20 Books of Summer, 13–16: Tony Chan, Jen Hadfield, Kenward Anthology, Catherine Taylor
Three from my initial list (all nonfiction) and one substitute picked up at random (poetry). These are strongly place-based selections, ranging from Sheffield to Shetland and drawing on travels while also commenting on how gender and dis/ability affect daily life as well as the experience of nature.
Four Points Fourteen Lines by Tony Chan (2016)
Chan is a schoolteacher who, in 2015, left his day job to undertake a 78-day solo walk between “the four extreme cardinal points of the British mainland”: Dunnet Head (North) to Ardnamurchan Point (West) in Scotland, down to Lowestoft Ness (East) in Suffolk and across to Lizard Point, Cornwall (South). It was a solo trek of 1,400 miles. He wrote one sonnet per day, not always adhering to the same rhyme scheme but fitting his sentiments into 14 lines of standard length. He doesn’t document much practical information, but does admit he stayed in decent hotels, ate hot meals, etc. Each poem is named for the starting point and destination, but the topic might be what he sees, an experience on the road, a memory, or whatever. “Evanton to Inverness” decries a gloomy city; “Inverness to Foyers” gives thanks for his shoes and lycra undershorts. He compares Highlanders to heroic Trojans: “Something sincere in their browned, moss-green tweeds, / In their greeting voice of gentle tenor. / From ancient Hector or from ancient clans, / Here live men most earnest in words and deeds.” None of the poems are laudable in their own right, but it’s a pleasant enough project. Too often, though, Chan resorts to outmoded vocabulary to fit the form or try to prove a poetic pedigree (“Suddenly comes an Old Testament of deluge and / Tempest, deluding the sense wholly”; “I know these streets, whence they come and whither / They run”; “I learnt well some verses of Tennyson / Years ago when noble dreams were begat”) when he might have been better off varying the form and/or using free verse. (Signed copy from Little Free Library) 
Storm Pegs: A Life Made in Shetland by Jen Hadfield (2024)
This is not so much a straightforward memoir as a set of atmospheric vignettes, each headed by a relevant word or phrase in the Shaetlan dialect. Hadfield, who is British Canadian, moved to the islands in her late twenties in 2006 and soon found her niche. “My new life quickly debunked those Edge-of-the-World myths – Shetland was too busy to feel remote, and had too strong a sense of its own identity to feel frontier-like.” It’s gently ironic, she notes, that she’s a terrible sailor and gets vertigo at height yet lives somewhere with perilous cliff edges that is often reachable only by sea. Living in a trailer waiting for her home to be built on West Burra, she feels the line between indoors and out is especially thin. It’s a life of wild swimming, beachcombing, fresh fish, folk music, seabirds, kind neighbours, and good cheer that warms long winter nights. After the isolation of the pandemic period comes the unexpected joy of a partner and a pregnancy in her mid-forties. Hadfield is a Windham-Campbell Prize-winning poet, and her lyrical prose is full of lovely observations that made me hanker to return to Shetland – it’s been 19 years since my only visit, after all. This was a slow read I savoured for its language and sense of place. 
With thanks to Picador for the free paperback copy for review.
From Shetland authors, I have also reviewed:
Orchid Summer by Jon Dunn (Hadfield mentions him)
Sea Bean by Sally Huband (Hadfield meets her)
The Valley at the Centre of the World by Malachy Tallack
Moving Mountains: Writing Nature through Illness and Disability, ed. Louise Kenward (2023)
I often read memoirs about chronic illness and disability – the sort of narratives recognized by the Barbellion and ACDI Literary Prizes – and the idea of nature essays that reckon with health limitations was an irresistible draw. The quality in this anthology varies widely, from excellent to barely readable (for poor prose or pretentiousness). I’ll be kind and not name names in the latter category; I’ll only say the book has been poorly served by the editing process. The best material is generally from authors with published books: Polly Atkin (Some of Us Just Fall; see also her recent response to the Raynor Winn fiasco), Victoria Bennett (All My Wild Mothers), Sally Huband (as above!), and Abi Palmer (Sanatorium). For the first three, the essay feels like an extension of their memoir, while Palmer’s inventive piece is about recreating seasons for her indoor cats. My three favourite entries, however, were Louisa Adjoa Parker’s poem “This Is Not Just Tired,” Nic Wilson’s “A Quince in the Hand” (she’s an acquaintance through New Networks for Nature and has a memoir out this summer, Land Beneath the Waves), and Eli Clare’s “Moving Close to the Ground,” about being willing to scoot and crawl to get into nature. A number of the other pieces are repetitive, overlong or poorly shaped and don’t integrate information about illness in a natural way. Kudos to Kenward for including BIPOC and trans/queer voices, though. (Christmas gift from my wish list) 
The Stirrings: Coming of Age in Northern Time by Catherine Taylor (2023)
“A typical family and an ordinary story, although neither the family nor the story seems commonplace when it is your family and your story.”
Taylor, who was born in New Zealand and grew up in Sheffield, won the Ackerley Prize for this memoir. (After Dunmore and King, this is the third in my intended four-in-a-row on the 20 Books of Summer Bingo card, fulfilling the “Book published in summer” category – August 2023.) It is bookended by two pivotal summers: 1976, the last normal season in her household before her father left; and 1989, the “Second Summer of Love,” when she had an abortion (the subject of “Milk Teeth,” the best individual chapter and a strong stand-alone essay). In between, fear and outrage overshadow her life: the Yorkshire Ripper is at large, nuclear war looms, mines are closing and protesters meet with harsh reprisals, and her own health falters until she gets a diagnosis of Graves’ disease. Then, in her final year at Cardiff, one of their housemates is found dead. Taylor draws reasonably subtle links to the present day, when fascism, global threats, and femicide are, unfortunately, as timely as ever. She’s the sort of personality I see at every London literary event I attend: Wellcome Book Prize ceremonies, Weatherglass’s Future of the Novella event, and so on. I got the feeling this book is more about bearing witness to history than revealing herself, and so I never warmed to it or to her on the page. But if you’d like to get a feel for the mood of the times, or you have experience of the settings and period, you may well enjoy it more than I did. (New purchase from Bookshop.org with a Christmas book token) 
20 Books of Summer, 8: Au Revoir, Tristesse by Viv Groskop
This is a substitute I picked out as a potential (now belated) #ParisinJuly2025 contribution. There’s been little time for writing over the past week while we’ve been hosting my sister and brother-in-law. Their whirlwind trip was shortened by a day due to a cancelled flight from the States, but we managed to pack in a lot, including a two-night mini-break down in Devon.
Reminiscent of Something to Declare by Julian Barnes and How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, this is a lighthearted tour through a dozen great works of French literature and the lessons they might offer modern readers on how to live well. Ever since her school days of studying French and spending every family holiday in France, Groskop has been obsessed with the language and culture. In most of the chapters, she undertakes a rereading of a novel she first read as a teenager or Cambridge student, marveling at how much more she gets out of it with greater life experience.
Although her choices are indisputable classics, she acknowledges they can only ever be an incomplete and biased selection, unfortunately all white and largely male, though she opens with Bonjour Tristesse and also includes Colette and Duras novels. I’d only read three of her dozen, in translation: along with the Sagan, Dangerous Liaisons and Madame Bovary (as well as other books by two of the additional authors), but it didn’t make much difference whether I was familiar with a plot or not. So long as one is not allergic to spoilers, it’s possible to enjoy these miniature essays’ witty combination of literary criticism, biographical information, self-help messaging, and a bit of autobiographical context.
