Read This: Books under the Radar is a weekly post written by a guest author – often a friend of mine, someone I’ve met on my writerly travels, or an author I admire – who recommends three books they think deserve more recognition. If you’re interested in buying any of the books, please click on the covers and give these hidden gems some love.

Read This: Barney Norris

I know Barney Norris as a novelist, but as you’ll see below he is also a theatremaker and if you’re interested in finding out more about his theatremaking skills, his latest play, The Band Back Together, is running at the Arcola Theatre in east London until 28th September. I know him primarily as a wonderful novelist, and I’m pretty sure I was first introduced to him via a Winchester Waterstones bookseller called Bob – who has since retired. I have interviewed Barney about his books and he’s interviewed me. Always enthusiastic and full of life. Here’s what he has to say about herself:

Barney Norris is a writer and theatremaker whose novels include Five Rivers Met On A Wooded Plain and Undercurrent, and whose plays include Visitors, Eventide, Nightfall and The Wellspring. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, has won many awards for his writing and been translated into ten languages. Undercurrent is available here and you can follow him on X and Insta: @barnontherun.

Here are Barney’s recommendations:

Life: A Users Manuel by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos

I cannot recommend this book enough – it’s an extraordinary puzzle novel by a famous member of the OULIPO, the mid twentieth century European experimental literature group, charting a kaleidoscope of extraordinary stories all bound together by a single jigsaw. I love pressing this book into people’s hands because it inspires me to dream bigger about literature. Too many novels read like drafts for TV shows, as if they aren’t in love with the bookishness of books and what makes them books and nothing else, at all; they tell stories about characters, one event after the other, in very traditional ways. Perec is the real, avant-garde deal, and he takes your breath away when you read him. There are other great Perec novels – A Void is a whole novel without the letter ‘e’; W or the Memory of Childhood is a stunning work; but Life is the masterpiece.

Seven Steeples by Sara Baume

I was sent this by the Guardian, for whom I reviewed it, and I think it’s one of the greatest achievements by a writer of my generation. Sara Baume has a glowing reputation as one of the most beautiful writers presently at work, but I don’t think this novel will be sufficiently appreciated until it sells as well as To The Lighthouse and is taught in schools as one of the most extraordinary expressions of how people saw and dreamed and longed and lived in the early twenty-first century. It’s such a lucid and beautiful poetic work that you just want to live in for ever. A work for writers to be very jealous of!

My Child, The Algorithm by Hannah Silva

 I can never quite put my finger on how writers manage to be funny, but Silva is really funny; she is playful, creative, subversive and utterly brilliant in this compelling story of co-writing a book with AI while raising her child and navigating modern life, Universal Credit, London housing and every other impossible obstacle in the way of people today. A moving and poetic book that is lovably and disarmingly and inspiringly honest.

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I haven’t read any of these but any of Sara Baume’s novels have been on my list to read, so Barney’s recommendation will hopefully finally be the prompt. Any here that catch your eye? And if you’d like to be told about future Read This recommendations, you can follow me on Instagram, or subscribe to my newsletter.

More Read This: Books Under the Radar

Lou Morrish author of Women of War
Francesca Ramsay author of Pinch Me
Sarah Leipciger author of Moon Road
Tim Chapman university librarian
Juliet West author of The Faithful
Lindsay Hunter author of Hot Springs Drive
Gina Chung author of Sea Change
Susmita Bhattacharya author of Table Manners
Vanessa Harbour author of Safe
Freya North author of The Unfinished Business of Eadie Browne
Judith Heneghan author of Birdeye
Clare Mackintosh author of I Promise it won’t always Hurt like This