Rebecca Watson Recommends
You may have first come across Rebecca Watson's writing in the Financial Times, where she works as Assistant Arts Editor. She's also been published in TLS, the Guardian, and Granta, to name a few. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.
litte scratch, her debut novel, tells the story of a day of the life of an unnamed woman, living in a lower-case world of WhatsApp notifications and office politics. Over the course of one day, the protagonist relays what it takes to get through just one day - from morning until night - while processing recent sexual violence. little scratch is about the coexistence of monotony with our waking, intelligent lives and how our internal and external lives exist hand-in-hand. little scratch is an incandescent debut with an urgent story that everyone should read.
Kane: Complete Plays
Sarah Kane
'I have read this collection five times now. Kane is dynamic, intense, funny and exact. Every time I am inspired.'
Giving up the Ghost
Hilary Mantel
'Writing a memoir is a difficult business, and Mantel takes that as a conceit, playing with the form and chronology as she goes. She tackles her experience of the uncanny and endometriosis with candid fluency.'
Lost Cat
Mary Gaitskill
'Master of ambiguity, of teasing experience into all dimensions, Gaitskill takes the loss of a cat and pushes at the edges until she is writing about, as she says herself, “the nature of love”.'
Another Country
James Baldwin
'This is my favourite of Baldwin’s novels. It is brilliant, ambitious, moving beyond belief. Beginning with a jazz musician meeting a woman in a bar, the plot complicates and darkens quickly, introducing more characters, obstacles, ambitions that lock and compete. Oh boy.'
Oreo
Fran Ross
'A playful, sly jaunt. A controlled, deliberate, humongous wink at the reader. Never has it been clearer while reading a book how much fun the writer is having.'
The Infatuations
Javier Marías
'This is the first Marías novel I read and my favourite if only because it acted as a portal into the world-building, accordion-stretching sentences of a writer I always want to be reading.'