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.

Rachel Cooke on Jane Gardam

GardamThe Old Filth trilogy is a masterpiece; Eddie Feathers and Veneering are two of the great comic creations, but the books are so wonderfully and deceptively easy to read that you don’t even notice all the things they are trying to tell the reader about the post-Empire world. Her novels are eccentric, but they are also psychologically acute. They feel true. They take you to places you didn’t think you cared about.