Rebel Library Recommends
Guest contributor: Max Porter
The novelist Max Porter recommends three books: The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman by Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert, Living With Trees by Robin Walter and Notes from Deep Time by Helen Gordon.
Max Porter is the author of The Death of Francis Bacon, praised as ‘a miniature masterpiece’, and ‘a feat of empathy, imagination and literary brio’. His Sunday Times bestseller Lanny was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and the 2019 Wainwright Prize. His first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year and the International Dylan Thomas Prize.
Rebel Library Recommends this month:
The Mermaid of Black Conch | Monique Roffey
The Man Who Planted Trees | Jean Giono
Solar | Ian McEwan
The Last Quarter of the Moon | Chi Zijian
The Man with the Compound Eyes | Wu Ming-Yi
The Tusk that did the Damage | Tania James
The Overstory | Richard Powers
The Wall | Marlen Haushofer
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis | Amitav Ghosh
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead | Olga Tokarczuk
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony | Roberto Calasso
The Rings of Saturn | W.G. Sebald
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance | John Berger
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World | Tyson Yunkaporta
After Ithaca: Journeys in Deep Time | Charlotte Du Cann
Poem of the Month
The English Summer | Holly Hopkins
Dun-coloured endangered species of specialist interest;
best found on grungy paths, behind gabardines,
near shoes on school radiators, wet socks at work.
A furred creature, hood-hidden, brolly-blinded, shy.
The invasive species: a fearsome firestorm
of peeled blue sky. Allelopathic leaf-crisper,
river-fading grass-bleacher, ice-cream smiling
skin-killer, furze-burning-forest-eater, agricide.
See the burn-blisters on the ridge of this ear.
See water rationing. See heat oedema. See dizziness.
Holly Hopkins grew up in Berkshire, grew up even more in London and now lives in Manchester. Holly’s first collection The English Summer (Penned in the Margins) is shortlisted for the Forward Prizes’ Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection and was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Special Commendation.
Looking for something you can’t find here? Contact our Librarian if you’re looking for something specific, or an educational book list to support teaching about climate change:
mattroselibrary@gmail.com.