I’ve read only two of Maggie O’Farrell’s ten novels, but, based on just those two I’m convinced she’s a major figure in modern fiction.  I’ve already talked about her 2020 novel Hamnet, which won all kinds of prizes and was made into a superb movie in 2025.  O’Farrell wrote the screenplay along with director Chloé Zhao, and Zhao nabbed a Best Director nomination and the film a Best Movie nomination. In a stunning performance, Jessie Buckley won the Best Actress Oscar; the last fifteen minutes alone would make her deserving of this award, but, please, see the whole thing. This is one of those movies as good as—but different from—the book on which it’s based, and if you haven’t seen it you are missing one of the best films of the decade. I’m glad I read the book and watched the film, but if you can deal with only one, see the movie.

It was on the basis of the Hamnet novel that my two-person book club essayed another O’Farrell book,The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, published in 2006. Click below to go to the publisher’s page:

It’s a novel about family—albeit a convoluted and dysfunctional one—and is also a bit of a mystery story, in that three related women’s voices are speaking during two different times: in India and Edinburgh in the 1930s and at the present time in Edinburgh. The mystery consists in the reader and the protagonist figuring out what happened to these women, as each had a checkered background.  The novel involves are two Scottish sisters, Esme (Euphemia) and Kitty, born in India but who moved to Scotland when their baby brother died. Solving what happened next falls to their descendant Iris, living now, who has her own convoluted life.

To avoid big-time spoilers, I’ll just note that for reasons that will be revealed, Esme was confined in a mental hospital for sixty years, all the while being perfectly sane. During this time her sister Kitty raised a family, but the nature of that family involves a spoiler.

By the present time, while Esme is still confined in a “facility,” Kitty has developed Alzheimer’s and her words appear as a series of incomplete but comprehensible thoughts,  thoughts that are unknown to Iris, who has decided to remove Eseme from her asylum and let her live in her home. Iris becomes obsessed with figuring out the family history despite Esme’s laconic nature and Kitty’s Alzheimer’s.

Bit by bit the pieces of the puzzle fall into place as you read, as the book comes to a bumpy and unexpected ending.  That’s all I’ll say except that, as in Hamnet, O’Farrell has an eye for detail and is a superb writer.

It’s a short book (243 pp. in my edition), and I should have heard of it but hadn’t. I’m calling it to your attention because it seems relatively unknown despite its excellence.  And of course I’m going to look into O’Farrell’s other books, the first of which, After You’d Gone, also received much acclaim.

And when I call books to your notice I hope you’ll let us know what you’ve read lately, especially the good stuff.

Not long ago I wrote about the bizarre tale of Jason Arday, a University of Cambridge professor accused of multiple instances of plagiarism as well as bizarre behavior and fabulism, involving stories about his background, appointments at other universities, physical feats, maladies, charity donations, and so on, all or many of them probably false. After the accusations mounted and Arday produced no evidence backing up his stories, he resigned his full professorship at Cambridge, admitting no wrong and blaming racism for the brouhaha.

But the tale isn’t done. On August 11 of this week, Simon & Schuster is issuing Arday’s memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, a book for which Arday reportedly got a six-figure advance (curiously, the publisher is no longer listed on the Amazon page but the publisher’s page is here).

So far there are only a couple of reviews of the book, and the main ones, from the Torygraph, Times of London, and the Atlantic, I’ve put below. All are archived so you can read them. Click on the screenshots to do so. I’ll put a brief excerpt of each review below the title.

The Torygraph:

Excerpts:

Earlier this year, shortly after it was announced that the publisher Simon & Schuster had bought the rights to Jason Arday’s memoir, the then professor of sociology of education at Cambridge University gave an interview to The Bookseller. “I always wanted to be a person who flew close to the sun,” Arday mused. “But sometimes I wonder: did I fly too close?”

On the evidence of his book – due to be published in the UK on August 27 – and all that has emerged about Arday in recent weeks, the answer is probably yes. Titled Great and Unfortunate Things, the memoir might have been more honestly named Great and Improbable Things. This week, suspicions were raised about whether Arday’s resignation letter, in which he announced his intention to leave his post at Cambridge, was written by AI; the casual reader of Great and Unfortunate Things might suspect the ghostly hand of AI too – although the book was apparently written in collaboration with the definitely human writer Eve Claxton.

. . . What is slightly unexpected about the book that Arday has actually written is that it is – at least on the surface – painfully, mind-numbingly dull. Anyone with a passing familiarity with LinkedIn will find much to recognise in its tone: gushing, earnest, slyly self-promotional, oddly impersonal. The book feels powered by a grim determination to inspire readers come what may, and to settle the debate once and for all about the absolute awesomeness of its subject, Jason Arday. Yet to do so it relies on a narrative that, with everything we now know about his habitual false claims, stretches credulity to breaking point.

