12 Days in Portugal and Spain & What I Read
It’s the second time we’ve braved the 20+-hour ferry crossing from the south coast of England to Santander in the north of Spain. Four years ago, we stayed on the edge of the Picos de Europa national park in Spain. This time we prioritized Portugal, spending a night in Spain on the way out and back. (In Léon, we acquired a taste for vermouth – and the free tapas that come with it. So cheap, too. What a fun eating-out culture!)
Portugal was a new country for us and we thoroughly enjoyed getting a taste of it. Spring seemed to be a month ahead of the UK and blossom was abundant. We stayed in three places in the north: Guimarães, the Douro Valley, and the Côa Valley. We took our new-to-us EV and found the distances manageable and charging cheaper and easier than in the UK. Going by car made packing easy and allowed us to bring back some port, Mr. F’s favourite tipple. However, there were hairy drives along confusing city streets and narrow mountain roads.
Our first stay was at Pousada de Santa Marinha, overlooking Portugal’s oldest city. One of a chain of state-restored castles and convents, it was originally a 12th-century monastery. We relished the bountiful breakfast buffet and manicured grounds but wished for more free time to relax in the grand common areas. Mostly we used this as a base for the first of two day trips to Porto, where we got good views from the cathedral tower, had delicious coffee and veggie snacks at 7g Roaster, and did a tour and tasting at Taylor’s port house. Portugal does a good line in doorstep cats. We also had our first sighting of swifts for the year on the 7th, flying above the azulejos (painted tiles) and cobbled streets of Guimarães before a traditional taverna meal of bacalhau (salt cod) fritters and bean stew with vinho verde.
Quinta dos Murças was, if anything, even more luxurious than the pousada. We were the only guests on our first of three nights at the winery, and after a private English-language cellar tour and wine and port tasting, a sit on the wisteria-covered balcony, and a three-course meal in the dining room, we were feeling like royalty. Along with grapes, they grow almonds, olives and several types of citrus. The lemon trees were dripping with the biggest fruits I’ve ever seen, and the smell of the orange blossom was truly intoxicating. The next morning we got up early and took a pack-up picnic on the train back into Porto, which was so hot and busy that we wondered why we’d bothered – though we did have an excellent tasting experience at a smaller producer, Poças, that included white and red wine, several ports, and a cocktail of white port, lime juice, and blood orange tonic served with a salt rim.
Portuguese is significantly more challenging than Spanish, so I was pleased with myself for managing an all-Portuguese transaction with the conductor on the rural branch line. The old-fashioned train carriages were spacious with comfortable seats, though the ride was not what one would call speedy. The journey back was fraught because we found ourselves pressed to catch the final train of the day (at just after 5:30 p.m.!), couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets at the station machines, were short of cash to pay the conductor on board, and arrived 2 hours late after a car collided with a telegraph pole and left the track blocked for an hour. The following day, what did we do? Got back on a train! (In the opposite direction, with tickets we’d carefully purchased ahead online.) This time we traveled toward the eastern end of the scenic Douro Valley so that we managed to see the whole river in pieces. The village of Tua had no particular sights, but we had a pleasant amble along its river boardwalk.
We’d earmarked the Côa Valley because it’s home to a sizable rewilding project. On the way, we stopped at Penascosa, an outdoor rock art site with etchings of ibex, aurochs and deer – and even ancient attempts at animation! The Rewilding Centre, where we stayed, is similar to a hostel and has an industrial kitchen because it also operates as a café for the villagers. In cities, we had tended to find English speakers, but the centre manager here had no English, so we happily switched to French (a true lingua franca!) to communicate with her.
The accommodation may have felt like a step down after our two previous splurges, but we’d booked a different treat to selves: an English-speaking guide from Wildlife Portugal who took us out in a Land Rover and found us loads of eagles, vultures and warblers. Bee-eaters and black storks were particular highlights. We were impressed by the array of landscapes: vines and olive groves, granite boulders, high cliffs, pools created by former mining, and green glens. At the hostel we met an English couple (one half a botanist) who are exploring Europe on Interrail passes during a three-month sabbatical, and they joined us for the second day of wildlife tourism; we discovered that Fernando is just as good with plants as with birds.
It was a varied, comfy, boozy trip. There was the touristy experience in Porto and parts of the Douro Valley, but also the ‘real’ countryside. Things ended on something of a sour note due to a rough return crossing of the Bay of Biscay. We’ll be back in Spain next summer to meet up with my sister and our nephew on his school trip to Barcelona, but that jaunt will be by train!
What I Read
En route: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, which I’ll review for a spring-themed post as it’s the first in a quartet of loosely seasonal novellas. You likely know this prison story from the film version.
In Portugal: three Portugal-set novels I’d proudly sourced, including two in translation. My only previous knowledge of Portuguese literature had been a DNF of a José Saramago novel.
