What Bristol is reading – July 27 to August 2

The announcement of the Man Booker Prize longlist provides anticipation for the next winner and until then we see some other award winners lingering. Anna Freeman’s visit to Stanfords a few weeks ago has helped her secure the number one position on the chart and sees Harper Lee’s Go Set A Watchman down to seventh.

1. The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman – the BBC have optioned the TV rights for this historical tale of female pugilists, whores and the gentry in Bristol, 1799. One of Bristol24/7’s top books of 2014, The Fair Fight is more than just distinctive plot and historical fights.

2. The Guest Cat by Tikashi Hraide was published in 2014 and has been a bestseller in France and the US. It was the winner of Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award and Nicholas Lezard describes it as “a gentle, thoughtful and subtly profound work, utterly without pretension or pyrotechnics, by a Japanese poet in his 60s.”

3. The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton is the author’s debut novel. Published in 2014 it was also Waterstones book of the year. While the list of supportive quotations runs ever long, the most consistent comment I have heard about it reflects the first review on Amazon: “The writing is long and tedious, the locations limited and she seems to describe a single location multiple times and yet other instances when a description of the setting would be useful, just skims over it.”

4. How To Be Both by Ali Smith. The Bailey’s Prize Winner for Women’s Fiction is one of the top selling books again. This split narrative over two periods of time has divided opinion and at the same time sold brilliantly. Our book club gave up on it for being too much like hard work but if you fancy a challenge then pick it up and let us know what you thought.

5. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami is not only a pleasure for the title, an homage to Raymond Carver’s short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but also a treat for those who love running and reading about it. Pleasant, simple and lacking in the surrealism of his usual subject matter, Murakami reflects in a way that will appeal to all who want to put on a pair of trainers and head off to anywhere.

6. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. This is the story of a dysfunctional family whose daughter talked so much that she would be told to start in the middle. Now two of her siblings have disappeared and we are told the tale from the middle to the end and back to the start, twice.This is Fowler’s sixth novel and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2014. It’s been out in paperback since March 2015. 

7. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson was the Costa novel award winner in 2013 and is the story of Ursula Todd who lives life after life, dying repeatedly in many ways. Atkinson’s A God in Ruins is her latest book and published in 2015. (See the author’s notes)

8. To Kill a Mockingbirdby Harper Lee. Harper Lee’s new book Go Set a Watchman, has led to a renewed love affair with a book that most people read in high school.

9. Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee. Having yet to read the first written Lee book, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of the New Yorker for a review. The story about this discovery is likely to be outlast the story itself.

10. The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Australian author Richard Flanagan, tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor haunted by a wartime love affair with his uncle’s wife. Post war, he finds his growing celebrity as a war hero at odds with his sense of his own failings and guilt. The 2014 Man Booker Prize winner is still widely read while the longlist for the 2015 prize was announced last week.

11. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt tells the story of Theo Decker who was separated from his mother at 13. All he has of her is the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. It was Tartt’s first new book in 11 years and won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize.

12. The Red Notebook by Antoine Laurain became an immediate favourite when Laurain mentioned the well-known Bristolian Archie Leach when he answered the Independent’s question:

Which fictional character most resembles you?  Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant in North by Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock, for this retort: “I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don’t intend to disappoint them all by getting myself ‘slightly’ killed.”

What’s there not to like.

With thanks to Stanfords, 29 Corn Street, Bristol, BS1 1HT.