. . . One striking feature is that the book is suspiciously stingy on detail: years, ages and last names are often withheld. Much of the kind of information, in short, that journalists and suspicious academics might have liked to be able to check is not included. The amount of money that Arday has raised for charity over the years, for instance, is kept ambiguous. Instead, the reader is fed platitudes such as “It was ingrained in me to devote myself to charity work whenever I could”, and “I’d taken part in all kinds of fundraising drives”.

. . . A more amusing thread running through the book is Arday’s almost impressive ability to draw parallels between himself and major figures from cultural history, all while ambiently stressing his humbleness and simplicity of heart. He was named by his mother after Jason and the Argonauts – a good thing too, he notes: “She couldn’t have known then that my life would involve so many trials, obstacles and tests of courage, just like that of my mythological namesake with his quest for the Golden Fleece.”

. . . Readers hoping to find vivid descriptions of some of Arday’s more colourful tales about his life will, alas, be disappointed. Arday has claimed that a severed pig’s head was delivered to his family home in south London, but the incident is not recorded here. Nor is there any mention of the bananas and bullets he has said he was sent in the post after starting in his role at Cambridge. The claim that a knifeman turned up at the university twice to threaten to harm him unless he resigned is also left out of the book, but would surely have made for absorbing reading. As would the car crash and subsequent three-month coma that he recounted in his initial proposal for the autobiography, but which didn’t make the final book.

We are treated, however, to regretful sermons about the scrutiny Arday has been subjected to because of the fateful combination of his skin colour and his success. When a professor implies that he might be cheating in his coursework (the cheek of it), Arday seizes the opportunity to note that “people who are Black or from other disadvantaged groups” commonly face such scepticism.

We are treated, however, to regretful sermons about the scrutiny Arday has been subjected to because of the fateful combination of his skin colour and his success. When a professor implies that he might be cheating in his coursework (the cheek of it), Arday seizes the opportunity to note that “people who are Black or from other disadvantaged groups” commonly face such scepticism.

The review leaves out some of the incidents that have surfaced during the reporting of Arday’s fabulism, including the pig’s head, bullets, and bananas he said were delivered to his family’s home, as well as Arday’s claim, in his book proposal, that he was in a car crash that put him in a coma for three months.

On to the Times of London, which pulls no punches in its title:

Excerpts (the Times, like the Torygraph, calls attention to the fact that Arday describes detailed memories when he was young—well before age 11 when he was able, he said, to speak):

Maybe I should turn myself in to the nearest cop shop now, because this review is not going to improve Arday’s mood. Great and Unfortunate Things is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe. Extraordinary claims are made with no supporting evidence. Arday’s story — regardless of its authenticity — feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals.

One notable feature of the book is what it omits. Several of Arday’s more incredible achievements are either not mentioned or included in a softened form. His adolescent football career doesn’t figure, and nor does the 600 miles in six days challenge. His remarkable fundraising achievements are alluded to, but no definitive figure is given. Perhaps his co-writer, Eve Claxton, did a little judicious fact-checking.

. . . There are, however, some new additions to the Arday canon. The brain tumour, for example — treatment for which caused him to lose his memory just before his viva, so he had to relearn his whole thesis from scratch. He also writes that he was severely beaten at the age of 18 by four youths in an unprovoked attack, causing him to have lifelong seizures.

. . . Even for the not-notably-modest genre of the inspirational poverty-porn memoir, Arday lays it on a bit thick. He compares himself at various points with Rocky (driven, gritty), Forrest Gump (simple, wise) and God. Seriously: his mother apparently believed that “just because God wasn’t always visible, that didn’t mean he wasn’t there”, and held that the same must be true for Arday’s intelligence.

And that points to the ultimate cruelty of this story. Arday’s self-mythologising is very funny, but it has done real damage — most significantly to nonverbal children and their families. By promoting the medically unusual story of his own late-childhood flourishing, Arday is creating false hope. Parents will blame themselves, wrongly, for not living up to the impossible standard of Giff.

. . . And that points to the ultimate cruelty of this story. Arday’s self-mythologising is very funny, but it has done real damage — most significantly to nonverbal children and their families. By promoting the medically unusual story of his own late-childhood flourishing, Arday is creating false hope. Parents will blame themselves, wrongly, for not living up to the impossible standard of Giff.

