February has felt longer than January, somehow. With more singing to do than usual, including a massive project centering around Handel’s Dixit Dominus, various health issues cropping up for both me and my fiancé, and almost uniformly terrible weather, I have felt some days as if all my energy and drive has burned out of me. One or two days of clear skies and milder air only reinforced how deeply I’m affected by a constant lack of direct sunlight. I just feel stuck, at the moment: everything I’m trying to do is still mid-stream (the PhD; the wedding; a possible career change) and every possible remedy seems to involve spending money (going away for a weekend; buying flowers) or damaging my blood sugar (having a sweet treat while running errands) or, of course, both.

Books are a solace in bad times. I probably ought to do some more comfort reading, re-reading, etc. Even so, I read fourteen books in February. The library haul is covered here; here’s what I thought of the rest.

provoked the most mixed feelings: Shibboleth, by Thomas Peermohamed Lambert (2025). I wrote about this Oxford-set satire of academia and 2020s campus liberalism for #ReadIndies, here.

book I most wanted to love and just liked: The Gilda Stories, by Jewelle Gomez (1991). Conceptually, this is brilliant: a set of interlinked stories that, put together, tell the story of a girl who flees slavery in antebellum Louisiana and is inducted into the eternal life of vampirism by two women who run the brothel where she’s taken in as a servant. Each chapter is set decades after the last, so Gomez gives us a sense of American history moving forward as well as the rhymes and resonances of the things that don’t change. Her conception of vampire society is brilliant too; it’s not a theft of blood but rather an exchange, the vaunted psychic abilities of vampires allowing them to give back to their victims in the form of good dreams, affirmations, wishes, impulses. Vampire society is presented as a found and created family in a way that closely aligns it with queer family-making; Gilda’s “creators” are a lesbian couple and same-sex love is central to the life Gomez imagines for her protagonist. Unfortunately, there’s an awkwardness in the writing that kept reasserting itself, a combination of oddly flat rhythm and too much telling. Here’s Gilda telling a friend that she’s killed a man before: “Yes”, she answered impatiently. The cloying smell of the air freshener and the closeness of the walls made Gilda even more anxious. The faces floated up in her mind again, and the bitterness of those moments singed the back of her throat. Savannah was surprised by her response and by its tone. How much more effective would it be to dramatise Savannah’s surprise – with a step back, a blink, even a gasp? (And why is Savannah’s response in the same paragraph? Surely we need a new one when the focus shifts from Gilda’s perceptions to her friend’s.) That awkwardness persists throughout, and kept my feelings for this book at a level of appreciation for its iconic status, but not love.

most badass protagonist: Aud Torvingen, of Nicola Griffith’s fabulous trilogy comprising The Blue Place (1997), Stay (2002) and Always (2007). I wrote about all three for #ReadIndies, here.

book I most feel I’ve barely scratched the surface of: Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson (2002). This was my first book by Johnson and I liked it very much indeed. It’s incredibly short- at 128 pages, it’d be perfect for Novellas in November – and yet manages to be epic in recounting the life of Robert Grainier, a lumberman in the Pacific Northwest who lives between about 1885 and 1968. Grainier reacts to both terrible events and humorous ones with a kind of passive equanimity that reminded me somewhat of István, the protagonist in David Szalay’s recent Booker Prize-winning novel Flesh, except Grainier’s feelings are actually clearer, despite or rather because of his muted responses. The loss of his wife and baby in a lethal wildfire nearly drives him mad, but he eventually regains a balance in his life that the reader is all the more invested in because of how low-key Johnson’s depiction of it is. There are also some marvelous comic moments, including a scene in which Grainier meets a man who has been shot by his own dog, and another in which he helps an acquaintance make an ill-fated proposal of marriage to a forthright young widow. Comparisons to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner are overused, but there’s a touch of both in these grotesque but tender moments. In terms of themes and symbolism, canines – dogs and wolves – recur, representing the line between the domestic and the wild. It’s a line Grainier himself seems to wander over repeatedly even as the coming of railways and logging of forest hastens the taming of the West. To make something that feels so rich and complete in such a small page span is a tremendous achievement. This will repay rereading.

best balance between the real and the surreal: As If, by Isabel Waidner (2026). This, my first taste of Waidner’s fiction, is an oddly charming little novel about two men who essentially swap lives, assuming that both are real, and one isn’t just a funhouse-mirror reflection of the other. But which would be which? One is Aubrey Lewis, whose wife Laurie has just died of throat cancer and whose high-profile on-stage breakdown early in his acting career led him to a safe, stagnant role as a detective’s sidekick on seventeen seasons of a BBC stalwart. The other is Lindsey Korine, whose wife Laurie is in remission from throat cancer; he never pursued acting, initially for fear of mockery at school and later from an apparent lack of stick-to-it-ive-ness, and has bounced between jobs. The men live around the corner from one another. One night, after Korine has walked out on his family and taken to living in the Barbican underpass, he spots Lewis – whom he recognises as a school acquaintance, and to whom he bears some resemblance – and follows him home. Korine goes for a last-ditch TV audition, pretending to be Lewis, and gets the gig; Lewis goes home to Korine’s wife and child, and assumes the responsibilities of parenthood. As If would probably be reminiscent of Paul Auster, if I’d ever read any Auster. (The title refers to the name of the TV project, which is based on a novel that, itself, is some kind of spinoff from Lewis’s earlier show; it also pretty clearly gestures to the novel’s themes of chance, risk, and, faintly, hope.) It’s never so weird as to utterly defy possibility, but it certainly dances merrily along possibility’s edge. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this, mostly down to Waidner’s perfect tone, which contains just the right blend of humor and pathos. I’d definitely read their work again. Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC; As If was published on 26 February.

most gloriously engrossing: Nonesuch, by Francis Spufford (2026). I’ve always known Spufford had an sff novelist’s heart – he’s been getting closer and closer to the genre with every novel he writes. With Nonesuch, he’s arrived. It’s his best yet, I think, an adventure through Blitz-raddled London and through time itself. Like all of my favourite secret-London novels, it relies on wonders: radio-wave angels imprisoned in the city’s statues, a sixteenth-century path to an enclave existing outside of space and time (“ye Pallace of Nonesuche”), a truly terrifying encounter with a construct that reminded me of the malevolent animated scarecrows in the Doctor Who two-parter “Human Nature”/”The Family of Blood”. The reason it’s so good, though, is the protagonist. Spufford has always been great at writing women, but here he really surpasses himself with Iris Hawkins, an ambitious secretary in a City firm. Iris wants to be rich, and she’s a social climber; her calibration of her vowels, from Watford to Chelsea, recurs regularly. She’s also got a fantastic financial mind and an endearing practicality. You know how we expect our heroines in books like this to be fascinated if they come across a wizardly cabal? Iris, refreshingly, truly couldn’t care less about the weirdos whose occult machinations have set all this in motion. Her main desires are to stay alive, to keep her lover Geoff alive, to stop a bitchy fascist from changing history so that England capitulates to the Nazis in 1939, and to find some way of balancing her fierce need for independence with the unexpected experience of falling in love. She’s a sexually active heroine without apology, but she doesn’t feel anachronistic. On the contrary, she feels unusual but not unlikely, someone who learns not to stand out but who is constantly working towards her goals, within her era’s limiting frameworks for class and sex. I suppose the combination of social-documentarian Blitz novel and metaphysical adventure story might strike other readers as incongruous, but I loved it. And while the immediate plot is resolved by the end of the novel, it ends on a literal “to be continued” that instantly creates another set of questions to be answered. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. If you’ve enjoyed Spufford’s previous work, don’t miss it. Huge thanks to Francis himself for the PDF proof; Nonesuch was published on 26 February.

best demonstration of how spiky eccentricity can mask deep vulnerability: Another Marvelous Thing, by Laurie Colwin (1986). I find Colwin hard to write about. She’s one of those authors who does what seems like perfectly ordinary magic. This short novel is about an extra-marital affair between people who, on the face of things, seem extremely ill-suited: fastidious, sophisticated Francis and slovenly, acerbic Billy (whose real name is Josephine, although no one calls her that except for her best friend’s imposing grandma). It’s brief and narrated through vignettes; we have to infer the connecting tissue of time, and sometimes of events, between each little chapter. Francis and Billy never consider leaving their spouses, whom they genuinely love, and they break up partway through the book. But the affair matters deeply to both of them, and the surprising poignancy of Another Marvelous Thing is the subtlety with which it shows that. No one gets histrionic here, and in fact mostly everyone is grumpy to everyone else, but the grumpiness is about hiding pain. Some of these chapters make perfect standalone short stories. Billy’s best friend’s wedding is one such, when the two women escape the reception temporarily and row out to an island in the ornamental lake to sneak cigarettes. The birth of Billy’s child is another; in fact that one is where the novel’s emotional centre lies, I think, where you get to see Billy in her sincerity for once, even as she keeps quipping. Her relationship with the nurse who attends her for her C-section is particularly winning. I don’t know, just try Colwin.

most confirmatory reread: Chasm City, by Alastair Reynolds (2001). First read in November 2019. I didn’t write anything about it then, but I remembered some things very vividly: the titular setting, an urban landscape that grew up around – and partly inside – a geothermal abyss on a planet called Yellowstone; “the hunt” or “the game”, in which victims are hunted across the rooftops and alleys of the city by the wealthy; and something about a giant snake that evolved to have its eyes inside its mouth. As it turns out, what I remembered count among the best, most effective aspects of the novel. Reynolds is terrific at settings: Chasm City is super atmospheric, with its constant humidity and yellow-brown tinged air. He’s also terrific at ideas. The Melding Plague, a kind of nanovirus that caused most of the technology on Yellowstone to malfunction, including the implants that many of its human citizens had as a matter of course, was a precursor to the protomolecule of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series; meanwhile, the snake creature with the internal eyes is known as a hamadryad and its biological cycles are, not to get too detailed about it, incredibly cool. Where Reynolds falls down is in characterisation and plotting. There’s a story here, potentially quite an interesting one, about identity and memory and immortality, but it gets rather lost in unnecessarily complicated back-and-forthing. Also, the sex and romance elements are perfunctory – it’s as if Reynolds decided he had to have them but his heart wasn’t in it; maybe that’s an editor’s fault – and all of the women are variants on nurturing or innocent, with the wisecracking dialed up or down as appropriate. I hear Reynolds got a lot better, and as the only two books of his that I’ve read are early efforts – and his world-building details are just so cool – I’ll try him again.

best near-apocalypse: Cold Earth, by Sarah Moss (2009). This is Moss’s first novel, and you can kind of tell – it hasn’t entirely settled, and lacks some of the defining formal qualities of her later fiction, like the lower-case chapter headings composed of quotations from the chapters themselves – but in some ways that makes it all the more appealing and interesting. Her recurrent thematic concerns crop up: islands, cold Northern landscapes, the past and how reachable (or not) it is, food. (All the more unsettling to read this novel, in which a deeply unsympathetic character, Nina, is obsessed with gourmet cookery, in the light of Moss’s memoir, where she talks about her own lifelong anorexia. Nina’s not obviously in the grips of an eating disorder, but her compulsion to think about food, talk about food, and judge the food made available to her, as well as the food choices of others, is so pervasive that it takes on a tinge of abnormality, particularly as her mental state declines and she experiences visions of ancient Greenlanders.) The plot’s pretty simple: six graduate students on an archaeological dig in rural Western Greenland struggle with one another, their isolation, and their fears regarding a viral epidemic which had just begun to make headlines back in Europe/North America when they went off-grid. Each section gets progressively shorter, and each constitutes a note or letter or journal written by an expedition member – some starting early in the dig, and some only when they begin to expect not to survive. It’s basically a chamber piece, albeit a chamber that’s massive and outdoors. Moss has always excelled at characterisation and at atmosphere; both are abundantly present in Cold Earth, with different sections revealing the reasons for some characters’ behaviour (a hidden bereavement, for example), and the beauty but also the uncompromising quality of the landscape ever more starkly apparent. The ending is possibly a missed opportunity, but on the other hand, it neatly avoids melodrama. I’ve only got two unread Moss novels now (Night Waking and Bodies of Light).

best book to read over an afternoon spent in a doctor’s waiting room: The Diary of a Provincial Lady, by E.M. Delafield (1930). I bonded over this with a nurse at the diabetes clinic at Guy’s Hospital; she came over, asked what I was reading, took a picture of the cover, and seemed delighted by the “real Englishness” of Delafield’s vibe. (I think she might have been Portuguese or Spanish.) These originated as columns in Time and Tide newspaper – which gets regular shout-outs in the text – sort of like Bridget Jones’s Diary; people thought they were by a real person, then gradually realised that it was all fictionalised, but the Everywoman aspect of the speaker and the satirical tone is part of the charm. Our Provincial Lady (we never learn her name) has a grumpy husband, two wholly ungovernable children, and a phalanx of neighbours including the garrulous Our Vicar’s Wife, the tyrannically feeble Mrs. Blenkinsop, and the unbearable Lady Boxe. She is part of a class that no longer exists: the household has servants, but also money troubles. There is a clear line of literary descent from The Diary of a Nobody that runs through the Provincial Lady and on to both Bridget Jones and Adrian Mole: very funny, self-aware and ironic to a degree but only imperfectly, mostly present-tense narration, fantastic pen portraits. This quotation from the back of my copy will tell you if you’d like this sort of thing or not: “January 22nd – Robert startles me at breakfast by asking if my cold – which he has hitherto ignored – is better. I reply that it has gone. Then why, he asks, do I look like that? Feel that life is wholly unendurable, and decide madly to get a new hat.” Have not we all? Perhaps a new hat is what I need, too. If only they didn’t cost money.

