7 September, chaired by Claire Armitstead
With the Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker created one of the most moving fictional depictions of the first world war we have; by writing about the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, she laid real-life foundations to an exceptional feat of the imagination.
Now, she is finishing her second trilogy: Noonday completes the series that began with 2007’s Life Class and continued in 2012 with Toby’s Room. But it is also a departure because, for the first time, Barker is venturing into the territory of the second world war. In Noonday the artist characters Paul, Elinor and Kit are in a capital city under attack; by day, they try to continue with their work but, by night, they must venture into the blitzed London streets to search the ruins for survivors.
Middle-aged Paul and Kit must adapt to their roles as non-combatants, while Elinor’s deeply held anti-war stance is challenged as her home town is bombarded. As ever, Barker disentangles questions of responsibility and guilt, class and personal loyalty, and the role of art in wartime to produce a stunning work of historical fiction.
10 September, chaired by Alex Clark
William Boyd’s new novel is subtitled The Many Lives of Amory Clay – which will no doubt set pulses racing for readers who loved Boyd’s Any Human Heart, which told the life story of the adventure-prone Logan Mountstuart. Boyd combined a surging narrative with the bold idea of capturing a single personality’s trajectory through a fictional lens. It was clever and compelling.
Sweet Caress is similarly panoramic in its ambition – taking us from the first world war, in which Amory’s father serves, through her nascent love of photography (“that momentous first click of the shutter that was the starting pistol that set me off on the race for the rest of my life”) to a career spent chronicling war and its aftermath with her camera. In her company, we travel to London, Berlin, Paris and Vietnam, among many other places, meeting friends, lovers, combatants and ne’er-do-wells along the way. And, as if to both entertain us and make us question the reality – or otherwise – of what we are reading, the text is studded with evocative and atmospheric photographs, and interspersed with journal entries. It’s a thrilling piece of craft, a meditation on work and life and everything in between.
14 September, chaired by Zoe Williams
Concert pianist James Rhodes’s memoir very nearly didn’t see the light of day; it took a (unanimous) decision by the supreme court in May for its publication to be assured. Rhodes’s ex-wife had brought an injunction against the book on the grounds that it would be a source of potential distress to their son. The judges ruled that, whether his disclosures were distressing or not, Rhodes had a right to tell his story that could not be curtailed by the law.
And it is a monumentally painful story. Rhodes describes how he was raped by his gym teacher at prep school, a trauma so severe that it led, unsurprisingly, to decades of mental illness, addiction and self-harm. But woven inextricably into this personal catastrophe was Rhodes’s lifelong love of classical music – a love that somehow imbued him with the strength to endure. Rhodes will perform during the course of the evening, in what promises to be an exceptionally powerful event.
Orhan Pamuk on A Strangeness in My Mind
23 September, chaired by Mark Lawson
A new novel by Nobel prizewinner Orhan Pamuk is always a literary event: novels such as My Name is Red and The Museum of Innocence cemented his reputation as one of the world’s great storytellers. With A Strangeness in My Mind, a vivid and absorbing account of “the life and daydreams” of yoghurt seller Mevlut Karatas, his readership is set to increase.
Mevlut comes from rural Anatolia to Istanbul in 1967 as a boy, in the most apparently romantic way: he elopes with his sweetheart, to whom he has been writing impassioned letters. But the fairytale is an illusion. He has been tricked into running off not with the object of his affections, but her older sister. Mevlut and Rahiya make a life in the big city, raising two daughters. And it is a city in transition, the traditional drink of boza that Mevlut sells is a rare remaining link to the past when everything else seems to be being torn down and rebuilt. Can Mevlut survive the changes in Turkish society and the slings and arrows that life throws at him and his family? Pamuk’s panoramic novel simultaneously tells the story of an individual life and a society on the brink of momentous change.
Margaret Atwood on The Heart Goes Last
29 September, chaired by Naomi Alderman
If you were so down on your luck that you were sleeping in your car, you’d jump at the chance of a home of your own and a job to go with it, wouldn’t you? How big would the catch have to be to stop you leaping at the opportunity? It’s certainly not big enough to stop Stan and Charmaine – who agree to enter the Positron Project, despite the fact that, for every month they spend in comfort and gainful employment, they have to spend another in prison.
But their lives of freedom don’t simply evaporate during their months of incarceration; rather they are instantly taken over by Stan and Charmaine’s “Alternates” – a couple just like them, who might even share some of the things they’ve bought with their posidollars. Functional doubles, the Alternates occupy the mirror space in each others’ lives: but what happens when one set falls to wondering exactly what the other is like?
Margaret Atwood has been imagining bleak and bizarre scenarios for decades, in novels ranging from The Edible Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale to the more recent dystopian world of the MaddAddam trilogy. Her eye for the most unpredictable caprices of the human heart and her narrative fearlessness have made her one of the world’s most celebrated novelists – and a most sought-after speaker.
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