July Releases by Carson, Du Bois, Humphreys, Nolen & Watkins
This month I have novels set in the Mojave Desert and a Northern Ireland that never was; poetry about food and cross-cultural identity / adolescent boys and self-harm; and a short nonfiction book offering ideas for how to reconnect with nature. Repeated themes include environmental damage, Bible imagery and toxic masculinity.
Few and Far Between by Jan Carson
“So this is all true.”
“Historically true or made-up true?”
“What’s the difference?”
This was my first from Carson – and her U.S. debut – though she’s well known in Northern Ireland for her novels and short story collections. (Our own Cathy of 746 Books gets a mention in the Acknowledgements!) Her fourth novel is a work of alternative history with subtle magic realist touches. In 1958, Terrence O’Neill (shortly to be elected Prime Minister) proposed draining Lough Neagh to give Northern Ireland a seventh county. That never happened, but in the world of Carson’s novel it did, creating “the Ark,” an archipelago of islands in the large lake. It was primarily a refuge for people fleeing the Troubles – and also happens to provide a nice raft of allusions to the Book of Genesis. In 2017, middle-aged siblings Marion and Robert-John Connolly are two of the last few remaining residents of the Ark, working as caretakers. They grew up here with their overbearing anthropologist father and German mother. Rumour has it that the government will soon flood the lake to deal with an algae bloom. The Connollys hope that the arrival of Alex Anderson, a homegrown academic writing a history of the Ark, will be their chance to defend their home.
Carson has given careful attention to her worldbuilding here. Along with the previously inhabited islands are four on the “Far Side” that seem more metaphorical: Middle Flat houses “the Sleepers,” who are in a coma due to trauma (cf. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Sleeping Beauties); Church Flat is a sort of bardo for the “Almost Dead”; Tom’s Hard is a suicide spot; and Eglish Flat is where people go to bury things they don’t want anyone to know about. Except, like the return of the repressed made physical, all that detritus has been resurfacing. Excerpts from Alex’s manuscript in progress treat this all matter-of-factly, and before long it all feels completely natural. Flashbacks to the 1970s and 1990s fill in backstories for the oddball central characters, whose off-kilter upbringing keeps them tied to an island chain that harbours as many bad memories as good ones. This was intriguing for its blend of realism and fabulist elements; I never knew what was going to happen next. I’ll read more by Carson for sure.
With thanks to Scribner for the proof copy for review.
Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois
In this yummy debut poetry pamphlet, food is wrapped up with memory and serves as tokens of a mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian identity. Sometimes when Du Bois is travelling in Asia, people assume that she is a total foreigner and bring her a fork instead of chopsticks, or remark on her bravery in trying dishes that are an acquired taste. In fact, she’s up for eating anything, no matter how spicy or unusual. Food can be about travel and adventure, but also about comfort and a sense of home. Family chats and celebrations revolve around good meals and drink: “We sate silence with stories / of firm favourites and elusive treats we long for”. A trip to London’s Chinatown entails more of that delicious alliteration and sibilance: “a pile of slender leaves serenades me with its many names: / eng chai, ong choy, kangkong, water spinach, morning glory.” I particularly loved the clever blend of cookery and family tradition in “Ode to Kaya,” where the quest for the perfect egg jam made with palm sugar and coconut milk brings back memories of a departed relative: “Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed / into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked / regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe.” These 19 poems are a feast, ranging widely across places, languages and cuisines.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
Unwilded: Finding Our Way Back to Nature by Alastair Humphreys
I discovered Humphreys’ work through his previous book, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted Local (and he’s now a judge for this year’s nature writing race). His wry, sometimes silly tone is reminiscent of Lev Parikian, and the two authors share a clear passion for the natural world and for enthusing others about its everyday wonders here in England. Humphreys opens with two recent events that reassured him that people care about nature: the public outcry that greeted the illegal cutting down of the famous Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall, and the joyful (if competitive) response to sightings of the Aurora Borealis. The former also serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when people are disconnected from nature: The two men convicted for the Sycamore Gap incident retorted that it was “just a tree.”
Humphreys doesn’t point fingers but acknowledges that the issue is systemic and affects all of us, even avowed countryside-lovers: “Our busy indoor lives, the moth-like lure of bright screens and shopping centres, and restricted access to much of our remaining green space all combine to make us more disconnected from the natural world than any previous generation.” Short chapters give strategies for various activities that, in as little as 15 minutes, could get people more engaged with the outdoors: litter picking, photographing the same tree every week for a year, foraging for blackberries, testing the water quality in a local stream, wild swimming, planting trees, and joining in a parkrun. I liked his idea of marking each full moon by enjoying a different spot by night. He also worked outdoors for one hour per day for a week, and dabbled in performance art through graffiti reading “15 Minutes to Nature” with an arrow or “NOTICE THIS TREE.” It’s easy to become disheartened by the scale of environmental problems, but Humphreys suggests choosing five to focus on, and then joining up with other local concerned citizens to work towards five corresponding mitigating actions. This is a readable and practical book written with a light touch. Like Lucy Jones’s Losing Eden, it ends with a utopian epilogue imagining humans living in harmony with a restored natural world. Let’s all keep living in hope, and doing our bit to make it a reality.
With thanks to the author and Eye Books for the free copy for review.
Afterlight by Caleb Nolen
Nolen’s debut collection won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry (the same award that my old blogger friend Carolyn Oliver won for her first book, Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble). It reflects on an early life marked by male friendship, addiction and other self-destructive behaviours, including suicidal ideation. The poet barely knew his father, who had a new wife and kids and treated meetings with his older sons as begrudged obligations. He and his high school friends snuck beer, weed and prescription pills. There were other even more dangerous things around, too –
from “First Gun”
A pistol, wrapped in an old shirt, hidden behind a panel
in his parents’ basement. When he brought it out to show us,
he held it carefully in both hands.
I was reading this collection at the same time as Michael Amherst’s The Boyhood of Cain, and the two chimed for their equation of expected masculinity with violence –
from “Letter to Cain”
My first consolation, my first friend,
tell me what you learned when the blood cried out:
who are we the keepers of, we who were not kept?
Nolen is 40, too young to have four dead friends – Bobby, Mike, Jonathan and Troy – threading through his memory. The book is rife with biblical references (“Jonah Years,” “Killing the Fattened Calf”), including letters addressed to particular figures: Abel, Job, the Woman Taken in Adultery, Paul the Apostle, Judas, the Man Possessed by Demons. Personal and religious history mesh, such that the quartet of departed friends are included alongside Mary of Oignies and the like in an Appendix of Hagiographies.
You’re making a life out of scribbling
the names of your dead friends.
This is a sombre collection that looks back with pain rather than nostalgia. Gentle alliteration and glimpses of nature help to make the vision of the past endurable.
With thanks to the University of Utah Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins
Watkins’s fourth work of fiction exudes love for a distinctive and endangered landscape: the deserts of the American West. Rose has worked for the Sierra Club and has a preteen daughter, Juniper, who lives with her father back east. The book opens with Miles, a former lover, returning to Rose’s life. Approaching age 40 and grieving her alcoholic mother’s untimely death, she finds herself yearning for a baby even though she feels it’s morally questionable to have children in a time of climate breakdown. If Miles won’t commit, she has a backup plan called “The Swirl” whereby male acquaintances will be invited to inseminate her after signing away parental rights. (Just the sperm, thanks; Rose will take care of the rest.) Meanwhile, she’s part of a loose group based at the Yellow Pine encampment, protesting the construction of a solar farm that would devastate local tortoise populations. The defenders’ impassioned conversations about how to work toward good in a time of corporation-driven extinctions are a highlight. It’s a bold, kooky, horny novel in the same vein as Melissa Broder’s Death Valley and Miranda July’s All Fours, but still manages an intellectual rigour and felicity of prose that I perhaps wasn’t expecting. Some sample lines:
It was surprisingly nice to be named a friend by the man who’d once poured salt on the slug of her heart
Rose and Miles sallied forth, trying again in Indian summer in a low-key failed state on a dying planet.
