O Brother

"Yes. The Scottish novelist and screenwriter John Niven—perhaps best known for the cult favourite Kill Your Friends — has just released a searing account of his fraught relationship with his charismatic younger brother Gary, who took his own life in 2010. O Brother records how their lives began in tandem but diverged; while John made his way in the music business, and later as a writer, Gary worked manual jobs and dealt drugs in the small town they grew up in. By the end of his life, Gary had alienated most of his friends and family, and was in debt—although not insurmountably so. Looking through his dead brother’s belongings, John tallies up the overdue bills and has the sickening realisation that he could have written a cheque and solved his sibling’s financial crisis instantly. But what might have been a grim story of self-recrimination and despair is, in Niven’s hands, a moving and even exuberant story that reflects the chaotic energy of their brother and the dark humour that he and his sister Linda forge from an otherwise harrowing situation. Let me slip in a couple more quick ones: naturalist Amy-Jane Beer just won the UK’s Wainwright Prize for The Flow: Rivers, Waters, and Wildness , in which she revisits the waterway that claimed the life of a close friend, and in doing so opens herself again to fluvial beauty; and former Five Books contributor Thea Lenarduzzi ‘s lyrical family memoir Dandelions is currently in contention for the UK’s Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. And finally, the next thing on my to-be-read pile is The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight by Andrew Leland, a sufferer of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that will ultimately result in complete blindness. The Millions editor Sophia Stewart raved that it was not only one of the best books she’d read in 2023, but “one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life. No descriptor feels capacious enough: an intellectually rigorous memoir, a moving cultural history, and a brilliant study of blindness, disability, and adaptation.” Sounds good to me."