For me, The Unbearable Lightness of Being-Milan Kundera; On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-Ocean Vuong; Love in the Time of Cholera-Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The most tragic, painful, human suffering can be presented and these writers present it in the most excruciatingly beautiful prose.
On Earth we are Briefly Gorgeous-“A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?”
What is the beauty for you?
West with the Night by Beryl Markham.
A writer Hemingway admired. The book is a memoir of living with her father in British Kenya on a horse farm. Then learning to fly a small plane as a bush pilot.
This passage is aching with nostalgia for what was and can’t go back to.
"I learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are buried deep - leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that a hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.
I left the farm at Njoro almost the slowest way, and I never saw it again."