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, or to see the full list and buy from Bookshop.org UK, while supporting independent bookshops, go here.

Read This: Alice Winn

I was sent a proof of Alice Winn’s debut novel, In Memorium, by her UK editor and I instantly loved it. And so did many other people around the world – it went on to win Waterstone’s Novel of the Year and was Sunday Times bestseller. I had the privilege of interviewing Alice at Hay Festival and more recently at Winchester Books Festival, and I can tell you that she is a very nice person, a great interviewee, as well as a wonderful writer. Here’s what she has to say about herself:

Alice Winn is the author of In Memoriam (Viking, 2023), a novel about forbidden love among soldiers in the First World War. She is American and Irish and grew up mostly in England and France. You can find her on Instagram.

Here are Alice’s recommendations:

The Living is Easy by Dorothy West (1948)

Cleo Judson is the ruthlessly ambitious daughter of a poor sharecropper. She is determined to lift herself and her entire family not just out of poverty, but into the highest echelons of Boston’s Black upper class.

Dorothy West is one of the more under-read writers of the Harlem Renaissance, and I don’t know why, because this book is such fun! Cleo falls into a literary tradition of cunning, self-serving heroines, in the vein of Vanity Fair’s Becky Sharp and Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara. This is a fat book about a whole society, not just one character, but it’s sharp and funny and lush. It’s full of expensive things, frivolities, and female rage. It’s enjoyable to read while touching on difficult things with a light hand: colorism, racism, classicism, religious guilt.

The Secret Battle by A.P. Herbert (1919)

The story of an officer in the First World War who is executed for cowardice, as told from the perspective of his best friend. One thing I find fascinating about this book is that Herbert is so profoundly uninterested in talking about the war. Instead, this is a psychological little novel about five officers driving each other crazy at the Battle of Gallipoli. All the battles are skipped over—you can read about them elsewhere, says Herbert. Instead he talks about the living conditions, the petty quarrels, how disagreeable people become when they’re exhausted and hot and covered in flies. It’s an almost domestic look at war. It’s easy to think of people in tragic situations as sort of superhuman—to think that the things that break them are big, bombastic evils like death and violence. But most war writers talk a great deal about the discomforts, the irritants, the mundane, infuriating problems. Harry Penrose’s personality is eroded not only by the terror and violence of the war, but also by cabin fever, by dust, and by stupid fights with his fellow officers. I wish more people would read this book, as it gives such a human and unusual insight into the First World War.

Family, by Ba Jin (1931), translated by Sidney Shapiro (1972)

A seminal, autobiographical Chinese novel about three stifled young men from a prosperous, conservative upper-class family. It’s maybe not accurate to describe this as an under-read novel, given that it’s one of the most widely-read books in China! I’ve heard it described as China’s War and Peace. But it’s surprisingly difficult to even find a copy for sale in the UK! (Ba Jin is sometimes written Pa Chin, if you’re looking for a copy.)

It opens with two teenage brothers walking home on a cold, snowy day, and it’s amazing how instantly Ba Jin differentiates between them, how quickly you know who they are—within a page. I’m not always one for descriptions of places; I tend to skip big long paragraphs about how things look. I find them boring. But Ba Jin (and Sidney Shapiro) writes about the exquisite beauty of the rich family’s compound in a way that was spell-binding.

I think the reason this book continues to be adored by students, however, is that Ba Jin captures the stomach-churning agony of young adults—I have almost never read any scene as affecting as the one in which Ming Feng, the sixteen-year-old bondmaid, tries urgently to ask one of the rich sons of the household for the help he promised her he would give—but he is too busy writing for his radical magazine. Even though the central protagonists are men, Ba Jin writes about women with heart-wrenching compassion. It always seems miraculous to me when a writer is able to create this many characters who all seem alive–it’s like magic. The book is short(ish), brilliant, and sweepingly romantic. I thoroughly recommend it!

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One of the benefits of running the Read This: Books under the Radar series is I get to see what books my guest authors choose earlier than you. And sometimes one of their suggestions appeals to me so much I go out and buy it and read it, before it’s even posted here. And this was the case with The Secret Battle by A.P. Herbert – Alice’s second choice. And I can honestly say that I agree with everything she says. Highly recommended by me too. 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
Barney Norris author of Undercurrent
Jo Leevers author of The Last Time I saw You