You were all so very sweet about the hellscape that was February; thank you. In terms of physical and mental health, and in terms of the weather, things did in fact improve in March. On the other hand, I was made redundant, which is hardly a mood-lifting experience. I am currently job-hunting and trying to put together at least piecemeal work while I do so. If you know anyone who needs GCSE or A-Level English tutoring, let me know. I’m south London-based but can also tutor remotely, and I’m DBS-checked and Safeguarding certified!

On the other hand, I read a hell of a lot of books: twenty-two in total. I was busy right out of the gate, racking up eleven reads in the first seven days of the month! (Well – I’m counting each volume of Clara Gazul separately; discounting that, it’d be ten books in seven days.) Such is the power of comfort re-reading. March’s library roundup is here; here’s what I thought of the rest.

PhD read that I was the most surprised to find genuinely entertaining: Paris Lions and London Tigers, by Harriette Wilson (1825). Wilson’s second book, after her wildly popular bestselling Memoirs, was also her first foray into fiction. Her main characters are the Callams, a nouveau riche English family whose fortune derives, with comical coarseness, from a successful soap-boiling business. Mr. and Mrs. Callam decide to educate their kids with foreign travel, so all five of them go to Paris and are swept up in the riotous world of expatriate high society. There’s a lot of satire, most of it good-spirited, and a surprisingly compelling plot about the marital disposition of the Callam girls (sensible Mary and silly Eliza) and several of their friends. It’s far from the greatest thing written in this period, but honestly, it’s not uninteresting either. There’s a hilarious “key” to the dramatis personae right at the front, because so many people assumed this was a roman à clef that Wilson’s publisher basically said “Screw it! If you were right – and we’re not saying you are – this is who the characters would have been based on.” Classic Wilson; she loved having things both ways. It’s a wonder she only got sued once in her career.

best comfort re-reading: The Immortals Quartet, by Tamora Pierce (1992-1996). I may have written here before about my youthful love of Tamora Pierce, author of feminist fantasy YA novels that smashed gender boundaries and encouraged me to be brave, resourceful, and loyal as a kid. I hate to think how much of my internal moral code derives from Pierce’s work. This quartet is about an extremely gifted “wild mage”, Daine Sarrasri, who starts out in Wild Magic (1992) as a traumatised teenager who loses her entire family to raiders. Taking a job with the horsemistress of the Tortallan Queen’s Riders, she learns to control her magic, which allows her to speak with animals and even shape-shift into one, and she also makes friends and learns how to trust. Book two, Wolf-Speaker (1994), takes her and her teacher, the world-class mage Numair Salmalín, to a remote fief in order to help the wolf pack who live there; they discover a treasonous plot along the way. Emperor Mage (1994) takes them to Carthak, a slaving empire based loosely on Roman Egypt, where Daine is given a new gift from a pissed-off Carthaki god, and where Numair must face his past. The quartet ends with The Realms of the Gods (1996), in which the overarching plot of the series – a war between the Great Gods and their sister, the Chaos deity Uusoae, echoed in the war between Tortall and Carthak – is resolved, and Daine unravels the mystery of her parentage. There are so many great creatures in these novels, from wolves and squirrels to dragons and basilisks to ones entirely of Pierce’s invention, like the unforgettable Stormwings (harpies whose bird-shaped parts are made of steel and who desecrate battlefield dead) and spidrens (carnivorous giant spiders with human heads). There’s some romance, but not too much, and it mostly comes near the end. Pierce is increasingly available in the UK and I’m so happy about it; her heroines are great role models, powerful and forthright but always human.

longest PhD read: Clara Gazul, or Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, vols. I-III, by Harriette Wilson (1830). It can be hard to tell how long books like this are, because unless you have a standardised Penguin Classics edition, you’re using original printed editions which tend to have very small pages with very wide margins. Clara Gazul‘s three volumes total 791 pages, but again, they’re small. It doesn’t feel like Middlemarch. It sure doesn’t read like Middlemarch. It’s odd and delightful in an entirely Harriette Wilson way. Bits are Gothic; bits are a Regency high society satire; bits are really compelling; bits are incredibly boring. There are occasional metafictional flourishes. Almost an entire chapter is devoted to a character writing a letter that includes a description of Wilson herself (cunningly disguised as “Harriette Memoirs”). Chapter titles include such gems as “Alberto—Is He A Bandit?” She’s not aiming for high literature at all; she’s quite specific in the Preface that any reader who’s sick in bed or on a long journey ought to be able to pick the book up at any point and enjoy it. And yet she does manage to maintain, develop and wrap up a plot; she’s a terrific sketcher, with the knack of giving a sense of a character’s personality in a paragraph; she has a sharp eye for detail and accent and human vanity. Clara Gazul doesn’t need to be a Penguin Classic, but there’ll be things to say about it, which is all I require.