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How has February treated you? What have you been reaching for on these grey and rainy days?

January was a terrific month in reading. Despite DNFing four books practically in a row, I read fourteen in total – and every single one of them was good. A few rose to greatness. At least one will be on my Best Books of 2026 list. I got in a few rereads, and covered a few backlist titles from authors whose work I knew I enjoyed. This is exactly the sort of start to the year that I’d been hoping for. I also got to spend one of my Christmas book vouchers. This month’s library reading is covered here; here’s what I made of the rest.

reread that interacted most interestingly with books I’d read earlier: Zami, by Audre Lorde (1982). First read in July 2020, when I enjoyed its warmth and humour, and was pleased to find that feminist poet and thinker Lorde wasn’t the deathly serious (and dull) theorist that I’d expected. It’s a memoir of her growing up, adolescence, and early adulthood. She feels like an outsider everywhere – as a bookish, visually impaired, fat Black girl, and then as a woman attracted to women – and that feeling becomes part of her identity too. Her early life reminded me of Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, emphasising the conventions of West Indian family life where she can’t fit in. As a young woman she moves away from New York, first to factory work in Stamford and then, on an impulse, to Mexico, where she blossoms. Early love affairs help, too, although none are particularly happy. The latter half of the book, taking place in the late 1950s, is fascinating about the lesbian subcultures of the time (Lorde doesn’t fit in here either: she’s neither a butch nor a femme and isn’t interested in those rigid categories). It was only a few years before the sexual fluidity and marital freedom Samuel R. Delany describes in The Motion of Light in Water, but it feels like a different world. Some of the melodramatic relationship material became repetitive and tiresome. The most interesting part of the book is Lorde’s teenage friendship with a girl who eventually killed herself, clearly because her father had been abusing her. Lorde’s love for Gennie – and, you get the impression, her guilt over Gennie’s death – was lifelong. I probably won’t reread this again, though.

longest awaited, and most worth waiting for: Menewood, by Nicola Griffith (2023). I’ve already mentioned the ten-year gap between this and its predecessor, the magnificent Hild. In Menewood, Griffith takes up the story of the Northumbrian princess who would become St. Hilda of Whitby almost immediately after that earlier book’s ending. The title is a place, a hidden valley in Elmet (West Yorkshire) which Hild’s uncle Edwin, the volatile High King of Britain, has given to her and her now-husband Cian. Holding Elmet for Edwin, Hild determines to build up Menewood as a sanctuary, where distinctions of slave and free are meaningless. Her role as Edwin’s seer appears to be lessening, for which she’s thankful, until the discovery that Penda and Cadwallon, the kings of Mercia and Gwynedd, have allied and are marching to threaten Edwin’s hold. History ensues, including the terrible battle of Hatfield Chase, which takes almost everything that Hild loves and that has given her purpose. The remainder of the novel deals with her recovery of self; her pursuit of vengeance on Cadwallon, who is now ravaging the North; and the choices she must make about what she will do with the power she accrues.

Like Hild, this installment is gorgeously written, with close attention paid to tactility and the senses, the cycles of nature, and the sheer hard work that it took to live, day to day, in this era. There are longueurs: after Hatfield, Hild takes a long time to recover, and the page space dedicated to her development of a viable fighting force is possibly a tad excessive. But Griffith’s effectiveness in these novels is partly due to the way she makes a reader understand time, and how differently it passed in earlier centuries. Taking her time is one way to do that, and we’re primed for it by the immersive, detailed nature of the writing. I’ve also always liked how Hild is permitted by the narrative to be both romantic/sexual/emotional (including in relationships that our era would label queer or sapphic) and practical/tactical/martial. That doesn’t change here, though she suffers in both aspects. We leave Hild at a moment that could, conceivably, serve as a capstone to a duology – but I hope Griffith writes a third volume.

most destabilising: Hangsaman, by Shirley Jackson (1951). In some ways it feels odd that I don’t have that much to say about this, because the way it operates – dreamy, suggestive, symbolic, blurring the lines between a fantasy life and occurrences in reality – would seem to indicate that there’s a lot to excavate. And there is, but I think the best way to excavate it might be to read the book yourself, not necessarily to read me talking about it. Most of it takes place during Natalie Waite’s first semester at college, during which it becomes apparent that she is far too strange for any of her classmates to make friends with. She is taken up, semi-ironically, by two slightly older girls who are trying to seduce their English professor, whose very young wife is a former student of the college, now suffering under the loneliness of social unmooring that comes with her marriage. Natalie herself is experiencing what it becomes progressively clearer are breaks with consensus reality. The book’s first section ends with a climactic scene at a cocktail party hosted by her parents, in which an ambiguous encounter with an older man in the backyard woods represents either an actual sexual assault or an emotional one that’s no less searing. For my money, it’s the former, and each section of Hangsaman contains a scene that repeats the contours of that one: a walk under dark trees with someone whose existence and behaviour threatens Natalie with the dissolution and fragmentation of her selfhood. (In section two, it’s Elizabeth, the professor’s wife; in section three, it’s Tony, Natalie’s apparent only friend.) It’s not a novel about the effects of assault in general, more a novel in which sexual threat is one of many menaces to the self; chief among the others is social conformity, which Jackson demonstrates often requires cruelty and disloyalty. I didn’t particularly enjoy the experience of Hangsaman, but it makes clear how much talent Jackson had, even at the start of her career.

slowest start: Augustus, by John Williams (1972). An epistolary, or rather documentary (not everything is in letter form; some are reports, journal entries, official proclamations, etc.) novel about the rise and life of Rome’s first emperor. Daniel Mendelsohn’s excellent introduction to the NYRB Classics edition identifies how this fits into Williams’s oeuvre: like Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing, it deals with the way a person can slowly but completely change over a lifetime, and the way that what they’re sure is good can change too. The first section deals with Octavius Caesar’s adolescence and early steps towards power in the wake of his uncle Julius’s murder. Unless you’re really into Roman military history, this is slightly drier and harder going than is ideal. I found my attention flagging at several points, but by the Battle of Actium, the stakes were obvious and the narration exciting again. Then we move into more interesting territory. Much of this centres around Augustus’s daughter Julia, whom he adores, and whom he is eventually forced to exile for adultery. (This saves her life: most of her lovers were involved in a conspiracy to kill both Augustus himself and her husband/stepbrother Tiberius, and the adultery charge pre-empts her indictment for treason.) Julia is a great character, and strong evidence for Williams’s facility at writing women. Her loneliness, her pride, her recklessness, and her rage all come through clearly in her first-person journal entries, written from exile on the tiny island of Pandateria. Other voices belong to Vergil, Ovid and Horace; Marcus Agrippa; Gaius Maecenas; Marcus Antonius (Mark Antony); even Cleopatra, which is rather brilliantly done – though all we get from her are official directives to staff followed by a letter to Antonius, they reveal perfectly both her mistrust of her lover’s capabilities and her determination to keep him sweet for as long as possible. We only hear Augustus’s own voice right at the very end, in a beautiful extended meditation on mortality, intentions, and the failures of even an apparently successful life that cements the thematic implications of all that has gone before. Williams is a remarkable ventriloquist, it should be added; each character has their own distinctive written style, without resorting to stylisation or caricature. Stoner is still his masterpiece, but this is enormously rewarding for those with patience enough to get past Actium.

most reassuring reread: The Madonna of the Mountains, by Elise Valmorbida (2018). Reassuring in the sense that my original response to this novel – loving it – was confirmed. On first reading it, I wrote, “It starts in 1923, with a girl called Maria Vittoria embroidering sheets for her dowry trunk. She’s twenty-five, alarmingly old to be unmarried… Valmorbida spins the story of Maria Vittoria’s life: her marriage, her children, the ascent of Mussolini’s government and the onset of WWII… The Madonna of the Mountains feels both universal (fears about infidelity, a child’s health, how to protect your family in uncertain times) and deeply, richly specific… It really feels as if you are peering into the head of, let’s say, your great-grandmother; someone whose world is not your world, whose socially conditioned responses are alien to your own… One of the most restrained, yet profoundly convincing, historical novels that I’ve read in years.”

That’s all still true. On this reread, I noticed some technical things. For example, how Valmorbida achieves the novel’s unique voice and tone: almost every chapter is narrated in free indirect style from Maria Vittoria’s perspective, so we’re both in third person (which gives us a sense of proportion) and locked in to her emotions and patterns of thought. There’s only one exception, when her daughter Amelia becomes the point of view character for a few crucial chapters. Time is also handled beautifully, through carefully chosen intervals: between sections, two or five years have passed, so that we get a sense of general continuity as well as an understanding that the events actually narrated to us are truly life-changing. The madwoman Delfina, who claims to be Maria Vittoria’s illegitimate cousin, serves as proof of hypocrisy and embodies the inadequacy of social norms: her outbursts ostracise her from the community and eventually lead to her death, but she is the quintessential frightening truth-teller, the inconvenient bastard on the margins of society who understands how things work better than any number of conventional, respectable people. She is Maria Vittoria’s dark double. Meanwhile, imagined monologues in italics from a Madonna statue inherited from her mother dramatise the demands that weigh on Maria Vittoria’s soul, the social and spiritual codes by which she lives and which define her. This superb novel was criminally underappreciated upon publication and should have been on the Walter Scott and Women’s Prize shortlists.

most bittersweet follow-up: A House for Alice, by Diana Evans (2023). This is a direct sequel to Ordinary People, Evans’s Women’s-Prize-shortlisted exploration of married (or at least committed) life in southeast London’s middle-class Black communities just after Obama’s election. It picks up eight years later, and focuses – at least initially – on the parents of Melissa, one of Ordinary People‘s protagonists. Her septuagenarian Nigerian mother, Alice, is beginning to make noises about “going home” to grow old and die; her white father, Cornelius, with whom Alice has not lived for decades, dies unexpectedly in a house fire as the novel opens, an event that takes place on the same day as the disastrous Grenfell Tower fire. Evans’s signature blend is to incorporate national/political happening with smaller-scale domestic event: Alice’s vacillation about her home reflects the “hostile environment”, Windrush Generation deportations, and the May administration’s naked contempt for immigrants and non-white Britons. Meanwhile, her daughter Melissa is beginning to regret having left her partner, Michael, the decision that ended Ordinary People; Michael is beginning to find that his second marriage, to jazz singer Nicole – vivacious, outgoing, and less a has-been than a never-quite-made-it – is perhaps shallower than he realised; Damian, whose marriage made up the other half of Ordinary People, has also left his wife, and we first encounter him searching for his runaway teenage daughter Avril in Paris. There is, in other words, an awful lot going on here (I haven’t even mentioned the flashbacks Melissa begins to have to what is clearly a childhood trauma related to her father’s alcohol abuse and violent tendencies, or the post-death scenes of Cornelius seeking a resting place in the afterlife). As a result, some characters are short-changed in uneasy-making ways. Avril is found, but does not get a happy ending, but little time is spent on the reality of her life or the effect on Damian of seeing his child suffer. Melissa’s flashbacks are not quite resolved. However, I’d rather read an overstuffed, ambitious novel – especially one that takes seriously the emotions and friendships between older women, such as Alice and her church friends, or Nicole and her circle of cool, artistic, powerful wine aunties – than a thin, timid one.

most poetic evocation of history’s emotional pull: May We Feed the King, by Rebecca Perry (2026). A curator of still life “scenes” for historic properties receives a new commission to dress half a dozen rooms in a former palace. Permitted to select any time period from the centuries in which the palace was inhabited, she (one assumes – we never find out) chooses the reign of a King who never expected to accede, and whose brief rule is still thought of as shameful and embarrassing. Struggling with a personal loss that’s never specified – though context clues suggest the death of a partner or a traumatic breakup – she finds herself drawn into the world of the long-vanished King, as well as increasingly attracted to the archivist (again, no gender specified) who provides the necessary documents for research. Meanwhile, a long central section in third person follows the King himself – his unexpected accession, reluctant response, and eventual mysterious disappearance – mostly focalised through him, with occasional forays into his personal attendant, a lady-in-waiting, or his power-hungry and frustrated chief advisor.

