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08/06/10--16:05: Annie Proulx (chan 1894158)

Alan Warner on the private, unassuming Annie Proulx: 'Sometimes, in their art and in person, a hero doesn't disappoint'

Annie Proulx is my hero. A private, unassuming and generous woman, she swept in at the age of 56, a fully-formed and great American writer.

She has a fascination with the nuts and bolts of things; her early books were practical manuals on home-brewing and advanced fence-making. This attention to detail expands into the dovetail joints and structural failures of life itself, and better allows her spectacularly to disassemble her unfortunate characters, loosing them among the traps and tripwires of American life: the poverty, the husks of what was love, the harshness and beauty of nature. Yet always the nobility of human stoicism shows through, tinctured with wise, deep humour.

Who can forget homeless Quoyle and his brood, plonked in a grim motel in The Shipping News? Or that fierce old survivor in "The Half-Skinned Steer", stuck in a car during a blizzard, knowing the last game is almost up? She is one of the truly great story writers of our time. There are no fancy-pancy suburban crises; first paragraphs are as big as whole novels. The prizes came as America recognised itself behind the tattered curtain. Close Range was a masterpiece – a writer in clear-sighted love with her subject. Further Wyoming stories have become richer and stranger: "Man Crawls Out of Trees", "Tits-Up in a Ditch".

She is a kind encourager of other writers. As a house guest in Wyoming, there are great anecdotes to be enjoyed, along with masterful margaritas and buffalo steaks; through the low windows sweep limitless sightlines, the ground cratered with bopping prairie dogs. Then there is the run of a library full of wonders: obscure medical texts, maps, local lore and gruesome oddities.

A poor correspondent myself, I file her jewelled emails separately since they reward rereading: rheumy sketches of human foibles, and unforgettable images – those vast Wyo skies, swept free of contrails after 9/11. Sometimes, in their art and in person, a hero doesn't disappoint.

Alan Warner

01/01/11--16:05: Books in 2011 – from the new Alan Hollinghurst to David Foster Wallace's unfinished The Pale King (chan 1894158)

There's little by way of ex-prime ministers' memoirs, but the year ahead offers some fiction big-hitters and some impressive debuts

By far the two most talked-about (if not most read) books published in the past 12 months have been Tony Blair's memoir A Journey and Jonathan Franzen's novel Freedom. It is tempting, therefore, to ask what their equivalents are likely to be in the coming year. The good news is that, as far as I can tell, they won't have any equivalents. If 2010 was, in literary terms, a year of disproportionate attention lavished on a few high-profile titles, 2011 looks set to be one in which the spoils of praise and publicity are more evenly divided.

It helps, of course, that no ex-prime ministers (or indeed ex-presidents) will be publishing their memoirs, although political anoraks will still have much to get them going, from volume two of Alastair Campbell's diaries, Power and the People (Hutchinson, January), to Sarah Brown's Behind the Black Door (Ebury, March), her account of life at No 10, which will certainly be more revealing about what wielding power is like than her husband's recent Beyond the Crash. Another politics title to look out for is Medhi Hasan and James Macintyre's Ed Miliband and the Remaking of the Labour Party, a July offering from the innovative politics publisher Biteback.

Those who like their reading to track the news cycle closely will also find much to divert them in Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website (Cape, February), by Assange's former number two, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. It's a book that is likely to irritate Domscheit-Berg's former boss, scooping as it does his own recently signed (and currently untitled) memoir, which Canongate expects to publish later in the year.

A broader, more reflective take on the recent past will be provided early in 2011 by two hard-hitting works of current affairs: Eric Hobsbawm's How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (Little, Brown, January), about the thinker's ongoing relevance to the modern world, and Dambisa Moyo's How the West was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices Ahead (Allen Lane, January), a critique of postwar western economic policy by the well-respected author of 2009's Dead Aid. In history and biography, 2011's offerings look slightly less compelling, aside from Simon Sebag Montefiore's Jerusalem: The Biography (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, January) and Sadakat Kadri's Heaven on Earth: A History of Sharia Law (Bodley Head, June). In October, the biographer Claire Tomalin publishes her eagerly awaited life of Dickens (Viking).

One non-genre fiction that is thriving is the memoir, and the first few months of 2011 sees a glut of them, many with a depressing theme: stand-outs include Sarah Manguso's The Two Kinds of Decay (Granta, February), about the author's struggle with degenerative disease, and Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story (Fourth Estate, March), about her battle to survive her husband's unexpected death. Another leading American novelist, Annie Proulx, is also branching out into the personal form, with Bird Cloud (Fourth Estate, February), an account of building a new home on a 640-acre plot of Wyoming prairie.

For some reason, books about raising children are much to the fore in coming months. Affluenza author Oliver James returns with How Not to F*** Them Up (Ebury, June), about bringing up under-threes, while in the memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Bloomsbury, February), Amy Chua, a Yale law professor, outlines the superiority of Chinese child-rearing methods. Joining them in this contentious terrain is Rebecca Asher's polemic Shattered: Modern Motherhood and the Illusion of Equality (Harvill Secker, April), calling for a revolution in child-rearing based on greater equality for mothers.

Moving to fiction, the first few months of the year are chiefly notable for some impressive debuts. In January, Sunjeev Sahota's Ours Are the Streets (Picador) audaciously attempts to make us feel sympathy for a British suicide bomber, while AD Miller's highly accomplished thriller Snowdrops (Atlantic) relates the misfortunes of a British lawyer in contemporary Moscow. Another January debut, Scissors, Paper, Stone (Bloomsbury), by Observer journalist Elizabeth Day, deftly unpicks a daughter's troubled relationship with her mother after her father has lapsed into a coma. In February, Tristran Garcia's Hate: A Romance (Faber) – a novel that took France by storm – chronicles friendship and death in 1980s Paris, while Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator (Viking) is a heartbreaking portrayal of war-torn Kashmir in the 90s. In March, Leo Benedictus's The Afterparty (Cape) – touted as a "new kind of novel" – offers an ingenious postmodern take on contemporary celebrity culture. Surely the year's unlikeliest debut, though, will be Jamil Ahmad's The Wandering Falcon (Hamish Hamilton), a collection of stories set in Pakistan's northwest frontier by a 77-year-old Pakistani ex-government official.

As the year moves forward, there will be a greater number of works by established authors. In April David Lodge brings out A Man of Parts (Harvill Secker), a fictional account of the life of HG Wells, and Esther Freud skewers the world of acting in Lucky Break (Bloomsbury). Edward St Aubyn returns in May with At Last (Picador), the final instalment of his exquisite Patrick Melrose series, while Anne Enright publishes The Forgotten Waltz, a story of remembered love set in contemporary Dublin, her first novel since her Booker prize-winning The Gathering. In June, the highly talented Ross Raisin brings out his second novel, Waterline (Viking), and there's also a return for Ali Smith, with the eccentrically titled There but for the (Hamish Hamilton).

But two novels stand out, for very different reasons, as particularly momentous. In April, David Foster Wallace's unfinished work The Pale King (Hamish Hamilton) finally hits the shelves, more than two years after his death. The story of life in a tax office, it promises to be yet another reminder from this remarkable writer of how wide the possibilities of fiction remain. And then in July, Alan Hollinghurst publishes The Stranger's Child (Picador), his first novel since his Booker-winning The Line of Beauty (2004). An epic story of two families and two houses spanning the entire 20th century, it promises to enhance its author's claim to the title of best British novelist working at the moment.

William Skidelsky

02/14/11--13:30: Digested read: Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx (chan 1894158)

4th Estate, £16.99

Driving through the wind-blown volcanic ash of Wyoming, it seems impossible not to ask why anybody would live there. I live there. The best way I can describe the otherworldliness of the river by Bird Cloud, with its towering 400ft cliff, is to invoke Uluru in Australia's red centre. Where else could a woman who carries centuries of Native American tradition in her little finger set down her roots?

During the 1980s, my sister and I were kept talking by a man in a shop and avoided being possibly involved in a fatal car accident as a result. It turned out the man's name was Proulx. It turned out he was no relation. I have since done a lot of research into previous generations of people named Proulx and none of them are relations either. Ah well.

I have lived in many of the wildest and most spiritual parts of North America. I had to leave Newfoundland when the local restaurant stopped serving turbot cheeks and I now find myself drawn away from Centennial because many of the inhabitants are too working class and watch American football on the television. So it is to Bird Cloud I am drawn, to create a sensitive eco-mansion with a $10,000 Japanese soak bath. All for just me.

There were difficulties finding an architect capable of realising my vision in the backwoods of Wyoming, as most could not conceive of anything but the most basic lumber dwelling. Eventually, I came across Kevin McCloud. "Annie has a dream," he said. "She wants to create a defiantly modernist Bauhaus structure that will breathe in the ancient spirits of the region. And with the reclaimed metal sheeting on the outside walls, that glows in the same blood-red of long dead Sioux warriors during the three hours of annual sunlight, I think she might achieve it."

It was also hard to find the right craftsmen. We tried Idle Ian and Bodger Brian, but it was clear when they arrived on site five minutes late that they were not up to my exacting standards. Eventually, Kevin found Patronised Pete and Put-Upon Paul, and the build got under way in late 2005. I had to go away to Capri for the winter and didn't return to Bird Cloud until the following spring. I was horrified. Not only were the tatami prayer mats made of unsustainable rice-straw, but the window in my bedroom had been positioned three inches too far to the left and my view of the eagle's nest was blocked by the cliff. It took three tonnes of dynamite and several hundred thousand dollars to rectify that problem.

The following three years followed a similar rhythm. I would go away somewhere important and glamorous for the winter, while Patronised Pete and Put-Upon Paul would work round the clock in the snow, and then I would come back and scream at them for having got nearly everything wrong. Imagine my fury to discover that the concrete floor sloped 2mm from the door to the wall and that it was not the precise shade of umber I had specified. That cost a further $70,000 to put right.

Worse was to come. My Japanese soak bath flooded the downstairs living area, ruining its recycled teak flooring, the cupboard drawers didn't open noiselessly, the temperature control for my library was faulty, the deer antler door handles had not been polished and the Polygal windows arrived with the wrong kind of non-abrasive dirt. I couldn't write a word for weeks.

During the rare lulls between catastrophes, I would take to the outdoors, removing the cattle that had wandered on to my estate and communing with the sublime, while giant eagles soared above me, repeatedly yodelling, "Thank Christ someone as deep as Annie has come to live in this Godforsaken land" as they patrolled the desolate skies. And then, disaster once more. Not only had Moron Martin, the landscaper, planted non-native species of chenopodium throughout my 700 acres, he had used non-organic compost to do so. I had to remove three feet of topsoil throughout to avert an environmental disaster.

