On Friendship by Andrew O’Hagan review – ties that bind
The novelist on the relationships that shaped his life, from schoolmates to the Rolling Stones and Edna O’Brien
Category Autobiography and memoir
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Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry review – a brilliant meditation on mortality
The Essex Serpent author offers a moving account of her father-in-law’s final illness that will resonate widely
The novelist Sarah Perry’s father-in-law, David, died of oesophageal cancer in 2022. This book tells the story of his dying, from the last time she saw him well, on a trip to Great Yarmouth at the end of summer, to his death less than two months later, just nine days after being diagnosed.
It’s not easy to account for what makes this book so special. Its main character is as unpromisingly ordinary as its title suggests, and some may even find him a little boring. David Perry is the kind of man who spends hours sorting his beloved stamp collection into albums with the aid of long-tipped forceps and magnifying glasses, or filling in his Sudoku puzzle books, or reading the latest copy of the Antiques Gazette, looking intently at porcelain dogs and chased silver punch-bowls.
‘There was comedy at all times’: Andrew O’Hagan on 15 years of funny, frank and champagne-fuelled friendship with Edna O’Brien
In the last decades of her life, the two novelists became close friends. He recalls their intense bond, their last trip to Ireland and her memories of being romanced by Richard Burton
I first met Edna O’Brien on a mild spring evening in 2009. There had been a party to celebrate the 70th birthday of Seamus Heaney and I was running late, so I put up my hand for a taxi and a rumbling black cab drew to a halt. The door swung open and Edna stepped on to the pavement like Ophelia out of the weedy brook. She was a vision in black velvet and volumised hair. She paid at the window, clearly irked after some altercation with the driver, and when she turned she immediately took my hand and offered a Joycean, or possibly a Glaswegian, effusion.
“I fucking hate the English. Do you?”
Cat On The Road To Findout by Yusuf/Cat Stevens review – fame, faith and charity
The enigmatic singer-songwriter on pop stardom, becoming a Muslim and returning to the stage decades later
When Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam and announced his conversion to the Muslim faith and retirement from music in the late 70s, Bob Dylan apparently remarked that he had “finally stopped trying to be the prophet and begun to follow The Prophet”. It’s a quote that Islam reproduces in his autobiography, viewing it as a benediction, but it also tells you something about the music that made him globally famous.
In the early 70s, the charts were awash with sensitive folky singer-songwriters. Their constituency, as Islam perceptively notes, was “the college generation, away from home, lonely and trying to find their place in the university of high academic expectations”. But none were as obsessed with spirituality as Cat Stevens, with his album titles that namechecked Buddha or referenced Zen poems, his conceptual song cycles based on numerology, his lyrical exhortations to “kick out the devil” and “get to heaven, get a guide”, and Morning Has Broken, the hymn he made a 1972 US No 1. If you’d had to place bets on which 70s superstar would pack it all in for religion, you’d have got far lower odds on Cat Stevens than, say, Noddy Holder.
‘A resistance to AI’: The author inviting readers to contribute to a mass memoir
Richard Beard says he’s got ‘better at telling the truth’ by arranging his life story on a grid – and invites others to do the same
Richard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men, thought he was writing his next book, a whole life memoir. In the event, he has written his way off the page and into an entirely new publishing model. The Universal Turing Machine is the title both of Beard’s memoir and the mass memoir project he hopes others will help him to build.
Organised as a chessboard, each of the 64 squares narrates one year of Beard’s life, in 1,000 words per year. (He’s 58, so the last five years are fictionalised.) The reader moves around the “board” as if they were a knight, picking the next year to read from options limited by the knight’s L-shaped ambulation.
Contributions to The Universal Turing Machine can be made at universalturingmachine.co.uk
107 Days by Kamala Harris review – no closure, no hope
The former presidential candidate sticks to the script in a memoir that will only cause further bad blood
Almost a year after the 2024 election there are still some houses with “Harris” signs in their windows dotted around my liberal Philadelphia neighbourhood. The result left many people in a state of shock and denial, unable to process exactly what went wrong.
No one was more shocked than Kamala Harris, whose inner circle had been confident on election night that they’d eked out a win during the whirlwind campaign. Cupcakes with “Madam President” toppings were ready to go; champagne on ice. “It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that [my husband] Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reveals in her new memoir, which functions as a political postmortem.
Night People by Mark Ronson review – a superstar DJ’s coming of age
Nerdery triumphs over gossip in this earnest but compelling memoir of the 90s New York club scene
It is bizarre to learn that, despite a career spent desperately trying to fill the dancefloor, reading the room night after night to predict how he might make it pop off, Mark Ronson never dances – “unless you count standing around, bobbing my head, and reciting rap lyrics as dancing”.
Night People is intended as Ronson’s memoir but is as much an attempt to immortalise the people and scenes he came up in as it is a reflection on a childhood shaped by the late-night parties hosted by his parents – first in London, where a distant memory of Robin Williams tucking him in to bed with “Nanu nanu” floats through, then later in Manhattan, when his mother marries Mick Jones from Foreigner.
Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang review – a daughter of China speaks again
The bestselling author returns with an account of how her homeland has changed – and the personal costs of fame
Remarkable success notoriously brings its own problems. Wild Swans, first published in 1991 and written by Jung Chang with the help of her husband, Irish-born historian and writer Jon Halliday, had a global impact few authors dare to dream of. It told the story of three generations of women in 20th-century China – Chang’s grandmother, her mother and herself – and became one of the most popular nonfiction books in history, selling more than 13m copies in 37 languages and collecting a fistful of awards and commendations. For any author, following that would be a challenge. Now, Fly, Wild Swans returns to the story, picking it up after Chang’s own departure from China in 1978, and revisiting episodes from the earlier work with added detail.
Wild Swans was Chang’s second book: her first was a biography of Soong Ching-ling, the wife of the early 20th-century revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, which, she volunteers, had deservedly little impact. Wild Swans was different: animated by a powerful family story, set against the dramatic political background of war and revolution and enlivened by Halliday’s formidable narrative talent, it was an instant hit.
Wainwright prize for nature writing awarded to memoir about raising a hare during lockdown
Debut author Chloe Dalton’s ‘dream-like’ book Raising Hare follows the writer from London to the countryside
A memoir about a woman who rescued a hare during the pandemic has won this year’s Wainwright prize book of the year.
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton follows the author from London to the countryside, where she looked after a leveret during lockdown.
From a new Thomas Pynchon novel to a memoir by Margaret Atwood: the biggest books of the autumn
Essays from Zadie Smith; Wiki founder Jimmy Wales on how to save the internet; a future-set novel by Ian McEwan; a new case for the Slow Horses - plus memoirs from Kamala Harris and Paul McCartney… all among this season’s highlights
Helm by Sarah Hall
Faber, out now
Hall is best known for her glittering short stories: this is the novel she’s been working on for two decades. Set in Cumbria’s Eden valley, it tells the story of the Helm – the only wind in the UK to be given a name – from its creation at the dawn of time up to the current degradation of the climate. It’s a huge, millennia-spanning achievement, spotlighting characters from neolithic shamans to Victorian meteorologists to present-day pilots.