The writer and broadcaster chooses five of his favourites. His new book, “Your Journey, Your Way” – a guide to the mental health system, based on the author’s own experiences – is out this week.
In Praise of Older Women
Stephen Vizinczey, 1965
This reads like an outrageously frank autobiography but is a novel about a man, like the author, who flees Soviet Hungary in 1956, eventually to Canada. Various aspects of sex and romance are encountered in a paean to the joys and complexities of relationships. The scene which explains how to seduce a stunning girl in an empty café with a battered ashtray is an all-time classic.
A.A Gill is Away
A.A. Gill, 2002
The great A.A. Gill is at his extraordinary best throughout this masterclass in the art of travel essays. Colleagues on the Sunday Times thought it tasteless to send a restaurant and TV critic to cover a Sudanese famine until Gill filed a dispatch so exquisitely honest and telling that it made them cry. He was a phrasemaker of genius.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Thunderstone
Nancy Campbell, 2022
A modern classic, this is a story of love, solitude and community set in the edgelands of Oxford. Sings with life – thought, felt and hymned.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Anima
Kapka Kassabova, 2024
My generation’s great travel writer moves to the wild highlands of Bulgaria and lives with the shepherds. Kapka Kassabova loses her relationship, her non-smoking and nearly her life and sanity to the mountains, the bears and alcoholic madmen she writes about, scoring another triumph in her Bulgarian quartet.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Wild Twin
Jeff Young, 2024
A sequel to the Costa-shortlisted “Ghost Town” – a haunted meditation on Liverpool which explores time and memory with a lyrical and shamanic intensity. “Wild Twin” (published on 18 September) follows the artist as a young man to Amsterdam, then at its counter-cultural peak. The two books are a profoundly serious attempt to see time afresh.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Horatio Clare chooses his favourite books