Sarah Hall / Features / Untitled Books

"I wouldn’t ordinarily choose to read a book about football. But I would always choose a book written by Alan Bissett, who is one of the funniest, most humane and insightful writers today."

Photograph: © Richard Thwaites

Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall is the author of four novels: Haweswater, The Electric Michelangelo (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Carhullan Army and How to Paint a Dead Man. She is the winner of The Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Betty Trask Award, The John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Portico Prize for Fiction.

James Salter: Burning the Days

The sense of a writer's identity gleaned or interpreted from their work is limited and sometimes well off the mark. Reading an autobiography by a favourite novelist can therefore be a strange, unveiling affair, both unsettling and delightful. James Salter's memoir, Burning The Days, is characteristic of his economic, glinting prose. The writing is taut and exceptionally beautiful, but the descriptions of his experiences as a pilot in Korea, and of living in New York and Europe, are outstanding, as finely worked as any fiction he has written. As with the novels, the narrative perspective flexes between intimacy and exteriority, but the portraiture of characters, including his self, always seems exact. Salter's life has been eventful and varied, at turns military and literary, and he has lived at the edge, as many never have or will. This is a fascinating account by a most unique and daring writer.

Alan Bissett: Pack Men

I wouldn't ordinarily choose to read a book about football. But I would always choose a book written by Alan Bissett, who is one of the funniest, most humane and insightful writers today. Pack Men is staged around Glasgow Rangers' 2008 European final in Manchester. The story follows three friends and a child as they travel down from Scotland for this epic, predictably volatile event. The author leads an intrepid, toe-curling investigation into male psychology, sectarianism, and violence. But the novel is more a study in praise of redeemable flaws than it is a scornful accusation or expose. Bissett's characters are complex, questioning, and always capable of surprising each other and the reader. They may fall, but not without some form of ascendancy along the way. Written with narrative innovation and demotic dexterity, Pack Men tackles an unsavoury subject with courage and compassion.

Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France

Now All Roads Lead to France is a first work of prose by the poet Matthew Hollis. It chronicles the last five years of Edward Thomas' life before his death in the First World War, during which the British literary scene was undergoing radical change as new poets and thinkers turned away from their Victorian models. Thomas emerges as an emotionally tormented figure, uncomfortable within family life, unfulfilled as a critic and jobbing writer until he begins writing poetry. A cast of familiar and marginal literary figures populates the book - Yeats, Pound, Brooke - but it is the productive and inspirational friendship with Robert Frost that Hollis focuses on to outline the development of Thomas as a poet, and the development of his sense of worth and satisfaction. The book is wonderfully engaging, carefully and respectfully written. It draws one of Britain's most talented poets from the shadows, but is also a haunting evocation of an age moving beyond living memory.

...............................................................................................................................................
The Beautiful Indifference, the new collection of short stories by Sarah Hall, is published in November by Faber and Faber.

Read Sarah Hall's introduction to the Guardian's Guide to Independent Bookshops
................................................................................................................................................

Tuesday, 4 October, 2011