Rod Liddle
The angels in Jim Crace’s Eden are tetchy and petty authoritarians, apart from one who can’t fly properly. This dissertation on freedom and mortality is rather wonderful – published two years ago but I caught up with it only this year. The best non-fiction book of the year is David Goodhart’s The Care Dilemma: Caring Enough in the Age of Sex Equality, which has the temerity to suggest that divorce rates and broken families might just have something to do with our epidemic of mental illness. How dare he?
Lionel Shriver
I’d recommend the novel Havoc by Christopher Bollen, set in an Egyptian hotel to which westerners have fled to avoid the tyrannies of Covid regulations. I loved the concept of a character who’s a compulsive meddler, priding herself on fixing people and their faulty relationships – only for the older woman to meet her match in an eight-year-old boy. It’s refreshing to read prose that is so well crafted.
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