Nigel Williams's latest novel is
Unfaithfully Yours. For the
Guardian he named his top ten books about the people in suburbia, including:
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's characters may roam all over the place – on nightmare cruises or ill-advised trips to Eastern Europe – but they are still bound to the suburban decencies. He writes about ordinary families with extraordinary honesty and delicacy and, though his characters are a long way from Palmers Green, their doomed attempts to do the right thing, for me, recall with almost painful clarity my own childhood, and, particularly, my father, who like the paterfamilias in this book, had a favourite chair … Incidentally, Freedom – whatever anyone may tell you – is just as good.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
The Corrections is on
Tim Lewis's list of the ten best Christmas lunches and
John Mullan's list of ten of the best episodes of drunkenness in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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