In 2009, after an agreeable six months in Germany, the work was complete and I was able to soak in my Japanese bath after a tough hour searching for prehistoric relics from the 19th century, congratulating myself that the project had only come in $4m over budget. And then Patronised Pete called to remind me that they didn't bother to clear the snow from the minor roads in winter, so I had really just built myself an expensive summer house. So my restless spirit must move once more. Luckily, Kevin has identified the perfect plot in the Yukon.

Digested read, digested: Grande Dame Designs.

John Crace

02/19/11--16:05: Bird Cloud: A Memoir by Annie Proulx – review (chan 1894158)

US author Annie Proulx's account of building her dream house shows that writing about the minutiae of project management is not her strong suit

Bird Cloud – or "Broke Bank House", as I'm sure Annie Proulx was not tempted to call it – is the story of how a great and ageing American writer came across a 640-acre spread of land in Wyoming, bought it and set about designing and building (more accurately, having people build) her ideal house on it. Books are like homes, too, and within 10 pages of crossing the threshold of this one readers will put up their feet, secure in the knowledge that they won't be moving on to another any time soon.

The book is also a history of the land the house stands on, and of how Proulx's desire finally to root herself here has its roots in a childhood of endlessly upping sticks. Preparing for one such move, Annie's dad put the family's pet crow "in a hole-punched cardboard box and lashed the box to the back bumper. The poor fellow was dead when we stopped for lunch by the side of the road, asphyxiated by exhaust". This is Proulx in a nutshell, in that something one might ordinarily think of as weird (a pet crow?) is also weirdly ordinary. On the larger canvas of the novels it's like magic realism without the cloying suggestion of genre tricks (trees talking to one another etc). The magic – from the reader's point of view – derives from the way the land seems to have found its ideal, almost instinctive expression in her prose. For the author it comes from a deep knowledge of practicalities and processes – both physical and economic – that have shaped and gouged the land and its people. That instinctive voice, in other words, is immensely sophisticated and learned. (Robert Frost did something similar, but took greater pains to bake the sophistication into down-home wisdom.) Midway through construction of the house, Proulx goes to New York "to talk about Jackson Pollock and the influence of the southwest Indians on some of his early work". Her writing has a primal power but there is nothing primitive about it.

To achieve a comparable effect in her house, she enlists an imaginative architect and a sympathetic crew of perfectionist local builders whom she dubs the "James gang". Needless to say, things do not go according to plan. The extreme weather – "days that burn your eyes out of their sockets gave way within hours to new snowstorms" – makes appalling demands on materials, builders and client alike. The combination of gales and snowstorms creates drifts so huge that Proulx reconciles herself to the idea that the house is uninhabitable in winter unless she is willing to live like a castaway for four months of the year. Given her dream of a kitchen with "drawers in red, violet, aquamarine, burnt orange [and] John Deere green" in which will be served "Argentinian salads of butterhead lettuce, tomato, sweet onion, roast lamb with Greek cucumber… and dry riesling for the cook", this was never going to happen. Still, this portrait of Annie the Ranch Goddess forms a charming contrast to the "bossy, impatient, excruciatingly shy, short-tempered, single-minded" author announced at the outset. These "character negatives" have ample opportunity to flourish as difficulties, noise and disruption mount, but Proulx's imperious and frequently impractical demands are redeemed by a dry sense of her own shortcomings. The granite counters, once installed, are a great success: "Everyone liked them, even me."

The James brothers wanted to seal their original deal with a handshake but Proulx does "not lead a handshake life" and insisted on a contract. I wonder: did that contract include a confidentiality clause? I'd be very curious to hear an account of this westerly pharaonic undertaking from a point of view other than the author-client's. Especially since the whole thing – which was always going to cost a bomb – went way over budget. Not to worry; Proulx is, in her own words, "fabulously wealthy". True, I have wrenched the phrase maliciously out of context – she's actually describing her metaphorical good fortune in being able to see a bald eagle's nest and a golden eagle's nest from her dining-room window – but a view like that was never going to come cheap. Everyone involved in the project must have been conscious that the Wyoming laureate was loaded, even if she insists at the outset that she is on a "tight budget". Later she has to start "selling stock" because the house has "taken all [her] money"; eventually she is "close to broke". At this point, as the cost, troubles and detailed recounting of every little setback and achievement mount up, the comfy reader described at the beginning of this review begins to fidget. It seems that there might be a different kind of identification between building a house and composing a book than was suggested at the outset. The latter begins suspiciously to resemble a way of covering the spiralling costs of the former.

Still, eventually it's all done (if still rather dusty) and Annie is free to roam the property, quaff some of that much-anticipated riesling and do some serious weather and bird-watching. Sentence after sentence reveals the immediate and intimate relation to the physical world that forms the backdrop to her fiction: eagles standing in the shallows, "cold water soaking their fancy leggings"; an eagle and a falcon engaged in "a sky-filling quarrel"; another eagle digging its talons into a trout, struggling to get airborne and ending up "riding the fish like a surfboard down the rushing river." This is the kind of stuff I, as a reader, cannot get enough of. Strange to discover, then, that I had soon had enough of it.

Early on in the book Proulx tells of an incident when she and her sister go into a cloth shop. There is something spooky about the guy behind the counter. They leave – and we know that something is going to happen. It's barely more than an anecdote; but these few pages have the instant traction that characterises the best fiction. It turns out that without the human and narrative purchase – conspicuously lacking in the final section of Bird Cloud – Proulx's observational prowess and gift for verbally harnessing the elements cannot long sustain themselves. In the context of the book as a whole it means that one reads the day-by-day, what's-gonna-go-wrong-next? account of impediments overcome with far greater attentiveness than the passages of achieved and qualified contentment. The house is not quite the definitive resting place she hoped it would become – and the book is not quite what we hoped it might be either. That's why home, as Philip Larkin put it in an altogether cosier context, is so sad: "A joyous shot at how things ought to be,/ Long fallen wide."

Geoff Dyer

02/25/11--16:07: Critical eye: books review roundup (chan 1894158)

Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx, Great House by Nicole Krauss and Henry's Demons by Patrick and Henry Cockburn

"I've long harboured a literary crush on Annie Proulx. At her best she's a world-class stylist, her prose as richly moist as her sensibility is dry." But Melanie McGrath in the Evening Standard didn't take to Bird Cloud, "a collection of essays and recollections, loosely themed around the idea of home, the largest section documenting Proulx's attempts over a couple of years to build her dream house" in Wyoming: "If property porn happens to be your thing, I'm sure you'll love this. Otherwise . . . Nothing you wouldn't learn ad nauseam from the property bore at a dinner party." "Property porn has never before risen to such literary heights," echoed Lewis Jones in the Spectator: "The best thing in Bird Cloud is the last chapter, which she devotes to the local wildlife: porcupines, coyotes, deer, elk, mountain lions, and above all the birds." According to David Vann in the Sunday Times, "the book is really more of a self-portrait of Proulx herself, late in her career, taking stock of her life and her place in the world . . . She chases down the past as energetically as she chases the neighbours' cows off the land she's trying to rehabilitate."

Most reviewers of Nicole Krauss's Great House noted its darker hue than her previous, well-received novel, The History of Love. "Readers who expect the same extrovert playfulness . . . are likely to be disappointed," wrote Adrian Turpin in the Financial Times: "Written unmistakably in a minor key, Great House is peopled by a cast of self-flagellants whose only connection is, for the most part, their failure to connect. It's a credit to her formidable skills that Krauss manages to make her emotionally tortured crew engaging. That said, you wouldn't want to go on holiday with any of them." Holly Kyte in the Daily Telegraph felt the "novel may simply be too grief-stricken for many . . . the solemnity of it would be crushing if it were not so beautifully expressed." "The History of Love is undoubtedly the more enjoyable novel of the two," thought Ashley Sayeau in the New Statesman. "And yet, at a time when market pressures demand that new books be both funny and heart-rending, featuring characters who suffer and prevail, it is encouraging to come across writing that does not try to distract the reader from realising that death marches, the Kindertransport and the attentions of the secret police do something to a person, and those who love them."

Ivan Fallon in the Independent saluted that paper's veteran foreign correspondent Patrick Cockburn, and Henry's Demons, "a book of extraordinary candour and frankness on the most private of his family affairs: the mental illness which struck his 20-year-old son nine years ago . . . His co-author is Henry Cockburn, an apparently happy, normal arts student in Brighton who one night, without any warning, suddenly tried to swim across the freezing estuary at Newhaven because, he said, 'voices' had told him to." Nina Lakhani in the Independent on Sunday paid tribute to "a frightening, gut-wrenching and fantastical story of a young man's voyage into madness . . . Henry's own words leap out. His descriptions . . . are so extraordinary and fanciful that they could be stories from a fairytale." Cressida Connolly in the Spectator also praised a "remarkable" book, "as important an addition to our understanding . . . as Oliver Sacks's extraordinary navigations through the secret realms of our brains . . . It would be impossible not to like Henry, who is candid, touching and often funny."

03/04/11--03:19: The great books giveaway (chan 1894158)

On Saturday 5 March, a million books will be given away across the UK in the first ever World Book Night. We asked writers which books they give as gifts and which they've been most pleased to receive. And children's authors recommended books to give to children

David Almond
I'd give a child any book by the amazing Cressida Cowell. Best to start with How to Train Your Dragon (Hodder) and then go on to the whole series that recounts the life and adventures of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III. The books are exciting, barmy, hilarious, clever, original, accessible, heartwarming and wonderfully well written.

Margaret Atwood
The book I most often give as a gift is The Gift, by Lewis Hyde (Canongate). I keep four or five copies around the house at all times, for swift giving to people who need them. Most often they are artists of one kind or another, and are worrying about the disconnect between what they do and how hard they work, and how little money they make. Hyde's book explains the differences between the money economy in which we think we live, and the gift economy, in which we also live. Gifts – including artistic gifts – travel in mysterious ways, but travel they must, or else they die. The Gift is essential reading for anyone who has embarked on this journey. (It also inspired the creators of World Book Night. That is one of its gifts.)

John Banville
The most fascinating and most beautifully produced book I have come across in some years was given to me by a friend this Christmas past. Microscripts, by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions/Christine Burgin), is a thing like no other, a transcription of Walser's tiny stories that he wrote in maniacally tiny handwriting, the letters no more than a millimetre high, so that an entire story would fit on the back of a matchbox. The deciphering of the script, by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte, was a triumph of scholarly tenacity, and this edition, designed by Christine Burgin, is a triumph of the book-maker's art.

