Max Porter trained as an art historian but his career took him in to the world of books. He previously managed an independent bookshop and won the Young Bookseller of the Year award in 2009. Max joined Granta and Portobello Books in 2012 as Commissioning Editor and after working with authors such as Man Booker prize-winner Eleanor Catton and Masha Gessen, he has now written his own book.
Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a story of a father and two young boys in the weeks following the death of their mother. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal.
Part novella and part essay on grief, Grief is the Thing with Feathers is sensitive and affecting and offers light relief with unexpected humour.
Dodge City (2026) Patrick deWitt "All Patrick deWitt's books are exquisite company, but Dodge City feels like an especially fine and honourable acquaintance to have made. I adored every page of this wise, funny, charming novel."
Transcription (2026) Ben Lerner "Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more."
The Ministry of Time (2024) Kaliane Bradley "Holy smokes, this novel is an absolute cut above! Kaliane Bradley leaps into a storytelling league of her own. This book is deadly serious speculative fiction, but it is also one of the funniest books I've read in years. It's exciting, surprising, intellectually provocative, weird, radical, tender, and moving. I missed it when I was away from it. I will hurry to re-read it. Make room on your bookshelves for a new classic."
Pity (2024) Andrew McMillan "Pity pays a great poet's tough but tender attention to the unspoken layers and historic fissures which lie beneath the wounded town of the self. This beautiful book about the marks that are left on people and places in turn leaves a deep empathic mark on the reader."
Orbital (2023) Samantha Harvey "This is such a beautiful book you have to adjust your readerly heart to take it all in. The plot is simply and extraordinarily our planet, watched by a handful of souls. Orbital wonders what it's like to be a human 'with a godly view' and because Samantha Harvey is such a spectacular prose stylist the wondering takes the form of breathtaking colour storms and brilliant encircling epiphanies of time and scale, technology and love, ambition and faith. It is an awe-inspiring and humbling love letter to Earth and those who reckon with the gift of it."
The Five Sorrowful Mysteries of Andy Africa (2023) Stephen Buoro "I fell in love with this novel immediately. It has hilarious energy, a satirical but also wildly ambitious philosophical framework . . . It's eccentric, profound, timely, specific but it also has global concerns and a really, really brilliant central character."
For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain (2023) Victoria MacKenzie "A beautiful book. I loved it. Margery and Julian are both so alive. The invisible balancing and weighing MacKenzie has done across the whole to bring them dialogue with each other and to bring the reader into emotional and spiritual connectedness with them is just so brilliant. And it's funny. It warmed my heart."
Black Dove (2022) Colin McAdam "I have long been convinced that Colin McAdam is a literary genius. What's extraordinary is that each of the books he writes is a totally distinct type of genius. Every time. He's in a league of his own."
All Along the Echo (2022) Danny Denton "One of my favourite contemporary writers. One of my favourite writers full stop. Danny Denton's work always blasts my mind and heart wide open, he's an absolute marvel."
When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2022) Irene Solà "When I Sing, Mountains Dance made me swoon. Translated with great musicality and wit, it is rich and ranging, shimmering with human and non-human life, the living and the dead, in our time and deep time; a fable that is utterly universal, deadly funny and profoundly moving."
Hourglass (2022) Keiran Goddard "Hourglass burnishes its ideas of love and agony with an almost mystical attention to feeling. This book truly glows in the heart of the reader."
Exactly What You Mean (2022) Ben Hinshaw "Ben Hinshaw renders ordinary human agonies with extraordinary precision and emotional insight. He specialises in the atmosphere of human interconnection, in subtle revelations and indelible images. This book is a riveting and beautifully patterned map of the emotional archipelago of longing and learning, loving and leaving."
Scary Monsters (2021) Michelle de Kretser "Scary Monsters is a radically brilliant diptych novel, in complex conversation with itself and with the world we live in, written by one of the living masters of the art of fiction. A beautifully troubling book."
Lean Fall Stand (2021) Jon McGregor "Lean Fall Stand is a bold and masterful investigation into the weather system of the human mind."
Diary of a Film (2021) Niven Govinden "Precision engineered European modernism from a master stylist. It walks us into a luminous and loving conversational drama, rich with complex erotics and interwoven private agonies. He writes exquisitely about art making, about obsession and responsibility. It's a gorgeous novel."
The Swallowed Man (2020) Edward Carey "Art objects live in the belly of this marvellous novel, images swallowed by text, sustained by a sublime and loving imagination. Like all Edward Carey's work The Swallowed Man is profound and delightful. It is a strange and tender parable of two maddening obsessions; parenting and art-making."
The Bass Rock (2020) Evie Wyld "A modern gothic triumph. Spectacularly well-observed, profoundly disquieting and utterly riveting. Like all Evie Wyld's work it is startlingly insightful about psychological and physical abuse. It is a haunting, masterful novel."
Weather (2020) Jenny Offill "The end times don't deserve such exquisite literary investigation. I folded down every page until I realised there was no point, I would fold them all, I would read the book again the second I was finished. A gorgeous, funny, deadly serious and warmly revelatory mesh of perfect paragraphs."
The Porpoise (2019) Mark Haddon "A full-throttle blast of storytelling mastery. I read it on the plane in a single sitting at 30,000 feet and enjoyed every second. Gorgeously written and very clever, but also such fun! Ancient and modern overlap and tangle in exhilarating ways, it’s like romping through a Literary Netflix: an episode of something historical and bloody, then something slick and contemporary, then something really weird and unnerving. So many pleasures in one book. The Porpoise is a joy to read."
Attrib.: And Other Stories (2017) Eley Williams "It's just the real inexplicable gorgeous brilliant thing this book. I love it in a way I usually reserve for people."
(b.1981)