Love laid down a new layer. Rose’s despair patinaed with faith.
“I’m trying to be unapocalyptic. I’m trying to be practical.”
I’ve been reading Watkins since her debut story collection, Battleborn, won the Dylan Thomas Prize, though it’s her first novel, Gold Fame Citrus, to which I’m most partial. Her third book, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, went too far off the rails for me, whereas this one is a return to form. The outlook is a little bit woo-woo and I appreciated the environmental theme more than the indulgent autofiction framework. Still, it feels realistic and up-to-the-minute, positing human connection and purposeful collective action as antidotes to hopelessness. (“It wasn’t enough to be anti … You had to be for something.”)
With thanks to riverrun/John Murray (Hachette) for the free copy for review.
Which of these July releases have you read, or will you seek out now?
What am I missing out on?
Summer Reads, Part I: Buti, Ellis, C. Foster (Reread), Itami, Thomson
The less said about the summer of 2026, the better. It feels like the heat wave will never end. We’ve had 4 mm of rain the whole month. Drought imperils so much. But it’s not right to complain when wildfires rage not so far away. One glance at the news headlines and there’s no avoiding the signs of climate breakdown everywhere. I can’t bear it. I just keep reading.
Year of the Drought by Roland Buti (2015; 2017)
[Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell]
How exhausting was that summer of 1976, always beating down on our heads!
This Swiss novella takes place during the infamous European heat wave that people still talk about half a century later. It’s a perfect febrile setting for 13-year-old Gus’s coming-of-age, which includes a sexual awakening and the dawning realisation that his parents aren’t perfect; that in fact his family is falling apart. The Sutters’ operations embody the move from family smallholding to an industrial model. They keep a small number of cattle but are also experimenting with large-scale henhouses holding thousands of birds. In contrast with that vast flock, about whose welfare the characters seem indifferent, is an injured white dove that Gus finds and keeps as a pet. (A wise choice by Buti: it’s easier to feel compassion for an individual, such as the dove or the old farm horse, Bagatelle, than for a faceless mass.) Helping Gus and his father on the farm is distant cousin Rudy, who has Down’s syndrome; disrupting their routines is Cécile, Gus’s mother’s friend, who has come to stay with them.
Because of the drought, our minds were full of dreams of coolness and moisture
Dreams of rain, dreams of love, dreams of preserving some mythical family happiness that maybe never existed. Like the weather, everything goes wrong – in tragic ways. It’s all so awful I recoiled. Buti jumps ahead several decades to offer a longer view of the land, but I couldn’t ignore how casually the teenage Gus adopted his father’s violent, misogynistic ways. None of what happens bodes well for the future. The one laugh I got out of the experience was the charity shop accidentally labelling the book “Romance fiction.” (Secondhand – BHF, Newbury) 
Book 1 of The Summerhouse Trilogy
The Clothes in the Wardrobe by Alice Thomas Ellis (1987)
I hadn’t had great luck with Ellis, fiction and nonfiction, before, but I’m so glad I was tempted by this omnibus edition and tried her again. This melancholy, introspective novella was right up my street. Margaret’s yearning for her Egyptian upbringing isn’t the only reason I reached for Moon Tiger as a readalike; Ellis’s tone reminded me of Barbara Comyns and Penelope Lively for its mix of cynicism and nostalgia. Margaret is soon to marry Sylvester, though she doesn’t love him at all and he’s closer to her mother’s age as well as a known womanizer. Perhaps the engagement was her mother’s idea more than her own? The title is an apt symbol for living to someone else’s expectations: “my life fitted me as ill as a garment designed for somebody else,” Margaret thinks. It’s no coincidence that she’s to be married in her mother’s old wedding dress. There are also sartorial metaphors around memory (“Did the elderly have minds like old wardrobes stuffed to overflowing…”) and resistance to ageing. I marked out so many shrewd observations and witty conversations. I empathized with Margaret’s feeling of being trapped in a life she hasn’t chosen.
It seems like one of those books where nothing will happen, but there’s actually a surprise ending that looks set to move Margaret onto a different track. As I understand it, the other two volumes repeat the weeks leading up to the wedding from other perspectives: Margaret’s staid mother-in-law-to-be; and her mother’s bohemian friend Lili, who was her bridesmaid back in Egypt and arrives in time to shake things up. I love that premise. The omnibus cover seems random, but the question of whether the cactus in the summerhouse will flower as good luck for the wedding becomes an important plot point. I’ll jump right into Book 2. (Secondhand – Regent Books, Wantage) 
The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster (2021)
The only thing that has redeemed these dry, scorching days is the swifts screeching across the sky. How can it be that I was once unaware of them? How is it possible for people not to look up for these noisy acrobats whenever they’re outdoors? Somehow, I was oblivious until maybe 10–15 years ago. Now, I always have at least one eye on the sky during these crucial few months. And although this year swifts have been with me since early April (first in Portugal and then in our neighbourhood), I’m already dreading their departure for Africa in a few weeks. They’re still here! I trill to myself each morning. But soon that won’t be true. And with populations in freefall, there may come a day when they don’t return to the UK at all.
Charles Foster is a kindred spirit who sets similar emotional store by the presence or absence of the common swift (Apus apus). I appreciated this when I first read it five years ago (my review), but all the more so now. The monograph takes us through one year with swifts. In the summer, he needs travel no further than his own street in Oxford, but the rest of the time he has to chase them down in continental Europe and central and southern Africa. It’s an old-fashioned quest, a romantic pursuit, a hopeless attempt to keep hold of creatures as fast and elusive as the wind. Foster salts his narrative with all the salient facts but acknowledges that, for all we claim to know about them, these birds retain an essential magic and mystery. “Their power, freedom and joy are the way that everything really is – though we don’t usually see it. It is just that when the swifts scream through the sky, you can’t miss it. That’s how everything, all the time, is meant to be.” (Review copy from Little Toller Books)
My original rating:
My rating now: 
Bonus content:
From Robert Macfarlane’s The Book of Birds (illus. Jackie Morris):
From the Spell Songs album Let the Light In: “Swifts”
& My current earworm, also featuring Kris Drever: a more general reassurance – or at least philosophical acceptance – that change is the one constant in life, in perfect pop song form (“Change”)
And from Ugandan poet Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians: “in the first part of the night, I saw the coastal villages, men arguing / about the price of oil and swifts darting into shadows.” (from “Codex© of Birds”)
Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami (2025)
Itami was shortlisted for a Costa Award for her enjoyable 2021 debut, Fault Lines. Kakigori is a flavoured shaved-ice dessert and it’s a great choice of title for this bittersweet – but mostly sweet – story of three sisters raised between Tokyo and London who reunite in Japan to spend a summer together with their prickly great-grandmother, Obaachan, who’s nearing 100. Narration alternates between Rei, the oldest, who has a high-flying finance job and keeps everyone in line; Kiki, who’s a single mother and works in a care home for the elderly; and Ai, a flighty pop star now in disgrace for her affair with a married man. Although there is much joy in their banter, little Hikaru’s antics, and the pursuit of the finest culinary treats, a shadow over it all is their mother’s unexplained death. She went for a swim one day when they were girls and never came back, nor was a body ever found; they have to suspect suicide. (“Well, that’s that, then. Nothing will be all right ever again.”) This easy-reading novel affirms the goodness of life despite the reality of death. Its typically Japanese feasts and funerary rites brought to mind Bryan Washington’s similarly well-balanced Memorial. My only note would be that I’m not sure the voices were distinctive enough to warrant three first-person narrators; third person rotating would probably have done the job. (Public library)
Saltwater: A Midsummer Ghost Story by Elaine Thomson (2026)
“The dead are closer than we think.”