The male writers tended to be syphilitic workaholics – Balzac is reputed to have drunk 50 cups of coffee per day to sustain his output – while the women flouted social conventions by drinking, taking much younger (and/or female) lovers and driving recklessly. While the subtitle promises “Lessons in Happiness,” from Hugo to Camus these are in fact pretty miserable narratives in which, as was especially common in the 19th century, protagonists are punished for ambition or transgressions, or never reach contentment because of self-delusion.
In boiling down each plot to one line of advice for a chapter title, Groskop’s tone alternates between earnest (“Our greatest weaknesses conceal our greatest strengths” = Cyrano de Bergerac) and tongue in cheek (“Social climbing rarely pays off, but you’ll probably want to do it anyway” = Le Rouge et le Noir). She describes the works with genuine affection and clearly believes they are still worth reading, yet isn’t afraid to question those aspects that have aged less well. Controversially, she suggests being selective with Proust’s mammoth oeuvre: “skim-read, rereading the passages you fall in love with and discarding the rest.” She also surveys how the stories live on through adaptations. Of the new-to-me, I’m most drawn to Bel-Ami but also fancy La Cousine Bette. This was a delight I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to fellow Francophiles. (New purchase – remainder from Hay Cinema Bookshop) 
Three Days in June vs. Three Weeks in July
Two very good 2025 releases that I read from the library. While they could hardly be more different in tone and particulars, I couldn’t resist linking them via their titles.
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
(From my Most Anticipated list.) A delightful little book that I loved more than I expected to, for several reasons: the effective use of a wedding weekend as a way of examining what goes wrong in marriages and what we choose to live with versus what we can’t forgive; Gail’s first-person narration, a rarity for Tyler* and a decision that adds depth to what might otherwise have been a two-dimensional depiction of a woman whose people skills leave something to be desired; and the unexpected presence of a cat who brings warmth and caprice back into her home. (I read this soon after losing my old cat, and it was comforting to be reminded that cats and their funny ways are the same the world over.)
From Tyler’s oeuvre, this reminded me most of The Amateur Marriage and has a surprise Larry’s Party-esque ending. The discussion of the outmoded practice of tapping one’s watch is a neat tie-in to her recurring theme of the nature of time. And through the lunch out at a chic crab restaurant, she succeeds at making the Baltimore setting essential rather than incidental, more so than in much of her other work.
Gail is in the sandwich generation with a daughter just married and an old mother who’s just about independent. I appreciated that she’s 61 and contemplating retirement, but still feels as if she hasn’t a clue: “What was I supposed to do with the rest of my life? I’m too young for this, I thought. Not too old, as you might expect, but too young, too inept, too uninformed. How come there weren’t any grownups around? Why did everyone just assume I knew what I was doing?”
My only misgiving is that Tyler doesn’t quite get it right about the younger generation: women who are in their early thirties in 2023 (so born about 1990) wouldn’t be called Debbie and Bitsy. To some degree, Tyler’s still stuck back in the 1970s, but her observations about married couples and family dynamics are as shrewd as ever. Especially because of the novella length, I can recommend this to readers wanting to try Tyler for the first time.
*I’ve noted it in Earthly Possessions. Anywhere else?
Three Weeks in July: 7/7, The Aftermath, and the Deadly Manhunt by Adam Wishart and James Nally
July 7th is my wedding anniversary but before that, and ever since, it’s been known as the date of the UK’s worst terrorist attack, a sort of lesser 9/11 – and while reading this I felt the same way that I’ve felt reading books about 9/11: a sort of awed horror. Suicide bombers who were born in the UK but radicalized on trips to Islamic training camps in Pakistan set off explosions on three Underground trains and one London bus. I didn’t think my memories of 7/7 were strong, yet some names were incredibly familiar to me (chiefly Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the attacks; Jean Charles de Menezes, the innocent Brazilian electrician shot dead on a Tube train when confused with a suspect in the 21/7 copycat plot – police were operating under a new shoot-to-kill policy and this was the tragic result).
Fifty-two people were killed that day, ranging in age from 20 to 60; 20 were not UK citizens, hailing from everywhere from Grenada to Mauritius. But a total of 770 people were injured. I found the authors’ recreation of events very gripping, though do be warned that there is a lot of gruesome medical and forensic detail about fatalities and injuries. They humanize the scale of events and make things personal by focusing on four individuals who were injured, even losing multiple limbs in some cases, but survived and now work in motivational speaking, disability services or survivor advocacy.
What really got to me was thinking about all the hundreds of people who, 20 years on, still live with permanent pain, disability or grief because of the randomness of them or their loved ones getting caught up in a few misguided zealots’ plot. One detail that particularly struck me: with the Tube tunnels closed off at both ends while searchers recovered bodies, the temperature rose to 50 degrees C (122 degrees F), only exacerbating the stench. The book mostly avoids cliches and overwriting, though I did find myself skimming in places. It is based on the research done for a BBC documentary series and synthesizes a lot of material in an engaging way that does justice to the victims. 
Have you read one or both of these?
Could you see yourself picking one of them up?
A Return to the Outer Hebrides & What I Read (Including 20 Books of Summer, 4–5)
Three summers ago, we first explored the Outer Hebrides, moving south from Lewis through Harris to North Uist and Benbecula. It took longer than expected to make it back to the Western Isles. (It’s also taken longer than expected to write up a trip we took in late June. My excuse is we’ve been having work done in the house for a couple of weeks and it’s thrown off routines, plus we’re now away again on a short break.) We kept our word and completed the southern half of the chain this year, staying on South Uist and journeying via Eriskay to Barra and Vatersay. As last time, we combined public transport and car rental. Unlike last time, we had no major transport disasters. We took the train up to Edinburgh, where we rented a car and headed first of all to the edge of the Cairngorms. The village had little to offer apart from riverside scenery, so while my husband did beetle-collecting fieldwork nearby, I spent my time reading in the idyllic B&B grounds. Here the wildlife came to me: seven stags and a red squirrel! I’ve substituted in two of my relevant trip reads to my 20 Books of Summer roster.
20 Books of Summer, #4
The Cone-Gatherers by Robin Jenkins (1955)
Rightly likened to Of Mice and Men, this is an engrossing short novel about two brothers, Neil and Calum, tasked with climbing trees and gathering the pinecones of a wealthy Scottish estate. They will be used to replant the many woodlands being cut down to fuel the war effort. Calum, the younger brother, is physically and intellectually disabled but has a deep well of compassion for living creatures. He has unwittingly made an enemy of the estate’s gamekeeper, Duror, by releasing wounded rabbits from his traps. Much of the story is taken up with Duror’s seemingly baseless feud against the brothers – though we’re meant to understand that his bedbound wife’s obesity and his subsequent sexual frustration may have something to do with it – as well as with Lady Runcie-Campbell’s class prejudice. Her son, Roderick, is an unexpected would-be hero and voice of pure empathy. I read this quickly, with grim fascination, knowing tragedy was coming but not quite how things would play out. The introduction to Canongate’s Canons Collection edition is by actor Paul Giamatti, of all people. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Then it was a several-hour drive to Oban to take our rescheduled ferry over to Lochboisdale in South Uist for the holiday proper to begin. With a six-night Airbnb stay booked in the home of a local woman, we relaxed into an unhurried pace of life. It’s more about the landscape than any particular indoor attractions here; during rainy spells we toured the excellent museum, tasted gin and rum at the North Uist (Downpour) and Benbecula (MacMillan Spirits) distilleries, took advantage of 5 for £1 books and CDs at the Benbecula thrift shop, and tried a couple of cafes, but for the most part we just made a few short excursions per day.
