Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (#NovNov25 Buddy Read)
Seascraper is set in what appears to be the early 1960s yet could easily be a century earlier because of the protagonist’s low-tech career. Thomas Flett lives with his mother in fictional Longferry in northwest England and carries on his grandfather’s tradition of fishing with a horse and cart. Each day he trawls the seabed for shrimp – sometimes twice a day when the tide allows – and sells his catch to local restaurants. At around 20 years old, Thomas still lives with his mother, who is disabled by obesity and chronic pain. He’s the sole breadwinner in the household and there’s an unusual dynamic between them in that his mother isn’t all that many years older, having fallen pregnant by a teacher while she was still in school.
Their life is just a mindless trudge of work with cosy patterns of behaviour in between … He wants to wake up every morning with a better purpose.
It’s a humdrum, hardscrabble existence, and Thomas longs for a bigger and more creative life, which he hopes he might achieve through his folk music hobby – or a chance encounter with an American filmmaker. Edgar Acheson is working on a big-screen adaptation of a novel; to save money, it will be filmed here in Merseyside rather than in coastal Maine where it’s set. One day he turns up at the house asking Thomas to be his guide to the sands. Thomas reluctantly agrees to take Edgar out one evening, even though it will mean missing out on an open mic night. They nearly get lost in the fog and the cart starts to sink into quicksand. What follows is mysterious, almost like a hallucination sequence. When Thomas makes it back home safely, he writes an autobiographical song, “Seascraper” (you can listen to a recording on Wood’s website).
After this one pivotal and surprising day, Thomas’s fortunes might just change. This atmospheric novella contrasts subsistence living with creative fulfillment. There is the bitterness of crushed dreams but also a glimmer of hope. Its The Old Man and the Sea-type setup emphasizes questions of solitude, obsession and masculinity. Thomas wishes he had a father in his life; Edgar, even in so short a time frame, acts as a sort of father figure for him. And Edgar is a father himself – he shows Thomas a photo of his daughter. We are invited to ponder what makes a good father and what the absence of one means at different stages in life. Mental and physical health are also crucial considerations for the characters.
That Wood packs all of this into a compact circadian narrative is impressive. My admiration never crossed into warmth, however. I’ve read four of Wood’s five novels and still love his debut, The Bellwether Revivals, most, followed by his second, The Ecliptic. I’ve also read The Young Accomplice, which I didn’t care for as much, so I’m only missing out on A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better now. Wood’s plot and character work is always at a high standard, but his books are so different from each other that I have no clear sense of him as a novelist. Still, I’m pleased that the Booker longlisting has introduced him to many new readers.
Also reviewed by:
Annabel (AnnaBookBel)
Anne (My Head Is Full of Books)
Brona (This Reading Life)
Cathy (746 Books)
Davida (The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog)
Eric (Lonesome Reader)
Jane (Just Reading a Book)
Helen (She Reads Novels)
Kate (Books Are My Favourite and Best)
Kay (What? Me Read?)
Nancy (The Literate Quilter)
Rachel (Yarra Book Club)
Susan (A life in books)
Check out this written interview with Wood (and this video one with Eric of Lonesome Reader) as well as a Q&A on the Booker Prize website in which Wood talks about the unusual situation in which he wrote the book.
(Public library)
[163 pages]
R.I.P. Reads, Part II: Feito, King, Link, Paver & Taylor
Soon it’ll be all novellas, all the time around here. But first I have a few more October reads to review.
A belated Happy Halloween! As a kid in the U.S. suburbs, I loved Halloween. It was such fun planning costumes – pumpkin, cowgirl and picnic table are a few memorable ones that I remember thanks to photographs – and my hoard of candy would last me for months. But these days, I tend to be pretty grumpy about the holiday. It never used to be a thing in the UK, but it has been creeping in year on year. I don’t mind a creatively carved jack o’ lantern, tasteful decoration or clever homemade costume. What does get my goat is plastic tat, gratuitous gore and the dozens of sodden sweets and wrappers littering the streets after last night’s rain and wind.
Anyway, we enjoyed the stormy evening because we spent it at friends’ having delicious autumnal lasagne and parkin, playing instruments and board games and eavesdropping on the trick-or-treaters. I had to laugh when J said “Take a couple” and one little girl replied, “That’s okay, I don’t really like sweeties.” These friends were keeping some ancient traditions alive: carving a turnip, wearing one’s clothes inside out and walking between two fires to ward off fairies. They also put potatoes in the treats bowl, which definitely confused the kids. (One did take a spud!)
I really leaned into the Readers Imbibing Peril reading this year. I had a somewhat lacklustre first batch, but these five were great!
Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito (2025)
This was among my Most Anticipated titles of the year – for the bonkers blurb but also because of how much I’d enjoyed Feito’s debut, Mrs. March. Both novels go deep with mentally disturbed protagonists. The first channeled Patricia Highsmith with its stylish psychological suspense; here we have a full-on blend of slasher horror and sadistic humour, wrapped up in a Victorian pastiche. Winifred Notty (naughty girl indeed) is the new governess at Ensor House on the Yorkshire moors. She couldn’t care less about her charges, Andrew and Drusilla. No, she’s here to exact revenge on the master of the house, Mr. Pounds. But not before she’s dispatched many a random servant and baby. “Bodies pile up in the attic.” Her brutal fantasies are so realistic that at times it’s difficult to separate them from what she actually carries out. Miss Notty is also a highly sexual being whose fixations could certainly be interpreted in Freudian ways. Feito spins a traumatic backstory for her antiheroine but doesn’t make it any excuse for her gleeful reign of terror. It’s delicious fun, especially for a Victorianist, but don’t attempt if you’re squeamish. (Read via NetGalley)
Misery by Stephen King (1987)
All these years I’d had two 1989–1990 films conflated: Misery and My Left Foot. I’ve not seen either but as an impressionable young’un I made a mental mash-up of the posters’ stills into a film featuring Daniel Day-Lewis as a paralyzed writer and Kathy Bates as a madwoman wielding an axe. (Turns out the left foot is relevant!)
Paul Sheldon wakes in a fog of pain, his legs shattered from a one-car accident on a snowy Colorado backroad. He’s famous for his historical potboilers about Misery Chastain but, like Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, has killed off his most beloved character. Except now he’s in the home of Annie Wilkes, his rescuer and biggest fan, and she demands he resurrect Misery. Annie is a former nurse who left the profession after numerous suspicious deaths on her watch. She keeps Paul dependent on her – and on Novril, a fictional opiate. In a case of ‘Scheherazade complex’, he’ll be her prisoner until he’s completed a sequel that’s to her satisfaction. Compared to Pet Sematary, the only other King novel I’ve read, this was slow to draw me in because of the repetitive scenes in a claustrophobic setting, and I wearied of the excerpts from Paul’s manuscript. But eventually I was riveted, desperate to know how Paul was going to get out of this predicament and what the final showdown could be. Extremes of pain and obsession make this an intense study of the psychology of a wretched pair. (Public library)
Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link (2008)
This is a reissue edition geared towards young adults. All but one of the 10 stories were originally published in literary magazines or anthologies. The stories are long, some approaching novella length, and took me quite a while to read. I got through the first three and will save the rest for next year. In “The Wrong Grave,” a teen decides to dig up his dead girlfriend’s casket to reclaim the poems he rashly buried with her last year – as did Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which Link makes a point of mentioning. A terrific blend of spookiness and comedy ensues.
“The Wizards of Perfil” and the title story are 50-some and 60-some pages, respectively, which allows a lot of space for intriguing weirdness and side plots. In the former, Onion’s cousin Halsa is purchased to be a servant to a wizard. The cousins both have the gift of foresight but can’t get the wizards to take them seriously when they beg that something to be done to prevent human disasters. It’s a brilliant allegory of the danger of waiting for an external force – God, the government, whatever – to solve everything versus getting on with it yourself. In the title story, a group of teens are obsessed with a mysterious Doctor Who-esque television show called The Library, which colours all their interactions. The main character Jeremy’s father is an eccentric sci-fi novelist named Gordon Strangle Mars who has written his son into his latest plot in a disturbing way. Jeremy recently inherited a gas station and phone box in Las Vegas and occasionally calls the phone box to air his grievances and solicit supernatural aid. My only other experience of Link was a standalone story I was once sent for review, “The Summer People,” which I didn’t get on with, so I was surprised to encounter such top-notch fantasy/horror tales. (Little Free Library)
Rainforest by Michelle Paver (2025)
I’d read all three of Paver’s previous horror novels for adults (Thin Air, Dark Matter and Wakenhyrst) and found them easy, atmospheric reading but not nearly as scary as billed. This is her best yet. Set in 1973 on an expedition to Mexico, it has as its unreliable narrator Dr. Simon Corbett, an English entomologist. Adding to the findings of the archaeological dig he’s accompanying, he’ll be hunting for mantids (praying mantises, stick insects and the like) by fogging sacred trees with pesticides. He also experiments with taking a hallucinogenic plant extract used by the Indigenous shamans, hoping to be reunited with his lost love, Penelope.
We know that Corbett’s employment is tenuous and that he’s seeing a therapist. Paver authentically reproduces the casual racism and sexism of the time and seeds little hints that this protagonist may not be telling the whole truth about his relationship with Penelope. The long sequence where he’s lost in the jungle is fantastic. Corbett seems fated to repeat ancient masochistic rites, as if in penance for what he’s done wrong. My husband is an entomologist, so I was interested to read about period collecting practices. The novelty of the setting is a bonus to this high-quality psychological thriller and ghost story. (Public library)
Bone Broth by Alex Taylor (2025)
Ash is a trans man who starts working at a hole-in-the-wall ramen restaurant underneath a London railway arch. All he wants is to “pay for hormones, pay rent, [and] make enough to take a cutie on a date.” Bug’s Bones is run by an irascible elderly proprietor but staffed by a young multicultural bunch: Sock, Blue, Honey and Creamy. They quickly show Ash the ropes and within a month he’s turning out perfect bowls. He’s creeped out by the restaurant’s trademark bone broth, though, with its reminders of creatures turning into food. At the end of a drunken staff party, they find Bug lying dead and have to figure out what to do about it.
This storyline is in purple, whereas the alternating sequences of flashbacks are in a fleshy pinkish-red. As the two finally meet and meld, we see Ash trying to imitate the masculinity he sees on display while he waits for the surface to match what’s inside. I didn’t love the drawing style – though the full-page tableaux are a lot better than the high-school-sketchbook small panes – so that was an issue for me throughout, but this was an interesting, ghoulish take on the transmasc experience. Taylor won a First Graphic Novel Award.
With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.
And one DNF: Saltwash by Andrew Michael Hurley. (I was warned!) It had no menace or momentum at all…
Any stand-out creepy reading for you this year?
R.I.P. Reads, Part I: Apostolides, Dahl, Harkness, Kingfisher & Kohda
Ghosts, witches, vampires, creepy underground things: It can only be Readers Imbibing Peril time of year! Here’s my first five reviews.
The Homecoming by Zoë Apostolides (2025)
This debut novel dropped through my door as a total surprise: not only was it unsolicited, but I’d not heard about it. In this modern take on the traditional haunted house story, Ellen is a ghostwriter sent from London to Elver House, Northumberland, to work on the memoirs of its octogenarian owner, Catherine Carey. Ellen will stay in the remote manor house for a week and record 20 hours of audio interviews – enough to flesh out an autobiography. Miss Carey isn’t a forthcoming subject, but Ellen manages to learn that her father drowned in the nearby brook and that all Miss Carey did afterwards was meant to please her grieving mother and the strictures of the time. But as strange happenings in the house interfere with her task, Ellen begins to doubt she’ll come away with usable material. I was reminded of The Woman in Black, The Thirteenth Tale, and especially Wakenhyrst what with the local eel legends. The subplot about Ellen drifting apart from her best friend, a new mother, felt unnecessary, though I suppose was intended to bolster the main theme of women’s roles. There’s a twist that more seasoned readers of Gothic fiction and ghost stories might see coming. While I found this very readable and perfectly capably written, I didn’t get a sense of where the author hopes to fit in the literary market; she’s previously published a true crime narrative. Full disclosure: I once collaborated with Zoë on a Stylist assignment. 
With thanks to Salt Publishing for the proof copy for review.
The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983)
I’m sure I read all of Dahl’s major works when I was a child, though I had no specific memory of this one. After his parents’ death in a car accident, a boy lives in his family home in England with his Norwegian grandmother. She tells him stories from Norway and schools him in how to recognize and avoid witches. They wear wigs and special shoes to hide their baldness and square feet, and with their wide nostrils they sniff out children to turn them into hated creatures like slugs. When Grandmamma falls ill with pneumonia, she and the boy travel to a Bournemouth hotel for her recovery only to stumble upon a convention of witches under the guise of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston, if you know the movie) has a new concoction that will transform children into mice at enough of a delay to occur the following morning at school. It’s up to the boy and his grandmother to save the day. I really enjoyed this caper, which I interpreted as being – like Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book – about imagination and making the most of one’s time with grandparents. But in the back of my mind was Jen Campbell’s objection to the stereotypical equating of disfigurement with villainy. The Grand High Witch also speaks with a heavy German accent. It would be understandable to dismiss this as dated and clichéd, but I still found it worthwhile. It also fit into my project to read books from my birth year. (Free from a neighbour) 
The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness (2024)
Somehow I’ve read this entire series even though none of the subsequent books lived up to A Discovery of Witches. What I loved about that first novel was how the author drew on her knowledge of the history of science to create a believable backdrop for a story of witches, vampires and other supernatural beings that took place largely in Oxford and its medieval libraries. Each sequel has elaborated further adventures for Diana Bishop, a witch; her vampire husband, Matthew de Clermont; and their family members and other hangers-on. Their twins, especially Becca, have inherited some of Diana’s power. I read the first half of this last year and finally skimmed to the end last week, so I haven’t retained much. Diana is summoned to the ancestral seat of the Bishops in Massachusetts and finds herself part of a community of gossipy, catty witches. (Dahl was right, they’re everywhere!) She has some fun, folksy interactions but things soon get more serious as she girds herself for a showdown with the darker implications of her gift. Overall, this didn’t add much to the ongoing narrative and the love scenes veered too close to romantasy for my liking. (Public library)
What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher [Ursula Vernon] (2025)
The third in the “Sworn Soldier” series, after What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night. Alex Easton is a witty, gender-nonconforming narrator, which is why I persist with these novellas even though I’m underwhelmed by the plots. Denton, the American doctor friend from the first book, begs Easton to come to West Virginia: his cousin Oscar has gone missing in a mine after sending a series of alarming letters about a red light he saw in the depths. Easton and their right-hand man, Angus, soon encounter claustrophobia-inducing cave systems, various kinds of bad air and siphonophore-like marine creatures that can assemble to imitate other beings. (Why aren’t these on the cover, huh?!) In other intriguing matters, Denton seems to have something going on with his friend John Ingold, an Indigenous scientist. Though, as Easton frequently reminds themself, that’s none of our business. There are some great set-pieces and funny, if anachronistic, asides (on learning how to flick a lighter just right: “I used to practice it for hours as a teenager, in hopes of impressing girls. Look, girls were more easily impressed in those days. Shut up.”) But my feeling with all three books is that they’re over before they’ve barely begun, and they never deliver the expected horror. Smart-ass, queer fantasy/horror: these will be some people’s perfect books, just not mine. If you’re intrigued, do at least try the first one, which riffs on Poe. (Read via Edelweiss)
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (2022)
A very different sort of vampire novel. Twenty-three-year-old Lydia is half Japanese and half Malaysian; half human and half vampire. She’s trying to follow in her late father’s footsteps as an artist through an internship at a Battersea gallery, which comes with studio space where she’ll sleep to save money. But she can only drink blood like her mother, who turned her when she was a baby. Mostly she subsists on pig blood – which she can order dried if she can’t buy it fresh from a butcher – though, in one disturbing sequence, she brings home a duck carcass. When she falls for Ben, one of her studio-mates, she imagines what it would be like to be fully human: to make art together, to explore Asian cuisine, to bond over losing their mothers (his is dying of cancer; hers is in a care home with violence-tinged dementia). But Ben is already seeing someone, the internship is predictably dull, and a first attempt at consuming regular food goes badly wrong. There are a lot of promising threads in this debut. It’s fascinating how Lydia can intuit a creature’s whole life story by drinking their blood. She becomes obsessed with the Baba Yaga folk tale (and also mentions Malay vampire legends) and there’s a neat little bit of #MeToo revenge. But overall, it’s half-baked. Really, it’s just a disaster-woman book in disguise. The way Lydia’s identity determines her attitudes towards food and sex feels like a symbol of body dysmorphia. I’ll look out to see if Kohda does something more distinctive in future. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) 
More coming up on Halloween (thankfully, including books I liked better on average)!
#1925Club: The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov
Simon and Kaggsy’s classics reading weeks always get me picking up older books. I found this unusual Russian novella on a giveaway pile a few years ago and it’s been on my #NovNov possibility shelf ever since, but now turned out to be the perfect time for it. This review also fits into the Hundred Years Hence challenge.
Sharik is an abused stray dog, living on scraps on the snowy streets of Moscow until Professor Philip Philipovich Preobrazhensky takes him in. The professor is a surgeon renowned for his rejuvenation procedures – implanting monkey ovaries into a middle-aged lady, for instance – and he has designs on the mutt. His new strategy is to take the pituitary gland and testicles of a just-deceased young man and transplant them into Sharik. The central chapter is composed of medical notes taken by Preobrazhensky’s assistant, Dr. Bormenthal. Gradually, a transformation is achieved: The dog’s bark becomes more of a human groan and his fur and tail fall off. Soon the new man is fully convincing: eating, dressing and conversing. Even in a matter-of-fact style, the doctor’s clinical observations are hilarious. “The dog[,] in the presence of Zina and myself, had called Prof. Preobrazhensky a ‘bloody bastard’. … Heard to ask for ‘another one, and make it a double.’” The scientists belatedly look into the history of the man whose glands they harvested and discover to their horror that he was an alcoholic petty thief who died in a bar fight. Sharikov follows suit as an inebriated boor who pesters women, wants to be known as Poligraph Poligraphovich – and still chases cats. Is it too late to reverse a Frankenstein-esque trial gone wrong?
This was a fairly entertaining fable-like story, with whimsical fragments of narration from Sharik himself at the start and close. The blurb inside the jacket of my 1968 Harvill Press hardback suggests “The Heart of a Dog can be enjoyed solely as a comic story of splendid absurdity; it can also be read as a fierce parable about the Russian Revolution.” The allegorical meaning could easily have passed me by, being less overt than in Animal Farm. Reading a tiny bit of external information, I see that this has been interpreted as a satire on the nouveau riche during the Bolshevik era: Sharikov complains about how wealthy the professor is and proposes that he sacrifice some of his apartment-cum-office’s many rooms to others who have nowhere to live. But yes, I mostly stayed at the surface level and found an amusing mad-scientist cautionary tale. I’ll read more by Bulgakov – I’ve had a copy of The Master and Margarita for ages. Next year’s Reading the Meow week might be my excuse.
[Translated from Russian by Michael Glenny, 1968]
(Free from a neighbour, formerly part of Scarborough Public Library stock)
I also intended to read An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser from the university library, having a dim memory of a black-and-white film version starring Montgomery Clift (A Place in the Sun). But the catalogue’s promised 400-some pages was a lie; there are two volumes in one, totaling 840 pages. So that was a nonstarter.
But here are some other famous 1925 titles that I’ve read (I’m now at 7 out of the top 15 on the Goodreads list of the most popular books published in 1925):
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Trial by Franz Kafka
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham
Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery
Carry On, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
I’ve previously participated in the 1920 Club, 1956 Club, 1936 Club, 1976 Club, 1954 Club, 1929 Club, 1940 Club, 1937 Club, 1970 Club, and 1952 Club.
Short Story Catch-Up: Carver, Cunningham, Park, Polders, Racket, Schweblin, Williams (& Heti Stand-Alone)
I actually read 15 collections in total for Short Story September. I’m finally catching up on reviews, though I’m aware that I’ve missed out on Lisa’s link-up. (My other reviews: Heiny, Mackay, McEwan; the BBC National Short Story Award 2025 anthology; Donoghue, Grass, Isherwood, Mansfield as part of my Germany reading.) To keep it simple and get the basics across before I forget any more about these books, I’ll post some shorthand notes under headings.
Cathedral by Raymond Carver (1983)
Why I read it:
- I’d really enjoyed What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.
- This fits into my project to read books from my birth year.
Stats: 12 stories (6 x 1st-person, 6 x 3rd-person)
Themes: alcoholism, adultery, fatherhood, crap jobs, crumbling families
Tone: melancholy, laconic
File under: grit-lit
For fans of: John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, Denis Johnson
Caveat(s): It doesn’t match What We Talk about When We Talk about Love.
If you read just one story, make it: “A Small, Good Thing”
(University library)
A Wild Swan and Other Tales by Michael Cunningham (2015)
Why I read it:
- I have a vague plan to read through Cunningham’s whole oeuvre.
- This one is different to his others, and beautifully illustrated by Yuko Shimizu.
Stats: 11 stories (3 x 2nd-person, 8 x 3rd-person)
Themes: coming of age, longing, loss, bargaining
Tone: witty, knowing
File under: fairy tale updates
For fans of: Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman
Caveat(s): For the most part, he doesn’t do anything interesting with the story lines.
If you read just one story, make it: “Little Man” (the Rumpelstiltskin remake)
(Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park (2025)
Why I read it:
- I’d heard buzz, probably because Park was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his novel.
Stats: 16 stories (12 x 1st-person, 1 x 1st-person plural, 1 x 2nd-person, 2 x 3rd-person)
Themes: the Asian American and university experience, writing, translation, aphorisms
Tone: jokey, nostalgic
File under: dystopian fiction, metafiction
For fans of: George Saunders
Caveat(s): There’s more intellectual experimentation than emotional engagement.
If you read just one story, make it: “An Accurate Account”
(Read via NetGalley)
Woman of the Hour by Clare Polders (2025)
Why I read it:
- I always like to sneak at least one flash fiction collection in for this challenge.
Stats: 50 stories, a mixture of 1st- and 3rd-person
Themes: childhood, sexuality, motherhood, choices vs. fate
Tone: sharp, matter-of-fact
File under: feminist, satire
For fans of: Claire Fuller, Terese Svoboda
Caveat(s): There’s too many stories to keep track of and not enough stand-outs.
If you read just one story, make it: “Woman of the Hour”
(BookSirens)
Racket: New Writing Made in Newfoundland, ed. Lisa Moore (2015)
Why I read it:
- Naomi’s blog always whets my appetite for Atlantic Canadian fiction, but I’m rarely able to find it over here.
Stats: 11 stories, mostly by Memorial University creative writing graduates (7 x 1st-person, 1 x 2nd-person, 3 x 3rd-person)
Themes: mental health, bereavement, tragic accidents
Tone: jaunty, reflective
File under: voice-y early-2000s lit-fic
For fans of: Sharon Bala (her story is among the best here), Jonathan Safran Foer; hockey
Caveat(s): I wouldn’t say I’m now a fan of any of the writers I hadn’t heard of before.
If you read just one story, make it: “23 Things I Hate in No Particular Order” by Gary Newhook
(Little Free Library)
Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin (2025)
[Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell]
Why I read it:
- I thought it would be good to add in another title in translation.
- I’d read Schweblin before (but I wish I’d remembered that I rated Fever Dream 2*.)
Stats: 6 stories (5 x 1st-person, 1 x 3rd-person)
Themes: near-misses, grief, memory, suicidal ideation
Tone: introspective, jaded
File under: Latin American weirdness (some mild magic realism)
For fans of: Guadalupe Nettel (The Accidentals is very similar but a bit better)
Caveat(s): A couple of the stories are overlong and none of them are particularly memorable.
If you read just one story, make it: “William in the Window”
(Read via NetGalley)
The Doctor Stories by William Carlos Williams, compiled by Robert Coles (1939)
Why I read it:
- I’m not sure how I came across it; perhaps through another doctor–author such as Gavin Francis or Atul Gawande?
Stats: 14 stories (plus a handful of poems and an autobiographical fragment), all 1st-person
Themes: addiction, childbirth, immigrants, poverty, the randomness of suffering
Tone: hardboiled, dedicated
File under: autofiction, dirty realism
For fans of: Raymond Carver, Gabriel Weston
Caveat(s): The descriptions of immigrants’ appearance/behaviour/speech is not always kind.
If you read just one story, make it: “Old Doc Rivers”
(University library) 
And a stand-alone story:
“The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea” by Sheila Heti (New Yorker, 2025)
To my knowledge, this is the only short fiction Heti has published. I’m generally a big fan of her bizarre autofiction – though Pure Colour was a step too far for me – and was fascinated to see on Eleanor’s blog that this is historical fiction, a genre Heti hasn’t attempted before. Or is it historical? The students of a girls’ boarding school have been sent out on a ship for their safety during a conflict. With news of a planned meet-up with a boys’ boat for a talent show and calls to knit socks for soldiers, it seems it must be the Second World War. But then there are references to headphones, Prince and Kurt Vonnegut. So it’s an alternative Cold War fantasy? Or a dystopian future scenario with retro elements? As in Motherhood, the characters appeal to an Oracle (here, a photograph of a departed girl called Audrey) when stymied by confusion. But the actual plot is just girls wanting men to love them – Dani obsesses about Sebastien, with whom she’s exchanging letters; Flora can’t stop thinking about her father’s infidelity – a common Heti theme, but the teenage perspective feels glib, indulgent; it’s YA without the heart or commitment. So I was somewhat aghast to learn this is from Heti’s novel in progress.
Nine Days in Germany and What I Read, II: Lübeck
(Part I covered Berlin.) Three works of short fiction embodied the rest of our journeying, from Berlin to Lübeck to home. We were sad to say goodbye to Lemmy and Roxanne, the affectionate, fluffy cats who came with our Berlin flat, but there were further adventures to be had. The hosts of our Lübeck Airbnb apartment also owned two cats we briefly met, but it wasn’t the same as having surrogate pets around.
Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (1939)
Isherwood intended for these six autofiction stories to contribute to a “huge episodic novel of pre-Hitler Berlin” titled The Lost. Two “Berlin Diary” segments from 1930 and 1933 bear witness to a change in tenor accompanying the rise of Nazism. Even in lighter pieces about a holiday at the Baltic coast and his friendship with a family who run a department store, menace creeps in through characters’ offhand remarks about “dirty Jews” ruining the country. The narrator, Christopher Isherwood, is a private English tutor staying in squalid boarding houses or spare rooms. His living conditions are mostly played for laughs – his landlady, Fraulein Schroeder, calls him “Herr Issyvoo” – but I was also reminded of George Orwell’s didactic realism. I had it in mind that Isherwood was homosexual; the only evidence of that here is his observation of the homoerotic tension between two young men, Otto and Peter, whom he meets on the Ruegen Island vacation, so he was still being coy in print. Famously, the longest story introduces Sally Bowles (played by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret), the lovable club singer who flits from man to man and feigns a carefree joy she doesn’t always feel. This is the middle of three Berlin books; I will have to find those and explore Isherwood’s other work as I found this witty and humane, restrained but vigilant. (Little Free Library)
On balance, we planned the division well: busy city days first, followed by a more restful long weekend; reliable English-speaking opportunities while we built up our confidence, then a more provincial setting where we could try out a bit of German. Friends were curious why we chose Lübeck. Two charitably assumed that I went for the Thomas Mann connections, but that was an incidental side benefit. (I quailed at the prospect of reading the 700+-page debut novel based on his family history, Buddenbrooks; instead, I intended to reread Death in Venice, but my Project Gutenberg download didn’t work, so I’ve earmarked it for Novellas in November instead.)
Nope, I was in it for the marzipan. Lübeck has been known for its marzipan since 1795. In 1926, there were 36 marzipan manufacturers in this northern city; three remain today and of course we visited both cafes and all three shops. Niederegger has a small museum above the Bettys-like café. You would not believe the scale or number of tableaux made entirely of almond paste! Nor the variety of flavours and packaging in the shop downstairs. We enjoyed marzipan hot chocolate, cappuccino and cakes, and came away with a modest supply of treats. We also dropped into a trendy restaurant where I had a “Lübecker martini” combining rum, marzipan liqueur and espresso.
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- Marzipan hot chocolate and traditional nusstorte at the Niederegger cafe.
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- Marzipanland was better! I had Othello Torte and a marzipan cappuccino.
In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield (1911)
Mansfield was 19 when she composed this slim debut collection of arch sketches set in and around a Bavarian guesthouse. The narrator is a young Englishwoman traveling to take the waters for her health. A quiet but opinionated outsider (“I felt a little crushed … at the tone – placing me outside the pale – branding me as a foreigner”), she crafts pen portraits of a gluttonous baron, the fawning Herr Professor, and various meddling or air-headed fraus and frauleins. There are funny lines that rest on stereotypes (“you English … are always exposing your legs on cricket fields, and breeding dogs in your back gardens”; “a tired, pale youth … was recovering from a nervous breakdown due to much philosophy and little nourishment”) but also some alarming scenarios. One servant girl narrowly escapes being violated, while “The-Child-Who-Was-Tired” takes drastic action when another baby is added to her workload. Most of the stories are unmemorable, however. Mansfield renounced this early work as juvenile and inferior – her first publisher went bankrupt and when war broke out in Europe, sparking renewed interest in a book that pokes fun at Germans, she refused republishing rights. (Secondhand – Well-Read Books, Wigtown)
On our travels, I also read…
- portions of various e-books for paid Shelf Awareness reviews: Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet, Beard by Kelly Foster Lundquist, Wreck by Catherine Newman;
- part of Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, which I’ll finish for Novellas in November;
- and portions of e-books for fun: Startlement by Ada Limón and An Oral History of Atlantis by Ed Park (more short story catch-up reviews to come).
Aside from marzipan, Lübeck has a lot going for it: lovely medieval Brick Gothic architecture – the iconic Holstentor gate once featured on the 50-mark note; proximity to the Baltic Sea; and connections with three Nobel Prize winners, two for literature – the other being Günter Grass. On the Saturday morning, we took a bus to Travemünde, a popular seaside resort town, for a walk along the cliffs. The path was busy with cyclists but the dog beach was nearly deserted. We watched a ferry setting off for Sweden. (Had we had a few more days to play with, we would have liked to tack on trips to Denmark from here and into Poland from Berlin.)
Buddenbrookhaus, the home of Mann’s grandparents, is undergoing a several-year renovation and expansion project. I wasn’t too upset about missing out on it, and there was a Mann exhibit in the tourist information centre. Instead, I went to the Günter Grass House museum, which opened in 2002. Grass spent his last 20 years living 15 miles south of Lübeck and kept an office in this building. For future reference, there’s a good-value day-ticket one can buy that covers all the museums in Lübeck. My husband went to the natural history museum while I learned about Grass, whom I’d never read before, and about Else Lasker-Schüler, whose works were on display in the rotating upstairs exhibit featuring figures who, like Grass, were writers and visual artists.
Grass grew up in what is now Danzig, Poland and was drafted into the Waffen-SS at age 17. He was lucky in that he soon received a minor injury that landed him in American custody. The Tin Drum, his well-known debut novel, drew on his military background, which he otherwise rarely discussed. Formally trained in art, he illustrated his works with the same motifs that appear in words. Flora and fauna run all through: fruit, onions; birds, snails, the flounder, cats and dogs. A multitalented writer, he also produced plays, poetry and political commentary. He won the Nobel Prize in 1999 and died in 2015. I found the material on his life and work unexpectedly diverting. I read the short volume below as soon as we got back.
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- Some of Grass’s grotesque hybrid animal drawings
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- Replica of the Grass family’s store in Danzig
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- Else Lasker-Schüler exhibit, including her death mask
Of All that Ends by Günter Grass (2015)
[Translated from German by Breon Mitchell]
This posthumous prosimetric collection contains miniature essays, stories and poems, many of which seem autobiographical. By turns nostalgic and morbid, the pieces are very much concerned with senescence and last things. The black-and-white sketches, precise like Dürer’s but looser and more impressionistic, obsessively feature dead birds, fallen leaves, bent nails and shorn-off fingers. The speaker and his wife order wooden boxes in which their corpses will lie and store them in the cellar. One winter night they’re stolen, only to be returned the following summer. He has lost so many friends, so many teeth; there are few remaining pleasures of the flesh that can lift him out of his naturally melancholy state. Though, in Lübeck for the Christmas Fair, almonds might just help? The poetry happened to speak to me more than the prose in this volume. I’ll read longer works by Grass for future German Literature Months. My library has his first memoir, Peeling the Onion, as well as The Tin Drum, both doorstoppers. (Public library)
Of all that ends: books, holidays, seasons. It was a trip that, like so many we take these days, was sometimes irksome and exhausting, and could be overwhelming (Berlin) or boring (Lübeck) by turns – yet was still far preferable to the humdrum of home life. And – isn’t it always the way? – just as we’d gotten comfortable with greetings, farewells and other everyday phrases in a new language, it was time to leave. We were more comfortable with French when ordering a vegan supper at a café and drinks in a bustling Art Deco bar during our quick overnight stay in Brussels, then it was onto the Eurostar to come back home. Somewhere on those many train rides back, I caught this monster cold that will not die after 10 days and counting. And the very day we arrived back in the UK, we felt a sudden shift to late autumn weather.
November will be here before we know it.
Nine Days in Germany and What I Read, Part I: Berlin
We’ve actually been back for more than a week, but soon after our return I was felled by a nasty cold (not Covid, surprisingly), which has left me with a lingering cough and ongoing fatigue. Finally, I’m recovered just about enough to report back.
This Interrail adventure was more low-key than the one we took in 2016. The first day saw us traveling as far as Aachen, just over the border from France. It’s a nice small city with Christian and culinary history: Charlemagne is buried in the cathedral; and it’s famous for a chewy, spicy gingerbread called printen. Before our night in a chain hotel, we stumbled upon the mayor’s Green Party rally in the square – there was to be an election the following day – and drank and dined well. The Gin Library, spotted at random on the map, is an excellent and affordable Asian-fusion cocktail bar. My “Big Ben,” for instance, featured Tanqueray gin, lemon juice, honey, fresh coriander, and cinnamon syrup. Then at Hanswurst – Das Wurstrestaurant (cue jokes about finding the “worst” restaurant in Aachen!), a superior fast-food joint, I had the vegetarian “Hans Berlin,” a scrumptious currywurst with potato wedges.
The next day it was off to Berlin with a big bag of bakery provisions. For the first time, we experienced the rail cancellations and delays that would plague us for much of the next week. We then had to brave the only supermarket open in Berlin on a Sunday – the Rewe in the Hauptbahnhof – before taking the S-Bahn to Alexanderplatz, the nearest station to our Airbnb flat.
It was all worth it to befriend Lemmy (the ginger one) and Roxanne. It’s a sweet deal the host has here: whenever she goes away, people pay her to look after her cats. At the same time as we were paying for a cat-sitter back home. We must be chumps!
I’ll narrate the rest of the trip through the books I read. I relished choosing relevant reads from my shelves and the library’s holdings – I was truly spoiled for choice for Berlin settings! – and I appreciated encountering them all on location.
As soon as we walked into the large airy living room of the fifth-floor Airbnb flat, I nearly laughed out loud, for there in the corner was a monstera plant. The trendy, minimalist décor, too, was just like that of the main characters’ place in…
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (2022; 2025)
[Translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes]
Anna and Tom are digital nomads from Southern Europe who offer up their Berlin flat as a short-term rental. In the listing photographs it looks pristine, giving no hint of the difficulties of the expatriate life such as bureaucracy and harsh winters. “Creative professionals” working in the fields of web development and graphic design, they are part of the micro-generation that grew up as the Internet was becoming mainstream, and they tailor their products and personal lives to social media’s preferences. They are lazy liberals addicted to convenience and materialism; aspiring hedonists who like the idea of sex clubs but don’t enjoy them when they actually get there. When Berlin loses its magic, they try Portugal and Sicily before an unforeseen inheritance presents them with the project of opening their own coastal guesthouse. “What they were looking for must have existed once upon a time, back when you only had to hop onto a train or a ferry to reach a whole other world.” This International Booker Prize shortlistee is a smart satire about online posturing and the mistaken belief that life must be better elsewhere. There are virtually no scenes or dialogue but Latronico gets away with the all-telling style because of the novella length. Were it not for his note in the Acknowledgements, I wouldn’t have known that this is a tribute to Things by Georges Perec. (Read via Edelweiss)
We got to pretend to be hip locals for four days, going up the Reichstag tower, strolling through the Tiergarten, touring the Natural History Museum (which has some excellent taxidermy as at left), walking from Potsdam station through Park Sanssouci and ogling the castles and windmill, chowing down on hand-pulled noodles and bao buns at neighbourhood café Wen Cheng, catching an excellent free lunchtime concert at the Philharmonic, and bringing back pastries or vegan doughnuts to snack on while hanging out with the kitties. The S-Bahn was included on our Interrail passes but didn’t go everywhere we needed, so we were often on the handy U-Bahn and tram system instead. Graffiti is an art form rather than an antisocial activity in Berlin; there is so much of it, everywhere.
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- Reichstag (Photos 1, 2 and 4 by Chris Foster)
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- Reichstag tower designed by Norman Foster
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- The Philharmonic
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- Brandenburg Gate (Photos 1-3 by Chris Foster)
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- Postdam’s Park Sanssouci
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- Wen Cheng noodles
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- Brammibal’s vegan doughnuts
I brought along another novella that proved an apt companion for our explorations of the city. Even just spotting familiar street and stop names in it felt like reassurance.
Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri (2022)
The narrator of this spare text is a Böll Visiting Professor experiencing disorientation yet resisting gestures of familiarity. Like a Teju Cole or Rachel Cusk protagonist, his personality only seeps in through his wanderings and conversations. After his first talk, he meets a fellow Indian from the audience, Faqrul Haq, who takes it upon himself to be his dedicated tour guide. The narrator isn’t entirely sure how he feels about Faqrul, yet meets him for meals and seeks his advice about the best place to buy warm outerwear. An expat friend is a crutch he wishes he could refuse, but the bewilderment of being somewhere you don’t speak the language at all is such that he feels bound to accept. Meanwhile, there is the possibility of another academic admirer, Birgit, becoming his lover. Strangely, his relationship with his cleaning lady, who addresses him only in German, seems the healthiest one on offer. As the book goes on, the chapters get shorter and shorter, presaging some kind of mental crisis. “I keep walking – in which direction I’m not sure; Kreuzberg? I’ve lost my bearings – not in the city; in its history. The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.” This was interesting, even admirable, but I wanted more story. (Public library)
We spent a drizzly and slightly melancholy first day and final morning making pilgrimages to Jewish graveyards and monuments to atrocities, some of them nearly forgotten. I got the sense of a city that has been forced into a painful reckoning with its past – not once but multiple times, perhaps after decades of repression. One morning we visited the claustrophobic monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and, in the Tiergarten, the small memorials to the Roma and homosexual victims of the Holocaust. The Nazis came for political dissidents and the disabled, too, as I was reminded at the Topography of Terrors, a free museum where brutal facts are laid bare. We didn’t find the courage to go in as the timeline outside was confronting enough. I spotted links to the two historical works I was reading during my stay (Stella the red-haired Jew-catcher in the former and Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute in the latter). As I read both, I couldn’t help but think about the current return of fascism worldwide and the gradual erosion of rights that should concern us all.
Aimée and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 by Erica Fischer (1994; 1995)
[Translated from German by Edna McCown]
Elisabeth “Lilly” Wust was a good German: the estranged wife of a Nazi and mother of four young sons. She met Felice Schragenheim via her new domestic helper, Inge Wolf. Lilly (aka Aimée) was slow to grasp that Inge and Felice were part of a local lesbian milieu, and didn’t realize Felice (aka Jaguar) was a “U-boat” (Jew living underground) until they’d already become lovers. They got nearly a year and a half together, living almost as a married couple – they had rings engraved and everything – before Felice was taken into Gestapo custody. You know from the outset that this story won’t end well, but you keep hoping – just like Lilly did. It’s not a usual or ‘satisfying’ tragedy, though, because there is no record of what happened to Felice. She was declared legally dead in 1948 but most likely shared the fate of Anne and Margot Frank, dying of typhus at Bergen-Belsen. It’s heartbreaking that Felice, the orphaned daughter of well-off dentists, had multiple chances to flee Berlin – via her sister in London, their stepmother in Palestine, an uncle in America, or friends escaping through Switzerland – but chose to remain.
The narrative incorporates letters, diaries and interviews, especially with Lilly, who clearly grieved Felice for the rest of her life. The book is unsettling, though, in that Fischer doesn’t let it stand as a simple Juliet & Juliet story; rather, she undermines Lilly by highlighting Felice’s promiscuity (so she likely would not have remained faithful) and Lilly’s strange postwar behaviour: desperately trying to reclaim Felice’s property, and raising her sons as Jewish. This was a time capsule, a wholly absorbing reclamation of queer history, but no romantic vision. (Secondhand purchase – Community Furniture Project)
[A similar recent release: Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück by Gwen Strauss]
The Lilac People by Milo Todd (2025)
This was illuminating, as well as upsetting, about the persecution of trans people in Nazi Germany. Todd alternates between the gaiety of early 1930s Berlin – when trans man Bertie worked for Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science and gathered with friends at the Eldorado Club for dancing and singing their anthem, “Das Lila Lied” – and 1945 Ulm, where Bert and his partner Sofie have been posing as an older farming couple. At the novel’s start, a runaway from Dachau, a young trans man named Karl, joins their household. Ironically, it is at this point safer to be Jewish than to be different in any other way; even with the war over, rumour has it the Allies are rounding up queer people and putting them in forced labour camps, so the trio pretend to be Jews as they ponder a second round of escapes.
While this is slow to start with, and heavy on research throughout, it does gather pace. The American officer, Ward, is something of a two-dimensional villain who keeps popping back up. Still, the climactic scenes are gripping and the dual timeline works well. Todd explores survivor guilt and gives much valuable context. He is careful to employ language in use at that time (transvestites, transsexuals, “inverts,” “third sex”) and persuasively argues that, in any era, how we treat the vulnerable is the measure of our humanity. (Read via Edelweiss)
[A similar recent release: Under the Pink Triangle by Katie Moore (set in Dachau)]
We might have been at the Eldorado in the early 1930s on the evening when we ventured out to the bar Zosch for a “New Orleans jazz” evening. The music was superb, the German wine tasty, the whole experience unforgettable … but it sure did feel like being in a bygone era. We’re so used to the indoor smoking ban (in force in the UK since 2007) that we didn’t expect to find young people chain-smoking rollies in an enclosed brick basement, and got back to the flat with our clothes reeking and our lungs burning.
It was good to see visible signs of LGTBQ support in Berlin, though they weren’t as prevalent as I perhaps expected.
For a taste of more recent German history, I’ve started Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, which is set in the 1980s not long before the Berlin Wall came down. Unfortunately, my library hold didn’t arrive until too late to take it with me. We made a point of seeing the wall remnants and Checkpoint Charlie on our trip.
Other Berlin highlights: a delicious vegetarian lunch at the canteen of an architecture firm, the Ritter chocolate shop, and the pigeons nesting on the flat balcony – the chicks hatched on our final morning!
And a belated contribution to Short Story September:
Touchy Subjects by Emma Donoghue (2006)
I seem to pluck one or two books at random from Donoghue’s back catalogue per year. I designated this as reliable train reading. The 19 contemporary stories fall into thematic bundles: six about pregnancy or babies, several about domestic life, a few each on “Strangers” and “Desire,” and a final set of four touching on death. The settings range around Europe and North America. It’s impressive how Donoghue imagines herself into so many varied situations, including heterosexual men longing for children in their lives and rival Louisiana crawfishermen setting up as tour-boat operators. The attempts to write Black characters in “Lavender’s Blue” and “The Welcome” are a little cringey, and the latter felt dated with its ‘twist’ of a character being trans. She’s on safer ground writing about a jaded creative writing tutor or football teammates who fall for each other. I liked a meaningful encounter between a tourist and an intellectually disabled man in a French cave (“The Sanctuary of Hands”), an Irishwoman’s search for her missing brother in Los Angeles (“Baggage”) and a contemporary take on the Lazarus myth (“Necessary Noise”), but my two favourites were “The Cost of Things,” about a lesbian couple whose breakup is presaged by their responses to their cat’s astronomical vet bill; and “The Dormition of the Virgin,” in which a studious young traveller to Florence misses what’s right under his nose. There are some gems here, but the topics are so scattershot the collection doesn’t cohere. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Trip write-up to be continued (tomorrow, with any luck)…
The BBC National Short Story Award 2025 Anthology
Another quick contribution to #ShortStorySeptember. I was delighted when Comma Press sent me a surprise copy of The BBC National Short Story Award 2025, which prints the five stories shortlisted for this year’s prize.
Now in its 20th year, the award has recognised established authors and newcomers alike – the roster of winners includes Lucy Caldwell, Sarah Hall (twice), Cynan Jones, James Lasdun, KJ Orr, Ingrid Persaud, Ross Raisin, Lionel Shriver and Naomi Wood – and the £15,000 prize money is very generous indeed for a single story.
This very evening, the winner will be announced live on the BBC Radio 4 Front Row programme (it starts at 7:15 p.m. if you’re in the UK). I’ll update my post later with news of the winner. For now, here are my brief thoughts on the five stories and which I hope will win.