I hadn’t heard of the Scottish island of Stroma, so assumed it was made up. In fact, it’s real, lying between Orkney and the north coast of Caithness on mainland Scotland, but uninhabited as of 1962. Tom Torrance travels by train and boat from Edinburgh a few days before midsummer to oversee the last steps in the construction of the island’s lighthouse and meet with Mr Stevenson (of the famous lighthouse-building clan, which included novelist Robert Louis Stevenson). With him is his brother Jamie; he’s not of much practical help, but they cling to each other because they lost their mother to tuberculosis a week ago. The travelling minister Tom meets on the train gives him a rowan-wood amulet and cautions him that midsummer is a liminal time when the spirit world is close at hand. Tom doesn’t heed the warning. He arrives to find a disaster-prone construction project that has entailed serious injuries and broken machinery. Flora Christie and her grandmother, Thrawn Jean, are local women with healing powers who are treated with suspicion: women, especially those with red hair, are considered bad luck around boats. The men want to seal a “witch bottle” into the wall for good luck. He dismisses their superstitions but at the same time keeps seeing hallucinations of the dead in the waves and on the in-construction edifice. Is it grief, Flora’s special whisky, or a real taste of the supernatural?
This was highly reminiscent of Michelle Paver’s work. The typical Victorian-pastiche ghost story bores me because it’s always just the same: the narrator is a dignified gentleman who can’t possibly be seeing such things, yet documents them and his own horror with great precision. Thomson set herself an interesting challenge, writing a quartet of Scottish ghost stories set at turning points of the year. (This is the second, after Hawthorn.) I probably won’t try the others unless my library acquires them. (Public library) 
Paris in July, II: Beauvais, Brown, Elkin and Lebovitz
July has been one long heat wave here in southern England. Luckily, it’s a bit cooler than it was earlier in the month, and we’re developing strategies for coping with what seems to be the new normal – until it gets worse again. My main tactic has been doing very little on most days apart from sitting on the couch or reclining on a mattress with a stack of books to hand. So it’s been good for one thing (maybe two): finishing books – and watching swifts. Following on from my first set of four Paris reads, I have another four (and five more coming up before the end of the month): a teen novel about overcoming peers’ prejudice, an essay anthology about the enduring appeal of the city for authors, a fragmentary memoir composed on a phone during a bus commute, and a record of a chef’s home renovation journey from hell.
Piglettes by Clémentine Beauvais (2014; 2017)
This was my second YA novel by Beauvais (after In Paris with You); she translated both herself and her proficiency in both languages allowed her to include wordplay that might have been lost otherwise (“I finally get what it means to have l’esprit de l’escalier, when I scream to her, from the bottom of the staircase…”). Mireille LaPlanche’s former friend Malo introduced a cruel annual tradition at their high school: a “Pig Pageant” in which classmates pick the fattest, ugliest girls – including her. She decides to team up with two other finalists, Astrid and Hakima, and show their persecutors what they can do. After a period of planning and training, they undertake a week-long cycle ride from their home in Bourg-en-Bresse to Paris, timed so that they’ll arrive on Bastille Day and crash the president’s garden party. Hakima’s older brother, Kader, who lost his legs in the Iraq War and uses a wheelchair, is their chaperone. They’ve dubbed themselves the “Three Little Piglettes” and tow a trailer full of sausages that they cook and sell at each stop. Soon they’re a social media phenomenon. This sweet, funny Cinderella story about defusing fatphobia includes good diversity rep and touches on lots of issues including anxiety, bullying, and unrequited love – all with an unmistakably French enthusiasm for wine, cheese and philosophy. (Edelweiss) 
A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light, ed. Eleanor Brown (2017)
A reread that I started shortly after our trip to Paris in December 2023 but left half-finished on a shelf until this month. The roster of 18 contributors leans very much towards women’s fiction. While I probably most enjoyed the third of the book that was by authors I’d read and liked before – J. Courtney Sullivan, Susan Vreeland, Paula McLain, Julie Powell, Therese Anne Fowler and Maggie Shipstead – all of the pieces are cosy and undemanding. They tell of time spent living, working or travelling in the city. Sometimes it meets expectations; other times, mishaps and faux pas create disillusionment until a future visit grants a second chance. There are favourite foods and language struggles, art treasures and magical spots to discover, and stereotypes to confirm or overturn. The experience of Paris can vary based on who the travel companion is – an enthusiastic child, a needy parent or a soon-to-be ex. Fowler made her research trip before writing a biographical novel about Zelda Fitzgerald, while McLain only saw Hemingway’s haunts after she’d written The Paris Wife. Each essay finishes with a quickfire list of favourite Paris moments, books, sites, songs, etc. Not a bad substitute for being there! (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)
My original rating (2017):
My rating now:
No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute by Lauren Elkin (2021)
Just imagine keeping a diary of your bus journeys in the Notes app of your phone for seven months and getting a book out of it. Elkin’s mostly unedited observations are based on people-watching and her own swirling thoughts in 2014–15. She covers obnoxious behaviours on public transport (the same the world over, it seems: “Oi. Manspreader. Bouge ton cul”); her teaching work; overheard conversations; and Paris as seen in different seasons. Her mind wanders across history and theory. The bus is a melting pot: She’s thrown into false intimacy with people she’s never seen before and hopes never to encounter again. Nothing much happens until it does. First it’s the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Then she falls pregnant but it’s ectopic and she loses the baby. And, after she’s switched to Métro commuting, the Hypercacher attacks. In the prologue and epilogue, Elkin talks about only understanding major events in retrospect. She also cites lockdown diaries as being a new subgenre her project fit into. But let’s be honest: if she’d not already made a name for herself as a cultural critic, this would never have been published. While it has some value as an in-the-moment historical document, I didn’t find it nearly as profound as, say Deborah Levy’s autobiography. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com with SellItBack voucher)
L’appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home by David Lebovitz (2017)
Lebovitz is a San Francisco pastry chef who moved to Paris a couple of decades ago. We get a lot of ideas from his dessert cookbook and extensive blog archive. Like The Sweet Life in Paris, this contains lighthearted musings about cultural differences between France and the US and many tantalizing recipes (most of them sweet but also a few savoury) that I am actually likely to make. But it’s primarily about the several-year saga of buying and restoring an apartment. Lebovitz had a grand plan for the kitchen, especially: a huge space with American-style appliances that would ease his cookbook writing and testing. French bureaucracy made the purchase difficult enough as the property had to be officially reregistered as residential rather than commercial, and the seller and realtor were both antagonistic.
But that was nothing compared to the nightmare of the renovation. To start with, Lebovitz was friendly with his contractor and his workers. In fact, too friendly, his partner, Romain, warned. He called the builders “tu,” brought fresh-baked treats for them, and always paid their bills promptly. They started taking liberties: hardly ever showing up, failing to meet deadlines, replying to every concern with “pas de problème” but never fixing the issues. The shoddiness and incompetence are truly astounding: counters at the wrong height, an unusable faucet, melted fuses, an electricity leak, buckled floorboards, askew windows, an upside-down water softener. Every mistake cost time and money, such that the whole job was three times longer and more expensive than projected. (A lawyer dissuaded Lebovitz from suing because in the French legal system it could take five years and not even go his way.)
Depending on your own experience, this might be cathartic, or too close to home, or a cautionary tale. (We’d already long decided we won’t do any major building projects because we can’t tolerate noise, disruption or strangers and our house is good enough for our needs.) Keep in mind that Lebovitz dealt with all this in a second language and his fortitude is impressive. Scenes at Ikea and conversations with his contractor are amusingly surreal. But I confess I did find this a little overlong and repetitive, and every setback made me cringe for him. I’ll have to bake some frangipane plum-raspberry gratins and try to forget the pain. (Secondhand – Better World Books with Little Free Library voucher)
20 Books of Summer, 10: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (2022)
These dozen short stories are gently surreal, flirting with magic realism and science fiction but never getting too weird. Adolescent girls sprout wings on their legs; an insomniac woman has an encounter with the sandman made literal; and kids find a haunted doll from a house emptied by accidental deaths and a suicide. “#ClimbingNation” is the most realistic, comparing the (sometimes fabricated) memories of those who knew a deceased climber. More often, there is a speculative element. In “Twenty Hours,” a husband and wife take turns killing each other and reprinting a new version of their spouse on a 3D printer. The title invention in “Time Cubes” offers people a chance to jump forward or reel backwards through their lives. “Scissors” first appeared in the Kink anthology edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell and isn’t the only story to blend sex and danger in a queasy way: I didn’t like how this and “June Bugs” undermine tenderness with violence. (And I objected to insects being used to prompt disgust in the latter; I had a similar problem with Claire Fuller’s latest novel.)
