Writer and researcher Jay Owens selects from her library some of her favourite and formative reads. Jay’s latest book, Dust, is out now
• Wind, Sand and Stars (1939)
By Antoine de Saint-Exupery
‘It is within us that the Sahara reveals itself,’ Saint-Exupery writes. His writing is quite spare, but captures the enormity of the desert and the transformation it made of him.
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• Diaries (1987)
By Isabel Eberhardt
The thing with Isabel Eberhardt is less the writing than the life that produced it – a 20-year-old Swiss woman who moves to Algeria in 1897, dresses as a man, smokes kif, joins the Qadiriyya Sufi order and travels far into the desert. A singular human being.
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• Red Dust (2002)
By Ma Jian
It’s 1980s Beijing. Artist, political dissident and general philanderer Ma Jian walks out on his family and spends three years walking the desert fringes of far western China, through Tibet and into the capitalist south, amid the political clampdowns of Deng Xiaoping.
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• A Waiter in Paris (2022)
By Edward Chisholm
Chisholm tells the wild stories of his fellow servers – paperless immigrants, ex-models, former Tamil Tigers, thieves, drug dealers and psychopathic managers – with style and vigour, but also compassion for their struggles.
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• How Infrastructure Works (2023)
By Deb Chachra
For Chachra, infrastructures of water and power, transit and communication are vast collective ‘megaprojects’ of mutual aid and care. She details how we must rebuild and transform them to make them equitable, resilient and sustainable in the century to come.
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• The Pulse of the Earth (2023)
By Adam Bobette
A bold and lyrical history of volcanology in Java that argues for the earth sciences as a mythic, ‘cosmic’ project deeply entangled with Indonesian animism. For Bobette, ‘Geology is not a stable thing but fluid and tempestuous and made, in part, by us.’
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• Chernobyl Prayer (1997)
By Svetlana Alexievich
‘What are we capable of comprehending?’ Alexievich asks. By making us bear witness to tragedy we might have thought ‘unimaginable’, she enlarges the scope of our humanity.