The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge (1998; 2001)
[Translated by Margaret Jull Costa]
The title figure is Walter, a former soldier who wanders the world and sends his bird paintings back to his daughter at the Dias family home in (fictional) Valmares. His actual visits are few and clandestine: Jorge keeps returning to a scene of him holding his shoes in his hand so he can soundlessly climb the stairs to see his daughter. You see, his daughter is officially his ‘niece’, born of an affair Maria Ema had with her husband Custódio’s brother. That act of adultery is the foundation of the novel but so tacit that it influences everything, including the language and narration. “Walter’s daughter” narrates – in third person or first – and frequently refers to herself as “Walter’s niece” instead.
The slippery narrative moves back and forth in time, pausing at a few landmark years. Very little happens, per se, apart from Walter’s daughter having a liaison with her mother’s therapist and then going to find her father in Argentina, but throughout we are invited to observe the family’s shifting dynamic and understand the narrator’s growing bitterness – “so bruised are we all by the passing of time.” I found the writing intermittently beautiful (“the sun was setting, persimmon red, behind the smooth fields”; “A tangle of living ghosts, the magical cortège of all tyrannies”) but sometimes pretentious or obfuscating to no purpose (“I invoke the decade of irony, the decade of silence pierced by the oblique laughter of cynicism”). (Interlibrary loan) 
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel (2016)
I knew of Martel’s obscure fourth novel through The Bookshop Band’s song “Why I Travel This Way,” about a bereaved man who starts walking backwards. What I didn’t realize is that the book is essentially three linked novellas and that song responds to just the first one, “Homeless.” Within a week, museum curator Tomás’s son, common-law wife, and father all died. Tomás sets off in his uncle’s early motorcar (this being 1904) to find a religious relic he learned about from a 17th-century priest’s journal written in São Tomé. But he has no idea how to drive, and accidents and persecution continue to beset him. A Job-like figure, he has set “his back to the world, his back to God” as a way of “not grieving” but “objecting.” Next, pathologist Eusebio and his wife have a high-minded discussion of the morality of murder mysteries in the 1939-set “Homeward.” Eusebio then undertakes an unexpected late-night job when an old woman arrives with her late husband’s corpse in a suitcase. Every cut reveals the substance of the man’s life rather than the reason for his death.
After religious parable and magic realism, “Home” initially seems more straightforward with its story of a widowed Canadian senator who buys Odo the chimpanzee from a research centre and relocates to rural Portugal. If you’ve read Life of Pi and/or Beatrice and Virgil, you know that Martel really goes in for his animal allegories. Odo might be considered symbolic of simplicity and joy in life. There are apt connections with the other novellas: not only an overarching theme of grief, but the specifics of one northern Portuguese village and its events that have become legend. And, yes, chimpanzees. A line from the first part serves as Martel’s mantra: “We are risen apes, not fallen angels.” Weird but satisfying. (Public library) 
The Piano Cemetery by José Luís Peixoto (2006; 2010)
[Translated by Daniel Hahn]
It may be premature, but I feel I can pinpoint some trademarks of Portuguese literature based on the few examples I’ve now read (plus Martel’s pastiche): narrative trickery, family dysfunction, metaphors of blindness, philosophical and religious dialogues, and a fine line between life and death. Unfortunately, in this case I found the appealing elements buried under an off-putting style. The Lázaro family are carpenters in 1910s Lisbon with a back room housing busted pianos that they use for their instrument-repair side business. To start with, the narrator is the dead patriarch of the family, who remembers how he met his wife at the piano cemetery and keeps watch over his children and grandchildren in the present day. There are also two long sections of stream-of-consciousness memories of his son Francisco as he runs the marathon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Francisco Lázaro was a historical figure who died in that athletic pursuit, but the family backstory of estrangement, domestic violence, and adultery that Peixoto builds around him is fictional. Punctuated by distance markers (“Kilometre one” and so on), Francisco’s fragments are decontextualised and often don’t join up or even form complete sentences. Add in the father’s fatphobic attitude toward one of his daughters and the laughably circuitous phrasing (“my thick hand in a single movement, like an impulse, but not even an impulse, like a desire you have for a moment and which becomes concrete in that same moment, another person’s desire within me, a desire which is not thought, but which rises up like a flame” – huh? can I blame the translator?) and you might see why this was a slog for me. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com) 
Plus a partial reread of a delightful teen novel we both read the last time we were in Spain:
The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius
[Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves]
Talk about a risen ape! Sally Jones is an animal narrator extraordinaire: a ship’s engineer who meets every challenge that comes her way with aplomb, traveling from Portugal to India and back just to clear the Chief’s name after he’s falsely accused of murder. She happens to be a gorilla, but her only real limitation is that she can’t voice human language; she understands and writes it perfectly, and can beat most people at chess. This doorstopper never feels like one because it races along on a tide of adventure and intrigue. The technology suggests a 1920s date. All the settings are evocative, but historical Lisbon is especially enticing (and not dissimilar to Peixoto’s): Sally Jones lives with Ana Molina, a famous fado singer, and works in her neighbour Signor Fidardo’s instrument workshop repairing accordions. 