This collection was a mixed bag for me, but I’ll finish on a positive note with three favourite stories. The first and last bookend the collection nicely, imagining how technology and art might salve loss. “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” is a dialogue between a VR operator and a client whose only wish is to reclaim a peaceful moment with her late mother – except the company has a rule about no dead individuals known personally. Then, in “Do You Remember Candy,” all food has become tasteless and Allie spins a business opportunity out of performance art that employs adjacent senses to evoke lost flavours. And the purest fun was “Bridezilla,” about a runaway bride attacked by a nebulous sea monster. There are great setups here, but I wouldn’t say that any of the stories features a truly memorable character.
Kim Fu, a second-generation Chinese Canadian living in Seattle, uses they/them pronouns. I loved their gender-bending 2014 novel For Today I Am a Boy and have kept trying their work but nothing since has lived up to that debut work. Although I appreciated the playful resistance to the permanence of death, I can think of other speculative collections that have handled such a theme more successfully, such as There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr. and The Man in the Banana Trees by Marguerite Sheffer. (Gift from my wish list)
#ParisInJuly2026, I: Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Deborah Levy & Chris Newens
I wouldn’t want to be in Paris right now – continental Europe is far too hot in high summer and in recent years the UK has been following suit – but I am having such fun travelling there through books. I have a fantastic stack of Paris-set novels and memoirs on the go, perfect for sinking into on long afternoons and evenings while I hide from the second round of the heat wave in our relatively cool lounge. These first four selections were corkers! I mostly read them earlier: in May, or across several years, or started in January but only just finished. And what a treat they all were: an epic yet intimate queer romance, two auto/fiction hybrids about making a life as an unconventional woman, and a tour through Paris food, district by district.
Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (2026)
There has been homoerotic content in Hargrave’s previous fiction for adults, but this is a full-blown queer love story that, with its time span (1978 to 2013) and heft, feels momentous, like a future classic. Erica is an earnest 18-year-old tourist experiencing Paris before starting at UEA. She meets Laure, an older, cynical Sorbonne art history student, on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur: drawn to her not just because they’re reading the same book (A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes) but also because Laure looks so perfectly Parisian there in a louche sprawl, smoking a cigarette. Laure is a confirmed lesbian, whereas Erica was previously straight. It’s coup de foudre for sure. Laure has been with many women, including married ones, but what she feels for Erica is different, and Erica leaving at the end of the summer is such a blow that her problem drinking gets out of control.
Comparisons with One Day by David Nicholls are inescapable what with the structure of jumping ahead by a few years with each section, although I’d argue that this is more similar to The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett and The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne. Hargrave’s close third-person narration alternates between her two protagonists and occasionally documents their interactions, though they keep missing their chance to be together. On two occasions Erica doesn’t write or visit when she should; twice they resume their love affair and could have gotten back together, but by then one or both has another partner. (Erica marries a Creative Writing MA classmate and they have two daughters.) The social context is important: they lose a dear friend to the AIDS crisis and Hargrave carefully bookends the action to show an advance in LGBTQ rights: early on, the characters are caught up in an attack on a gay bar in 1978; in the last pages, France legalizes same-sex marriage.
Thirty-five years is a long time in any relationship, but Erica and Laure’s is repeatedly strained by absence and perceived betrayals. They each, separately, go through a lot, including bereavements, addiction, mental health issues, and career disappointments. I thought the novel might have a speculative element, contrasting their potential life together with their divergent trajectories. In fact, only in one brief instance does Hargrave offer an alternative version of how things might have gone. Instead, the focus is on moments when fear or negligence stopped one of them from reaching out. I quibbled with a few seeming anachronisms and errors but overall found this delicious, touching, and even strangely close to home sometimes. Paris itself is a star, its museums, bars, and streets a perfect backdrop; Monet’s gardens and the Norfolk coast are appealing settings, too. This was a sweet, sexy, sobering read I can wholeheartedly recommend. (Public library) 
A linking passage:
“They went together to the Père-Lachaise and Erica pulled a button off her shirt to put on Gertrude Stein’s grave. Laure was amazed she knew Tender Buttons but not that Gertrude Stein had loved a woman. She did not want to be the lesbian prophet to this girl, but she could not help herself.”
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction by Deborah Levy (2026)
“Gertrude Stein said that’s enough. (I know that that’s not enough now.)”
~from “Roseability” by Idlewild – enjoy the c. 2000 Scottish punk!
Here’s the good news: You don’t need to know anything – or particularly care – about Gertrude Stein to enjoy this. Even not having read any Stein, just having read about her, it was clear to me that the style is an homage in places (repetition, scant punctuation). But where Stein’s is famously cryptic, Levy’s prose is crystal-clear as usual. There’s a gauzy fictional storyline in which the narrator is wrestling with an inchoate essay about Gertrude Stein. (Rather like Geoff Dyer trying to write about D.H. Lawrence in Out of Sheer Rage.) She has two close friends: Eva is a graphic novelist with an international background, currently separated from a husband back in Seattle; Fanny is a polyamorous French lesbian who works in finance and, no matter the topic, tells it like it is. A mystery of sorts arises in the form of Eva’s lost cat, Bob. Fanny has heard about a cat found drowned in the canal and they later meet a Frenchman whose cat was stolen. (It’s unclear whether it’s all one and the same cat.)
Cute American cover (though the British one is probably more apt).
The narrator alternates between this minor intrigue, biographical fragments about Stein, and her struggle to know how to capture her subject in words. Stein was brought up in a German Jewish household in Pennsylvania and failed her medical school exams at Johns Hopkins. In Paris she lived with Alice B. Toklas as she pleased, without apology: an artist’s muse, intellectual and author inspired by “early psychology and cubism.” Levy clearly admires Stein for pushing the boundaries of literature and of life, paving the way for so many. I wasn’t sure that the ‘story’, such as it is, matters here, or at least not as much as the biography and pastiche. Levy is very much in Ali Smith territory here. In any case, I found it playful, sophisticated and beguiling. There are so many plainly put but brilliant lines:
“Stein put her immense writing energies into making sure she was not understood. This is what interested me most about her writing. She did not believe it is worth having a conversation if everything is understandable.”
“Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.”
I have a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that I’m going to attempt soon…
(Public library)
Real Estate by Deborah Levy (2021)
I’m not sure why it took me so long to read the final volume of Levy’s so-called Living Autobiography. I started it in August 2022: perfect timing because that was the year we bought our first house. But I left it part-read on a shelf until April. It’s not my favourite of the trilogy – that’s The Cost of Living, which is perfect – but I appreciated it a lot more than Things I Don’t Want to Know, which felt forced. Levy paints her life as restless, nomadic; to an extent, she likes it that way. She flits between London and Paris, attends a literary festival in India and takes an extended holiday in Greece. At age 60, single and with adult daughters, she doesn’t have to answer to anyone. Yet she longs for a home of her own – a deep sense of fulfilment that perhaps can’t be bought along with a piece of property. Is it a paradox to desire grounding but also freedom? That’s the main question that Levy explores here, and you can see why Stein would become a model for her (Leonora Carrington is another in this book). “It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.” This is incredibly quotable, and really a perfect book for every woman of a certain age as we come to resemble our mothers and ponder how to go on constructing ourselves through words and relationships.
to think and feel and live and love more freely is the point of life
So then, now that I was a sixty-year-old female character, both unwritten and constantly rewriting the script, what did I value, own, discard and bequeath?
Levy has an enviable talent for simplicity and clarity, but simultaneous impact and meaning. I’d be lucky to ever write anything autobiographical that has half as much elegance and power as her work. (New purchase – Amazon?)
