William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. Any Human Heart was longlisted for the Booker Prize and adapted into a TV series. His books have won many literary awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Fiction, and the Costa Book Award. He was named a Granta Best Young Novelist in 1983, and in 2005, he was awarded the CBE. Boyd's newest novel is The Predicament.
In 2020 at GQ (UK) he tagged "five books that, for him, embody and inspire resilience like no others," including:
Speak, Memory by Vladimir NabokovRead about another entry on the list.
This book is Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishing, exemplary autobiography. Nabokov (born in 1899) was the scion of a rich, enlightened,noble Russian family. He grew up in a world of unreflecting wealth and astonishing privilege. All of which was snatched away forever with the arrival of the Russian Revolution in 1917. Nabokov then became an impoverished exile – first in Berlin, then Paris and then, with the advent of the Second World War, the US. Fame and fortune eventually arrived, thanks to the global success of his novel Lolita, but what is remarkable about Nabokov’s telling of his life story is his composure. He lost everything, he never returned to his native land, his father was assassinated, family members perished in the Holocaust, but his view of life and his savouring of its particular pleasures never wavered. There was no bitterness, no regrets, no wailing at misfortune. The book is also beautifully written – in English. Miraculously, he became, after James Joyce, the language’s unrivalled stylist.
Speak, Memory is on Eve Claxton's top ten list of memoirs and autobiographies, Anne Applebaum's top five list of memoirs of Communism and Eva Hoffman's list of five notable memoirs of identity, dislocation & belonging, and is one of Susan Cheever's favorite books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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