albert Camus (at the front, wearing a flat cap), the best real-life literary goalie – here, with the University of Algiers football team. Photograph: Roger-Viollet/Rex Features

Back when the World Cup was in those exciting and unpredictable first rounds, we were playing away at Penguin's imaginary books World Cup, where an England with JK Rowling, George Orwell and Agatha Christie in attack and the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens in the midfield could possibly – possibly – have had a chance to win something.

The UK imprint imagined matches and footballing incidents on Twitter, and we joined in the fun, asking for your all-time favourite literary teams. Now that the actual competition is coming to an end, here are our top five writers' XIs.

TimFootman offered an all-nationalities, all-time XI with Albert Camus as goalkeeper (because – "duh" – the French author played as a goalie while studying at the University of Algeria). He chose a pretty hard-core defence (Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Samuel Richardson and Vikram Seth) "because you need big guys at the back", went for a self-explanatory "middlebrowfield" with John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett and Elizabeth Gaskell, and chose Bret Easton Ellis, Will Self and DBC Pierre in attack because, "as Mr Suárez proved, it's the scary, unpredictable, slightly bonkers ones who get results." No comment.

Photograph: Toby Moses

tagomagoman gave an extensive justification for this killer and eclectic XI, managed by "respected and innovative coach with a steely heart of darkness" Joseph Conrad. Some of our favourite picks:

James Joyce (centre-back): "The ultimate cultured centre-back famously left his native Ireland to learn his trade on the continent. It is a rare forward who can find a way past his impenetrable prose."

Cormac McCarthy (central midfield): "This tough tackling, no nonsense player patrols the border country between midfield and defence. If you thought the Comanche attack in Blood Meridian was brutal you should see what he does to a midfield runner who has the temerity to approach his territory."

F Scott Fitzgerald (central midfield): "Seen by some as a luxury player too keen to sit back and admire his own beautiful passes. Sometimes seems more concerned with his celebrity lifestyle with his glamorous wife than his career. But when he puts his mind to it, boy can he play. With the steely McCarthy beside him they form a formidable midfield."

William Burroughs (right midfield): "Old snake hips is one of the most feared wingers in the game. Has suffered with 'refuelling' issues in the past, but as long as he receives his 'vitamin supplement' before the game is a reliable asset. Famous for terrorising full-backs with his notorious cut-up technique that leaves them gasping for comprehension. Should score more goals, but suffers from a wayward shot."

Photograph: Toby Moses

neophil33 disagreed with Penguin's version of the French team and offered the following instead (with Anatole France, François Rabelais, Alphonse Daudet, Marguerite Duras, Louis Aragon, François Mauriac as subs), which sparked quite a debate. "That midfield could be a bit flaky", said shinerbock. "I'd have Proust among the subs – just in case you needed to bring someone on to run down the clock", offered AnotherBe. shinerbock jumped in again: "You can't have Rimbaud and Verlaine in the same team together. Even on opposite wings. There's no discipline there. Bring them on as 'impact subs', when Baudelaire's been sent off for showing off." Etcetera.

Photograph: Toby Moses

"At last, a competition Ireland will dominate", ventured theundertone. We had as many as four different Irish teams suggested – here's one by SanPaolo: from Patrick Kavanagh ("weird loner, ideal keeper") to Oscar Wilde ("big target man, ex-boxer, great turn – of phrase) and Samuel Beckett ("mercurial forward, famously not many kicks") on the attack and of course Joyce at the midfield ("creative, but tendency to overelaborate"). Although as Sunburst said, perhaps their star player would suffice: "between 11 best English novelists of the 20th century and one chapter of Ulysses, I'd confidently put my money on the latter."

Photograph: Toby Moses

And finally, how irresistible is this team from Ancient Rome suggested by Serdal:

Cicero (goalkeeper): "Reliable, can do everything, great reflexes, huge belief in his own abilities, can be a show-off, never to blame in his own mind."

Caesar (left-back): "Lean, efficient, fast, unfussy, able to influence referees with his propagandistic style."

Ovid (left midfield): "Great work-rate, though defensively suspect, the side's greatest technique and pacey as hell, should complement Caesar's qualities."

Virgil (central midfield): "Used to be a slim, tricky player, in his later days a player of gravity but lots of emotions, able to mix the rough and the magical."

Photograph: Toby Moses

There were so many other brilliant line-ups that we had to leave out – do take a look at the delightful thread, which included discussion of referees and even a wink to our own sports writers. And, as always, add your own or tell us what we’ve missed in the comments below. But let's close with a team from Magnusson which he promises will be "precise, efficient and beautiful in its simplicity":

Photograph: Toby Moses

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A Treacherous Paradise by Henning Mankell review

Henning Mankell in Mozambique. Photograph: Björn Lindgren

Henning "Wallander" Mankell takes a fascinating historical fragment as the basis for this tale of Portuguese Africa. In the early 20th century, one of the biggest brothels in Lourenço Marques (now Mozambique's capital, Maputo) was owned by a white Swedish woman.

