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Five-time Booker Prize nominee Sebastian Barry is the author of A Long Long Way, On Canaan’s Side, and Days Without End. The Irish author’s new novel, The Newer World, follows a formerly enslaved Tennessean who’s navigating America’s post–Civil War era.
‘Letters and Journals: Katherine Mansfield’ (1977)
The dark wind of a fatal illness blows through these letters and journals. Mansfield was only 34 when she died. She was the only writer that Virginia Woolf truly felt as a rival, and with very good reason. Buy it here.
‘The Last Chronicle of Barset’ by Anthony Trollope (1867)
Trollope had his manservant wake him early every morning and he would write till 8 a.m. By this method he managed to produce a great number of long, long books. The six volumes of the Barchester novels are crowned by The Last Chronicle of Barset, 900 pages of infinite readability. Buy it here.
‘The Great Fires: Poems, 1982–1992’ by Jack Gilbert (1996)
I met Gilbert briefly on an old track in the mountains of Paros in 1981, just a moment of two strangers passing and nodding and saying three words. His poems are classical, but severely and lovingly contemporary too. Buy it here.
‘Avid Reader’ by Robert Gottlieb (2016)
This is the generous autobiography of the greatest editor of his time. I had an exciting friendship with him in the last years of his long life. He referred at one point in passing to Toni Morrison’s Beloved—“which I just happened to edit.” Well, yes, my good Lord Bob. Buy it here.
‘The Journal of Sir Walter Scott’ (1890)
These poignant and revealing journals cover the years after the financial disaster that engulfed Scott. Instead of being declared bankrupt, he made an arrangement with his creditors that he would write his way out of difficulty. He is 54 in 1825 when he begins his diary; it ends about six years later, with his early demise. Almost on the stroke of that midnight, the debts were fully paid off. Buy it here.
‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham (1998)
This was the book everyone seemed to be reading in New York when I was there in 1998. Which was an encouraging fact, because it is in a way a very austere work of art, surreally channeling Virginia Woolf, its glistening surfaces suggesting somehow very great depths. If there are bookshops in heaven, I’d like to think Virginia Woolf was reading it too. Buy it here.