Perry’s writing is wonderful: assured, precise, evocative. I love fiction that delves deeply into the specifics of an unusual job, and the curator’s love for her work helps to make the level of detail she gives us feel, not excessive, but grounded in her characterisation. (There’s an especially great section about plastic-resin food props and the website you can order them from.) Her attempts to inhabit the King and his world offer a commentary on loss and time that are counterpointed by her own personal loss: in the end, we lose everything to history except for what is preserved, which is only ever incomplete. But art and beauty can emerge from our efforts to rediscover or recreate what is lost. Elegant, melancholy and with a faint extension of hope at its end, this is a début that I’d very much like to see on the Walter Scott, Women’s, and even Booker longlists this year. Published 29 January; thanks to Granta and NetGalley for the eARC.

best palate cleanser: Blurb Your Enthusiasm, by Louise Willder (2022). Willder estimates she’s written five thousand blurbs in her career as a publishing copywriter. In this book, the first thing published under her actual name, she pulls back the curtain on blurb efficacy: how do you convince people to open the covers of a book? Are spoilers ever okay? What kind of voice do you choose for each one? Do you have to read the whole book before blurbing it? (N.b.: in the UK “blurb” means the synopsising copy on the book jacket. In America, it means an advance quote of praise from another author. Willder uses it in the UK sense throughout.) Other chapters range further afield. Some of these worked better for me than others. Everything about cover design (including how text and image can be made to work around and with one another) fascinated me, as did theorising about the ideal title (Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog, apparently, combining the commercial allure of presidential gravitas, medical content, and an animal – though several books under this title have been published, and unaccountably, none of them has been a bestseller). I was less convinced by chapters that dealt with historical publishing, which made the sorts of leaps that my supervisors would be annoyed at me for. (I actually think it is perfectly fair to see the extraordinarily long titles of Daniel Defoe’s era as proto-blurbs if that is your angle, but it feels like a substantial claim to make without any hedging. At the very least, it would be good to acknowledge that literary marketing has not remained unchanged for 400 years.) Some of the material on different genres – romance, sci fi, etc. – felt both under-considered and unnecessary. These are churlish complaints, though, given Willder’s infectious enthusiasm and the fun with which she infuses her behind-the-scenes tour of this under-appreciated area of the book industry. Its witty, low-key tone strikes exactly the right note.

prolixest fantasy: Tigana, by Guy Gavriel Kay (1990). Tigana balances almost perfectly between being very compelling and very annoying. It’s a political fantasy in which an occupied peninsula is uneasily divided between two separate colonial powers, one of whom takes vengeance on the province in which his son was killed in battle by using sorcery to erase the place’s name from memory and speakability. Only people who were born there can say, hear or understand the word “Tigana”. Much of the novel’s page count follows the long and secret efforts of the province’s Crown Prince, Alessan, to build a human intelligence network across the peninsula, cause the mutual destruction of both occupying powers, and restore Tigana to the memory of the world. It’s compelling stuff, counter-pointed by characters such as Dianora, a Tiganese woman whose own vengeance quest has been derailed by falling in love with the man she’s sworn to kill, and Devin, a singer who doesn’t know his own heritage until he gets involved with Alessan’s plans. On the other hand, women are invariably defined through their attractiveness or sexuality (even if that sexuality is “oh gosh, no thanks”). More frustratingly, Kay has a terrible habit of overwriting. Here he is describing a character who sees someone she doesn’t expect:

And then, at the bottom of the staircase, as she stepped onto the mosaic-inlaid tiles of the floor, she realized who was waiting by the palace doors to escort her out and her heart almost stopped.

There was a cluster of men there. D’Eymon, for one, and Rhamanus as well, who had stayed in the Palm as she’d been sure he would, and had been named as Brandin’s Lord of the Fleet. Beside them was Doarde the poet, representing the people of Chiara. She had expected him: it had been d’Eymon’s clever idea that the participation of one Island poet could help counterbalance the crime and death of another. Next to Doarde was a burly, sharp-faced man in brown velvet hung about with a ransom’s worth of gold. A merchant from Corte, and a successful one clearly enough[…] Behind him was a lean grey-clad priest of Morian who was obviously from Asoli. She could tell from his colouring, the native Asolino all had that look about him.

She also knew he was from Asoli because the last of the men waiting for her there was from Lower Corte and she knew him.

None of the description in the second paragraph is necessary. They’re mostly characters we’ve already met, but we don’t need to know what they’re doing or even that they’re here in this scene. It’s obviously a technique designed to extend the moment, like slow-mo in a film, to emphasise the impact of seeing someone so unexpected. But it has the opposite effect here, not least because Kay has been doing it for the last 500 pages at this point. Even the individual sentences are weirdly redundant: “mosaic-inlaid tiles”? Just say “mosaic floor” or “tiled floor”. “Waiting by the palace doors to escort her out” – why not just “waiting by the doors” or “waiting to escort her out”? It’s clumsy. I’ll definitely try Kay again, since he’s still writing and well-regarded, and this example of his work is nearly four decades old, but I hope he got better at reining himself in…

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Have you had a successful reading start to 2026?

Less slumpy in November – I read some excellent books this month. The real issue has been the feeling that I’m teetering on the verge of running out: my print TBR is down to zero, my Kindle TBR is down to one (which I’m meant to read with a friend at some point in the near future). The library has certainly ridden to the rescue a few times, but if a reading material crisis occurs out of hours, their ebook holdings don’t always have what I want. (It’s a bit like shopping in a Nisa Local; you can probably find something, but you can’t really go in with specific ingredients in mind.) Recently, the solution has been rereading, the value of which is becoming ever clearer. Still, it’s a good thing Christmas is coming. This month I read thirteen books. Some were covered in November’s #LoveYourLibrary post; here’s what I made of the rest.

best time travel: The Motion of Light in Water, by Samuel R. Delany (1988). The subtitle of this memoir is “Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village”, and of Delany’s adult life it covers about five years (plus quite a lot of childhood and adolescent experiences and developments). What a five years, though. He married a woman (his best friend) straight out of high school because of a pregnancy scare, despite both of them knowing he was gay, and remained married to her for nearly twenty years. (She was Marilyn Hacker, who became a National Book Award-winning poet.) There must have been something in the water in this place and time; both of them have extraordinary creativity and talent from a very early age. They have lots of friends, and move in circles of people who are or become artistically famous, but there’s very little name-dropping, and what there is is truly delightful. (In one anecdote, a nineteen-year-old Delany impulsively invites W.H. Auden and Chester Kallmann to dinner at his and Marilyn’s walk-up; they bring wine and are thoroughly lovely to the two younger writers. In another, Delany – who initially planned to be a professional folk singer – is slated to play at a bar in the Village that had previously promised the slot to another guy. The other guy storms out in protest. His name? Bob Dylan.) I also loved the way Delany deals with his and Marilyn’s untraditional relationship structure: they’re open, he’s gay, she turns out to also be gay, but they both have a lot of sex with each other and end up in a throuple with a (married) drifter which lasts for months and culminates in the guy’s wife moving in down the hall, largely unaware of the relationship. It’s brilliant – not played for laughs, though the humour of the situation is acknowledged, but rather explored with a retrospective curiosity. Even if you’ve never read his novels, this is worth tracking down, although it’s hard to find in the UK: I ordered it new from its publisher, University of Minnesota Press.

best sadness: Stoner, by John Williams (1965). You were all right, okay. This is a beautifully subtle novel about an ordinary guy having a kind of sad-sack life, and it’s one of the best things I’ve read all year. I was put off this by reading a review that described Stoner’s wedding night as “marital rape”; this is not a strictly inaccurate description of what happens, but Williams’s approach and tone is so even and delicate that it doesn’t feel gratuitous or salacious. I also don’t agree with the charge that the novel exonerates Stoner for everything about the marriage’s failure while making his wife Edith a manipulative hysteric. What Williams does is reveal how two people can be fatally, horribly wrong for each other, and can make each other’s worst tendencies worse over years. Stoner is not a saint; he’s overly passive, and naively idealistic well into adulthood. But he does try – just not enough, and not in the right way – with his daughter Grace, whose trajectory is among the most painful in a very painful book. He also gets to experience love with a colleague, Katherine, whose portrayal proves that Williams is perfectly capable of writing interesting, complex, agentic women. The chapters detailing the affair and its results are gorgeous, spare but rich; the novel’s final scene, on Stoner’s deathbed, is absolutely masterful, especially given that the narration is in close-third throughout. Isn’t it annoying when books that everyone raves about turn out to be great. This one absolutely did.

two long-overdue rereads: Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Northanger Abbey (1817, but written 1803), by Jane Austen. I wish I’d enjoyed both of these more. I mean, Austen is superb; I’ve read all her published novels at least twice as well as her collected juvenilia and Lady Susan, and her achievements are just undeniable. But Sense and Sensibility struck me as really quite melancholy, far more so than I’d remembered. Elinor really suffers, for a very long time, and no one pays much attention, and Marianne – even though she’s obviously wallowing – experiences real suffering too. Maybe the most interesting part was seeing how the Eliza Brandon subplot functions to move the disgrace of seduction off of Marianne. Both Elizas are narrative sacrificial lambs whose falls occur off-page but are nevertheless essential to ensure that Marianne is enlightened regarding Willoughby’s character while avoiding the same fate. (Is Eliza Sr. the closest Austen ever comes to actually depicting a prostitute? The word is never used and neither Eliza ever appears in the action, but it’s very clear.) Meanwhile, the final romantic pairings are acceptable – they don’t absolutely violate plausibility – but you have to read with a very sober eye to do so. Northanger Abbey, meanwhile, was pretty good (and especially fun to revisit now that I’ve got some Radcliffe under my belt), but I just can’t think of much to say about it a week after reading. Apart from to observe Isabella Thorpe’s impressive resemblance to Becky Sharp (an acknowledged influence on Thackeray, or not?), and the brilliant way that General Tilney is uneasy-making without having to be a literal Gothic murderer. It’s quite bad enough to be a chilling and repressive influence on your own children’s happiness, Austen suggests. A modern retread of this that majors on Tilney as an emotionally abusive dad would be interesting.

book I’m most glad to have read: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany (1991). Made a great chaser to The Motion of Light in Water. It’s basically two long essays, the second rather more academically written than the first (but still totally readable), about the gentrification and redevelopment of the Times Square neighbourhood, and New York City more generally. Delany’s overriding thesis is that regular, casual contact between people of different social classes and statuses is what makes a neighbourhood, particularly an urban one, both safe and pleasant. This is very far from the prevailing idea of suburban or provincial communities, which rely instead on networking: more of a closed system, functioning to keep people’s interactions largely within their own social class. In the second essay (“Red”), he makes some really good arguments that the supposed benefits of networking actually tend to emerge far more readily from cross-class contact. In the first (“Blue”), he builds a fascinatingly detailed picture of how public contact spaces – specifically public sexual spaces, like porn cinemas and corners where street hustlers hung out – worked in the pre-Giuliani era. He deals especially well with the counter-arguments that he’s being naive or nostalgic (he absolutely isn’t), and that women were less safe in that earlier era. Again, without being naive, he demonstrates that these neighbourhoods and sexual spaces tended towards greater public safety, particularly for women, partly because they were governed by very clear codes (if someone didn’t want to do something, their no was a no, and you moved on; if someone seemed volatile or untrustworthy, a whisper network would let you know pretty quickly.) I underlined so much of this; he gets at a problem of authenticity that many global capitals, including London, are experiencing in a touristified, social-media-optimised century. Brilliant thinking, brilliant writing.