William Boyd
On the whole I prefer to give a book token and let people make their own selection, but my book-gift of choice more often than not tends to be Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics). It is a unique novel – taking the form of hundreds of pages of footnotes to a 999-line epic poem in rhyming couplets. It's very funny, as well as being very brilliant. No one else could have written it and no one could ever hope to write anything similar. So I give it, I suppose, both as a kind of a test and a mark of respect, the subtext being: I hope you appreciate this extraordinary book and also that I think you are the type of cultured person with a fully functioning sense of humour who will.

Raymond Briggs
The best book I received as a child was William the Outlaw, by Richmal Crompton (Macmillan). I remember sitting by the fire in the kitchen and laughing so much I almost fell off the chair. My mother got slightly alarmed thinking I was having a fit. Today, I have an almost complete collection of the William books; their crackpot humour never dates and is as good as the Goons.

Anthony Browne
The one book I would give to a child is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by the American writer and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (Andersen), an extraordinary, unique picture book with a brilliant premise. The fictional introduction – the only piece of text longer than two sentences – explains that the pictures in the book are the articles of an unsolved mystery. Thirty years ago a man called Harris Burdick approached a children's book publisher, explaining that he had written 14 stories. Rather than burden the publisher with his entire body of work, he brought just one picture from each story, under each of which he had written the title and a brief caption for the illustration. The publisher was fascinated by the pictures and told Burdick that he would like to see the stories in their entirety as soon as possible. Burdick agreed to bring them to him the next day. But he didn't show up. For years, the publisher tried desperately to track him down, without success. Harris Burdick had mysteriously disappeared and all that was left of him were the 14 mesmerising pictures.

The rest of the book shows us the strange black and white illustrations with their titles and captions. Each one is a superb, imaginative work of art. Having set himself up with the inspired introduction, Van Allsburg was then at liberty to produce a series of drawings entirely from his imagination, free from the limitations of a traditional narrative. The result is a series of implied narratives that are as enthralling as the child's imagination chooses them to be. I have often talked about the importance of leaving gaps between the pictures and the text for children to fill in with their own imaginations. In the case of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, the gaps are cavernous.

AS Byatt
I particularly like giving books to my literary granddaughter, who is going to read English at university next year. Things like the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, or the poems of Wallace Stevens, or Keats's letters. Or Alice Oswald's The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Faber). I remember starting my own library of poetry at her age, and I still have those books. I also send her things like Angela Carter's anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (Virago) – short, sharp stories to read in between A level studies.

Julia Donaldson
I would give Days with Frog and Toad, by Arnold Lobel (Harper). This is one of four books, each containing five short stories about a pair of amphibian friends. Frog is the straight guy and Toad is the comically cantankerous half of the duo. He endears himself to readers because he embodies so many human foibles, such as laziness, fear and attachment to routine. (And his frequent exclamations of "Blah!" get children hooting with laughter, so perhaps it's not the ideal bedtime choice.) In my favourite story, "The List", Toad makes a list of Things To Do and then refuses to do anything when it blows away. (He can't chase after it because that wasn't on the list.) I know just how he feels.

Roddy Doyle
I think I was 10. I was having a party. The weather was good, so my mother was keeping us all outside, so we'd break nothing and get sick on the grass. One of my friends handed me a present. He looked a bit embarrassed. I knew what it was before I opened it. A book.

Books weren't presents. I loved books, but they were a bit like food. I loved chicken, but a leg in wrapping paper would have been a huge disappointment. But my mother was looking, so I thanked him and tore off the paper. Great Expectations. I eventually read it. Pip in the graveyard, the escaped convict – more than 40 years later, I'm still reading Dickens.

Margaret Drabble
The best book I've ever been given is the complete six-volume edition of Van Gogh's letters last Christmas, but the book I kept on giving to my grandchildren when they were small was Dr Seuss's The Sneetches (HarperCollins). I gave them all lots of copies until I was told to stop. I loved this book so much, I wanted them to love it too. Dr Seuss is so amusing and egalitarian and free-thinking and so unlike all the more respectable English books I was given and liked as a child. Green Eggs and Ham was pretty good too, but the Sneetches were best. They should be compulsory reading for all warring nations.

Dave Eggers
I find myself recommending Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (Harper Perennial), about the Biafran war, all the time. It's ideal for people who are are looking for the scope and breadth of Tolstoy, or Chekhov, Edward P Jones or even Steinbeck. She has the kind of unwavering command of history and humanity that puts her in that company.

Tim Flannery
My all-time favourite book gift is Oliver Lawson Dick's edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives (Penguin). You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England, and with the lives of the likes of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Harvey and Lady Herbert revealed "unto ye cunny", it was far too dangerous a work to publish until long after Aubrey's death.

The book I've been most pleased to receive is Tomás O'Crohan's 1929 classic The Islandman (Oxford). It was a present from my great friend Adam Wynn, and what a classic tale it is, telling vividly of the last remnants of a truly tribal Europe.

Neil Gaiman
The book I give most often is Tom Phillips's gloriously strange A Humument (Thames & Hudson). I do not know how to describe it to people – art book? Novel? Proto-graphic novel? It is unique: a mundane and gloomily worthy Victorian novel called A Human Document, recreated, reinvented and retold, page by page, into the adventures of a man named Toge. Each page has been painted into, cut up. The original novel is still visible, but now there's a mad, allusive tale of life on top of it, filled with gnomic, haiku-like texts and paintings. It even has a sex scene. Whatever it is, it makes me happy.

John Gray
"Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text." So writes Fernando Pessoa in the 148th note of The Book of Disquiet (Penguin, edited and translated by Richard Zenith), a unique text composed from scraps that the elusive Portuguese writer left in a large trunk; it was first published in 1982, nearly 50 years after his death. Writing under the guise of a series of alter egos or "heteronyms", Pessoa established himself as one – in fact, several – of Portugal and Europe's greatest poets. If you're looking for plot and character or a message of some kind, The Book of Disquiet is not for you. If you're bored with such conventional fictions, it may be the book you've always been looking for.

Mark Haddon
The book I most often give away is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (Vintage). As the subtitle describes it, it is "A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years". At root it is an explanation of why Eurasians run the world: not because of any innate racial superiority but because of blunt geographical and biological facts. It's easy for societies to move east or west between similar climates, for example, but very hard for societies to migrate north and south (you don't cross the Sahara on a whim in search of good farmland). The book is also packed with solutions to old unanswered questions as well as intriguing questions you'd never thought of asking. Why did Aztecs die of Spanish diseases while the Spanish seemed immune to Aztec ones? Why can't you train a leopard to hunt? How the hell did anyone find Pitcairn Island, let alone tell anyone else about it?

The book I've most enjoyed receiving as a gift is Full Moon, by Michael Light (Cape), which is full of big, beautiful, digitally restored photographs of the Apollo missions. I think it's very difficult to believe completely in the fact that men have travelled to the moon until you read this book – the crispness of the focus, the sheer physical detail, bolts and tubes and scratched glass, the dirtiness of the lunar surface. Perhaps I'm still a 12-year-old boy at heart, but I can't open this book without a kind of ache, an almost religious realisation that there really is somewhere else.

Mohsin Hamid
The book I most often give is Pereira Maintains by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, translated by Patrick Creagh (Canongate). It's an amazing novel: a political thriller, a touching romance, deliciously compressed and formally intriguing. I give it because it's a pleasure to read and among the books I love it's the one that most people have never heard of. (It's also one of the books I've been most pleased to receive as a gift, in San Francisco a decade ago, for all the same reasons.)

Charlie Higson
I would give a child any of Andy Stanton's Mr Gum books (Egmont) – they are wildly funny and inventive and play around with the whole idea of what a book is and how a story is told. Any author who creates a billionaire gingerbread man called Alan Taylor deserves to win the Nobel prize for literature. The book I was most pleased to receive when I was a kid was a collection of Greek myths and legends. I've always loved these stories and they're the basis of nearly every story told since then. They appealed to me as boy because there's a pleasing lack of morality to them and lots of fighting.

Eric Hobsbawm
I was once, a long long time ago, given WH Auden's Look, Stranger! (Faber), just published, as a birthday present. That is the book gift I remember most vividly.

Mary Hoffman

If the child were 8-12 years old, I think I would choose Louis Sachar's Holes (Bloomsbury). This is a perfectly constructed book as well as being exciting, funny and full of suspense. You know you are in safe hands from the opening line: "There is no lake at Camp Green Lake." It's a real writer's book, giving tremendous pleasure to an adult who appreciates Sachar's skill. But it's equally enjoyable by a child reader – a winner all round.

Michael Holroyd
The book I most often give as a present is A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes (Vintage Classics). A superficial reason is that, owing to a generous moment of confusion by Royal Mail, I have several copies in a handsome Folio Society edition. But the real reason is that I consider it a much-overlooked and undervalued novel, inappropriately eclipsed perhaps by William Golding's Lord of the Flies. On one level it's an exciting adventure story with great storms and earthquakes, terrific animals, unruly children and some dubious pirates. What more, when young, could you want? But all this coexists with another narrative, darker and more sophisticated, complex and tragic. You can read this book over again and have read a different novel.

Anthony Horowitz
If there was anything I hated receiving as a child, it was a book token. I had a couple of namby-pamby aunts who always gave me book tokens, a present almost purposely designed to remind me how thick and illiterate I was. There was always the expectation that I would buy a "good" book – rather than a Beano annual. And anyway I often lost the wretched thing long before I got anywhere near a shop. But I loved receiving books and still remember unwrapping Andrew Lang's Tales of Troy (Wordsworth) one Christmas day. It instantly opened the world of myth and legend for me. I absolutely loved the adventures of Ulysses, the death of Achilles, the rivalry of the gods, the construction of the wooden horse that ended the nine long years of war. Myths could be seen as the first great stories of our civilisation, and Lang told them very well (with excellent illustrations). This was the start of an enthusiasm that has lasted to this day. I still hate book tokens though.

Lewis Hyde
I went to college in Minnesota in the mid-1960s. There were a number of talented poets in the state at the time, including Robert Bly and John Berryman. We young writers used to hang around them just to see how they held their pens, what kind of paper they used, what they ate for breakfast.

This is an example, it turns out, of a Hindu practice, darshan, meaning to lay eyes on or to behold. Young artists need to be able to contemplate their more accomplished elders. Something is transmitted by sight alone. More is transmitted, of course, by the work of art itself, by the poem spoken or in print. And, to be sure, there needs to be an actual cash economy of literature if writers and publishers are to survive. But the cash economy is useless unless the gift of art is there as well, doing its strange, transformative work.

The young Bob Dylan lived in Minnesota a few years before I got there and he has since written about the day in Minneapolis when he first heard Woody Guthrie recordings: "I listened all afternoon . . . as if in a trance . . . feeling more like myself than ever before".

