Hi! I’m starting this newsletter a little differently to my usual [SMASHES THROUGH YOUR WALL AT 100KM/H TO START TALKING ABOUT BLOOD] approach because I have a weird, cool piece of news that I hope will interest you: the debut novel I co-wrote with my wife Onjuli Datta, THE VIEW WAS EXHAUSTING, is being published next month, on July 6th. If you have ever enjoyed the books I recommend, or the way I write about those books, I think there is a good chance you will like this novel, which is full of the kinds of landscapes, relationships, jokes, vibes, characters and barely restrained sexual tension that Onj & I love. To our great delight, other people seem to love it, too.
THE VIEW WAS EXHAUSTING, like most novels, is about a lot of things. It’s about power and privilege, and trying to work out what you owe the world; it’s about yacht parties, complicated relationships with your mother, buzzcuts, photoshoots and backstage secrets. It’s about two very famous people and has several pop culture Easter eggs in there as well as probably far too many references to Middlemarch and Hemingway. But at its core, more than anything else, the thing that Onj and I wanted to write was a carve-your-heart-out, ride-or-die, oh-shit-here-comes-the-bridge love story. This book is about falling in love. It’s about realising you were already in love. It’s about the wild thrill of your best friend, and the infuriating specificity of hating your best friend, and the stomach-plunging moment of looking at your best friend and thinking hahaha shit. To tie into that, in this month’s newsletter I’m talking about other books that I have loved because of the way they wrote about love, because of the same heartskip I’m hoping readers will find in our novel.
One more note before I move onto the recs: preorders are one of the best ways to support debut authors, and especially, when possible, preorders from independent bookstores. If you would like to read a (imo) good novel and also help out your old friend the grumpy book reccer, I would be so grateful if you chucked a preorder our way. Here are some helpful links:
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Eileen Chang’s LOVE IN A FALLEN CITY plays a swift sleight-of-hand in a novella so slim that you can read it, as I did, twice in a row, first in shocked delight and then to appreciate the trick. Divorcée Bai Liusu is living with her family, who are furious at her for returning to the nest, especially when they’re so busy trying to get her younger sister married to cosmopolitan playboy Fan Liuyuan. Instead, Liuyuan and Liusu are fascinated by one another, and a complicated game follows as they both try to gain the upper hand. Liusu’s cool-faced awareness that she is stepping lightly along the brink of disaster, trying to save herself with the bad hand that she’s been dealt, is appealingly reminiscent of Edith Wharton, with a simmering undertone/overtone/everywheretone of sex. The romance here is all quiet, subdued heat, telephone calls in the middle of the night, gentle leans against a stone wall, and you think you are reading about two people wrangling for power, until Chang sweeps the table clear and love comes blooming up in shocking, transfixing pleasure.
(buy @ betterworldbooks)Keep your eye on Tamsyn Muir, who is one of our best living writers and tends to have you laughing so much that you are taken brutally unaware when you suddenly need to cry. PRINCESS FLORALINDA AND THE FORTY-FLIGHT TOWER is another jewel of a novella, with the internal logic of a video game or board game: Princess Floralinda, trapped at the top of her tower by a standard issue fairytale witch, must either wait for a prince to come rescue her from the fleet of monsters on each of the forty flights (unlikely: they keep dying on the ground floor), or battle her way out herself. Luckily, she has a bad-tempered fairy on hand to help. The structure of this story is deeply satisfying, like a walnut shell you crack open to find an entire gleaming world inside, and it plays with gender and gore and finds them intertwined in a way that obsessed me. You know that Caitlyn Siehl line? “When is a monster not a monster?/Oh, when you love it.” Read this book.
(you can preorder a signed second edition direct from the publisher)Hala Alyan’s SALT HOUSES is a love letter to family, scrawled with as much misunderstanding and tension as you would expect in that; it also contains a long and complex marriage, fresh heartbreaks, full-throttle crushes, and plenty of secrets and hurts and sex. Alyan’s sprawling, interwoven novel tells the story of the Yacoub family, tracking them over four generations as they are driven from their Palestinian home to Kuwait to Boston to Paris to Beirut and beyond, interrogating the way we intersect with war and invasion, questioning what makes a refugee, what makes a citizen, what makes a home. My favourite part of the novel is contained in just one character, bright-eyed Mustafa, who is equally beloved by his sister Alia and her husband (and Mustafa’s best friend) Atef, who casts such a light that it infuses the rest of the novel. There are so many things I loved about this book—its poetic, tender prose; its sharp-eyed characterisation, as Alyan’s characters grow old and are seen from sharper outside perspectives without ever losing that sweet kernel of themselves you first meet; one of the best spiritual awakenings I’ve read—but I have thought about Mustafa with on-and-off obsession since I finished SALT HOUSES in a quiet midnight.
(buy @ bookshop)If you’re fixated on romance like I am, it can be interesting to watch the way love stories evolve over the centuries. I once read that the Hellenic novels popular between the first and third centuries (for a long time considered sub-par literature) popularised the idea of love at first sight, a revolutionary moment after centuries of avid pursual seen as the only chance to win a woman’s heart (grim!). Romance gives up our tells. Having said all of that, mostly I enjoyed THE LAIS OF MARIE DE FRANCE, a collection of Breton poems from the 12th century, simply for how fresh and funny and charming they were. There’s something for everyone in here: Arthurian romance! a gay werewolf! several devastating responses to cheating! a fairy queen shows up for her knight in distress and carries him away to what I can only assume is an extremely sexy time! The poems are brimming with sweet, unexpected details and genuinely moving moments, and it’s also fun to read a bunch of medieval romances written by a woman who clearly had an eye for childrearing duties — there are several moments where quests have to be paused so someone can breastfeed, or an infant isn’t left magically in a tree for the night but swiftly rescued and wrapped up warm. There are a number of translations to suit your interest, and the sticklers amongst us might want to opt for poetry, but I read the Penguin Classics prose version and honestly had a great time.
(pick your poison on ebay)ALSO CONSIDER: All of the short stories in Laurie Colwin’s perfect collection The Lone Pilgrim, but especially “The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing”, the funniest and sexiest professor husband/stoner wife story you’ll ever read; Hera Lindsay Bird’s Pyramid Scheme, the poem that was read at my wedding; all of Jane Austen, because you deserve a treat; America Is Not The Heart, Tam Lin, To Calais, In Ordinary Time and other excellent love stories already recced in previous editions; Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends and Emily Henry’s People We Meet On Vacation, two books I spent great evenings with this month. Finally, to whet your appetite: it feels like we’ve spent the last five years perfecting a playlist to accompany THE VIEW WAS EXHAUSTING. Listen here for glitz, swagger, grumpy pop, grand gestures in song form, and obviously a key entry from the king of kissing, Jason Derulo.