BOOKS THAT TRANSFORM HOW WE THINK

A phrase often rolled out by reviewers is that a book ‘holds up a mirror to our times’. Arguably, not a terribly helpful description given that any book concerned with the present shows the world back to us one way or another. A much harder achievement that only truly applies to a handful of books is that a work of the imagination should transform how we understand our times. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie grippingly falls into this category and we were thrilled to see it scoop the Women’s prize for fiction earlier this week. In celebration, it is available again on Alexi.

The work of Edward St Aubyn also changes how we see the world and his astonishing Patrick Melrose novels, adapted by David Nicholls and irresistibly fronted by Benedict Cumberbatch, have been lighting up the British small screen. Meanwhile, Cathy Rentzenbrink’s incomparable memoir The Last Act of Love gives us “a story of grief [with] joy in it” and for those gripped by the recent royal wedding, we’ve featured Matthew Dennison’s Queen Victoria: A Life of Contradictions, which is a brief biography of the monarch who set the royal family on its (until now) alarmingly narrow and emotionally straitjacketed path.
©Alexi 2017
www.alexibooks.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 15th, 2018