Holiday reading recommendations

ERIK VARDEN
I didn’t want Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (Fitzcarraldo, £14.99; Tablet price £13.49) to end. Each sentence is chiselled to perfection. The book is cynical about faith, but tender, too, recalling moments when “the soul was fired with reverence”. There is pathos in the retelling of grief, fun in accounts of absurdities. She says of a teacher: “She took being Scottish personally.” McCarthy’s self-irony is delicious. At times she touches greatness, notably in the last chapter.

FIONA SAMPSON
Helen Garner, novelist and author of extraordinary literary social investigations, is the grande dame of Australian letters. Her diaries, newly collected as How to End a Story (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20; Tablet price £18), are unputdownable. Ranging from curtain-making to writing habits to the misunderstandings intrinsic to friendship – and culminating in the story of an appalling marriage – they capture the entire texture of a life and reveal a profound, observant, truly great writer.

A.N. WILSON
I have come late to the party. Declan Ryan’s Crisis Actor (Faber, £12.99; Tablet price £11.69) is a wonderful poet’s first collection published two years ago. A series of vignettes of friends, strangers, oddities, are interlaced with scenes from boxing legends. These are poised, inventive, well crafted poems which jolt us humanely into comic awareness of life’s tragedy. I’m overwhelmed.

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