What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in September
Charlotte Wood, author
Lioness, the latest from New Zealander Emily Perkins, is about social aspiration and the traps lying in wait for women when money and marriage menacingly collide. Perkins is one of my favourite writers and her shrewdly observant prose snaps with wit and acerbic insight.
The Wren, the Wren is another recent favourite. Anne Enright is always electrifying and one of the things I most admire is her blazing contemporariness. Unlike other writers of her stature, she steadfastly refuses to let her work calcify or turn peacefully innocuous: you have to be on your mettle to read an Enright book, and that is exciting. This mother-daughter-grandfather family-mythology novel is one of her best, I think.
Look out for Rapture by Australian novelist Emily Maguire, soon to scorch the UK and Australian publishing scenes. Published in October in Australia and March 2025 in the UK, this medieval story about Pope Joan is a total departure from Maguire’s usual contemporary realism.
• Stone Yard Devotional is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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Amelia, Guardian reader
I have recently read Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh, about a woman who works in a juvenile correctional facility during the day and goes home to her alcoholic father in the evening. Every relationship in this book is dysfunctional, none more so than the one she eventually builds with Rebecca, a new colleague. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this novel since. The build up of tension was exquisite, I could actually feel my shoulders hunching and my hands gripping the pages with more force each time I turned a page. When I finished reading it my husband asked me if I had enjoyed it. I just looked at him with my mouth open – I had no words.
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Lissa Evans, author
Last year I read an acclaimed collection of new stories by Afghan women writers, entitled My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird. Shortly before it was published, the Taliban recaptured Kabul; over the months that followed, these same women kept in touch with one another on WhatsApp, and a chronological selection of their messages – despairing, hopeful, fascinatingly detailed and fiercely brave – has been published as My Dear Kabul. Their experiences diverged sharply; some remained in Afghanistan, grimly learning to adapt to the encroaching restrictions (one ruefully congratulates herself for having kept her expensive, body-concealing chador from the previous Taliban occupation, 20 years before); others managed to leave, settling as refugees in countries as disparate as Iran and Australia, struggling to restart their lives in a new language and without their wider families. But the common thread is their desire to carry on writing, to tell their stories with clarity and precision. It’s a deeply humbling read.
A Memoir of My Former Self by Hilary Mantel is a wide-ranging collection of her non-fiction and is pure enjoyment from start to finish. It includes wonderfully incisive film reviews, fervent essays on neglected writers, moving yet witty memoirs, riveting, if slightly random, magazine pieces (who’d have guessed Mantel was such an authority on perfume?) and, best of all, in my opinion, her Reith lectures on the role that history plays in our culture. I wanted to make a note of every line.
• Small Bomb at Dimperley by Lissa Evans is published by Doubleday (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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John, Guardian reader
I have been reading Rosarita by Anita Desai, described by the author as “a fragment”. The writing is vivid, unhurried. It is concerned with the unreliability of memory, an ambivalent search for a hidden part of someone’s life. When I finished it I was moved, and wished it hadn’t ended. I’ll certainly read it again.
