BOOKS

Sunshine reads

Here are four books chosen by the team at Topping & Co. with themes of place, escape and travel. With locations from France and Florence to Shanghai and the Amazon, these are all ideas for immersive summer reads.

Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles

Review by Saskia Hayward Already the winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize, this has a hybrid form, part-memoir and partnature writing. Through swimming pools, typhoons, oceans, and rainstorms, water is the thread through which a rich tapestry of associations are born. The book traces a child’s journey to adulthood and across a map, from Borneo to Aotearoa New Zealand to Shanghai to London.

Powles’ previous work includes Forward Prize-nominated Magnolia, 木蘭, the food memoir Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai, and Bitter Melon 苦瓜, a small press she founded to publish poetry by Asian diaspora writers. Her concern with language is ever-present, both entangled with the politics of mixed-race identity, and in the pleasure she derives from the pure physicality of words. Here seiche waves are “like a mouthful of warm milk.”

Water for Powles is at once reassuring and unsafe, a duality that speaks of a life where the threat of a tsunami is always present. Yet her writing retains a dreamlike quality, conjured through descriptions that are luminous and rich, saturated with soft edges. Magnolia petals are “crumpled and browning at the edges, but still pink like slices of meat.” It’s a pleasure to read, revealing a world rendered as if lying in a pool looking at the sky.

Canongate, £14.99

The Gold Machine: In the Tracks of the Mule Dancers by Iain Sinclair

Review by Saskia Hayward The Gold Machine is the latest book from Iain Sinclair, whose previous books, such as Lights Out For The Territory, have earned him a reputation as a chronicler of urban myth, in his signature hallucinogenic, hypnotic language.

Here he unravels the journey that took him and his daughter from Hackney to Peru, following the footsteps of his great-grandfather Arthur Sinclair, who had travelled there in 1895, crossing the Amazon on a raft in an ill-fated quest for gold.

The book is an attempt to superimpose two journeys –and two narratives –that cannot coexist. One of the Victorian Sinclair, with his voracious desire for riches, viewing the world through the lens of colonial and well-worn Boys’ Own adventure archetypes; the other of the contemporary Sinclair, to whom the violent exploitation of the land and the indigenous peoples are barefaced, documented in the stark colours of a smartphone camera. As always with Sinclair, this revolves around the psychology of place, of how history is etched onto the land and its people, and also how, when you write about place, you are inevitably writing about yourself. Oneworld, £20

Still Life by Sarah Winman

Review by Matthew Leigh Known for her glittering debut When God Was a Rabbit, Sarah Winman has the soul of a storyteller. Still Life represents an evolution in style and scope for her. Where her previous books were neatly contained and pristinely focused, her latest novel is a wild and winding adventure through multiple decades of its eccentric cast’s lives.

Winman’s background in theatre is visible, with each scene perfectly staged, each member of its broad cast exquisitely realised. At the heart of the story is the absurdly named Ulysses Temper, though it could equally be seen as an ensemble piece, with Ulysses as the glue that keeps his elective family together.

Opening in 1944, we meet him as a young soldier, optimistic and invincible. Life carries him along, back to the tight London community he came from and then, later, to Florence. Both cities are exquisitely rendered, with Winman opting to focus largely on fleshing out the pockets of these cities in which our heroes reside. A vivid impression of place is manifested through a close, intimate perspective. The narrative winds and undulates, before crescendoing to a buoyant and optimistic finish. The characters appreciate art, music, food and literature without pretence, with effusive emotion. The ultimate victory of the novel, however, is one that is keenly felt after the past year: the joy of togetherness and community it depicts is tender and beautiful. It shows that home is never any one place, rather it’s the people we choose to spend our lives with, and those who choose to spend theirs with us. Harper Collins, £16.99

Paul by Daisy LaFarge

Review by Matthew Leigh When Frances, a young graduate student, spends a summer volunteering in rural France, she hopes to re-establish her sense of self that was dislodged after a scandal drove her out of Paris. She doesn’t, however, anticipate the impact of meeting Paul, the significantly older owner of the eco farm.

Daisy Lafarge, a poet who gained recognition for her T. S. Eliotshortlisted collection Life Without Air, intelligently renders the discomfort of power imbalances, as Frances struggles with her own passivity in the face of the emotional neediness of various male figures around her. Village communities vacillate between being quaint and stifling as she finds herself caught in the current of a passion that is not her own. The prose is minimalist, allowing room for the uneven dynamics of power between its characters to exist at a quietly discomforting volume. Tense and unsettling, Paul is as terse as a thriller but all the more unnerving thanks to its muted realism set against the serene and sunny tranquility of the French countryside. Granta, publishes 5 August, £12.99 n

Topping & Co. is hosting Iain Sinclair on 20 October in conversation with artist and author of The Vorrh trilogy, Brian Catling. toppingbooks.co.uk