She crops up in tax records, but we know nothing else about her. Mankell names her Hanna and gives her a thoughtful nature (she "radiates an aura suggesting she is a totally genuine human being") and a harsh backstory: she grew up in Sweden's remote north, was pushed out by her poor family and ended up on a boat to Australia but never got there. The most successful parts of the novel portray the brutal, segregated life of Lourenço Marques – the black population lower their gaze to whites who may beat them for a slight, while the whites fear that outward pliability hides defiance. Hanna's decency is undermined by the society she finds herself in; when she embarks on a personal crusade, the town closes ranks. Mankell's writing can be drab but he tells a good story, and this is a grimly believable picture of how colonialism denigrates both servant and master.

• To order A Treacherous Paradise for £7.19 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims review Zombies in Louisiana

'It’s a buffet out there' … Zombies from the TV series The Walking Dead. Photograph: AP

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is at the centre of a zombie outbreak. For now the authorities are coping – just – rounding up the undead and quarantining them. But the imminent hurricane season threatens to unleash mayhem.

As the narrator, Michael, tells his girlfriend: "It's a buffet out there." Still, he risks being bitten to help his best friend look for his father, suspected of falling victim to undeath. There is very little gore in this highly unusual take on the zombie novel. Instead, Bennett Sims delivers a disquisition on the idea of the zombie, combining low and high culture in a firework display of extended metaphors, obscure vocabulary and intellectual sparks. With a heavy debt to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and vigorous nods to Nabokov, Heidegger, Tarkovsky, Shklovsky, Levinas and Proust, to mention a few, the book is ambitious and thought-provoking. Sims displays a positively Will Self-ish love of words (the illuminated head of the man on a "Walk" sign is "syncarpous and starlit, a perfect oval of refulgent drupelets") as he focuses in on the philosophical conundrum of undeath, seemingly yearning for its impossible state that is neither "Being" nor "Nothingness". An existentialist meditation.

• To order A Questionable Shape for £6.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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Book reviews roundup: How to Build a Girl, Village of Secrets and A Broken World

'She writes with breathtaking brio' … Caitlin Moran. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

"Any novel that begins with its 14-year-old narrator masturbating in the same bed as her sleeping little brother can't be all bad. Indeed, Caitlin Moran's spirited coming-of-age tale romps from strength to strength. After her popular essayistic memoir How to Be a Woman, Moran's first novel for adults, How to Build a Girl, follows the remaking of Johanna Morrigan, a pudgy, smart-mouthed teenager from the West Midlands". Lionel Shriver in the Times pronounced herself "a Moran fan … At 39, the author can still summon the raw, jangled experience of being a teenager." "There's a lot about masturbation here – as much an age of coming as a coming of age novel", noted an equally admiring Julie Burchill in the Spectator: "She writes with breathtaking brio, like a great professional hoofer who has been toe-tapping since tot-hood but has never grown tired of performing: very much a 'Ta-da! – see what I did there?' type of writer." But Liz Jones in the Evening Standard didn't agree: "The problem is, this novel has no depth or pathos. Even though it's based on what she knows, there is no sense that this new girl is real … It's all quite glib … Moran hasn't stretched herself … It would be easy to give this book a good review … But I feel it's my job … to warn young women when I think they're wasting their money."

Village of Secrets by Caroline Moorehead, an account of Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, the "remote mountain village", as Sinclair McKay wrote in the Daily Telegraph, "that provided sanctuary and escape for numbers of Jewish people … is riven with complexity". It is "also about ownership of history. Moorehead analyses how, in recent years, the story … has been fluffed up as a sort of national comfort blanket – a beacon of redemptive light in Vichy darkness … at the expense of difficult truth … If anything, Moorehead's pacy, headlong narrative, zigzagging across the war years and different territories with so many piercing vignettes and close detail, packs too much in and the structure suffers. A longer book would have given more room for reflection …" Alan Judd in the Spectator praised the book for pointing out "the brute facts. France was one of only two sovereign states (the other was Bulgaria) to do the Nazis' work for them, rounding up and deporting over 150,000 – half of them Jews – to death or slavery. From the start, Vichy 'consistently offered more than Germany asked for, more and also sooner'."

On the cover of the anthology A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War, edited by Sebastian Faulks and Hope Wolf, the author of Birdsong is "for obvious commercial reasons", wrote Libby Purves in the Times, put first "and much bigger". Wolf's "area of research in war writing includes 'miniature narratives and popular form (anecdotes, jokes, cliches, memes)' and Faulks himself handsomely acknowledges in his introduction that the book's merits are largely due to her search for the oblique, the overlooked and the international. He is right … the pleasure of the book is in the straightforward human responses." According to Gerard Henderson in the Daily Express "it is the pain, the suffering and the confusion that dominates this impressive work – the awful reality of warfare summed up by Private Frank Cocker, who wrote from the front in 1915, following the loss of his brother: 'My heart is so stunned I don't know whether it is broken or not.'"

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The World Cup is political theatre of the highest order

Germany has a football team to match its ambition and character. Photograph: Rex Features

Is anything more global than football? Fifa believes that the 2014 World Cup will exceed the total world audience of 3.2 billion that watched the 2010 South African tournament. The USA team's games have attracted record viewing figures at home, and, in an increasingly fragmented media world, national team's games have truly exceptional audiences everywhere. Few singular events – not a man on the moon, not the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics – have held humanity's attention like the World Cup final between Germany and Argentina that awaits us.

