#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)
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.
Book
My original rating:
My rating now: 
Film
April Releases by Victoria Bennett, Ben Lerner and Barbara Yelin
A memoir of gardening to come to terms with midlife and a new island home, a work of autofiction about memory and technology, and an arresting graphic novel tracing the life of a child Holocaust survivor: it was a real variety last month. (But then again, I say that every month, don’t I?)
The Apothecary by the Sea: A Year in an Orkney Garden by Victoria Bennett
I’ve been hankering to get back to the Orkney Islands after two decades but haven’t managed it yet; reading about it was the next-best thing. There’s a similar make-do attitude to Bennett’s second book, which is about adapting to the unexpected and being in tune with nature. After being forced out of their rented home in Cumbria (and, disastrously, having to raze the abundant garden they’d made there), Bennett and her husband and son resettled in South Ronaldsay. Moving to Orkney was a long-held dream that allowed the couple to become property owners for the first time in their fifties. Chronic illness restricts what she can do, but over the course of a little over a year, she slowly, steadily turns their little outdoor space into a bountiful apothecary garden when not out exploring a new landscape.
I loved Bennett’s 2023 debut memoir, All My Wild Mothers. Both employ a similar structure of short chapters named after plants with medicinal uses. However, the first book is a lot richer, distilling as it does the experiences and wisdom of an entire life. The format is fresh there, whereas this sequel needed new strategies to set it apart. It’s so short – with sections of gardening tips, further plant rundowns, and recipes for padding – that I suspected the author and publisher were scratching around for enough material to fill a book. The editing is also lacking this time around; dangling modifiers and minor typos abound. This could have been more substantial had Bennett waited a few more years to develop an intimate knowledge of Orkney and make connections with people to draw on. Still, there are reassuring sentiments about accepting one’s limitations, welcoming the changes of age, and setting humble goals (“The garden, like life, is not perfect. Start with what you have”), and the black-and-white illustrations by Bennett’s husband, Adam Clarke, are gorgeous. Though it’s fairly niche, I can, offhand, think of several people to whom I would recommend Bennett’s work.
Written while listening to Doing This for Love, the fab new album by Kris Drever, everyone’s favourite Orkney singer.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the free copy for review.
{SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO}
Transcription by Ben Lerner
The UK cover
You know what you’re in for with a Ben Lerner work, in much the same way as when you pick up something by Rachel Cusk, Katie Kitamura or Deborah Levy. The narrator resembles Lerner in that he is a 45-year-old writer who graduated from Brown University and has spent significant time in Madrid. The novella opens with him on a train to Providence, Rhode Island to write a long profile of his mentor, a German writer named Thomas. Thomas is turning 90 and there is a sense that this is to be his “exit interview” – yet he’s as sharp as ever, describing his early life as if composed of film scenes.
There is a strong emphasis on the visual here, but also on the oral. Thomas’s first memory is of hearing Hitler’s voice on the radio, and the narrator fully intended to record this conversation, but dropped his phone in the sink at the hotel and now it won’t turn on. He decides this evening will just be a pre-chat, and tomorrow they’ll get into things properly. For some reason, though, he can’t admit his technological failure to Thomas and instead brings his dead phone out, puts it face down on the table, and pretends that this is all on the record.
I prefer the U.S. cover, as per usual!
The book is in three long sections, named after different hotels. The second is set in Madrid, where, a few years later, the narrator gives a talk as part of a Festschrift for Thomas. He’s turned the story about his phone into a self-deprecating joke, but it turns out that his conference co-organizer, Rosa, is not the only one angry with him for what she perceives as falsifying Thomas’s last testament. This causes him to second-guess himself.
The third section is, ostensibly, a conversation between the narrator and Thomas’s son, Max – except the former can hardly get a word in edgewise (as was the case with Thomas, too), so it’s really more of a monologue. And, strangely, the subject is Max’s young daughter Emmie’s extreme food issues: a sort of pre-anorexia. Except Thomas would philosophize his granddaughter’s struggle, or query her screen time. Max remembers that when Thomas was hospitalized with Covid, apparently near death, he poured out many warm words to his father. Then Thomas recovered. On their first post-Covid visit, Max recorded his father’s speech without telling him he was doing so – an ironic counterpart to the narrator’s actions.