longest-overdue re-reading: Protector of the Small Quartet, by Tamora Pierce (1999-2002). Pierce’s first, and breakout, quartet told the story of Alanna of Trebond, who disguises herself as a boy for eight years in order to undertake training as a knight. After Alanna earns her shield, a law is passed allowing girls and young women to train openly for knighthood – but for ten years, no one takes advantage of it. This quartet follows the first girl to do so: Keladry of Mindelan, daughter of the Tortallan ambassadors to the Yamani Islands (a fantasy analogue of imperial Japan). Made to agree to a one-year probationary period, she passes her First Test (1999; see what I did there?) with flying colours, establishing a reputation as someone who won’t stand for the bullying that’s commonplace among her fellow pages or for the sexism thrown at her from conservative elements in the capital. In Page (2000), Kel and her friends continue to hone their skills, but an enemy from her first year conspires to try and force her to fail the final-year examinations. Squire (2001) traces the four-year apprenticeship that all trainees must undertake with an active knight in the field; this reintroduces old friends from other Tortall-set quartets, and culminates in Kel’s Ordeal of Knighthood, in which (unlike the other candidates) she’s given a specific quest. In Lady Knight (2002), the realm is at war and Kel’s first command involves building and defending a refugee camp – plus she has her quest to fulfill, somehow. Unlike Pierce’s earlier heroines, Kel doesn’t have a magical Gift or divine powers; she’s just incredibly tenacious, fair-minded, and stubborn. She puts the hard work in. An excellent Goodreads review, to which I can’t link (but if you’re on GR and want to read it, it’s currently the second most popular one for Lady Knight) puts it well: if Alanna is Dana Scully, Kel is Leslie Knope. It makes this series a particularly good one to return to as an adult; I’m glad I did.

best palate cleanser: Snowspelled, by Stephanie Burgis (2017). I downloaded this on the recommendation of Jo Walton, who read all the other books in the series too and pronounced them “a series of delightful romances in a world similar to that of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy novels”. Having not read Randall Garrett, my personal comp is: Bridgerton, plus spells and minus the explicitness. (There’s sex, but it’s entirely skimmed over; the focus is on kissing. Even the very sex-in-fiction-averse will struggle to get upset about it.) This is a novella, which means that – as often seems to happen with genre works written to a novella word count – everything feels slightly short-changed. The mystery gets solved in the protagonist’s head but the solution is withheld until the dramatic climax, which I don’t like (and with a first-person narrator, it feels especially cheaty.) Although we do get to experience the resolution of the romance obstacle for ourselves, there’s something a little tidy about the way the characters realise their mistakes. On the other hand, the setting is great: a roughly Regency-era Britain in whose history Boudicca repelled the Romans with the help of her second husband, a magic-wielder, and gender roles developed such that women are the kingdom’s politicians and men serve as their helpmates, using magic. I particularly liked the way this is demonstrated by the subtle flipping of expectations: if our heroine Cassandra and her ex-fiancé Wrexham are caught kissing, he’s the one whose reputation would be compromised. This is not trying to be deep or literary; it isn’t Jonathan Strange (but what is?) It worked very well as a sign-off to a long weekend of comfort reading, and I wouldn’t say no to reading more in the series, although I suspect they’ll all be best read in a similarly palate-cleansing way.

book it took me the longest to read for no discernible reason: Minor Black Figures, by Brandon Taylor (2025). At some point in this book, someone describes an art show as containing works accessible only to a small coterie of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. You have to assume an author knows they’re handing a hostage to fortune with a line like that, particularly in a book set amongst a small coterie of artists and philosophers living in New York in the first half of the 2020s. For about the first third of this novel, that’s how I felt about it: that the writing was very good, as is Brandon Taylor’s way, but that the level of interest I, the reader, was being assumed to have in the minutiae of an extremely specific stratum of society was far higher than my actual level of interest. That is kind of the point, it turns out; we’re so committed to the perspective of the protagonist, Wyeth, that we only slowly realise how deeply the novel is actually critiquing (as well as offering some compassion to) his frantic involutions of thought and self-criticism. As I texted a friend, “it oscillates between being irritatingly locked in to the youthful gay arts scene in a narrowly delimited number of streets in a single city, and being more interestingly concerned with things like navigating intimacy and the various legacies of religious faith. The musings on subjectivity and social posturing stuff is largely boring, but the other stuff is great, as long as the main character isn’t thinking about how things will look on social media (boring).” When he inquired whether I’d actually recommend the book or not, I had to admit that I would, but also that my critical perspective can be summarised as “less theory, more connection (and banging)”.