. . . Nor do I have any sympathy for his publisher. Fact-checking works of non-fiction should be standard practice. Instead, as we know from The Salt Path, it’s often no more than an exercise in libel-proofing: reality doesn’t matter. Arday still has defenders who claim he is the victim of a racist stitch-up. In a post-truth world, audacity beats veracity every time.

My understanding is that publishers commonly make authors, in their contract, attest that what they wrote is their own work, is not plagiarized, and is factually true. (I had to do that with my trade books.) But publishers themselves do not have the time nor the money to do their own extensive fact-checking, ergo the contract. (Sometimes, if there’s a chance of lawsuits for libel or defamation against the publisher, they do a “legal read” using a lawyer. This may be why they changed two names in Arday’s book.)

Regardless of whether Simon & Schuster fact-checked Arday’s book, surely the University of Cambridge should have checked his credentials more thoroughly. When claims about Arday’s fabulism surfaced, Cambridge just sloughed them off, saying that investigations of plagiarism belonged to Arday’s Ph.D. university, not Cambridge. That is a dereliction of duty on the part of Cambridge. Only when the ruckus became more prominent did they launch their own investigation, whereupon Arday resigned.

I’ve found one book that was withdrawn because of factual inaccuracy, a memoir of an Australian police officer published by Hachette.  Presumably Arday’s book could also be withdrawn if they find factual inaccuracies. But how can you check some of his claims if there’s no evidence one way or another. I could say “I flew up to the Moon and back yesterday, though nobody saw me,” and that is uncheckable. It’s unlikely, but how do you say it didn’t happen?

Another book, The Salt Path by Raynor Winn, made dubious claims according to the Observer, but was not withdrawn.

The Atlantic has perhaps the most extensive take on the book, but also gives it a thumbs-down:

Excerpts:

 . . . A year later, [Arday] set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”

That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

Arday’s claims have now fallen apart, of course, and Cambridge should be embarrassed. The Atlantic made inquiries:

Arday did not respond to questions from The Atlantic, but he told The Timeslast week that he is not a “liar” or a “fantasist” and that he’d been given insufficient supervision as a graduate student, especially in light of his learning disabilities: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake, there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” He also seemed to address such allegations at a conference in April for the British Sociological Association, where he gave a talk about pervasive efforts to discredit Black scholars including himself. “These people are brilliant, perversely brilliant,” he told his colleagues. “There are times when you look at what they’re doing and you say to yourself, Well done, well played, very good. You’ve caught me [in] a thousand knots—how do I get myself out of this situation?”

. . . Great and Unfortunate Things, which Arday co-wrote with Eve Claxton, is still scheduled to come out next week from Simon & Schuster. The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent. But the book is also, in a way, very honest and quite telling: It provides a vivid portrait of a man who was always manifestly ill-equipped for academia yet found a way to reach its upper levels. This is not someone else’s cruel assessment of Arday’s tragic and improbable career. It’s his own.

The reviewer, Daniel Engbber, recounts the now-familiar obstacles that Arday faced and apparently overcame. Here’s one that the Atlantic tried to fact-check, but failed:

The book sticks mostly to this frantic register, and coincidence abounds. Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.

Is that really true? I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. Even asking that question places me on the wrong side of Arday’s moral ledger. Again and again, the book acknowledges his “impossible” success, yet his indignation at anyone who ever doubted him remains a running theme throughout the book. These are Arday’s villains—the Ivan Dragos and the Clubber Langs of academia, who dared to wonder whether his work was really so original, or questioned whether he did it on his own. He swallowed his “feelings of offense,” he says in reference to one lecturer who insisted on drilling him about subject material in person, “but I have never forgotten them.”

. . . But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.

Could that be due to legal fact-checking? Who knows? And Arday cannot be sued for what he claims in the book proposal but not in the book. But he and the publisher can be sued, and the book withdrawn, if the book does contains factual claims that are false.

As a publishing veteran told me, “If this guy applied for a job with our company, we’d check his references. Did Cambridge?” In the end, the damage is mostly not to Simon & Schuster, who may make a pile, or to the reader, who may like a good tale even if it’s false, or even to Arday himself, who simply cannot believe he did anything wrong, and also got a tidy sum for his book. The real damage is done to Cambridge University for apparently hiring on background rather than merit, as well as to black scholars of real quality, who are now subject to being denigrated as “DEI hires”.  I often wonder if Arday believes the tales he tells, in which case he is mentally ill, or is he simply a grifter getting by on outrageous tales, with doubts dispelled by his accusations of racism. Who knows?

