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.

China Miéville on Attic Summer by Jane Gaskell (1963)

All of Gaskell’s books astonish, in a variety of ways. Here in this early work there is something in particular about the ingenuousness of the prose, the strangely affectless excitement of youth at a questionable end of Kings Road. This city veers between violence and matter-of-fact beauty with passages of ecstatic description that have simply never been surpassed. That Gaskell, one of the greatest London writers, is also one of the most neglected, is a literary dereliction that a retrospective Folio Prize might go some way to obviating.