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. You can see the full list of books which have been selected, as well as the author’s latest book on Bookshop.org, where you can have a browse and buy any that take your fancy. Happy reading!

Read This: Ruth Thomas

You might remember that a few weeks ago I had Jo Leevers, the author of The Last Time I Saw you, on Read This: Books Under the Radar and one of her choices was Ruth Thomas’s The Home Corner, and now here Ruth is with her three choices. Such pleasing circularity. Here’s what she has to say about herself:

Ruth Thomas is the author of three novels and three short story collections and her work has been shortlisted for various prizes including the John Llewellyn Rhys Award, the VS Pritchett Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Her latest novel The Snow and the Works on the Northern Line was a BBC Book at Bedtime in 2021. Ruth has taught Creative Writing at St Andrews University, been an RLF Writing Fellow and is a mentor for the Scottish Book Trust. She lives in Edinburgh and is working on a new novel and story collection.

Instagram and Bluesky @RuthieSThomas and at ruth-thomas.com

Minna Needs Rehearsal Space by Dorthe Nors, translated by Misha Hoekstra 

I first came across Danish writer Dorthe Nors when I picked up a copy of her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal and was immediately hooked by the opening line, ‘Sonja is in a car, and she’s brought her dictionary along.’ It was the juxtaposition of the banal with the unexpected that I found so exciting, and these qualities are even more evident in Minna Needs Rehearsal Space. This is a tiny novella (eighty-nine pages long!) told in a series of taut, third person statements, all in the present tense. The sentences have a hypnotic, almost Peter-and-Jane-like quality, but what Nors conjures up in her layering of brief, informative observations is quite magical. Her protagonist Minna, a composer living in Copenhagen, is trying to get over a breakup and at the same time desperate for some rehearsal space to work in. On top of this, her intensely houseproud sister Elizabeth is doing a great job of winding her up even further. What Minna really needs, it turns out, is a holiday – and along with the journey she makes to the coast comes the realisation of what she has actually been struggling with all along. Brilliant – comic, profound and extremely clever.

The Hero of This Book by Elizabeth McCracken

 This is such a beautiful book – an elegy to the novelist’s late mother and a hymn to London as she revisits places the two of them once visited there together. Elizabeth McCracken is celebrated in America as a novelist, essayist and short story writer, but apart from her debut novel The Giant’s House I don’t think she’s that well known over here. This is baffling to me, as her voice is incredible – conversational, funny, odd, poignant. It’s her descriptions of fleeting images and conversations that make this memoir so vivid, and her writing captures scenes and atmospheres so expertly it’s like being there. In one chapter she describes being stuck in a London Eye ‘capsule’ with a family all wearing identical T-shirts saying ‘BOBO’s 80!!! – ‘…with one exception’ (McCracken slyly adds), ‘an upright old woman with steel-gray hair, whose T-shirt had her own photograph printed upon it, and below, I’M 80. No exclamation marks’. It’s deadpan humour like this that makes McCracken’s recollections of her mother even more poignant. ‘I was trying to decide what I thought about my life’, she writes, and this is the fantastic result. What a conjuring act, and what a voice.

A Particular Man by Lesley Glaister

Lesley Glaister has been described by The Sunday Telegraph as ‘one of Britain’s finest novelists’ but her books are not nearly as feted as they should be. ‘A Particular Man’ tells the story of Starling, a young man who was interred in a Japanese prisoner of war camp and has returned to England to look for the family of a friend who died there. He has something he needs to give them that belonged to his friend but also, traumatised by his experiences, a lot to work out for himself. Glaister’s novels are wonderfully page-turning, and I think this is one of her most compelling. There’s a dark oddness to her descriptions which reminds me of Shena Makay’s writing, and she’s also brilliant, like Mackay, at describing the deprivations and grot of post-war suburban England and the way people are simply trying to get by as well as they can. Glaister never overlooks small details – a hedgehog bootscraper ‘with its idiotically cheery expression’, a kitchen stove ‘like a warm body’. The novel’s told from three different perspectives – all convincing – but it’s Starling’s angry and fragile voice that moved me the most.  

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Funnily enough I recently read Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors after I picked it up in a bookshop in Copenhagen, but it languished on my shelves for a couple of years before I got round to it, and I also really enjoy it’s kind of bland quirkiness. Is that a thing? It is now. Any of these three 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
Barney Norris author of Undercurrent
Jo Leevers author of The Last Time I saw You
Alice Winn author of In Memmoriam
Anna Mazzola author of The House of Secrets
Alice Peterson author of The Saturday Place
Jenna Smith bookblogger
Lucy Atkins author of Windmill Hill
LV Matthews author of To Love a Liar