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t call attention to those who defended Arday and echoed his claim that this affair was simply a racist witch hunt. Here’s one article from The Guardian, which, in other articles, did a lot to call attention to Arday’s unbelievable claims (click to read):

This article doesn’t defend Arday so much as criticize the people who brought him down, and even implies that Arday’s fall wasn’t so bad because “there’s lot of people who don’t deserve to be where they are.” If that’s meant to defend Arday, it’s shameful. (“Andrews” below refers to “Kehinde Andrews, who was the first Black Studies professor in the UK but was recently made redundant from Birmingham City University.”)

A quote:

“It’s not just about Black people – any minoritised group, our success is generally seen as not being genuine,” said one academic, speaking anonymously.

“[The row] will make the small number of Black people in the field feel much more vulnerable. It will give licence for a while to people who don’t want Black people in the academic space and it may give pause to people who want to redress the massive [racial] imbalance in academia.

“But it’s a mistake to think of any of this as a meritocracy – there’s lots of people in academia who don’t deserve to be where they are, and there’s lots of people who should be more advanced in their careers than they are.”

Andrews said he was setting up an independent Black Studies centre, describing the university sector as “toxic”.

“Academia is set up so that there’s these few places and we’re all fighting over scraps to get into these places,” he said. “It might just be time to say, let’s do it ourselves and let’s not keep relying on these institutions.”

But while Arday’s case – and cuts to the humanities – negatively affect morale, many academics emphasised the proud history of Black scholarship, insisting the Arday affair must not be allowed to tarnish it.

“Black British academics – like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby and Isaac Julien – punch way above their weight globally. The idea that this one incident in some way reflects Black British academia in general is bonkers,” one academic said.

“There’s a bunch of people out there who think Black people are less intelligent than white people, and that the only way they can get anywhere is by being forced into situations that they are unqualified for. For those people, being Black is the definition of being unqualified. It’s an old racist wine in a new bottle.”

That’s fine: Arday’s fall should not in the least affect other black scholars. But it’s weird that the author uses the fall as a reason to call out academia for racism.

Finally, Richard Dawkins has an interesting piece in UnHerd (click to read) arguingthat Arday’s prose is obscurantist and stilted: a sign that he didn’t have much to say:

One short excerpt:

Dawkins’ Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic discipline expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Modern physics is genuinely difficult. Natural selection of Pleistocene man did not prepare our poor brains for Einstein or Heisenberg. Common sense, forged in a world of middle-sized objects travelling at medium speeds, must be sent away on compassionate leave when we open a book on quantum mechanics or relativity. Physicists have no need to language-up their writing. Their subject is intrinsically difficult. Naming no names, practitioners of a subject that any fool can understand may suffer from what has been called “physics-envy”. Longing to sound more profound than they are, what recourse have they but obscurantist language? Look, for example, at the following passage from Arday’s thesis:

“An important consideration which also formed part of the theoretical paradigm for the research recognised that the mentoring process is socially constructed, and therefore the relationship between the participants and the researcher needed to be tailored towards supporting the professional development of the student teachers, and making them autonomous social actors in this process, hence the researcher adopting the secondary position of facilitator within the research.”

I must ask: did the examiners at Liverpool John Moores University, who judged his thesis worthy of a PhD, actually read it? One trivial give-away: the thesis contains 332 instances where a plural noun’s terminal “s” is incorrectly followed by an apostrophe. There’s even one in the thesis title: “An exploration of peer-mentoring among student teachers’ to inform reflective practice within the context of action research.” Where I come from, a PhD candidate has a research supervisor, with a duty of care. It’s hard to believe even he read the thesis before letting it go forward to examination.

There’s more at the site, and stay tuned as other reviews of Arday’s book appear.  Will I read it? I don’t think so. I’ll let others do that job, as three reviewers above have kindly done.

I just finished a long (843-page) novel in my two-person book club with my friend Wendy. (We alternate choosing propitious books, read them at the same time, and discuss them online.) This one, Lonesome Dove (1985) by Larry McMurtry, turned out to be not only a page-turner, but also one of the finest modern novels I’ve read (it won a Pulitzer for fiction). In fact, I’ve put it in consideration with a few others as The Great American Novel.

What, you ask, are the characteristics of a candidate for the Great American Novel? This is purely subjective, but I’ll give my criteria. It has to be set in America, of course, and display diverse aspects of America and Americans themselves. It has to be epic (i.e., longish and involved), not hew too closely to a heavy-handed theme, contain tragedy and sorrow as well as joy, along with a soupçon of humor.  It has to be so American that it could not be set in any other country. And when you finish it, you will have not only a sense of what America was like at a given time, but also a need for your own time to process what you’ve read.