Myself, I remember that Bly once gave me a little pamphlet of translations he'd made of poems by Issa. Here's one of them:

Now listen, you watermelons –

if any thieves come –

turn into frogs!

The first page of this pamphlet contained a simple declaration: "This booklet is a gift, and is not to be sold." Years later I myself was to write a book on gift exchange and art. Perhaps the seed of that work was planted by my having been lucky enough to witness an older man's generosity.

PD James
I never give books, only book tokens, which I give frequently for birthdays and at Christmas to young and old members of my family. There would in any case be no book that I would most often give, as each book has to be chosen individually for the recipient. The book I have been most pleased to receive was The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, which was awarded to me as a short story prize at the Cambridge and County High School for Girls on 12 November 1936.

Hari Kunzru
As so much of my reading life takes place onscreen, I've increasingly begun to fetishise books as objects. I find a lot of gifts in rare-book dealers – a first of BS Johnson's The Unfortunates as a wedding present for two writers, and an early edition of The Lord of the Rings for a childhood friend. I've given several people books in Collins's Britain in Pictures series, published as a patriotic exercise during the second world war. These little books survey everything from novelists to mountaineers. Texts were written by major figures such as Edith Sitwell, John Betjeman, John Piper and Cecil Beaton. They're beautiful and inexpensive, and you can always find one that's appropriate for the recipient.

John Lanchester
About 10 years ago I had a conversation with Jonathan Franzen about writers' books, in the sense of books particularly admired by other writers but not, for whatever reason, as widely famous as they deserved to be. He mentioned Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson, and since then it's become the book I've given away more often than any other. It's a collection of linked short stories, Johnson's first; before it he was best known as a poet. It's a beautifully fresh fiction, whose main character is a young, junky alcoholic, and it's an extraordinary, Blakean piece of poetic prose – that being one of the hardest things for any writer to achieve without succumbing to self-indulgence.

Another book I greatly admire and have often given away, and even more often recommended, is John Keegan's The Face of Battle (Pimlico), about ordinary soldiers' experience of war down the centuries. For some reason I've had a very low level of uptake when it comes to people actually reading the book, maybe because the friends I've given it to tend to be anti-war types. But that's the point: the soldier's-eye-view makes this about as anti-war as a book can be.

Andrea Levy
In 1979 I was given a copy of The Women's Room, by Marilyn French (Virago) for my 23rd birthday. I had never really read a novel from start to finish before. I was made to read Dickens and George Eliot at school, which was such tough going for me that I believed reading fiction to be a form of torture. So I looked at this fat book and wondered if it might be useful as a door stop. But then I started to I read it and I was amazed. That experience changed me into a voracious reader. It was the most valuable present I have ever been given.

David Lodge
I possess a small black-bound copy of Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!), by Jerome K Jerome, inscribed on the fly-leaf: "Happy Xmas to David, Love & Kisses, Auntie Eileen" and dated "Xmas 1944". I was nine years and eleven months old. Eileen was my mother's younger sister, a glamorous and exciting figure to me because she was working as a civilian secretary for the US army in recently liberated Paris. How she obtained the book, the 106th impression, printed in December 1944, and conveyed it to me I do not know. It quickly became one of my favourite books, which I read again and again, especially when comfort reading was required. I tended to skip the historical and topographical passages and revisit the comic set pieces. I have just read the first few pages again and almost immediately I was laughing aloud at the funniest description of hypochondria in all literature.

Many years later a Bulgarian postgraduate student who was writing a thesis about my novels wrote to ask me some questions, one of which was: "is your writing influenced by Jerome K Jerome?" It had never occurred to me before – I liked to answer this kind of question with such names as Joyce, Greene and Waugh, but I replied without hesitation, "Yes". I hope she got her PhD – she deserved it for that insight.

David Mitchell
Choosing the right gift-book is the art of the matchmaker – it must be tailored to the individual – and so there's no single book that I give to people habitually. Books that I have given to more than one person, however, include Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (Bloomsbury), Minnesotan poet James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press), Chekhov's A Life in Letters (Penguin) (his de facto memoir) and, most recently, Keith Richards's meaty, wise autobiography, Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

The book I was most pleased to receive as a gift was Through the Looking-Glass. I was about 10, and my mum just left it in my bedroom, unannounced. I remember following the bizarrely staid Alice on her trippy quest (wondering why she never screams "You people are all total nutters!") until it was too dark to read any more.

Michael Moorcock
Apart from George Meredith's spectacular The Amazing Marriage (out of print for 80 years), the book I give away most frequently is probably One Last Mad Embrace, by Jack Trevor Story (Reinkarnation), once the Guardian's favourite and funniest columnist. Although The Trouble with Harry and Live Now, Pay Later are better known (and almost as funny), I believe Embrace to be his masterpiece, skilfully blending the real life of an impoverished movie writer with a hilariously fast-paced plot. It's impossible to tell where autobiography ends and invention begins, but it's safe to say that the more absurd and incredible the anecdote the more likely it is to derive from Story's own life. For some reason, books about lower middle-class or working-class life rarely stay in print, but Story's books have enough enthusiasts to be regularly reprinted and are pictures of an almost forgotten world of the 1950s and 60s.

The book I was most pleased to receive (as an adult) was The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, recently reprinted by Savoy Books with all the original brilliant illustrations from Lilliput magazine. The Surrealist Sporting Club's dwarf boxer mostly fights timepieces, but plays Mars at soccer, enjoys the night of the big witch shoot, looks in at a very long-running play at the Plant Theatre and goes 10 rounds with a grandfather clock. Absolutely original, incredibly funny. The new edition is also one of the most beautifully produced books around.

Andrew Motion
I don't have a regular giveaway book: I'm more likely to give something I happen to have read recently and liked. But if I were to have a regular . . . it would be Edward Thomas's Collected Poems (Faber). They don't make big claims, but they're stealthily commanding: a beautiful end in themselves, and a doorway to modern poetry. And being given something? The chance would be a fine thing. Anything by or about Tennyson is always very welcome (address supplied).

David Nicholls

The books we give change as we grow older. At university I presented The Rattle Bag to anyone who so much as looked at me, but two have remained constant over the years: Tender is the Night, by F Scott Fitzgerald (Penguin) and JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey (Penguin), two books that languish in the shadow of better-known works. In truth, Franny and Zooey is more of a gamble – I know some people find it precious and self-indulgent – but I'd be very wary of befriending anyone who wasn't moved by the last page of that beautiful book.

As to gifts I've received, I have a first edition of Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings which would be at the top of my list in the event of that terrible hypothetical house-fire.

Michelle Paver
When I was about five years old, my father gave me Once Long Ago, by Roger Lancelyn Green for Christmas. At the time, I didn't own many hardbacks – mostly we got our books from the library – and this was the biggest, most beautiful book I'd ever owned. It's a marvellous collection of fairy stories from around the world: there's a man-eating Chinese monster who's a satisfyingly messy eater, an ancient Egyptian treasure thief, a terrifying Icelandic witch in a stone boat – and many more, all evocatively illustrated by the Czech artist Vojtech Kubasta. Although I didn't realise it at the time, each story is retold in a style that's in keeping with its source country, whether it's Sudanese, Polynesian, Japanese or Basuto.

I read it again and again. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've ended up delving into the myths of different cultures to create my own fairy tales. And it hasn't escaped my notice that the first story in the collection is an American Indian story called "The Boy and the Wolves".

Terry Pratchett
Some miscalculation a few years ago meant that we ended up with, I think, five copies of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. We didn't take any of them back to the shop, taking the view that even in the outside toilet you might find yourself wanting to know in a hurry about the correct usage of the Oxford comma. The experience led to a family pact, but generally Schott's Miscellany manages to get through twice. That is fine because in our house books are neither furnishings nor badges of learning; they are debris. Officially we have two libraries, which are defined as places where you store your old books while your new books pile up beside the bed. All library owners have to beware of the inveterate book borrower but I am a compulsive book lender and keep a stock of Gail Bell's The Poison Principle (Pan), and I'm down to my last copy of Dorothy Hartley's Food in England (Piatkus).

Annie Proulx
As I love Italian cuisine I have given away so many copies of that wonderful regional history of geography, people, particular dishes and foodstuffs by the Russian-born literary scholar Elena Kostioukovitch, Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (Duckworth), that I rarely have a copy on hand for myself. Kostioukovitch is Umberto Eco's translator. The book is lavishly illustrated and gives great reading pleasure. For North American friends who share an interest in natural history, I have found nothing more gripping and readable than Tim Flannery's The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (Penguin). For friends who are curious about New Mexico, the unique murder mysteries of Tony Hillerman featuring Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee give a detailed picture of the dry desert-mountain terrain of the American south-west.

Jonathan Raban
There's an element of missionary activity in giving a book to a friend. Of course you want to simply share your own excitement and pleasure in the text, but you also want to turn your friend into a fellow convert, an initiate in the faith. I like to give poetry anthologies to people who don't usually read poetry. It hardly matters which anthology: it might be Palgrave's Golden Treasury (Oxford), or Christopher Ricks's newish edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, or Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney's The Rattle Bag (Faber). I imagine someone, grown slack in the habit of skimming a novel for its story or a newspaper column for its opinion, discovering, for the first time, the joy of patiently teasing out, say, the three stanzas of Keats's "Ode to Melancholy", word by word and line by line, over the course of a rapt hour or three.

Ian Rankin
When I was a student, a friend gave me the first two volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (Arrow) for my birthday. I started reading the first book, thinking: not sure I'm going to like this. All snobby privilege and a world I won't be interested in. By volume two, I was hooked. Widmerpool and the others were such good company, and the writing was elegant and concise, so I bought the rest of the books in the series.

Michael Rosen

It all depends on the age of the child, but I think the tales that seem to work on so many levels for different ages are the Greek myths. I know of two very good retellings – Geraldine McCaughrean's and Terry Deary's – but the stories can be revisited in different ways at different times in our lives. This makes them great for sharing, too.

Meg Rosoff
My parents gave me Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (Puffin) for my 11th birthday. The book features a geeky, intelligent child who also happens to be named Meg; she is overshadowed by a variety of cooler, more intelligent, academically successful characters. As part of the harrowing quest to find her scientist father, Meg is presented with the gift of her faults by the strange and tragic Mrs Whatsit. This was my first literary epiphany – it went against everything I'd ever been taught about being good and cultivating only positive qualities. Passion, stubbornness and rage save Meg in the end, and it was exactly those qualities that (after many trials and tribulations, and more than 30 years later) saved me.