“You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle” is an excerpt from Colwill Brown’s linked short story collection, We Pretty Pieces of Flesh. It’s in broad Doncaster dialect and written in the second person, thus putting the reader into the position of a young woman who is often pressured – by men and by the prevailing standards of beauty – into uncomfortable situations. It’s all drinking and sex and feeling in competition with other girls. ‘You’ grow up limited and bitter and wondering if revenge is possible. This was admirable for its gritty realism but not pleasant per se, and convinced me I don’t want to read the whole book.
“Little Green Man” by Edward Hogan begins with a classic scenario of two very different people being thrown together. Carrie stands out not just for being nearly six feet tall but also for being the only woman working for Parks and Gardens in Derby. One morning she’s assigned a temporary apprentice, Ryan, who is half her age and might be dismissed with one look as being no good (“lines shaved into his eyebrows … dyed blond hair” and a baby at home). But their interactions go beyond stereotypes as we learn of Ryan’s ambitions and his disapproving dad; and of Carrie’s ex, Bridget, who wanted more spontaneity. It’s a solid, feel-good story about not making your mind up about people, in the vein of Groundskeeping.
“Yair” by Emily Abdeni-Holman is another two-character drama, with the title figure an Israeli estate agent who takes the female narrator looking for an apartment in Jerusalem in 2018. Sexual tension and conflicting preconceived notions are crackling between them. A simple story with an autofiction feel, it reminded me of writing by Sigrid Nunez and Elizabeth Strout and exposes the falsity of facile us-and-them distinctions.
“Two Hands” by Caoilinn Hughes is a three-player comedy starring a married couple and their driving instructor. After a motorway crash in the beloved Fiat Panda they brought with them from Italy when they moved back to Ireland, Desmond and Gemma are in need of some renewed confidence behind the wheel. They talk about work – Des’s ancient archaeology research, Gemma’s translations – but not about the accident, which clearly is still affecting them both. Meanwhile, their late-seventies instructor is a War and Peace-reading calm presence whose compassion stretches only so far. I found this sharp, witty and original, just like Hughes’s Orchid & the Wasp.
Last but not least, “Rain: a history” by Andrew Miller is set in a sodden near-future English village. The protagonist has been having heart trouble and failing to connect with his traumatized teenage son. Nothing in his house or on his person ever feels dry. Their surroundings are menacing and desolate, yet still somehow beautiful. A letter came through the door last week, inviting everyone to meet in the parish church this evening. What can be done? Perhaps solidarity is as much as they, and we, can hope for. This was spare and haunting, and so much better than The Land in Winter.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading these entries and wouldn’t mind four out of the five winning. My sense of the spirit of the award is that it should go to a stand-alone story by an up-and-coming author. It’s hard to say what judges William Boyd, Lucy Caldwell, Ross Raisin, Kamila Shamsie and Di Speirs will go for: realism, novelty, subtlety, humour or prophecy? My personal favourite was “Yair,” but I have an inkling the award might go to Caoilinn Hughes and I would be very happy with that result as well.
With thanks to Comma Press for the free copy for review.
UPDATE: The winner was … the story I enjoyed the least, “You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle.” Nonetheless, I acknowledge that Colwill Brown has a distinctive voice.
#ShortStorySeptember: Stories by Katherine Heiny, Shena Mackay and Ian McEwan
Every September I enjoy focusing on short stories, which I seem to read at a rate of only one or two collections per month in the rest of a year. This year, Lisa of ANZ Lit Lovers is hosting Short Story September as a blogger challenge for the first time. She’s encouraging people to choose individual short stories they would recommend, so I’ll be centring all of my reviews around one particular story but also giving my reaction to the collections as a whole.
“Dark Matter”
from
Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny (2015)
“One week in late February, Rhodes and Gildas-Joseph told Maya the same come fact, that there was a movement to reinstate Plato’s status as a planet.”
Maya is engaged to Rhodes but also sleeping with Gildas-Joseph, the director of the university library where she works. She’s one of Heiny’s typical whip-smart, exasperated protagonists, irresistibly drawn to a man or two even though they seem like priggish or ridiculous bores (witness the “come fact” above – neither can stop himself from mansplaining after sex). Having an affair means always having to keep your wits about you. Maya bumps into her boss with his wife, Adèle, at a colleague’s cocktail party and in line for the movies, and one day her fiancé’s teenage sister, Magellan (seriously, what is up with these names?!), turns up at the coffee shop where she is supposed to be meeting Gildas-Joseph. Quick, act natural. By the end, Maya knows that she must decide between the two men.
This is the middle of a trio of stories about Maya. They’re not in a row and I read the book over quite a number of months, so I was in danger of forgetting that we’d met this set of characters before. In the first, the title story, Maya has been with Rhodes for five years but is thinking of leaving him – and not just because she’s crushing on her boss. A health crisis with her dog leads her to rethink. In “Grendel’s Mother,” Maya is pregnant and hoping that she and her partner are on the same page.
This triptych of linked stories is evidence that Heiny was working her way towards a novel, and I certainly prefer Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser. However, I really liked Heiny’s 2023 story collection, Games and Rituals, which has much more variety.
I like the second person as much as anyone but three instances of “You” narration is too much. The best of these was “The Rhett Butlers,” about a teenager whose history teacher uses famous character names as aliases when checking them into motels for trysts. The cover image is from this story: “The part of your life that contains him is too sealed off, like the last slice of cake under one of those glass domes.”
Although all of these stories are entertaining and have some of the insouciance and bittersweetness of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, they are so overwhelmingly about adultery (the main theme of at least 8 of 11) that they feel one-note.
why have an affair if not to say bad things about your spouse?
She thought that was the essence of motherhood: acting like you knew what you were talking about when you didn’t. That, and looking at people’s rashes. It was probably why people had affairs.
I would recommend any of Heiny’s other books over this one, but I wanted to read everything she’s published and I wouldn’t say my time spent on this was a waste. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
“All the Pubs in Soho”
from
Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags by Shena Mackay (1987)
“It was his father’s vituperation about ‘those bloody pansies at Old Hollow’ that had brought Joe to the cottage on this empty summer holiday afternoon.”
It’s 1956 in Kent and Joe is only eight years old, so it’s not too surprising that, ignorant of the slang, he shows up at Arthur and Guido’s expecting to find flowers dripping red. Their place becomes his haven from a home full of crying, excreting younger siblings and a conventional father who intends to send him to a private girls’ school in the autumn. That’s right, “Joe” is Josephine, who likes to wear boys’ clothes and insists on a male name. Mackay struck me as ahead of her time (rather like Rose Tremain with Sacred Country) in honouring Joe’s chosen pronouns and letting him imagine an adult future in which he’d keep company with Arthur and Guido’s bohemian, artistic set – the former is a poet, the latter a painter – and they’d take him round ‘all the pubs in Soho.’ But in a sheltered small town where everyone has a slur ready for the men, it is not to be. Things don’t end well, but thankfully not as badly as I was hoping, and Joe has plucked up the courage to resist his father. There’s all the emotional depth and character development of a novella in this 26-page story.
I’ve had a mixed experience with Mackay, but the one novel of hers I got on well with, The Orchard on Fire, also dwells on the shattered innocence of childhood. By contrast, most of the stories in this collection are grimy ones about lonely older people – especially elderly women – reminding me of Barbara Comyns or Barbara Pym at her darkest. “Where the Carpet Ends,” about the long-term residents of a shabby hotel, recalls The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. In “Violets and Strawberries in the Snow,” a man in a mental institution awaits a holiday visit from his daughters. “What do we do now?” he asks a fellow inmate. “We could hang ourselves in the tinsel” is the reply. It’s very black comedy indeed. The same is true of a Halloween-set story that I’ll revisit next month.