most underwhelming in comparison to the author’s other work: A Sicilian Romance, by Ann Radcliffe (1790). I read three Radcliffes in a row near the end of September and thought I’d polish off the major novels (I still haven’t read her first or last) with this, in which a virtuous young heroine flees an arranged marriage she doesn’t want and discovers the terrible secrets her father has been keeping from her along the way. Julia, our protagonist, has considerably less interiority than Emily St. Aubert of Udolpho, or Adeline La Motte of The Romance of the Forest. The narrative is also far less frequently focalised through her. In one way this is actually kind of cool, because it adds to the suspense: for example, at one point Julia disappears from her cell and the reader simply doesn’t know how she’s escaped for several chapters, putting us on a level with the other characters in the book and piquing our curiosity. On the other hand, it means that a lot of the book is spent not with Julia but with her brother Ferdinand or lover Hippolitus, so the sense of female subjectivity responding to terror and adversity that Radcliffe is so famous for doesn’t really get developed here. The most telling thing about A Sicilian Romance is that I’m already finding it quite hard to remember specifics of the plot without making an effort. It’s good to have read it, but it doesn’t do much that doesn’t happen better or more interestingly elsewhere.

most reliable read: The Hermit of Eyton Forest, by Ellis Peters (1988). I’m starting to wonder if I should just note when I’ve read a new Cadfael mystery and move on, as they are both marvelous and not that distinct from each other. What does stand out about this one is the relative prominence in the plot of details about the long English civil war: the fate of a vanished courier from the besieged Empress Matilda to her supporter Brian FitzCount is significant to the identities and motives of a number of characters. There’s also a more sustained treatment of a child character in this book than in many of the others. Through nine-year-old Richard Ludel, heir to the Eaton manor after his father’s death, Peters tackles the problem of dynastic marriage, and particularly of dynastic marriage arranged between young people by their greedy older relatives with little thought for their wellbeing. The relationship between Richard and his intended, Hiltrude, who’s a decade his senior, is very nicely done; she’s also being manipulated and abused by her family, Peters doesn’t let us forget, and they surprise each other with their humanity before helping each other out.

other book I’m most glad to have (re)read: Beloved, by Toni Morrison (1987). I read this once before, ten years ago, and had forgotten virtually all of it. It is superb. Much of the plot revolves around revealing not what happened, exactly (in many contexts, ranging from “what happened in the woodshed” to “what happened on the plantation” to “what happened on the journey to freedom”) but how and why it happened. Sethe, the primary protagonist, has spent eighteen years not knowing why her husband, Halle, never met her at the rendezvous point from which they had planned to escape North together. When another man from her old plantation, Paul D., turns up at the house on the outskirts of Cincinnati where she and her mother-in-law and single surviving daughter made a life, she starts to “rememory” – as does Paul. The ghost of the baby Sethe killed when she thought recapture was imminent is not happy about Paul’s appearance, first trying to make him uneasy through what we realise are “normal” levels of poltergeist activity (Sethe and Denver are accustomed to it), then by manifesting as an actual, physical woman, who calls herself Beloved: the single word that appears on the baby’s headstone. There’s so much more: Morrison is brilliant at seguing from one character’s thoughts to another, and from the present action to memories of the past, within a sentence or two. We hear what Paul D. experienced, including an incredible sequence in a forced labour camp where nearly fifty men, chained together in a line, save themselves from a mudslide; we hear about Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law, bought out of slavery by her still-enslaved son and called to preach an unconventional but much-needed gospel to free Black people, until the day slave-catchers violate the precincts of her home. Brilliant line succeeds brilliant line. Sixo, one of the plantation men, says of his lover, “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” Is there a better way to describe how it feels to love someone who loves you back? And is there a better book than Beloved for laying out one of the worst of chattel slavery’s violations, the way that it punished enslaved people for feeling love, even as it was unable to prevent them from doing so? Just magnificent.

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How has your November reading gone?

My reading really slowed down in October. I’ve been in pain for much of it – the chest/rib injury from late September, plus what appears to be fasciitis in my left foot, which is being treated by a physio – and I got a foul combination of sinus infection, sore throat and dry cough, which sapped much of my remaining energy. The new term is in full swing, which always means more events and more deadlines, though I’m not teaching this year. (There’s light at the end of the thesis tunnel, though still only a pinprick.) Singing picks up in this season, too. Perhaps for some or all of these reasons, I’ve been teetering on the edge of a reading slump all month. Some early successes for RIP XX were followed by a #1925Club fail (though a #LoveYourLibrary win!), and much of what I have read seemed to take longer and grab me less than it usually does. I managed thirteen books this month. Here’s what I thought of the ones that still need discussing.

strangest: Chevengur, by Andrei Platonov (1928; transl. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler 2024). This is a bit of a slog, but also a masterwork, which couldn’t be published in the Soviet Union during Platonov’s lifetime. Born in 1899, he basically grew up with the Revolution, which is a pretty rare case for a major Russian writer of the era: most of them were either already adults when it started, or nearing the end of their lives, or they were born into the established Soviet regime. He started out as a true believer, but died of TB that he caught from his son after the latter was sent to a work camp on trumped-up charges at the age of fifteen, an experience which shook Platonov’s belief in the regime considerably. Chevengur reflects that deep ambivalence; although he was convinced it praised socialism, he was (correctly) informed by Maxim Gorky that it really doesn’t read that way. It’s often described as a Russian Don Quixote, which is sort of true and sort of flattening. It’s certainly about idealism; two men seek perfect communism and think they’ve found it in the titular village, but no idyll can last. It contains a very good horse whose name is Strength of the Proletariat, which might be a joke or might be totally serious—with Platonov it’s always extremely difficult to tell. That’s one of the things that makes Chevengur such a strange read: there are tonal disjunctions that apparently work in Russian to create a rich, disorienting fluctuation between states, but in the Chandlers’ English translation, which I must say is readable, it often loses that sense and instead feels whiplash-y. Not sorry I read it, though it probably wasn’t the place to start with him. The Foundation Pit is shorter and I might try that next.

best re-set book: A Spoonful of Murder, by Robin Stevens (2018). The sixth book in Stevens’s thoroughly charming Murder Most Unladylike middle-grade series, one of which I’ve written about before. These are among the best books on the market for younger readers at the moment, a little like golden-era Pixar in that adults can enjoy them on their own level. They’re totally unpatronising and always hit just the right tone. In this installment, 1930s schoolgirl detectives Daisy and Hazel travel to Hong Kong after Hazel’s grandfather dies and she is summoned home to be present for his funeral rites. On their arrival, Hazel’s father ambushes her with a new baby brother and a totally reshuffled household setup: her beloved nursemaid, Su Li, has been reassigned to look after baby Teddy, and her mother—Mr. Wong’s first/primary wife, but not the mother of Teddy—seems to be furious about everything, including Hazel’s personal appearance and behaviour. In the midst of all this, there’s a murder and a kidnapping, and the girls must find the killer even more urgently because Hazel comes under suspicion. Stevens does a characteristically excellent job of gently highlighting the effects of cultural differences: the usually in-charge Daisy is a fish out of water in Hong Kong as a white English girl, while Hazel, who often feels awkward or secondary in England, is confident and assured in this familiar environment, whether she’s explaining new foods, different domestic setups, or why it’s going to be difficult for the two girls to explore the city alone. Also, truly excellent servant characters: they’re all real people, not just labour-performing props. Ah Lan, the gardener’s boy; Ping, the new maid assigned to Hazel; and Su Li herself, have smarts, agency, and personality, and all are vital to how the plot unfolds. Stevens’s writing is just so perfectly trustworthy.

most heartrending, but (or because) least sentimental: A Fine and Private Place, by Peter S. Beagle (1960). This isn’t a scary book at all, but arguably could have counted for RIP XX, because it’s about a man who lives in a graveyard full-time and talks to ghosts. Beagle wrote it when he was nineteen, which is just incredible: not only does the writing have the confidence and competence of an artist already fully in charge of his craft, but the emotional beats—doomed love, irreparable loss, facing the possibility of being remembered as a failure, trying to find reasons to wake up in the morning—are portrayed with nuance and sensitivity that feels, for lack of a better word, really mature. It’s also a very Jewish book, in a low-key sort of way, not only because there’s a real refusal to capitulate to Christian paradigms of the afterlife but also because one of the main characters, Mrs Gertrude Klapper, is a lovingly portrayed mid-century New York Jewish matron who speaks Yiddish to her elderly neighbours. The ghost love story and the human love story intertwine so beautifully, and somehow Beagle keeps the tone floating effortlessly above maudlin sentiment while never letting it dissolve into cynicism, either. Oh, and he’s funny. An incredible feat, and one of the most genuinely moving and saddening and hopeful novels I can think of.

most caustic social realism: Colored Television, by Danzy Senna (2024). The opposite of the Beagle in the sense that this is a deeply cynical novel, or at least a novel about deeply cynical people. Jane, the protagonist, is a mixed-race (Black/white) woman whose tricky second novel has taken a decade to finish. When she finally sends it off to her agent, triumphant and proud of her “mulatto War and Peace”, the agent’s response – as the reader has suspected from the start – totally deflates her: the book isn’t good. Living in LA with her artist husband Lenny, whose art doesn’t sell, and their two children, in a series of house-sitting-for-friends situations interspersed with stints in horrible cheap apartments, Jane is desperate on a number of levels. So when the possibility of writing for TV appears on the horizon, she jumps at it. Colored Television is painful and thought-provoking about racial identity (I hadn’t fully registered that Black people can be racist about mixed people, for one thing), artistic integrity (is stability better than art? Are they mutually exclusive?), and marriage (goodness, the number of lies these people tell each other!) I enjoyed it while reading it, and have kept it on my shelf because I can’t think of another book that has pushed similar questions into the forefront of my brain while retaining such sharpness. I find that I don’t have much to say about it, but I’d recommend it.

most life-saving reread: The Long Price Quartet, by Daniel Abraham (2006-2009). I really love these books. They’re fantasy novels but feel like alt-history with a single magical element; if you enjoyed Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun (2021), you’ll get on with these. They’re set fifteen years apart from one another, so the ramifications of the events of each book have a lot of time to percolate and come clear. I’ve never seen another fantasy series use a structure like it, and it works incredibly well. Book one, A Shadow in Summer (2006), is about laying the foundations for a world-altering change: friendship between two young men, their love for the same young woman, and the tenacity of a bookkeeper in her fifties with a bad hip reveal a conspiracy whose implications are only just being felt as the book ends. Book two, A Betrayal in Winter (2007), is about the unwilling ascendancy of one of those young men to the throne of his father’s city; it’s largely a tale of court intrigue and a murder mystery whose solution we know from the start, though that doesn’t diminish the pleasure of watching other characters figure it out. In An Autumn War (2008), the man on the city’s throne ends up reluctantly – and, refreshingly, badly – leading a war to save his world, which somehow ends in victory and defeat for both sides: only Daniel Abraham, you’ll realise if you get this far, could write that outcome. Finally, The Price of Spring (2009) moves fifteen years after the great battle to save the world and asks what resentment, patience, and monomania have wrought in the interim. Abraham’s women are uniformly excellent – dynamic, complex, convincing – and he understands that “morally grey” doesn’t have to mean “mass murder with brief self-indulgent guilt”. Rereading these made me feel like I was using my brain, without trying to force it into shapes it was too tired to take. I commend them to you.

book I immediately wanted to recommend to the most people: Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell (2022). I could think of three friends, off the top of my head, who would love this, the second winner of the Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction. It takes the form of vignettes – you could call them interconnected short stories, as the same network of characters spreads through the book, some more visible at times than others – set on Vancouver Island in the late 21st and early 22nd century, after a series of plausible catastrophes including rising sea levels and waves of pandemics have rendered the internet patchy and vehicular travel all but impossible. The whole world hasn’t actually ended, but the islanders are so isolated to begin with that they, at least, have to start almost from scratch. And they do, whether that’s a dedicated group of academics and librarians saving the local university’s collections by storing boxes of books with sympathetic locals – and thereby ensuring that people have access to instructions on market gardening, electrical engineering, landscape management, etc., for the next two or three generations – or a group of youths organising into salvage gangs to strip abandoned suburban homes of useful materials like copper and glass. It’s so realistic and yet so hopeful. The central episode, originally an award-winning short story around which Campbell then built the rest of the book, features a violin-maker who cuts down the oldest Sitka spruce on the continent to build an instrument for a local prodigy. Campbell unobtrusively but tightly weaves themes of building, waiting, patience, art, and makes them resonate with the wider community’s actions as they try to survive an uncertain and rapidly changing world. I tried to describe the story out loud to my fiancé after finishing and suddenly found myself sobbing. Arboreality is absolutely superb, and also very short (117 pp. in paperback) – pick it up from the (independent!) publisher Stelliform Press for Novellas in November.

