Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Granta
Hardback
Staff Picks: Sam says…
There have been a hundred George Orwell biographies, as Solnit readily admits at the start. But this isn’t really a book about Orwell, at least not the Orwell that we know. It starts as a quest to find two fruit trees that Orwell planted in the 30s, and diverges from there to topics that have pervaded the writings of both the author and her subject: ecology and the economy, community and the domestic, geological and ancestral time. In Solnit’s rendering we find an Orwell that we don’t recognise, but perhaps feel closer to for being cast in the light of Solnit’s own preoccupations. Her digressions don’t always come off, but they are always a pleasure to read. One to curl up with this winter, once the roses have gone over.