CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS: I discovered Margaret Yourcenar. Her Memoirs of Hadrian, written across decades, made me truly see the ancient world for the first time. A stunning book. I rediscovered John Updike's Couples, one of the great novels of the suburbs. It makes me want to be so much better at my craft. Fiona McGregor's Indelible Ink and Brendan Cowell's How it Feels both showed me a Sydney I have never known. Max Schaeffer's debut novel Children of the Sun bravely examined the fraught contradictions of masculinity and homosexuality, how desire complicates our political correctness. Colm Toibin's The Empty Family is a wonderful collection, unflinching about the pettiness of our cruelty to one another and, in the final story, unapologetic about the transcendence possible through something called love. Karl O. Knausgaard's A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven is masterful, breathtaking.Check the full list out, here.
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COLM TOIBIN: The two novels I liked best were David Grossman's To the End of the Land and David Malouf's Ransom. Both books deal with fear and bravery, violence and forgiveness, parents and children. But more than anything, both understand that rhythm and texture in language and the space around words have an almost tactile quality and must be handled as a painter handles paint. In poetry, Seamus Heaney's The Human Chain has a hushed, elegiac tone and is his most beautiful book in many years. I have been getting nothing but pleasure and amusement from Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica. He was a big, sad old softie.See also: The Yellow Wind: With a New Afterword by the Author
, See Under: LOVE: A Novel
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