Alongside the 75,000 people in the crowd at Rio's Maracanã on Sunday the global digital chorus will be immense. Facebook announced more than a billion World Cup-related interactions during the first half of the tournament among 220 million people. In the first week alone, the 459m exchanges exceeded those reported for Sochi 2014, this year's Super Bowl and the Oscars combined. The semi-final between Brazil and Germany generated 35m tweets peaking at more than half a million a minute when Germany's fifth goal went in.

Among the tweeters inside the Maracanã on Sunday we can expect commentary from Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, seated alongside the rest of the BRIC premiers: Brazil's president Rousseff, Russia's Vladimir Putin, South Africa's Jacob Zuma and China's Xi Jinping. The Brazilian foreign service will need to find some space for the finalists themselves: chancellor Merkel and presidents Gauck and Kirchner. No doubt the heads of state of Costa Rica, Mexico, Iran and the US, all of whom have been engaging via social media, will put in their 1o cents' worth too.

In this respect the World Cup is political theatre of the highest order – an instrument of soft power, a node in the global networks of power – but its dramatic structure is a complex and shifting thing. For the devotee, the early rounds are like gorging on an addictive DVD box set. Suddenly one is watching two, three, even four episodes a night. A significant part of the world has been rearranging its sleeping and working patterns around the tournament. In China, reports suggest this has triggered a wave of deaths through nervous overexhaustion.

Alongside the spectacle has run the counterspectacle of the protest movements and the Kevlar-plated leviathan of the Brazilian security forces. This feels more like an experimental parallel-universe novel, where two worlds run alongside each other reflecting and commenting but only very rarely actually touching. The protests have taken many forms – street art, computer hacking of sponsors' websites – but the demonstrations dwindled to almost nothing. The cost of this has been the militarisation of public space and the absurdly aggressive policing of dissent, making the few brave forays by dissidents the critical grit beneath the glitter.

The multi-character, multi-layer stories that the tournament has generated, the highly structured dramatic climaxes of the games, and the mad chatter of public running commentary on characters and private lives, makes the World Cup feel like a great global soap opera. Cameroon and Ghana are consumed by fights over money between the players and their notoriously rapacious football officials. Luis Suárez loses his emotional control and is punished, globally lampooned but lauded in Uruguay.

While the games in Brazil are the fulcrum of any one of these many plotlines their most dramatic and meaningful expressions occur at home. This is more the territory of a multi-authored international collection of short stories and essays. England's journey seemed a textbook exposition of the private opulence of the Premier League and the public squalor of the national team. In Iran, it is the female characters who are strongest. Officially banned from viewing football with men, they have followed the national team surreptitiously in mixed cafes and then paraded through central Tehran in defiance of the theocracy. Hundreds of thousands of ecstatic Colombians welcomed home their team as if they were champions rather than defeated quarter-finalists – their best World Cup performance ever serving as a suitable marker for a nation finally moving beyond the protracted drug wars of the last three decades.

These nations and stories are no longer tied to just one place but are diasporas. Mexico's victory against Croatia saw LA Chicanos take to the streets of South Central in such numbers that the LAPD intervened. Algeria's passage to the second round was met by ecstatic crowds and magnesium flares in Algiers, but also in Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Roubaix, where celebrations turned into street fights with the police.

Is there something grander at work than this global kaleidoscope? Is there no clearer arc of meaning at work? There are certainly recurring themes. The global inequalities of ethnicity, gender and class were surely on display when one compared the makeup of the crowds with their teams, and the teams with their coaching staff. But it is narrative that we crave. As teams have been eliminated and the incredible cacophony of games and goals quietens, the semi-finals have focused our attention on the plotlines of just four nations.

The Dutch are returning home to contemplate the limits of being a small nation in the global order and by some way the smallest population of the four. However much team and economy are nurtured by brilliant coaching and innovative education, there seems to be a ceiling on their progress. Brazil has had a bitterer pill to swallow – the manner of their departure from the competition, comprehensively humiliated by Germany 7-1, forensically laid bare the illusions of Brazilian football. Brazil no longer plays good or beautiful football: the game, like many of its institutions, has been poisoned by corruption, elite mismanagement, cynicism, a brutally Hobbesian will to win, and no amount of overwrought patriotism, mawkish crying and fist pumping can disguise it.

The backdrop to the Argentinians' almost impregnable nerve and defensive concentration on the field is president Kirchner's bitter fight with US-based vulture funds over its rescheduled debt obligations. Under immense economic pressure and looking a major debt default in the eye, the country still aims to cock a snook at the international order. The huge numbers of Argentinian fans have been the most voluble and unruly at the tournament. The idea that they might win the final is their host's nightmare scenario.

Germany, still described in the hapless cliches of efficient machines and ruthless, clinical finishing, were actually dazzling: precisely the word that the French press used to laud the Brazilians at the 1938 World Cup when they surprised the world and showed us what the new football looked like. Now the positions are reversed. Germany, finally emerging as what it has been for decades, the pre-eminent European power, has a football team to match its ambitions and its character: brilliantly organised but instantly flexible, individually accomplished but telepathically networked, technically superior to the Brazilians in touch, positioning and anticipation. Yet they carry other German traits too: a collective solidarity that disdains the egotistical, and a realistic conservatism about an uncertain world, for no one feels victory is assured.