best perspective on an author’s preoccupations: Medusa’s Ankles: Selected Stories, by A.S. Byatt (collected 2021). Byatt’s most famous novel, Possession, holds a really special place in my heart, and I got that plus her whole Frederica Quartet signed by her when she came to speak at my college. She was an absolute delight in person, too: both tartly clever and generous, quite a rare combination. I decided to read this selection of her stories very slowly, only one or two per day, and so it took me the better part of a month. Though her novels are set in our world, there’s always more than a tinge of the fantastical about her approach to storytelling – from the cadences of her sentences to her fascination with texture, colour, and light to a recurring interest in transformations, both physical and emotional. These stories really bring that home: some are true fables, like “Cold” (about a coddled princess whose unusual physical needs mirror her emotional ones and whose marriage becomes a success in direct proportion to her husband figuring out how to meet those needs) or “Dragons’ Breath” (a weird little story in which a village is overtaken by dragons who are more geological than reptilian). Some just have a fable’s shape and flavour, like the title story, in which a “middle-aged woman with a hairdo” puts up with her hairdresser’s selfish thoughtlessness for years and finally snaps, or “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, a novelette where the djinn is both absolutely real and representative of something else, some elusive freedom that the protagonist, Gillian Perholt, is able to achieve in middle age, despite the social narrative that suggests she should be considered irrelevant now. That’s another thing Byatt is deeply interested by: the ways in which women are freed and/or confined. She’s not simplistic: she knows mid-20th-century feminism has opened doors, but she also suggests that the barriers to equality aren’t less real for being subtler, or less visible, than they were to historical women. “Racine and the Tablecloth” is an amazing example of her working through this, a story about a schoolgirl being discouraged from university – and fighting that discouragement, but maybe losing some other, intangible battle along the way – that made me better understand several people that I actually know. A few late entries, “The Narrow Jet” and “Raw Material”, might have been my favourites. One is about two elderly gentlemen, possibly Victorian, building a fountain as a kind of final hurrah, and juxtaposes their project with the experiences of an enigmatic and possibly mythical creature who lives in the mud of the pond they’re building in; it’s lovely, funny, bittersweet. The other is a brilliant story about writing that ends with a horrendous, unexpected twist and forced me to think about the ethics of storytelling in a really concrete way, and how we all engage in it just by existing in the world, making up details and filling in blanks about most of the people we encounter daily.

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How was your reading in October? Did you do RIP XX, or join in with the #1925Club?

September was really busy for work, and less busy for academia, although my first peer-reviewed article, about Mary Robinson’s 1792 debut novel Vancenza, is now in the world! It’s in an open-access journal, and can be read for free here if you fancy it. I also caught up with a dear friend I hadn’t seen since we were both about fourteen. Wonderfully, it was as if hardly any time had passed.

This past weekend, to round off the month, M and I attended a wedding at Canterbury Cathedral. It was totally stunning: the bride’s train and veil took two people to move, there were sixty people in the choir alone and nearly 300 guests in total, and the cathedral itself is so beautiful. Unfortunately, just as we were leaving the reception in the deanery gardens, I tripped and fell very hard on my left side. My fall was broken by a large deadwood log and what seems to have been a pile of poison oak or nettles. The upshot is that I not only have a rash up the arm and hand that broke the fall, but have either badly bruised the intercostal muscles on my left side or possibly fractured a rib. (I’m not exhibiting the “red flag symptoms” that would permit an x-ray, so we may never know for sure.) Right now my side is continuously painful, but particularly when I breathe deeply, and I can’t bend at the waist (i.e. lean forward, backwards, or sideways) without stabbing pain. I never realised how much of my daily movement involved leaning until now… I’m taking OTC painkillers, and there’s not much else to be done except wait for it to heal, whatever it is.

I also read some books this month: fourteen, in total. Three I discussed earlier counted for RIP XX, and two more were covered in September’s #LoveYourLibrary roundup. I also went on a kick of reading five Gothic and Gothic-adjacent novels from the 1790s by Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft. I’m hoping to write those up, but unsure if I’ll have the energy. TL;DR: Radcliffe is hypnotically readable and surprisingly funny. The Mysteries of Udolpho is unexpectedly long but also unexpectedly good, The Romance of the Forest is shorter and maybe better, The Italian is mid-length and well-paced but its heroine has noticeably less interiority than Radcliffe’s other heroines. Meanwhile, Wollstonecraft (of whose work I read Mary: A Fiction and Maria; or the Wrongs of Woman) was better at nonfiction than at fiction.

After all that (!), here’s what I made of the rest of September’s reading.

most new-to-me sci fi premise: The Afterlife Project, by Tim Weed (2025). A two-strand postapocalyptic novel. In one storyline, Dr Nick Marchand wakes up in a pod that has harnessed quantum time (in a way I didn’t entirely grok) to deposit him ten thousand years into the future. Humanity was on its last legs when he entered the pod, literally decimated by a super-pandemic, most of the survivors of which were rendered infertile. Nick’s mission is to find out if anyone at all survived, reproduced, and founded even the tiniest of civilisations to last this long. The second strand follows the increasingly frantic efforts of the research team he left behind in 2068, led by his lover Dr Natalie Quist, to find a woman or girl who can still reproduce. Their secondary mission generally goes unspoken: to capture or coerce said woman or girl into the second pod, and send her into the deep future for repopulative purposes with Nick, who happens to have retained his fertility. Setting aside that this is a totally useless task if you only have one fertile couple—your new civilisation will fall to inbreeding within a few generations—I like Weed’s idea here, at least on paper. What would it be like to wake up in a pristine world alone? What would it be like to mourn not only the loss of world culture, but also of small personal comforts: fresh coffee, blueberry scones, hot showers? There’s a paragraph near the start where this really comes home (it’s where the blueberry scones are mentioned), and the descriptions of the deep-future wilderness that was once New Hampshire are uniformly absolutely stunning. But to pull it off for the whole novel, Weed’s characters would need to feel more complex and the narrative would need to be more interested in their subjectivities. There’s an effort in that direction, but the main characters don’t feel specific enough; Quist in particular is someone we’re told is the greatest mind of her generation, but we never see her behaving in ways that signal anything other than “generically pleasant older woman”. I found the ideas and questions that this sparked really rich, but it’d be great to see this premise built upon with stronger character work. Free e-copy from publisher Podium—thank you!

book I was most surprised to like: The Silver Book, by Olivia Laing (forthcoming 2025). Laing’s first novel, Crudo, felt too shackled to its own moment for me to like it unreservedly or to feel that it would stand the test of time. The Silver Book is a more interesting project. It’s a short novel that follows the making of both Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò and Fellini’s 1976 film Casanova through the eyes of Nicholas, a young English gay man who comes to Italy in flight from trauma and guilt, and becomes involved with Danilo Donati, who designed the sets and costumes for both films. I know nothing about movies and have never seen either of these two, although I am aware of Salò‘s reputation: it’s an adaptation of de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom that allegorises the brutality of fascism, and sounds unbelievably gross. (That link is to the detailed plot summary on Wikipedia; those of weak stomach are hereby warned.) Laing creates tension by putting Nicholas’s naive perspective (and a little bit of Dani’s more worldly one) against what we know of history, including Pasolini’s brutal unsolved murder at the age of forty-five amid rumours that he was attempting to buy back film reels stolen from his warehouse. The Silver Book is, I think, about the simultaneous hiding and revealing of queer life that some mid-century art scenes (and indeed European fascism for some élites) facilitated, and about the warping effects of power. I’m not sure that it entirely succeeds; Laing insistently skims the surface of events in a way that is obviously a deliberate choice (Nicholas must remain naive right to the end, after all), but that forecloses their ability to dig deeper into the dynamics that we glimpse between individuals and institutions. I really liked it, though. It’s extremely evocative—there are some amazing scenes in the workshop where Dani’s team builds surreal objects for Casanova, like a giant whale that you can walk around inside—the dialogue is good, and there’s some excellent food writing. I’m pleased to see Laing’s fiction developing in this way. NetGalley, publishing 6 Nov. 2025.

hardest to get a handle on, though eventually rewarding: Orchid and the Wasp, by Caoilinn Hughes (2018). Initially I expected this to be an Irish contemporary-historical version of Vanity Fair, with a very young female protagonist on the make in the echelons of the powerful. And Gael Foess—only a year older than me—is a kind of millennial Becky Sharp, although she largely avoids having sex with people to whom she isn’t attracted as a strategy for advancement, which I found refreshing. Gael’s style is more breathtakingly audacious and effort-intensive social engineering and financial grifts. In one incredible scene, she gets an interview for an MBA at the London Business School despite having no business experience by doing an amazing amount of behind-the-scenes work; in another, she uses an eight-hour transatlantic flight in first class to extract a check for $50,000 from the only other passenger in the cabin. This is all just the middle section of the book, though. It starts with her as an eleven-year-old: the early chapters dig deep into a complicated family dynamic, though the full extent of this we only discover in half-formed mental asides or exasperated, after-the-fact conversations. One plot point I’m still not sure about, although if it’s what I think it is, it’s horrifying, and horrifyingly well camouflaged. Perhaps what made it so difficult to get properly engrossed by Orchid and the Wasp was a constant uncertainty about what the book was going to be, or trying to be. At different points, it’s a bleak family drama; a hyper-modern picaresque; a satire on, if not the 1%, at least the 10%; a dissection of the complicity and greed that created the global financial crisis. (The book’s main action takes place between 2008 and 2011, including scenes at the Occupy Wall Street encampment; Gael’s father Jarleth, who looms large in her life, is a cold and unscrupulous investment banker.) Of course it’s all of those things, and they don’t necessarily have to sit uneasily with one another. There are, however, qualities of relentlessness and a kind of frenetic density in the experience of reading the text—which, though third-person, is focalised entirely through Gael, whose brain is constantly a-whir. It makes the book exhausting. I’m not at all sure that this isn’t a novel of genuine genius, but I’m also not at all sure that I’d care to read it again. Does anyone else have thoughts? Passed on by Rebecca—thank you!

most purely pleasurable and moving: Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell (2024). Greenwell is very insistent that this is not to be seen as autofiction, despite the fact that what happens in it happened to him, and the protagonist shares many details of his life (a gay poet who used to live and teach English in eastern Europe and now resides in Iowa City with a Spanish academic husband whose first name starts with L.) That’s his prerogative as an author, I suppose, and actually the rich texture of Small Rain feels more like what I still, very uncoolly, think of as “proper” fiction than like the rather etiolated quality I associate with contemporary autofiction. On one level, it’s about the protagonist experiencing a medical emergency for reasons no one can work out, even by the novel’s end, and spending a week in hospital during the autumn of 2020, when Covid was a little bit figured out but we didn’t yet have a vaccine. (Masks and PPE are a thing; he’s allowed a visitor once admitted to the ward, but has to go to the ER alone.) On another level, it’s about care, trust, and vulnerability—when you’re sick, yes, and being looked after by strangers whom you can only hope will do their jobs well, but also when you love another person and choose to spend your life with them. On other levels still, it’s about how those themes show up in contexts ranging from home ownership to sibling relationships to poem analysis. (There are two absolutely stonking readings of poems: one is the verse from which the novel takes its name, a favourite of mine, a short and enigmatic 16th-century lyric; the other is “Stranger’s Child” by George Oppen, the kind of poem that my particularly literary training often fails to get purchase on. Greenwell[‘s narrator] interprets both so well and with such sustained attention, which for me is what close reading is all about.) I just loved the experience of reading this. Greenwell’s prose is intentionally stylistic here, but not clotted or heavy: fluid run-on sentences, lots of comma splices, totally engrossing, and never more precious or literary than it is human and emotive. A strong year-end list contender. Passed on by Susan—thank you!

How has your September reading treated you?