That emphasis on interiority and self-searching may be why this took me five full days to read despite it not being particularly long. My mental and intellectual energy is being used up at such a rate that what I seem to require in fiction more than anything else at this moment is plot, and this hovered right on the edge of my current capacity. That’s a weird feeling for someone who has always prided herself on her ability to read literally anything. Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC. Minor Black Figures was published in the UK on 19 March 2026.

funnest/silliest imagination of the future: The Futurological Congress, by Stanisław Lem (1971; trans. Michael Kandel, 1975). A delightful short novel in which a space explorer, Ijon Tichy, is sent to the eponymous conference by his boss for no particularly good reason ([I] remarked that, really, I wasn’t much of an expert on futurology. His reply was that hardly anyone knows a thing about pumping, and yet we don’t stand idly by when we hear the cry of “Man the pumps!”) and gets caught up in a coup that involves copious amounts of hallucinogenic chemicals being pumped into the air and water supply. Shot by police and cryogenically frozen for decades, he’s thawed out in a strange new future where you can pop to the corner store to buy yourself a Rembrandt on the way home, lavish food is abundant, housing conditions are uniformly opulent, and new knowledge is acquired not by reading it but by taking a pill that contains it (leading to an excellent throwaway scene in which Tichy takes half an encyclopaedia and suffers indigestion). Save for the mysterious fact that people often seem to be panting heavily for no clear reason, especially after taking the elevator, it would be a utopia. But Tichy, as a man out of time, finds it all a bit baffling, and eventually he’ll discover some salient truths about this civilisation… The Futurological Congress is far from being a gritty dystopia; it’s more of a goofy, satirical fable, albeit one with much stronger anxiety about overpopulation than you might expect. (This seems to have been a major concern in the ’70s. Paul Erlich’s influential but wildly misguided and eugenicist book The Population Bomb came out in 1968.) Tichy appears in several of Lem’s books as an affably hapless everyman; his humorous but earnest perspective is largely what makes this work. It’s a very different flavour from the other Lem novel I’ve read, Solaris, but it neither takes itself too seriously nor outstays its welcome. Fans of Kurt Vonnegut and H.G. Wells would get on well with this.

book I most liked the idea of, without being sold on the execution: The Watermark, by Sam Mills (2024). This has been on my radar for a while, because the idea is great. It’s a metafictional literary romance in which protagonists Jaime and Rachel are – separately – trapped in the same book, a bad Victorian pastiche by the self-regarding reclusive big-name author Augustus Fate (seven times Booker nominated, but no wins!) They find each other, fall in love, and eventually regain their memories. Realising they’re trapped in a book, they find a way out – but only into another layer of fiction. And then it happens all over again, only slightly differently. And again. And again. Lots of rich things to be said about fate (Augustus Fate!) and free will, rationality vs. religious belief, the solidity of identity. Also lots of fun to be had with the concept of Booksurfing, the method by which Jaime and Rachel travel between books. (It involves hallucinogenic tea!)

Unfortunately, if you’re going to do anything remotely like this, you do need to be offering something that stands up to comparisons with both Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series. I don’t think Mills’s book compares well to either. For sheer zaniness combined with total dedication to the premise, Fforde has her beat. Calvino, who takes it all somewhat more seriously, might be a better comparison, but I always feel aware while reading Calvino that any thinness is meant, that an extract from a supposed novel that doesn’t convince as literature is meant to point out the artificiality of the environments the characters are in, whereas with Mills, it felt like she was sincerely trying to write extracts from the four different novels that her protagonists end up in, and just not doing a very good job of it. There’s little stylistic distinction between them, which is probably the worst thing; I could forgive dragging plots or a sense of inauthenticity in dialogue or phrasing, because these are fake novels within a real novel populated by the fictional characters of said real novel – unsurprising if the edifice of fiction starts to creak a little – but the way that all of the novels have the same ineffable medium-roast tone is too much, or rather too little, for me. Another obvious comparison would be David Mitchell, but he’s also better at this: whatever Cloud Atlas‘s faults, you know from a single sentence whether you’re in the Adam Ewing section or the Luisa Rey one or the Sloosha’s Crossin one. The Watermark is at its most engaging near the end, as Jaime and Rachel fight to climb out of fiction once and for all; that’s not nothing, but if a 500+-page novel only starts to feel urgent near the end of its page count, you’ll already have lost a lot of readers.

