Books by Alan Garner
Alan Garner is a British novelist who has been recommended many times on Five Books; he is arguably best known for his fantasy works aimed at children and young adults—including the Carnegie Medal-winning The Owl Service, a YA novel based on the Welsh myth of Blodeuwedd, and Red Shift, a 1973 fantasy that moves from Roman Britain, to the time of the English Civil War, into (what was then) the present day.
Treacle Walker, an unsettling, fable-like coming of age story, was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Garner told The Guardian that the book was loosely based on tales of a historical figure, a tramp called Walter Helliwell (better known locally as ‘Treacle Walker’) “who claimed he could cure all things but jealousy.”
“Treacle Walker is a mysterious tale of a young boy, as he tries to make sense of the world around him. What is wonderful about the book is that it’s a journey through a landscape that cannot be grasped by reason alone. It’s about enabling the child to set off on his own journey—there’s a marvellous moment at the end, when the boy himself takes the reins of Treacle Walker’s cart and sets off on his own. It’s a bildungsroman, to use the pretentious literary term. But what I like about it is that the start point and the end point of the world can never be fully understood.” Read more...
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Neil MacGregor, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
“It was completely unlike any book I’d ever read, in that it trusted the reader to make sense of things without holding one’s hand at all, or explaining anything ever. And at 15, I was so flattered by this book that seemed at once very exciting but unwilling to explain itself. So I read it over and over and over again.” Read more...
The best books on Witches and Witchcraft
Diane Purkiss, Historian
“It’s different to the others in that it deals with adolescent crisis. This is a coming-of-age story. It is the story of a woman made of flowers–of oak broom and meadowsweet. She is created as a wife for a young man who is not allowed to have a human wife–because of a curse. And they are happy for a while until she falls for someone else. She and her lover conspire to kill her husband, who had told her he could only be killed in a particular and rather elaborate way. She tricks him into telling the secret, with unexpected consequences. You get the sense of the strange rituals–especially in Garner’s books–a sense that the stories have filtered down through the ages. In The Owl Service this idea is taken even further–in that these myths are actually manipulating the modern characters in the story. It’s just great stuff.” Read more...
Books Drawn From Myth and Fairy Tale
Alan Lee, Cartoonists & Illustrator
Interviews where books by Alan Garner were recommended
Books Drawn From Myth and Fairy Tale, recommended by Alan Lee
Alan Lee, illustrator of such classics as The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, talks to Five Books about his favourite stories drawn from myth and fairy tale, what they mean to him, and how important it is for young readers today to experience these ancient stories.
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1
Red Shift
by Alan Garner -
2
The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia
by Neil Price -
3
Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs
by Rane Willerslev -
4
The Annotated Collected Poems
Edward Thomas (ed. by Edna Longley) -
5
The Poems of Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë (ed. by Derek Roper)
The best books on Witches and Witchcraft, recommended by Diane Purkiss
The best books on Witches and Witchcraft, recommended by Diane Purkiss
For centuries, the witch has been an index not only of what we fear most in others, but also what we cannot cope with—the powerfully abnormal, strange and often irrational elements—in ourselves. And the best way to understand the history of witches and witchcraft is to first understand the supernatural, according to Diane Purkiss, Professor at Keble College, Oxford and author of the lauded book The Witch in History.
The Best Fiction of 2022: The Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Neil MacGregor
The Booker Prize is awarded each year to the best original novel written in the English language. We asked the art historian Neil MacGregor, chair of this year’s judging panel, to talk us through the six novels that made the 2022 shortlist—and why fiction can be a most effective means of engaging us emotionally in social and political crisis elsewhere.
Witches and Witchcraft