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- Honesty box with cakes
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- Photos by Chris Foster
We saw acres of machair (wildflower-rich fields), sand dunes undermined by an empire of rabbits, deserted beaches, and rare patches of woodland. We successfully staked out white-tailed sea eagles, red-throated divers, and a red-necked phalarope; watched cuckoos and short-eared owls (who are active in the daytime) as much as possible; and stared at every likely sea loch but failed to find an otter. Each evening we’d heat up a simple supper – pouches of curry and rice; ravioli with tomato sauce – using the microwave and hob. In quite a contrast to the heatwave-mired south of England, we had 12–16 degrees C (54–61 degrees F) most days, with light rain and high winds. The radiators and Rayburn (a big stove like an Aga) were on most of the time.
20 Books of Summer, #5
The Inn at the Edge of the World by Alice Thomas Ellis (1990)
Eric and Mabel moved from the Midlands to run a hotel on a remote Scottish island. He places an advertisement in select London periodicals to lure in some Christmas-haters for the holidays and attracts a motley group: a bereaved former soldier writing a biography of General Gordon, a pair of actors known only for commercials, a psychoanalyst, and a department store buyer looking for a novel sweater pattern. Mabel decides she’s had enough and flees the island just as the guests start arriving. One guest is stalking another; one has history on the island. And all along, there are hints that this is a site of major selkie activity. I found it jarring how the novella moved from Shena Mackay-like social comedy into magic realism and doubt I’ll read more by Ellis (I’d already read one volume of Home Life), though this was light and enjoyable enough. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
I was pleased that I managed to find two relevant hyperlocal reads. It was so neat to encounter the same place names out the car window and in my books:
To the Edge of the Sea: Schooldays of a Crofter’s Child by Christina Hall (1995)
Hall’s father inherited a South Uist croft and the family struggled so much financially that she was sent to live with her schoolteacher aunts on Benbecula and then Barra. Some things haven’t changed on the islands, such as the rabbits on the machair and the notoriously choppy ferry rides back to the mainland, where she attended a convent school at Fort William. There are some enjoyable pen portraits, such as of an Irish peddler. The most memorable incident was when she ran away from the aunts’ to attend a family wedding on Benbecula. The tone is pleasant, reminiscent of early Diana Athill and Doreen Tovey, but this isn’t one to pick up unless you have a particular interest in the places described. (Public library)
A Summer Like No Other by Martin MacIntyre (2018; 2025)
As World Cup fever ramps up in the summer of 1978, aimless 20-year-old Colin Quinn breaks from his university studies to shadow his uncle, Dr. Ruairidh Gillies, during his locum on South Uist. Between the home medical visits and recording folktales and songs by an eighty-something bard and several other members of the community, Colin gets to know almost everyone – but the person he knows the least well is himself. His involvement with the bard’s great-niece and her abusive husband will change the tenor of the summer for him, and have lasting consequences that only become clear decades later.
The many Gaelic phrases, defined in footnotes, help to create the atmosphere. The chapter epigraphs from the legend of Oisín (son of Fionn Mac Cumhaill) and Tír Na nÓg, the land of eternal youth, heighten the contrast between Colin’s idealism and the reality of this life-changing season. I think this is the first book I’ve read that was originally published in Gaelic and I hope it will find readers far beyond its island niche. (BookSirens)
There’s Something about Mary
My husband would like it known that he was the clever clogs who spotted a theme to our trip: Mary.
1) Our transit through Edinburgh was brief and muggy, but we made sure to leave just enough time to queue for cones at Mary’s Milk Bar, which has the most interesting flavours you’ll find anywhere. Pictured, though half eaten, are my one scoop of Earl Grey and peach sorbet and one scoop of fig and cardamom ice cream. When we returned to Edinburgh to return the car at the end of our trip, I took the train home by myself but C stayed on for a conference, during which he treated himself to another round at Mary’s.
A piper statue at the Airbnb that continually frightened us on the stairs.
2) Our South Uist host was Mary MacInnes, a major mover and shaker in the local Gaelic-speaking community. (Her Alexa even obeyed Gaelic commands.) She is a retired head teacher of one of the schools and had various grandchildren popping in and out. Thanks to her heads-up, we had a unique cultural experience: a local arts venue’s lunchtime ceilidh of live music that was being filmed for BBC Scotland. Between her and others, we heard a lot of spoken Gaelic and got further into the mood by finding Julie Fowlis’s Gaelic-language albums online and playing them in our rental car. Each morning, Mary served us breakfast. We made the mistake of answering “Yes” to the question “D’ye take porridge?” on the first morning and had to slog through a stodgy bowl for five of the next six days. However, she also produced fresh-baked scones on two days and that made up for it. Triangular and baked in a cast-iron skillet, they tasted more like soda bread and were a perfect snack with jam.
3) The final full day of our trip was spent on Barra, a quick hop from South Uist. Whereas Lewis and Harris are staunchly Protestant, the southern islands are Catholic. We’d found a roadside shrine on South Uist, and on this late June day we devoted a couple of hours to climbing up Heaval, Barra’s highest hill as far as the statue of Mary, Star of the Sea. We were taken with this round, rugged island of secluded coves and beach-lounging cows; I can imagine going back to spend more time there. (I’d also like to see a bit more of Eriskay, from which our ferry departed and where the shipwreck that inspired Whisky Galore – one to read next time – took place.) Our hostel room overlooked the harbour where our ferry for the mainland was docked, which was handy as we had to be in the queue by 6:10 the next morning.
My additional reasonably local or otherwise relevant reading:
Four Ducks on a Pond: A Highland Memory by Nicholas the Cat with Annabel Carothers (2010)
A quaint short memoir set in the 1950s on the island of Mull (which we sailed past on our way to and from the Outer Hebrides). It’s narrated in tongue-in-cheek fashion by Nicholas the Cat, who pals around with the farm’s dogs, horse and goats and comments on the doings of its human inhabitants, such as “Puddy” (Carothers), a war widow, and her daughter Fionna, who goes away to school. “We understand so much about them, yet they understand so little about us,” he opines. Indeed, the animals are all observant and can communicate with each other. Corrieshellach is a fine horse taken to compete in shows. The goats are lucky to escape with their lives after a local outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease among livestock. Nicholas grows fat on rabbits and fathers several litters. He voices some traditional views (the Clearances: bad but the Empire: good; crows: bad); then again, cats would certainly be C/conservatives. A sweet Blyton-esque read for precocious children or sentimental adults, this passed the time nicely on a long drive. It could do with a better title, though; the ducks only play a tiny role. (Favourite aside: “that beverage which humans find so comforting when things aren’t right. Tea.”) (Secondhand – Benbecula thrift shop)
Katie Morag’s Island Stories by Mairi Hedderwick (1995)
I read half of this large-format paperback before our trip and the rest afterward. It collects four of Hedderwick’s picture books, which are all set on the Isle of Struay, a kind of Hebridean composite that reproduces the islands’ wildlife and scenery beautifully. Katie Morag’s parents run the shop and post office and her mother always seems to be producing another little brother. In Katie Morag Delivers the Mail, the little red-haired girl causes chaos by delivering parcels at random. Sophisticated Granma Mainland and practical Grannie Island are the stars of Katie Morag and the Two Grandmothers. Katie Morag learns to deal with her anger and with being punished, respectively, in …and the Tiresome Ted and …and the Big Boy Cousins. Cute stories with useful lessons, but the illustrations are the main attraction. I’ll get the rest of the books out from the library. (Little Free Library) 
Island Calling by Francesca Segal (2025)
The sequel to Welcome to Glorious Tuga, which I reviewed for Shelf Awareness last year. Charlotte Walker is a tortoise researcher who becomes the default veterinarian on this remote South Atlantic island that combines a 1950s English ethos with a cosmopolitan heritage from sailors and settlers. In this volume, Charlotte resolves her troubled love triangle and cements her understanding of her father’s identity. But the main thing that happens is that her posh and entitled mother, Lucinda Compton-Neville, takes a break from her busy job as a QC to travel to the island and demand that Charlotte return to London with her. Motherhood is a strong theme throughout: Natalie Lindo, already a mother of four, has to decide what to do about a high-risk pregnancy; half-feral Annie Goss rejects her mother’s affection, and so on. Some of the characters are lovably quirky, but overall I find the cliché-laden series lackluster, a pointless and indulgent side-track and thus a real waste of talent by Segal (after The Innocents and Mother Ship, especially). If you enjoy romance novels or escapist beach reads, you might feel differently. But I won’t bother reading the third volume.
With thanks to Chatto & Windus (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
I also made good progress on Storm Pegs by Jen Hadfield, a memoir of life in Shetland – different islands with their own character, but still fitting the hardy Scottish spirit.
I’d finished my first 7 Books of Summer by the end of June, so I was on track as of then. (Reviews of two more coming up on Friday.) I’m in the middle of some designated reads, but it’ll be ages before I finish any. I’ll hope to review another batch by the end of July.
The Best Books from the First Half of 2025
Hard to believe it, but it’s that time of year already. It’s the ninth year in a row that I’ve been making a first-half superlatives list. It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year rundown, but for now, these are my 16 favourite 2025 releases that I’ve read so far (representing the top ~21% of my current-year reading). Pictured below are the ones I read in print; all the others were e-copies. Links are to my full reviews.
Fiction
Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel: Alison has writer’s block and is consumed with anxiety about the state of the world. “Who can draw when the world is burning?” Then she has an idea for a book – or maybe a reality TV series – called $UM that will wean people off of capitalism. That creative journey is mirrored here. Through Alison’s ageing hippie friends and their kids, Bechdel showcases alternative ways of living. Even the throwaway phrases are hilarious. It’s a gleeful and zeitgeist-y satire, yet draws to a touching close.
Sleep by Honor Jones: A breathtaking character study of a woman raising young daughters and facing memories of childhood abuse. Margaret’s 1990s New Jersey upbringing seems idyllic, but upper-middle-class suburbia conceals the perils of a dysfunctional family headed by a narcissistic, controlling mother. Jones crafts unforgettable, crystalline scenes. There are subtle echoes throughout as the past threatens to repeat. Reminiscent of Sarah Moss and Evie Wyld, and astonishing for its psychological acuity, this promises great things from Jones.
Save Me, Stranger by Erika Krouse: Twelve first-person narratives voiced by people in crisis, for whom encounters with strangers tender the possibility of transformation. In the title story, the narrator is taken hostage in a convenience store hold-up. Others are set in Thailand and Japan as well as various U.S. states. Krouse focuses on young women presented with dilemmas and often eschews tidy endings, leaving characters on the brink and allowing readers to draw inferences. Fans of Danielle Evans and Lauren Groff have a treat in store.
Insectopolis: A Natural History by Peter Kuper: “If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” (E. O. Wilson) After an unspecified apocalypse, only insects remain. Group by group, they guide readers through an empty New York Public Library exhibit, interacting within and across species. It’s a sly blend of science, history, stories and silliness. There are interludes about insects in literature and unsung heroines of entomology. Informative and entertaining at once; what could be better? Welcome our insect overlords!
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch: In her research into UK divorce cases in the 1980s, Lynch learned that 90% of lesbian mothers lost custody of their children. Her earnest, delicate debut novel, which bounces between 2022 and 1982, imagines such a situation through close portraits of three family members. Maggie knew only that her mother, Dawn, abandoned her when she was little. Lynch’s compassion is equal for all three characters. This confident, tender story of changing mores and steadfast love is the new Carol for our times.
Are You Happy? by Lori Ostlund: Nine short fictions form a stunning investigation into how violence and family dysfunction reverberate. “The Peeping Toms” and “The Stalker” are a knockout pair featuring Albuquerque lesbian couples under threat by male acquaintances. Characters are haunted by loss and grapple with moral dilemmas. Each story has the complexity and emotional depth of a novel. Freedom versus safety for queer people is a resonant theme in an engrossing collection ideal for Alice Munro and Edward St. Aubyn fans.
Dream State by Eric Puchner: It starts as a glistening romantic comedy about t Charlie and Cece’s chaotic wedding at a Montana lake house in summer 2004. First half the wedding party falls ill with norovirus, then the best man, Garrett, falls in love with the bride. The rest examines the fallout of this uneasy love triangle as it stretches towards 2050 and imagines a Western USA smothered in smoke from near-constant forest fires. Still, there are funny set-pieces and warm family interactions. Cross Jonathan Franzen and Maggie Shipstead.
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld: Sittenfeld’s second collection features characters negotiating principles and privilege in midlife. Split equally between first- and third-person perspectives, the 12 contemporary storylines spotlight everyday marital and parenting challenges. Dual timelines offer opportunities for hindsight on the events of decades ago. Nostalgic yet clear-eyed, these witty stories exploring how decisions determine the future are perfect for fans of Rebecca Makkai, Kiley Reid, and Emma Straub.
Nonfiction
Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You: A memoir of saying the unsayable with food by Candice Chung: A vibrant essay collection spotlighting food and family. Chung reconnects with her semi-estranged parents by taking them along on restaurant review gigs for a Sydney newspaper. Fresh from a 13-year relationship with “the psychic reader,” she starts dating again and quickly falls in deep with “the geographer.” The essays range in time and style, delicately contrasting past and present, singleness and being partneredr.
Poets Square: A Memoir in 30 Cats by Courtney Gustafson: Working for a food bank, trapped in a cycle of dead-end jobs and rising rents: Gustafson saw firsthand how broken systems and poverty wear people down. She’d recently started feeding and getting veterinary care for a feral cat colony in her Tucson, Arizona neighbourhood. With its radiant portraits of individual cats and its realistic perspective on personal and collective problems, this is a cathartic memoir and a probing study of building communities of care in times of hardship.
Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing, ed. Alden Jones: Sixteen authors of diverse sexual orientations and genders contrast here and there and then and now as they narrate sensory memories and personal epiphanies. In these pieces, time abroad sparks clarity. There’s power in queer solidarity, whether one is in Berlin or Key West. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s piece is the highlight. A stellar anthology of miniature travelogues that are as illuminating about identity as they are about the places they feature.
Immemorial by Lauren Markham: An outstanding book-length essay that compares language, memorials, and rituals as strategies for coping with climate anxiety and grief. The dichotomies of the physical versus the abstract and the permanent versus the ephemeral are explored. Forthright, wistful, and determined, the book treats grief as a positive, as “fuel” or a “portal.” Hope is not theoretical in this setup, but solidified in action. This is an elegant meditation on memory and impermanence in an age of climate crisis.
Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future that Never Was) by Colette Shade: Shade’s debut collection contains 10 perceptive essays that contrast the promise and political pitfalls of “the Y2K Era” (1997–2008). The author recalls the thrill of early Internet use and celebrity culture. Consumerism was a fundamental doctrine but the financial crash prompted a loss of faith in progress. Outer space motifs, reality television, Smashmouth lyrics: it’s a feast of millennial nostalgia. Yet this hard-hitting work of cultural criticism, recommended to Jia Tolentino fans, reminisces only to burst bubbles.
Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson: A book about everything, by way of ginseng. It begins with Thompson’s childhood summers working on American ginseng farms with his siblings in Marathon, Wisconsin. As an adult, he travels first to Midwest ginseng farms and festivals and then through China and Korea to learn about the plant’s history, cultivation, lore, and medicinal uses. Roots are symbolic of a family story that unfolds in parallel. Both expansive and intimate, this is a surprising gem from one of the best long-form graphic storytellers.
Poetry
Is This My Final Form? by Amy Gerstler: This delightfully odd collection amazes with its range of voices and techniques. It leaps from surrealism to elegy as it ponders life’s unpredictability. The language of transformation is integrated throughout. Aging and the seasons are examples of everyday changes. Elsewhere, speakers fall in love with the bride of Frankenstein or turn to dinosaur urine for a wellness regimen. Monologues and sonnets recur. Alliteration plus internal and end rhymes create satisfying resonance.
Small Pointed Things by Erica McAlpine: McAlpine’s second collection is full of flora and fauna imagery. The title phrase comes from the opening poem, “Bats and Swallows” – in the “gloaming,” it’s hard to tell the difference between the flying creatures. The verse is bursting with alliteration and end rhymes. She expands the view through conversations, theories and travel. What-ifs, consequences and regrets; mythical allusions, elegies and the concerns of motherhood. Just my sort of poetry: sweet on the ear, rooted in nature and the everyday.
Which of these grab your attention? What other 2025 releases should I catch up on?
Three on a Theme for Father’s Day: Holt Poetry, Filgate & Virago Anthologies
A rare second post in a day for me; I got behind with my planned cat book reviews. I happen to have had a couple of fatherhood-themed books come my way earlier this year, an essay anthology and a debut poetry collection. To make it a trio, I finished an anthology of autobiographical essays about father–daughter relationships that I’d started last year.
What My Father and I Don’t Talk About: Sixteen Writers Break the Silence, ed. Michele Filgate (2025)
This follow-up to Michele Filgate’s What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About is an anthology of 16 compassionate, nuanced essays probing the intricacies of family relationships.
Understanding a father’s background can be the key to interpreting his later behavior. Isle McElroy had to fight for scraps of attention from their electrician father, who grew up in foster care; Susan Muaddi Darraj’s Palestinian father was sent to America to make money to send home. Such experiences might explain why the men were unreliable or demanding as adults. Patterns threaten to repeat across the generations: Andrew Altschul realizes his father’s hands-off parenting (he joked he’d changed a diaper “once”) was an outmoded convention he rejects in raising his own son; Jaquira Díaz learns that the depression she and her father battle stemmed from his tragic loss of his first family.
Some take the title brief literally: Heather Sellers dares to ask her father about his cross-dressing when she visits him in a nursing home; Nayomi Munaweera is pleased her 82-year-old father can escape his arranged marriage, but the domestic violence that went on in it remains unspoken. Tomás Q. Morín’s “Operation” has the most original structure, with the board game’s body parts serving as headings. All the essays display psychological insight, but Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s—contrasting their father’s once-controlling nature with his elderly vulnerability—is the pinnacle.
Despite the heavy topics—estrangement, illness, emotional detachment—these candid pieces thrill with their variety and their resonant themes. (Read via Edelweiss)
Reprinted with permission from Shelf Awareness. (The above is my unedited version.)
Father’s Father’s Father by Dane Holt (2025)
Holt’s debut collection interrogates masculinity through poems about bodybuilders and professional wrestlers, teenage risk-taking and family misdemeanours.
Your father’s father’s father
poisoned a beautiful horse,
that’s the story. Now you know this
you’ve opened the door marked
‘Family History’.
(from “‘The Granaries are Bursting with Meal’”)
The only records found in my grandmother’s attic
were by scorned women for scorned women
written by men.
(from “Tammy Wynette”)
He writes in the wake of the deaths of his parents, which, as W.S. Merwin observed, makes one feel, “I could do anything,” – though here the poet concludes, “The answer can be nothing.” Stylistically, the collection is more various than cohesive, with some of the late poetry as absurdist as you find in Caroline Bird’s. My favourite poem is “Humphrey Bogart,” with its vision of male toughness reinforced by previous generations’ emotional repression:
My grandfather
never told his son that he loved him.
I said this to a group of strangers
and then said, Consider this:
his son never asked to be told.
They both loved
the men Humphrey Bogart played.
…
There was
one thing my grandfather could
not forgive his son for.
Eventually it was his son’s dying, yes.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the free e-copy for review.
Fathers: Reflections by Daughters, ed. Ursula Owen (1983; 1994)
“I doubt if my father will ever lose his power to wound me, and yet…”
~Eileen Fairweather
I read the introduction and first seven pieces (one of them a retelling of a fairy tale) last year and reviewed that first batch here. Some common elements I noted in those were service in a world war, Freudian interpretation, and the alignment of the father with God. The writers often depicted their fathers as unknown, aloof, or as disciplinarians. In the remainder of the book, I particularly noted differences in generations and class. Father and daughter are often separated by 40–55 years. The men work in industry; their daughters turn to academia. Her embrace of radicalism or feminism can alienate a man of conservative mores.
Sometimes a father is defined by his emotional or literal absence. Dinah Brooke addresses her late father directly: “Obsessed with you for years, but blind – seeing only the huge holes you had left in my life, and not you at all. … I did so want someone to be a father to me. You did the best you could. It wasn’t a lot. The desire was there, but the execution was feeble.” Had Mary Gordon been tempted to romanticize her father, who died when she was seven, that aim was shattered when she learned how much he’d lied about and read his reactionary and ironically antisemitic writings (given that he was a Jew who converted to Catholicism).
I mostly skipped over the quotes from novels and academic works printed between the essays. There are solid pieces by Adrienne Rich, Michèle Roberts, Sheila Rowbotham, and Alice Walker, but Alice Munro knocks all the other contributors into a cocked hat with “Working for a Living,” which is as detailed and psychologically incisive as one of her stories (cf. The Beggar Maid with its urban/rural class divide). Her parents owned a fox farm but, as it failed, her father took a job as night watchman at a factory. She didn’t realize, until one day when she went in person to deliver a message, that he was a janitor there as well.
This was a rewarding collection to read and I will keep it around for models of autobiographical writing, but it now feels like a period piece: the fact that so many of the fathers had lived through the world wars, I think, might account for their cold and withdrawn nature – they were damaged, times were tough, and they believed they had to be an authority figure. Things have changed, somewhat, as the Filgate anthology reflects, though father issues will no doubt always be with us. (Secondhand – National Trust bookshop)
#ReadingtheMeow2025, Part II: Books by Mayo, Reinhold, Taylor and More
This year’s Reading the Meow challenge is drawing to a close. I’m adding to my first set of reviews with these selections: a novelty book about women and cats, an autobiographical sequel about an animal-lover’s menagerie in Provence, and a travel book about Scottish wildcats – plus a one-off essay that drew me in for its title and one more children’s book.
Behind Every Great Woman Is a Great Cat (2019)
The only name on the cover is Lulu Mayo, who does the illustrations. That’s your clue that the text (by Justine Solomons-Moat) is pretty much incidental; this is basically a YA mini coffee table book. I found it pleasant enough to read bits of at bedtime but it’s not about to win any prizes. (I mean, it prints “prolificate” twice; that ain’t a word. Proliferate is.) Among the famous cat ladies given one-page profiles are Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacinda Ardern, Vivien Leigh, and Anne Frank. I hadn’t heard of the Scottish Fold cat breed, but now I know that they’ve become popular thanks Taylor Swift. The few informational interludes are pretty silly, though I did actually learn that a cat heads straight for the non-cat person in the room (like our friend Steve) because they find eye contact with strangers challenging so find the person who’s ignoring them the least threatening. I liked the end of the piece on Judith Kerr: “To her, cats were symbols of home, sources of inspiration and constant companions. It’s no wonder that she once observed, ‘they’re very interesting people, cats.’” (Christmas gift, secondhand)
Watchers in the Sun: Life at Mas des Chats by Margaret Reinhold (1994)
Last year I read the previous book, Sanctuary in the South (also titled Watchers by the Pool) on holiday. This is more of the same: pleasant stories about the personalities and interactions of a rotating cast of cats, some of whom she’d brought with her from England to Provence, others who transformed from strays she fed outdoors to part of the indoor hierarchy. Lily is the grande dame with private quarters upstairs; Monsieur le Gris is the top cat, bullying several younger cats but forming strong bonds with others. Most of the time Reinhold seems to hit a natural limit of nine, but that’s with several dying and being replaced by cats who wandered in or kittens people brought her. She also has two dogs and at one point rescues an old, deaf spaniel from drowning. Her French neighbours seem (to her, and probably us readers) strangely unsentimental about their pets by comparison. I enjoyed this a bit less than the first book because it was so similar – again with the Doreen Tovey-like anecdotes about the local humans – and because with the former I had the benefit of reading it on location in the South of France. The photographs by William Gooddy are a quaint reminder of the days when you shot a roll of film and had no idea how your photos had turned out until you got it developed. Even if some were blurry or underexposed, you used them because that was the best you had! (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com)
Tracking the Highland Tiger: In Search of Scottish Wildcats by Marianne Taylor (2019)
A perfect segue from Reading the Meow to our Scotland holiday coming up on Friday. I’d not heard of Taylor although she’s a prolific natural history writer. Such species quest narratives have become very common. The contextual information about the world’s cat species and the difference between Scottish wildcats and domestic cats, including the example of a half-feral cat she adopted, is fairly interesting, but the way she separates it from her trips to Speyside and Ardnamurchan to look for wildcats in 2013–18, which are each given their own chapter, feels odd. A similar book being published today would have blended the travel, research, and autobiographical information better. There’s plenty of habitat in the Scottish mountains for wildcats; the problem they face is hybridization with domestic cats. There’s no such thing as a purebred anymore. Captive breeding and reintroductions are the only way the species is likely to survive. “Timing a trip to look for Scottish wildcats is difficult in a way, but in another way it’s not: no matter what time you go, you’re almost guaranteed not to see one.” (At least she’s self-deprecating about it.) For most of the way through, you’re convinced the author will never find one. But you’ve got to keep hoping…
[I got this from a Little Free Library on Lewis, probably the most remote one I’ve ever frequented. Alas, it’s the only one in the Outer Hebrides and there aren’t any others that we’ll pass by on our travels in the Highlands.]
And a couple of bonus books:
The Mousehole Cat by Antonia Barber; illus. Nicola Bayley (1990) – The town of Mousehole in Cornwall (the far southwest of England) relies on fishing. Old Tom brings some of his catch home every day for his cat Mowzer; they have a household menu with a different fishy dish for each day of the week. One winter a storm prevents the fishing boats from leaving the cove and the people – and kitties – start to starve. Tom decides he’ll go out in his boat anyway, and Mowzer goes along to sing and tame the Great Storm-Cat. This story of bravery was ever so cute, words and pictures both, and I especially liked how Mowzer considers Tom her pet. (Free from a neighbour)
“A Conversation with a Cat” from A Conversation with a Cat and Others by Hilaire Belloc (1931) – I have no idea how I came across this but I had to borrow it for the title. Alas, only the six-page opening story is actually about a cat; the rest is, I suspect, light essays in the vein of Jerome K. Jerome. In the title piece, a man stops for a beer at a railway station bar and a beautiful long-haired cat jumps up onto his lap. “If it be true that nations have the cats they deserve, then the English people deserve well in cats, for there are none so prosperous or friendly in the world,” he thinks. He considers himself chosen and names the cat “Amathea.” He monologues to her about how comforting her presence is (“there is not a man living who knows better than I that the four charms of a cat lie in its closed eyes, its long and lovely hair, its silence, and even its affected love”) and how wonderful it is that she knows nothing of mortality. “You will never leave me. I will respect your sleep and we will sit here together through all uncounted time,” he vows. At which point she, of course, hops down and promptly approaches another patron for attention. Just like a cat. (University library)
I also enjoyed this page from Awkward Family Photos by Mike Bender and Doug Chernack, which I perused from the Little Free Library:
I’ve had such fun with Reading the Meow this year! Thanks again to Mallika for hosting it. My favourite read of the challenge was Poets Square, followed by Mornings without Mii. The Mousehole Cat was great, too. (All are pictured below apart from Mii, which I read on Kindle.)
#ReadingtheMeow2025, Part I: Books by Gustafson, Inaba, Tomlinson and More
It’s the start of the third annual week-long Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri! For my first set of reviews, I have two lovely memoirs of life with cats, and a few cute children’s books.
Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats by Courtney Gustafson (2025)
This was on my Most Anticipated list and surpassed my expectations. Because I’m a snob and knew only that the author was a young influencer, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the prose and the depth of the social analysis. After Gustafson left academia, she became trapped in a cycle of dead-end jobs and rising rents. Working for a food bank, she saw firsthand how broken systems and poverty wear people down. She’d recently started feeding and getting veterinary care for the 30 feral cats of a colony in her Poets Square neighbourhood in Tucson, Arizona. They all have unique personalities and interactions, such as Sad Boy and Lola, a loyal bonded pair; and MK, who made Georgie her surrogate baby. Gustafson doled out quirky names and made the cats Instagram stars (@PoetsSquareCats). Soon she also became involved in other local trap, neuter and release initiatives.
That the German translation is titled “Cats and Capitalism” gives an idea of how the themes are linked here: cat colonies tend to crop up where deprivation prevails. Stray cats, who live short and difficult lives, more reliably receive compassion than struggling people for whom the same is true. TNR work takes Gustafson to places where residents are only just clinging on to solvency or where hoarding situations have gotten out of control. I also appreciated a chapter that draws a parallel between how she has been perceived as a young woman and how female cats are deemed “slutty.” (Having a cat spayed so she does not undergo constant pregnancies is a kindness.) She also interrogates the “cat mom” stereotype through an account of her relationship with her mother and her own decision not to have children.