Plus the latter half of another novel or two I had on the go, and most of a couple of pre-release e-books for Shelf Awareness reviews: the odd Kitten by Stacey Yu, about a cat-identifying millennial Disaster woman, and The Half Life by Rachel Beanland. Set in 1970s Sardinia, this was a perfect summer read – intelligent as well as sultry – about a young Navy wife’s sexual coming of age and casual investigation into the ongoing effect of American nuclear submarines on the island’s natural environment.
Rearranging and Culling My Library
I’m a thrill-seeker, me; when life gets boring, it’s time to engage in the extreme sport of rearranging my home library. My goal this month has been to shake things up and trick myself into being lured by my own books. After all, I was attracted enough to acquire them all. But at some point it’s as if I stop seeing the individual books and they collectively become a sort of wallpaper.
And as I’ve mentioned to some of you, I’ve been disappointed that attempts to highlight segments of my collection – e.g. shelves devoted to BIPOC authors and Women’s Prize nominees – failed: these books seemed more likely to sit unread for years. It must be something to do with creating a feeling of obligation. Even my piles of foodie reads and medical memoirs, two of my favourite subgenres, have gotten ignored.
Signed copies shelves: fiction; nonfiction
Setting up special-interest sections backfired, so what next? First, I switched up locations in the upstairs; second, I adjusted the classifications. The one hard and fast rule in my collection is that I separate read from unread books. I don’t currently have room to display read paperbacks, which are in boxes upstairs awaiting built-in shelving in our lounge. I only have one bookcase for read hardbacks, and it’s at capacity; I’ll soon have to reconsider how I display them (and double-stack in the meantime).
Nonfiction priority; hardback fiction; upcoming challenges and miscellaneous
For my fiction TBR, I interfiled everything into one sequence. Previously, I had kept story collections and novellas separate, but the latter are easy to spot. I’m a librarian at heart and could never eradicate alphabetical order. But, as Jan Morris observed in A Writer’s House in Wales, “I am … stymied in my methodical ordering of this library by the matter of size. Books can be maddeningly un-uniform, meaning that some … which should be side by side with their fellows, are too tall to get on the proper shelves.” Thus a separate shelf for hardbacks and oversize paperbacks.
Upcoming and seasonal reads; first half of Fiction A-Z
Then, on a whim, I decided to mix it up by creating a rainbow bookcase on the landing. (To make it more of a challenge, I told myself I could use no Penguins for orange. And I put all the green Viragos together on a different shelf for visual impact.) This made me appreciate just how many books have blue spines, and dull white or black ones! I’m rather pleased with the result, but I will have to be loose about the contents: books will come and go as I read and pass them on, and add others in. In fact, I slotted three in yesterday – two green and a pink – after a trip to our local indie bookstore for my friend’s belated 70th birthday treat.
Other areas I’ve created:
- Priority shelves for time-sensitive books (to be reviewed at publication or for challenges)
- Nonfiction priority – two shelves, one in approximated Dewey order; another that includes review copies and some part-read
Fiction A-Z, part II
Plus some I’ve maintained:
- Priority to reread
- Seasonal books, in a box
- Signed copies – fiction and nonfiction separate; the handful of unread ones are offset
All through this process, I kept an eye out for books I was no longer keen to read. I ended up jettisoning another 81 (after the 90–100 I culled last year during our hallway redecoration), 17 of which I’ll sell; the rest will be donated to charity or the Little Free Library or given to book club friends as part of the book swap game we do for our holiday social each year.
To reread (top shelf and bottom left stack); nonfiction priority
My criteria for getting rid of books were, as I’ve expounded in several posts before:
- Is it a duplicate copy? I used to keep two copies of certain books, thinking I’d do buddy reads with my husband. I have to face facts, though: buddy reads don’t work for us. He tends to read one book at a time and races ahead, while I falter or give up entirely (ahem, Cloud Atlas). I’ve only kept multiple copies where I think it’s a book we might consider setting for book club.
- Is the condition too poor? I’m not usually overly picky about this, but I did ditch four books whose spines were so faded that the title was no longer legible.
- Am I really going to read it? This is a difficult one. I like the idea of certain books but forget that I have random pet peeves, and only so much space – and time. If unsure, I checked the Goodreads page. Ratings and reviews from my friends, but also from randoms whose taste I’ve come to know, can be very helpful in telling me if something is likely to be for me. Some examples of books I decided against keeping, and the reasons:
- Peculiar Ground by Lucy Hughes-Hallett: A doorstopper of a saga that starts in the 17th century, one of my last choices of historical period to read about.
- The Mammoth Cheese by Sheri Holman: Shortlisted for the Orange Prize, but it’s over 400 pages and has great potential to be hokey.
- Eothen by Alexander Kinglake: I had two copies and rid myself of both, even though Jan Morris called it one of the best travel books of all time, because I can’t bear straight travelogues, especially antiquated ones.
- The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner: I DNFed her previous novel and decided against reading her latest; why would the one in between suit me any better?
- The Men Who Stare at Goats and Them by Jon Ronson: I enjoyed two of his books pre-pandemic, but when I look at these now, they just seem dated.
- Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn: Bought at The Works in Whitby in 2016 and kept all these years because I was amused by the sales stickers layering up from £2 to £1 to 50p to 25p to 10p. Yes, I bought it for 10 pence. But after a decade, I accepted that I was never going to read this 400+-page novel about an invented drug that induces happiness but then leads to a murder.
As I was going through my groaning set-aside shelf, especially, I had to be honest with myself. Sometimes I misjudge and request a review copy, then for years feel guilty about not reading something that turned out not to be for me. Or I might have liked something enough to get 50–100 pages, or more, into it but then ran out of steam. My choices for these (80+) books were: resume it right away; shelve it with the TBR, either with my progress marked with a slip of paper, or with the intention of starting over at the beginning; or call it unfinished and get rid of it.
The rainbow bookcase! Have you ever made one of these?
This will be an ongoing task and an evolving system, especially if I ship the remainder of my books over from the USA in June. They’ve been in boxes in my sister’s basement – before that, my dad’s storage unit; before that, my parents’ garage – for far too long. It’s time for a final prune and a reunion with the rest of their family across the pond.
Whether all this honing and rearranging of my collection has been successful, time will tell: my end-of-year stats will reveal whether I’ve managed to read more from my own shelves. I reckon I’ll enjoy the mental athletics of remembering where I’ve moved a book and finding something to fit a seasonal challenge or personal goal. Now that the books have new neighbours, I might be tempted by my long-neglected Four in a Row project again. And for 20 Books of Summer, the only parameter will be that they must be from my own shelves.
How have you kept your TBR under control recently? Do you also have to ‘trick’ yourself into reading your own books?
Cover Love 2025
As I did in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, I’ve picked out some favourite book covers from the past year’s new releases. This time, I’ve read all of the books featured!
I’m drawn to flora and fauna on book covers; and to adapted artworks.
These two stood out for their psychedelic colour choices.
I like an unusual, elegant font. Can anyone identify the one below? I actually wonder if I would have chosen to read all four books had the font not attracted me.
Neat that the image and/or (most of the) title are vertically aligned – a rarer choice.
I found this paper cut-out striking, and loved how a cheekily torn matchbook gives the middle finger.
But my two favourite title and cover combinations of the year were:
- Calls May Be Recorded for Training and Monitoring Purposes by Katharina Volckmer – The cover is totally appropriate to the bonkers and raunchy contents (see my Shelf Awareness review – even though I technically reviewed the North American release I’m sticking with the full title and sex doll of the UK edition).
(Overall favourite:)
- Pan by Michael Clune – The cover perfectly captures the mood of this weird novel about a teenage boy who has panic attacks and muses about attributing them to the god Pan. The painting snippet is from The Drunkenness of Noah by Camillo Procaccini; but the eyes, look at those eyes!
Postscript: In January 2026, Lit Hub chose their 75 best book covers of the past decade. Pan tied for third place for 2025.
What cover trends have you noticed this year? Which ones tend to grab your attention?
Guest Review of Greene Ferne Farm by Richard Jefferies (#NovNov25)
As busy as he is as a lecturer in animal ecology at the University of Reading (and a multi-instrumentalist in several folk/Americana bands), my husband, Dr Chris Foster, managed to find time to read and review (below) something for Novellas in November. This is a random, obscure Victorian novel (from 1880) that we picked up at a book sale in Kingsclere last month.
“The 19th-century author Richard Jefferies is better remembered as a nature writer than as a novelist, and in this slight early novella (albeit published only seven years before his death from tuberculosis at age 38) it is indeed his evocation of the landscapes, wildlife and weather of rural Wiltshire that stand out most.
“Jefferies conjures atmosphere skilfully, from an uneasy night lost on chalk downland in thick fog to the lonely, dust-filled room where an avaricious old farmer looks out at the sunset from his armchair. There’s a sense of abundant nature as a backdrop for rural life that can be taken for granted, a sense of connectivity across generations – “the cuckoo came and went; the swallows sailed for the golden sands of the south; the leaves, brown and orange and crimson, dropped and died” – but also a prescient fear expressed here by a landowning squire that modern farming methods such as ‘ploughing engines’ might “suck every atom out of the soil.” The abundance of corncrakes portrayed around Greene Ferne is just one reminder for contemporary readers of how much wildlife has been lost from farmland since Jefferies was writing.
“The plot is lacklustre in comparison to the prose: a Hardyesque blend of love triangles and scenes from rural life, with no sense that the occasionally dramatic events portrayed are helping to build any narrative momentum. The portrayals of rustic village folk, complete with thick country accents, feel clichéd and idealised, especially given the decidedly un-Hardyesque happy ending, but the quality of Jefferies’ writing for much of Greene Ferne Farm is at least an encouragement to check out his other, better-known work.” [126 pages] 
#NovNov25 Begins! & My Year in Novellas
Welcome to Novellas in November! The link-up is open (see my pinned post). At the start of the month, we’re inviting you to tell us about any novellas you’ve read since last November.
