The Book of Forgotten Authors (Riverrun) sounds like a post-modern meta-novel from the early 1980s, one that everyone pretends to have read in the original Spanish. In fact, it’s the title of Christopher Fowler’s invigoratingly down-to-earth catalogue of 99 writers, mostly anglophone, who used to be famous 50 years ago but whom no one now remembers. There’s Pierre Boulle, the engineer who doubled up as the author of Bridge Over the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes. Intriguing too is Pamela Branch, whose second novel from 1951, The Lion in the Cellar, features a drunken bartender with a phantom marmoset on his shoulder. Bibliophiles will love revisiting the midlist of yesteryear while uppity authors should be given the book as a memento mori, a hint as to where they will be heading next.
Anxieties around survival become literal in Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table (HarperCollins). In this memoir, Simon Westaby recounts the 35 years he has spent at Oxford’s John Radcliffe hospital trying to unlock a few extra years for patients with failing hearts. Most recently he has been fitting the walking dead – those for whom no donor organ is forthcoming – with artificial hearts, in effect turning them into grateful cyborgs. With his battle cry of “bugger protocol” and his renaming of medical directors as “the Stasi”, Westaby comes across as the bloke you’d want on your side in the fight to stay alive.
Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes With Death (Tinder) shows the fragility of life from another angle. At first glance it might all sound a bit melodramatic – O’Farrell is only 45 and in good health – but her point is that: “We are, all of us, wandering about in states of oblivion … unaware of when the axe may fall.” The Costa-winning novelist describes her experience as an eight-year-old with encephalitis, as an adult traveller on a plummeting aeroplane and, finally, as a teenager in a hilltop encounter with a creepy stranger who will go on to murder another girl. The effect of reading O’Farrell’s rehearsals for the end is, paradoxically, to find your spirits soaring.
One of the best biographies this year was Andy Friend’s Ravilious and Co: the Pattern of Friendship (Thames & Hudson), a lovely account of the artist Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) who reimagined southern England’s landscapes in a series of stunning woodcuts and watercolours that grafted vernacular forms on to a modernist sensibility. The “and Co” refers to the group of friends, including Edward Bawden, Enid Marx, Percy Horton and Peggy Angus, whom Ravilious gathered around him at the Royal Academy in the 1920s. With the encouragement of their tutor Paul Nash, these talented young people worked to bridge the gap between art and design, producing book jackets, illustrations, patterned papers and fabrics. Their images are beautifully captured here.
No single figure catches the glamour and proto-modernity of the postwar period quite as nicely as Princess Margaret. In Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret (4th Estate) Craig Brown sets before us a series of flickering cameos as the late sister of the Queen smokes and scowls her way around polite society. There she is being snappish with servants, while here she is being rude to fellow dinner guests and downright cruel to strangers: “Have you ever looked in the mirror and watched yourself walk?”, she asks a man who has been disabled since birth. Brown, a satirist, does so much more than send up the figure he describes as “a nightclub burlesque of her sister”. His book is nothing less than an examination and a challenge to biographical form itself, with clever counterfactual sections in which PM gets married to Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, and sulkily delivers the Christmas broadcast.
Dr Johnson maintained that there was no life about which a book could not be usefully written. “Use” here meant morally helpful, a way of imagining other lives in order to make better sense of our own. This is certainly true of Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Little, Brown), an account of what it feels like to be 260kg at your heaviest. Gay, who is a black American of Haitian descent, describes the constant chafing, breathlessness and tightness, as well as the appalled glances and jeering sneers. As for the why of it, Gay reveals that she was gang-raped at the age of 12, and reacted by eating until she had created a body that felt invulnerable, or perhaps invisible, to the male gaze. This whip-smart book takes on everything from the Fat Acceptance Movement to waitresses who assume that, just because a person is large, they must long for the clammy touch of strangers.
In this centenary year of the Russian Revolution, the best new book about the region was actually concerned with “The Great Patriotic War”, as the 1939‑45 conflict was locally known. In The Unwomanly Face of War (Penguin Classics) by Nobel literature prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich we hear the testimony of Soviet women as they rush to the front to in serve a wide range of roles, from nurses to snipers, in the battle against the invading fascists. This book was initially published in Russia in the 1980s, but with a great deal of the explicit detail scrubbed out by anxious authorities. Now with the full text restored and expanded, the book has appeared in a brilliant English translation by Richard Pevear for the first time.
In An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic (William Collins) classics professor Daniel Mendelsohn recounts how his elderly father recently insisted on joining his undergraduate class on Homer. Bronx-born Jay Mendelsohn has some tart things to say about whether Telemachus, Odysseus and the rest can really be counted as “heroes” (Telemachus, he complains, is a cissy who cries all the time while Odysseus cheats on his wife). Gradually, the backstory of the Mendelsohns’ own complicated father-and-son relationship unfolds, reaching a climax as they journey around the Mediterranean on a Homerically themed cruise.
At the other end of the human scale is The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (Verso) by Marcus Rediker. Lay was an 18th-century British-born progressive who took it on himself to point out to his fellow Quakers in Philadelphia that keeping slaves was hardly in line with the sect’s founding principles of brotherly equality. When arguing didn’t work, Lay staged noisy interventions, and on one occasion even threw a bladder filled with pig’s blood at his “covetous” co-religionists. What made this moral and physical bravery all the more remarkable was that Lay was tiny, no more than 4ft tall. “In his time,” concludes Rediker, “Benjamin may have been the most radical person on the planet.” This, then, is micro-history at its best, a careful concentration on one small man’s activities as a way of testing out the limits of what could be thought, known and felt in the hive-mind of early modern America.
Finally, there’s Tina Brown’s The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 (W&N). No matter how much you might hate yourself for wanting to read the British journalist’s account of her wonder years at the helm of the US’s pre-eminent glossy, the troubling fact is that it is addictive. Brown offers a ringside view of New York City as it starts to revitalise itself in the big-spending, no-taste Reagan years. Many of the movers and shakers who snake and snark through Brown’s Vanity Fair are now dead, which is probably why she can risk being so breathtakingly rude about them. But several grands fromages are unaccountably with us still. Pre-eminent among them is the millionaire realtor Donald Trump, already emerging in the pages as a lout sane people avoid the moment they spot him bobbing towards them across a crowded room, shouting nonsense.
• Kathryn Hughes’s latest book is Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum (4th Estate).