Salman Rushdie
Three times in my life I've been given beautiful old editions of translations of the great story-compendium The Arabian Nights, or, to give it its proper title, The Thousand Nights and One Night. I'm delighted to have them all. This is the book that contains all other books; and its frame story, the tale of the teller of tales Scheherazade, is one of the great accounts of heroism in all of literature. It is the story of how a brilliant and brave woman escapes death at the hands of a monster – King Shahryar, who has been marrying, deflowering and then executing a virgin every night for three years – by telling him stories every night for the next two and three-quarter years and, improbably, civilising him. That she falls in love with the beast she tames is also the stuff of fable.

Lionel Shriver
The novel I've most enjoyed giving is A Home at the End of the World, by Michael Cunningham (Penguin). This author is better known for a later book, The Hours – naturally, since that one made it to the cinema. But this earlier novel has a rare warmth to it, without ever seeming sappy. It reconfigures the concept of family into something you can create, as opposed to a bunch of people you're simply stuck with. When I gave this book to my best friend in New York, he went out and bought – I kid you not – 10 more copies to give to other friends. Now that's a good present: one that multiplies itself.

Frances Stonor Saunders
The Door, by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix (Vintage) is a painfully beautiful account of the unlikely bond between two women – an (unnamed) married writer and her enigmatic cleaner, Emerence – who are separated by class, education, age and experience. The story develops into an emotionally and morally complex pas de deux, and holds you spellbound until the end.

You can read the novel again and again without really understanding how it works, but it conjures a psychological atmosphere that is unforgettable. It confirms the Hungarian Szabó as one of the great voices of 20th-century European literature. She died in 2007, aged 90, with a book in her lap.

Colm Tóibín
Over the 19 years since it first appeared, Eugene McCabe's novel Death and Nightingales (Vintage) is the book I have most often given to people. This is because of my own experience reading it – a sheer delight in the scenes and sentences, and then a realisation, a sudden jolt, as the enormity of what is really being planned and plotted becomes plain to both the heroine and the reader all at the same time. It is a wonderful gift because once someone has read this book, they become addicted to talking about it, describing their shock at the level of darkness and evil and sheer malevolence, as well as innocence, depicted and dramatised in its pages.

Rose Tremain
All writers have to steer a difficult course round the giving of their own books. When I started writing, I used to imagine that friends would gasp with joy at the arrival of a newly published Rose Tremain hardback, but I was mainly deluded. And I never had much luck with either of my parents or with my sister as readers. The gift of a new book was habitually followed by a deafening silence.

Perhaps this has made me wary of offering novels – my own, or anyone else's. What I most often give is the poetry that has really spoken to me, starting with my three favourite collected editions, Yeats, Auden and Larkin, and topping these up with a dash of Carol Ann Duffy, who seems to be the only serious modern poet who has remembered how to conjure the liberating power of laughter.

Sarah Waters
One of my most treasured possessions is a Picador paperback copy of the Grimms' Household Tales, given to me as an 11th birthday present in 1977. Until then, fairy stories had come to me via Disney, and were rather cosy affairs. These short, odd stories were much darker, and I found myself both troubled and thrilled by their macabre details: the talking horse's head in "The Goose-Girl", the endlessly growing noses in "The Nose Tree", the little girl who has to cut off a finger to make a key for her brothers' prison in "The Seven Ravens". The illustrations – by Mervyn Peake – only added to the beauty and the weirdness.

Like all powerful narratives, their meanings shift with each re-reading. I was wonderfully lucky to receive them at such a hungry, impressionable age. The book, when I handle it now, still feels like a gift.

Jacqueline Wilson
To a small child I'd give Lavender's Blue: A Book of Nursery Rhymes, compiled by Kathleen Lines and brilliantly illustrated by Harold Jones (Oxford). He uses a wonderful delicate colour palette of blue, sage green, lilac and apricot to create his own quirkily detailed dream-like world. You could pore over the pages every day for a year and still find fresh delights.

www.worldbooknight.org

03/11/11--16:05: Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx - review (chan 1894158)

Kathryn Hughes listens to Annie Proulx's tale of house-building woe

Such is the charged magic of Annie Proulx's prose that you might think there is no subject it cannot render luminous. But try Polygal. It crops up rather a lot in Proulx's latest book and, no matter how hard she tries, she cannot make this particular brand of polycarbonate plastic sing. And it's not Polygal's fault, either. Much of Bird Cloud, Proulx's first non-fiction book for 20 years, remains inert, as stubbornly charmless as the Wyoming wilderness in which it squats.

Bird Cloud is subtitled "a memoir" but anyone hoping that Proulx is going to reveal all will be disappointed. Instead what she offers is an account of two years in the middle of the last decade during which she attempted to build her dream house – aka Bird Cloud – on a plot of wind-scoured land strung out along the North Platte River. There's trauma aplenty here, but not of the misery-memoir kind. Taps leak, the wrong building parts arrive and the state-of-the-art concrete floor turns a funny colour. The Polygal creaks and snaps alarmingly in the night, ringing out shots like gunfire. The house that was intended as "a poem in wood" turns out to be more of an argument in expensively sourced materials from around the world, including a bath from Japan, timber from Alaska and tiles from Brazil. There's even a sink, inspired by a photo in a glossy magazine, which reveals itself on arrival to be so snooty that it refuses to fit anywhere and is elevated to the status of sculpture instead.

All this might seem a long way from Proulx's usual beat of exquisite ordinariness. In novels and short stories such as The Shipping News and "Brokeback Mountain", her quiet, sinewy characters find their worlds split apart by disturbances far more profound than a dodgy boiler or misfiring colour scheme. But while Proulx's focus may have altered in its shift from fiction to autobiography, her style has not. As a result wrangles with soft furnishings are conveyed in that plucked prose she normally reserves for characters negotiating the overwhelming tides of geography and history. The effect is like one of those classy parlour games where you are required to rewrite the Highway Code in the style of Hemingway.

Of course, it isn't all like this. Proulx, who is 75, has picked this patch of Wyoming for her dream home – rather than, say, a retirement complex in Florida – precisely because it is strung with those deep narratives of time and place that she has made her own. It turns out that her 650-acre plot has been the stage for many a chapter of animal and human history. Volcanoes once erupted here and dinosaurs ambled; the Ute and Arapaho Indians made peace and war for centuries. And then in 1849 came the covered wagons, carrying hardscrabble families across the central plains of North America on their way to golden California. Each migration left its trail in the form of displaced rocks, still-traceable tracks and buried ephemera. When Proulx isn't fussing over the tatami matting in her meditation room, she likes to roam her scrubby estate with her husky builders, scratching for clues to the land's previous tenants.

What, though, do the husky builders feel about this? Early in Bird Cloud Proulx immodestly declares that one of her good points is an ability "to put myself in others' shoes constantly". But on the evidence of this memoir she has an almost total lack of interest in the people subsumed in her all-consuming project. The builders, whom she turns into faux-cowboys by calling them "the James Gang", don't seem to have any choice when the lady with the chequebook demands that they down tools and help her hunt for arrowheads. Various contractors pass through the site and are rechristened according to her needs as "Mr Floorfix" or "Mr Solar". Her family make quick pitstops but, doubtless deterred by the drama of the apparently homicidal windows, sensibly continue on their way to somewhere more soothing.

Worse still is the tone of clumsily disguised self-regard that trickles into the corners of Proulx's narrative. She does that annoying thing of constantly telling us how many books she has ("more than you" is the clear message). When, using her imported Japanese bath for the first time, there's a massive flood into the library below, I found myself sneakily pleased. She also graciously lets us in on the special living requirements of internationally successful writers: they need attics to store their luggage because, you see, they are required to travel so much. Terrific stylist that she usually is, Proulx even lets slip such blushingly formulated musings as "I find innovative architecture extremely interesting".

All this self-satisfaction might have been bearable had Proulx built a house which a) we could see and b) she could actually live in. But this is the sort of posh memoir that doesn't include photographs, as if to deter the kind of slummy reader who likes to have a good old nose around people's lives. And as for b), well, Proulx discovers halfway through the project that the road to Bird Cloud is impassable from November to March. This is tricky, even if you're as nippy on your skis as Annie. So the upshot is that one of the world's greatest writers – and, despite everything, Annie Proulx really is – has built an expensive summer cottage and, worse still, made us sit up late to hear all about it when we'd much rather have retired to the guest bedroom with a good book.

Kathryn Hughes's The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton is published by HarperPerennial.

Kathryn Hughes

08/31/11--03:30: The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje – review (chan 1894158)

Michael Ondaatje's new novel tells of a journey from childhood to the adult world

Years ago I found a copy of Michael Ondaatje's Rat Jelly in a favourite bookshop in north-east Vermont. From that day I was an admirer, not only of his books, but because of his involvement in Brick, the best literary publication in North America, and his dedication to an independent small Canadian press, Coach House Books. Ondaatje, born in Colombo when it was Ceylon, came to Canada in the early 1960s. His deep roots in the east colour much of his writing with references and places at once familiar and exotic. He is justly recognised as a master of literary craft.

The Cat's Table seems at first as if it might be a picaresque novel set in a constricted space, a favourite choice of many writers since Sebastian Brant's 1494 Ship of Fools. Ondaatje gives us the cat's table, the opposite of the captain's table, and the most undesirable dining assignment aboard the cruise ship Oronsay. This allows Ondaatje to lay out an extraordinary assortment of characters like cards on a table, shuffle and redeal them. It gives the passengers a sense of invisibility and the freedom to behave as they wish. As we read into The Cat's Table the story becomes more complex, more deadly, with an increasing sense of lives twisted awry, of misplaced devotion.

The ship is sailing from Colombo to England, a three-week journey by way of the Suez Canal. At the rather large cat's table are three dissimilar boys headed for English schools: "Mynah" (Michael, the narrator), betel-leaf chewing tough guy Cassius and frail, philosophical Ramadhin. They are all wary of each other at first, but quickly lock together in a bad-boy gang to become the terror of the ship, appearing everywhere, slipping in and out of dangerous situations. The curiosity everyone feels about fellow passengers infects the trio of 11-year olds. They snoop and eavesdrop and imagine. "We were learning about adults simply by being in their midst." What they see and learn on that fateful ship, not without pain, shapes their adult lives. A distant older cousin, Emily, becomes Mynah's emotional Virgil in the time of mounting anxiety. A first-class traveller, Flavia Prins, whose husband knows Mynah's uncle, has promised to keep an eye on him. She proves to be a fount of ship-board gossip.

