Five titles that embody resilience

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:

A Far Cry From Kensington by Muriel Spark

Muriel Spark was a survivor. Born into a Scottish, Jewish family in Edinburgh she sought, like many Scots, a form of early exile abroad. But life was hard initially, before her novels eventually brought her fame and financial security. This novel (published in 1988) is particularly autobiographical, set in London in the 1950s. Its central character, Mrs Hawkins, is a mesmerising self-portrait of the author at this particular juncture in her life. Scraping a living on the fringes of the literary world, Mrs Hawkins (a young widow) is very overweight, supremely confident and a life force. People are drawn to her; her judgements rival Solomon’s; she is indomitable. The book is a kind of hymn to self-sufficiency – or resilience – and a model handbook of how to overcome what look like adverse situations. And it is written in Spark’s unique tone of voice: terse, funny, adamantine.

Read about the other entries on the list.

A Far Cry From Kensington is among Joanna Biggs's top ten books about working life.

--Marshal Zeringue