The year is 1912, and the SS City of Birmingham is approaching India. On board is Edward Morgan Forster, a reserved man taunted by writer’s block.

So opens Booker Prize-winner Damon Galgut’s brilliant fictional biography of E.M. Forster, Arctic Summer. Forster’s life was dictated above all by his belief in storytelling and by his relationships-from Mohammed el-Adl, an Egyptian tram conductor whose companionship becomes invaluable, to the Greek literary titan, poet C.P. Cavafy. Galgut’s reimagining of Forster’s life is at once enlightening, humorous, and deeply convincing-a clear and sympathetic psychological probing of one of Britain’s finest novelists.