The diverse characters have callings or hobbies that dog them like familiars. The svelte Miss Lasqueti keeps a cage of pigeons and has a vest studded with pockets for the birds; half-deaf Asuntha in her green dress is reclusive and subservient and carries a fatal secret; Sir Hector de Silva lies in his emperor-class stateroom dying from a curse. The teacher Mr Fonseka is reclusive, armoured by his books and burning a bit of hemp rope for nostalgia's sake; Mr Daniels has a huge garden of medicinal and poisonous plants in the bottom of the ship; Max Mazappa, aka Sunny Meadows, is the jazz savant musician "on the skids" who attracts Miss Lasqueti but leaves the ship at Port Said. There is an athletic Australian girl rollerskater who half-attracts, half-frightens the boys. There is the Jankla Troupe (one cannot have a cruise ship without an entertainment troupe) and their headliner, the Hyderabad Mind. More or less by accident Mynah aids and abets the sneak thief, Baron C, while card-playing Mr Hastie, the Head Kennel Keeper, is, after his disgrace, replaced by his puffed-up assistant, Mr Invierno. But all these are subsidiary figures compared to the bound prisoner who, accompanied by guards, exercises late at night. The boys are wild to know who this mysterious man is and what his crime; his dreadful story eventually links to several of the passengers.

The novel tells of a journey from childhood to the adult world, as well as a passage from the homeland to another country, something of a Dantean experience. The constriction of space intensifies a sense of allegory as a frame surrounds a painting. For the excited boys the cleavage between east and west floods their consciousness when the ship passes through the Suez Canal. They hang on the bow rail, "where we could witness the fragmentary tableaux below us – a merchant with his stall of food, engineers talking by a bonfire, the unloading of refuse, all of them, all of this, we knew we would never see again. So we came to understand that small and important thing, that our lives could be large with interesting strangers who would pass us without any personal involvement."

The ship docks in England and the passengers disembark. All that has occurred on board the Oronsay, all that was seen and experienced, is carried ashore by the passengers in memories, damaged psyches, degrees of loss, evanescent joy and reordered lives.

Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud is published by Fourth Estate.

11/25/11--02:31: Reading group: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (chan 1894158)

It's off to Newfoundland for December's wintry selection. If you get your skates on you might pick up a free copy

All of the December suggestions have been mixed together in a woolly hat, and it has delivered its choice: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. This was a nomination from ripley1, who wrote "I felt frozen stiff and windblown reading most of it".

Shotsford supported the nomination, calling it "one of the coldest books I have ever read" and stateoftheart described it as a "fine wintry book".

So, definitely on topic, although Kendrew did point out that "in addition to the bloody cold there was little in the way of decent food to look forward to. All those seal flipper pies and squid burgers".

I have no idea what s/he's talking about, since I am in the happy position of knowing next to nothing about the book at this stage in our monthly journey. Even so, I'm hoping for good things. It wasn't the most-nominated book this time round, but it was clearly a popular choice, with 46 recommendations, which makes me optimistic. Then there's the fact that Annie Proulx is an excellent writer, and plenty of people seem to think The Shipping News is her masterpiece – not least the juries for the Pulitzer prize for fiction and the National Book Award, who both gave the novel gongs.

Elsewhere, there's a Kevin Spacey film adaptation to discuss and we may also have a look at something called The Ashley Book of Knots, since Proulx named that as the major influence on the book … And, as ever, I'm open to suggestions. If there's something you think we should be discussing, do say so in the comments below.

But first, the reading. I'm ordering my copy right away. And, good news! The wonderful people at Fourth Estate have offered us 20 editions of the book to the first 20 people who post asking for one in the comments below. And if you're not quick enough on the draw for a freebie, don't despair: the Guardian bookshop has sorted us a 30% discount: you can buy it from them for £5.59, down from £7.99.

Sam Jordison

12/08/11--05:41: The Shipping News: Moderate or good? (chan 1894158)

Our voyage into Annie Proulx is under way, but the outlook for a satisfying read remains unclear

There was a mixed reaction when The Shipping News was announced as this month's Reading Group choice. Plenty seemed pleased. But many were disappointed.

As expressed by Lobster1: "Oh gosh … I really didn't like the book … eeek … I enjoyed the story but I had problems with her prose style … I found it annoying."

This prose style seems to be the sticking point. Even many of those that like the book seem to find it difficult. Shavedlegs wrote: "I agree with the comments about her writing style. I found it really hard work and it took me ages to really get into it. It's worth sticking with it as the description of a bleak Newfoundland winter and the emergence of the key characters is beautifully done. Definitely a slow burner."

MajorWhipple too had worries about the pace, saying: "It's a terrific work although the pace might not suit everyone." Although he went on to note: "For me it was the perfect marriage of style and setting. Excellent characterisation and plotting too."

Kendrew agreed: "I fell out of love with fiction for many years and it was this book that persuaded me to fall again. Many people have told me that they find Proulx difficult and hard going but I found her quite the opposite. I have since read Postcards, and after Cormac McCarthy I find Proulx wonderful when describing landscape."

So what is it about the style in the Shipping News? Is it (as Partridge says of one of Quoyle's early pieces of journalism) "like reading cement"? Or, as that line might suggest, is it rather witty?

Personally, at just over halfway mark, I'm on the Kendrew-MajorWhipple side of the fence – although it took me a while to get there. At first I wondered what Proulx had against relative pronouns and conjunctions. I stumbled over sentences like the following:

"But Partridge, dribbling oil, said 'Ah, Fuck it.' Sliced purple tomato. Changed the talk to descriptions of places he had been, Strabane, South Amboy, Clark Fork."

I also wondered if I was going to find the imagery heavy going:

"As she spoke she changed in some provocative way, seemed suddenly drenched in eroticism as a diver rising out of a pool gleams like chrome with a sheet of unbroken water for a fractional moment."

Because that passage came early in the book, it got me worried. I spent a long time starting at it, sometimes thinking it sounded quite pleasant, other times thinking "but divers rising out of pools don't gleam like chrome" and "how long is a fractional moment"?

As it turns out, nothing since has tripped me up. Like many of the best books, The Shipping News has taught me how to read its rhythms, cadences and how to take in its imagery. Now, I'm racing through and enjoying every word. I can't verbalise why those sometimes clipped, sometimes languorous sentences fit the setting so well – it's more of a feeling. Is it too much to suggest that those waves and troughs, ebbs and flows, fogs, clouds and moments of piercing brightness in the prose are right for Newfoundland? Perhaps. But I'm sure that Proulx's prose is an admirable tool for conveying the tough poetic speech patterns of local characters like Billy:

"'Tis a strange time, strange weather. Remember we had a yellow day on Monday – the sky cast was an ugly yellow like a jar of piss. Then yesterday, blue mist and blasting fog. Cap it off, my sister's youngest boy called up from St John's, said there was a fall of frozen ducks on Water Street, eight or ten of them, feathers all on, eyes closed like they was dreaming, froze hard as polar cap ice. When that happens, look out boys."

I could read passages like that all day. Annie Proulx, it's fair to say, knows her weather. Wind, snow, rain, lots of rain, storms, odd strange moments of sunshine and then, fog: "Fog against the window like milk..." "The sullen bay rubbed with thumbs of fog" … "green of grass stain, tilted in fog."

There are masterful descriptions of the elements – a pleasure in and of themselves – although, of course, there's more to them than mere decoration, as this early description of the strange hero Quoyle indicates:

"His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled."

Fog again. A splendidly-worked pathetic fallacy. Or at least, that's how I've been reading it. I should state again here that other opinions are available. I've just spotted this New York Times review stating: "Weather offshore or overland can often seem chokingly imbued with portentousness."

So there you go. As we already know, this isn't a book that pleases everyone. Although it's definitely keeping me happy. Whenever I come back to it, the strange rhythm and texture of the prose transports me straight to Newfoundland. It's one of those books that's enjoyable enough to make me resent the rest of my day. How mundane doing the dishes seems when I could be reading about Quoyle. I'm even feeling antsy writing this piece. In fact, I think I may slope off and read some more now …

Before I do, I'd just like to solicit opinions. How do you find the weather? Hard going? Bright and clear? And what is it that is so unusual and appealling/unappealling about the prose? Oh yes, and one last thought from cutta:

"Christ it's dull. Haven't read it but it's been Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 for God knows how long and still nothing's happened. All that 'low, Biscay, deepening rapidly' or 'southeast Iceland, good, becoming poor, 7' etc etc. Occasionally there's an exciting bit about hurricane warnings but I still struggle to stay awake till the end each night."

There's no pleasing some people...

Sam Jordison

12/19/11--07:27: The Shipping News: Further reading (chan 1894158)

Some useful articles providing background to this month's Reading group choice

If you've enjoyed The Shipping News – and its eccentricity – as much as I have, I imagine you'll be keen to find out more about the author. The links gathered below should help – and I'll be glad to hear of any other suggestions in the comments. A few hints of the discoveries that await: Proulx's first book was published when she was 56, she's famous for her refusal to suffer fools, she spent a long time living in the woods … Amazing woman, in other words.

If you've yet to get hold of a copy of The Shipping News, you can buy a discounted version in the Guardian shop. Buying The Ashley Book Of Knots, is, sadly, a bit more of a facer. Even with a tasty £10 discount, you're going to have to shell out £40. I still covet an edition, mind you. Four thousand pictures of knots and accompanying descriptions of their uses: it sets the imagination racing. Proulx suggests the same in the acknowledgements section of The Shipping News: "Without the inspiration of Clifford W Ashley's wonderful 1944 work, which I had the good fortune to find at a yard sale for a quarter, this book would have remained just the thread of an idea." Sadly, getting hold of a secondhand copy of the book nowadays appears to cost a fortune. So if you spot one in a sale, snap it up. If you get two copies, send one to me too!

Here's Annie Proulx's official publisher page.

This touching enconium by Alan Warner provides an excellent brief guide to the writer.

This interview with Atlantic Online gives some fascinating details about Proulx's life before writing, as well as her life as a writer. Also good for this nugget: Q: "What are you working on now?" A: "A collection of short stories set in Wyoming." I guess that'll be Brokeback Mountain then …

A BBC interview with Annie Proulx, conducted by James Naughtie.

An excellent interview with bookslut.

And here's the daddy. The Paris Review Art Of Fiction interview with Proulx. Worth it for the joke about the traffic alone … Oh and the revelation that she's friends with Jim White, the genius behind Wrong Eyed Jesus.

Finally, just because, here's Seamus Heaney's Shipping Forecast:

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warming voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown …

Anything else we should be looking at? Or any books we should hunt out? Please post suggestions in the comments below!

Sam Jordison

12/19/11--07:55: The Shipping News: Concluding questions (chan 1894158)

Annie Proulx's novel undoubtedly closes beautifully, but how it leaves its characters is more uncertain

Towards the beginning of our investigation of The Shipping News, we were told about the end. Pamish wrote: "Probably the best closing sentence ever written. Save it up."

SignificantOther agreed: "This book has one of the best and most beautifully-written last paragraphs of all the novels I know."

