Ian Brown, nominated for Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-First Year: The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning? published by Vintage Canada
Everyone who reads my book should read Ian McEwan's Nutshell next, because a) it's a novel, and one should consume non-fiction and fiction in alternate bites, like beans and corn (together they make a whole protein); and b) because Nutshell starts at the other end of life, not as the diary of a newly older man, but as the inner monologue of Hamlet in utero, as he listens to his mother plot his father's death with her lover, his boring real estate developer uncle. It's understandable to have regrets at 60, even if you can't do anything about them – a fact readers will glean from Sixty. But if McEwan/Hamlet is right, our fates are sealed in DNA well before we have even a chance to be self-determining. Which is both reassuring and not. Plus McEwan's command of language is just gobsmacking, even in his 60s; the wonder is that he is hilarious as well. He makes aging look brilliant.
Deborah Campbell, nominated for A Disappearance in Damascus: A Story of Friendship and Survival in the Shadow of War, published by Knopf Canada
Everyone who reads my book should read Zinky Boys next, because it tells a different hidden story of war – in this case the Soviet Union's war in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, interweaves the voices of Soviet men and women: the doctors and nurses and sex workers and soldiers, and the mothers of those "lucky" ones who returned from the battlefield in zinc coffins. Her account – heartbreaking, harrowing, idiosyncratic – serves as a powerful riposte to official narratives. In her Nobel speech, she said, "I work with missing history. … I'm interested in little people. In my books, these people tell their own little histories, and big history is told along the way." Paired with that I recommend Ann Jones's outstanding Kabul in Winter, a fierce and lyrical from-the-ground portrait of Afghanistan's more recent history. Like Alexievich, Jones knows that wars never end.
Matti Friedman, nominated for Pumpkinflowers: An Israeli Soldier's Story, published by Signal/McClelland & Stewart
I recommend The Cruel Sea by Nicholas Monsarrat, and won't mind if you read it before Pumpkinflowers instead of afterward, or if you skip my book entirely and go straight to his. The Cruel Sea was published in 1951, but it took me another 26 years to be born, and another 39 before I read it this summer. The story (like mine) is about a few dozen men isolated in frightening circumstances, their connection to the ordinary world increasingly tenuous; but here the setting is a British corvette in the Atlantic in WWII. Monsarrat served on similar ships in the war. For me, the book was a lesson on how a good writer gets at an experience shared across times and cultures – in this case, being young and sent into something dangerous that you barely understand – not with generalizations, but with the meticulous evocation of a very particular little world. It also made me want to go to sea.
Ross King, nominated for Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies, published by Bond Street Books/Doubleday Canada
Everyone who reads my book should read a novel by Octave Mirbeau next, because not only was he one of Monet's closest friends but he was also a brilliant, courageous and now, sadly, much underrated writer. A good place to start would be Sébastien Roch, an autobiographical novel describing "the murder of a child's soul" – the sexual abuse of Sébastien at a Catholic boarding school in the 19th century. The terrible experience made Mirbeau a passionate and articulate crusader against all abuses of power. He tackled difficult subjects such as domestic slavery (in Diary of a Chambermaid) and the sexual exploitation of young girls (in the play Le Foyer). For those not faint of heart, there's The Torture Garden, a strange and deeply disturbing parable that was – incongruously – partly inspired by Monet's beautiful garden at Giverny, to which he was a frequent and welcome visitor. His books may sometimes be grisly (Mirbeau said he wanted to make his readers look Medusa in the face), but they are enlivened by his rich humour, playful language and vivid imagination.
Sonja Larsen, nominated for Red Star Tattoo: My Life as a Girl Revolutionary, published by Random House Canada
Everyone who reads my book should read Your Heart Is A Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa next because it explores, in a very different way, a lot of the same themes of activism, idealism and identity. What does it mean to be a good person? What is our obligation to each other? I think these are always questions we're asking ourselves, whether it's between family members or between people from different countries. I loved how he captures the energy of being at a protest and the compassion for the contrasting perspectives of his characters on issues that are both intimate and global, personal and political.