Gustafson knows how lucky she is to have escaped a paycheck-to-paycheck existence. Fame came seemingly out of nowhere when a TikTok video she posted about preparing a mini Thanksgiving dinner for the cats went viral. Social media and cat rescue work helped a shy, often ill person be less lonely, giving her “a community, a sense of rootedness, a purpose outside myself.” (Moreover, her Internet following literally ensured she had a place to live: when her rental house was being sold out from under her, a crowdfunding campaign allowed her to buy the house and save the cats.) However, they have also made her aware of a “constant undercurrent of suffering.” There are multiple cat deaths in the book, as you might expect. The author has become inured over time; she allows herself five minutes to cry, then moves on to help other cats. It’s easy to be overwhelmed or succumb to despair, but she chooses to focus on the “small acts of care by people trying hard” that can reduce suffering.
With its radiant portraits of individual cats and its realistic perspective on personal and collective problems, this is both a cathartic memoir and a probing study of how we build communities of care in times of hardship.
With thanks to Fig Tree (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Mornings without Mii by Mayumi Inaba (1999; 2024)
[Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori]
Inaba (1950–2014) was an award-winning novelist and poet. I can’t think why it took 25 years for this to be translated into English but assume it was considered a minor work of hers and was brought out to capitalize on the continuing success of cat-themed Japanese literature from The Guest Cat onward. Interestingly, it’s titled Mornings with Mii in the UK, which shifts the focus and is truer to the contents. Yes, by the end, Inaba is without Mii and dreading the days ahead, but before that she got 20 years of companionship. One day in the summer of 1977, Inaba heard a kitten’s cries on the breeze and finally located it, stuck so high in a school fence that someone must have left her there deliberately. The little fleabitten calico was named after the sound of her cry and ever after was afraid of heights.
Inaba traces the turning of the seasons and the passing of the years through the changes they brought for her and for Mii. When she separated, moved to a new part of Tokyo, and started devoting her evenings to writing in addition to her full-time job, Mii was her closest friend. The new apartment didn’t have any green space, so instead of wandering in the woods Mii had to get used to exercising in the corridors. There were some scares: a surprise pregnancy nearly killed her, and once she went missing. And then there was the inevitable decline. Mii’s intestinal issues led to incontinence. For four years, Inaba endured her home reeking of urine. Many readers may, like me, be taken aback by how long Inaba kept Mii alive. She manually assisted the cat with elimination for years; 20 days passed between when Mii stopped eating and when she died. On the plus side, she got a “natural” death at home, but her quality of life in these years is somewhat alarming. I cried buckets through these later chapters, thinking of the friendship and intimate communion I had with Alfie. I can understand why Inaba couldn’t bear to say goodbye to Mii any earlier, especially because she’d lived alone since her divorce.
This memoir really captures the mixture of joy and heartache that comes with loving a pet. It’s an emotional connection that can take over your life in a good way but leave you bereft when it’s gone. There is nostalgia for the good days with Mii, but also regret and a heavy sense of responsibility. A number of the chapters end with a poem about Mii, but the prose, too, has haiku-like elegance and simplicity. It’s a beautiful book I can strongly recommend. (Read via Edelweiss)
let’s sleep
So as not to hear your departing footsteps
She won’t be here next year I know
I know we won’t have this time again
On this bright afternoon overcome with an unfathomable sadness
The greenery shines in my cat’s gentle eyes
I didn’t have any particular faith, but the one thing I did believe in was light. Just being in warm light, I could be with the people and the cat I had lost from my life. My mornings without Mii would start tomorrow. … Mii had returned to the light, and I would still be able to meet her there hundreds, thousands of times again.
The Cat Who Wanted to Go Home by Jill Tomlinson (1972)
Suzy the cat lives in a French seaside village with a fisherman and his family of four sons. One day, she curls up to sleep in a basket only to wake up airborne – it’s a hot air balloon, taking her to England! Here the RSPCA place her with old Auntie Jo, who feeds her well, but Suzy longs to get back home. “Chez-moi” is her constant cry, which everyone thinks is an awfully funny way to say miaow (“She purred in French, [too,] but purring sounds the same all over the world”). Each day she hops into the basket of Auntie Jo’s bike for a ride to town to try a new route over the sea: in a kayak, on a surfboard, paddling alongside a Channel swimmer, and so on. Each attempt fails and she returns to her temporary lodgings: shared with a parrot named Biff and comfortable, yet not quite right. Until one day… This is a sweet little story (a 77-page paperback) for new readers to experience along with a parent, with just enough repetition to be soothing and a reassuring message about the benevolence of strangers. Susan Hellard’s illustrations are charming. (Secondhand – local library book sale)
And a couple of other children’s books:
Mittens for Kittens and Other Rhymes about Cats, ed. Lenore Blegvad; illus. Erik Blegvad (1974) – A selection of traditional English and Scottish nursery rhymes, a few of them true to the nature of cats but most of them just nonsensical. You’ve got to love the drawings, though. (Secondhand – Hay Castle honesty shelves)
Scaredy Cat by Stuart Trotter (2007) – Rhyming couplets about everyday childhood fears and what makes them better. I thought it unfortunate that the young cat is afraid of other creatures; to be afraid of dogs is understandable, but three pages about not liking invertebrates is the wrong message to be sending. (Little Free Library)
May Graphic Novels by Alison Bechdel, Peter Kuper & Craig Thompson
May has been chock-full of new releases for me! For this first batch of reviews, I’m featuring three fantastic graphic novels that have made it onto my Best of 2025 (so far) list. I don’t read graphic books as often as I’d like to – my library tends to major on superhero comics and manga, which aren’t my cup of tea – but I sometimes get a chance to access them for paid review purposes. (The first two below are ones I was sent for potential Shelf Awareness reviews, but I missed the deadlines.) Reading these took me back to the early 2010s when I worked for a university library in South London and would walk to Lambeth Library on my lunch breaks to borrow huge piles of books, mostly taking advantage of their excellent graphic novel selection. That was where my education and fascination began.
Spent: A Comic Novel by Alison Bechdel
I’ve read all but one of Bechdel’s works now. Fun Home was among the first graphic books I read and is a great choice if you’re new to this form of storytelling. It’s a family memoir about her father’s funeral home business and closeted lifestyle, which emerged shortly after her own coming-out – and shortly before his accidental death. In Spent, Alison and her handy wife Holly live on a Vermont pygmy goat farm. Alison has writer’s block and is struggling financially despite her famous memoir about her taxidermist father having been made into a successful TV series, Death & Taxidermy. Mostly, she’s consumed with anxiety about the state of the world, what with the ongoing pandemic, her sister’s right-wing opinions, and the litany of awful headlines. “Who can draw when the world is burning?” she exclaims.
Then Alison has an idea for a book – or maybe a reality TV series – called $UM that will wean people off of capitalism. That creative journey is mirrored in Spent, which is composed of 12 “episodes” titled after Marxist terminology. Through Alison’s ageing hippie friends and their kids, Bechdel showcases alternative ways of living: a commune, a throuple, nonbinary identity, unpaid internships, Just Stop Oil demos, and the influencer lifestyle versus rejection of technology. It’s (auto)fiction exaggerated to the brink of absurdity, with details changed enough to mock but not enough to hide (e.g., she’s published by “Megalopub,” the hardware store is “Home Despot,” her show airs on “Schmamazon”).
Tiny details in the drawings reward close attention, such as Alison and Holly’s five cats’ antics during their morning routine, and a stuffed moose head rolling its eyes. It’s the funniest I can remember Bechdel being, with much broad humour derived from the outrageous screen mangling of her book – cannibalism, volcanoes and dragons come out of nowhere – and her middle-class friends’ hand-wringing over their liberal credentials. Even the throwaway phrases are hilarious. It’s a gleeful and zeitgeist-y satire, yet draws to a touching close as Alison has the epiphany that she can’t fix everything herself so must simply do what she can, “with a little help from her annoying, tender-hearted, and utterly luminous friends.”
Accessed as an e-book from Mariner Books. Published in the UK by Jonathan Cape (Penguin).
Insectopolis: A Natural History by Peter Kuper
Nearly a decade ago, I reviewed Peter Kuper’s Ruins, which features monarch migration and has as protagonist a laid-off Natural History Museum entomologist. Here insects have even more of a starring role. The E. O. Wilson epigraph sets the stage: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” We follow an African American brother-and-sister pair, the one dubious and the other eager, as they walk downtown to the New York Public Library. The sister, who holds a PhD in entomology, promises that its exhibition on insects is going to be amazing. But just before they reach the building, a red alert flashes up on every smartphone and sirens start blaring. A week later, the city is a ruin of overturned cabs and debris. Only insects remain and, group by group, they guide readers through the empty exhibit, interacting within and across species.
It’s a sly blend of science, history, stories and silliness. I loved the scenes of mosquitoes and ants railing against how they’ve been depicted as villainous, and dignified dung beetles resisting scatological jokes and standing up for their importance in ecosystems. There are interesting interludes about insects in literature (not just Kafka and Nabokov, but the Japanese graphic novel The Book of Human Insects by Osamu Tezuka), and unsung heroines of entomology get their moment in the sun. The pages in which Margaret Collins, an African American termite researcher in the 1950s, and Rachel Carson appear to a dragonfly as ghosts and tell their stories of being dismissed by male researchers were among my favourites. Informative and entertaining at once; what could be better? Welcome our insect overlords!
Accessed as an e-book from W. W. Norton & Company.
Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson
I’d read several of Thompson’s works and especially enjoyed his previous graphic memoir, Blankets, about his first love and loss of faith. When I read this blurb, I worried the niche subject couldn’t possibly sustain my attention for nearly 450 pages. But I was wrong; this is a vital book about everything, by way of ginseng. It begins with childhood summers working on American ginseng farms with his siblings in Marathon, Wisconsin. Theirs was a blue collar and highly religious family, but Thompson and his little brother Phil were allowed to spend their earnings from the back-breaking labour of weeding and picking rocks as they pleased. Each hour, each dollar, meant a new comic from the pharmacy. “Comics helped me survive my childhood. But what will help me survive my adulthood?” Thompson asks.
Together with Phil, he travels first to Midwest ginseng farms and festivals and then through China and Korea to learn about the plant’s history, cultivation practices, lore, and medicinal uses. As he meets producers – including a Hmong man whose early life mirrors his own – he feels sheepish about how he makes a living: “I carry this working-class guilt – what I do isn’t real work.” When his livelihood is threatened by worsening autoimmune conditions, he tries everything from acupuncture to psychotherapy to save his hands and his creativity.
This chunky book has an appealing earth-tones palette and shifts smoothly between locations and styles, memories and research. When interviewing growers and Chinese medicine practitioners, the depictions are almost photorealistic, but there are also superhero pastiche panels and a cute ginseng mascot who pops up throughout the book. Like Spent, this pulls in class and economic issues in a lighthearted way and also explores its own composition process.
The story of ginseng is often sobering, involving the exploitation of immigrants (in the Notes, Thompson regrets that he was unable to speak with any of the Mexican migrant workers on whom the American ginseng harvest now depends), soil degradation, and pesticide pollution. The roots of the title are both literal and symbolic of the family story that unfolds in parallel. Both strands are captivating, but especially the autobiographical material: Thompson’s relationship with Phil, his new understanding but ongoing frustration with his parents, and the way all three siblings exhibit the damage of their upbringing – Phil’s marriage is crumbling; their sister Sarah, who has moved 26 times as an adult, wonders what she’s running from. A conversation with a Chinese herbal pharmacist gets to the heart of the matter: “I learned home is not WHERE I am. Home is HOW I am.”
Both expansive and intimate, this is a surprising gem from one of the best long-form graphic storytellers out there.
With thanks to Faber for the free copy for review. Published in the USA by Pantheon (Penguin).
Spring Reading: Simon Barnes, Jackie Kay, and Michael Morpurgo
With all the roses in full bloom and the swifts back and nesting in the corner of our eaves, it’s been feeling more like summer than high spring as we approach the end of May. I didn’t amass many spring-themed books this year, but managed to piece together the below trio of library books. They feel quite England- (and Scotland-) specific; I wonder how well these authors are known outside the UK. All:
May Day by Jackie Kay (2024)
May Day is a traditional celebration for the first day of May, but it’s also a distress signal – as the megaphone and stark font on the cover reflect. Aptly, there are joyful verses as well as calls to arms here. Kay devotes poems to several of her role models, such as Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson, Peggy Seeger and Nina Simone. But the real heroes of the book are her late parents, who were very politically active, standing up for workers’ rights and socialist values. Kay followed in their footsteps as a staunch attendee of protests. Her mother’s death during the Covid pandemic looms large. There is a touching triptych set on Mother’s Day in three consecutive years; even though her mum is gone for the last two, Kay still talks to her. Certain birds and songs will always remind her of her mum, and “Grief as Protest” links past and future. The bereavement theme resonated with me, but much of the rest made no mark (especially not the poems in dialect) and I don’t find much to admire poetically. I love Kay’s memoir, Red Dust Road, which has been among our most popular book club reads so far, but I’ve not particularly warmed to her poetry despite having read four collections now.
Spring: The Story of a Season by Michael Morpurgo (2025)
I’d not read Morpurgo before. He’s known primarily as a children’s author; if you’ve heard of one of his works, it will likely be War Horse, which became a play and then a film. This is a small hardback, scarcely 150 pages and with not many words to a page, plus woodcut illustrations interspersed. As revered English nature authors such as John Lewis-Stempel and Richard Mabey have also done, he depicts a typical season through a diary of several months of life on his land. For nearly 50 years, his Devon farm has hosted the Farms for City Children charity he founded. He believes urban living cuts people off from the rhythm of the seasons and from nature generally; “For so many reasons, for our wellbeing, for the planet, we need to revive that connection.” Now in his eighties, he lives with his wife in a small cottage and leaves much of the day-to-day work like lambing to others. But he still loves observing farm tasks and spotting wildlife (notably, an otter and a kingfisher) on his walks. This is a pleasant but inconsequential book. I most appreciated how it captures the feeling of seasonal anticipation – wondering when the weather will turn, when that first swallow will return.
And a skim:
Spring Is the Only Season: How It Works, What It Does, and Why It Matters by Simon Barnes (2025)
This 400+-page tome has an impressive scope. Like Mark Cocker does in One Midsummer’s Day, Barnes retreats all the way back to the Big Bang and then slowly zooms in, via the evolution of plants and the phenology of birds and insects. He also covers every possible topic you could think of relating to spring: religious festivals, mythology, literature, art, farming, and so on. Had I never read another book on spring, perhaps I would find this compendium satisfying, but it is rather meandering and too many of its points of reference are familiar. Moreover, the overall project is too similar to Tim Dee’s extraordinary Greenery. Alas, Barnes isn’t half the writer Dee is, so this ends up being a rather workmanlike survey. I most enjoyed the chapter-ending “Signs of Spring” lists from his Norfolk home. These more than illustrate how seasonality has gone awry due to climate change; a whole chapter wasn’t necessary to spell it out.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 