The themes drew me in, and the writing is addictively lucid. But what does it all mean? Lerner’s repeated references to father-and-son glassmakers and their beautiful glass flowers indicate his interest in questions of talent, (metaphorical) inheritance and legacy. The narrator’s version of Thomas’s memories being presented as gospel raises the question of whether fiction is the more appropriate vehicle for biography. There is also a message about overreliance on technology. The narrator feels helpless without his phone, even for one night: He can’t communicate with his family or confirm his walking route with online maps. But I wasn’t sure how Max’s daughter fits in, except perhaps as an emblem of multigenerational mental health struggles. This was an odd little book that I might like to discuss in a book club but found stubbornly unsatisfying to ponder on my own. (Read via Edelweiss)
Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory by Barbara Yelin (2023; 2026)
[Translated from German by Helge R. Dascher]
Edited by Charlotte Schallié and Alexander Korb
Barbara Yelin’s Irmina was the subject of an early review on my blog (just over 10 years ago!); I called it “one of the most visually stunning graphic novels I’ve ever come across” and noted that it was “based on a fascinating family story.” Such is even truer of this illustrated biography of a child Holocaust survivor. Yelin met Emmie Arbel at Ravensbrück Memorial in 2019 and over the next several years they had many conversations in person and online, which Yelin has memorialized in this solemn, powerful graphic novel. Emmie was born in the Netherlands in 1937 and first sent to a transport camp at age five. She then spent time in Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, where her mother died. After the war, she and her brothers were displaced persons in Sweden before returning to the Netherlands to live with a foster family. Since then she has had a career, raised three daughters, divorced, retired early, lost a daughter, and traveled extensively but mostly lived in Israel. Yelin recreates scenes from Emmie’s life but mostly recounts recent conversations (and so is herself a repeated presence in the book). The narrative moves back and forth in time in imitation of memory. Emmie’s ever-present cigarette is a crutch as she tries to find words for the unspeakable.
A key motivation for this book is to face the facts that survival is not a one-time event and that trauma is complex and ongoing. In Emmie’s case, her foster father (himself a Holocaust survivor) molested her for years. The memory of rape remained locked inside until a breakdown in 1977, when she started seeing a therapist – which, she insists, saved her life.
The colour palette is appropriately sombre: lots of dark blue and grey shading into black, which is the colour of memory for Emmie. And yet there is vibrant colour in the depiction of Emmie’s home and garden in Tiv’on, and in her interactions with her children and grandchildren. I can’t revisit particular spreads of this book without crying. One is the final few pages before the epilogue, in which Emmie remembers lying in a camp with typhus.
“They put me with the dying and the dead. I knew I was going to die. I was not afraid. I think I remember how it felt to be dying. It was a good feeling. There was no pain, no hunger, no noise. Nothing. It was quiet and good. But I live.”
This is a work of real courage, of speaking out in spite of a suspicion that all is bleak and meaningless.
“Humiliation. I was not a human being. I was a number, you know. I feel like no one can understand what I’m feeling. But if I don’t talk about it, the others can’t understand. They can’t understand what happened. And it must not happen again. And that’s why I have to speak.”
With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.
March Releases by Emily Haworth-Booth, Roz Morris, Catherine Redford & Joann Sfar
Autofiction about beloved animals and ambivalence over motherhood, a witty memoir of house-hunting in the South of England, a poetry collection reflecting on bereavement and queer parenthood, and a graphic novel adaptation of a 20th-century classic: I had a real variety this month.
Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth
Is the entire novel built around a pun? The French for mother, mère, is a homophone for mare. Like Motherhood by Sheila Heti, this is a work of autofiction that circles the question of becoming a mother and posits the writing life and other relationships as partial substitutes for parenthood. But yes, there is also a literal horse. The narrator lives in London with her husband and scrapes together a living by teaching creative writing on Zoom and writing children’s books. They’ve recently lost their dearly loved dog and are friendly with the neighbours whose garden they share and whose noise they hear the other side of a wall – so much so that she thinks of the two girls as “not-my-daughter” and “also-not-my-daughter.” The narrator is contracted to write a book about plastics for children but can’t seem to land on the right tone somewhere between alarm and false cheer. Approaching age 40, she’s finally coming to terms with the fact that she won’t be a mother due to premature ovarian failure.
