Sylvia Brownrigg recommends

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of five novels including The Delivery Room and Pages for You, a collection of stories, Ten Women Who Shook the World and a novel for children, Kepler’s Dream, which was turned into an independent feature film. Sylvia's books have been included in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times lists of notable fictions and translated into several languages. She has been published widely as a reviewer and critic in the Guardian, the New York Times, and the LA Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Brownrigg’s new memoir, The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found, was published April 2024

Read on to find out which six books Sylvia recommends, and why…

Given my profession, it's not surprising that I have loved being immersed in stories since I was a kid - it's just that now I am sometimes immersed in ones I am writing, not reading! I am especially drawn to books with vivid characters - I am not generally as concerned about plot. I love learning and thinking about how other people live and get through their particular problems and dilemmas — and recently I have been drawn to memoirs for that reason, too. These books all have people in them I keep thinking about, even long after closing the book.

James

Percival Everett

You don’t have to know Mark Twain’s American classic Huck Finn to become immersed in Everett’s brilliant retelling: the story of an escaped slave on the run with a white orphan boy is powerful on its own terms. Anyone who saw the film American Fiction, based on a different Everett novel, will recognize the blade-sharp satire on whites’ perceptions of Black Americans. But the book is also very affecting, and Everett’s James is an indelible creation.

Nicholas Nickleby

Charles Dickens

An absolute positive about the pandemic for me was starting to meet with friends via Zoom; and a Dickens reading group we began in 2021 is still going! (There is a LOT of Dickens.) We read slowly, savoring the humor, the mad range of characters, the vivid settings. Nickleby has been my favorite: it’s got a couple of great villains, hilarious set pieces, and the added advantage of being narrated, if you alternate between reading and listening as I have, by the great Alex Jennings.

This Strange Eventful History

Claire Messud

Does it bend the rules here to choose a friend’s novel? But Claire Messud is such a fine writer, and her latest is a remarkable story, largely autobiographical, about a French couple over seventy years (beginning in 1940) of their family’s trials and displacements, across geographies including Algeria, Canada, the US and the French Mediterranean coast. We happened to be writing books based on our grandfathers and fathers around the same time, so I appreciate all the more how artfully she weaves her family stories together!

Orbital

Samantha Harvey

This is a beautiful and consoling book. It’s a novel, and won the Booker Prize last year, but it feels also like a meditation. It’s about six astronauts who are in the international space station, circling the earth, and each one has a distinct story, and reason for having wanted to be an astronaut. Above all, as they gaze down on the blue planet, they are awestruck by its beauty, and by how insignificant are the things that separate humans from one another. Right now, I think many people are finding that reminder welcome.

Crying in H-Mart

Michelle Zauner

I want to include one memoir, since it’s a genre I’ve been enjoying lately: it fascinates me how many different ways people find to tell life stories. Michelle Zauner is an American indie pop singer whose funny, poignant bestseller describes her rocky relationship with her Korean mother, and her grief at losing her to cancer in 2014. The mother-daughter love language was always food, and there are brilliantly detailed descriptions of Korean dishes. I recommend not reading this book when you’re hungry.

The Fell

Sarah Moss

As a parent who had a teenager at home during lockdown, I feel as though we’re still trying to grasp the pandemic’s many knock-on effects. I often recommend this gripping novel by Sarah Moss for the way it captures the tensions of that time. A single mum breaks the rules by going off on a walk in the Peak District, leaving her teenaged son to wonder when— or if—she might return.… It’s a story about how we look after one another, and the characters’ warmth and wit are a nice counterpoint to the taut suspense.