Garden Antiques For Sale

Contemporary authors. Who will we still be reading in fifty years' time?

Can't think of anybody now who will last that long, and I have been a lifetime reader, but I can find hardly anyone now who writes well enough to really endure. I have gone back to re-reading Victorian writers, some of the Persephone Press books, a few (very few) Bloomsbury Group, Iris Murdoch, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, etc. There is absolutely nobody writing now that i think 'Great, great, they've written a new novel'. So who do you think will last? I think I will have to cast my net wider and go to Eastern Europe and Africa and Australia (but no to Peter Carey).

I actually doubt that Harry Potter will become ‘literacy classics’ and stand the test of time on the merit of the books alone, at the moment there is too much hysteria around them for the books to earn any serious credit.

I thought Glen Duncan (I, Lucifer, Love Remains) had great potential, his style of writing seem to over-shadow all in the books I mentioned, though I was greatly disappointed by his recent efforts.

Sebastian Faulks is a fond favourite of mine, he has just been selected (2006) by the estate of the late 007 author to write the next official 007 book; Devil May Care. I’ve recently read Birdsong detailing events surrounding the Great War and I found the book mesmerised me, I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since. Human traces, Englby are both also enticing books.

Moving away from English writers to South America, I find Gabriel Garcia Marquez to be an inspired writer, a part of the Latin American boom.

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