At this point – spoiler alert! – if you haven't yet finished the book, you should probably look away now. As Pamish and SignificantOther suggest, this paragraph is so good it's worth quoting in full:

For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

What do you make of that? Even as I typed the passage out I changed my mind again. I remembered, for instance, that the "bird with broken neck" earlier on in the story didn't really fly away. I also started feeling sure that water can't ever be older than light. This time around, the words struck me as pessimistic. Bleak, even. Which is strange, because the first time I read them, I thought that Proulx had copped for the happy ending. For a brief moment, I felt almost as let down as I did when staggering to the end of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It seemed to me there was something untrue there, some unwarranted jauntiness. It was only after a few moments reflection that it began to dawn on me that she might be saying that Quoyle's chances for painless happiness are slim. That it would be, in fact, miraculous if he escaped further trials. And that, rather beautifully, Proulx seems to have left it down to her readers to decide whether or not they believe in such miracles.

Later, when I listened to Proulx give a rare interview about The Shipping News with the BBC's James Naughtie, another possibility presented itself. Provocatively, the author claimed that this passage merely gives "the illusion of the happy ending. I wrote the book to deceive the reader. It's a happy ending that isn't really happy … "

So the whole thing is smoke and mirrors? Proulx knew all along that Quoyle was still bound to suffer? It's a possible reading. But at this stage, I'm afraid I have to bring in Barthes and the death of the author. Proulx may have had these dark intentions (just as she may also have simply said she did on a whim, as interview-subjects sometimes do), but ultimately that might not matter. If we accept that we shouldn't impose a limit on the novel, and that what the author meant and what the book says are not necessarily the same thing, Quoyle can be set free. If most readers decide that he is happy, well, he probably is. In fact, it seems to me that the fate of our hero is in your hands. Do you see him sailing contentedly into the early winter sunset of Newfoundland? Or do you see rough seas ahead? How did those final – lovely – words strike you?

Sam Jordison

12/22/11--05:11: The Newfoundland of The Shipping News – in pictures (chan 1894158)

Location is central to Annie Proulx's The Shipping News. Haven't got round to booking your trip to Newfoundland yet? The Newfoundland and Labrador Tourist Board have kindly furnished us with some snaps of the place so you can get a feel for it

Sam Jordison

12/22/11--05:36: The Shipping News: Proulx's Newfoundland (chan 1894158)

The extremity of the location is one of the most memorable aspects of the novel. But how recognisable is it?

Look at a gallery of the Newfoundland of The Shipping News

No one who has read The Shipping News will be surprised to learn that Annie Proulx found Newfoundland inspiring.

"Within 10 minutes of landing on the rock I knew that this was a tremendously important place for me," she once told an interviewer. "The more I saw the more I loved. I knew I wanted to write something about this place. And it's hard to explain – because it's not a loveable place. It's very harsh, the weather is cruel, you can hardly drive for a mile without having a moose get in your way… "

Equally importantly, she also explained that her story could only have happened in a place "where people are kind". Quoyle was trampled on everywhere apart from Newfoundland. When he got there, he was able to have a shot at happiness.

Judging from the comments under the first few Reading Group articles about the book, however, not all Newfoundland residents feel quite so fondly of Proulx as she does about them.

"I live in Newfoundland and have spent some time up on the coast whose environment and people she 'describes' and I can tell you that book is a bunch of malarky from page one," frankthefist wrote. "But one detail in particular made me angry. She has people put a Bible in an outhouse to use for toilet paper. Those people are particularly religious and tidy. The idea that they would use a Bible to wipe their arses with is too insulting to pass. The whole book is full of bullshit 'observations' that make a Newfoundlander's skin crawl. Typical Yank making it up to seem more real."

Ouch!

"I'm also from Newfoundland" Millieb added, "and I agree with frankthefist. There might be much to admire about the book, but the culture it describes isn't one that I recognise at all (and I grew up spending a fair amount of time visiting relatives and family friends who lived not that far from the part of the coast she's describing). Proulx is an evocative stylist, but the book is more of an imaginative fantasia on Newfoundland than any sort of accurate representation of it – not, of course, that that's necessarily a bad thing. And while I have eaten flipper pie (wouldn't recommend it), the only place I've ever come across mention of a squid burger is in this novel."

I'm disappointed about the non-existence of squid burgers, but I don't have many objections to Proulx's depiction of the place itself. Surely it's Proulx's right to write fiction? As plenty of other people below the line pointed out, the fact that The Shipping News isn't entirely accurate shouldn't be seen to detract from Proulx's achievement.

"As others have said, she draws you in so powerfully that you become part of these places and lives – however 'other' they are from your own experiences – so that they resonate in your imagination afterwards," wrote Soixante10.

I would agree with that. It's now more than a fortnight since I put the book down – and I've read a lot since – but my quiet moments are still often filled with thoughts of fog rolling in, windswept coastlines and how strange it would be to have a moose get in the way of my car. Even if Proulx's depiction isn't strictly accurate, it is inspiring - as the Guardian's own Alison Flood can testify. "I love The Shipping News so much that we went on our honeymoon to Newfoundland," she wrote, "and it is every bit as gorgeous as Proulx makes it sound".

Sadly, constraints of time and budget have prevented me from being able to visit the place myself. Besides, I've learned there are few flights from the UK to Newfoundland outside May to October. Newfoundland, it's safe to say, is out on a limb. It contains the easternmost city in the American continent (St John's) and is so far removed from most of the rest of the world that it has its own timezone (Newfoundland Standard Timezone, a fiercely inconvenient three and a half hours behind GMT). It is also regularly visited by icebergs from May to July – and even if you can't see them for yourself, you can follow them on Twitter.

While I haven't yet visited, I have at least spoken to a few people on the island and while none of them are prepared to admit to the existence of squid burgers, they have all confirmed that other aspects of the book are true. Most notably, that there's an awful lot of rough weather and fog. Erin Skinner from Newfoundland and Labrador Tourism (the main source of the splendid photos in the gallery that accompanies this articlefdafdfasdfsdad) told me that she's seen days where warm sunshine has given way to snow, hail and rain in quick succession. She also attests that there are parts of Newfoundland where "everybody knows your name" and that there are a great many "thriving" community newspapers. L'Anse Aux Meadows, the isolated northerly part of Newfoundland that roughly corresponds to the area described in the novel, is served by The Northern Pen. I'd advise any fan of The Shipping News to give it a read. When I clicked on it, joyfully, the lead article contained a picture of a grounded boat and notes about a storm. (Sample line: "He's confused not only to how his home of 17 years survived last Thursday night's violent wind storm but also what to do with the bridge considering it is no longer attached to his house instead it lays upside down about 15 metres away.") Other pleasures included a piece about snowmobiles, and one about iceberg surveillance.

Quoyle would be in his element. So too, I'm beginning to think, would I. I haven't even mentioned the fact that Newfoundland is also reputed to offer some of the world's best whale-watching opportunities and it's stunningly beautiful. There's even a thriving literary scene, with a literary festival in a national park in August – and if that sounds a little too hectic, there are a number of writing residencies available on a retreat on the isolated Fogo island. I fondly await having an excuse to see it for myself…

Sam Jordison

12/23/11--14:55: The Review Christmas quiz (chan 1894158)

From snail-smuggling to hair-cuts, our fiendish quiz tests your literary knowledge … plus who said what in 2011

Find all the answers here

John Banville

1. Who thought to cry out to the angelic orders?

2. Whose was the necessary angel?

3. Who had an angel to dine?

Sebastian Barry

1. Which mid 19th-century American writer, in a letter to his friend Hawthorne, said this about which of his own novels: "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."?

2. Which Irish poet said this about his career, and where: "I dabbled in verse and it became my life."?

3. Which iconic comic American actor said playing which play in Miami in 1956 "was like trying it out in truant school, or playing Giselle in Roseland"?

Antony Beevor

1. In which novel by which writer was the fictional ideology of nihilism invented?

2. Whom did the social-climbing Madame Verdurin finally marry in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu?

3. In which 1987 novel did John James Todd make the last great silent movie which proved to be a commercial disaster?

Craig Brown

1. Which author used to smuggle snails into France 20 at a time, 10 under each breast?

a) Colette

b) Patricia Highsmith

c) AS Byatt

d) GK Chesterton?

2. Match the comment by Jessica Mitford to the person:

a) A super-pig in all ways.

b) To know him was to loathe him.

c) He sounds ghastly.

d) If I was him, I'd be a lot nicer.

i) Tony Blair

ii) LBJ

iii) Edward Kennedy

iv) God

3. Who did Ted Hughes describe in a letter as looking "somehow like a paper clip"?

a) John Selwyn Gummer

b) Michael Barrymore

c) Aubrey Beardsley

d) Jacques Tati

Jilly Cooper

1. Who wrote in which poem, and which breed was the woodman's dog, who "Wide-scampering snatches up the drifted snow / With ivory teeth, or ploughs it will his snout; / Then shakes his powder'd coat and barks for joy"?

2. In which poem did which author write "But good dog Tray is happy now; / He has no time to say 'Bow Wow!'/ He seats himself in Frederick's chair / And laughs to see the nice things there; / The soup he swallows sup by sup – / And eats the pies and puddings up."?

3. Who wrote about which breed of dog, in which book,"Thin and tired, hopeful, happy – and hungry, his remarkable face alight with expectation – the old warrior was returning from the wilderness."?

Helen Dunmore

1. Who threw a string of pearls valued at $350,000 into her waste-paper basket?

2. Whose teeth are tolerable, but not out of the common way?

3. Who sat on her suitcase in the Gare du Nord and wept?

Geoff Dyer

1. Who said of whom: "Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest."?

2. Who said of which book that it took "two subjects: the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else."?

3. Who described a companion as "a true poet" because "He knows all about things he knows nothing about."

Jennifer Egan

1. What was F Scott Fitzgerald's initial title for The Great Gatsby?

2. How long did William Faulkner claim that it took him to write Sanctuary?

3. Name the American who wrote crime novels in the 1940s and 50s in which the detective was a sexy lawyer named Scott Jordan?

Antonia Fraser

1. What do the following have in common: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Amina and Heidi?

2. Which is the odd one out?

a) Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

b) Tomorrow to fresh fields, and pastures new.

c) A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

d) To be, or not to be: that is the question.

3. Queens of England who might have been but weren't. How were they actually known to history?

a) Queen Mary II

b) Queen Elizabeth II

c) Queen Sophia

Neil Gaiman

1. Which profession did Lolly Willowes and Sylvia Daisy Pouncer share?

2. Chrestomanci and Tim shared this title, even if they were not in the same profession.

3. Mr Leakey was the creation of which scientist? And where did he suggest that mangoes were best eaten?

David Hare

1. David Kipen once said "The story of modern American cultural criticism is the story of three California girls who went East." Name the three.