August was a much-needed quieter month after a truly manic beginning to the summer. M and I tend to take the month off from singing, which helped a lot. We spent the extra time doing things like solving crossword puzzles over morning coffee and embarking on favourite countryside walks. A lot of friends had birthdays to celebrate. It was quiet and nice. I also read a ton, seventeen books in total. Seven were for 20 Books of Summer; one more got a write-up in this month’s #LoveYourLibrary post. Here’s what I made of the rest.

most disorienting setting: Thus Was Adonis Murdered, by Sarah Caudwell (1981). An epistolary murder mystery in which the suspect and investigators are all members of the same chambers (legal firm), specialising in tax law. The narrator, Hilary Tamar, is never gendered, which Caudwell manages to sustain with remarkable naturalness. Hilary’s voice is waspishly witty, and the milieu they inhabit and describe is both casually privileged and proudly unworldly; imagine a spiritual bastard child of P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer’s Rumpole books. The odd thing about it, which threw me sufficiently to make me wonder whether 1981 was really like this, is the novel’s conception of sexual politics. Jo Walton describes it thus: “The other noteworthy thing is gender—not the triviality that Hilary’s gender remains unstated, but that this takes place in a universe in which women are sexual predators and beautiful young men sexual prey, for both women and older men, and this is axiomatic. This was in fact not the case in 1981, and is not now, but nobody within the novel questions it.” I guess that’s comforting. Anyway, much of this takes place in Venice, and there are some truly terrific one-liners and dialogues. I can absolutely see why people cite these as favourite comfort reads; they’re very stylised, but satisfying. Source: bought secondhand at Culzean Castle bookshop, Scotland

most gripping: Basilisk, by Matt Wixey (2025). SO glad I persevered past initial formatting problems, redownloaded this, and got to read it. The main story is the testimony of a “white hat” hacker named Alex, who, with her colleague Jay, discovers what seems to be a hidden game orchestrated by a figure calling himself the Helmsman. As Alex and Jay play through the puzzles and challenges they’re set, they receive as rewards single chapters of what seems to be the Helmsman’s memoir: an account of a brilliant but increasingly unhinged scientist in a shadowy government department, conducting research into the feasibility of developing a “cognitive weapon”. He settles on something that, in the world of thought experiments, is known as a basilisk: a sentence that will fundamentally alter the victim’s understanding of reality. Eventually, it becomes clear that whatever Alex and Jay are playing isn’t a game: that there are people willing to kill to stop them from reaching the final level and discovering the sentence that comprises the weapon, and that those who have won the game often react so badly to the basilisk that they die, commit acts of unspeakable violence, and/or become insane.

I can’t improve on Laura’s perceptive disentangling of the ways in which Wixey riffs on the “Lovecraftian knowledge-as-horror” trope, or on her assessment of how cleverly he plays with the reader’s emotions (what does it mean that this book is so gripping? As we race towards the end, potentially meeting the same fates of death or madness as the characters, we still want to know: What is the basilisk? What are the words? And what does that say about us, eh?) The characters are fairly thinly sketched: Alex, Jay, and the mysterious Holly Soames—whose annotations to Alex’s testimony suggest that she, too, works for some shadowy government agency seeking to understand what happened after the fact—are basically player characters, people-shaped stand-ins for the reader’s own curiosity. But they work incredibly well; Basilisk wouldn’t be as effective a book if it went in deep on characterisation and background. Instead, it’s utterly absorbing (I read its 600 pages in a single day; a lot of the length is Holly’s and Alex’s own footnotes to the text, so it’s not actually that long). I also haven’t stopped thinking about it since reading it—about the specific details of what happens, and what various elements of the novel might mean or represent, and more broadly about the implications of its premise. Are there things we just aren’t meant to know? What if the cultural valorisation of endless discovery and the heroic individual who dares enlightenment (Plato’s cave is a recurring motif) is ultimately a trap made out of arrogance? A most superior philosophical techno-thriller; highest recommendation. Source: NetGalley

best sequel: The Sirens Sang of Murder, by Sarah Caudwell (1989). More fun with murder and tax lawyers! This one does an interesting bait-and-switch where you think that, to understand the motive for murder, you need to understand a fairly complicated (to me) financial trust administered in terms of great secrecy. Actually, the conditions of the trust don’t matter much at all; they’re very human murders, ultimately. (One of the lawyer-detectives, Julia, complains at the end that it’s all too old-fashioned to be plausible.) It’s interesting to see how Caudwell continued to use epistolary form in crime novels: instead of letters from Venice, this time, it’s telexes from Jersey, Monte Carlo, and the Cayman Islands. I had to Google “telex”; clearly the use of this technology is meant to indicate that the lawyers are old-fashioned even within their own era, since there were certainly fax machines by the late ’80s. But that distinction would have passed me by if I hadn’t checked. So interesting, what remains intelligible and what doesn’t. (What subtle markers are we missing in much older texts, for example?) Source: passed on by Laura—thank you!

book I was most sincerely shocked not to hate: Caracole, by Edmund White (1985). A (non-blogging) literary friend and I decided to read this together; I’d never read White, and my pal had never read this one. He finished it first and was not impressed, citing the lack of structure, the way the dense language works against narrative momentum, and the paucity of characters about whom one cares. I was therefore expecting something like Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, one of the worst reading experiences of recent memory, and was pleasantly surprised to find that Caracole is better. It’s set in an unnamed city and country—in chapter one it feels like Garcia Marquez’s Central America, but the city seems approximately Venetian; at no point does it feel like ’80s New York, as the back cover claims—and follows the sexual and social escapades of a very young man, Gabriel, plus an orbiting group of characters that include his childhood sweetheart Angelica, his uncle Mateo, his uncle’s mistress Edwige, Gabriel’s own mistress Mathilda, and Mathilda’s adult son Daniel (oh, and Daniel’s mistress Claude). There’s quite a lot of ripely described sex, so have a care if you’re reading it on the Tube, but ultimately it’s a curiously conservative novel to my mind, in the sense that Tom Jones is: it’s very interested in family relationships, and the (false, but no one in the novel knows this) significance of a family name.

White is generally lauded as a writer of beautiful sentences. I found him hypnotic, but also pretentious and baggy. The middle sections in particular go on for far too long, and get repetitive, making proclamations about characters at length instead of letting the characters reveal themselves to us. What I’m really stuck on is the final chapter, which takes place at a masque and suddenly introduces revolution/resistance as a real concern; the implication on the final page is that a crime of passion, totally unpolitical, is about to serve as the spark (or excuse) for a people’s revolt. The entire book up til now has portrayed the resistance movement as peripheral and ineffective; it has been mentioned, but not taken seriously. Did White genuinely think he was writing a political novel? The ending, where Gabriel is about to be made into a folk hero through the connivance of Angelica and her friend Maurizio, despite having done precisely nothing—does that emerge organically in any way from the book’s apparent interests in the previous 340 pages (sex, loneliness, artifice)? Is the fact that our focus hasn’t been on the revolution at all an indictment of the collaborationist/intellectual capacity to be distracted? Or is it just bad plotting? Like pretty much everything about Caracole, it’s hard to tell. I need to read more White to see if this is representative. Source: bought secondhand from World of Books

book that most grew on me: Home, by Marilynne Robinson (2008). Initially, I was prepared to judge this Gilead sequel as beautiful and unnecessary. Why would we need the same events told from a different point of view, and without the luminous first-person voice achievement of John Ames? But in fact Home is doing its own thing. Perhaps the key to this book, for me, was understanding that Robinson makes it possible to read against the grain concerning retired Presbyterian preacher Robert Boughton. We are allowed, perhaps even nudged, to find him disingenuous and manipulative. The besetting disaster of these books is Boughton’s son Jack, apparently a ne’er-do-well from birth who compounds his own disgrace by getting a local girl pregnant in his late teens, then abandoning her and the baby. Jack’s return to the family home after twenty years away occurs at the start of the book, and of course it’s what Boughton has always wanted: his beloved son is back. But Jack is still who he is, not who his father would not-so-secretly prefer him to be. He can’t summon up faith in God, or even really the desire to have faith, and he’s an alcoholic. These seem like such minor sins in 2025, but for the little world of Gilead, Iowa in 1950, they really matter. Boughton is growing old, too, and encroaching dementia makes him both more honest and more cruel to his son—although it’s pretty clear that he has always been a sort of God monster. This is delicately underlined by his genteel racism: whenever the civil rights protests are on the news, he mutters about provocation and everyone keeping to themselves. Gilead is as much about the ripples of the Civil War as it is about God; Home takes those concerns and brings them into the narrative present with equal subtlety and to equal effect. I haven’t even mentioned Glory, the youngest daughter, through whose eyes all this is focalised and who has her own hidden currents of strong and surprising feeling about her family and home. (Just wait til you find out what she thinks when her father says he’s leaving her the house.)

I’ve already read Robinson’s third Gilead novel, Lila, and loved it (though never wrote about it), maybe because it takes us out of this complacent little town for a bit and because Lila Ames is by far the most sympathetic of these recurring characters. I’m still not sure whether the most recent one, Jack, is worthwhile or just a rehash. Home, however, has made me more willing to concede the possibility that Robinson is attempting to use this series to do something meaningful with perspective and sympathy and the long view. Source: passed on by Laura—thank you!

book that had no right to be as good as it was: The Fifth House of the Heart, by Ben Tripp (2015). Ridiculously readable but also very capably written, this is that most maligned of things, a vampire novel. Its take on vampires—what they are, how they function—is fresh and interesting: they’re just another species of creature, albeit one that ends up looking like whatever its main food source is. Structurally, the book’s a heist. Our human protagonist, Asmodeus Saxon-Tang (he knows how silly his name is, please call him Sax) puts together a group of specialists to assault the hoard of an ancient vampire in central Europe who has marked him for her revenge. Sax is a septuagenarian gay antiques dealer who has known of vampires since the ’60s; he occasionally works, to his immense resentment, with the Vatican, who are interested in the creatures for reasons that sort of fall apart when you consider that there’s no metaphysics involved given that they’re just organisms like any other organism, but it doesn’t matter.

Tripp’s approach to diversity is 50:50. The heist gang is composed of an African-American soldier, an Eastern European criminal, and a South Korean professional vamp-hunter, with a minor Bollywood actress also getting involved, not to mention Sax and his mixed-race niece Emily, and each one is individuated. On the other hand, the Romanian guy is a boorish misogynist, and the Korean woman is a mostly silent figure whose response to the traumatic murder of her whole family is psychopathic violence, which seems to smush a bunch of stereotypes together in an effort to transcend stereotype. (There’s also one slur used in dialogue that, although the reader is clearly expected to disapprove, I think we could have done without.) For the most part, though, it’s all focalised through Sax in third person, and he’s a great protagonist: crotchety, pragmatic, cowardly, avaricious, kind. There are some terrific set pieces: a mission to escape a labyrinthine and elaborately booby-trapped Loire Valley château is particularly tense. The prose is a cut above, too; not self-conscious or poetic or anything, but Tripp knows how to use words interestingly without getting in his own way. Well worth the punt, and I’d definitely read him again. Source: Kindle

most compelling nonfiction: The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS, by Elizabeth Pisani (2008). This is such well written and compelling stuff, even if it is sixteen years old and therefore missing analysis of recent developments like the availability of PrEP. Pisano, a UN epidemiologist, proffers a window into international development thinking at the time of the book’s publication (and perhaps now too): the idea that HIV/AIDS is a development issue, caused by generic “poverty” and “disempowerment”, was well-meaning but fatally wrong. She argues passionately that the big bucks from the philanthropic HIV industrial complex need to be spent on things that don’t look cute (like mothers and babies) or make good sound bites; instead, the greatest difference can be made in making risky behaviours around sex—mostly commercial/transactional sex—and drug injection safer. These include needle exchanges and incentives for condom use. But, as she dryly puts it, there aren’t any votes in doing nice things for junkies. I occasionally found some of her language to be unnecessarily combative, and some of it (especially in relation to trans sex workers) is of its time. Clearly, though, she’s no ideologue or bigot: she wants to save lives, and the numbers point to solutions that politics doesn’t like. Extraordinarily clear and engaging writing, too; Pisani’s first career was in international journalism and it shows. Well worth reading. Source: passed on by Rebecca—thank you!

two excellent rereads: The Return of the Native (1878) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), by Thomas Hardy. I felt really burned out on contemporary and even 20th-century stuff at the end of this month. I wanted something older, a classic, preferably familiar to me. Thomas Hardy’s novels, written at the tail end of the nineteenth century, were perfect: modern enough in style not to feel like my academic work, just familiar enough (I’ve read seven of his novels, and now reread four), but I picked two that I hadn’t read since 2009 and 2010, respectively, so there were still lots of surprises. I’ve also always felt close to his novels because they’re set in Wessex—an imagined avatar for southwestern England—and have always taken place, inside my head, in versions of locations around my grandparents’ old village in the South Downs and my aunt’s former home in Dorset.