Into all this comes the love of a horse. She finds a stable two miles away and spends three days a week there riding and tending to a black and white mare. As a child she’d been horse-crazy, so this isn’t “a new feeling … but a resurgence. Deeply familiar. Lust and tenderness and hope mingled.” Time with the horse reminds her to be present, to live in her body despite its flaws, to take joy in the everyday. “Being with the horse has come to feel more and more like an exercise in metaphor.”
Haworth-Booth makes caring for an animal analogous with motherhood, but doesn’t stop at easy symbolism. The mare might stand in for female fear and vulnerability, but is also flesh and blood. Cultivating bodily bonds with other creatures is part of how we find purpose when life is threatened by chronic illness and climate breakdown.
This is Haworth-Booth’s adult debut and I hope it will be submitted for next year’s McKitterick Prize. Its wry honesty appealed to me, as did the narrator’s interactions with her mother (who forwards her “Childfree and fabulous” e-newsletters) and not-my-daughter, who share her interest in horses. There’s also the meta angle of the narrator assembling an “H folder” that eventually becomes this book. Hard to tell in my Kindle file, but some passages seem to be aligned like poetry. “The boundaries are blurring … this is the age of the non-binary, the hybrid, … the uncategorisable,” the narrator says to her students. “What about a collection of thoughts themed around a subject, themed around, for example, a horse?” I can see how some would find this insufferable, but it really worked for me. (Read via NetGalley)
Turn Right at the Rainbow: A Memoir of Househunting, Happenstance and Home by Roz Morris
Now that we’re four years on from the purchase of our first property, I can read about house-hunting without finding it too depressing! When Morris and her husband Dave decided to move out of London, securing a buyer for their house was a cinch, but finding a new place that they loved as much as their home of twenty-plus years seemed like an insurmountable challenge. She wrings much humour from the process by comparing house viewings with first dates – as in a romcom, you’re always looking out for “The One,” but all the potential suitors have various issues – and employing jokey nicknames (“the Rusty Tractor house,” “The Aardvark House”), and a financial shorthand of arms and legs.
Estate agents, potential buyers, and sellers alike are maddening in their quirks. There are so many inexplicable features in otherwise normal suburban Surrey properties: more toilets than bedrooms, giant air-conditioning units, a long bench that looks like it belongs in a bus station waiting room, and so on. In between details of the search, Morris remembers her upbringing in mining country made famous by Alan Garner and how she and Dave met and made a life together as childfree writers. This is a warm and funny read whose short chapters fly by, but it also made me ponder what is essential in a home. Though I was mildly taken aback by the ending, I came to think of it as fitting, in a T.S. Eliot knowing the place for the first time sort of way.
With thanks to the author for the free e-copy for review. (Published by Spark Furnace.)
The Way the Water Held Me by Catherine Redford
This isn’t your average bereavement story: Redford was only 35 and had a young child at the time that her wife died of cancer. We don’t hear so much about being widowed early, or in a same-sex partnership. Redford interrogates the expectations of widowhood (“If not Victoria, I can be Jackie O”) through biographical poems about Mary Shelley’s writings in the wake of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s untimely death. There’s a found/collage poem pieced together from one of Shelley’s letters; others quote from her Frankenstein and The Last Man. Elsewhere, Redford alludes to Woolf, Wordsworth and Wuthering Heights. Redford recalls feeling bombarded by people’s sympathy (“The flowers arrive like a tsunami”) and having no idea how to respond when asked how she’s doing. She relives moments from their carefree courtship days, lists the elements of “Her Last Day,” and documents the rituals that enshrine memory. I loved the archival vocabulary of “Obituary” (below) and how belongings left behind take on outsize significance: “I cross-examine every page of her notebooks, lay out the contents / of each drawer in a crescent on the floor as if they are grave goods // selected for her journey to the afterlife” (from “Circles”). The alliteration and nature (especially seaside) imagery were just right for me. From the hardest of circumstances came something tender and lovely.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)
Graphic novel adaptation by Joann Sfar (2008); colours by Brigitte Findakly
[Translated from French by Sarah Ardizzone, 2010]
Reading The Little Prince in the original French was a long-term project in my high school French curriculum. I can still remember snippets such as “Dessine-moi un mouton” (“Draw me a sheep”) and apprivoiser (to tame) – it was good for learning such random vocabulary words. You are probably familiar with this fable of a pilot who crashes in the desert and meets a strange, possibly alien boy and talks with him about his interplanetary journeys as well as a flower, a snake, a fox, and so on. Before he landed on earth, he alighted on six other planets where he met a king, a vain man, a drunk, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer, all of whom appeared to be trapped in destructive patterns of their own making.
