Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Top ten novels of solitude

Teju Cole was raised in Nigeria and came to the United States in 1992. He is a writer, photographer, and professional historian of early Netherlandish art. Open City is his first novel. He lives in New York City.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten novels of solitude, including:
Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

This slim volume is the daddy of English spy novels. A big-game hunter decides, on a lark, to get the president of a central European country in his gun sights. He does, but he's caught, stripped, tortured, and left for dead, and he must slip out of the country unnoticed. We are with him all the hair-raising way. It is genre, certainly, but it is far better-written than most "literary" fictions.
Read about the other books on the list.

Rogue Male is on John Mullan's list of ten of the best chases in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue