Review Catch-Up: Memoirs by Maggie Nelson and Jonathan Tepper
Two memoirs that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now: a novella-length response to chronic pain, and a story of growing up at a refuge for addicts and AIDS victims in Spain.
Pathemata: Or, The Story of My Mouth by Maggie Nelson (2025)
This is a very short (68-page), dreamy meditation on pain. Nelson has ongoing chronic jaw pain despite multiple expensive trips to specialist clinics and many different treatment strategies tried. As she writes, it’s the pandemic era and she’s also home-schooling her son. Meanwhile, her marriage to H seems to be crumbling. The text is composed of non-indented sentences in roughly thematic groupings. But dreams are recounted as often as real-life events, making this a particularly slippery work of autofiction, with an emphasis on the fiction.
The dentist in the valley and I go back and forth over injecting my jaw with Botox.
I hold out, realising that the only thing that frightens me more than pain and its viciousness is numbness, paralysis.
Sometimes I wonder what I would have thought about all these years, if I hadn’t spent so much time thinking about the pain.
Nelson dwells on the irony of someone who talks for a living having so much trouble with oral speech. She also reflects on the early loss of her father and the recent death of a close friend, C. Could it be that jaw pain is how her body is manifesting long-held grief and stress? she wonders.
The Argonauts is an absolute classic of life writing and I’ve long admired Nelson’s cultural criticism. She’s an important thinker on queerness and embodiment, in the vein of Garth Greenwell and Olivia Laing. Aside from the indulgence of including all the dreams (and one instance of jargon: “It sounds like an invagination – a chamber to hold the pastiche of lacerations”), there’s nothing wrong with this per se. It’s just that the essay is over before it’s begun. Why not part of a longer essay collection, or expanded into a full-length memoir?
With thanks to Fern Press, Vintage (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
{SPOILERS IN THIS ONE}
Shooting Up: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Addiction by Jonathan Tepper (2026)
In the early 1980s, the author and his three brothers moved to Spain with their missionary parents, Elliott and Mary, who founded Betel, a rehabilitation centre for junkies (yonkis). “Our neighbourhood [San Blas in Madrid] was the biggest drug supermarket not only in Spain but in all of Europe, and it was happening right on our doorstep.” Betel is still operating today and has supported 100,000 addicts, but it all started with eight young men in the Teppers’ living room. Elliott was filled with righteous enthusiasm for the task and always had scripture passages and C.S. Lewis quotes on the tip of his tongue. When his four sons went delivering leaflets to heroin addicts on the street, they stood out for their blond hair and blue eyes. Soon, though, the yonkis they helped became more than ‘customers’, or objects of pity, but friends as close as family.
From a child’s perspective, the memoir effectively recreates scenes and dialogue from these outreach years. I especially appreciated the descriptions of what it’s like to grow up inside a religious bubble: “the invisible walls of my family and beliefs had been my world. In the [goldfish] bowl you think the water is all there is”. I’m a minister’s kid myself, so I nodded along to lines like “Being a preacher’s kid meant being the first to church and last to leave as my parents hugged and spoke to everybody.” There was real grief as, one by one, young men they knew fell victim to AIDS: Luis, Ángel, Raúl, Salva, Jambri. But there were other losses, too: Tepper’s younger brother, Timothy, died in a car accident while they were back in the USA on a sabbatical in 1991, and his mother later died by suicide after being disabled by a brain tumour.
There’s a section of black-and-white photographs at the end of the book, and the chapters are headed with Spanish phrases to evoke the setting. Later chapters follow Tepper through his college years and the triumph of getting a Rhodes scholarship. (In fact, he and his two remaining brothers all graduated from Oxford University on the same day.) The focus on academic success as a more legitimate high than that offered by drugs reminded me of Educated by Tara Westover, while the solemn duty of being an eyewitness to the AIDS crisis is reminiscent of All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks. This is a touching tribute to all those dead.
With thanks to the author and Constable (Little, Brown) for the advanced proof copy for review.
March Releases by Emily Haworth-Booth, Roz Morris, Catherine Redford & Joann Sfar
Autofiction about beloved animals and ambivalence over motherhood, a witty memoir of house-hunting in the South of England, a poetry collection reflecting on bereavement and queer parenthood, and a graphic novel adaptation of a 20th-century classic: I had a real variety this month.
Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth
Is the entire novel built around a pun? The French for mother, mère, is a homophone for mare. Like Motherhood by Sheila Heti, this is a work of autofiction that circles the question of becoming a mother and posits the writing life and other relationships as partial substitutes for parenthood. But yes, there is also a literal horse. The narrator lives in London with her husband and scrapes together a living by teaching creative writing on Zoom and writing children’s books. They’ve recently lost their dearly loved dog and are friendly with the neighbours whose garden they share and whose noise they hear the other side of a wall – so much so that she thinks of the two girls as “not-my-daughter” and “also-not-my-daughter.” The narrator is contracted to write a book about plastics for children but can’t seem to land on the right tone somewhere between alarm and false cheer. Approaching age 40, she’s finally coming to terms with the fact that she won’t be a mother due to premature ovarian failure.
Into all this comes the love of a horse. She finds a stable two miles away and spends three days a week there riding and tending to a black and white mare. As a child she’d been horse-crazy, so this isn’t “a new feeling … but a resurgence. Deeply familiar. Lust and tenderness and hope mingled.” Time with the horse reminds her to be present, to live in her body despite its flaws, to take joy in the everyday. “Being with the horse has come to feel more and more like an exercise in metaphor.”
Haworth-Booth makes caring for an animal analogous with motherhood, but doesn’t stop at easy symbolism. The mare might stand in for female fear and vulnerability, but is also flesh and blood. Cultivating bodily bonds with other creatures is part of how we find purpose when life is threatened by chronic illness and climate breakdown.
This is Haworth-Booth’s adult debut and I hope it will be submitted for next year’s McKitterick Prize. Its wry honesty appealed to me, as did the narrator’s interactions with her mother (who forwards her “Childfree and fabulous” e-newsletters) and not-my-daughter, who share her interest in horses. There’s also the meta angle of the narrator assembling an “H folder” that eventually becomes this book. Hard to tell in my Kindle file, but some passages seem to be aligned like poetry. “The boundaries are blurring … this is the age of the non-binary, the hybrid, … the uncategorisable,” the narrator says to her students. “What about a collection of thoughts themed around a subject, themed around, for example, a horse?” I can see how some would find this insufferable, but it really worked for me. (Read via NetGalley)
Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Memoir of Househunting, Happenstance and Home by Roz Morris
Now that we’re four years on from the purchase of our first property, I can read about house-hunting without finding it too depressing! When Morris and her husband Dave decided to move out of London, securing a buyer for their house was a cinch, but finding a new place that they loved as much as their home of twenty-plus years seemed like an insurmountable challenge. She wrings much humour from the process by comparing house viewings with first dates – as in a romcom, you’re always looking out for “The One,” but all the potential suitors have various issues – and employing jokey nicknames (“the Rusty Tractor house,” “The Aardvark House”), and a financial shorthand of arms and legs.
Estate agents, potential buyers, and sellers alike are maddening in their quirks. There are so many inexplicable features in otherwise normal suburban Surrey properties: more toilets than bedrooms, giant air-conditioning units, a long bench that looks like it belongs in a bus station waiting room, and so on. In between details of the search, Morris remembers her upbringing in mining country made famous by Alan Garner and how she and Dave met and made a life together as childfree writers. This is a warm and funny read whose short chapters fly by, but it also made me ponder what is essential in a home. Though I was mildly taken aback by the ending, I came to think of it as fitting, in a T.S. Eliot knowing the place for the first time sort of way.
With thanks to the author for the free e-copy for review. (Published by Spark Furnace.)
The Way the Water Held Me by Catherine Redford
This isn’t your average bereavement story: Redford was only 35 and had a young child at the time that her wife died of cancer. We don’t hear so much about being widowed early, or in a same-sex partnership. Redford interrogates the expectations of widowhood (“If not Victoria, I can be Jackie O”) through biographical poems about Mary Shelley’s writings in the wake of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s untimely death. There’s a found/collage poem pieced together from one of Shelley’s letters; others quote from her Frankenstein and The Last Man. Elsewhere, Redford alludes to Woolf, Wordsworth and Wuthering Heights. Redford recalls feeling bombarded by people’s sympathy (“The flowers arrive like a tsunami”) and having no idea how to respond when asked how she’s doing. She relives moments from their carefree courtship days, lists the elements of “Her Last Day,” and documents the rituals that enshrine memory. I loved the archival vocabulary of “Obituary” (below) and how belongings left behind take on outsize significance: “I cross-examine every page of her notebooks, lay out the contents / of each drawer in a crescent on the floor as if they are grave goods // selected for her journey to the afterlife” (from “Circles”). The alliteration and nature (especially seaside) imagery were just right for me. From the hardest of circumstances came something tender and lovely.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)
Graphic novel adaptation by Joann Sfar (2008); colours by Brigitte Findakly
[Translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone, 2010]
Reading The Little Prince in the original French was a long-term project in my high school French curriculum. I can still remember snippets such as “Dessine-moi un mouton” (“Draw me a sheep”) and apprivoiser (to tame) – it was good for learning such random vocabulary words. You are probably familiar with this fable of a pilot who crashes in the desert and meets a strange, possibly alien boy and talks with him about his interplanetary journeys as well as a flower, a snake, a fox, and so on. Before he landed on earth, he alighted on six other planets where he met a king, a vain man, a drunk, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer, all of whom appeared to be trapped in destructive patterns of their own making.
I had a few issues. The main one is that, these days, the story falls for me in the same category as other intolerably twee stuff like Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Granted, “You can only see clearly with the heart. What matters is invisible to the eye” is profound in its simplicity. But much of the rest had me rolling my eyes. As for the adaptation, why was it deemed necessary? The original The Little Prince is illustrated. Plus the drawing style is rather grotesque. (I don’t remember this from the only other book I’ve read by Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat.) I guess the idea was to contrast the boy’s innocence and blue-pool eyes with the essential ugliness of much of what he encounters. But what’s with most of the planets’ residents having noses like penises? (Unsolicited review copy from SelfMadeHero)
Three for #ReadingWales26: Tishani Doshi, Gwyneth Lewis & Jan Morris
As well as Reading Ireland Month, it’s Reading Wales Month, hosted by Karen of BookerTalk and Kath of Nut Press. I read three relevant books by women – my ideal trio of a novel, a poetry collection and a memoir – and also experienced some additional poetry via a special church service.
Fountainville by Tishani Doshi (2013)
This is part of a Seren series retelling the medieval Welsh legends in the Mabinogion. Doshi has Welsh and Indian parentage; here she blends her knowledge of both countries and their stories. Luna, the narrator, works as an assistant to Begum, the Lady of the Fountain. Begum and her husband Kedar, a gangster, operate a shady surrogacy clinic. Then Owain Knight comes to town and makes Luna a proposition and things get complicated. Though this is novella length, it took me ages to slog through it. My lack of familiarity with the source text felt like a problem – I’d rather it had been summarized in a foreword rather than an afterword – and Doshi’s narrative is insipid despite the soap opera-ready content; I saw none of the spark and originality I’ve found in her excellent poetry. On this evidence I’m unlikely to pick up any more of her fiction. In any case, it was appropriate that I bought an ex-Swansea Libraries copy from Richard Booth’s Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye. (Secondhand purchase)
First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis (2025)
I’ve read a couple of Lewis’s poetry collections before (e.g. Parables and Faxes), as well as her memoir of depression and her travel book about sailing with her husband. She was Wales’s first poet laureate in 2005–6 and this is her sixth collection in English. The first section about her childhood with an emotionally abusive mother envisions her mother as a spider. The rest of the book traces the effects of that early trauma into chronic illness and mental health struggles. There is a sense of lost time. “Late Blackberries” opens “Where was I during the glut? I missed / the first sweetness, alluring and glossy // black as a dormouse’s eye, when pickings / were easy. A decade lost being ill tastes // bitter.” The imagery is drawn from physics, the countryside, medieval religious art, and the discovery of mummies. The two most quintessentially Welsh poems are “Red Waistcoat,” about coming across a dead ewe in a field, and “Under,” commemorating a fatal 2011 mining accident. Forasmuch as the book’s themes seemed perfectly assembled to appeal to me, I never felt they’d been brought to life in the language. (Secondhand purchase – Exeter charity shop)
A Writer’s House in Wales by Jan Morris (2002)
“My house is so absolutely of its setting, is rooted so profoundly not just in the soil, but in the very idea of Wales, that anywhere else it would lose all charisma.”
Although Jan Morris was famous for travelling the world and writing all about it, she equally loved being able to retreat to Trefan Morys, “for me … a summation, a metaphor, a paradigm, a microcosm, an examplar, a multum in parvo, a demonstration, a solidification, an essence, a regular epitome of all that I love about my country.” That excerpt from the first paragraph is a typical example of her effusive overwriting. This short book was clearly written for people (Americans) who know nothing about Wales, not even where on earth it is. I love her cosy evocation of her home – actually the renovated 18th-century stable block of the former family home, ample for her and Elizabeth in their dotage – and its bookshelves and animal life, whether domestic (Ibsen the Norwegian forest cat) or wild (bats in the attic!).
However, this was a reread and I found it indulgent as well as quaint this time around. It reminded me most of her diaries (the first volume was In My Mind’s Eye) and would be ideal for reading in tandem with those. Morris writes, “I am emotionally in thrall to Welshness.” I couldn’t help but think of biographer Sara Wheeler’s words about Morris’s contradictions: “she was a famous chronicler of the British Empire (some say an apologist for it) and a card-carrying Welsh nationalist. She was singular and contrary”. Wheeler slept in this house, in Morris’s bed, after her death while working through the papers.
I’ve always meant to source more from this National Geographic Directions series of brief travel books in which authors celebrate a beloved place. The only other I’ve read is Land’s End, Michael Cunningham’s book on Provincetown. (Free from The Book Thing of Baltimore)
For Advent last year and Lent this year, my church put on special evening compline services that combine liturgy and folk-inspired music my husband helped with. Earlier this month we had an extraordinary R.S. Thomas-themed service with some poems read aloud from the pulpit and others set to avant-garde music (a theremin was ruled out, but a harmonium, melodeon and glockenspiel featured, as well as a mandolin, banjo, toy piano and electric guitar). I was mostly unfamiliar with Thomas, who was a priest as well as a poet, and was gobsmacked by the commingling of scientific and theological vocabulary and the tolerance of doubt. Here are some extracts.
It is this great absence
that is like a presence,
that compels me to address it without hope
of a reply.
You speak
all languages and none,
answering our most complex
prayers with the simplicity
of a flower, confronting
us, when we would domesticate you
to our uses, with the rioting
viruses under our lens.
You have made God small,
setting him astride
a pipette
And all this in a carefully assembled pamphlet that I’ve kept as a souvenir.
I might not have chosen the best books this year, but I’m still feeling well disposed towards the Welsh. A nice link is that Thomas lived just a few miles from Morris. In her book she calls him “perhaps the greatest Welsh poet writing in English since George Herbert.” She describes him thus: “I last set eyes on R. S. Thomas standing all alone beside our coastal road gazing silently into an adjacent wood, as though communing with the crows and blackbirds in its branches … Whenever I recall him at the roadside that day, looking silently into the trees as though the answer to all things was to be found among them, the memory gives me a sense of calm and liberation, as Wales itself does”.
Three for the First Day of Spring: Renkl, Sukegawa and Tucker
I suppose the best kind of spring morning is the best weather God has to offer.
~I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Happy spring! (Although the blossom is fading and, going by the temperature the past few days, you might think it was early summer here.) When I borrowed the psychological thriller The First Day of Spring from the library, I decided to consider that my built-in review deadline. As is my wont, I’ve turned it into a trio with two books more laterally related to spring: a lovely book of miniature autobiographical essays about interactions with family and the natural world, and a short Japanese novel about misfits who find belonging at a pancake restaurant.
Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss by Margaret Renkl (2019)
My favorite season is spring—until fall arrives, and then my favorite season is fall: the seasons of change, the seasons that tell me to wake up, to remember that every passing moment of every careening day is always the last moment, always the very last time, always the only instant I will ever take that precise breath or watch that exact cloud scud across that particular blue of the sky.
The memoir in flash essays is one of my favourite niche forms. (Beth-Ann Fennelly and Abigail Thomas also do it exceptionally well.) It took me a long time to promote this book from occasional bedside reading pile to daytime stack, but at a certain point it became impossible to let it out of my hands for very long. I had to smell it and browse her brother Billy’s collage artworks. Each piece is somewhere between a paragraph and several pages long, and they make up a rough chronology of a life, from her grandmother’s memories of the 1930s onward (the passages in italics are interview transcripts) through to the present day.
Renkl grew up in Alabama in the 1960s–70s, in the sort of mildly dysfunctional family that most of us probably have. She contrasts what she knew as a child with what she didn’t. It was a happy childhood but. (Her mother’s recurring mental health problems and racial tensions in the South would be two ways to finish that sentence.) There were hounds and porch seats and three kids in the backseat on vacations. There were funerals and old love songs and Bible verses and playing in the woods. Grandmother tells of births and deaths, and Renkl remembers life’s transitions: getting her first period, being so homesick that she couldn’t finish college in Philadelphia, adjusting to early motherhood and then to an empty nest – an appropriate metaphor because many of the essays are about birds Renkl watches feeding and nesting. She isn’t naïve; she knows nature is cruel. Not every fledgling will survive and majestic hawks will kill equally beautiful songbirds. She realizes how dire the situation is for monarch butterflies, too, but keeps planting milkweed at her Nashville home.
This balancing of appreciation for life and acceptance of death is at its finest in the late pieces on her parents’ death. Her mother, like mine, died suddenly after a stroke, and her words on that loss are exquisite as well as painful. Still, she asserts, “Human beings are creatures made for joy. Against all evidence, we tell ourselves that grief and loneliness and despair are tragedies, unwelcome variations from the pleasure and calm and safety that in the right way of the world would form the firm ground of our being.”
Like Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Renkl brings a poet’s eye for language and an amateur’s awe at the natural world to her micro-essays. She calls a cedar waxwing “An operatic aria of a bird. A flying jungle flower. A weightless coalescence of air and light and animation.” This is a book to cherish and learn from and reread. (Birthday gift from my sister from my wish list) 
{SPOILERS IN THESE NEXT TWO REVIEWS}
Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa (2013; 2017)
[Translated from Japanese by Alison Watts]
It was the colours (especially that wash of cherry-blossom pink) that first attracted me to this book, and the foodie theme that kept me reading. Sentaro manages a small shop on Cherry Blossom Street, Doraharu, which sells dorayaki – pancakes filled with sweet bean paste (“during cherry-blossom season petals sometimes drifted in, falling into the pancakes as they cooked”). He takes little pride in the work; it’s just a way to keep busy and pay off his debts from the time he was in prison for drug-dealing. When an elderly woman named Tokue offers to make the sweet bean paste for a pittance, he decides to give her a trial even though he usually orders it in bulk. Tokue’s homemade is so much better that the shop is soon making record profits. She trains Sentaro up in the art of making the perfect paste, which to her is a mystical process that involves listening to the beans. Not only does Tokue have new ideas for the menu, but she also makes troubled teenage customers such as Wakana welcome with friendly conversation. Along with Marvy the canary, these three form a fragile little family.
But then rumours start spreading about Tokue and her health, and Doraharu’s owner threatens to shut the place down if Sentaro doesn’t let her go. It turns out that she had Hansen’s disease (the preferred term for leprosy) and lives in a sanatorium. Even though she has long since been cured, there is still a stigma, and when she was young she could only find love and community among her fellow patients. In an Author’s Note, Sukegawa explains that the legislation keeping Hansen’s patients isolated was only repealed in 1996. His philosophy, made explicit in the letters Tokue writes to Sentaro after leaving the shop, is that one doesn’t have to be useful to have a meaningful life; simply being alive and observing is enough. I found Tokue saccharine: too wise, good and all-forgiving. This is easy reading, yet the dialogue felt stiff, the characterization thin, the letters unsubtle, and the detail of confectionery-making too technical. Secondhand – public library book sale) 
The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker (2021)
I’d very much admired Tucker’s first two books – The Time in Between, a memoir of her childhood anorexia; and especially That Was When People Started to Worry, case studies of young women’s mental health – so asked my library to purchase her debut novel. Tucker is a trainee clinical psychiatrist. The psychological insight she’s developed professionally and through writing about herself and others served her well in crafting this portrait of a deprived girl who murders other children. I could have included it in my Mother’s Day post because, as in the similarly dark Like Mother (by Jenny Diski), it’s the lack of a mother’s love that leaves the protagonist numb and unsure of how to bring up her own daughter.
It’s no whodunit because eight-year-old Chrissie admits in the novel’s first line, “I killed a little boy today.” The mystery is why, and how she’s ultimately caught. It’s the first day of spring when she commits that first murder, of a toddler who lives on the same rough housing estate. Her house isn’t much of a home with no money for electricity, no food in the cupboards, an emotionally absent mother and a father who comes and goes without warning. Chrissie is always hungry, always craving. She couldn’t stand that Steven was loved and coddled while she had nothing. Harbouring “a delicious secret” gives her a “belly-fizzing feeling … like sherbet exploding in my guts. … That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world.” She wants to tell people what she’s done, but knows she mustn’t.
It’s also the first day of spring when five-year-old Molly falls from a seawall and breaks her wrist. Her mum, Julia, panics when she gets a call from child social services. It becomes clear by the second chapter that Julia is the new name Chrissie was given when she left the residential home for child offenders to start a new life. Sure that they’ll blame her and take Molly away, she gets on a train back to her old neighbourhood to see Mam and her childhood best friend, Linda. “I remembered this in Mam – the pull and push, cling and reject.” The subject matter might have become unbearable had Tucker emphasized the salacious details. Instead, she casts a compassionate eye on generational patterns of neglect and incompetence – patterns that can be broken through hard work. It’s riveting reading, and Julia’s love for Molly and Linda’s enduring friendship brought tears to my eyes. (Public library) 
Three on a Theme for Mother’s Day: Baker, Diski and Sampson
It’s Mothering Sunday in the UK today, so, like last year, I’m featuring three very different books about mothers and motherhood: a memoir, a novel and a poetry anthology. There are complex emotions at play in the first two due to grief, abuse and disability. The poems are cheerier (thankfully) and reflect on the experience of motherhood but also of being mothered. On that last point, I’ve added my response to a relevant short story I happened to read today.
Reading My Mother Back: A memoir in childhood animal stories by Timothy C. Baker (2022)
Baker is a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Aberdeen. His first non-academic publication is a curiously beguiling novella-length reappraisal of favourite children’s books. “To misquote Heraclitus, you cannot read the same book twice.” While he’s sheepish about including so many 19th- and early-20th-century white male authors, he can’t do otherwise as these are the texts that first taught him about death, loneliness and friendship: Charlotte’s Web, The Wind in the Willows, The Magician’s Nephew and Watership Down. (Also The Secret Garden.) Baker grew up in Maryland and Vermont, lonesome and closeted, with parents who briefly joined a cult. In his memory, his mother (who had been abused) always suffered with chronic illness and pain. In each chapter, he weaves together a discussion of a plot with stories from his early life and critical opinion on the value of rereading. It helped that I was familiar with six of the nine books Baker features (and others by Gallico, though not The Man Who Was Magic); I’d not even heard of Merle the High Flying Squirrel or The Book of the Dun Cow.
I spotted this in the Wigtown Festival Shop* on our 2023 visit to Scotland’s Book Town and could hardly believe it existed because it seemed so perfectly suited to me: I loved animal books, especially Watership Down, as a child; I’ll read any bereavement memoir going; I grew up 30 miles from Baltimore, where Baker spent his early life; he and I both had strict religious upbringings; and his mother experienced kidney failure (after eating a foxglove??), a link to my family’s history of kidney disease. There are plentiful differences, too, of course, but Baker emphasises connection. “If reading these books has taught me anything,” he concludes, “it is that all of my stories are individual, and all of them are universal. What we share is the unshareability of our grief … [but also] the joy of knowing that we have loved.” And for such a seemingly niche book (from Goldsmiths Press), I have actually found myself mentioning it to two blogger friends in recent days, so that’s proof he was right. 
[*As to how the book finally came into my possession: I added it to my wishlist and an acquaintance (a former mayor of Newbury, in fact) bought it for me for my 40th birthday. However, he forgot to bring the gift to our joint party and it took another 2+ years to extract it from him – through explicit reminders when we invited him to join us on a quiz team.]
Like Mother by Jenny Diski (1988)
I’ve enjoyed the late Jenny Diski’s travel memoirs (Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train) and essays (On Trying to Keep Still). This novella was my first taste of her fiction and, while it’s dark as hell, I admired the psychological acuity and playfulness with narration. Occasional chapters introduce a dialogue between Nony and an imaginary interlocutor whose role is to listen to the story of her mother, Frances, a former dancer. That family history is the substance of the rest of the book, which is in an omniscient third person. The artificiality of the setup is blatant, though; Nony can neither think nor speak, having been born without a brain (hydranencephaly). Nony’s full name is thus Frances’s cruel joke.
By necessity, the story stretches back to Frances’s parents, Ivy and Gerald, whose postwar optimism soon ceded to the reality of addiction, adultery and the attrition of love. A semiferal Frances escaped her unhappy home for the streets of London and engaged in sex play with Stuart on a bombsite. This went on for years. For Stuart, it blossomed into genuine love, but the numb Frances could never return his feelings and only used him. There are some really painful scenes here, such as Stuart stealing ether from the chemistry supply cupboard so she can huff herself into temporary oblivion, and a drunk Ivy molesting adolescent Frances. “Like mother, like daughter” is a bitter confirmation of inherited trauma. Nony might well be a symbolic manifestation of Frances’s desire to cultivate nothingness. To the extent that she is a literal baby – I’m really not sure – Frances does seem to love her and care for her physical needs, even as she’s grateful that the relationship will be short-lived.
Diski draws attention to the falsity of her narrative technique at the very end. It’s a disturbing yet intriguing novel that I think must be trying to make a wider point about postwar disillusionment. (Enough to make one question one’s growing antipathy towards Boomers?) I was reminded faintly of Nutshell by Ian McEwan, which is from the perspective of a fetus, and I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf, a troubling story of a mentally ill mother and her disabled son. I have another novella plus a short story collection by Diski on the shelf, and I daresay after those I’ll have to seek out everything else she wrote. (University library)
Night Feeds and Morning Songs, ed. Ana Sampson (2021)
“I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood
and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.”
~Liz Berry
It would have been easy to make such an anthology samey and sentimental, so kudos to Sampson for curating a solid mix of contemporary and period work. The poems are grouped into loose categories covering pregnancy, the sleepless nights of early motherhood, the power of womanly solidarity, the legacy (or absence) of one’s own mother, and the milestones of life as a child grows up and moves away. (Jackie Kay marvels that her baby boy is now a 6-foot-2 world traveller.) However, there are almost as many emotional approaches and poetic forms as there are contributors. Exhilaration meets exhaustion; guilt and grief threaten to overwhelm the good times. Sometimes the infant is addressed directly. The tone might be sombre, outraged or satirical. A few excerpts:
from “Labour Ward Prayer” by Vicky Thomas
Give us this day our daily miracle.
Exchange our offering of sweat and tears
and, most of all, of blood,
for new life, crumpled as a new leaf bud.
from “The Visitor” by Idra Novey
…more dragon
than spaniel, more flammable
than fluid …
All wet mattress to my analysis,
he’s stayed the loudest and longest
of any houseguest
from “What My Kids Will Write about Me in Their Future Tell-All Book” by January Gill O’Neil
They will say that no was my favourite word,
More than stop, or eat, or love.
That some morning, I’d rather stay in bed,
laptop on lap, instead of making breakfast
…
They will say they have seen me naked.
Front side, back side – none of which
were my good side.
I enjoyed re-encountering work by some personal favourite poets such as Caroline Bird, though most entries were new to me. Sampson’s section introductions aren’t particularly illuminating and often reference poems that aren’t actually in the part in question. Some of the 19th-century and earlier material is quaintly twee, but I did love discovering Christina Rossetti’s “To My First Love, My Mother.” This is the poem that made me cry, though:
(Little Free Library)
And a bonus short story:
“Egg Mother” by Kim Samek (from I Am the Ghost Here): I’m two stories into Samek’s gently surreal collection. This second story combines the themes of parenting and grief prevalent above. Her openings are knockout: “At thirty-six I turn into a scrambled egg. It happens a few months after I give birth.” In therapy, the narrator discovers that she’s been repressing her grief over her mother, who died of cancer when the narrator was 13. The therapist suggests that she and her husband hold a joint ‘funeral’ for her mother and her younger self in a graveyard. But even after the ritual, she doesn’t return to herself. It’s a sobering but realistic message: some things one just doesn’t get over.
“Every story that I read becomes the story of my mother.”
~Timothy C. Baker
Last night, we saw Brooklyn expat singer-songwriter Annie Dressner (and Sean Duggan of Steady Habits) in concert at a church hall. I was mostly underwhelmed by her quirky confessional songs and little-girl voice, but a couple of songs stood out for me. One, “I Just Realized,” includes the line “And I hope that I can be just like my mother.”
Today was a more emotional day than I was expecting. I got a sweet posy from church, but having a whole service focussed on mothers and mothering was hard for me. I had to mostly switch off to get through it.
Just in my current stack, there are so many books about mothers or mothering…
the loss of a mother (Eva Luna by Isabel Allende; The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl; I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith) – so common an element in novels that I have to think it’s shorthand for a character who has to pluckily rely on their own psychological resources- mothers’ protective instinct (The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine)
- emotional distance from an unstable mother (Carrie by Stephen King; First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis; Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates; The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker, which also includes the struggle to be a good mother in turn)
- mixed feelings about the inability to have a child (Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth)
- a mother’s grief at the loss of a child (Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin)
I know it’s a subject I’ll be reading and thinking about for the rest of my life.
Three on a Theme: English Seasons and Flora (Brazier, Lamb and Parker)
These three books trace the turning of a typical year of the English seasons, especially as experienced through flora: produce for a veg stall, plants laid into a traditional hedge, and “weeds” celebrated for their wild beauty.
The Honesty Box: The diary of a broken marriage, a mental health crisis and a large marrow by Lucy Brazier (2025)
From one Christmas season to the next, Brazier highlights the delights and challenges of rural living (in the Bridport–Lyme Regis area of Dorset). She takes on a project of setting up and stocking her own honesty box – an unmanned roadside produce stall where visitors pay into a cashbox – with garden produce, preserves and baked goods, plus friends’ crafts. All along, her marriage is in an extended, low-level crisis: Steve’s bluntness, lack of social skills, and panicked inability to do his share of household tasks have long been issues. When he gets a combined ADHD and autism diagnosis, he has a roadmap but no easy solution. Going on medication and finding peers in a similar situation help somewhat, but he still struggles.
Brazier draws clever parallels between the turning of the seasons and the ebb and flow of a marriage. Wild swimming with friends and countryside walks with Margot the dog are ways of communing with nature. She incorporates all the daily concerns of her midlife existence, including home repairs, menopause and seeing Raff, the oldest of their three children, off to university. Brazier used to be a PFD talent agent in London, dealing with the likes of Anna Maxwell Martin, then worked for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and his River Cottage cookery empire (she wrote their Christmas book); she’s now a freelance ghostwriter. She’s gently nostalgic for the days of balancing early motherhood and a stressful career, but also grateful for the slower pace of life she’s found in the countryside. There are also some amusingly ill-fated holidays (camping and boating), contrasted with a luxurious one in Italy.
It’s all very affable, the month-by-month present-tense write-ups offering an appealing blend of realism about life’s unpredictability and strategies for muddling through. While it may mean most to women of a certain age or those with neurodivergence in the family, anyone in a long-term relationship will find much to relate to. (Public library)
Of Thorn and Briar: A Year with the West Country Hedgelayer by Paul Lamb (2025)
I picked this up after it was shortlisted (and highly commended) for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. Lamb’s lifestyle could be from the 19th century: he lives in a sparse, cosy wagon, driving it from place to place and pausing for weeks-long projects laying traditional hedges across southwest England. Autumn through late winter is his key work period, to avoid the bird-nesting season. It’s gruelling physical labour. Sometimes he sees he’s made a difference; when he gets discouraged, he has to remind himself to take a longer view. “The hedger, like the forester, has to think of his work not as something completed in days or weeks or even months, but instead in years, decades and centuries.” Lamb can’t help but notice the daily shifts in weather adding up to changing seasons; it all affects his daily work.
This gets reasonably technical about the different qualities of tree species and what they’re like to work with. I learned, or at least was reminded of, the vocabulary word “pleaching,” which means cutting a thin tree trunk vertically – almost but not all the way through – and laying horizontal branches into the crease. It takes skill to describe practical actions in a way that laypeople can picture. However, this account, which covers one August through the following July, is quite monotonous and repetitive. I blame the simple past-tense narration, which quickly becomes an ‘I did this, then I did that’ rundown and had me skimming more than half of the time. Literary techniques would have helped break up the format: extended flashbacks to his apprenticeship or family life, more scenes and dialogue, and some lyrical or imagined passages. (There is one particularly nicely done Hardy-esque vignette where he converses with Dorset locals in a pub.)
During the pandemic, Lamb’s daughters encouraged him to start an Instagram account, which now has 195,000 followers. No doubt it was his social media fame that led to this book deal. His writing, though serviceable, lacks sparkle. I enjoyed it as a window onto a rare profession and nearly forgotten way of life, but would hesitate to recommend unless you have patience and a greater-than-average interest in the subject matter. (Public library) 
Understorey: A Year Among Weeds by Anna Chapman Parker (2024)
(One of my best backlist reads of last year.) Parker set out to study and sketch weeds as a way of cultivating attention and stillness as well as celebrating the everyday and overlooked. Her quick black-and-white drawings and written observations bear witness to the seasons changing but also to the minute alterations she observes in herself and her children. Here are a couple of examples of shorter entries:
25 April
Wild garlic flowers are explosive. As so often in drawing[,] there is a slippery negotiation between fidelity (getting the shape right) and spirit (capturing the feel of it). By the third drawing I’ve got my eye in and the balance between the two is nearer the mark. If I stayed here a week in the grass, drawing a single flower in a single stroke with my eyes closed, maybe eventually I’d hit it bang-on true.
10 December
On my way back from the shops, I find myself detouring to check in on the sowthistle again. Its leaves are drier now and the crisping at the edges is spreading inward. The leftward lean is more pronounced. A few more of the flowers have gone over. But there’s something else, as well – some impression of a former intimacy. A sensation not only of the past flower, but of my past self here, two days ago. Through the drawn encounter, the plant allows me to recognise myself, passing.
Taking a half-hour out of her day to find a subject feels transgressive in one sense, but dutiful – even holy – in another. Along with her frequent illustrations, there are reproductions of other artworks that depict wildflowers in situ, such as Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf (1503). The tone is high-brow, meditative, introspective as she focuses on being present. This was just my kind of nature book, and all the more special because I’ve holidayed in her home of Berwick-on-Tweed so could picture some of the ‘overgrown’ spaces she honours. 
With thanks to Duckworth for the proof copy for review.
Miscellaneous for #ReadIndies: Grenville & Holman-Hunt, Trans History & Travel Poetry, Kathleen Jamie & Kristen Zory King
Squeaking in some more reviews on the last day of a challenge, as is my wont. Today I have mini-responses to a wide selection: a graphic novel companion to LGBTQ history, an exposé that will have you checking the ingredients lists on all your toiletries and other household cleaning products, a memoir of an eccentric Edwardian childhood, poems about modes of travel and the states of mind they produce, superb nature essays blending personal and environmental writing, and a mini collection of flash fiction about young women.
Trans History: From Ancient Times to the Present Day by Alex L. Combs and Andrew Eakett (2025)
Queer people of all varieties have always been with us; they just might have understood their experience or talked about it in different terms. So while Combs and Eakett are careful not to apply labels retrospectively, they feature a plethora of people who lived as a different gender to that assigned at birth. Apart from a few familiar names like Lili Elbe and Marsha P. Johnson, most were new to me. For every heartening story of an emperor, monk or explorer who managed to live out their true identity in peace, there are three distressing ones of those forced to conform. Many Indigenous cultures held a special place for gender-nonconforming individuals; colonizers would have seen this as evidence of desperate need of civilizing. Even doctors who were willing to help with early medical transitions retained primitive ideas about gender and its connection to genitals. The structure is chronological, with a single colour per chapter. Panes reenact scenes and feature talking heads explaining historical developments and critical theory. A final section is devoted to modern-day heroes campaigning for trans rights and seeking to preserve an archive of queer history. This was a little didactic, but ideal for teens, I think, and certainly not just one for gender studies students.
Readalike: Meg-John Barker’s Sexuality: A Graphic Guide
(Read via Edelweiss) [Candlewick Press]
The Case Against Fragrance by Kate Grenville (2017)
File this with other surprising nonfiction books by well-known novelists. In 2015, Grenville started struggling while on a book tour: everything from a taxi’s air freshener and a hotel’s cleaning products to a fellow passenger’s perfume was giving her headaches. She felt like a diva for stipulating she couldn’t be around fragrances, but as she started looking into it she realized she wasn’t alone. I thought this was just going to be about perfume, but it covers all fragranced products, which can list “parfum” on their ingredients without specifying what that is – trade secrets. The problem is, fragrances contain any of thousands of synthetic chemicals, most of which have never been tested and thus are unregulated. Even those found to be carcinogens or endocrine disruptors in rodent studies might be approved for humans because it’s not taken into account how these products are actually used. Prolonged or repeat contact has cumulative effects. The synthetic musks in toiletries and laundry detergents are particularly bad, acting as estrogen mimics and likely associated with prostate and breast cancer. I tend to buy whatever’s on offer in Boots, but as soon as my Herbal Essences bottle is empty I’m going back to Faith in Nature (look for plant extracts). The science at the core of the book is a little repetitive, but eased by the social chapters to either side, and you can tell from the footnotes that Grenville really did her research.
Readalike: Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People
(Secondhand – gift from my wish list) [Text Publishing]
My Grandmothers and I by Diana Holman-Hunt (1960)
The author was the granddaughter of Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt (The Light of the World et al.). While her father was away in India, she was shunted between two homes: Grandmother and Grandfather Freeman’s Sussex estate, and the mausoleum-cum-gallery her paternal grandmother, “Grand,” maintained in Kensington. The grandparents have very different ideas about the sorts of foodstuffs and activities that are suitable for little girls. Both households have servants, but Grand only has the one helper, Helen. Grand probably has a lot of money tied up in property and paintings but lives like a penniless widow. Grand encourages abstemious habits – “Don’t be ruled by Brother Ass, he’s only your body and a nuisance” – and believes in boiled milk and margarine. The single egg she has Helen serve Diana in the morning often smells off. “Food is only important as fuel; whether we like it or not is quite immaterial,” Grand insists. Diana might more naturally gravitate to the pleasures of the Freeman residence, but when it comes time to give a tour of the Holman Hunt oeuvre, she does so with pride. There are some funny moments, such as Diana asking where babies come from after one of the Freemans’ maids gives birth, but this felt so exaggerated and fictionalized – how could she possibly remember details and conversations at the distance of several decades? – that I lost interest by the midpoint.
Readalike: Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece
(Secondhand – Community Furniture Project) [Slightly Foxed]
In Transit: Poems of Travel, ed. Sarah Jackson and Tim Youngs (2018)
Some methods of transport are just more romantic than others. The editors’ introduction notes that “Trains were by far the most popular … followed by aeroplanes and then boats.” Walks and car journeys were surprisingly scarce, they observed, though there are a couple of poems about wandering in New York City. Often, the language is of maps, airports, passports and long flights; of trading one place for another as exile, expatriate or returnee. The collection circuits the globe: China, the Middle East, Greece, Scandinavia, the bayous of the American South. France and Berlin show up more than once. The Emma Press anthologies vary and this one had fewer standout entries than average. However, a few favourites were Nancy Campbell’s “Reading the Water,” about a boy launching out to sea in a kayak; Simon Williams’s “Aboard the Grey Ghost,” about watching for dolphins on a wartime voyage from England to the USA; and Vicky Sparrow’s “Dual Gauge,” which follows a train of thought – about humans as objects moving, perhaps towards death – during a train ride.
(New purchase from publisher) [The Emma Press]
Findings by Kathleen Jamie (2005)
As I found when I reread Sightlines in 2022, Jamie’s topics couldn’t be better suited to my interests: Scottish islands, seabirds, medical history, and the meaning we derive from mortality. She visits the Orkney Islands just before the winter solstice, which draws a faithful few to the tomb of Maes Howe. From her attic room in Fife, she watches peregrine falcons on a cliff face. A gannet’s skull is her prized souvenir from a boat tour to an uninhabited Hebridean island. Vigilance pays off when she hears, then sees, corncrake on the Isle of Coll. Although she has a penchant for empty places, she also writes about cityscapes and hospitals. “Skylines” looks out over Edinburgh, also the setting for “Surgeons’ Hall,” about the pathology museum on the Royal College of Surgeons campus (my 2018 visit). In “Fever” her husband has a scary bout of pneumonia. Jamie is one of our wisest writers on nature and human culture. She asks whether any creatures are truly wild given the pervasiveness of human influence. Even as she seeks out the ancient, she knows we are all ephemeral. “Sabbath” is the best single essay, combining a visit to Lewis with her worry for her mother, who’s had a stroke, and her grandmother, who is to move into a care home. She explores the island “relishing the movement of my body, its own small continuing strength. It wouldn’t last forever – that was the truth of it – but today I could cycle along a road, to see where it led.”
(University library) [Sort Of Books]
My rating in 2012:
My rating now:
Ladies, Ladies, Ladies by Kristen Zory King (2025)
I’d never encountered “chapbook” being used for prose rather than poetry, but it’s an apt term for this 61-page paperback containing 18 stories. It’s remarkable how much King can pack into just a few pages: a voice, a character, a setting and situation, an incident, a salient backstory, and some kind of epiphany or resolution. Fifteen of the pieces focus on one named character, with another three featuring a set (“Ladies,” hence the title). Laura-Jean wonders whether it was a mistake to tell her ex’s mother what she really thinks about him in a Christmas card. A love of ice cream connects Margot’s past and present. A painting in a museum convinces Paige to reconnect with her estranged sister. Alice is sure she sees her double wandering around, and Mary contemplates stealing other people’s cats. The women are moved by rage or lust; stymied by loneliness or nostalgia. Is salvation to be found in scripture or poetry? Each story is distinctive, with no words wasted. I’ll look out for future work by King.
(Duplicate copy passed on by Marcie – thank you!) [Stanchion Books]
Which of these do you fancy reading?
Six more indie publishers spotlighted, for a total of 19 books and 18 publishers this month – job done!
Also covered:
Ansell, Farrier, Febos, Hoffman, Orlean, Stacey
Chevillard, Hopkins & Bateman, McGrath, Richardson
Victorian-Themed Novels by Annie Elliot and Livi Michael
There are plenty more indie books that I’m in the middle of, or picked out but didn’t get to in February. As much as possible, I’ll continue reading (indie) books from my shelves this year.
#ReadIndies Review Catch-Up: Chevillard, Hopkins & Bateman, McGrath, Richardson
Quick thoughts on some more review catch-up books, most of them from 2025. It’s a miscellaneous selection today: absurdist flash fiction by a prolific French author, a self-help graphic novel about surviving heartbreak, a blend of bird photography and poetry, and a debut poetry collection about life and death as encountered by a parish priest.
Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard (2024)
[Trans. from French by David Levin Becker]
I’d not heard of Chevillard, even though he’s published 22 novels and then some. This appealed to me because it’s a collection of micro-essays and short stories, many of them witty etymological or historical riffs. “The Guide,” a tongue-in-cheek tour of places where things may have happened, reminded me of Julian Barnes: “So, right here is where Henri IV ran a hand through his beard, here’s where a raindrop landed on Dante’s forehead, this is where Buster Keaton bit into a pancake” and so on. It’s a clever way of questioning what history has commemorated and whether it matters. Some pieces elaborate on a particular object – Hegel’s cap, a chair, stones, a mass attendance certificate. A concertgoer makes too much of the fact that they were born in the same year as the featured harpsichordist. “Autofiction” had me snorting with laughter, though it’s such a simple conceit. All Chevillard had to do in this authorial rundown of a coming of age was replace “write” with “ejaculate.” This leads to such ridiculous statements as “It was around this time that I began to want to publicly share what I was ejaculating” and “I ejaculate in all the major papers.” There are some great pieces about animals. Others outstayed their welcome, however, such as “Faldoni.” Most feel like intellectual experiments, which isn’t what you want all the time but is interesting to try for a change, so you might read one or two mini-narratives between other things.
With thanks to the University of Yale Press for the free copy for review.
What to Do When You Get Dumped: A Guide to Unbreaking Your Heart by Suzy Hopkins; illus. Hallie Bateman (2025)
Discovered through Molly Wizenberg’s excellent author interview (she did a series on her Substack, “I’ve Got a Feeling”) with illustrator Hallie Bateman. It’s a mother–daughter collaboration – their second, after What to Do When I’m Gone, a funny advice guide that’s been likened to Roz Chast’s work (I’ve gotta get that one!). Hopkins’s husband of 30 years left her for an ex-girlfriend. (Ironic yet true: the girlfriend was a marriage counselor.) Composed while deep in grief, this is a frank look at the flood of emotions that accompany a breakup and gives wry but heartfelt suggestions for what might help: journaling, telling someone what happened, cleaning, making really easy to-do lists. Hopkins interviewed six others who had been dumped to get some extra perspective. Bateman describes her mother’s writing process: she made notes and stuck them in a shoebox with a hole in the lid, then went on a retreat to combine it all into a draft. At this point Bateman started illustrating. It was complicated for her, of course, because the dumper is her dad. She notes in the interview that she couldn’t just say “He’s an asshole” and dismiss him. But she could still position herself as a girlfriend to her mother, listening and commiserating. The vignettes are structured as a countdown starting with day 1,582 – it took over four years for Hopkins to come to terms with her loss and embrace a new life. This is a cute and gentle book that I wish had been around for my mom; it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than therapy.
With thanks to Bloomsbury for the free e-copy for review.
The Beauty of Vultures by Wendy McGrath; photos by Danny Miles (2025)
I enjoyed McGrath’s Santa Rosa trilogy and was keen to try her poetry, so I’m pleased that Marcie’s review pointed me here. McGrath came to collaborate with Miles, a musician, after her son told her of Miles’s newfound love of bird photography. She writes in her introduction that she wanted to go “beyond a simple call-and-response,” to instead use the photos as “portals” into art, history, memory, mythology, wordplay. The form varies to suit the topic: “sonnet, pantoum, acrostic, ghazal, concrete poem, … even a mini-play.” (I didn’t identify all of these on a first read, to be honest.) One poem imitates a matchbox cover and another is printed sideways. Most of the images are black-and-white close-ups, with a handful in colour. There are a few mammals as well as birds. One notable flash of colour is the recipient of the first poem, the sassy rebuttal “A Message from the Peahen to the Peacock.” The hen tells him to quit with the fancy displays and get real: “I’ve seen that gaudy display too often.”
Other poems describe birds, address them directly, or take on their perspectives. Birds are a reassuring presence (cf. Ted Hughes on swifts): “I counted on our robins to return every spring” as a balm, the anxious speaker reports in “Air raid siren.” A nest of gape-mouthed baby swallows in an outhouse is the prize at the end of a long countryside walk. With its alliteration and repetition, “The Goldfinch Charm” feels like an incantation. Birds model grace (or at least the appearance of grace):
Assume a buoyancy, lightness, as though you were about to fly.
That yellow rubber duck is my surreal mythology.
Head above water. Stay calm. Paddle like crazy.
They link the natural world and the human in these gorgeous poems that interact with the images in ways that both lead and illuminate.
A female swan is a pen and eyes open
I try to write this dream:
a moment stolen or given.
Published by NeWest Press. With thanks to the author for the free e-copy for review.
Dirt Rich by Graeme Richardson (2026)
Dirt poor? Nah. Miners, gravediggers and archaeologists will tell you that dirt is precious. It’s where lots of our food and minerals come from; it’s what we’ll return to – our bodies as well as the material traces of what we loved and cared for. Richardson, the poetry critic for the Sunday Times, comes from Nottinghamshire mining country and has worked as a chaplain and parish priest. He writes of church interiors and cemeteries, funerals and crumbling faith. There’s a harsh reminder of life’s unpredictability in the juxtaposition of “For the Album,” about the photographic evidence of a wedding day; and, beginning on the facing page, “After the Death of a Child.” It opens with “A Pastoral Heckle”: “The dead live on in memory? Not true. / They lodge there dead, and yours not theirs the hell.” Richardson now lives in Germany, so there are continental scenes as well as ecclesial English ones. The elegiac tone of standouts such as “Last of the Coalmine Choirboys” (with its words drawn from scripture and hymns) is tempered by the chaotic joy of multiple poems about parenthood in the final section. Throughout, the imagery and language glisten. I loved the slant rhyme, assonance and sibilance in “Rewilding the Churchyard”: “Cedars and self-seeders link / with the storm-forked sycamore.” I highly recommend this debut collection.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
Which of these do you fancy reading?
(Goodbye to) Winter Reads by Sylvia Plath (#ReadIndies) & Kathleen Winter
The sunshine, temperatures and flora suggest that spring is here to stay, though I wouldn’t be surprised by a return of the cold and wet in March. We live in the wrong part of the UK for snow lovers; we didn’t get any snow this winter, apart from some early-morning flurries one day when I was fast asleep. My seasonal reading consisted of a lesser-known posthumous poetry collection, a record of a sea voyage past Greenland, and a silly children’s book.
Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath (1971)
A prefatory note from Ted Hughes explains that these poems “are all out of the batch from which the Ariel poems were more or less arbitrarily chosen and they were all composed in the last nine months of Sylvia Plath’s life.” Ariel is much the stronger collection. There are only 19 poems here; the final one, “Three Women,” is more of a play (subtitled “A Poem for Three Voices”) set on a maternity ward. Motherhood is a central concern throughout. There’s harsh, unpleasant language around womanhood in general. The opening title poem is a marvel of artistic imagery, assonance and internal rhyme, but also contains a metaphor that made me cringe: “Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, / Truer than women, / They seed so effortlessly!”
That paints motherhood as hard won, as “Childless Woman” reinforces by turning purposeless menstruation into a horror story with its vocabulary of “a child’s shriek” — “Spiderlike” — “Uttering nothing but blood— / Taste it, dark red!” — “My funeral” — “the mouths of corpses”. Plath was certainly ambivalent about babies (“Thalidomide” is particularly frightening) but I bristled at childlessness being linked with living only for oneself. Then again, pretty much everything – men, God, travel, animals – is portrayed negatively here. “Winter Trees” is the single poem I’d anthologize. (University library)
Published by Faber, so counts for #ReadIndies
Boundless: Adventures in the Northwest Passage by Kathleen Winter (2015)
I read this excellent travel book slowly, over most of the winter, including during that surreal period when He Who Shall Not Be Named was threatening to annex Greenland. Winter was invited to be a writer-in-residence aboard an icebreaker travelling through the Northwest Passage, past southwest Greenland and threading between the islands of the Canadian Arctic. She was prepared: a friend had taught her that the only thing to say in these sorts of lucky, unexpected scenarios is “My bags are already packed.” Her ‘getaway bag’ of two pairs of underwear, a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a LBD wasn’t exactly Arctic-ready, but she still had a head start. She adds an old concertina and worn hiking boots that resemble “lobes of some mushroom cracked off the bole of an old warrior tree.”
It’s not a long or gruelling trip, so there’s not much of the bellyaching that bores me in trekking books. Winter is interested in everything: birds, folk music, Indigenous arts and crafts, her fellow passengers’ stories, the infamous lost Arctic expeditions, and her family’s history in England and Canada. She collects her scraps of notes in a Ziploc, and that’s what this book is – a grab bag. Winter is enthusiastic yet prioritizes quiet epiphanies about the sacredness of land and creatures over thrills – though their vessel does get stranded on rocks and requires a Coast Guard rescue. It would be interesting to reread her Orange Prize-shortlisted novel about an intersex person, Annabel. (If you hanker to go deeper about Greenland, read This Cold Heaven by Gretel Ehrlich and Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg.) (Secondhand – Bas Books)
& A bonus children’s book:
The Snow Womble by Elisabeth Beresford; illus. Margaret Gordon (1975) – I thought this would be a cute one to read even though I’m unfamiliar with the Wombles. But it’s just a one-note extended joke about the creatures not being able to tell their snowman version of Great-Uncle Bulgaria apart from the real one. The best thing about reading this was the frontispiece’s juxtaposition of elements: the computer-printed bookplate, the nominal secondhand price (withdrawn from London Borough of Sutton Public Libraries), and the wholly inappropriate inscription Grandad Nick chose from King Lear! (Little Free Library)
#ReadIndies Nonfiction Catch-Up: Ansell, Farrier, Febos, Hoffman, Orlean and Stacey
These are all 2025 releases; for some, it’s approaching a year since I was sent a review copy or read the book. Silly me. At last, I’ve caught up. Reading Indies month, hosted by Kaggsy in memory of her late co-host Lizzy Siddal, is the perfect time to feature books from five independent publishers. I have four works that might broadly be classed as nature writing – though their topics range from birdsong and technology to living in Greece and rewilding a plot in northern Spain – and explorations of celibacy and the writer’s profession.
The Edge of Silence: In Search of the Disappearing Sounds of Nature by Neil Ansell
Ansell draws parallels between his advancing hearing loss and the biodiversity crisis. He puts together a wish list of species – mostly seabirds (divers, grebes), but also inland birds (nightjars) and a couple of non-avian representatives (otters) – that he wants to hear and sets off on public transport adventures to find them. “I must find beauty where I can, and while I still can,” he vows. From his home on the western coast of Scotland near the Highlands, this involves trains or buses that never align with the ferry timetables. Furthest afield for him are two nature reserves in northern England where his mission is to hear bitterns “booming” and natterjack toads croaking at night. There are also mountain excursions to locate ptarmigan, greenshank, and black grouse. His island quarry includes Manx shearwaters (Rum), corncrakes (Coll), puffins (Sanday), and storm petrels (Shetland).
Camping in a tent means cold nights, interrupted sleep, and clouds of midges, but it’s all worth it to have unrepeatable wildlife experiences. He has a very high hit rate for (seeing and) hearing what he intends to, even when they’re just on the verge of what he can decipher with his hearing aids. On the rare occasions when he misses out, he consoles himself with earlier encounters. “I shall settle for the memory, for it feels unimprovable, like a spell that I do not want to break.” I’ve read all of Ansell’s nature memoirs and consider him one of the UK’s top writers on the natural world. His accounts of his low-carbon travels are entertaining, and the tug-of-war between resisting and coming to terms with his disability is heartening. “I have spent this year in defiance of a relentless, unstoppable countdown,” he reflects. What makes this book more universal than niche is the deadline: we and all of these creatures face extinction. Whether it’s sooner or later depends on how we act to address the environmental polycrisis.
With thanks to Birlinn for the free copy for review.
Nature’s Genius: Evolution’s Lessons for a Changing Planet by David Farrier
Farrier’s Footprints, which tells the story of the human impact on the Earth, was one of my favourite books of 2020. This contains a similar blend of history, science, and literary points of reference (Farrier is a professor of literature and the environment at the University of Edinburgh), with past changes offering a template for how the future might look different. “We are forcing nature to reimagine itself, and to avert calamity we need to do the same,” he writes. Cliff swallows have evolved blunter wings to better evade cars; captive breeding led foxes to develop the domesticated traits of pet dogs.
It’s not just other species that experience current evolution. Thanks to food abundance and a sedentary lifestyle, humans show a “consumer phenotype,” which superseded the Palaeolithic (95% of human history) and tends toward earlier puberty, autoimmune diseases, and obesity. Farrier also looks at notions of intelligence, language, and time in nature. Sustainable cities will have to cleverly reuse materials. For instance, The Waste House in Brighton is 90% rubbish. (This I have to see!)
There are many interesting nuggets here, and statements that are difficult to argue with, but I struggled to find an overall thread. Cool to see my husband’s old housemate mentioned, though. (Duncan Geere, for collaborating on a hybrid science–art project turning climate data into techno music.)
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
The Dry Season: Finding Pleasure in a Year without Sex by Melissa Febos
Febos considers but rejects the term “sex addiction” for the years in which she had compulsive casual sex (with “the Last Man,” yes, but mostly with women). Since her early teen years, she’d never not been tied to someone. Brief liaisons alternated with long-term relationships: three years with “the Best Ex”; two years that were so emotionally tumultuous that she refers to the woman as “the Maelstrom.” It was the implosion of the latter affair that led to Febos deciding to experiment with celibacy, first for three months, then for a whole year. “I felt feral and sad and couldn’t explain it, but I knew that something had to change.”
The quest involved some research into celibate movements in history, but was largely an internal investigation of her past and psyche. Febos found that she was less attuned to the male gaze. Having worn high heels almost daily for 20 years, she discovered she’s more of a trainers person. Although she was still tempted to flirt with attractive women, e.g. on an airplane, she consciously resisted the impulse to spin random meetings into one-night stands. (A therapist had stopped her short with the blunt observation, “you use people.”) With a new focus on the life of the mind, she insists, “My life was empty of lovers and more full than it had ever been.” (This reminded me of Audre Lorde’s writing on the erotic.) As Silvana Panciera, an Italian scholar on the beguines (a secular nun-like sisterhood), told her: “When you don’t belong to anyone, you belong to everyone. You feel able to love without limits.”
Intriguing that this is all a retrospective, reflecting on her thirties; Febos is now in her mid-forties and married to a woman (poet Donika Kelly). Clearly she felt that it was an important enough year – with landmark epiphanies that changed her and have the potential to help others – to form the basis for a book. For me, she didn’t have much new to offer about celibacy, though it was interesting to read about the topic from an areligious perspective. But I admire the depth of her self-knowledge, and particularly her ability to recreate her mindset at different times. This is another one, like her Girlhood, to keep on the shelf as a model.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece by Julian Hoffman
Hoffman’s Irreplaceable was my nonfiction book of 2019. Whereas that was a work with a global environmentalist perspective, Lifelines is more personal in scope. It tracks the author’s unexpected route from Canada via the UK to Prespa, a remote area of northern Greece that’s at the crossroads with Albania and North Macedonia. He and his wife, Julia, encountered Prespa in a book and, longing for respite from the breakneck pace of life in London, moved there in 2000. “Like the rivers that spill into these shared lakes, lifelines rarely flow straight. Instead, they contain bends, meanders and loops; they hold, at times, turns of extraordinary surprise.” Birdwatching, which Hoffman suggests is as “a way of cultivating attention,” had been their gateway into a love for nature developed over the next quarter-century and more, and in Greece they delighted in seeing great white and Dalmatian pelicans (which feature on the splendid U.S. cover. It would be lovely to have an illustrated edition of this.)
One strand of this warm and fluent memoir is about making a home in Greece: buying and renovating a semi-derelict property, experiencing xenophobia and hospitality from different quarters, and finding a sense of belonging. They’re happy to share their home with nesting wrens, who recur across the book and connect to the tagline of “a story of shelter shared.” In probing the history of his adopted country, Hoffman comes to realise the false, arbitrary nature of borders – wildlife such as brown bears and wolves pay these no heed. Everything is connected and questions of justice are always intersectional. The Covid pandemic and avian influenza (which devastated the region’s pelicans) are setbacks that Hoffman addresses honestly. But the lingering message is a valuable one of bridging divisions and learning how to live in harmony with other people – and with other species.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the free copy for review.
Joyride by Susan Orlean
As a long-time staff writer for The New Yorker, Orlean has had the good fortune to be able to follow her curiosity wherever it leads, chasing the subjects that interest her and drawing readers in with her infectious enthusiasm. She grew up in suburban Ohio, attended college in Michigan, and lived in Portland, Oregon and Boston before moving to New York City. Her trajectory was from local and alternative papers to the most enviable of national magazines: Esquire, Rolling Stone and Vogue. Orlean gives behind-the-scenes information on lots of her early stories, some of which are reprinted in an appendix. “If you’re truly open, it’s easy to fall in love with your subject,” she writes; maintaining objectivity could be difficult, as when she profiled an Indian spiritual leader with a cult following; and fended off an interviewee’s attachment when she went on the road with a Black gospel choir.
Her personal life takes a backseat to her career, though she is frank about the breakdown of her first marriage, her second chance at love and late motherhood, and a surprise bout with lung cancer. The chronological approach proceeds book by book, delving into her inspirations, research process and publication journeys. Her first book was about Saturday night as experienced across America. It was a more innocent time, when subjects were more trusting. Orlean and her second husband had farms in the Hudson Valley of New York and in greater Los Angeles, and she ended up writing a lot about animals, with books on Rin Tin Tin and one collecting her animal pieces. There was also, of course, The Library Book, about the wild history of the main Los Angeles public library. But it’s her The Orchid Thief – and the movie (not) based on it, Adaptation – that’s among my favourites, so the long section on that was the biggest thrill for me. There are also black-and-white images scattered through.
It was slightly unfortunate that I read this at the same time as Book of Lives – who could compete with Margaret Atwood? – but it is, yes, a joy to read about Orlean’s writing life. She’s full of enthusiasm and good sense, depicting the vocation as part toil and part magic:
“I find superhuman self-confidence when I’m working on a story. The bashfulness and vulnerability that I might otherwise experience in a new setting melt away, and my desire to connect, to observe, to understand, powers me through.”
“I like to do a gut check any time I dismiss or deplore something I don’t know anything about. That feels like reason enough to learn about it.”
“anything at all is worth writing about if you care about it and it makes you curious and makes you want to holler about it to other people”
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
No Paradise with Wolves: A Journey of Rewilding and Resilience by Katie Stacey
I had the good fortune to visit Wild Finca, Luke Massey and Katie Stacey’s rewilding site in Asturias, while on holiday in northern Spain in May 2022, and was intrigued to learn more about their strategy and experiences. This detailed account of the first four years begins with their search for a property in 2018 and traces the steps of their “agriwilding” of a derelict farm: creating a vegetable garden and tending to fruit trees, but also digging ponds, training up hedgerows, and setting up rotational grazing. Their every decision went against the grain. Others focussed on one crop or type of livestock while they encouraged unruly variety, keeping chickens, ducks, goats, horses and sheep. Their neighbours removed brush in the name of tidiness; they left the bramble and gorse to welcome in migrant birds. New species turned up all the time, from butterflies and newts to owls and a golden fox.
Luke is a wildlife guide and photographer. He and Katie are conservation storytellers, trying to get people to think differently about land management. The title is a Spanish farmers’ and hunters’ slogan about the Iberian wolf. Fear of wolves runs deep in the region. Initially, filming wolves was one of the couple’s major goals, but they had to step back because staking out the animals’ haunts felt risky; better to let them alone and not attract the wrong attention. (Wolf hunting was banned across Spain in 2021.) There’s a parallel to be found here between seeing wolves as a threat and the mild xenophobia the couple experienced. Other challenges included incompetent house-sitters, off-lead dogs killing livestock, the pandemic, wildfires, and hunters passing through weekly (as in France – as we discovered at Le Moulin de Pensol in 2024 – hunters have the right to traverse private land in Spain).
Luke and Katie hope to model new ways of living harmoniously with nature – even bears and wolves, which haven’t made it to their land yet, but might in the future – for the region’s traditional farmers. They’re approaching self-sufficiency – for fruit and vegetables, anyway – and raising their sons, Roan and Albus, to love the wild. We had a great day at Wild Finca: a long tour and badger-watching vigil (no luck that time) led by Luke; nettle lemonade and sponge cake with strawberries served by Katie and the boys. I was clear how much hard work has gone into the land and the low-impact buildings on it. With the exception of some Workaway volunteers, they’ve done it all themselves.
Katie Stacey’s storytelling is effortless and conversational, making this impassioned memoir a pleasure to read. It chimed perfectly with Hoffman’s writing (above) about the fear of bears and wolves, and reparation policies for farmers, in Europe. I’d love to see the book get a bigger-budget release complete with illustrations, a less misleading title, the thorough line editing it deserves, and more developmental work to enhance the literary technique – as in the beautiful final chapter, a present-tense recreation of a typical walk along The Loop. All this would help to get the message the wider reach that authors like Isabella Tree have found. “I want to be remembered for the wild spaces I leave behind,” Katie writes in the book’s final pages. “I want to be remembered as someone who inspired people to seek a deeper connection to nature.” You can’t help but be impressed by how much of a difference two people seeking to live differently have achieved in just a handful of years. We can all rewild the spaces available to us (see also Kate Bradbury’s One Garden against the World), too.
With thanks to Earth Books (Collective Ink) for the free copy for review.
Which of these do you fancy reading?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 