From the book Letters of Note: Music, compiled by Shaun Usher. ‘Get at the very heart of it’, a letter from Ludwig Van Beethoven to Emilie H. Introduced by Shaun Usher.
Letter read by Simon Callow.
Jo Marchant and Helen Czerski take us on a journey through humanity’s relationship with the heavens, in this brilliant Intelligence Squared discussion of Jo’s new book The Human Cosmos.
What is the best way to live? Matt Haig introduces his new novel The Midnight Library. Discover Nora Seed’s world today
‘On good nights, I lost my phone. On bad nights, I lost my sanity’
As Terri White’s memoir Coming Undone is published, this harrowing and incredibly powerful extract has run in the Guardian. It’s about what it was like to grow up with abuse, and then move across the world – to the dream job, in the dream city – only to still struggle, chaotically, with drink and with pain.
Terri White
Guardian
Do the work: an anti-racist reading list
“What will happen after this news cycle is over and social media posts about diversity die down? Layla F Saad chooses books to fortify a long-term struggle.”
Layla F Saad
Guardian
Some recommended reading during lockdown
Throughout May we’ve been recommending books (and, as a bonus, dropping the ebook price for each of them to less than a fiver!). If you’d like to see all of our lockdown reads in one place, then do I have the one place for you.
“My mood during the weeks before the operation was the kind of hysterical calm you’d expect from someone who’s just made an appointment to get hit by a lorry. I wandered quietly around the house downloading audiobooks and trying not to have a heart attack.”
Robert Webb – the author of the bestselling memoir How Not To Be a Boy and the new debut novel Come Again – wrote in the Observer about his very real, very close encounter with his own mortality.
Robert Webb
Observer
‘We’re here to talk about Webb’s debut novel, Come Again, a genre-defying time-travel tale — part adventure, part love story, part comedy, part dissertation on bereavement. It’s about a widow, Kate, whose husband, Luke, has dropped dead from a tumour that had been secretly growing in his brain since childhood. In the chaotic depths of heartbreak and despair, Kate awakes one day to find herself back in her old university halls bedroom. It is freshers’ week, she is 18 again, and here is her chance to remeet the undergraduate she will go on to marry and warn him about the time bomb in his head that, if left untreated, will kill him 28 years later. Come Again is a breathtakingly insightful evocation of grief.’
The Sunday Times
‘If you were ill and I couldn’t be with you, don’t worry, I would FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, phone, write letters, send videos and anything else I could think of to tell you how much I love you, and what an amazing mum you have been to me.’
Janie Brown is the author of Radical Acts of Love – a moving account of her conversations with the dying during her thirty years as an oncology nurse. She has joined the Letters Live campaign #ReadALetter, reading a letter she’s written to her mum.
Patience Agbabi speaks to Ian McMillan on BBC Radio 3’s The Verb about time travel, word play and autism in her debut children’s novel The Infinite. Listen to the conversation and a reading from Patience from 33 minutes in.
Maaza Mengiste speaks to Monocle’s Georgina Godwin about her new book, The Shadow King, which casts a light on the women who went to war in the late 1930s in Ethiopia, the country of Mengiste’s birth.
‘Would you say there’s any end in sight, Charlie?’ Two fading Irish gangsters are waiting on the boat from Tangier. A lover has been lost, a daughter has gone missing… The Booker-longlisted Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry is out now in paperback.
“This is a lament for a lost London, one which used to be much wilder, darker and poorer … This book will help you see it through new eyes. It is a delight.
Nicholas Lezard
Evening Standard
