The all-star line-up

“It’s a celebratory issue,” says the estimable ed. “Write about the books that brought you joy at Wanted.” Going back over six years of columns, my preference for memoir, biography, and history is clear.

There was some fiction, certainly, like the brilliant Horse by Geraldine Brooks, which brought the antebellum American South alive against the background of the Civil War. It’s not an era I’m very familiar with, and her gripping treatment of it was a revelation.

Another novelist who brings me joy, and for whose books I wait, drumming my fingers, is Mick Herron. His Slough House series with its cast of failed MI5 agents is irresistible. Witty and twisted, the stories star one of the most joyously repugnant main characters, Jackson Lamb, the obese, smoking, farting oaf who lives on Scotch and Chinese takeaways. New Daughters of Africa — a huge anthology of writing by women of African descent, edited by the supernova Margaret Busby — had me in its grip for months. More than 200 women contributed, including South Africans Phillippa Yaa de Villiers and Nomavenda Mathiane.

There is much to savour in this compendium. I showed off my Irish roots writing about the exalted writer Edna O’Brien, caustic, beautiful, and brave, who inspired generations of women with her refusal to bend to patriarchal Catholic rules. I bared my loyal Jozi soul writing about two superlative books that sift the city’s grime and find gems. Laurice Taitz-Buntman, editor of I Love You I Hate You: A Book about Love, Hate, a City, and Lots of T-Shirts, has almost single-handedly made Joburg cool again with her Joburg In Your Pocket site. In this collection she unleashes a posse of writers such as Gus Silber and Niq Mhlongo to scan the city.

Another terrific book that parses the maddening mystery of the city is Tanya Zack’s Wake Up, This Is Joburg, with photographs by Mark Lewis. You’ll never see the city in the same way again. I am drawn to outré, eccentric lives, so the biographies of spirited photographer Peter Beard in Kenya (Wild by Graham Boynton) and Nancy Cunard in Jazz-Age Paris (Five Love Affairs and a Friendship by Anne de Courcy) were just up my street, as was Swan Song, Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s assured retelling of the drama around Truman Capote’s set of lustred women friends.

Having worked in glossy magazines myself, I can’t resist stepping back into that world. Nicholas Coleridge was the urbane nabob of the Condé Nast empire and his deliriously entertaining life story The Glossy Years chronicles the three golden decades of the industry, from the 1980s until the advent of the digital age. In New York, a college dropout named Dana Brown worked behind the bar at a restaurant Condé Nast staffers frequented. He was handsome and agreeable, so the editor of Vanity Fair took him on and he rocketed up the organisation to become deputy editor. In his memoir, Dilettante, he tells outrageous stories of those extravagant end days in magazines.

On another floor of the Condé Nast building, a man of vast influence held court: André Leon Talley. He was the fashion director at Vogue for decades, right hand to Anna Wintour, and his huge, flamboyant figure a regular sight in the front row of shows. But his glittering memoir The Chiffon Trenches has a very dark undertone of the malice in that world, and of his battles with food and mental health.

Michelle Zauner’s piercing Crying in H Mart brought much joy and a whole new appreciation of Korean culture. Zauner is an American-Korean indie-rock musician who turned her grief for her mother into a chronicle of food and caring. I’d say two of the books that had the most impact on me in recent years were Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain and Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. In the former, Keefe blows the lid on the horrific opioid-addiction scandal in the US, revealing its origins in the nefarious inventions of members of the Sackler family.

Stolen Focus is petrifying: a cool examination of how our brains are being fragmented by social media and our reliance on our phones. Hari demonstrates that, by solving the attention crisis, we can collectively shape a better society. Right now, we are too fractured, too frenzied, to understand what needs to be done. Put down those phones, then, and read a book.