story collection I think is best discussed entirely by quoting individual sentences from it: Passion and Affect, by Laurie Colwin (1974). It was a good thing, Benno often thought, that Charlotte was good-looking, because left to her own devices, she might have been deeply unattractive and never noticed (“The Elite Viewer”). He moved, the way precocious children do, from the serious to the flirtatious and struck an irresistible balance in between (“Dangerous French Mistress”, in which a character also describes himself, perfectly, as a “mute uncomprehending walrus”). Paul [a child] began a collection of birds’ eggs that he displayed on sweat socks in the potting shed (“The Water Rats”). She functioned as smoothly as a hospital kitchen (“The Girl with the Harlequin Glasses”). At the door to his office, he was greeted by a young man wearing his hair in the manner of John Donne, a three-piece suit, and cowboy boots (“Passion and Affect”). He rarely laughed, but when he did it was like a meal (“The Man Who Jumped Into the Water”). In the photo, he looked as if he were Architecture, and she was a random, flying buttress he was supporting (“A Road in Indiana”). The two of them hang together like icicles (“The Smartest Woman in America”). Basically, they thought their personalities were works of art, and they were not far wrong (“Imelda”). Soon, he would be the only member of the Big Plum staff, including the members of the board – perhaps the only person in the supermarket business – with a Ph.D. in art history (“The Big Plum”). If those sentences on their own don’t sell this collection to you, I don’t know what would.

best surprise: The Keeper, by Tana French (2026). This is the third of French’s Cal Hooper novels, a series she started to move away from her wildly successful Dublin Murder Squad series. The first one, The Searcher, came out in 2020. At the time I liked it and thought it heralded an interesting departure, but it faded from my mind very quickly and now I can’t recall much about it. I’ve never felt inclined to revisit it, which is unusual for me; I reread most of French’s novels pretty regularly. Reading The Keeper, therefore, I was almost fresh; I remembered Cal’s previous life as a Chicago P.D. detective, and his semi-foster kid Trey, whose brother’s disappearance he looks into in The Searcher, but not much else.

It turned out not to matter; it helped a little to have some orienting prior knowledge, but for the most part I didn’t really need it. Here’s what French can still do better than any other crime writer working (and significantly better than writers in most other genres): map emotional currents in an environment, whether that’s a village community or a single room. These novels have taken her focus out of the Irish city and into the Irish countryside, whose inhabitants have rich and complex layers of relationship – to each others’ families, to the land itself, to various ideas like loyalty and boundaries and what the right thing to do looks like – that an outsider like Cal can sometimes see more readily, but sometimes can’t see at all until it’s far too late. Some of the most compelling parts of The Keeper show Cal recognising those invisible social land mines, not always in time to react to them. Here’s what’s risky about these books: they’re in third person. The immediacy of French’s Dublin narrators (and even the protagonist of her standalone The Wych Elm) is gone. It’s made up for here by using dual perspectives: Cal’s girlfriend Lena is a village woman born and bred, and how she sees the situation is very different from how he sees it, and we get to see through her eyes too. The secondary characters are also terrific. I love Trey, and her maybe-girlfriend Kate, but my favourites are Mart Lavin, an older farmer who takes Cal under his wing but who is by no means an innocent old boy, and Dymphna Duggan, a frankly terrifying elderly woman whose position in the village – dispenser of knowledge and information, but for a price, every single time – would have made her a witch or bad fairy only a few generations back. French has never been a crime writer for everyone, and the slow pace of revelation in The Keeper might put some readers off, but there’s always some fascinating character interaction going on that means the pace doesn’t need to be rip-roaring. On the basis of this, I might have to go back and reread The Searcher, just to find out what I missed the first time. Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC. The Keeper will be published in the UK on 2 April 2026.

---

How has your March reading gone? Have you read any of these? (Probably not the Harriette Wilsons, but hey, you never know…)

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.

---

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…

---

Have you had a successful reading start to 2026?