I have a designated shelf of short books that I keep adding to throughout the year. Whenever I’m at secondhand bookshops, charity shops, the Little Free Library, or the public library volunteering, I’m always eyeing up thin volumes and thinking about my piles for November.
But I read novellas other times of year, too. Forty-five of them between December 2024 and now, according to my Goodreads shelves (last year the figure was 44 and the year before it was 46, so that’s my natural average). I often choose to review books of novella length for BookBrowse, Foreword and Shelf Awareness, so that helps to account for the number. I’ve read a real mixture, but predominantly literature in translation and autobiographical works.
My four favourites are ones I’ve already covered on the blog (links to my reviews): The Most by Jessica Anthony, Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier and Three Days in June by Anne Tyler; and, in nonfiction, Mornings without Mii by Mayumi Inaba. Two works of historical fiction, one contemporary story; and a memoir of life with a cat.
What are some of your recent favourite novellas?
R.I.P. Reads, Part I: Apostolides, Dahl, Harkness, Kingfisher & Kohda
Ghosts, witches, vampires, creepy underground things: It can only be Readers Imbibing Peril time of year! Here’s my first five reviews.
The Homecoming by Zoë Apostolides (2025)
This debut novel dropped through my door as a total surprise: not only was it unsolicited, but I’d not heard about it. In this modern take on the traditional haunted house story, Ellen is a ghostwriter sent from London to Elver House, Northumberland, to work on the memoirs of its octogenarian owner, Catherine Carey. Ellen will stay in the remote manor house for a week and record 20 hours of audio interviews – enough to flesh out an autobiography. Miss Carey isn’t a forthcoming subject, but Ellen manages to learn that her father drowned in the nearby brook and that all Miss Carey did afterwards was meant to please her grieving mother and the strictures of the time. But as strange happenings in the house interfere with her task, Ellen begins to doubt she’ll come away with usable material. I was reminded of The Woman in Black, The Thirteenth Tale, and especially Wakenhyrst what with the local eel legends. The subplot about Ellen drifting apart from her best friend, a new mother, felt unnecessary, though I suppose was intended to bolster the main theme of women’s roles. There’s a twist that more seasoned readers of Gothic fiction and ghost stories might see coming. While I found this very readable and perfectly capably written, I didn’t get a sense of where the author hopes to fit in the literary market; she’s previously published a true crime narrative. Full disclosure: I once collaborated with Zoë on a Stylist assignment.
With thanks to Salt Publishing for the proof copy for review.
The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983)
I’m sure I read all of Dahl’s major works when I was a child, though I had no specific memory of this one. After his parents’ death in a car accident, a boy lives in his family home in England with his Norwegian grandmother. She tells him stories from Norway and schools him in how to recognize and avoid witches. They wear wigs and special shoes to hide their baldness and square feet, and with their wide nostrils they sniff out children to turn them into hated creatures like slugs. When Grandmamma falls ill with pneumonia, she and the boy travel to a Bournemouth hotel for her recovery only to stumble upon a convention of witches under the guise of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston, if you know the movie) has a new concoction that will transform children into mice at enough of a delay to occur the following morning at school. It’s up to the boy and his grandmother to save the day. I really enjoyed this caper, which I interpreted as being – like Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book – about imagination and making the most of one’s time with grandparents. But in the back of my mind was Jen Campbell’s objection to the stereotypical equating of disfigurement with villainy. The Grand High Witch also speaks with a heavy German accent. It would be understandable to dismiss this as dated and clichéd, but I still found it worthwhile. It also fit into my project to read books from my birth year. (Free from a neighbour) 
The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness (2024)
Somehow I’ve read this entire series even though none of the subsequent books lived up to A Discovery of Witches. What I loved about that first novel was how the author drew on her knowledge of the history of science to create a believable backdrop for a story of witches, vampires and other supernatural beings that took place largely in Oxford and its medieval libraries. Each sequel has elaborated further adventures for Diana Bishop, a witch; her vampire husband, Matthew de Clermont; and their family members and other hangers-on. Their twins, especially Becca, have inherited some of Diana’s power. I read the first half of this last year and finally skimmed to the end last week, so I haven’t retained much. Diana is summoned to the ancestral seat of the Bishops in Massachusetts and finds herself part of a community of gossipy, catty witches. (Dahl was right, they’re everywhere!) She has some fun, folksy interactions but things soon get more serious as she girds herself for a showdown with the darker implications of her gift. Overall, this didn’t add much to the ongoing narrative and the love scenes veered too close to romantasy for my liking. (Public library)
What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher [Ursula Vernon] (2025)
