Annalena McAfee / Features / Untitled Books

"All fiction is a higher form of gossip, and so is the best sort of biography. When I was researching the history of women war correspondents, as background to my first novel, The Spoiler, I was drawn by the story of Margaret Fuller."

Annalena McAfee

Annalena McAfee worked in newspapers for more than three decades. She was Arts and Literary Editor of the Financial Times and founded the Guardian Review, which she edited for six years.

Michael Frayn: Towards the End of the Morning

All journalists are narcissists. We want to read novels about journalism, and when we leave the job, we want to write about it. Ex-hack Evelyn Waugh's immortal Scoop satirised the Fleet Street of the 1930s. Three decades later, Michael Frayn, formerly of the Guardian and the Observer, had a more benign, but no less funny take on the rackety denizens of The Street of Shame. Even then, the way of life - the expenses fiddles, the three-bottle-lunches - was imperiled and a valedictory note rings beneath the comedy. An ambitious journalist marooned in the country notes and crossword department of a national newspaper, dreams of fame and is presented with the chance to break into the glamorous and lucrative world of television. His exciting new career move does not entirely go to plan. Frayn is as hilarious on the institutionalised torpor of a once great newspaper as he is on the vanity and superficiality of the television industry.

Susan Cheever: American Bloomsbury

All fiction is a higher form of gossip, and so is the best sort of biography. When I was researching the history of women war correspondents, as background to my first novel, The Spoiler, I was drawn by the story of Margaret Fuller, who became the first accredited women war correspondent when she went to Italy to report on the siege of Rome. She had been a literary critic and was part of the remarkable philosophical and literary circle known as the Transcendentalists who lived in Concord, Massachusetts, in the mid nineteenth century. Cheever's book is a group biography of them - Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau - and is as deft and lively as the best accounts of the British Bloomsbury Group.

John Updike: Rabbit Angstrom
The Rabbit tetralogy, written over three decades, charts the development of modern America from the optimism of the early Kennedy era in 1960 to the end of the Reagan years in 1990 through the eyes of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. Updike makes his fallible, ill-educated car salesman, with his unruly appetites, an endearing Everyman who struggles gamely with a ripely complicated personal life against a background of social and political change.
Updike's death in 2009 robbed us of one of our very best writers. But his work endures and there is some consolation in re-reading his fiction, and in particular this masterpiece, with its crystalline prose and merciless humour, its wisdom and essential humanity.

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The Spoiler by Annalena McAfee is published by Vintage Books

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Thursday, 21 April, 2011