Brian Lewis grew up on a tough council estate after arriving in Britain as part of the Windrush generation. At the age of eight he developed an interest in chess and joined a team made up of council estate kids to take part in championships, generally against children from more privileged backgrounds. At 12 he took on – and beat – an international grandmaster.
You have probably never heard of Lewis and yet he is one of thousands of ordinary people joining a rapidly growing trend to preserve their life stories for posterity with a ghostwritten autobiography. And there has been a sharp rise in demand for these services after the pandemic.
Translators face the creative balancing act of remaining faithful to the source text while also ensuring that the translation is a smooth, informative read. One intriguing task for translators of Austen has been how to describe the 19th-century British food featured in the many convivial sequences that shed light on characters through their social interaction.
Since the Middle Ages, botanical explorers inspired by ancient accounts of this remarkable plant have sought it on three continents, and always in vain. Many historians view the disappearance of silphion as the first recorded extinction of any species, plant or animal, and a cautionary tale in how thoroughly human appetite can erase a species from the wild.
But is silphion truly extinct? Thanks to a lucky encounter almost 40 years ago, and decades of subsequent research, a professor at Istanbul University suspects he has re-discovered the last holdouts of the ancient plant more than a thousand years after it disappeared from history books, and nearly a thousand miles from where it once grew.
Writing is an isolating job – “a life of homework”, according to my next-door neighbour. One surprising thing to emerge from this biography is just how much Pratchett valued and acknowledged the help of a circle of family, friends and fans. Wilkins is pre-eminent here but there’s a roster of advisers, illustrators, toymakers, cartographers and fellow writers – notably Neil Gaiman – who are accorded places of honour in the Venerable Order of the Honeybee. The Pratchett who emerges from this book is good at many things – beekeeping, mead making, gardening, negotiating, pissing people off – but most of all, he seems to have been good at love. Gaiman said: “This is the loophole writers get – as long as you read us, we’re not dead.” Keep on reading him.
To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity: the grocery store “that took about six songs to get to”; the zine that allowed him to rearrange “photocopied images, short essays and bits of cut-up paper into a version of myself that felt real and true.” This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion — all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life.