The third in the “Sworn Soldier” series, after What Moves the Dead and What Feasts at Night. Alex Easton is a witty, gender-nonconforming narrator, which is why I persist with these novellas even though I’m underwhelmed by the plots. Denton, the American doctor friend from the first book, begs Easton to come to West Virginia: his cousin Oscar has gone missing in a mine after sending a series of alarming letters about a red light he saw in the depths. Easton and their right-hand man, Angus, soon encounter claustrophobia-inducing cave systems, various kinds of bad air and siphonophore-like marine creatures that can assemble to imitate other beings. (Why aren’t these on the cover, huh?!) In other intriguing matters, Denton seems to have something going on with his friend John Ingold, an Indigenous scientist. Though, as Easton frequently reminds themself, that’s none of our business. There are some great set-pieces and funny, if anachronistic, asides (on learning how to flick a lighter just right: “I used to practice it for hours as a teenager, in hopes of impressing girls. Look, girls were more easily impressed in those days. Shut up.”) But my feeling with all three books is that they’re over before they’ve barely begun, and they never deliver the expected horror. Smart-ass, queer fantasy/horror: these will be some people’s perfect books, just not mine. If you’re intrigued, do at least try the first one, which riffs on Poe. (Read via Edelweiss)
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda (2022)
A very different sort of vampire novel. Twenty-three-year-old Lydia is half Japanese and half Malaysian; half human and half vampire. She’s trying to follow in her late father’s footsteps as an artist through an internship at a Battersea gallery, which comes with studio space where she’ll sleep to save money. But she can only drink blood like her mother, who turned her when she was a baby. Mostly she subsists on pig blood – which she can order dried if she can’t buy it fresh from a butcher – though, in one disturbing sequence, she brings home a duck carcass. When she falls for Ben, one of her studio-mates, she imagines what it would be like to be fully human: to make art together, to explore Asian cuisine, to bond over losing their mothers (his is dying of cancer; hers is in a care home with violence-tinged dementia). But Ben is already seeing someone, the internship is predictably dull, and a first attempt at consuming regular food goes badly wrong. There are a lot of promising threads in this debut. It’s fascinating how Lydia can intuit a creature’s whole life story by drinking their blood. She becomes obsessed with the Baba Yaga folk tale (and also mentions Malay vampire legends) and there’s a neat little bit of #MeToo revenge. But overall, it’s half-baked. Really, it’s just a disaster-woman book in disguise. The way Lydia’s identity determines her attitudes towards food and sex feels like a symbol of body dysmorphia. I’ll look out to see if Kohda does something more distinctive in future. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) 
More coming up on Halloween (thankfully, including books I liked better on average)!
#NovNov25 and Other November Reading Plans
Not much more than two weeks now before Novellas in November (#NovNov25) begins! Cathy and I are getting geared up and making plans for what we’re going to read. I have a handful of novellas out from the library, but mostly I gathered potential reads from my own shelves. I’m hoping to coincide with several of November’s other challenges, too.
Although we’re not using the below as themes this year, I’ve grouped my options into categories:
Short Classics (pre-1980)
Just Quicksand to read from the Larsen volume; the Wilder would be a reread.
Contemporary Novellas
(Just Blow Your House Down; and the last two of the three novellas in the Hynes.)
Also, on my e-readers: Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin, Likeness by Samsun Knight, Eradication: A Fable by Jonathan Miles (a 2026 release, to review early for Shelf Awareness)
*Margaret Atwood Reading Month is hosted by Marcie of Buried in Print. I’ve just read The Penelopiad for book club, so I’ll start off with a review of that. I might also reread Bluebeard’s Egg, and I’ll be eagerly awaiting her memoir from the library.
[*Science Fiction Month: Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino, Archive of Unknown Universes by Ruben Reyes Jr., and The Afterlife Project (all catch-up review books) are options, plus I recently started reading The Martian by Andy Weir.]
Short Nonfiction
Including our buddy read, Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde. (A shame about that cover!)
Also, on my e-readers: The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer, No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit, Because We Must by Tracy Youngblom. And, even though it doesn’t come out until February, I started reading The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly via Edelweiss.
For Nonfiction November, I also have plenty of longer nonfiction on the go, a mixture of review books to catch up on and books from the library:
I also have one nonfiction November release, Joyride by Susan Orlean, to review.
Novellas in Translation
At left are all the novella-length options, with four German books on top.
The Chevillard and Modiano are review copies to catch up on.
Also on the stack, from the library: Super-Frog Saves Tokyo by Haruki Murakami
On my e-readers: The Old Fire by Elisa Shua Dusapin, The Old Man by the Sea by Domenico Starnone, Our Precious Wars by Perrine Tripier
*German Literature Month: Our recent trip to Berlin and Lübeck whetted my appetite to read more German/German-language fiction. I’ll try to coincide with the Thomas Mann week as I was already planning to reread Death in Venice. I have some longer German books on the right-hand side as well. I started Kairos but found it hard going so might switch to audiobook. I also have Demian by Hermann Hesse on my Nook, downloaded from Project Gutenberg.
Spy any favourites or a particularly appealing title in my piles?
