Lionel Shriver

did not like David Mitchell's Black Swan Green (at the FT). And elsewhere in the FT books section, David White makes me want to read Wole Soyinka's memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn, a sequel to his Ake: The Years of Childhood. In my experience of multi-volume memoirs divided in this way, the childhood parts are often better written but the adult ones have much more interesting material to work with. (And here's the link for Norman Rush's review in the NYTBR.)