We started with Fiona McFarlane’s tiger on the coast of New South Wales and we finished eight weeks later in the company of the volatile “young skins” of Glanbeigh, having travelled to Colin Barrett’s fictional west of Ireland town via the new China with Evan Osnos, and from Kabul to London via Oxford, New York and Islamabad with Zia Haider Rahman. On the way we followed Gruff Rhys as he traced his farmhand ancestor’s search for a fabled tribe of Welsh-speaking Native Americans and we spent time with Marion Coutts, sharing her pain, frustration and love as her husband, the art critic Tom Lubbock, experienced the debilitating effects of a brain tumour.
The brain and its workings returned several times: Henry Marsh showed us what it was like to operate on its “soft white substance … moving through thought itself” while Matthew Thomas in his novel We Are Not Ourselves presented us with a closely observed study of what happens when Marsh’s “jelly” falls victim to dementia. We learnt new ways of interpreting architecture from Tom Wilkinson’s Bricks and Mortals, and encountered brilliant new approaches to the short story in May-Lan Tan’s Things To Make and Break, which made it to the longlist as the Guardian readers’ choice.
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