From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Anne Tyler on A Word Child by Iris Murdoch (1975)

If there had been a Folio Prize in 1975, I would have wanted to award it to Iris Murdoch’s A WORD CHILD.

I love this book. I consider it an exceptionally WARM novel – not an adjective you’d usually associate with an author as cerebral as Iris Murdoch. Its language is stunning and its characterizations dead-on – as usual with her writing – but what fixed it in my mind forever was the breathtaking moment when the entire pattern of her hero’s life was revealed for the first time. I won’t say what that moment was, because I’m hoping people will want to find out for themselves, but I have to admit that, as a plot-deficient writer myself, I felt a stab of pure, unadulterated envy.