Today I have a travel book about appreciating nature in any weather, a sui generis memoir drawn from a decade of diaries, and an impassioned cry for the environment in the wake of a young adult son’s death.

I’m also bidding farewell to a whole slew of review books that have been hanging around, in some cases, for literal years – I think one is from 2021, and several others from 2022. Putting a book on my “set aside” shelf can be a kiss of death … or I can go back at a better time and end up loving it. It’s hard to predict which will occur. On these, alas, I have had to admit defeat and will pass the books on to other homes.

In All Weathers: A Journey through Rain, Fog, Wind, Ice and Everything in Between by Matt Gaw

Gaw’s two previous nature/travel memoirs, the enjoyable The Pull of the River and Under the Stars, involve gentle rambles through British landscapes, along with commentary on history, nature and science. The remit is much the same here. The book is split into four long sections: “Rain,” “Fog,” “Ice and Snow,” and “Wind.” The adventures always start from and end up at the author’s home in Suffolk, but he ranges as far as the Peak District, Cumbria and the Isle of Skye. Wild swimming is one way in which he experiences places. He notices a lot and describes it all in lovely and relatable prose.

I was tickled by the definitions of, and statistics about, a “white Christmas”: in the UK, it counts if there’s even a single snowflake falling, whereas in the US there has to be 2.5 cm or more of standing snow. (Scotland is most likely to experience white Christmases; it has had 37 since 1960 vs. 26 in northern England. The English snow record is 43 cm, at Buxton and Malham Tarn in 1981 and 2009.) There’s underlying mild dread as he notes how weather patterns have changed and will likely continue changing, ever more dramatically, into his children’s future.

I find I don’t have much to say about this book because it is very nice but doesn’t do anything interesting or tackle anything that isn’t familiar from many other nature books (such as Rain by Melissa Harrison and Forecast by Joe Shute). It’s unfortunate for Gaw that his ideas often seem to have been done before – his book on night-walking, in particular, was eclipsed by several other works on that topic that came out at around the same time. I hope that the next time around he’ll get more editorial guidance to pursue original topics. It might take just a little push to get him to the next level where he could compete with top UK nature writers.

With thanks to Elliott & Thompson Books for the free copy for review.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

Heti put the contents of ten years of her diaries into a spreadsheet, alphabetizing each sentence (including articles), and then ruthlessly culled the results until she had a 25-chapter (no ‘X’) book. You could hardly call it a narrative, yet looking for one is so hardwired that every few sentences you are jolted out of what feels like a mini-story and into something new. Instead, you might think of it as an autobiographical mosaic. The recurring topics are familiar from the rest of Heti’s oeuvre, with obsessive cogitating about relationships, art and identity. But there are also the practicalities of trying to make a living as a woman in a creative profession. Tendrils of the everyday poke out here and there as she makes a meal, catches a plane, or buys clothes. Men loom large: explicit accounts of sex with Pavel and Lars (though also Fiona); advising her friend Lemons on his love life. There are also meta musings on what she is trying to achieve with her book projects and on what literature can be.

Grammatically, the document is a lot more interesting than it could be – or than a similar experiment based on my diary would be, for instance – because Heti sometimes writes in incomplete sentences, dropping the initial pronoun; or intersperses rhetorical questions or noes to self in the imperative. So, yes, ‘I’ is a long chapter, but not only because of self-absorbed “I…” statements; there’s also plenty of “If…” and “It’s…” ‘H’ and ‘W’ are longer sections than might be expected because of the questioning mode. But it’s at the sentence level that the book makes the biggest impression: lines group together, complement or contradict each other, or flout coherence by being so merrily à propos of nothing. Here are a few passages to give a flavour:

Am I wasting my time? Am low on money. Am making noodles. Am reading Emma. Am tired and will go to sleep. Am tired today and I feel like I may be getting a cold. Ambivalence gives you something to do, something to think about.

Best not to live too emotionally in the future—it hardly ever comes to pass. Better to be on the outside, where you have always been, all your life, even in school, nothing changes. Better to look outward than inward. Blow jobs and tenderness. Books that fall in between the cracks of all aspects of the human endeavour.

It’s 2:34 every time I check the time these days. It’s 4 p.m. It’s 4:41 now. It’s a fantasy of being saved. It’s a stupid idea. It’s a yellow, cloudy sky. It’s amazing to me how life keeps going. It’s better to work, to go into the underground cave where there are books, than to fritter away time online. It’s crazy that I need all of these mental crutches in order to live. It’s fiction. It’s fine.

Scrambled eggs on toast at Yaddo. Second-guessing everything. Second, he said that no one is buying fiction. See the complexity. See the souls. See what kind of story the book can accommodate, if any. Seeing her for coffee was not so bad.

It’s surprising how much sense a text constructed so apparently haphazardly makes, perhaps because of the same subject and style throughout. Sometimes aphoristic, sometimes poetic (all that anaphora), the book is playful but overall serious about the capturing of a life on the page. Heti transcends the quotidian by exploding the one-thing-after-another tedium of chronology. Remarkably, the collage approach produces a more genuine, crystalline vision of the self than precise scenes and cause-and-effect chains ever could. A work of life writing like no other, it must be read in a manner all its own that it teaches you as you go along. I admire it enormously and hope I might write something even half as daring one day.

With thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions for the free copy for review.

