Holly Connolly provides a not-that-festive list of book recommendations, featuring highlights from the past year and works from two writers who’ve recently left us
Hervé Guibert began writing
To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life in the last week of 1988; he has just been diagnosed with AIDS but is convinced he can survive. He plots the novel against the uncertain coordinates of this new virus: “I have a sense of the structure of this new book I’ve been harbouring within myself all these last weeks, but I don’t know how it will unfold in its entirety; I can imagine several endings, all of which fall for the moment under the heading of premonition or desire, but the whole truth is still hidden from me.”