Discovering a new author is one of the great joys of reading. I came across Tessa Hadley for the first time only last year and I have been reading through her short backlist with huge pleasure since then. Late in the Day and The Past were two of the best novels I read last year and, although it’s a little early in 2020 to be definitive, I don’t expect to read a better or more enjoyable novel than The London Train this year. Its structure is unusual. What appear to be two largely separate stories, linked through the simple device of journeys between two places, London and Wales, come together cleverly just before the end of the book. The first of the stories, The London Train, tells of Paul’s search for his young daughter who has gone missing in London. Only Children, the second story, tells of a journey in the opposite direction and of Cora’s retreat from an unhappy marriage to her family’s home in Wales.

Hadley’s writing stands within a very strong English tradition. It puts me in mind sometimes of the likes of Margaret Drabble and Anita Brookner. Maybe it’s the settings – the emotional lives of the English upper middle classes with all that turbulence beneath the polite surfaces – or the understated style in which it’s all brought to life. The precise and almost forensic way in which she peels back the layers of apparently unremarkable lives and uncovers the longings and losses beneath is so impressive.

Anyone who loves novels and hasn’t been living in a cave for the past six months has heard of American Dirt. It attracted plenty of positive reviews before it was published from the likes of John Grisham and Stephen King, was an Oprah Book Club choice, and earned its author, Jeanine Cummins, an advance of $1 million. What could possibly go wrong? Well, almost everything seems to be the answer to that question. In a very public argument that seemed to me to generate far more heat than light, critics lined up to level a slew of accusations against Cummins. The most persistent complaint can be summarized by a phrase I wasn’t familiar with before the controversy, “cultural appropriation”. The heart of the accusation seems to be that Cummins, a white woman with no direct personal experience of migration, cannot and should not “appropriate” the experience of a Mexican woman forced to flee her home in Acapulco and seek safety in the United States because of threats from a drug cartel.

This seems at first sight to be nonsensical. Isn’t fiction by definition fictional? Beatrix Potter was never a rabbit, J.K. Rowling was never a boy, and Tolkien was never a hobbit. Literature is the expression of imagination. Jeanine Cummins is entitled to imagine the experiences of migrants from Central America and to set down for readers the expression of that imagination. Readers will decide the value, veracity, and validity of that expression, but they aren’t entitled to deny her right to make it.

As for the novel itself, it’s a heartfelt and sincerely told story. It’s also an undeniably gripping account of some of the terrible sacrifices made daily by those looking for new lives in the United States. But – and this is where some of Cummins’s critics are on safer ground – the central character (Lydia) is never entirely convincing. Perhaps I was influenced more than I realized by the furor surrounding American Dirt, but Lydia’s voice never felt fully authentic to me.

It’s a place I know very well, a place of stone and bog, of heather covered mountains, big skies, and dangerous seas. A sparsely populated wilderness on the westernmost edge of Europe. Connemara has seen more than its share of suffering and its stories often speak of loss, penury, disappointment, exile, and death. Lost in Connemara is a collection of five such stories, printed in both English and Irish and selected by Brian Ó Conchubhair.

The first of the stories, Páidín Mháire, was written by Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882-1928), a relative of my mother and arguably one of the best Irish-language storytellers. His statue (below) used to sit in a prominent spot in Eyre Square in Galway before vandals knocked poor old Pádraic’s head off, forcing the local council to move him to the safety of a local museum. I remember as a child sitting on his stony lap while my mother proudly took pictures of me with our famous relative.

There are some gems in this short collection, notably The precious last days by Pádraic Breathnach. I’m very grateful to Micheál O’Chonghaile, the publisher at Cló Iar Chonnacht, for the gift of this book. It’s so impressive to see the literary traditions of these remote places being preserved and promoted.

Is it courageous or foolhardy to demolish parts of your life to find something more fulfilling, to turn your back on a loveless marriage in pursuit of passion, or to walk away from wealth for a simpler way of living?

Eve Laing, 60 years-old, a celebrated painter, chooses demolition, discarding husband and home as she sets out on the path to a new life and new artistic vision. The backdrop to Nightshade is the London art world and the novel’s story line follows a long night-time journey through the city by Tube and on foot.  I don’t think the author intended this to be a “state of the nation” novel, but to my mind one of its greatest strengths is this particularly vivid sense of place and how it communicates so effectively a feeling of what the UK is like right now: febrile in its uncertainty, fragmented and fractured by inequality and division.

Nightshade is an ambitious novel, preoccupied with sexual equality, gender politics, the posturing and hypocrisy of the contemporary art world, and much more. If that makes it sound stuffy or arid, let me tell you it isn’t. It’s an elegant and thought-provoking read and, especially in its final third, something of a thriller. This is the first novel by Annalena McAfee that I’ve read. I was impressed. And what a gorgeous dust jacket ….

Back in January I wrote here about Parisian Lives, Deirdre Bair’s delightful memoir of her life as a biographer. The following month I visited Paris, one of my final trips before the pandemic gripped the world, and sent a message to Deirdre, knowing how much she loved that city and how many memories it held for her of her times spent with Samuel Beckett and Simone De Beauvoir. We set one date after another for lunch in Manhattan and postponed them all as the city’s restaurants were forced to close. Ten days ago, Deirdre emailed me to say we would “celebrate in happier days”. That celebration and that happier day never arrived. Deirdre died suddenly on April 17th, the very day we had earmarked for lunch on West 44th Street.

I concentrated on Sally Mann’s photographs for the first time a year or so ago when a publisher friend of mine sent me a copy of A Thousand Crossings. Before that I was only vaguely aware of her work and, when I thought of it at all, associated it with the controversy that flared up a few years ago about unsettling images she had taken of her children. I didn’t know she had written an autobiography until it showed up in a recent feature about must-read books.