Moveable Feasts: A Story of Paris in Twenty Meals by Chris Newens (2025)
Newens, an English journalist, grew up working in his family bakery and tea rooms, so knew of the hard labour and long, early hours that daily food preparation requires. He’d lived in Paris for a decade when he decided that his strategy for getting a broader understanding of his adopted city would be through its cuisine. Arrondissement by arrondissement, he explores culinary landmarks and famous dishes, choosing one recipe from each to recreate in his kitchen. Some of these are familiar French staples such as croissants, crêpes, macarons, a goat’s cheese salad and tartiflette. Others aren’t so much a recipe as a serving suggestion: fresh oysters, an omelette with no ingredients beyond 3 eggs, pre-packaged escargots. Tourist food can be good or terrible, depending on where you go.
To get beyond clichés and give an accurate portrait of Paris, Newens realized, it’s essential to include ethnic dishes such as banh mi, couscous, falafel, kebabs (made of equal parts lamb belly and turkey thigh meat) and meen puyabaisse (a Tamil-fusion fish stew – A Waiter in Paris taught me that many of the city’s food service workers are from Sri Lanka) to reflect the many immigrant cultures that call Paris home. To mix things up, he sometimes strays from the usual format of meeting with restaurant staff and learning a dish from them. One chapter is an elegy for the family friend through whom he first discovered French food. In others he is surprised by the delicious/awful fare on offer at a Paris soup kitchen/sex club. Ultimately, he concludes that what sets the food in France apart, no matter the cuisine in question, is the quality of the produce, so his final trip is to Rungis, the largest produce market in the world, which supplies most of Paris’s food needs at some times of year. He then ties it all together by hosting a picnic where guests cook one of his 20 recipes to bring.
This is the best sort of armchair travelling, where you get to experience the deliciousness and excitement vicariously and can be relieved that you’ve avoided all the inconvenient or embarrassing realities of interviewing strangers. I also learned a fair bit about the different districts’ personalities and how tradition meets modernity in French food. Food is a daily chance at pleasure and I just love reading about it (even though I don’t cook). Newens won a Jane Grigson Trust Award for New Food and Drink Writers, and with his curiosity and sense of humour it’s easy to see why. (Read via Edelweiss)
The Best Books from the First Half of 2026
Hard to believe it, but it’s that time of year already. For a decade now, 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 15 favourite current-year releases that I’ve read so far (representing the top 23% of the 2026 releases I’ve read this year; or the top 10% of my overall reading so far). It’s been a brilliant year for fiction! Links are to my full reviews where available.
Fiction
Daffodil Days by Helen Bain: Bain’s remarkable debut novel builds a slantwise biographical portrait of Sylvia Plath through her interactions with friends and acquaintances in the last years of her life. It’s everyone from her midwife to her brother to a washing machine salesman. The vignettes proceed backward through the book’s 17-month span: a determined metaphorical move from resignation to optimism. The focus is therefore not on the end of Plath’s life but on the full flow of her genius.
The Half Life by Rachel Beanland: In Beanland’s enchanting third novel, a young Navy wife has a sexual awakening and discovers her scientific vocation while stationed on an Italian island. The title cleverly suggests both nuclear fallout and how secrets constrain people. Beanland adeptly depicts grief, homesickness, and culture shock, and illuminates American and Italian politics. Sensual and intriguing, this belated-coming-of-age story reminiscent of Beautiful Ruins and The Atomic Weight of Love is an absorbing summer read. [Forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on July 14.]
Brawler by Lauren Groff: The nine short stories in Groff’s exceptional eighth book profile women in states of desperation and probe legacies of loss and violence. Themes of midlife reinvention and latent queerness recur. There’s also a startling Jamesian fable; a 1950s Southern gothic black comedy that would do Flannery O’Connor proud; and the masterful novella-length examination of privilege and obsession. The prose is stellar and the endings breathtaking. Groff is a first-rate novelist, but her short stories are truly peerless.
Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth: This work of autofiction circles the question of becoming a mother and posits the writing life and other relationships as partial substitutes for parenthood. The narrator spends three days a week riding at a local stable and tending to a black and white mare. Haworth-Booth makes caring for an animal analogous with motherhood, but doesn’t stop at easy symbolism. Cultivating bodily bonds with other creatures is part of how we find purpose when life is threatened by chronic illness and climate breakdown.
Whistler by Ann Patchett: Patchett is a master on the subject of family dysfunction, and her 10th novel, a stepdaughter-stepfather love story, is as wise as ever on secrets, traumatic memories, and storytelling. The bittersweet tone is perfectly judged. Daphne’s banter with her loved ones is a delight. The plot whisks along, its satisfying full circle returning to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she saw Eddie Triplett for the first time in 40 years, and incorporates a clever metanarrative twist. Quiet but surprising, witty yet heartrending.
Nonesuch by Francis Spufford: A grown-up fantasy book for those of us who were Narnia-obsessed children. It’s a rollicking blend of realistic WWII-set fiction and alternative history, with some magical and time travel elements. I was impressed that Spufford voices a young woman as protagonist and takes her ambitions and sexual desire seriously. There are witty turns of phrase throughout yet never an inappropriate levity. This parallel world is cleverly imagined and carefully reasoned, and the whole is shot through with a clear love of London.
John of John by Douglas Stuart: In Stuart’s superb third novel, set on the Isle of Harris in the 1990s, Cal seeks to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family’s expectations and his devout upbringing. An absorbing, deliciously melodramatic story is built around the contrast between modernity and the old ways. The characters’ power plays and acts of desperation are heartrending, but mischief and love of colour and crafts lend lightness. Stuart’s every observation is profound; the simplest phrase is memorable for its beauty.
Nonfiction
The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly: Fennelly takes the same approach as in flash fiction: some of these 45 pieces are as short as one sentence, remarking on life’s irony, poignancy or brevity. Again and again, she loops back to her sister’s untimely death; other topics are her mother’s worsening dementia, her happy marriage, her continuing 28-year friendships with her college roommates, the pandemic, and her ageing body. One of the most in-depth pieces revisits a lonely stint teaching in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s.
Leaving Home by Mark Haddon: Eighty-seven nonchronological vignettes range across Haddon’s life and his parents’. Most are awful: his cold, invalid mother; his father’s adultery; cruel treatment at boarding school; medical crises. Impressive that he’s a functional person given the lack of love and empathy in his early life, and that he’s so honest about mental health. Haddon is also an artist and there’s a wealth of comics, portraits and family photographs here (plus cynical captions on stock photos to puncture any potential nostalgia).
Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt: Paul Auster died of non-small cell lung cancer on April 30, 2024. “I’m living in a haunted house,” his widow writes. This isn’t a straightforward bereavement memoir but moves back and forth between past and present and incorporates various documents, such as e-mail updates she sent to friends and family during Paul’s illness. It’s particularly interesting to learn about their mutual influence on each other’s work. Recommended to fans of either or both authors, as well as those interested in grief stories.
Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies by Dani Netherclift: One scorching afternoon in 1993, the author’s father and brother drowned while swimming in an irrigation channel near their Australia home. A joint closed-casket funeral took place six days later. Eighteen at the time, Netherclift witnessed her relatives’ disappearance but didn’t see their bodies. Must one see the corpse to have closure? she wonders. “The presence of absence” is an overarching paradox. The contradictions and ironies of the situation defy resolution.
Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory by Barbara Yelin: An illustrated biography of a child Holocaust survivor based on interviews. Survival is not a one-time event because trauma is complex and ongoing. In Emmie’s case, her foster father (himself a Holocaust survivor) molested her for years. The colour palette is appropriately sombre. And yet there is vibrant colour in the depiction of Emmie’s home and garden in Israel. This is a work of real courage, of speaking out in spite of a suspicion that all is bleak and meaningless.
Poetry
Visitations by Julia Alvarez: Like a miniature autobiography in verse, Alvarez’s radiant fifth collection offers snapshots from her life: a childhood in the Dominican Republic, immigration to 1960s New York City, the vicissitudes of adulthood, and the bittersweetness of later-life love. In a prose afterword, she calls the poems “visitations from selves of the past and present.” With its vivid scenes and alliterative phrasing, this gorgeous collection presents food and family, memory and companionship, as talismans to hold against the darkness.
Scrap Book by Nick Martino: Martino’s debut poetry collection draws on his mother’s journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and his father’s incarceration. The imagery spotlights Midwest farm country. Love and meaning are salvaged from family wreckage in the same way one might “look/ for fugitive beauty in the bulldozed” orchard. Free verse alternates with forms: an unrhymed sonnet, an aubade, and a “duplex.” Alliteration and assonance sparkle, and two poems employ anaphoric rhetoric.
The Way the Water Held Me by Catherine Redford: Redford was 35 with a young child when 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 through biographical poems about Mary Shelley. I loved the archival vocabulary of “Obituary” and how belongings left behind take on outsize significance. The alliteration and nature imagery are just right. From the hardest of circumstances came something tender and lovely.
Have you read any of these, or might you now based on my recommendation? What other 2026 releases should I catch up on?
June Releases by Fiona Mozley, Heather Sellers & Myfanwy Tristram
This month I have a fiction–poetry–nonfiction trio covers fake memories, Florida’s beauty and weirdness, and the past 50 years of protests in the UK. I also excerpt my reviews of five June releases I read in advance for Shelf Awareness, including one that’s in the running for my Book of the Year.
Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley
When writer Mary Mooney dives into her memories during appointments with her therapist, Sita, most of what comes up is the everyday stuff of her childhood in York: mild shenanigans with her younger brother, Jos; her friends Amelia and Eve plus Eric, a newcomer from New York City; and their wider circle. Early on, though, she warns readers that she’s untrustworthy. “In recent years, I have had difficulties with my memory,” she confesses. “It was not a sickness of forgetting. I did not have too few memories, but too many,” some of which couldn’t possibly be real – the best example being her conviction that her grandfather assassinated Hitler. She also tells Sita of a hotel fire and her rudeness to a couple of right-wing writers and journalists – things one does in dreams but not generally in real life.
The focus is on Mary and her peers’ formative teen years around the start of the Iraq War. In the final chapter, she offers a where-are-they-now for her closest friends. “Most of this is a verifiable journey through a life I really lived,” she notes, but “from hereon the fabrications begin.” This should have been an exciting revisiting of recent history in the company of an unreliable narrator, but everything about the novel is so dull that it was impossible to stay interested. It feels like pedestrian autofiction (insomuch as Mozley is from York and came of age in the same period as Mary, who is nominated for a major award for her first novel) drawing on a Blair-years upbringing. Mozley’s Elmet, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, is one of my favourite debut novels of the last decade, so it’s a real shame that her subsequent work hasn’t lived up to that potential. Hot Stew (2021) was a DNF for me, a caricature-heavy London state-of-the-nation novel, and Awake Awake reads like a half-baked debut, not a world-class novelist’s third. Unless I hear rave reviews about a return to form in future, that’s it for me with Mozley.
With thanks to John Murray Publishers for the free copy for review.
Women in Tampa Talking about Alligators by Heather Sellers
With such a title, how could you not want to read it?! In her fifth poetry collection, Sellers, a Florida native, recounts conversations with her neighbours, backyard sightings, and boat trips through swamp country. An appreciation of beauty rubs shoulders with awareness that it is threatened by climate breakdown and the state’s existential identity crisis. She describes Florida as “the thumbs-down thumb”; it “hangs on, for now, bobbing, / as she lowers into the dull warm blue sea.” Lovely poems about birds spin delightfully unexpected imagery: “watching the great white egret / stiletto across the jasmine fence, / black patent legs shining”. But they also contain barbs about the polluting influence of modern life (spot the alliteration and internal and slant rhymes):
Someone’s silvery phone gleaming underwater.
A fleet of rays flew between our little boats, skin kites on roller skates.
We discovered the things slung around the channel marker
was not a bird, just a plastic sack: the common, grey Florida Wal-Mart bag.
Cormorants dove into the chests of mangrove.
High above, paragraphs of frigates cursive-d land, land, land.
As winter and summer swap, the advantages and downsides of living in an identikit suburb mostly inhabited by retirees from elsewhere become clear. Nature is red in tooth and claw even in her garden, where crows prey on baby mockingbirds. Alligators are everywhere, and when “removed” for being a “nuisance” – in other words, interfering with human activity – their end reveals our inhumane priorities. “No? Seriously? They are euthanized? Euthanized for what, for living?” This is a terrific free verse collection at the intersection of the edenic and the diminished everyday. I would definitely read more by Sellers.
Published by Lynx House Press. With thanks to publicist Jeffrey Yamaguchi for the free e-copy for review.
Noisy Valley: The Art of Protest by Myfanwy Tristram
This is not a comprehensive history of protest but a snapshot of it over the past half-century or so, focussing on the Rhondda Valley in South Wales (not far from Cardiff), where a surprising number originated. The frame story is an exhibit of Tristram’s protest drawings at the Workers Gallery in Ynyshir, where she meets those featured. Each story is then expounded in turn, based on interviews with someone who led the protest or participated in it. We learn of miners’ strikes, a protest against a hospital closure, outrage over toxic runoff from a landfill, and a campaign to save Northern Meadows. One impetus was the worrying trend in the UK (and elsewhere) of governments cracking down on peaceful protests with overly harsh punishments.
I was surprised to find that two of the chapters had local relevance for me: the Greenham Common women’s peace camp and the Aldermaston marches (part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). I was additionally taken aback to spot Martyn Joseph, a Welsh singer-songwriter we’re familiar with from Greenbelt Festival, turning up to sing a new bespoke version of “This Land Is Your Land” for a protest. I’m not fond of the talking heads approach to graphic nonfiction (also seen in Sexuality: A Graphic Guide and Trans History) or of the particular style here – monochrome in the main text with a few full-colour pages plus in the asides on the history of protest and changing regulations. I preferred the spreads focusing on landscapes. However, this is a worthwhile project and I particularly appreciated the below quote, which captures my feeling about the environmental marches I’ve been on in London.
You might find this a bit weird, but I never really thought that protest ever achieves its purpose. We still have nuclear weapons, you know. But it is worthwhile. My feeling is that protest is wonderful because it brings people together as a social group. The meeting of hearts and minds. I would argue that’s very positive.
~David Hurn, Aldermaston photographer
With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain: A remarkable debut novel about the last years of Sylvia Plath’s life. I’ve already discussed it here.
Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself by Deni Elliott with Graham Buck: Elliott was diagnosed as legally blind as an adult, though she’d always had limited vision. She explores her relationships with five very different dogs and introduces the process of training guide dogs in this heartwarming story of human–animal connection and resilience.
Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance by Maggie Helwig: Helwig is the rector of inner-city Toronto’s St. Stephen-in-the-Fields. Her stirring sermons espouse a practical, progressive theology and affirm the power of solidarity and the commitment to social justice in turbulent times (including the pandemic years).
Scrap Book by Nick Martino: Martino’s formally inventive debut poetry collection draws on his mother’s journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a Midwestern family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and his father’s incarceration.
Whistler by Ann Patchett: Patchett is a master on the subject of family dysfunction, and her tenth novel, a stepdaughter–stepfather love story, is as wise as ever on secrets, traumatic memories, and storytelling. This is one of my top three books of 2026 so far, along with Brawler and John of John.
Which of these June releases have you read, or will you seek out now? What am I missing out on?
20 Books of Summer, 8–9: Greenwell and Reid for Pride Month
As part of my Pride Month coverage (more coming up in Love Your Library on Monday), I’m reviewing a sophisticated gay novella that’s celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and a gossipy pastiche of a Hollywood tell-all that I read for Wednesday’s upcoming book club. SPOILERS APPEAR IN BOTH, so if details of what happens bother you, you may want to skim or skip over some of what follows. In fact, it might be a spoiler just to include the Reid under this heading…
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (2016)
Greenwell’s third novel, Small Rain, was my novel of 2024, so I wanted to go back to his debut and trace the development of his talent. This, too, is autofiction and shares a preoccupation with the profound uncertainty produced by illness and a newfound awareness of mortality. There are also, through flashbacks, glimpses of the author’s strict, religious Kentucky upbringing in both. But What Belongs to You mostly arose from the years Greenwell spent teaching English in Bulgaria. A version of the first section was published in 2011 as a standalone novella called Mitko. This is the name of the mercurial, possibly mentally ill and unhoused sex worker that the American teacher meets in the bathrooms of Sofia’s National Palace of Culture and keeps encountering—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—in the years to come. “Never before had I met anyone who combined such transparency … with such mystery,” the narrator marvels; he feels “held like his beloved, or his child; or held, I suppose it must be said, like his captive or his prey.” Their relationship is wildly imbalanced. The sex can be tender or violent. He gives Mitko money; Mitko gives him syphilis. The narrator meditates on his bodily fear, his sense of betrayal, the unknowability of others, and the deviousness of appropriating their stories for his art. I didn’t love reading about gay cruising, but the stream-of-consciousness section about his earlier life, prompted by news of his father’s imminent death, and the granular account of a train ride with his mother he spends observing a little boy and his grandmother were right up my street – masterful examples of how to translate experience directly into hypnotic prose. Greenwell is the James Baldwin of our time. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017)
I always thought this came after Daisy Jones & the Six, but instead that 2019 novel brought renewed attention to her earlier work. They are both structured around biased first-person confessions in an interview setting, as well as, here, faux documents (gossip magazine articles). Evelyn Hugo grew up the daughter of Cuban immigrants in 1940s Hell’s Kitchen and escaped to Hollywood at age 15. That was through her first marriage; the others to come were for a mixture of reasons: short-lived passion, career advantage, public scandal, or masking the truth of another relationship. Because, in fact, the real love of this blonde bombshell’s life was a woman: fellow actress Celia St. James, with whom she co-starred in a Little Women adaptation. They have an intermittent relationship over the decades, both hiding in marriages to men so they can be together in secret and so that Evelyn can have the child she longs for. (Evelyn insists throughout that she is bisexual, which bothers lesbian Celia.)
It’s a rollicking tour through a convincing pastiche of an Old Hollywood career, divided into sections based on the husband of the time. Evelyn comes across as cut-throat: willing to lie and manipulate people to get ahead. And yet you can’t help but admire her shrewdness; she’s also sympathetic for the poverty and domestic violence she’s endured, if not for how she’s leveraged her sensuality (her large breasts were famously almost shown in a French film). Ever the actress, she is still performative even when she claims to be disclosing the truth publicly for the first time. I wondered if she was too clichéd as a brassy Latina.
My main problem, though, was with the framing story: Evelyn demands that Monique Grant, a biracial rookie journalist, write her life story. Evelyn is 79 and strangely sure she’ll die soon, so wants to both unburden herself and set the record straight. Monique is going through a divorce and learns from Evelyn to treat this simply as the breakdown of a marriage rather than as a personal failure. She also absorbs lessons of how to be assertive and advance her own career. But early on Reid signposts a shock connection to be revealed between Evelyn and Monique. That ‘big reveal’ was a bit of a letdown. It could have just been an interview transcript (hello, Daisy Jones!) or finished ‘biography’.
In any case, writing as two characters of colour took guts from Reid, and bisexual rep is always welcome. This was an undemanding, soap opera-esque summer read. The only category on which it might fall short in our book club ratings is the writing, which is lite (but good for guzzling). Think of it as a fruity cocktail in book form. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project)
Book vs. Film: What Are You Going Through / The Room Next Door
Film, because…
I’m borrowing the idea from a post series by Kate of Books Are My Favourite and Best that compares books and their adaptations. It’s now vanishingly rare for me to see movies – I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the ones I’ve seen in the last three years – because we haven’t had a television for a decade or more, don’t subscribe to any streaming services, find going to the cinema too expensive, and mostly can’t be bothered to get out an old laptop to watch our measly collection of DVDs. It’s kind of a shame, because I was a real cinephile in my high school and early college years, making my way through the American Film Institute’s top 100 list, recording B&W classics from late-night TV, and following the Oscars race to enter a low-value pool. It certainly means a lot more time for books, though.
BUT I watched two streamed movies while I was staying with my sister in the States, both chosen for their literary influences or similarities. (I ran out of time to watch Women Talking, which I was eyeing up but it would have incurred a separate cost.) One was The Menu, about a megalomaniac chef for whose extravagant multi-course meals the mega-rich travel to a private island. Elle suggested it as a companion to Land of Milk and Honey with its chef protagonist and questions of power, sexuality and wealth. The Menu, starring Ralph Fiennes, was good fun, with a twisty plot and strong performances, but got darker and gorier than expected as Fiennes’ character uses dishes to explore childhood trauma and settle old scores.
The other was Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, The Room Next Door (2024). It’s based on Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through (2020), which I read at its release. It’s the story of a writer whose friend, ravaged by cancer, asks her to be present when she ends her life. As is typical of Nunez’s sparse, Cusk-like autofiction, the characters have no names and minimal histories, there are no speech marks, and the scant plot is layered with various other found stories and aphorisms. The film is, of necessity, very different: it zeroes in on the assisted suicide plot, makes events more concrete, and goes as far as the aftermath rather than just-before-the-end. I watched it with my sister because, as a hospice nurse, she has an interest in the topic.
Julianne Moore at The Room Next Door premiere (BFI LFF: Royal Festival Hall, 19 October 2024) (Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons).
{SPOILERS IN THE REMAINDER}
In The Room Next Door, Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is a writer whose latest book explores her fear of death. She and Martha (Tilda Swinton) were acquaintances when they worked for the same magazine, but they seem to have lost touch over the decades. Martha’s journalistic career was much more exciting, taking her to war zones as a correspondent. Martha has a daughter, Michelle, whom she’s really not in touch with, partly as a result of not being frank about the identity of Michelle’s father. Ingrid is shocked by Martha’s request and it takes her a while to come around to the idea of being the person ‘in the room next door’ when Martha takes the euthanasia drug she’s bought off the dark web.
Nunez’s novel opens with the narrator attending a doom-and-gloom lecture by her ex, who is convinced that climate change won’t be addressed and the human race will die out. I was surprised that he’s included in the film and in fact given an expanded role: not only is there the scene from the book in which Ingrid meets Damian (John Turturro) for lunch and tells him what’s going on with her friend, but we learn that he was an ex for both of them, and he helps Ingrid deal with the fallout of Martha’s actions. He also seems to function as a reminder of sexuality, which remains a powerful impulse even in the face of individual or collective death.
When I got home from the States, I reread the Nunez and – though she’s a favourite of mine – I confess I was disappointed. The philosophical and storytelling asides seem like unnecessary distractions when all you want to know is what happens with her friend. (I have, of course, also read The Spare Room, which preceded the Nunez by 12 years, in the meantime.) My original review seems generous as well as admirably succinct. (It’s depressing for me to go back to old reviews; not only have I not gotten any better, my writing has deteriorated, if anything. Is it laziness? Erosion of formality? Lack of time? Loss of focus?)
My sole complaint then was that Nunez spent too much time recounting the plot of a mystery novel the narrator reads. Well! Having reviewed her collected short stories, It Will Come Back to You, I can report that said plot is that of her “The Plan,” published in LitMag in 2019. How (playful and meta, yes, but) self-indulgent to borrow her own short story! So while I still appreciated the overall theme of empathy and the wise observations (“The only thing harder than seeing yourself grow old is seeing the people you’ve loved grow old … most people are in denial about aging, just as they are about dying”), and enjoyed the monologue from a cat which I’d forgotten about, I got bored and impatient the second time around. (I’m still a Nunez stan, though. – Am I using that right? Are we still saying that?)
Ultimately, then, The Room Next Door surpasses its source material for its focus, its performances, its locations, and its weirdness. Almodóvar cuts most of the peripheral material and makes it all about the women’s relationship with each other, as well as Ingrid’s with her ex and Martha’s with her daughter. The elegant Moore does a fine job in the role; the only way to have given a flavour of Nunez’s narration would have been to use voiceover or diary-writing scenes, which could have been naff. But Swinton is a marvel. Her American accent is ever so slightly strange, but that works; she’s such a striking person that it fits for her to be somewhat otherworldly. She is a perfect vessel for Martha’s frustrated rage and her body language, as well as the costuming and makeup, highlight the differences between her well periods, when she’s vibrant, and her worst relapses, when she’s pale and gaunt. (I was astonished to learn that both actors are now 65, by the way!)
Tilda Swinton, Pedro Almodóvar, and Julianne Moore at 81st Venice International Film Festival (Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).
In the book, the friends stay in an Airbnb in upstate New York. In the film, Casa Szoke, an hour from Madrid in Spain, stands in. It’s a stunning Modernist (also described as “brutalist”) house, and the pool terrace and the staircase dividing Martha’s room from Ingrid’s downstairs are key features. Probably the single most interesting decision Almodóvar made was to have Swinton play Michelle as well, which emphasizes the persistence of family traits and – because Michelle has a scene after Martha is dead – makes it seem like she’s not completely gone. Of course, Almodóvar has always gone in for surrealism and doubling, and I loved this hint of the mysterious. I also appreciated the repeated quotes from James Joyce’s novella The Dead (“faintly falling … upon all the living and the dead.”).
The gist may be the same, but the reading and viewing experiences are really very dissimilar and, while I wouldn’t dissuade you from either, it was the film that impressed me most.
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20 Books of Summer, 4–7: Fadiman; Kingsolver & O’Farrell Rereads; Sullivan
I finished several of these a while ago now, but it’s been a struggle to summon up the motivation to write about them, especially during the heat wave we’re currently experiencing in the southern half of England. You’ve heard a lot from me recently as I’ve been catching up on reviews, so I’ll try to keep these responses to one (long) paragraph each.
Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman (2026)
This was one of my Most Anticipated titles of the year because I’ve loved Fadiman’s nonfiction, especially the bookish Ex Libris, which I’ve read twice. Her essays are warm and fluent, braiding memoir and observation in a natural way and drawing readers in whether they share her particular preoccupations or not. “Frog” is about her guilt for not being more attentive to her children’s surprisingly long-lived pet frog, Bunky; “South Polar Times” recounts her obsession with polar exploration and what she discovered in the archives of the magazine Shackleton produced in the 1910s. At the centre of the book is a triptych on modern technology (“My Old Printer”) and language use, especially as she’s experienced it as a Yale professor trying to adjust to pandemic-era teaching (“Screen Share”) and expanded gender possibilities (“All My Pronouns,” which is mostly about getting used to “they” as a singular pronoun for nonbinary individuals). What a relief that advancing age and pedantry didn’t see her joining the anti-woke camp. The final essay, “Yes to Everything,” was – I think – the afterword to her late student Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness (2014). For me the highlight was “The Oakling and the Oak,” about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s disappointing son (“A penumbra of impossible expectation began to settle around Hartley’s head”). There’s a tantalizing parallel here with her own sense of needing to live up to her literary father, Clifton Fadiman, that I wish she’d explored further. So: good stuff here, but only seven essays, all of which were originally published elsewhere. It feels like scraping the barrel. And why the laudatory foreword by someone I’ve never heard of (Sam Anderson)? I ordered this while in the States to get to a free-shipping limit and I’m glad I got the chance to read it, but it’s not a must. Do seek out “Frog” and “Oak,” though. (New purchase – Target.com)
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (2000)
In all her life Lusa had never seen such an oversexed, muggy summer. Just breathing was a torrid proposition.
Although I remembered this as being in Kingsolver’s top tier of novels, I recalled no details beyond a female ranger who lives in the woods, has an affair with a hunter, and studies coyotes (actually, I thought it was wolves – I was conflating Deanna’s surname, Wolfe, and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, which has a similar setup). I’d forgotten that there are two other strands: Lusa, a Polish-Palestinian entomologist widowed young, inherits her husband’s family farm and tries to make a go of goat breeding despite others’ disapproval; and Garnett, a pious old man trying to resurrect the American chestnut after it was wiped out by blight, has an ongoing low-key feud with his organic orchard-keeping neighbour, Nannie. These threads rotate under the headings “Predators,” “Moth Love,” and “Old Chestnuts.” There are pleasing connections between the main characters, who are also thematically linked by ideological disagreements and the possibility of new life and romance when age or circumstances seemed to disqualify them. Kingsolver writes brilliantly about science, and although she gets a little preachy through Nannie, in a way that presages Unsheltered (“It’s glory, to be part of a bigger something. The glory of an evolving world”), her environmentalist messages are always right on. It’s depressing to note that, more than a quarter-century later, the issues she raises related to food production and pesticide use are worse rather than better. Like Margaret Atwood, she’s a literary prophet of our time. I’m nearly halfway through her upcoming novel, Partita, for a Shelf Awareness review and its protagonist, Livia, seems to be in the lineage of Deanna – an Appalachian girl who tries to exceed her origins. This was a big ol’ satisfying summer read. Whyever didn’t Kingsolver win the Women’s Prize for this one? (Little Free Library)
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Poolside reading at my nephew’s graduation party.
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell (2006)
Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.
Another reread. I remembered the mental hospital element but think I may have otherwise had this confused with Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, which also features historical family secrets and a great big twist. This was our book club selection for June, and although I missed the meeting (which was also our summer social) while I was back visiting my family, I wanted to catch up by reading it again – especially after it earned a perfect score from the rest of the group! In the novel’s present day, vintage clothing store owner Iris is having an affair with a married man and learns that she has a ‘mad’ great-aunt who will soon be her responsibility when the hospital Esme has called home for 60 years closes. Why did Iris’s grandmother, Kitty, hide that she had a sister? With Kitty on a dementia ward, she can’t ask outright. Instead, narration alternates between the sisters’ growing-up years in India and Edinburgh – where flighty, rebellious Esme caught boys’ eyes while obedient Kitty didn’t – and Iris and Esme embarking on a tentative relationship. The use of the present tense for both, as well as the fragments of memory we gradually work out are Kitty’s, create a continuous narrative so gripping that I could easily have consumed it in one sitting had I not had other commitments. Grief, parenting, male privilege, family legacies, and a freedom of spirit that might today be branded neurodivergence are strong elements. It’s appalling how women have been punished for breaking the rules, but the other ensuing betrayals are just as shocking. This must have one of THE best surprise endings out there. I can’t believe I’d forgotten the details. After a couple of lacklustre early novels, O’Farrell’s career truly took off with this one. Now to reread her other gems. (Borrowed from a book club friend)
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Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan (2009)
Smith had left its mark on her, so that the place would always feel like home
I’ve had a mixed experience with Sullivan’s novels, but this debut was a delight. Let’s start with the clever title: An American graduation ceremony is called “commencement,” so it marks both an ending and a beginning. For four friends who meet at Smith College, a women-only institution, in the late 1990s, their student experiences have effects that carry on into their ‘real’ lives afterwards. We watch how their relationships with each other, and with family members and partners, shift over the course of nearly a decade. Sally arrives on campus bereft from the death of her mother, but she doesn’t let her sadness corrode her ambition or her kind heart. Bree is engaged to a man when she comes up from Savannah but leaves in a committed relationship with a woman. April was raised by a single mother and has always been a strident feminist, but graduates with plans to go to extremes in drawing attention to the plight of sex workers. The framing story of the friends gathering for Sally’s wedding introduces us first to Celia, who is in some sense still living the student life in the small New York City apartment she brings one-night stands back to after drunken evenings. The wedding ends up in a huge fight between the four, and as the years pass they split off into pairs and trios of loyalty before a crisis brings them back together. It’s a little far-fetched how this all plays out, but I was invested enough in all four characters that I was happy to go along with it. Sullivan went to Smith (I also attended what was a women’s college at the time, Hood), so you have to wonder if anything was autobiographical for her. She weaves in various women’s issues, such as sexual assault and decisions about career and motherhood. I applaud Sullivan for mentioning support for trans men on campus, though her discussion does seem of its time and today I think the debate would be more around allowing trans women to attend. I chose this to read because my recent USA trip was for my nephew’s high school graduation. It’s perfect for Curtis Sittenfeld fans. (Secondhand purchase – 2nd & Charles)
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 