Brilliant first novel imagines the inside story of Truman Capote’s final work

Words Uli Lenart

BOOK OF THE MONTH

SWAN SONG

Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott/Hutchinson

In 1975, Esquire magazine published extracts from what would turn out to be Truman Capote’s final — unfinished — novel, Answered Prayers, detonating a literary grenade that would scandalise American high society. Exposing the closely guarded secrets of Manhattan’s jet set, the truths that Capote expertly charmed from the lips of these socialites over expensive cocktails in exclusive restaurants, would ultimately leave him socially ostracised as he spiralled ever deeper into drink-and-drug addictions. Moving back and forth from the 1940s to the 1980s, Swan Song is the impressively imagined story of Capote’s childhood, blossoming career, and how the affairs and indiscretions exposed in Answered Prayers may have actually played out. The result is a deliciously gossipy imploding opera of scandal, set in the halcyon days of American high society. Simultaneously fabulous and tragic, Swan Song is an incredibly accomplished debut. 14 June

THE UNPUNISHED VICE: A LIFE OF READING

Edmund White/ Bloomsbury

Blending memoir and literary criticism, The Unpunished Vice is a compendium of all the ways reading has shaped literary icon Edmund White’s life and work. With wit and honesty, he recalls everything from reading Henry James, and socialite Peggy Guggenheim in her private gondola in Venice, to phone calls at eight in the morning with novelist and poet Vladimir Nabokov. Featuring writing that has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review and The Times Literary Supplement, among others, The Unpunished Vice is a wickedly smart and insightful account of a life in literature. 28 June