The link-up is now open for you to share your planning post!
Any novellas lined up to read next month?
Novellas in November 2025 Link-Up (#NovNov25)
Novellas in November 2025 was a roaring success: In total, we had 50 bloggers contributing 216 posts covering at least 207 books! The buddy read(s) had 14 participants. It was our best year yet – thank you.
*For the curious, our most reviewed book was The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (4 reviews), followed by The Most by Jessica Anthony (3). Authors covered three times: Franz Kafka and Christian Kracht. Authors with work(s) reviewed twice: Margaret Atwood, Nora Ephron, Hermann Hesse, Claire Keegan, Irmgard Keun, Thomas Mann, Patrick Modiano, Edna O’Brien, Clare O’Dea, Max Porter, Brigitte Reimann, Ivana Sajko, Georges Simenon, Colm Tóibín and Stefan Zweig.*
Check out all the posts here:
#ShortStorySeptember: Stories by Katherine Heiny, Shena Mackay and Ian McEwan
Every September I enjoy focusing on short stories, which I seem to read at a rate of only one or two collections per month in the rest of a year. This year, Lisa of ANZ Lit Lovers is hosting Short Story September as a blogger challenge for the first time. She’s encouraging people to choose individual short stories they would recommend, so I’ll be centring all of my reviews around one particular story but also giving my reaction to the collections as a whole.
“Dark Matter”
from
Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny (2015)
“One week in late February, Rhodes and Gildas-Joseph told Maya the same come fact, that there was a movement to reinstate Plato’s status as a planet.”
Maya is engaged to Rhodes but also sleeping with Gildas-Joseph, the director of the university library where she works. She’s one of Heiny’s typical whip-smart, exasperated protagonists, irresistibly drawn to a man or two even though they seem like priggish or ridiculous bores (witness the “come fact” above – neither can stop himself from mansplaining after sex). Having an affair means always having to keep your wits about you. Maya bumps into her boss with his wife, Adèle, at a colleague’s cocktail party and in line for the movies, and one day her fiancé’s teenage sister, Magellan (seriously, what is up with these names?!), turns up at the coffee shop where she is supposed to be meeting Gildas-Joseph. Quick, act natural. By the end, Maya knows that she must decide between the two men.
This is the middle of a trio of stories about Maya. They’re not in a row and I read the book over quite a number of months, so I was in danger of forgetting that we’d met this set of characters before. In the first, the title story, Maya has been with Rhodes for five years but is thinking of leaving him – and not just because she’s crushing on her boss. A health crisis with her dog leads her to rethink. In “Grendel’s Mother,” Maya is pregnant and hoping that she and her partner are on the same page.
This triptych of linked stories is evidence that Heiny was working her way towards a novel, and I certainly prefer Standard Deviation and Early Morning Riser. However, I really liked Heiny’s 2023 story collection, Games and Rituals, which has much more variety.
I like the second person as much as anyone but three instances of “You” narration is too much. The best of these was “The Rhett Butlers,” about a teenager whose history teacher uses famous character names as aliases when checking them into motels for trysts. The cover image is from this story: “The part of your life that contains him is too sealed off, like the last slice of cake under one of those glass domes.”
Although all of these stories are entertaining and have some of the insouciance and bittersweetness of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, they are so overwhelmingly about adultery (the main theme of at least 8 of 11) that they feel one-note.
why have an affair if not to say bad things about your spouse?
She thought that was the essence of motherhood: acting like you knew what you were talking about when you didn’t. That, and looking at people’s rashes. It was probably why people had affairs.
I would recommend any of Heiny’s other books over this one, but I wanted to read everything she’s published and I wouldn’t say my time spent on this was a waste. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
“All the Pubs in Soho”
from
Dreams of Dead Women’s Handbags by Shena Mackay (1987)
“It was his father’s vituperation about ‘those bloody pansies at Old Hollow’ that had brought Joe to the cottage on this empty summer holiday afternoon.”
It’s 1956 in Kent and Joe is only eight years old, so it’s not too surprising that, ignorant of the slang, he shows up at Arthur and Guido’s expecting to find flowers dripping red. Their place becomes his haven from a home full of crying, excreting younger siblings and a conventional father who intends to send him to a private girls’ school in the autumn. That’s right, “Joe” is Josephine, who likes to wear boys’ clothes and insists on a male name. Mackay struck me as ahead of her time (rather like Rose Tremain with Sacred Country) in honouring Joe’s chosen pronouns and letting him imagine an adult future in which he’d keep company with Arthur and Guido’s bohemian, artistic set – the former is a poet, the latter a painter – and they’d take him round ‘all the pubs in Soho.’ But in a sheltered small town where everyone has a slur ready for the men, it is not to be. Things don’t end well, but thankfully not as badly as I was hoping, and Joe has plucked up the courage to resist his father. There’s all the emotional depth and character development of a novella in this 26-page story.
