The great American writer James Salter was only just finding wider acclaim when he died age 90 in 2015. For many years a writer’s writer admired by authors from Susan Sontag to Richard Ford, he produced an arresting body of work spanning novels, short stories, screenplays, memoirs and journalism. His masculine, lyric style has often been compared to Hemingway, but it is more purposefully beatific and sensual.

He takes a more compassionate view of men and women maturing through war and work, the “great games,” he called them, of the grown-up 20th century world. Don’t Save Anything, a new collection of non-fiction pieces for publications such as Esquire and The Paris Review, provides a welcome entry point to his aesthetic and preoccupations.

A graduate of West Point, Salter was a fighter pilot in Korea, a period documented in his novel The Hunters. He is one of the masters of writing about the US military and Don’t Save Anything includes a handful of essays on this theme.

Female readers, though, may be irked by Salter’s focus on the virile and his musings in the chapter Men and Women. “Women have a harder duty in this world,” he writes. “They have been given their beauty in recompense.” In a passage that resonates in the aftermath of the Weinstein scandal, he posits that “men’s dream and ambition is to have women ... but this is something that needs to be restrained ... Men will take what they are not prevented from taking and the force of society must be set against this impulse.”

In one of a number of travel pieces about Aspen, he notes rapturously that “nothing is more thrilling than a talented girl skiing — boldness, grace, speed.” His romantic take on brothels in When Evening Falls may well also have feminists raising their eyebrows. This is a compelling and wholly welcome introduction to Salter’s writing.

THE MUSIC SHOP
by Rachel Joyce

Rachel Joyce’s fifth novel, The Music Shop, centres on a lanky, dishevelled music savant named Frank, who runs a record store in London, and a mysterious woman in a green coat with whom he falls madly in love. Get the girl, lose the girl, try to get the girl back again — it’s a classic rom-com structure. But Joyce makes it fresh. As with her earlier novels (The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy), it is the madcap ensemble cast that brings the book to wacky, poignant life. Like Anne Tyler, Joyce has a knack for quickly sketching characters in a way that makes them stick. This is a touching, sometimes funny book about surviving change, the power of music and the importance of having a community — wacky or not. As with all of Joyce’s books, it will surprise you.

THE IMMORTALISTS
by Chloe Benjamin

Reading fiction is, if you think about it, a kind of magic: Tiny dark letters, on a white background, are transformed — poof! — into vivid, colourful, breathing stories. Entire lives unfold, on those plain pages; we travel, in our armchairs, with them, through multiple years and cities and rooms. We meet strangers, love them and let them go, all while barely moving a muscle. Chloe Benjamin’s second novel, The Immortalists, is one of those hocus-pocus experiences — and, appropriately, it has magic at its core. It’s a decades-spanning tale of a family, whom we meet in a vivid prologue. Benjamin slips into each of the characters’ heads and lets us live there for a while, writing in a delicate third-person voice that knows everyone’s secrets. There are moments as taut as a thriller, where time disappears as you turn pages; and passages of quiet compassion, as the characters reflect on the bonds of siblinghood, on the idea of home, on how those we have lost can still manage to stay with us, in ways that we can’t always explain. Its ending is unexpectedly emotional, as a wise secondary character comes to realise that “magic is only one tool among many for keeping one another alive.”

THE LIBRARY AT THE END OF THE WORLD
by Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Set in a fictitious village somewhere on the west coast of Ireland, The Library at the Edge of the World is a sweet novel about weathering unwelcome change. Hanna Casey finds herself, in midlife, back home in Ireland and living with her mother again, after she discovers her wealthy London barrister husband has been having an affair.
In the last 50 pages, this becomes something akin to a Maeve Binchy novel, with quirky characters popping up out of nowhere, townsfolk pulling together, and the formerly cranky Hanna blooming into the heroine of the town.