Rowan Williams Recommends
The poet and theologian shares his recommended reading
Dr Rowan Williams is a man of many proverbial hats (and a mitre, more literally). We will describe him to you as poet, public intellectual, theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury. However you know him, we think you'll enjoy this thoughtful selection.
A few of our highlights from Rowan's publications are The Way of St Benedict, published earlier this year, his collaboration with Gwyneth Lewis on The Book of Taliesin and Carcanet's 2014 collection, The Poems of Rowan Williams.
Dickens
Peter Ackroyd
'The most vivid biography in the last half century of the great novelist. One of the books I’ve been re-reading with immense delight in the lockdown, an enormous, exuberantly overwritten book, both satisfying and tantalising, rather like its subject’s fictions.'
Devils
'Dostoevsky has an Olympic reputation for gloom and pain, but this novel, while it has more than its share of both, shows us some of his unexpected qualities as a humorist and satirist.'
What You Have Heard Is True
Carolyn Forché
'One of the most powerful, chilling books of last year, this is an account of a young American poet’s visits to El Salvador in the 1970’s at a time of appalling political repression and violence – for her, the beginning of a lifetime of advocacy and witness.'
The Music of Time
John Burnside
'Another poet, this time writing about his own experience of poetry, covering a huge variety of work from across the globe, a beautiful, idiosyncratic celebration of what poets do with language.' We also have some signed first editions available.
Laurus
Eugene Vodolazkin
'One of the great Russian novels of the last decade, an historical narrative full of anachronistic humour, theological subtleties and extraordinary psychological imagination.'
Politics and Conscience
Roger Lipsey
'A short and fiercely concentrated discussion of what ‘political virtue’ might look like, by the author of a major biography of Dag Hammarskjold – second Secretary General of the UN, an outstanding moral/political thinker and unconventional mystic. A necessary book when politics is reduced to short term cosmetics and soap opera.'