Clifford Geertz, the anthropologist wrote: "Culture is the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves." If there is a global culture and a global humanity, then the World Cup, more than any other phenomenon, is where those tales are told. We are fortunate then that the game we have chosen as our collective avatar should be so inventive a storyteller that a single game of football – the World Cup final – can, for 90 minutes, bind so many strands of this turbulent planet together.

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Best holiday reads 2014 - top authors recommend their favourites

I loved Akhil Sharma's novel Family Life (Faber) because it feels emotionally true. I also loved Daughters Who Walk This Path by Yejide Kilanko (Pintail), a debut novel set in western Nigeria, which on the surface is about a young woman coming of age, but is really an exploration of social taboos, gender and family. I have just started reading – and am really enjoying – Lily King's novel Father of the Rain (Atlantic); it's so well done.

First I am going to read John Williams's Augustus (Vintage Classics). His "campus novel" Stoner was last year's rediscovery, but the epistolary story of the first Roman emperor looks even better. I shall also be packing Edith Hall's Introducing the Ancient Greeks (WW Norton). Great to see how a feisty woman does the "introduction".

Berlin: Imagine a City by Rory MacLean (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). Berlin vies with London, currently, as the coolest city on the planet. MacLean's wonderfully knowledgable overview of the city's history helps explain the place's enduring fascination. Hollow Mountain by Thomas Mogford (Bloomsbury) is the third novel in a highly original and compelling Mediterranean noir series featuring the resourceful and all-too-human Gibraltar-based young lawyer Spike Sanguinetti. Tremendous atmosphere, rich characterisation and ideally complex plotting. I Knew the Bride by Hugo Williams (Faber): it's rare that a book of poetry exhibits "grace under pressure" with such laconic aplomb. Williams's superb poems about his visits to a dialysis ward pull off a near-impossible balancing act: a haunting memento mori leavened with wry, worldly amusement.

I recommend two novels that have just been published – Neel Mukherjee's The Lives of Others (Chatto & Windus) and Philip Hensher's The Emperor Waltz (4th Estate). The former takes place in Bengal in the 1960; the latter in the Bauhaus in 1920s Germany and 1970s London, with brief visits to fourth-century Rome and a present-day hospital ward. Both novels are splendidly thought out and extraordinarily readable. And then I'd like to add Jane Gardam's collection – The Stories (Little, Brown) – full of wit, unexpected turns of events and splendid writing. Every summer I bury myself in one author I read avidly late at night – this year it is Alan Furst, whose compulsive thrillers are just as exciting when revisited.

'Eleanor Marx: A Life' is a wonderful book … Shami Chakrabarti. Photograph: David Fisher/Rex Features

I've just finished Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes (Bloomsbury) and have already given copies as gifts, for holiday reading. It's a wonderful book: part biography of a great woman of letters and activism; part family drama and whodunnit. Feminism began in the 1870s not the 1970s and Eleanor Marx's progressive internationalism as translated by Holmes is so relevant today. A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury) is my holiday novel as I love Shamsie's beautiful painting with words. I've enjoyed her previous books for the way that the sweep of human history touches and turns the intimate lives of her characters. Unsurprisingly, this book, like the Eleanor Marx biography, has already achieved widespread critical acclaim.

For those with the luxury of late post-school-holiday breaks, there are some really exciting offerings out in September. I am looking forward to The Taxidermist's Daughter by Kate Mosse (Orion), Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett (Macmillan) and Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose (Bloomsbury).

As I am a Man Booker prize judge this year, my summer reading list consists of 160 new novels that I can neither name nor (currently) endorse, although in late July my fellow judges and I will announce a longlist recommending 12 or 13 novels for everyone's summer reading lists. Then, once I have reread the longlist, I am immensely looking forward to catching up on some non-novels, including (after a surfeit of 600-plus-page tomes) several short-story collections: Lying Under the Apple Tree by Alice Munro (Vintage), Tenth of December by George Saunders (Bloomsbury) and Bark by Lorrie Moore (Faber). I also crave the astringency of some non-fiction, and am especially eager to read Jill Lepore's Book of Ages (Knopf), the story of Benjamin Franklin's sister, Ian Leslie's Curious (Basic), and Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses (Penguin). Once I can face a novel again, I look forward to being the last reader in Britain to finally begin Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle (Vintage).

For a moving and highly contemporary story full of suspense, take Bernardine Bishop's new novel Hidden Knowledge (Sceptre). If you're going to Italy (or even if not), I recommend a couple of books that illuminate Italian history of the fascist period: Lucy Hughes-Hallett's The Pike (4th Estate), an entertaining biography of the outrageously colourful poet and man-of-action Gabriele d'Annunzio, to be offset by Antonio Pennacchi's epic novel The Mussolini Canal (Dedalus). The latter will make you want to head off at once to the Pontine Marshes.

