Educated by Tara Westover

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Educated

Prepare to laugh, cry, cringe and gasp at this fierce love letter from a daughter to her parents

Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a deeply dysfunctional Mormon family. Her fanatical father believed the End of Days was fast approaching, so she and her six older siblings spent every summer bottling hundreds of peaches and every winter rotating emergency supplies in the belief that when the end came her family would survive. Prevented by her parents from attending school, Tara has no birth certificate. She also has no medical records, due to her authoritarian father’s extreme aversion to hospitals and doctors of any kind. As far as the state is concerned, she doesn’t exist. Educated by Tara Westover is the remarkable story of her struggle for self-invention.

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Books on loving yourself

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Learn to love yourself this Valentine

Can you properly love someone without first learning to love yourself? I don’t think so. So what better time to start than this Valentine. As you would expect, I’m a great believer in books helping us find the right kind of self-love and have made a selection for The Wildsmith Papers. Curious? Go find out.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

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Bad Blood

A peek into the dark corners of Silicon Valley

Twenty-one-year-old Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes had a game changing idea for the health care industry, a steely determination and seductive powers of persuasion; she also had an execution problem and questionable ethics. In Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, an investigative journalist at The Wall Street Journal, we get the shocking story of Theranos, the largest health care start-up fraud in recent history. A page turning real-life thriller.

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Cost Award Book of the Year Winner 2019

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Costa Book of the Year 2018

Biography won this year in the competition for the Costa Book of the Year 2018. The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es is the story of a Jewish girl, Lien, hidden from the Nazis during the Second World War by the author’s grandparents. Van Es own journey in writing the book and befriending Lien, who had fallen out with his family, is a big part of this book. Sounds like a wonderful read which I will definitely add to my towering pile.

The Guardian on the winner.

More about 2018 Costa category winners.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

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Books to look forward to in 2019

What an exciting year in books we have ahead of us! Literary treats are virtually queueing up to be read. Highlights for us include Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Colson Whitehead’s new novel The Nickel Boys and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. But most of all, we look forward to be surprised by a debut novel from an author we’ve never heard of before.

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Unquiet by Linn Ullmann

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Unquiet

A luminous example of fictionalised autobiography

In 2014, when Unquiet by Linn Ullmann was still in the process of being written, the Norwegian writer and journalist was asked by Vogue what she was currently working on. ‘I am writing a memoir’, she replied, ‘or at least I thought it was a memoir. But since my memory is both very vivid and not entirely reliable, it could just as well be a novel.’ At the time, Ullmann was promoting her book Det dyrebare (The Cold Song) in America. The ‘memoir’ she described became the 2015 sensation De urolige, which was recently published in English as Unquiet in a translation by Thilo Reinhard.

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The Order of the Day by Eric Vuillard

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The Order of the Day

Sleepwalking into disaster

What really happened in the 1938 meeting when Hitler told the Austrian Chancellor Schuschnigg to roll over or be rolled over? Or during the dinner at 10 Downing Street where Foreign Minister Ribbentropp waxed lyrical about macaroons while watching Chamberlain receive the news that Germany had invaded Austria? In The Order of the Day by Eric Vulliard, the author has pieced together the facts, filled in the gaps and created a fascinating and frightening account of a sleepwalk into disaster.

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Need something to cuddle up with this January?

Try the delightful Cazalet Chronicles - Jane Austen meets Downton Abbey

I was inspired to pick up The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard after hearing snatches of the Radio 4 a while ago, and reading reviews of Artemis Cooper’s biography of the author – about whom I knew little apart from the fact that she was unlucky enough to have been married to the old devil himself, Kingsley Amis. How glad I am that I did, particularly in the dying days of this particularly dismal year. The experience of reading the Cazalet series (The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and All Change) is like stepping into a warm bath. Comforting, life-affirming, immersive – and you absolutely don’t want to pull the plug.

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Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

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Things Fall Apart

Colonialism in the eyes of the colonised

A respected clansman – the strongest, fiercest and proudest – Okonkwo is the very symbol of masculinity and power in his Nigerian clan. Enter the British colonialists, waving their God and Queen and, within a few years, both Okonkwo and his Igbo village Umoufia are crushed. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, published in 1959, was the first account of colonialism from the perspective of the colonised. It was written in English and widely published in the West and is an arresting portrayal of the destruction of an indigenous community.

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