BJ Silcox

Absolutely.

So A Little Life, which was, as you described, absolutely massive.

It was a book that everyone was putting into everyone else's hands.

It deeply affected people.

It's a book about

A young man and the circle of friends in which he grows up, college friends who are in New York together in the 80s, 90s and noughties, sort of grapple with what it means to be young men in New York.

Except our protagonist, Jude, has suffered extraordinary, and I mean absolutely extraordinary, a history of ornate Baroque suffering.

And he brings this history of incredible brokenness to his adulthood and he's unable, sadly, to escape that.

The novel, while it begins as a kind of coming-of-age tale, these young men full of vim and vigour attacking New York, it sort of circles in and becomes a story about how these friendships circle around Jude's irredeemable trauma.

So very affecting.

Then the second book, My Absolute Darling, is about a young girl called Turtle whose mother has died and she's being brought up by her survivalist father in California.

She's isolated from friends, isolated from family, and her father routinely rapes her.

And it's a book, from her perspective, loving her father because he's the only family, the only person that she has, but also understanding that the things that are happening to her, the abuse that's happening to her, which is, again, detailed in incredible, ornate detail, is wrong in a way that she doesn't know how to explain or escape from, but also is, in a sense...

caught in, in a way that means it's almost impossible to untangle from her life where she stops and her father begins.

So both of them are books that are united by this sense of being anchored in what the body can stand.

So I first read A Little Life because every person that I knew, every reader that I knew, was

avidly putting this into my hands enthusiastically and they were all saying to me this book is extraordinary I've never read anything like it it moved me in a way that I've never been moved before and I take that really seriously as as most of your listeners will you take the recommendations of the people you love seriously and I sat down and I read this book and I was completely and utterly alienated by it I felt like I was being manipulated and I wasn't able to escape and that

what I was being rewarded with, with perseverance, was more suffering.

That the reward for staying with Jude's story was to find out just how broken and just how hurt he was.

And it haunted me.