Another novel that I’ve considered as a possible Great American Novel is The Great Gatsby, which we’ve all read in high school. (It’s short, has well-delineated themes, and portrays American ambition.) But it’s not a good candidate as it portrays only a small slice of American life (rich people and obsessive love) and is not an epic, having as it does only a few characters. Another, also by Larry McMurtry, is The Last Picture Show (1971), a fantastic book and an equally fantastic movie—in fact, I think the eponymous movie is the best American or English-language movie ever made. Below is one scene from the movie, which I see as not only archetypically American but full of low-key but intense emotion. (McMurtry co-wrote the screenplay with director Peter Bogdanovich.)

Here Sam the Lion (played by Ben Johnson), who runs the picture show, restaurant, and movie theater in the tiny oil town of Anarene, Texas (modeled on Archer City, pop 1070, where McMurtry lived), takes young Sonny (played by Timothy Bottoms) fishing along with Sam’s mentally disabled son Billy. Sam reminisces about his love for Lois Farrow (played by Ellen Burstyn), who was married when they had an affair.

I think this is the modern and American equivalent of Shakespeare. No, the language isn’t fancy, but the emotions are real and deep. I can’t imagine any non-American equivalent. Johnson won the Oscar that year for Best Supporting Actor:

But I digress, except to say that one of the themes of this movie is similar to that in the novel Lonesome Dove: the attempt of people to stave off loneliness by trying to connect with others, and their inevitable failure to do so.

The plot of Lonesome Dove (which was also made into a 6-part t.v. miniseries) can be seen in extenso at the Wikipedia page. In short, it’s about a group of cowboys who run a livery stable and a horse- and cow-selling operation in the eponymous Texas town. (Time: mid-nineteenth century.) The leaders of the group are a pair of retired Texas Rangers, Captain Woodrow F. Call and Captain Augustus “Gus” McCrae, played respectively in the miniseries by and Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones (great casting!). There’s a shortage of women in Lonesome Dove, and the men patronize :Lorena, the town’s only prostitute—the word in the book is always “whore”—when they need a “poke.”

There are a number of adventures, including a cattle-stealing jaunt to Mexico, but the meat of the plot comprises delineation of the characters, which include a black cowboy, Deets, the moral center of the book and the only man who is wholly admirable. Gus and Call decide to take a big herd of cattle to the distant but lusher plains of Montana, where they envision building a ranch. They take with them all the Hat Creek outfit men, as well as Lorena, who eventually falls in love with Gus. Along the way several other women appear, all having, like the men, frustrated relationships.  One woman, Clara, who lives in Nebraska, is the female equivalent of Deets: a moral center, though she’s immensely unhappy.

At any rate, tons of adventures ensue: there are fights with bears and Indians, murders, hangings of horse thieves, duststorms, locust plagues, and moments of happiness. If nothing else, McMurtry shows us that the life of a cowboy was far from romantic. It was hard, dirty, and exhausting.

There are also tragedies and some very sad deaths. The ending just sort of tapers off. .  there is no satisfying denouement, and that is good. (McMurtry wrote three other books in the series with prequels and sequels to this book, but I’m not interested in reading them.)

It’s a good candidate for the Great American Novel because, first, you can’t get more American than cowboys depicted at the height of Cowboydom in the mid- to late nineteenth century. But much more than that is the diversity of emotions and characters that make the book as rich as a novel by Dickens—if he wrote a novel with Americans rather than Brits.  As my friend Wendy wrote about Gus and Call, “They all were so human, deeply flawed, stubborn, and yet had their own standards and principles. And they kept going, which I think is the American bit of it.” 

All I can do is recommend that you read this book, pronto. Its length may overwhelm those who can’t read even short books, but it’s involved, engaging, and wonderful, right up there with All the Light We Cannot See (another Pulitzer winner) as the best piece of modern fiction in English I’ve read in years.

Are there other candidates for the Great American Novel? Yes, Huckleberry Finn is a good one, embodying the characteristics of the genre shown above.  I have heard that East of Eden, by Steinbeck, another wholly American epic, is another one, and I plan to read it soon.

Here’s the book that you must read:

Here is McMurtry talking about the book. Note that the cowboys in Lonesome Dove were older than McMurtry describes as typical of the era, with Gus and Call being seniors.

If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to a short video showing Robert Duvall claiming that the role of Gus was his favorite—and he had many great roles. Note that he compares Gus to a Shakespearian character.  There’s also a scene from the miniseries showing Gus and Call, in which, curiously, Gus reminisces about his lost love Clara.  (I haven’t seen the miniseries.) There are parallels with the Sam the Lion scene above.

Now I’ve made my recommendation, but I’m sure I’m missing candidates for the Great American Novel. What would you recommend as the book who takes the title?