In this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they have been reading recently. This month, recommendations include a tear-jerking novel, stories of female friendship and a gamechanging guide to the way we eat. Tell us in the comments what you have been reading.
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Travis Alabanza, writer and performer
I’m not really someone who cries a lot, I wish I cried more. I often want to, but the tears just never flow. Yet when I finished an advance reading copy of Bellies by Nicola Dinan I had to sit down and let myself cry. Real tears. Not one singular tear to brush off, but embarrassing flood-gates-open crying tears. A loud crying in contrast to the quiet sadness of this book. The way Dinan writes about love, loss, growing up, transitioning and our bodies took my breath away. I can’t wait for this novel to be published, so I can talk about it with everyone I know.
• Travis Alabanza won the 2023 Jhalak prize for None of the Above, published by Canongate (£16.99).
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Mick, Guardian reader
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is a dreamlike venture into questions of alternate universes, new worlds and old intelligence, told in the form of diary entries of the eponymous narrator. Piranesi spends his days fishing, crafting, admiring the numerous statues of the House, and writing his journal, whose entries are delightfully honest, succinct, and beguiling. Clarke does not spoon-feed you exposition; instead, you must let yourself be carried away on the tides of her storytelling, until you yourself feel like an eternal and timeless inhabitant of the House. I devoured Piranesi in two days, but have been thinking about it for much longer.
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Ella Creamer, Guardian writer
Marlowe Granados’s Happy Hour and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet both examine the rewards and limits of women’s friendship under capitalism.
In Happy Hour, we meet Isa and Gala, two carefree young women visiting New York for a summer. The friends are broke and get by on the favours of men who buy them free drinks, pay for their cabs and give them gifts. In Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Lenu and Lila come of age in a violent postwar Naples, embroiled in fights between communists and fascists, with (unhappy) marriage being one of the only means of escaping poverty.
In both tales, women use their sexual currency to obtain financial capital, in some way subverting the misogyny they face. However, Ferrante in particular suggests these transactions slowly rot one’s spirit. Perhaps Isa and Gala, Lenu and Lila bond over the secret knowledge that while these exchanges feel wrong, there are few better options for making ends meet. And as the novels develop, the friends give each other the courage to resist social expectations, to rebel.
In other ways, the books are worlds apart. Happy Hour is what it says on the tin: a sweet cocktail, a delight in diary format to be enjoyed over a few evenings. Ferrante’s works are epic and shattering – but also knowing, putting into words that which is so hard to explain.
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Cath, Guardian reader
Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken is a book everyone should read. Have you ever really thought about what all those numbers and complex chemical words mean on the back of your ice-cream or your gravy granules or your frozen pizza? Did you know that highly processed foods are so addictive that it may be the biggest challenge of your life to stop eating them? Occasionally a book comes along that is not just a gamechanger, but a life changer. I read it in three days and can honestly say I can’t imagine eating most of the food I have shovelled into my mouth for the past 40 years ever again.