Your Wild and Precious Life: On grief, hope and rebellion by Liz Jensen

Jensen’s younger son, Raphaël Coleman, was just 25 when he collapsed while filming a documentary in South Africa and died of a previously undiagnosed heart condition. Raph had been involved in Extinction Rebellion and Jensen is a founding member of Writers Rebel. They both deemed activism “the best antidote to depression.” Her son had been obsessed with wildlife from a young age and was rewilding acres of their land in France, as well as making environmentalist films (he had achieved minor fame as a child actor in Nanny McPhee) and participating in direct action, such as at the Brazilian embassy in London.

For Jensen, the challenge, especially after lockdown confined her to her Copenhagen flat, was to channel grief into further radicalism rather than retreating into herself or giving in to the lure of suicide. She tried to see personal grief as a reminder of ecogrief, and therefore as a spur. One way that she coped was turning towards the supernatural. She continued to hear and speak to Raph, in daily life as well as through a medium, and interpreted bird sightings as signs of his continued presence. An additional point of interest to me was that the author’s husband is Carsten Jensen, the writer of one of my favourite books, We, the Drowned.

This doesn’t particularly stand out among the dozens of bereavement memoirs I’ve read. (It was also remarkably similar to Alexandra Fuller’s Fi, which I’d read not long before.) Perhaps more years of reflection would have helped – Mary Karr advises seven – though I suspect Jensen felt, quite rightly, that given the current state of the environment we have no time to waste. And I have no doubt that the combination of a mother’s love and an ecological conscience will make this book meaningful to many readers.

With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.

And the DNFs…

there are more things, Yara Rodrigues Fowler – I loved Stubborn Archivist so much that I leapt at the chance to read her follow-up, but it was just too dull and involved about Brazilian versus UK politics. Nor did the stylistic tricks feel as novel this time around. I read 66 pages. (Fleet)

The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty – Gunty dazzled critics and prize judges in the USA, winning a National Book Award. I was drawn to her debut novel for the composite picture of the residents of one Indiana apartment building and the strange connections that develop between them over one summer week, including perhaps a murder? Blandine, the central character, is a sort of modern-day mystic but hard to warm to (“She normally tries to avoid saying in which out loud, to minimize the number of people who find her insufferable”), as are all the characters. This felt like try-hard MFA writing. I read 85 pages. (Oneworld)

Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth, Claire Horn – I usually get on well with Wellcome Collection books. I think the problem here was that there was too much material that was familiar to me from having read Womb by Leah Hazard – even the SF-geared stuff about artificial wombs. I read 45 pages. (Profile Books)

Blessings, Chukwuebuka Ibeh – This debut novel has a confident voice, buttressed by determination to reveal what life is like for queer people living in countries where homosexuality is criminalized. Obiefuna is cast out for having a crush on Aboy, his father’s apprentice, even though the two young men share nothing more physical than a significant gaze into each other’s eyes. The strict boarding school his father sends him to is a place of privation, hierarchy, hazing and, I suspect, same-sex experimentation. I found the writing capable but couldn’t get past a sense of dread about what was going to happen. Meanwhile, I didn’t think the alternating chapters from Obiefuna’s mother’s perspective added anything to the narrative. I read 62 pages. (Penguin Viking)

The War for Gloria, Atticus Lish – Lish’s debut novel, Preparation for the Next Life, was excellent, but I could never get stuck in to this follow-up, despite the appealing medical theme. When Gloria Goltz is diagnosed with ALS, her 15-year-old son Corey turns to his absent father and others for support. It was also unfortunate that Lish mentions the Ice Bucket Challenge: that was popularized in 2014, whereas the book is set in 2010. I read 75 pages. (Serpent’s Tail)

Snow Widows: Scott’s Fatal Antarctic Expedition through the Eyes of the Women They Left Behind, Katherine MacInnes – I seriously overestimated my interest in polar exploration narratives. MacInnes seems to have done quite a good job of creating novelistic scenes through research, though. I read 35 pages. (William Collins)

The Woodcock, Richard Smyth – I feel particularly bad about this one as I’ve read and enjoyed three of Smyth’s nature books and my husband and I are friendly with him on Twitter. Initially, I got Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent, anyway) vibes from this 1920s-set novel about the upheaval a naturalist and his wife experience when an American whaler and his daughters arrive in their small coastal English town. I read 90 pages. (Fairlight Books)

Better Broken than New: A Fragmented Memoir, Lisa St Aubin de Terán – I accepted this for review because I’d often seen the author’s name on spines in secondhand bookstores but didn’t know anything about her work. The précis of her globe-trotting life is stranger than fiction: marriage to a Venezuelan freedom fighter, managing a sugar plantation in the Andes, living in an Italian palace for 20 years, founding a charity in Mozambique. The vignettes in the early part of the book (e.g., skipping school and going on daytrips by train at age eight) are entertaining, if written with blithe disregard for a reader’s need for context or perspective. But the fragmented nature means it all feels as random as life, without the necessary authorial shaping. The publisher has done her a disservice as she seeks to relaunch her career by not proofreading properly: Many small errors slipped through the net, making this look like a sloppy manuscript. The worst happen to be other authors’ names: Jane ‘Austin’, ‘Kahil’ Gibran, Virginia ‘Wolfe’. Are you kidding me?! I read 53 pages. (Amaurea Press)