I can't recommend A God in Every Stone by Kamila Shamsie too strongly – this is her best novel yet, which is high praise to give to the author of Burnt Shadows. A young Englishwoman – an archaeologist in Turkey before the first world war, then a nurse to wounded soldiers – searches for her lost love whom she may have unwittingly betrayed. The narrative moves to the struggle for Indian independence and the boy she befriends, against the custom of culture and class, in a subtle tapestry in which love, history and archaeology all have their place. Exciting and, in the end, profoundly moving, this will solace you during the grimmest holiday. I intend to read Ten Cities that Made an Empire by Tristram Hunt (Allen Lane), believing that his characteristically well researched and lively account of the imperial legacy in Boston, Bridgetown, New Delhi, Melbourne and so forth will serve as a substitute for sitting at airports on my way to visiting these colourful cities.

George Saunders's Tenth of December, which won the inaugural Folio prize has been somewhat overshadowed by the very different but equally wonderful A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride (Galley Beggar), also shortlisted for the Folio prize and which went on to win several other awards including the Baileys. So I think it should be pointed out that reading both books is compulsory.

I was recently sent an advance copy of H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (Jonathan Cape), which is out in August. It's about the author TH White and grief and training goshawks and is, as I promise on the cover, very hard to put down.

I'm also looking forward to reading Letters of Note edited by Shaun Usher (Canongate), a collection of "correspondence deserving of a wider audience" in both facsimile and typescript. Jack the Ripper writes to the chairman of the Whitechapel vigilance committee. Mary, Queen of Scots writes about her impending execution. A telegram is sent from the sinking Titanic. Elvis Presley asks Richard Nixon if he can become a "federal agent at large". If you're not tempted by those four alone, you have a heart of stone. One last suggestion – if you're unwilling to leave the hammock or open your eyes – I'm re-re-listening to Seamus Heaney reading his own translation of Beowulf (Faber). The original poem is one of the great works of literature; Heaney's genuinely thrilling translation will make you understand why – and he was blessed with one of the most beguiling voices I have ever heard.

Mohsin Hamid is looking forward to reading Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

The first in my towering pile of books is Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide (Hamish Hamilton), because I think the government spying that he uncovered via Edward Snowden is terrifying and I'd like to know more. And the second is Decoded (Allen Lane), Mai Jia's debut novel about a Chinese secret-service cryptographer, which I've heard is brilliant – and is also, come to think of it, probably not unrelated to the first.

Most of my reading this year is of forgotten or neglected British short stories for a big Penguin anthology. But I'll take a break from Sapper, Stacy Aumonier, Lanoe Falconer and HA Manhood for a couple of special new novels. Early copies of Sarah Waters and David Nicholls look beautifully promising; Waters's The Paying Guests (Virago) is a sumptuously subdued story of making do and getting by after the great war, Nicholls's Us (Hodder & Stoughton) is a wrenching examination of a journey through Europe that goes terribly wrong and a consideration of what it means to be a parent today. Apart from that, it's going to be the usual strategy of alternating PG Wodehouse and Elmore Leonard, their sunny temperaments perfect for the beach.

Nicholson Baker's Paul Chowder novels, The Anthologist (Pocket) and Travelling Sprinkler (Serpent's Tail), are wonderful: chatty, bizarrely informative, wise, kind, unpredictable and funny. Chowder is a lovelorn, impoverished poet who, in the second book, has hit the Three Fs – Fifty Fucking Five – and is no nearer to achieving financial or emotional stability. He knows a lot, though. The Anthologist is brilliant on the unlikely subject of rhyme (Chowder thinks blank verse is a fascist conspiracy); in Travelling Sprinkler, Chowder tells us about bassoons, cigars, Logic software, Debussy and protest songs. Will Hermes's Love Goes to Buildings on Fire (Viking) is a book about more or less every piece of music made in NYC between 1973 and 1977 – Television, Blondie and Talking Heads, of course, but also salsa, disco, free jazz and the first days of hip-hop. It's as authoritative a piece of social history as you'll come across – Hermes is David Kynaston with a rhythm section. I am intending to read J Anthony Lukas's Common Ground (Vintage), a Pulitzer-winning book first published in the mid 1980s about race and class in Boston. After very strong recommendations from people I trust, I found that I owned it already. This seemed like a sign.

In the early 90s I studied philosophy at Warwick University, at a time when the department was an incubator for radical ideas about the impact of new technologies on culture and society. A number of people from that time have gone on to do significant work in theory, literature and even music. This summer I'm looking forward to books by two former colleagues/fellow inmates. #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader edited by Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian, is published by Mackay's own Urbanomic press, which is rapidly becoming one of the most significant philosophy publishers in the world. "Acceleration" is this year's theoretical buzzword and this collection examines its current usage and excavates its roots, which go back to the 19th century. Mark Fisher's essay collection Ghosts of My Life (Zero Books) faces up to his own experience of depression and links it to wider cultural and political concerns. Someone who wasn't at Warwick in the 90s, at least as far as I know, is Hassan Blasim, who has just won the Independent Foreign Fiction prize for his story collection, The Iraqi Christ (Comma Press), which is also in my hand luggage.

