An Artist of the Floating World • Kazuo Ishiguro • 1986
My favourite writer of all time. Remains of the Day is wonderful, but this book, which follows an ageing painter in post-WWII Japan looking back on his life, is my personal favourite. Both play with memory and what we chose to forget or reimagine.
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Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery • Andrea Stuart • 2013
After a trip to Nevis, I became fascinated by how sugar fuelled the slave trade in the Caribbean. Stuart, whose ancestors were Barbadian, has produced both an amazing history and an intense and surprising family memoir.
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The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down • Anne Fadiman • 1997
This former New Yorker writer and Yale professor produces a page-turning reported narrative of the tragedy that ensues when Hmong immigrants in California struggle with the USA’s byzantine medical system.
Wide Sargasso Sea • Jean Rhys • 1966
Probably my favourite novel. In her moody, beautiful way, Rhys creates an anti-colonial, feminist answer to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Jane Eyre. It turns out the madwoman in the attic was a beautiful heiress; both she and the Jamaican heat are way too much for Rochester to handle.
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The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone • Olivia Laing • 2016
Laing does something amazing, which is to take her own failed relationship and difficult resettlement from London to NYC and turn it into an expansive exploration of the art born of loneliness. Leaves you feeling grateful.
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DV • Diana Vreeland • 1984
The memoir of the former editor of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, surely the most imaginative fashionista ever. Delicious details from someone who travelled widely and really knew how to live. Pink is the navy blue of India!
A Short History of Byzantium • John Julius Norwich • 1988
A history that’s both incredibly detailed, complete and entertaining. Lots of love and war.
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