The Return of the Native was the first one I revisited. After sixteen years, I remembered character names, the evocative heathland setting, and a handful of vividly rendered scenes. The best is when two excellently named characters, Damon Wildeve and Diggory Venn, play dice for the inheritance of Thomasin Yeobright (another great name) by the light of glowworms on Egdon Heath. Even more atmospherically, Venn is a reddleman, someone who sells the red pigment that farmers use to mark rams and thus predict which ewe might be in lamb later in the year; his product has permeated his skin, making him bright red all over. But the two main characters are Thomasin’s brother Clym, who returns from a career as a Paris jeweler, disgusted by the commercial world and intending to start a school for the children of Egdon labourers; and Eustacia Vye, the closest thing the area has to gentry, who despises her rural surrounds and is convinced she’s destined for greater things. Clym and Eustacia are drawn to each other, but she has a pre-existing history with another man—nothing substantial, but serious enough to make her reputation doubted—and moreover, they don’t share enough mutual interests or values to make a successful couple in the first place. Eustacia is a fantastic creation: charismatic, darkly beautiful and mesmerising, she’s often described by other characters as a witch, but she’s also barely nineteen, with no close friends or relatives to advise her or offer a constructive channel for her strong will. In a different novel, she’d be like Austen’s Emma, learning better and growing into maturity; in a Hardy novel, she’s doomed. But so are a lot of other characters.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is the later book and probably the more famous one, but I’m not sure it’s the better one. I don’t think anyone needs me to summarise the plot, so instead I’ll mention what I noticed this time around. One: the pacing is surprising. The book is divided into seven sections of unequal length. Tess’s defloration at the hands of Alec D’Urberville happens at the end of section one. Given how much emphasis there is on this event, both within the book and in the critical conversation about it, you might expect it to come later and form some sort of high point of the action, but no! It’s like how “Let It Go” happens twenty-seven minutes into Frozen. The novel doesn’t build up to that moment; it rests upon it. Even Tess’s confession to Angel Clare happens at the end of section four, with loads more plot still to come (though possibly not quite enough. It does drag slightly in the back half.) Two: Hardy is really into Tess. Sensuous physical descriptions of her are everywhere. Sometimes they’re sweet, but mostly they’re startling and not a little creepy. He talks about her mouth a lot. He also, especially early on, emphasises her “figure”; contextually, one surmises, Tess has large breasts for her age. At the book’s start she’s only about sixteen but is frequently taken for older. Hardy claims this happens because her state of physical development exceeds her emotional development. As far as it goes, this actually makes perfect sense to me: the adultification of teenage girls is an old phenomenon and Hardy clearly disapproves of the men who see Tess as sexual fair game. But he muddies the waters by seeming to see her that way himself at times. This was probably the thing that made me saddest about rereading this book: how visible the victimisation of a child is, within it. Three: the Durbeyfields are hilarious and poignant and interesting. John, Tess’s father, is hopeless—a sentimental, self-aggrandising alcoholic—but his swagger is winning. (Drunk the night before he’s meant to set out for market at dawn, he protests, “I? I shall be all right in an hour or two.”) Joan, her mother, is what Tess might have been with less education: resilient to the point of vulgarity, careless, once very beautiful, and—I love this touch—extremely fond of music, as is Tess herself. Tess’s sister Liza-Lu is a figure of faint hope at the end. Lots going on with the Durbeyfields; you can’t just dismiss them as hapless peasants. Source: old personal copies

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How has your August reading treated you?

Such a peculiar month. Lots to report. Joy and restoration sat side by side with stress from every quarter, whether fiddly billing and travel bookings for the day job, receiving—and having only two weeks to action—feedback on my first ever academic article (academia-adjacent readers: is it normal for article feedback to cause you to feel like the stupidest person in existence?), or the washing machine spewing foul water all over the under-sink cupboard the day after we got back from holiday (thank Christ for Checkatrade, and specifically for the glorious Vlatko of PlumbLondon, who arrived within two hours wearing a t-shirt that said “#LikeABosch“, diagnosed a blockage within seconds, and fixed it in under half an hour), followed the next week by our shower completely ceasing to work (PlumbLondon won themselves another job; they’re so good, the shower gave up on Sunday and we had a new one in situ by Wednesday night).

On the other hand, we went camping in Yorkshire for nine days of glorious weather and walking. We stayed in pods, not tents; I shall never look back from the pleasures of having a mattress, a roof, and a kettle readily available. One of our activities was climbing Whernside, the tallest of the Yorkshire Three Peaks. It’s one of the nastiest ascents—not especially steep at any given moment, but very long—I’ve personally experienced, but we all managed it and it felt so worthwhile. Back down south, I turned thirty-three, and was thoroughly spoiled by my fiancé with cocktails—the bar was doing limited-edition Jane Austen-themed ones!—and a very fancy dinner. I also went to Cambridge for a flying visit to my bestie, who’s now a JRF there, and enjoyed a garden party, High Table dinner, and getting to sleep in a sixteenth-century building that was originally the residence of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII.

Also, I read sixteen books. I wrote about one tranche of 20 Books of Summer reading here, another here, and covered the rest of the month’s library borrows here. Here’s what remains.

best spy escapism: White Eagles Over Serbia, by Lawrence Durrell (1957). ’50s-set as well as written, an espionage novel about anti-Tito activities in postwar Yugoslavia. I had no idea about any of this, but apparently the British supported Tito despite his being a Communist dictator because his Partisan troops were the most effective anti-Nazi force in the area during WWII, and British authorities assumed he’d be effective at keeping Nazi sympathies firmly squashed after the war ended (which, as far as it went, was probably true). Brilliantly efficient descriptions, reasonable characterisation, and proper adventure/wilderness stuff. Also dryly funny. Not many women: literally, one, and she isn’t in the main part of the action, but she’s incredibly brave (working for OZNA, the Communist secret police, in order to stay alive, but acting as a double agent for the Royalist underground) and definitely not presented as either silly or superhuman. This sort of thing is probably ultimately tosh, but it’s extremely enjoyable and Durrell does it with perfect technical competence and panache. I couldn’t have asked for a better thing to read in one sunny day on holiday. Are his other novels this entertaining? Source: bought secondhand at Culzean Castle bookshop, Scotland

best novel about inarticulate people having deep emotions: The Tree of Man, by Patrick White (1955). White was an Aussie Nobel-winner whose astonishing Voss was a book of the year for me in 2024. The Tree of Man is less focused and intense, but it’s a novel that fits into a specific category I really like, which you could call “inarticulate people with deep emotions living off the land” (see also Faulkner, McCarthy, Harry Crews’s memoir, Fiona Mozley’s Elmet, the two big Steinbecks). Things happen in it—infidelity, crime, spiritual awakening, marital sex and love, a killer flood, a killer bushfire, friendship, ageing—but it’s not entirely about any of those things; rather, it relies on the cumulative effect of them, so that we feel we’ve lived the lives of Stan and Amy Parker, and their children Ray and Thelma, along with them. The way the children grow up (Ray a violent psychopath, Thelma a social climber who patronises her parents) is fascinating and subtly drawn. The book ends, as it must, with the death of Stan, and lingers on Ray’s son, now an adolescent himself, walking alone in the gully and thinking about writing. (Maybe a mini self-portrait there?) I like it less than Voss; the balance of depressing and elemental is tilted slightly too far in the direction of depressing; but White is bloody good. Source: Herne Hill station secondhand shelves

pleasantest surprise: The Children of Húrin, by J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Christopher Tolkien (2007). This is material dealt with at shorter length in The Silmarillion; Christopher, Tolkien’s son and most indefatigable editor, took three “Great Tales” that his father had always intended to treat in a more sustained fictional manner, and put them together from notes and pre-existing texts. The Children of Húrin is the most effective and complete of these. It starts with the devastating defeat of the forces of good at a once-in-a-generation battle, which is the story from which my Aurë entúluva tattoo derives. The hero Húrin, captured by the demonic Morgoth and refusing to submit to him, is bound to a seat on the top of a mountain from which he will be able to watch every moment of his children’s cursed lives. The book opens with the chapters that establish this premise, then largely follows Húrin’s son, Túrin, who becomes an outlaw prince and is eventually felled by his own pride and wrath. There are a few chapters about Niënor, Húrin’s daughter, though not as many as I’d like. When the siblings finally meet, it’s… well, it’s classical tragedy and so the circumstances are utterly twisted, let’s just put it that way. This tale has so many interesting, complicated female characters, though: Húrin’s wife Morwen is so emotionally aloof that it borders on the concerning, but she is determined to save her children from the warlords who overrun her country, and her kinswoman Aerin—forced into marriage with one of those warlords—uses what power and status she still has to save lives in the region for decades. (I would love a top-notch fanfic novel about the Lady Aerin. Please, y’all.) Also there’s a terrifying and gross (in every way) dragon in this one. From what I’ve heard, I don’t think the other two Great Tales novelisations fared nearly as well, but this was terrific. Source: nicked from a Ribblehead pub with books-by-the-yard décor

best novel about love and marriage: Happy All the Time, by Laurie Colwin (1978). Riffing off my identification of books that feel real, this doesn’t quite—everyone in it is a little bit too smart and weird, and definitely too financially comfortable—but it comes awfully close, and moreover is charming. It follows two second cousins, Guido and Vincent, as they court and marry two very different women, the precise Holly and the prickly Misty. It features men being emotional about their relationships, without the slightest indication that this is in any way unusual or unmanly, and women being fantastically uncliché about love and babies, with some great dialogue. “The trouble with you”, Misty tells Vincent, “is that you’re so committed to being polite… You should be more like me.” “In what way?” he asks, and she replies serenely, “I am the scourge of God.” Colwin’s brilliance is in showing us how a person’s assertion that they are the scourge of God can both be sort of true, and rest upon their terror that they are secretly too much of a squishy marshmallow to survive. Misty, c’est moi. I will definitely read more Colwin; she feels like a more generous Barbara Trapido. Also, should you need persuading, this is what got my mother-out-law, who had been twenty pages into the humongous The Crimson Petal and the White for about three years, to finally just read another book. I think that made her happy; it certainly did me. Source: bought secondhand at Culzean Castle bookshop, Scotland

best argument for more non-anglocentric sci fi: Spaceman of Bohemia, by Jaroslav Kalfař (2017). This is both a science fiction novel—in which the first Czech astronaut is dispatched to investigate a mysterious purple cloud of space dust and meets a telepathic alien arachnoid fond of Nutella, whom he dubs Hanuš—and a political novel, exploring the ripples of 20th-century Czech history. Jakub Procházka, the astronaut, is the son of a Communist torturer. This legacy haunts Jakub from childhood onwards, as one of his father’s former victims, now a member of the ruling political class in capitalist Prague, uses his newfound power to ensure that the Procházkas are first shunned and then evicted from their home, which he then buys and leaves empty. Kalfař deals with the question of what heroism means, the way a public hero must surrender their life to a cause, and the various institutions that ask people to surrender their lives in this way, including, of course, the Church, the Communist regime, and the new capitalist order. The fifteenth-century religious martyr Jan Hus is a major touchstone: Jakub’s ship is named for him. I’m not sure how well this fusion works. The space-set sections have a different tone, much goofier and in some senses more bittersweet, although they’re definitely legible as nods to the Czech surrealist tradition of Kafka, Vítězslav Nezval, and others. It’s good to read genre fiction that doesn’t reproduce Anglo-American cultural assumptions, though; this was really enjoyable. (Hanuš is absolutely great.) Source: passed on by Rebecca—thank you!

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What have you most (or least) enjoyed reading in July?