Constantine Phipps's What You Want (Quercus) is unlike any other book published this year, indeed this century: a long verse-novel in rhyming couplets, about, as its subtitle says, "the pursuit of happiness". Dante, adultery, theme parks, psychotherapy – it's all here, but unjokily so, and one of the most moving things about the book is the unusual texture of its melancholy seriousness. Patricia Lockwood's poems, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (Penguin), funny, dirty and sex-mad, is a book I'll be taking on my summer travels; to get a flavour of her work, look online for the devastating prose poem "Rape Joke". Finally, this season has been unusual for seeing the publication of three very important books about money: Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Harvard), Atif Mian and Amir Sufi's House of Debt (Chicago) and Michael Lewis's Flash Boys (Allen Lane), three very different, but not necessarily contradictory, takes on the great subject of the age.

Two long-awaited lives that I couldn't wait until summer to read were Updike by Adam Begley (Harper) – which gives equal weight to my favourite novelist's life and books and the often eye-watering overlaps between them – and Roy Jenkins: A Well-Rounded Life by John Campbell (Jonathan Cape), which achieves an equally impressive balance between policies and peccadillos. Two works that I will read in the summer months are: John Carey's memoir The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books (Faber) and Philip Hensher's novel The Emperor Waltz, which, from flicking, seems to continue his bold experiments with form.

Road Ends (Chatto & Windus) is the latest intricate and thought-provoking story of a remote Canadian community by Mary Lawson, author of Crow Lake. Olivia Laing's To the River (Canongate) is a fine instance of the new school of landscape-writing pioneered by Robert Macfarlane, vividly charting a slice of Sussex. But my find of the year has been Sarah Moss: I revelled in Cold Earth (Granta), a brilliantly tense mix of archaeology and conflicting personalities, and at once sought out her next novel, Night Waking (Granta). More please, Sarah.

Hilary Mantel recommends Toby Clement's Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims, 'a savage and tender adventure story'. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Kingmaker: Winter Pilgrims (Century) is a savage and tender adventure story, deeply researched and lightly told: Game of Thrones for real, with the bonus of style and sardonic wit. The climate is mostly chilly in Toby Clement's novel, as his characters struggle to survive civil war in 15th-century England, but the heart warms to his skilful, intelligent fiction. Stranger than fiction but just as gripping is How to Ruin a Queen (John Murray), Jonathan Beckman's masterly exploration of the "diamond necklace" affair, a bizarre scandal that some claim set Marie Antoinette on the road to the guillotine. Well-travelled imaginations will enjoy a jaunt with fiery polymath Christopher Potter; How to Make a Human Being (4th Estate) is a quirky investigation into our deepest nature, and calls on evidence from PG Wodehouse and Marcel Proust, Christopher Robin and Francis Crick, the Book of Revelation and the Worm Breeder's Gazette.

I am a notoriously bad holiday book packer; I tend to panic and bring, say, Hard Times. This year I want to read: Michael Cunningham's The Snow Queen (4th Estate) because he's my favourite writer; Sarah Waters's The Paying Guests (Virago), because she's also my favourite writer; the Maudes's translation of War and Peace (Oxford), because it's the best novel in the world; and enormous amounts of very bleak Rendellesque crime fiction.

A robust translation programme in India is finally making the richness and diversity of Indian fiction accessible to a broader audience. I am looking forward to reading Hangwoman (Hamish Hamilton) by KR Meera, an acclaimed novelist in Malayalam. Other books on my list are Bilal Tanweer's novel The Scatter Here Is Too Great (Jonathan Cape), Rüdiger Safranski's Romanticism: A German Affair (Northwestern University Press), an account of one of the most influential, intellectual and literary movements of the modern age, and Hisham Aidi's Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon).

Meteorologists are predicting a hot summer so I'll be reading books designed to keep me from feeling too sunny: Pete Ayrton's weighty anthology No Man's Land (Serpent's Tail), featuring accounts of the first world war by 47 writers, some of them combatants, many of them from other parts of the world; Marion Coutts's memoir The Iceberg (Atlantic), which describes the three years between the diagnosis of her husband Tom Lubbock's brain tumour and his death; Hugo Hamilton's novel Every Single Minute (4th Estate), about two friends, one of whom is terminally ill, spending a weekend in Berlin; an early proof copy of Epilogue by an English-born, US-based writer called (no kidding) Will Boast (due from Granta), which recounts the deaths of his mother, father and brother; and a battered paperback of Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (Oxford), with its portrait of youthful nihilism, thwarted love and parents grieving for absent children.

Andrew Motion recommends Sigrid Rausing's Everything Is Wonderful.

Everything Is Wonderful, by Sigrid Rausing (Perseus), may not be exactly a typical beach read, but it is – because and in spite of its severities – a marvellously interesting piece of writing. An account of her time on a collective farm in Estonia in the 1990s, all brought back with compelling and melancholy accuracy. Damon Galgut's new novel Arctic Summer (Atlantic) is also preoccupied by varieties of sadness – but is so crisply written, with a deceptive simplicity and directness, that it feels full of affirmations. And then there's The Odyssey, which I reread every year, this time accompanied by Adam Nicolson's intriguing account of his own Odyssey addiction, The Mighty Dead (William Collins).

Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field by John Lewis-Stempel (Doubleday). Having recently acquired a meadow, I'm eager to learn from someone who knows not only all about the different kinds of life in such a place and how they all fit together, but who can also write so vividly. I've enjoyed Philip Hensher's previous books so much that I'm greatly looking forward to The Emperor Waltz (4th Estate), which is satisfactorily hefty. And I'm going to reread Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (Vintage Classics) to marvel again at how a 25-year-old could have the impudence to take on such a huge subject and the genius to deal with it so majestically.

