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.

Rupert Thomson on 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma

Family LifeIn sentences that are always considered, spare, and beautifully crafted, Akhil Sharma mixes humour with desperation to devastating effect, but what makes Family Life special for me, what lifts it above most other books I’ve read in the last few years, is its sheer humanity.

It is too often said of novels that they “touch the heart”. This one really does.