Susannah Dickey’s new novel into the wreck follows three siblings as they return home for their father’s funeral. To mark its release, the Northern Irish novelist and poet has picked a further five of her favourite books about returning home for Big Issue.
Ladivine by Marie NDiaye
This is an incredible novel, with relentless perspective shifts. Once a month, Clarissa reverts to her birth name, Malinka, and returns to Bordeaux to visit her mother – the proud, resigned Ladivine. A perfectly wrought analysis of self-making amidst the backdrop of racism in mid-20th century France.
Read more:
- Top 5 books about obsession, selected by author and academic Marieke Bigg
- Top 5 books inspired by folklore, chosen by Scottish novelist LA MacRae
- Top 5 books on wood, trees and forests, chosen by woodworker and writer Callum Robinson
A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
The homecoming here is a psychic one – Etsuko, a Japanese woman living in England, casts her mind back to a post-war summer in Nagasaki, and her friendship with Sachiko, an imprecise, mutable woman whose disturbing actions become a prism for Etsuko’s own repressed trauma.
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai
There’s an amazing serenity to this novel, which focuses on the grandson of Prince Genji exploring an ancient monastery in Kyoto. His movements become a kind of narrative homecoming for us as readers, and his search becomes akin to a search for home, for meaning.
The Gathering by Anne Enright
You can’t have a list of books about returning home without an Enright. This is my favourite of hers, a masterclass in the fraught and uneasy alliances of family, and how historic silence renders our understandings of self more fragile.