I had a much better reading month than the below image would suggest, completing sixteen books in total. I wrote about the first seven entries in this year’s 20 Books of Summer here, here and here, and covered the rest of June’s library reading in a #LoveYourLibrary roundup here. After all of that, there are only three remaining books to discuss, and here they are.

most transporting: The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff (2023). I absolutely love wilderness survival stories, and for much of its length, that’s exactly what this is. A servant girl flees a stockade one winter night in the middle of a wilderness. She’s also fleeing famine, plague, and the very real possibility of being caught and executed for murder. She was given the name Lamentations, her mistress calls her Zed, but in the wilderness she rejects both names and becomes someone with no name at all. Eventually we realise when and where we are: the Jamestown colony in Virginia, circa 1610, in the “starving winter”. As she struggles to survive, moving north in search of French traders and deliberately avoiding the Indigenous people who live in the area, we get flashbacks to her infancy in a London poorhouse and then as servant girl to “the mistress”, a beautiful Italian woman who (it’s lightly hinted) might have been Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, the journey across the ocean, and the terrible events leading up to her murder of the mistress’s second husband.

We also get the most extraordinary set pieces, in which the girl’s physical pain and occasional delirium combines with her deep religious faith and her deepening understanding of the natural world to produce scenes that have the lucid beauty of a mystic’s dream. My favourite of these is when she hides in a narrow ledge behind a waterfall from some Piscataway trackers (who, she later realises, probably wanted to help her, not hurt her), and ends up witnessing a bear bathing by night, coming to an understanding that the bear can feel awe, and concluding that it can also know God. I love the register Groff landed on for this entire novel, Biblically inflected and lightly archaic but not grandiose; imagine if Cormac McCarthy were readable. Other readers have complained that Groff’s authorial presence is too intrusive; I noticed a few over-statements of theme, but I just didn’t care about them, because the language and the slow changing of the girl’s relationship to the world mattered more. The final chapters are just exceptional, some of the finest and most moving writing I’ve encountered in years. It had me weeping by the last page. An unforgettable experience. Source: passed on by Rebecca—thank you!

most destabilising: Very Cold People, by Sarah Manguso (2022). This has the feel of autofiction but is more grounded than such fiction usually is. For one thing, it’s about a girl growing up, not an adult, and for another the girl has a name (Ruth). It’s set in a class-obsessed New England town and deals, obliquely at first and then increasingly explicitly, with the legacies of child sexual abuse. It’s impressively put together and capably written, especially the way Manguso deals with the passing of time, but it’s also the opposite of grabby; I got through it in a day because it was short, but it was not hard to put down. Not because it’s explicit or gratuitous, it just depicts an atmosphere of suffocation and indifference and class striving and parental meanness that does not entice. Obviously this is on purpose, and obviously Manguso is a smart enough writer to make it short, knowing this. I’m glad I read it, but it hasn’t really stuck in the mind and I’d have no inclination to return to it. I’d try another Manguso, though; her nonfiction seems interesting. Source: passed on by Laura—thank you!

most unexpected pleasure: Father Melancholy’s Daughter, by Gail Godwin (1991). I loved this but it’s quite odd, possibly a book that could not have been written now or indeed significantly earlier than it was written. A lot of its surface details are of personal interest to me: the protagonist, Margaret, lives in rural Virginia, attends UVA in Charlottesville (my hometown), is the daughter of an Episcopalian priest, falls in love with another ordained and slightly older man, and ends up visiting parts of England I know well, such as Farnham. A lot of its other details remind me of Madeleine L’Engle’s adult novels: Margaret’s father’s tendency towards depression and passionate interest in the writings of mystics like Meister Eckhart, for example; the focus on ruptured family relationships; the characters’ fundamental acceptance of traditional gender roles, even if the novel itself pushes against them. Margaret’s mother, referred to always as “Ruth”, leaves the family when Margaret is six to live with a close female friend (though apparently not in a sexual way) and dies in a car accident while away from home. The story is about Margaret’s growing up, both chronologically—from child to young woman—and emotionally—from an abandoned, wounded girl to someone with agency in her own life. The events of the final act, though I won’t spoil them, are absolutely necessary to this emotional development; clearly Margaret can’t become her own person without them, painful though they feel. Turns out my mother, who was visiting last week and saw this on my shelf, loves Gail Godwin. I’ve never read her before but I think, based on this, that she might be a sort of intellectualised version of Lee Smith, a Southern female author with both an academic and a spiritual bent. I’ll definitely seek out more of her work. Souce: passed on by Rebecca—thank you!

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What did you particularly enjoy reading in June? Are you doing 20 Books of Summer?

May. I clung on by my fingernails. Deadlines came and were met. Mental gears were shifted every other day or so. Requirements seemed to cluster mid-month, in one particularly exhausting ten-day sprint. I did have a fantastic experience at an academic conference in Paris, which was an absolute joy, but that didn’t make me less tired. As previously mentioned in May’s long #LoveYourLibrary roundup, a lot of my reading this month was for comfort. In periods of frenzy like this, I like and need escapism, which actually means constant reading, just nothing very difficult. At the beginning and end of the month, I managed a few other books: three rereads, which is almost as good as a comfort read since I know what’s going to happen, two very engaging new or forthcoming releases, and a short new-to-me novel. Here they are.

most devastatingly sad reread: Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson (2014). Stevenson interweaves a general memoir of his founding of, and work with, the Equal Justice Initiative, with a more detailed account of one particular case: that of Walter McMillian, a Black man condemned to death in 1988 for the murder of a white woman he was adamant he didn’t commit. McMillian’s is an extraordinary, ordinary story, one of perverted justice, racist investigators, and indifferent arbiters. He was exonerated and released in 1993, but he had spent years on death row and the strain of that took a toll on his marriage, his friendships, and eventually his health. Others of Stevenson’s case studies describe botched executions, the judicial murder of children and vulnerable adults, and the current state of American prisons as “warehouses for the mentally ill.” He’s a good writer—not a beautiful one, but journalistic and gripping—and it is impossible to read his book without feeling rage and grief. In some ways, though, it almost feels old-fashioned. Just Mercy came out in the final years of Obama’s second term, pre-Trump and pre-George Floyd and pre-Philando Castile and pre-Breonna Taylor, though not pre-Ferguson or pre-Trayvon Martin or pre-Freddie Gray. It is possible, in retrospect, to read Stevenson’s careful control of his own tone as a form of respectability politics. He may really be this equable and calm, but calls for “courteous” or “civil” disagreement tend to lead to precisely this kind of cooled discourse. It’s interesting to see it in action. Just Mercy would be a different book if published today. Source: old personal copy

most comforting reread: A Room with a View, by E.M. Forster (1908). I love this book so much. Wonderful Mr. Emerson! Wonderful violets! Even wonderful Charlotte Bartlett, who gets her redemption right at the end. “By the side of the everlasting Why, there is a Yes—a transitory Yes if you like, but a Yes.” I hadn’t realised before how entirely normal Lucy Honeychurch is. She’s not especially clever, or even sensitive. She has one or two talents, including one for Beethoven, and a certain receptiveness. That’s enough; that suffices, because she allows those parts of her to grow, for her to evade the mental and spiritual aridity of her class and time. The fact that she’s not special is precisely what makes her such a good heroine. We could be like this too, Forster suggests; we could all be true to ourselves, and kinder, and happy. Source: old personal copy

most addictive: Let the Bad Times Roll, by Alice Slater (2025). What fun I had with this! I devoured it in a day. It’s a novel about a scammer, of course, my generation’s favourite type of crime. Charismatic Daniel is missing in New Orleans; his sister Caroline throws a dinner in London and invites three of his friends, plus a psychic who claims to have spent the past two weeks with Daniel in Louisiana. Between them all, surely, they’ll get to the truth of the matter. And they do, although not in the way Caroline expects. This is just so great on detail: the smells, sounds, tastes and emotions of a city that relies on marketing its history to survive; the strange combination of euphoria and creeping inauthenticity that produces. Every character is convincing, though we get much more time with Selina, the psychic, than most of the others, and I’d have liked a more even spread. (That’s rare; usually in novels with five point-of-view characters I think at least three are superfluous or badly done.) The third quarter of this book is hard to read if you have traumatic financial experiences in your past, I’ll warn you now. On the other hand, when the bad times start rolling—when the violence begins—I gulped it down with pure glee. Which is a morally dubious reaction, I know, but man does Slater do catharsis! This is a dream of a summer read, and deserves to be huge. Source: NetGalley, publishing 10 July

best use of real-world events: Consider Yourself Kissed, by Jessica Stanley (2025). This is the sort of book that shows you, as Jo Walton says, how authors keep their books’ covers apart without having wizards or spaceships in them. It’s a novel about a young woman trying to make her way in London, through a serious long-term relationship, stepmotherhood and her own pregnancies, with a partner whose job as a political commentator makes the mad governmental upheavals of the 2013-2023 decade in Britain relevant in a particularly personal way. (When a leadership contest is announced among the Tories, for example, or the Brexit hard deadline might pass without a deal, Adam is excited because it gives him material; Coralie is enraged because it derails their childcare arrangements.) At points it feels like a “kids ruin your life” novel, which I’m sick of, but Stanley is actually more subtle than that, and her supporting characters are fantastic. Really, quietly, it’s a novel about surviving parental abuse and the permanent damage that can do to the coping mechanisms of children, which those children then have to fight not to pass on to their own kids. I can’t identify at all with Coralie’s maniacal longing for children, which made this a more anthropologically interesting read than expected. She also sometimes feels like an overly passive protagonist (I kept wanting to call through the pages at her, “Get therapy!”), but there’s some verisimilitude in that; it mirrors the helplessness many of us felt through this era. On the whole, I really liked it. This would appeal to fans of Diana Evans’s Ordinary People, or indeed Lily King’s Writers and Lovers. Source: NetGalley, published 8 May

most unjustly maligned reread: The Word for World is Forest, by Ursula K. LeGuin (1972). Something I admire enormously about LeGuin is her willingness to admit when she changed her mind, or fell short of her own high standards for her art. She rethought the way she did gender in Earthsea (1968-1990) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969); she also wrote a reflection on this book in which she described it as “too much of a preachment”. The allegory between the human (“yumen”) colonisation of the planet Athshe, and the American war in Vietnam, are indeed very plain, including massacres and rapes of native Athsheans, and napalm bombings of their villages. But I also think The Word for World… has been too harshly criticised in some quarters for being obvious; it’s still an extremely interesting novel, which poses a question I’ve rarely if ever seen addressed in fiction before: what a people might stand to lose by resistance to colonialism.

Not in a material sense—perhaps there’s security of a sort in the “creechie-camps”, but Le Guin does not suggest that the humans provide anything to the Athsheans in the way of food, clothing and technology that they can’t provide better for themselves. Rather, the Athsheans have historically not been a violent people; murder is unknown among them, let alone war. They have other, culturally induced methods of channelling rage and aggression. The Athshean protagonist, Selver, becomes a god briefly because he brings to his people an idea that they have never previously entertained. Once they have followed Selver and successfully pushed humans off their world, they can’t go back: the final lines of the book suggest that, like Prometheus, Selver has brought a possibility into the world that cannot be undone. Athshean society will change fundamentally, and eventually perhaps out of all recognition, with the knowledge that they can kill. This is not, in LeGuin’s hands, an argument for not resisting; it is an argument for not colonising, for not putting other societies in the position where even the act of resistance requires a level of assimilation.Source: passed on by Laura T.—thank you!

most new-to-me approach to fantasy: Something Rich and Strange, by Patricia A. McKillip (1994). McKillip is a big dog of late-20th-century fantasy, but this was the first time I’d read her. This is about a couple who live by the sea—Megan’s a dreamy artist who does seascapes and Jonah’s a grumpy shop owner who sells maritime trinkets—and the way they both end up entranced by what the jacket text calls “fairies” but which are perhaps more properly nereids, or sea nymphs. There’s a brother, Adam, and a sister, Nereis, and their mother Doris or Dory (who really was a Greek sea goddess). McKillip writes beautiful prose, almost luxurious in its focus on colour and texture, that nevertheless doesn’t stray away from sense. It lends itself really well to a story where the fantastical enters the real. It’s sort of urban fantasy-inflected, but in a coastal town, not a big city, and not magical realism either; this is proper committed fantasy, only the secondary world is within our own. Megan has to go rescue Jonah from Nereis and her song at the end, which of course I loved. The ecological message comes through perhaps a touch overtly, but I guess, since it was 30 years ago and we haven’t done much to save the sea, the urgency was justified. Source: 99p Kindle copy

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How was your reading in May? Have you read any of these? Are you planning to do 20 (or 15, or 10) Books of Summer starting in June this year?