Victoria’s Summer Picks 2024

Recommended by Victoria
‘Hannah arrives in London as a teenage refugee from Eritrea with only the diary of her dead mother and memories of war-torn family life. She has to navigate the faceless UK asylum system, first in a foster home in Kilburn and then on the streets and parks of Fitzrovia and Bloomsbury. This is also where Hannah discovers her own and her parents’ subversive desires. The Seers is a short and powerful novel – by turns sexy, enraging, saddening – that also asks of the reader why it is that we so often insist on comparing, measuring and weighing incommensurable sufferings.’

Recommended by Victoria
‘Mammoth is the third novel(la) in Eva Baltasar’s loosely connected triptych – Permafrost and Boulder are the other two. Reading those first is not a prerequisite for enjoying Mammoth: the books primarily share Baltasar’s style – distinguished by acerbic wit, dotted with punches of insight – and the fact of a lesbian character – albeit a different one in each book. In Mammoth, the unnamed first-person narrator is young and desperate to get pregnant but also tired of cosmopolitan life in Barcelona. She seeks a simpler life on an abandoned farm in the Catalan hills, but of course life has a knack of never being really simple.’

Recommended by Victoria
‘It’s difficult to come up with four thinkers from the twentieth century who took their ideas in more radically different directions than Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Ayn Rand and Simone Weil. At first glance it’s not clear how their lives and philosophies could be the subject of a coherent intellectual biography. And yet, Wolfram Eilenberger (translated from German by Shaun Whiteside) manages to produce just such a book: written in short, accessible chapters, the narrative charts their lives and ideas across continents, at the same time capturing currents of thought that persist until today. The Visionaries pairs well with other recent quartet biographies of philosophers, The Women are Up to Something, Metaphysical Animals and How to Think Like a Woman.’

Recommended by Victoria
‘Rosarita is the acclaimed novelist Anita Desai’s latest book. The novel follows a young Indian woman on her language trip to Mexico, where she is confronted with the supposed fact that her mother – then and there known as Rosarita – once came to this exact town to pursue her art. But what art? When did her mother ever leave India? And why? Desai’s masterful storytelling takes us on a journey across Mexico and across time, exploring themes of post-colonialism, gender politics and intimate family relationships.’

Recommended by Victoria
‘This is philosophical fiction at its peak. Parade contains four long chapters that interweave the lives of four different artists – all called G, two men, two women – with the life of the first-person narrator and her husband. Like the characteristic covers, Cusk’s prose is clean and deceptively simple while asking some of the most difficult existential questions: what does it mean to create (produce?) art? Is it anything like creating (producing?) a child? Do the answers to those questions differ depending on whether you are a man or a woman? (Parade’s answer is surely ‘yes’, but in interesting ways.) If we are creations (products?) of our own parents, what do we owe them? In true Cusk fashion, Parade is a novel in which the action is pared down to moments that could be life-changing, if only we recognised them as such.’