2. Which one of the three said "I have done my share of soul-wrestling and it's not too tough to do"?

3. And which one wrote "Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself"?

PD James

1. Who brought news, and to whom, that a private had been flogged.

2. Which bird united a 1941 farce and a 19th-century poet?

3. Which amateur helped to ring in the New Year and why?

Hilary Mantel

1. What did Dr Johnson recommend as a tipple for aspiring heroes?

2. What drink did Housman recommend "for fellows whom it hurts to think"?

3. Whose tasting notes are these: "Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!"

Lorrie Moore

1. Which great American novel is sometimes said to have the same plot as which Brontë novel?

2. Which Terrence Malick film has the same plot as which Henry James novel?

3. Which Jonathan Franzen character of last year is said to resemble someone who was just murdered this year?

David Nicholls

Who are they?

1. "It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor."

2. " … a red-haired person whose hair was cropped as close as the closest stubble; who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheletered and unshaded that I remember wondering how he went to sleep. He was high-shouldered and bony … and had a long, lank, skeleton hand."

3. " … item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth."

Annie Proulx

1. What bird was honoured in a book by JA Baker?

2. Who was the notorious 18th-century English bookseller given a violent emetic by a vengeful Alexander Pope?

3. Who said: "A wall and a chair are a great deal"?

Ian Rankin

1. "In the first room there is a birth, in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the detective and the Bible-reader cross upon the stairs." A description of Edinburgh, but by whom?

2. Which Muriel Spark novel opens with a shopper in a boutique becoming furious when told the dress she is trying on is impossible to stain?

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the village of Lasswade (south east of Edinburgh) in 1848 to pay his respects to which author?

Helen Simpson

1. Which playwright was known by his contemporaries as "gentle George"?

2. Which character in which play asks, "What's integrity to an opportunity?"

3. What was the day job of the author of The Provok'd Wife?

Ali Smith

1. Which single word, characterfully misspelt, links Katherine Mansfield's 1920 short story "Bank Holiday" and Angela Carter's 1984 novel Nights at the Circus?

2. What four-word title for a discarded autobiography unites a young Faustian witch and a silent movie star?

3. "A natural history museum, a hermit's cave or a magician's laboratory. Birds flew about freely. Fish and live grass snakes in glass cages ... not to mention his favourite, the old rabbit, which hopped about among moss, stones and fresh leafy branches." Which Scandinavian poet had a boyhood bedroom described by his literary sister like this?

Colm Tóibín

1. Thomas and Heinrich Mann, who came from a family of five, wrote many books, but their brother Viktor wrote only one book. What was it called?

2. Seepersad Naipaul, the father of VS Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul, published, with a private press, one volume of fiction. What was it called?

3. Jorge Guillermo Borges, father of Jorge Luis Borges, also published one volume of fiction with a private press. What was it called?

Rose Tremain

1. In which 2010 memoir does the humorously mystifying word "hotchamachacha" frequently appear?

2. In which classic German novel does the hero meet his death for writing postcards?

3. Who said that a good mode for writing was to stay "in your mental pyjamas"?

Sarah Waters

1. In which novels do the following fictional ships or boats appear? The Clorinda, the Pequod, the Demeter, the Pipistrello, and the Goblin.

2. Of which author did a woman once cry: "He'll have his hair cut regular now!" – and to what was she referring?

3. What connects Jackie Kay, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, LM Montgomery, Tom Sharpe, Ntozake Shange and Vernon Lee with DH Lawrence?

Have you been paying attention in 2011?

1. In which unnamed former country is Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife, winner of the 2011 Orange prize, generally assumed to be set?
a) Czechoslovakia.
b) Ceylon.
c) Zaire.
d) Yugoslavia.

2. Who wrote a book that controversially suggested that smart girls should trade on their "erotic capital" to get ahead?
a) Caitlin Moran.
b) Daisy Goodwin.
c) Jeanette Winterson.
d) Elizabeth Hakim.

3. Who dismissed whose writing as "the Emperor's new clothes" in disagreeing with fellow prize judges?
a) Stella Rimington criticising Alan Hollinghurst.
b) Carmen Callil criticising Philip Roth.
c) Andrew Neil criticising Edmund de Waal.
d) Susan Hill criticising Edward St Aubyn.

4. Which Pulitzer prizewinning novelist this year brought out a book about keeping chickens?
a) Alice Walker.
b) Annie Proulx.
c) Barbara Kingsolver.
d) Jane Smiley.

5. Who said reading any female writer confirmed his view they were "unequal to me", and which novelist did he cite in particular?
a) Stephen King, JK Rowling.
b) George RR Martin, JK Rowling.
c) Martin Amis, Toni Morrison.
d) VS Naipaul, Jane Austen.

6. Whose Twitter bio says, with Popeye: "I yam what I yam and that's all that I yam"?
a) Salman Rushdie.
b) Neil Gaiman.
c) Jeanette Winterson.
d) Ian Rankin.

7. Who was revealed as having a literary tattoo, and who is quoted?
a) David Beckham and Nietzsche.
b) Brad Pitt and Alain-Fournier.
c) Anne Hathaway and Jane Austen.
d) Lady Gaga and Rilke.

8. Which of the authors in Forbes's list of publishing's top 10 earners in 2010/11 said "Actually, I don't read books"?
a) Jeff "Wimpy Kid" Kinney.
b) Suzanne "Hunger Games" Collins.
c) Stephenie Meyer.
d) James Patterson.

9. Which Booker-winning or shortlisted novelist suffered political catastrophe this year, and where?
a) Thomas Keneally in Australia.
b) Indra Sinha in India.
c) Chinua Achebe in Nigeria.
d) Michael Ignatieff in Canada.

10. Whose posthumous novel featured an American road trip?
a) Beryl Bainbridge.
b) Roberto Bolaño.
c) JG Ballard.
d) JD Salinger.

11. Who introduced us to the Ariekei?
a) Margaret Atwood.
b) AS Byatt.
c) George RR Martin.
d) China Miéville.

12. The narrator of Alice LaPlante's prizewinning murder mystery Turn of Mind suffers from … ?
a) Amnesia.
b) Epilepsy.
c) Alzheimer's.
d) Synesthesia.

13. What links Jeffery Deaver and Anthony Horowitz?
a) They wrote new books for famous series.
b) They killed off their long-running heroes.
c) They were surprise longlistees for the Booker prize.
d) They both collaborated with James Patterson.

14. Who branched out into writing Smut?
a) Iain Banks.
b) Nicholson Baker.
c) Anita Brookner.
d) Alan Bennett.

15. Who set a novel in hell?
a) Scarlett Thomas.
b) Chuck Palahniuk.
c) Stephen King.
d) Terry Pratchett.

16. Whose long-awaited new novel was so big it had to be published in two volumes?
a) Umberto Eco.
b) Michel Houellebecq.
c) Haruki Murakami.
d) Peter Nadas.

17. Who fictionalised Princess Diana?
a) Monica Ali.
b) Linda Grant.
c) Martin Amis.
d) Alan Hollinghurst.

18. The Emperor of All Maladies: a Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukerherjee won which award this year?
a) The Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction.
b) The Wellcome Trust book prize, celebrating medicine in literature.
c) The Guardian First Book award.
b) The Costa biography award.

19. The denouement of David Nicholls's bestselling novel, One Day, made into a film this year, takes its inspiration from lines from which Victorian novel?
a) The Mill on the Floss.
b) Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
c) Wuthering Heights.
d) Great Expectations.

20. Which British historian's response to this summer's riots was to say "the whites have become black"?
a) Niall Ferguson.
b) David Starkey.
c) Antonia Fraser.
d) Simon Sebag Montefiore.

21. Waterstone's was sold by HMV for £53m in May to which wealthy buyer?
a) Russian millionaire Alexander Mamut.
b) Independent bookseller James Daunt.
c) Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson.
d) Harry Potter author JK Rowling.

22. Whose political diaries made it on to the stage this year?
a) Alan Clark.
b) Edwina Currie.
c) Tony Benn.
d) Chris Mullin.

23. Costa, Forward and TS Eliot shortlisted poet David Harsent also wrote an episode for which television show this year?
a) The Bill.
b) Inspector Morse.
c) A Touch of Frost.
d) Midsomer Murders.

24. What's the prize for the Omnivore's "Hatchet Job of the Year" book review award?
a) A prize pig.
b) A case of champagne.
c) A hatchet.
d) A year's supply of potted shrimp.

Who said … ?

1. "My main compulsion is secrecy."

2. "The doorbell rings and I nip to the loo. I count no fewer than nine canisters of hairspray on 'his' side of the sink."

3. "Brian Cox may have the wonders of the universe to play with, but I had the contents of my bra and pants and, ultimately, obviously they were the more mysterious and awesome."

4. "This book … is really the sheerest twaddle ... Writing this bad cannot earn the kind of attention [Geoffrey] Hill demands; he is wasting his time and trying to waste ours."

5. "The [Somerset House] ice rink truly sparkles. Children under the age of eight can join the Penguin Club which successfully guides children through their first tentative steps on the ice. Renowned authors will hold storytelling sessions under the tree."

6. "He complained that he'd really hurt his foot. When I asked how he'd done it – had he fallen off a stage? – he said: 'No, I've got a facsimile copy of Leonardo's Milan Codex in my library and I dropped it on my foot'."

7. "Adam Levin's book is the real thing, I think ..."

8. "That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable."

9. "I wonder whether to bother too much with the strictures of [Colin] Imber, whose latest book stands at 1,258,969th place on the Amazon list."

10. "Pankaj Mishra embarrassingly flaunts his Oriental roots to please the ex-empire's champagne socialists. Presumably it was to win their applause that this Buddha of Grub Street launched his ad hominem attack."

11. "Meat Market is a thin, bloody sliver of feminist dialectic, dissecting women's bodies as the fleshy fulcrum of capitalist cannibalism."

12. "Wikileaks cook books ... I would love to get these going Julian but we need to reassure the publishers we are on track with the other book first."

13. "His fame, then and now, had a [Being There character] Chauncey Gardiner quality, seemingly called into being by a novelist-shaped vacancy on the cover of Time."

14. "Like me, [Christopher Hitchens] is Jewish on his mother's side. Like me, he's busy and productive. Unlike me, he is not a cheap whore. Well, I'm quite an expensive whore. But I'm quite a good whore. Because I kiss."

15. "She never stops, does she? Penis this, penis that. Rachel cannot speak about any subjects, whether it is somebody on the Moon or Trident, without bringing the conversation back to penises."

Books: Annie Proulx | guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/annie-proulx/rss

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