Books | The Guardian
The Scottish comedian narrates her traumatic experience of being ‘wired differently’ and why autism is so frequently missed in womenWhen the Scottish comedian Fern Brady phoned her father to say she had been diagnosed with autism, he was on his daily commute back from London. He said, “Oh right”, and began complaining about the traffic. Brady replied:...
Glorious People by Sasha Salzmann, Your Utopia by Bora Chung, The Time of Cherries by Montserrat Roig and Her Side of the Story by Alba de CéspedesGlorious People by Sasha Salzmann, translated by Imogen Taylor (Pushkin, £16.99) “Somehow we survived. Again and again,” says a woman in this novel about life in the former USSR. Growing up in the 1970s in...
Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the commentsI was lucky enough to be sent an early copy of David Nicholls’ forthcoming novel, You Are Here, a publication well-timed for those who adored the recent One Day Netflix adaptation. Nicholls’ latest book has long been on my...
The punk poet on finally getting JD Salinger, why he rereads the Bible, and growing up with Rupert Bear and BatmanMy earliest reading memory My earliest memories are of reading Rupert Bear, American comic books – Batman, Superman, Weird Planets, Creepy Worlds, Sinister Tales, Mad magazine, Kid Montana, Kid Colt: Outlaw and also Dick Tracy.My favourite...
The Iranian-American poet’s debut novel tells the tale of a bereaved writer – but struggles with too much angstIn Martyr!, the debut novel by Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar, a troubled young man is searching for a reason to live. Cyrus, the son of an Iranian migrant factory worker in Indiana, lost his mother in an infamous 1988 air disaster, when...
From Herod as the Messiah to a virginity test for Mary – the Christian story, but not as you know itAs far as variant versions of the nativity story go, the one from the second-century Gospel of James is hard to beat. It starts off rather beautifully by telling how, at the moment of Jesus’s birth, the world suddenly stops turning: birds hang in the...
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