Hold Still is a memoir of the passions that have driven and consumed Mann’s life. Her children and husband. Gee-Gee, the African American servant who raised her amid the benign indifference and occasional neglect of her natural parents. Photography, of course, and, perhaps the strongest inspiration of them all, the landscape of the American South, that realm of tragedy, conflict, melancholy, and sentimentality to which her life and her art are so deeply connected.

The best books about art lead you to the art itself, and that was certainly the case for me with Hold Still. It made me want to pore over those misty pictures of the fields, rivers, and skies of the American South that are the wellspring of Mann’s inspiration. It took me also to those challenging and provocative portraits of her family, taken with that same intense, unflinching eye.

I’m always wary of hype, so I was on my guard when a friend gave me a pre-publication copy (the cover littered, of course, with breathless reviews from booksellers) of a novel that’s being promoted as one of the “hot” books of 2020, My Dark Vanessa. It’s a story, set in Maine, of a sexual relationship between a 15 year-old girl and her 42 year-old male teacher. Even before it was published, the book was notorious. It was picked as an Oprah Book Club choice and then suddenly dropped, somewhat mysteriously. Accusations were flung around of “appropriation” and plagiarism. All good for sales, of course.

So, what’s it about, this new, hot property? The novel is narrated by the victim, Vanessa Wye. Its chapters mostly alternate between 2000, when Vanessa begins the destructive relationship with her English teacher, Jacob Strane, at an exclusive boarding school in Maine, and 2017 when Vanessa is thirty-two, living alone, still damaged, still obsessed, and still self-absorbed.

On the evidence of this, her debut novel, Kate Elizabeth Russell is a capable and promising storyteller, but My Dark Vanessa is a dull, flat book. Whatever the jacket says, it’s not “dynamite” or “explosive” and it isn’t a “sensation”.  Vanessa and Jacob, victim and abuser, are little more than cyphers, never properly realized and rarely elevated above the level of stereotypes. My Dark Vanessa will, I’m sure, sell very well and have its few weeks of fame because reviewers and feature writers will do their best to present it as titillating and scandalous. In fact, it’s nothing of the sort. Russell had sincere intentions for the book, but lacks the experience to deliver a work that fully realizes those intentions.

A woman opens a bookshop in a small town in Suffolk in 1959. There’s not much more to say about the plot of Penelope Fitzgerald’s lovely story first published in 1978, but don’t be fooled into assuming this is one of those small-scale, minor provincial novels. The Bookshop is a tiny, unforgettable gem. Florence Green’s ambition and independence expose the class tensions, power structures, and sexism of small-town life, but satire and polemic aren’t Fitzgerald’s main business here. The Bookshop is about loneliness and disappointment and how we cope with them, and about how destructive petty resentments can be.

Penelope Fitzgerald was awarded the Booker Prize in 1979 and died in 2000. The Bookshop was adapted into a film in 2017 starring Bill Nighy and others. In one of those strange coincidences, Nighy stood next to me when I bought my copy of the novel in London earlier this year.

Even those who have never heard of Reynolds Stone (1909-1979) know a little of his work. The crest on every British passport, the masthead of The Times, the memorial to Winston Churchill in Westminster Abbey. The first time I remember paying attention to him was more than thirty years ago when I bought a first edition of Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl with its beautiful dust jacket by Stone. Murdoch and Stone were great friends and somewhere in my book collection I have a copy of the tribute she paid to him at his memorial service. Of course, Stone seemed to know everyone in Britain’s artistic community. Kenneth Clark, Benjamin Britten, John Piper, Kathleen Raine, and John Betjeman were just a few of the many friends who crowded into the Stones’s beautiful rectory at Litton Cheney in Dorset.

He was primarily a superb engraver, one of the very best and the equal of those more celebrated (like Gwen Raverat), but he was also a very accomplished typographer, letter cutter, and water colorist. His brilliance is fully reflected in this beautifully illustrated and touching tribute written by one of his sons.

James Lees-Milne, when asked to consider writing Stones’s biography, famously remarked “I can’t write about a saint”. He was deeply loved by his family and wide circle of friends and it’s clear there was a profound and sincere humility about him. His life stood securely on three pillars – work, friendship, and family – and it was a life that brought him great satisfaction and contentment. This memoir isn’t uncritical but it’s undeniably affectionate. The picture that emerges here is one of a good man and a great artist.

Chen Maoping (who took Sanmao as her nom de plume the name of a well-known cartoon character) was born in mainland China in 1943 and raised in Taiwan. She had a restless, nomadic spirit and spent many years in the 1960s and 70s wandering the world, arriving in the Spanish Sahara (as it was known in those days) in 1974. Stories of the Sahara, a collection of twenty essays first published in 1976, is Sanmao’s account of those years spent among the Sahrawi people.

Even today, Western Sahara is a rarely visited, remote, and quite inhospitable part of the world. Forty years ago, and especially for a young Chinese woman, it must have been a place of significant hardship and some danger. A little of that comes through in Sanmao’s memoir but what dominates the story is her strength, courage, humor, and an unusually distinctive voice. Direct, engaging, and deeply personal, Sanmao speaks across the decades. What an extraordinary person she must have been. It’s little wonder that she has become a cultural icon for those who are fascinated, as she was, by people living at the margins of the world.

Some of the essays, such as Night in the wasteland, Crying camels, and The mute slave, are perfect miniatures of the art of reportage. Vivid, urgent, and deeply compassionate, this is an unforgettable memoir and a must-read for those who love travel writing at its best.