The cover is so bad it’s good, amirite? In the title story, Susan Vigo is on her way by train to give a speech at a writers’ workshop and running through possible plots for her mystery novel in progress. “Slaves to the Mushroom” is another great one that takes place on a mushroom farm. Mackay’s settings are often surprising, her vocabulary precise, and her portraits of young people as cutting as those of the aged are pitiful. This would serve as a great introduction to her style. (Secondhand – Slightly Foxed Books, Berwick) 
“The Grown-up”
from
The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan (1994)
“The following morning Peter Fortune woke from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a giant person, an adult.”
A much better Kafka homage, this, than that forgettable novella The Cockroach that McEwan published in 2019. Every story of this linked collection features Peter, a 10-year-old with a very active imagination. Three of the stories are straightforward body-swap narratives (with his sister’s mangled doll, his cat, or his baby cousin), whereas in this one he’s not trading with anyone else but still experiencing what it’s like to be someone else. In this case, a young man falling in love for the first time. Just the previous day, at the family’s holiday cottage in Cornwall, he’d been bemoaning how boring adults are: all they want to do is sit on the beach and chat or read, when there’s so much world out there to explore and turn into a personal playground. He never wants to be one of them. Now he realizes there are different ways to enjoy life; “he stopped and turned to look at the grown-ups one more time. … He felt differently about them now. There were things they knew and liked which for him were only just appearing, like shapes in a mist. There were adventures ahead of him after all.”
Of course, I also loved “The Cat,” which Eleanor mentioned when she read my review of Matt Haig’s To Be a Cat. At the time, I’d not heard of this and couldn’t believe McEwan had written something suitable for kids! These stories were ones he read aloud to his children as he composed them. There is a hint of gruesomeness in “The Dolls,” but most are just playful. “Vanishing Cream” is a cautionary tale about wanting your family to go away. In “The Bully,” Peter turns a bully into a tentative friend. “The Baby” sees him changing his mind about an annoying relative, while “The Burglar” has him imagining himself a hero who stops the spate of neighbourhood break-ins. Events are explained away as literal dreams, daydreams or a bit of magic. This was an offbeat gem. Try it for a very different taste of McEwan! (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Summer Reading 2025: Anthony, Espach, Han & Teir
In the UK, summer doesn’t officially end until the 22nd, so even though I’ve been doing plenty of baking with apples and plums and we’ve had squashes delivered in our vegetable box, I’ve taken advantage of that extra time to finish a couple more summery books. This year I’m featuring four novels ranging in location from Rhode Island to Finland. I’ve got all the trappings of summer: a swimming pool, a wedding, a beach retreat, and a summer house.
The Most by Jessica Anthony (2024)
I can’t resist a circadian narrative. This novella takes place in Delaware on one day in early November 1957, but flashbacks and close third-person narration reveal everything we need to know about Virgil and Kathleen Beckett and their marriage. I’m including it in my summer reading because it’s set on an unseasonably warm Sunday and Kathleen decides to spend the entire day in their apartment complex’s pool. The mother of two drifts back in memory to her college tennis-playing days and her first great love, Billy Blasko, a Czech tennis coach who created a signature move called “The Most,” which means “bridge” in his language – the idea is to trap your opponent and then drop a bomb on them. Virgil, who after taking their two boys to church goes golfing with his insurance sales colleagues as is expected of him, loves jazz music and has just been sent the secret gift of a saxophone. Both spouses are harbouring secrets and, as Laika orbits the Earth overhead, they wonder if they can break free from the capsules they’ve built around their hearts and salvage their relationship. The storytelling is tight even as the book loops around the same events from the two perspectives. This was really well done, and a big step up from Enter the Aardvark. (Public library)
The Wedding People by Alison Espach (2024)
You’ve all heard about this one, right? It’s been a Read with Jenna selection and the holds are stacking up in my library system. No wonder it’s been hailed as a perfect summer read: it’s full of sparkling banter; heartwarming, very funny and quite sexy. And that despite a grim opening situation: Phoebe flies from St. Louis to Newport and checks into a luxury hotel, intending to kill herself. She’s an adjunct professor whose husband left her for their colleague after their IVF attempts failed, and she feels she’ll never finish writing her book, become a mother or find true love again. Little does she know that a Bridezilla type named Lila who’s spent $1 million of her inheritance on a week-long wedding extravaganza (culminating in a ceremony at The Breakers mansion) meant to book out the entire hotel. Phoebe somehow snagged the room with the best view. Lila isn’t about to let anyone ruin her wedding.
What follows is Cinderella-like yet takes into account the realities of bereavement, infidelity, infertility and blended families. Because of the one-week format, Phoebe’s depression is defused more quickly than is plausible, but I was relieved that Espach doesn’t plump for a full-blown happy ending. I did also find the novel unnecessarily crass in places, especially the gag about the car. Still, this has all the wit of Katherine Heiny and Curtis Sittenfeld. I’d recommend it if you enjoyed Dream State or Consider Yourself Kissed, and it’s especially reminiscent of Sorrow and Bliss for the mixture of humour and frank consideration of mental health. It’s as easy to relate to Phoebe’s feelings (“How much of her life had she spent in this moment, waiting for someone else to decide something conclusive about her?”; “It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for someone to save us”) as it is to laugh at the one-liners. “Garys are not wonderful. That’s just not what they are meant to be” particularly tickled me because I know a few Garys in real life. (Public library)
The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han (2008)
Every summer Belly and her mother and brother have joined her mother’s best friend Susannah and her sons Conrad and Jeremiah at their beach house. She’s had a crush on Conrad for what’s felt like forever, but she’s only ever been his surrogate little sister, fun for palling around with but never taken seriously. This summer is different, though: Belly is turning 16, it’s Conrad’s last summer before college, and his family seems to be falling apart. The novel kept being requested off me and I puzzled over how it could have eight reservations on it until I realized there’s an Amazon Prime Video adaptation now in its third and final season. I reckon the story will work better on screen because Belly’s narration was the main issue for me. She’s ever so shallow, so caught up in boys that she doesn’t realize Susannah is sick again. Her fixation on the brooding Conrad doesn’t make sense when she could have affable Jeremiah or sweet, geeky Cam, who met her through Latin club and liked her before she grew big boobs. He’s who she’s supposed to be with in this kind of story, right? I think this would appeal to younger, boy-crazy teens, but it just made me feel old and grumpy. (Public library) 
The Summer House by Philip Teir (2017; 2018)
[Translated from Swedish by Tiina Nunnally]
The characters are Finland-Swedish, like the author. Erik and Julia escape Helsinki with their children, Alice and Anton, to spend time at her father’s summer house. Erik has just lost his job in IT for a large department store, but hasn’t told Julia yet. Julia is working on a novel, but distracted by the fact that her childhood friend Marika, the not so secret inspiration for a character in her previous novel, is at another vacation home nearby with Chris, her Scottish partner. These two and their hangers-on have a sort of commune based around free love and extreme environmental realism: the climate crisis will not be solved (“accepting the grief instead of talking about hope all the time”) and the only thing to do is participate in de-civilisation. But like many a cult leader, Chris courts young female attention and isn’t the best role model. Both couples are strained to breaking point.
Meanwhile, Chris and Marika’s son, Leo, has been sneaking off with Alice; and Erik’s brother Anders shows up and starts seeing the widowed therapist neighbour. This was a reasonably likeable book about how we respond to crises personal and global, and how we react to our friends’ successes and problems – Erik is jealous of his college buddy’s superior performance in a tech company. But I thought it was a little aimless, especially in its subplots, and it suffered in comparison with Leave the World Behind, which has quite a similar setup but a more intriguing cosmic/dystopian direction. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Any final summer books for you this year?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 