Designed to mimic my Lorna Sage reading project of six women writers each year (here in 2024 and here in 2025), I chose Julia Alvarez, Alexis Wright, Annie Ernaux, Olga Tokarczuk, Gish Jen, and Leslie Marmon Silko for 2026.

At first, I thought I would read a few books by each writer and then look for some essays/non-fiction. Quickly I realised that the project worked because of its structure: one book and one essay. So, even though a single selection felt random—when I was the chooser, and not Lorna Sage—I resumed with more modest expectations.

Julia Alvarez (b. 1950), the Dominican-American writer, was born in New York City, where she lived with her family for three months, before they returned to the Dominican Republic; ten years later, her father participated in the plot to overthrow the dictator, Rafael Trujilio, so they fled to the United States. She describes this time period through the eyes of the Mirabel Sisters, who were part of the same resistance movement, in her 1994 novel In the Time of the Butterflies. She’s also written poetry, and many books for children of all ages.

Butterflies is both engaging and informative, and it’s the Alvarez novel I had in mind from the start, but the one unread here longest is How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (her first, from 1991), which draws on her adjustment to life in the United States. I didn’t realise the Mirabel sisters are historical figures, but that only added to the novel’s impact (because I didn’t know how their story would end). “They became real to my imagination. I began to invent them,” she explains in a postscript to the novel. They appear off-stage in her book for teens, Before We Were Free (2002), which was also good. Her most recent novel is her seventh: The Cemetery of Untold Stories.

Other reading: A Lithub article about how a detached retina forced her to rethink her ideas about storytelling and narrative. There’s also a collection of essays from 1998 (Something to Declare) and a memoir from 2012, about three key relationships in her life (A Wedding in Haiti). And a fortuitously timed interview in the Jan/Feb issue of Poets&Writers (requires a login).

Alexis Wright (b. 1950) is a Waanyi writer from present-day Australia who has won the Miles Franklin Award for Carpentaria (2006), the Stella Prize for Tracker (2018), and won both prizes a second time for her 2024 novel Praiseworthy. My intention was to read Tracker, because I had never read her non-fiction, but I read her debut novel Plains of Promise. Fantasies I spun about rereading the other novels quickly receded: both because this biography of Tracker Tillmouth is such an engaging account, that it feels a little like reading fiction (besides the record-breaking number of acronyms) and because it’s eleventy-billion pages long (I finished mid-July).

Presenting multiple perspectives, each of which reads like a transcript of conversations that one imagines taking places on porches with the ends of cigarettes burning in the night or in kitchens where food is being prepared in the background and cups of coffee instinctively refilled, makes this volume fascinating from start ‘til stop:

“Yes, we are all Aboriginal. Yes, we understand that, but are we more Aboriginal than that Aboriginal—and on and on it goes. So you have this argument time and time again with what being Aboriginal means, going out in bush camps and so forth, saying you want to understand your country and finding it difficult because language and cultural norms are not there. So Aboriginal society itself, it is not a different society, it is a vast society of transition if you like, from traditional Aboriginal life to the urban Aboriginal life.”

Other Reading: Her essay “The Inward Migration in Apocalyptic Times” published in Emergence Magazine is an excellent introduction to the foundational ideas about storytelling, but there are also many references to The Swan Book (at least one of you counts that as a favourite). There’s a listening option too.

My first reading of Annie Ernaux (b. 1940) was in the late ‘90s when I came upon Simple Passion (translated from the French by Tanya Leslie) in the library fiction stacks. Her style was so direct and intimate, it stood out in the landscape of my reading. (I’d recently discovered Barbara Pym and Rumer Godden too: European authors equated with U.K. authors typically.) Exteriors takes the form of a diary with segments for 1985-1992 containing her observations of life in Paris, often on the commuter rail system.

“Also, committing to paper the movements, postures and words of the people I meet gives me the illusion that I am close to them. I don’t speak to them, I only watch them and listen to them. Yet the emotions they arouse in me are real.”

I also read Shame: “At the age of twelve I was living by the rules and codes of this world; it never occurred to me that there might be others.” And three translated by Alison L. Strayer: The Other Girl, Getting Lost, and The Years, which I read with Bookish Beck (such an expansive but compact work: company was much appreciated). And Do What They Say or Else translated by Trans. Christopher Beach and Carrie Noland: “All these people at the supermarket, or in their cars, who didn’t know they had missed out on their lives. I felt superior to them for knowing.” Bron has been on an Ernaux kick for a while now, so she joined in with A Woman’s Story: Ernaux is a MustReadEverything author for her.

Other Reading: “The Walrus” published this interview with Ernaux by Karin Schwerdther (translated by Neil Smith) three weeks after Ernaux received the Nobel, in which she discusses the unspeakable, the importance of letters, and having had the same email address forever.

I hadn’t planned on so many by Ernaux: more ILLs came through than expected (and, as it turns out, together they’re about the same length as Alexis Wright’s Tracker). So we’ll see how this project’s second-half unfolds. It’s nearly the end of August and I’ve barely begun Tokarczuk’s Flights, but I’m also reading Gish Jen’s Bad, Bad Girl (she’s my Sept/Oct selection): my plan for Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony in Nov/Dec might yet work.

So far, I’ve not thought about whether to continue this project next year, because another fun project has been my summer of Claires (Claire Keegan, Claire Fuller, Claire Lombardo, Claire Messud, Claire Vaye Watkins, Claire Oshetsky and, ohhhhh, I am forever forgetting one Claire …and it is always a different one).

But if you were to choose an author for a project like this yourself, whose names would vie for inclusion?