Ian Rankin 'can hardly tear himself away' from Linda Grants Upstairs at the Party. Photograph:Rex Features

Clothes Clothes Clothes Music Music Music Boys Boys Boys by Viv Albertine (Faber) – cumbersome title but a terrific read. Two sides of a record, with side one being the birth of punk and rise of Albertine's band the Slits, and side two comprising her life afterwards, filled with huge challenges. Gripping and moving. I've just started Upstairs at the Party by Linda Grant (Virago) and can hardly tear myself away from it. Grant always writes with incisive elegance and here paints a compelling picture of 1970s England in a plot that revolves around the disappearance of a charismatic student. She's been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize before, and this is shaping up to be a stunner. The Secret Place by Tana French (Hodder & Stoughton) isn't published until August, but I've managed to snatch a prepublication copy and will be taking it with me on holiday. Her previous novel, Broken Harbour, was a clever and compelling mystery set in post-crash Ireland. No idea what this one's about but that doesn't matter – Tana French always delivers.

I don't much like the word "thriller", especially when it's applied to serious, thoughtfully written novels such as Louise Doughty's Apple Tree Yard (Faber), the first of her books I've read. It's about a passionate love affair but has its own extraordinary originality. Since I read a lot, I like to be able to say that I've never read anything like it. Much the same applies to the very different Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey (Viking). Maud is very old and aware of the slow coming of dementia, while her daughter does her best to control her impatience with her mother's vagaries and what she sees as absurd assumptions. Yet, as the tension mounts, the reader knows Maud is right. A novel I've just read for the second time but look forward to reading again is Edward St Aubyn's Never Mind (Picador), the first volume in his brilliantly written nightmarish sequence. I have already read the other four in the Melrose Family box set, but will read them again, ending with At Last where Patrick hopes that, with his parents gone, he may find freedom at last.

Sabrina Mahfouz is one of the most original, smart, and interesting younger voices in the UK, and The Clean Collection (Bloomsbury Methuen) brings together her plays and poems. There's no shortage of first world war material around, but for me the most surprising and affecting remains Indian Voices of the Great War – Soldiers' Letters 1914-18, edited by David Omissi (Palgrave Macmillan). And Tobias Hill's What Was Promised (Bloomsbury Circus), which tells the stories of three families of Londoners from 1948-88, is as textured, beautifully written and ultimately gripping as anyone who knows his work would expect.

Lionel Shriver was immediately hooked by James Lee Burke's Wayfaring Stranger. Photograph: Richard Saker/Rex Features

I'm not a big crime reader, but James Lee Burke is unusually literary, and his novel Wayfaring Stranger (Simon & Schuster) is unusually literary even for him. The first couple of pages hooked me right away. Besides, he wrote a lovely note to me this year, though we'd never crossed paths, and he seems like the nicest man in the world. (Writers are all too rarely spontaneously generous with other writers.) I always like Amy Bloom's books, and Lucky Us (Granta) entails a complex relationship between two girls that becomes an even more complex relationship between two women. Finally, Gods in Alabama by Joshilyn Jackson (Hodder) – something old and borrowed; why, part of the cover is blue! Strongly recommended by a reliable friend, and bound to take me back to my buried southern American roots.

Don't go on holiday without Lorrie Moore's Bark, short stories remarkable for their sharpness of wit and depth of feeling. I'd also pack Elizabeth McCracken's Thunderstruck & Other Stories (Jonathan Cape), her first collection in 20 years and well worth the wait. A grippingly unputdownable novel for the beach is Thomas Mann's family saga Buddenbrooks, to which Birgit Vanderbeke's The Mussel Feast (Peirene Press), written just before the fall of the Berlin Wall around the figure of a tyrannical father, provides a darkly funny chaser.

I am reading Roy Foster's Vivid Faces (Allen Lane), which, on the basis of the early chapters, will change the entire way we see the 1916 Rebellion in Ireland. He has explored the social, intellectual and sexual lives of the revolutionary generation, man and women, and thus created a vivid picture of a world much more various and daring than previously seen. By widening the scope of the study of the rebellion, he has created a template for future historians. On the subject of sex and generations, I have also read Peter Stamm's Seven Years (Granta), in Michael Hoffman's translation. With his delicate touch, his way of using the minimum of means to suggest the maximum of emotion, Stamm has been a big discovery for me, I am looking forward to his new book All Days are Night.

The Vagenda by Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Coslett (Square Peg) is a brilliant expose of women's mags and marketing – laugh-out-loud and painfully funny. This gives me hope for women and for feminism and for fun. Five hundred pages at the beach may seem like a lot but Eleanor Marx: A Life by Rachel Holmes is a well-paced, well-written biography: clever, moving and a joy to read. Kamila Shamshie's A God in Every Stone has strong storytelling and is a page-turner that is also a literary delight. Mrs Moneypenny's Financial Advice for Independent Women (Penguin) should be in every woman's beach bag and it will help you to pay for the holiday.

