Frances Wilson is the author of Literary Seductions, which was praised by Alain de Botton as 'psychologically rich and wise', and The Courtesan's Revenge, which was described as 'a wonderful biography... Witty and sharp' by Jane Ridley in the Spectator. She lives in London with her daughter.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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Freud's Requiem: Mourning, Memory and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk by Matthew von Unwerth
In Freud's Requiem, Matthew von Unwerth speculates on a summer walk that Freud never took, a bond of friendship he never forged, and the transience of material existence. In this sense it is a book about non-events. Less history than late Romantic prose poem, Freud's Requiem is endowed with its own unconscious life, and dreams of other walks in other turbulent times during which other conversations did or did not take place.
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Titanic edited by John Wilson Foster
Titanic must be one of the most satisfying anthologies ever. John Wilson Foster begins his account of the great liner before she was born, when her terrible existence was only imagined by writers like Thomas Carlyle. The story is then continued in newspaper accounts, letters, eye-witness statements, poems, enquiry records. What makes it a book to remember however, are the introductions and commentaries by Foster himself, the perfect companion for this voyage out.
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The Quest for Corvo - An Experiment in Biography by A J A Symons, introduction by A S Byatt
The Quest for Corvo is the most strange, moving, absorbing, and atmospheric attempt at biography I have read, and its reissue by NYRB will hopefully attract a whole new generation of mesmerised, baffled readers. Whether it is the curious flavour of Corvo himself (AKA Frederick Rolfe) which lingers, or the even more peculiar one of Symons, is part of the book's allure. Corvo's oddest effect however, is that as soon as you have put it down it evaporates from the memory, and needs to be started again.
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Esther Woolfson was brought up in Glasgow and studied Chinese at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Edinburgh University. Her critically acclaimed short stories have appeared in many anthologies and have been read on Radio 4. She has won prizes for them and for her nature writing.
My favourite books of the decade are:
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The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers is beautifully written, complex and important. The story of the relationship between a Jewish refugee physicist from Hitler's Germany and a black American singer, it is too a history of modern America and the struggle for civil rights, all the more resonant since President Obama's election.
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Junot Diaz is a dazzling writer and this book a marvel of bleakness and humour, tragedy and farce. Set against the background of Trujillo's hideous regime in Dominica, it introduces the hapless modern-day American dreamer Oscar, unable to escape from the inevitability of history.
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The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd
A small, perfect classic, reprinted in 2009, this book chronicles the author's passionate relationship with the Cairngorm mountains. Every observation is fine, detailed and knowledgable, every description, whether or rock, plant or animal, alight with beauty and a burning, persuasive love. Written at the end of the Second World War, it conjures a precious, and possibly doomed world.
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