I’ve had a mixed experience with Mackay, but the one novel of hers I got on well with, The Orchard on Fire, also dwells on the shattered innocence of childhood. By contrast, most of the stories in this collection are grimy ones about lonely older people – especially elderly women – reminding me of Barbara Comyns or Barbara Pym at her darkest. “Where the Carpet Ends,” about the long-term residents of a shabby hotel, recalls The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. In “Violets and Strawberries in the Snow,” a man in a mental institution awaits a holiday visit from his daughters. “What do we do now?” he asks a fellow inmate. “We could hang ourselves in the tinsel” is the reply. It’s very black comedy indeed. The same is true of a Halloween-set story that I’ll revisit next month.
The cover is so bad it’s good, amirite? In the title story, Susan Vigo is on her way by train to give a speech at a writers’ workshop and running through possible plots for her mystery novel in progress. “Slaves to the Mushroom” is another great one that takes place on a mushroom farm. Mackay’s settings are often surprising, her vocabulary precise, and her portraits of young people as cutting as those of the aged are pitiful. This would serve as a great introduction to her style. (Secondhand – Slightly Foxed Books, Berwick) 
“The Grown-up”
from
The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan (1994)
“The following morning Peter Fortune woke from troubled dreams to find himself transformed into a giant person, an adult.”
A much better Kafka homage, this, than that forgettable novella The Cockroach that McEwan published in 2019. Every story of this linked collection features Peter, a 10-year-old with a very active imagination. Three of the stories are straightforward body-swap narratives (with his sister’s mangled doll, his cat, or his baby cousin), whereas in this one he’s not trading with anyone else but still experiencing what it’s like to be someone else. In this case, a young man falling in love for the first time. Just the previous day, at the family’s holiday cottage in Cornwall, he’d been bemoaning how boring adults are: all they want to do is sit on the beach and chat or read, when there’s so much world out there to explore and turn into a personal playground. He never wants to be one of them. Now he realizes there are different ways to enjoy life; “he stopped and turned to look at the grown-ups one more time. … He felt differently about them now. There were things they knew and liked which for him were only just appearing, like shapes in a mist. There were adventures ahead of him after all.”
Of course, I also loved “The Cat,” which Eleanor mentioned when she read my review of Matt Haig’s To Be a Cat. At the time, I’d not heard of this and couldn’t believe McEwan had written something suitable for kids! These stories were ones he read aloud to his children as he composed them. There is a hint of gruesomeness in “The Dolls,” but most are just playful. “Vanishing Cream” is a cautionary tale about wanting your family to go away. In “The Bully,” Peter turns a bully into a tentative friend. “The Baby” sees him changing his mind about an annoying relative, while “The Burglar” has him imagining himself a hero who stops the spate of neighbourhood break-ins. Events are explained away as literal dreams, daydreams or a bit of magic. This was an offbeat gem. Try it for a very different taste of McEwan! (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Get Ready for Novellas in November!
Novellas: “all killer, no filler”
~Joe Hill
Hard to believe, but it’s nearly that time again. Autumn is drawing in. For the SIXTH year in a row, Cathy of 746 Books and I are co-hosting Novellas in November as a month-long blogging and social media challenge celebrating the art of the short book. A novella technically contains 20,000 to 40,000 words, but to keep things simple we will define it as any work of under 200 pages.
This year we have two buddy reads, a 2025 fiction release and an older work of nonfiction:
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood is set in the early 1960s and features a young man who lives with his mother in northwest England and carries on the family tradition of fishing for shrimp. He longs for a bigger and more creative life, which he hopes he might achieve through his folk music hobby – or his chance encounter with an American filmmaker. On one pivotal day, his fortunes might just change. Check out this interview with Wood to whet your appetite. Last year our buddy read, Orbital, won the Booker Prize, auguring good things for novellas in the public sphere. Seascraper is on the longlist! In this Q&A on the Booker Prize website, Wood talks about the unusual situation in which he wrote it. (160 pages)
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde is a 1984 collection of short pieces by the late Black lesbian feminist. I’ve only read Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, so I’m looking forward to this. From the Penguin website: “The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those ‘outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women’. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose – essays, speeches, letters, interviews – explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity, and includes her landmark piece ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’.” A great opportunity to tie into Nonfiction November. (190 pages)
Please join us in reading one or both books any time between now and the end of November!
You might like to start off the month with a My Year in Novellas retrospective looking at any novellas you have read since last year’s NovNov, and then finish with a New to My TBR list based on what short books others have tempted you with.
It’s always a busy month in the blogging world with Nonfiction November, German Literature Month, Margaret Atwood Reading Month and SciFi Month. Why not search your shelves and/or local library for novellas that could count towards multiple challenges?
From early October a link-up post will be pinned to my site so you can add your planning posts or reviews. Keep in touch via Bluesky (@bookishbeck.bsky.social / @cathybrown746.bsky.social) and Instagram (@bookishbeck / @cathy_746books) and feel free to use the terrific feature images Cathy has made plus our new hashtag, #NovNov25.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 