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Traditional publishing is 'no longer fair or sustainable', says Society of Authors

'Authors need fair remuneration if they are to keep writing' … Society of Authors chief executive Nicola Solomon

After figures released this week showed professional authors' median annual incomes have collapsed to to £11,000, The Society of Authors' chief executive has claimed that traditional publishers' terms "are no longer fair or sustainable".

Earlier this week, the Authors' Licensing & Collecting Society released a survey of almost 2,500 writers which found that the median income of a professional author last year was £11,000, down 29% since 2005 – a period in which median earnings for UK employees have fallen by 8%. By this year, according to the survey, just 11.5% of professional authors said they earned their income from writing alone, compared with 40% in 2005.

The ALCS set its findings against Department of Culture, Media and Sport figures which show that in 2014, the creative industries were worth £71.4bn per year to the UK economy. "In contrast to the decline in earnings of professional authors, the wealth generated by the UK creative industries is on the increase," it said. "If unchecked, this rapid decline in the number of full-time writers could have serious implications for the breadth and quality of content that drives the economic success of our creative industries in the UK."

Nicola Solomon, who heads the 9,000-member strong Society of Authors, said that publishers, retailers and agents are all now taking a larger slice of the profit when a book is sold, and that while "authors' earnings are going down generally, those of publishers are increasing".

"Authors need fair remuneration if they are to keep writing and producing quality work," she said. "Publisher profits are holding up and, broadly, so are total book sales if you include ebooks but authors are receiving less per book and less overall due mainly to the fact that they are only paid a small percentage of publishers' net receipts on ebooks and because large advances have gone except for a handful of celebrity authors."

On top of that, said Solomon, "publishers are doing less for what they get. There are still important things they do – a traditional publisher can edit, copy edit, design, market, promote, make your book better, deal with foreign sales. With ebooks, though, publishers' costs are less, so authors should get a better share. They do not have to produce, distribute or warehouse physical copies. Even on traditional books, publishers' production costs have gone down but authors have not benefited from these costs savings. And, increasingly authors are being asked to do a lot of marketing and promotion themselves."

Earlier this week, the award-winning children's writer Mal Peet told the Guardian that his royalties for the last half of 2013 were £3,000. Evie Wyld, who has won prizes including Australia's Miles Franklin award, said that she earns around £8,000 per year from writing novels. "This is because although I got a generous (I think) advance for my last book, it takes me a long time to write the books," she said. "On top of that I write articles which are time-consuming, which I don't necessarily enjoy, and that I'm not terribly good at, and do events, as well as running a bookshop. Winning the awards has been vital for staying afloat this year. It's meant, most importantly, that I'm able to start a new book."

The ALCS survey of writers – which covered members of ALCS, the Society of Authors, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and the National Union of Journalists – also found that writers are still making most money from printed books, but digital earnings are on the rise. Compared with a 2007 survey, when "only a small proportion of writers had received any money from digital publications", digital books were found to be the third largest sector in terms of financial importance to writers.

Self-publishing, meanwhile, is becoming an increasingly attractive option for writers, according to the survey, which found that just over 25% of writers had published something themselves. Writers were investing a mean of £2,470 in publishing their own work, with the median investment at £500, and typically recouping their investment plus 40%. Eighty-six per cent of those who had self-published said they would do so again.

Mark Edwards is an author who topped Amazon's charts with the self-published thrillers he co-wrote with Louise Voss before landing a deal with HarperCollins. Unhappy with his deal, he then returned to self-publishing, and released The Magpies, which he says sold 160,000 copies before Amazon Publishing acquired rights.

"I spent 15 years trying to get a deal before self-publishing. When I finally got a deal it was a disappointment so I returned to self-publishing, which rescued my writing career. Lots of writers are seeing other writers having success via self-publishing and deciding to try it themselves. I would encourage any mid-list author to try it. A lot of writers who've got back the rights to their novels are now self-publishing them and having a lot of fun in the process," he told the Guardian.

It offers, he said, "freedom and control", and higher royalties. "As the writer, you will always be the person who cares most about your work, and if you can channel that passion and energy and know what you're doing, this can be more effective than having a team of people who have 10 other books coming out that week." But it is not a simple route. "Some aspiring writers think it will be easy, but your chances of success are as slim as getting plucked from an agent's slush pile. Writers shouldn't see self-publishing as an easy way to find success. It's hard work and you need to be obsessive, smart and talented to make it work. But if you do, the rewards can be great."

The Society of Authors includes self-published writers among its members if they have sold 300 copies of a single title in print form, or 500 copies in ebook form, within a 12-month period. According to Solomon, most writers would "still prefer a traditional publishing deal but the terms publishers are demanding are no longer fair or sustainable".

"What a writer needs to do is to consider very clearly, at the very beginning, what they are getting into," she said. "It's a Dragon's Den. You could go out and do it yourself, or you could go with a traditional publisher. There is still an imprimatur of quality from going with a traditional publisher, and you may well sell more copies, particularly in physical, but you are giving a vast amount away for that: probably well over 90% of the list price of the physical or ebook. More importantly almost all publishers ask for those rights for the whole lifetime of copyright with very limited possibilities of getting your rights back, even if sales are woeful. Authors need to look very carefully at the terms publishers offer, take proper advice and consider: is it worth it, or are you better off doing it yourself?"

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