A new book app is challenging the notion that reading “well” necessarily means falling back on the same old classics, from Trollope to Tolstoy. Each week, Alexi, a “digital book club”, turns to writers for inspiration, asking them to rout out hidden gems which are then offered to members to read on their phone or tablet. The result is an ever-changing library that features a selection of books you’ll have heard of – and many you are less likely to know. Here are 11 of the best from Alexi’s recent recommendations.
Tracy Chevalier recommends
The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy (Flamingo)
I find I read the same kind of book over and over, usually a novel with a linear structure, a sympathetic protagonist, a problem that needs resolving, a definite ending. Occasionally, however, it’s good to shake things up. Barbara Gowdy’s 1999 novel puts you right inside a herd of elephants and keeps you there until you start feeling and thinking like one. It’s a rare feat to get us inside a reality so alien, and to sustain it. Available from Amazon
Esther Freud recommends
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys (Penguin)
This is the book that changed me. It made me think about the possibility of writing my own novel and gave me a splinter of hope that a novel about memory and longing, about loneliness and belonging, could be a page-turner. Available from Amazon
Salley Vickers recommends
At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald (4th Estate)
In this less well-known title by Penelope Fitzgerald, larger-than-life Freddie is the head of an out-at-elbows theatrical school based in Covent Garden during the early Sixties. The book has two wonderful running jokes: the school supplies the children for a fictitious West End musical of Dickens’s Dombey and Son – with Paul Dombey’s infamously naive question “What is money?” making a typically Fitzgeraldish appearance during a fraught meeting about the school’s dodgy finances; also, there is a production of Shakespeare’s King John, a play so little-known that it becomes the perfect vehicle for the author’s dauntingly cultivated wit. Available from Amazon
Cathy Rentzenbrinck recommends
The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning (Cornerstone)
I don’t fully understand why I am so drawn to fiction set in wartime but I suspect it is something to do with the way normal behaviour is suspended. In war, people break the rules precisely because they are surrounded with evidence that life is short. I’m less interested in military matters than in how relationships are impacted – all that adultery as the bombs fall – and how trauma of all kinds is then dealt with, or not. Available from Amazon
Francis Spufford recommends
Wake by Elizabeth Knox (Corsair)
Fourteen New Zealanders survive an outbreak of insane violence. As they do their best to bury the dead and to look after one another, they realise that they are still trapped with the cause of the madness, and that it isn’t finished with them. Both genuinely terrifying and exquisitely written by a novelist of high imagination, Wake uses horror to poke at the monstrous edges of everyone’s experience. Once the adrenalin subsides, you realise you may be in the presence of wisdom. Available from Amazon
Jay McInerney recommends
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (Faber)
This is a great New York novel. A coming of age story set in Brooklyn in the Seventies, with gentrification still a couple of decades away, Lethem’s pop-culture-soaked tale grapples with race and class and family even as it flirts with comic-book inspired magic realism. Available from Amazon
Tessa Hadley recommends
Troubles by JG Farrell (Weidenfeld)
I’ve always thought that a novel is like a house: the way you can move from room to room inside it, the way the past can coexist there with the present, the different characters living and changing, held together in its shape. The Majestic is a vast decaying hotel in Ireland in 1920. There are still a few guests, but cats are having their kittens in the upstairs rooms, and the letters in “Majestic” are falling off one by one. Marvellously funny. Available from Amazon
Max Porter recommends
David Jones: Engraver, Soldier, Poet, Painter by Thomas Dilworth (Jonathan Cape)
Published earlier this year, this long-awaited biography of poet, soldier and artist David Jones does not disappoint. Jones is my favourite artist so I was simply in heaven reading this dense and authoritative biography, which is – importantly – lavishly illustrated. It is particularly brilliant on Jones’ Catholicism, his development and growth as a spiritual maker, a man torturously in tune with the sacred. Available from Amazon
Jane Smiley recommends
Transylvanian Trilogy by Miklós Bánffy (Arcadia)
A few years ago, a friend said that he was enjoying Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy, so I bought it, and about three years later, I read it. I went slowly, and absolutely adored it for the heady mix of landscape, politics, romance – and the sense of a world irretrievably lost. Available from Amazon
Adam Foulds recommends
The Name Of The World by Denis Johnson (HarperCollins)
There are books I return to again and again for their energy and intensity, for their verbal imagination and freshness of perception. They are not ironic or detached; they do not hold life at a distance. They give it all to you. This short novel is not widely known, but should be. It is unique and completely convincing, worldly and visionary, unpredictable and haunting. Available from Amazon
Rick Moody recommends
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles (Sort Of)
Jane Bowles’s output was very small, just a play, some short stories, and this one – phenomenally strange – novel, written in 1943, about a couple, estranged and intensely united, travelling abroad. Causality doesn’t work in any normal way here, and the dialogue is startling in its obliquity, but the whole is funny and remarkably original. Available from Amazon
For info on Alexi, see: alexibooks.com