Welcome to Book Talk, where we help you find new fuel for your bookish obsession. While you might not find these authors while scrolling short-form content online, you will find their work to be significant, impactful, and, hopefully, something you reach for time and again. Happy reading!
Savannah Brown is nothing short of admirable. Still quite young, she has already released five books: three poetry collections and two works of fiction, the first — her poetry collection Graffiti(2016) — at only 20-years-old. In 2022, she received the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award by The Poetry Society and has gone on tour, sharing her poetry across the United Kingdom, thanks to Arts Council England.
I came to Brown’s writing honestly: after dedicatedly consuming her spoken word poetry and other videos online, where she talks about everything from existentialism and death, to relationships and identity. Her poetry collection Sweetdark (2020) is by far my favourite book of poems to date, beating out Atwood’s Power Politics (1971) by a mile. And while I highly suggest you peruse a copy for yourself — of both, while you’re at it — we’re here to talk about The Truth About Keeping Secrets (2019).
While you’ve heard me go on about thrifting books, of finding hidden gems at the library, I’ve bought every single one of Brown’s books brand new. This is a testament to just how enthralling her work is: I didn’t want to borrow her books, or wait to stumble on them in a thrift store — I needed them on my shelf right now, so I could return to them time and again. So when The Truth About Keeping Secrets was finally released, you know I ordered that quicker than you can say existentialism.
Full disclosure: there are very few young adult books that I have enjoyed in adulthood. I often find them to be cloying, or trying too hard to keep up with current trends. Having said this: The Truth About Keeping Secrets is not that. It’s insightful, daring, and draws in Brown’s characteristic longing to understand the human condition — with a healthy dose of humour, too. Brown somehow finds ways to make even the most horrific — a dead father; the trials of teenagehood — both funny and relatable.
Reading her work, you can’t help but feel understood, like someone has taken a magnifying glass to your heart and spelled out what they see there — something that is both terrifying and gratifying to experience.
Beyond this, her prose can’t help but draw from her roots in poetry and her long, rambling video essays about human existence. Everything she writes and performs is beautiful; everything thought out down to the word. So before you go: some of those poetics — that longing, the way of boiling down a sea of feeling into a single line — for you to take with you:
“And ahead of me, June moved like her body had a whole world in it.”
Happy reading!
