Books: 2023 Writers' Recommendations
Wales Arts Review brings you the hottest recommendations from a year in fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, chosen by some of Wales’s top writers and commentators.
Jude Rogers
The best book I’ve read this year is Lucy Jones’ brilliant Matrescence. It’s got everything I love in non-fiction – experimentation, gutsy poetic writing, gritty, deep dives into big areas of knowledge, while being written in a vivid, page-turning, accessible style. Its subject is one that many would think is incredibly everyday – how a woman changes from the early stages of pregnancy through childbirth and the first five years of parenthood – but it’s not. This book is as firmly political as it is wildly personal.
Through all her research and deep reading, Lucy shows how radically women mutate physically, psychologically and neurologically, and how little the world around them pay attention. She smashes myths about how nature cares for its own and how ‘natural’ being a mother really is, without ever wagging her finger, and she writes with real warmth, curiosity and love. Few books in my adult life have made me want to rant, beam and punch the air like this one. (I have also learned how my brain has grown and retained grey matter in the last decade, and that my body retained matter from the foetus who is now playing FIFA in the next room. It’s mind-bending stuff.)
My favourite Welsh books make odd bedfellows and show what my reading life is like: Mike Parker’s All The Wide Border (I live in view of the last ridge of the Black Mountains, so I gobbled this up), The Last Firefox by Lee Newbery (a magical book for children which I had to beg my son to read to him, so I didn’t miss any) and Alex Wharton’s Doughnuts, Thieves and Chimpanzees (the latest book by our new Children’s Laureate for Wales, whose poems crackle with wide-eyed childlike delight). All show off great, characterful voices – and can handily fit into a stocking.
Jude Rogers’s book The Sound of Being Human was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2022. You can subscribe to her substack newsletter here.
Gary Raymond
I loved the contemporary energy of Nerys Williams’s Republic. Nostalgic, fierce, political, it marks her out as a writer working at the very frontiers of what is possible in poetry (and prose poetry – but I don’t want to get mixed up in those debates of definitions). There’s a great playlist that goes along with it too. In fiction, I wasn’t quite expecting to be so won over by Thomas Morris’s latest collection of short stories, Open Up. He expands on the preoccupations – and geographical boundaries – of his multi-award-winning debut, but there is a still a Welsh heart beating under the book. What I loved most was the suggestion of magic realism in the stories which seems to have added a further layer to a writer emboldened by the very idea of risk-taking. It’s heartening that writing this ecstatic is getting so much support in publishing.
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