Lucy Steeds' Desert Island Books

Featuring a deliciously sneaky modern classic, and a quiet and devastating meditation on time and memories and what might have been...

It’s been a long time since a book—particularly a debut—has made me want to bellow from the rooftops about how much I love it. One I’ve wanted to press into people’s hands with a desperate plea: Read this. And then along came The Artist by Lucy Steeds.

The cover. The metaphors: "A sheen of fear slips over him, as if someone has cracked an egg down his back." The imagery: "Sunlight radiates from the yellow fields, and dust sticks to the olive trees, dark and fragrant in their arthritic twists." The prose: "August deepens like a bruise." And the descriptions of food: "Wooden tables have been placed throughout the square and spread with papery onions, plump tomatoes, bushels of parsley."

If I were the type of reader who highlighted favourite lines, there wouldn’t be a single page left unmarked. (Alas, my high school French teacher used so much red pen on my essays that I developed a lifelong fear of underlining.)

A beautiful, iridescent, and luminous read, The Artist follows Joseph, an aspiring writer; Tata, a reclusive painter; and his obedient niece, Ettie, as their lives intertwine against the stifling backdrop of one hot summer in Provence. A seductive, sun-drenched story set in a heady, dusty farmhouse, it is a novel of quiet intensity—its landscape vivid, its characters entirely unforgettable.

It’s my first five-star read of the year, and while I know we’re barely out of January, trust me when I say it will be a hard one to beat.

If you’d love to get your hands on this spellbinding book (and trust me, you should), become a paid subscriber to my Substack for your chance to win a copy. Each week, subscribers are automatically entered into a draw to win a book by that week’s featured author. Otherwise, consider buying it Bookshop.org—a better way to shop online, where every purchase supports local independent bookstores.

Now, without further ado, read on to find out which eight books Lucy would take with her to the sandy shores of a desert island…

The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

This book chronicles Ross Gay’s mission to experience delight every single day. It’s a riff on J. B. Priestley’s book from the 1940s, but Gay is kinder than Priestley, I think (Priestley’s delights include ‘Other People’s Weaknesses’). Gay details his everyday delights from writing letters by hand to drinking kombucha in a mid-century glass, and his emphasis is on noticing things in a world which is constantly trying to distract you. These are not essays but ‘essayettes’ (great word), and I think they would keep me good company on the island. They’re a reminder to pay attention, and bask in what you find.

Still Life by Sarah Winman

This is one of those books you want to press into the hands of everyone you love. My grandmother pressed it into mine, and I have since pressed it into the hands of friends and family members with the fervour of a zealot. WWII is over. People are rebuilding their lives. And through a caprice of fate, a beloved gaggle of friends from the East End of London are rebuilding theirs in Florence. Still Life is brimming with art and food and salty sea swims and surprise connections with strangers. It’s a love letter to E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (one of my other all-time favourite books), and dances through the years with perpetual energy and vim. It’s about the profundity of goodness, and has some of the most beautiful last words of any book I’ve ever read.

Letters on Cézanne by Rainer Maria Rilke

I read a lot about art when writing The Artist, and Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne was one of the most blazingly illuminating books: he writes about light and colour in a way that makes you go, ‘Oh, he gets it’. The letters are written to his wife Clara, and something about this means you can feel the blood surging through his hand as he writes. He is so desperate for Clara to see what he sees. She was a sculptor and he a poet, and there’s an urgency in the way he describes paintings for her; his words conjure the colours and textures so viscerally. But these letters are about so much more than art. They’re about love and the desire to transfer something from one heart to another.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

I saw a Tweet once that said ‘Is The Secret History the best book in the world or did you just read it when you were 16?’ and the good news for me is the answer is both. My best friend gave me this book for my sixteenth birthday (complete with exuberant dedication scrawled over the entire first page) and it felt as if it had been written specifically for me. It was so deliciously sneaky. So unashamedly intelligent. So much fun! One of my favourite parts is where Richard and Francis need to talk to each other in code so speak in Ancient Greek, but are obviously limited by their vocabulary: ‘There is talk among the citizens. The mother is concerned with the dishonour of the son having to do with wine.’ Re-reading this on an island would take me back to that heady, obsessive, intense teenage time. As Julian says at the beginning, ‘I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?’

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

I have read this book. I love this book. I know I have understood only a fraction of it. I would like several long years on an island to re-read it, in the hope of cracking open more glimmers of its magic. It’s such a dizzying feat of storytelling and imagination, and one of the greatest things about it is that you can feel wholly enveloped by it even if you haven’t unlocked all of its secrets. I think of it often, in particular that dazzling first line: ‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’

The Complete Poems of John Donne

John Donne was the literary bad boy par excellence of the sixteenth century and, later in life, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral. He spent his early years writing voraciously horny erotic poetry and his later ones conveying departed souls to the afterlife. What range! This is the man who wrote ‘As liberally, as to a Midwife, shew thyself’ but also ‘He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.’ All of human life is in Donne’s poetry. He is magnetic, and his work acts as a reminder to feel things deeply. To let love and desire drive you wild, to let grief overcome you, and to feel every stinging blow and triumphant high with the same piercing intensity. Donne was a man who loved words and knew how to transform them, as an alchemist transforms dull metal into gold. I could live in his stanzas forever.

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

This is a very slim novel about a man who spends a summer uncovering a mural in a church. It takes place in 1920, in the aftermath of WWI, and is a quiet and devastating meditation on time and memories and what might have been. It packs a lot of beauty into a few pages, and has this delicate folding structure where the present looks back on the past which looks to the future. You feel winded by the almost unbearable weight of time as Tom spends his summer sleeping in the belfry, entangling himself in the lives of the villagers, and peeling back layers and layers of this ancient painting.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi lives in the House. The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable; its Kindness infinite. I’m not sure whether this would be the perfect book for the island, or whether it might tip me over the edge into existential oblivion. Piranesi lives in a house which expands, Escher-like, and never seems to end. It is full of peculiar statues and rising water and sea birds which appear and disappear. To say anything about this book is almost to say too much; Susanna Clarke reveals each detail with the instinctive timing and precision of a conjuror. We explore the house with Piranesi through his diary entries (I love an epistolary novel) and it feels like exploring the world for the very first time. This is a book where you come away with new eyes and have to emerge, blinking, into your life again.