I had a few issues. The main one is that, these days, the story falls for me in the same category as other intolerably twee stuff like Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse. Granted, “You can only see clearly with the heart. What matters is invisible to the eye” is profound in its simplicity. But much of the rest had me rolling my eyes. As for the adaptation, why was it deemed necessary? The original The Little Prince is illustrated. Plus the drawing style is rather grotesque. (I don’t remember this from the only other book I’ve read by Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat.) I guess the idea was to contrast the boy’s innocence and blue-pool eyes with the essential ugliness of much of what he encounters. But what’s with most of the planets’ residents having noses like penises? (Unsolicited review copy from SelfMadeHero)
January Releases by Julian Barnes and Stewart O’Nan
These two novels by literary lions (of the UK and USA, respectively) share themes of ageing, loss, and memory, as well as a wry and gently melancholy tone. I’ve read 23 books by Julian Barnes, some of them twice; Stewart O’Nan has also published twenty-some books, but was a new author for me.
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes (2026)
“That’s what I’ve been after all my writing life: the whole story.”
Julian Barnes has been a favourite author of mine since my early twenties. He insists this novella will be his final book. It’s a coy fiction–autofiction mixture featuring the same fixations as much of his work: how time affects relationships and memory, how life gets translated into written evidence, and how we make peace with death. The narrator is one Julian Barnes, a writer approaching age 80 and adjusting to a recent diagnosis of a non-life-threatening blood cancer. The ostensible point is to retell his Oxford University friends Stephen and Jean’s two-stage romance: they were college sweethearts but married other people; then Julian reintroduced them in their sixties and they married – but it didn’t last.
He parcels out bits of this story in between pondering involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM), his “incurable but manageable” condition, and his possible legacy. He hopes he’ll be exonerated due to waiting until Stephen and Jean were dead to write about them and adopting Jean’s old Jack Russell terrier, Jimmy. His late wife, Pat Kavanagh, is never far from his thoughts, and he documents other losses among his peers, including Martin Amis (d. 2023 – for a short book, this is curiously dated, as if it hung around for years unfinished). There are also, as one would expect from Barnes, occasional references to French literature. Confident narration gives the sense of an author in full control of his material. Yet I found much of it tedious. He’s addressed subjectivity much more originally in other works, and the various strands here feel like incomplete ideas shoehorned into one volume.
It’s a shame that I had just reread Talking It Over, a glistening voice-led novel of his from 1991, because it showed up the thinness and repetition of much of his recent work. (I even thought I spotted a reference to Talking It Over as Jean is warning Julian not to write about her and Stephen. “I’ll tell you the truth, and don’t you ever fucking use it, not even deeply disguised in some novel where I appear as Jeanette [Gillian?] and Stephen is Stuart.”) I see his oeuvre as a left-skewed bell curve: three of the first four novels are not worth reading and five of the last seven have also been dubious, but with much excellent material in between. It’s been a case of diminishing returns from The Sense of an Ending onwards, but I have many excellent rereads to look forward to. My next two will be A History of the World in 10½ Chapters – a typically playful take on documented history and legend – and Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his forthright memoir about mortality. If you’ve not read Barnes before, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start as you’ll get a taster of his trademark topics and dry wit, but delving into his back catalogue may well prove more rewarding.
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Evensong by Stewart O’Nan (2025)
The comparisons to Kent Haruf and Elizabeth Strout in the press materials and pre-publication reviews are spot on: this is the kind of quiet American novel that appeals for its small-town ambience and cosy community of lovably quirky people with everyday problems. O’Nan grew up in Pittsburgh, the setting for this fourth book in a loose series based around the character Emily Maxwell – I did have a slight feeling of having wandered into a variant of Olive, Again partway through, but it wasn’t a major stumbling block for me. The generally elderly, female members of the Humpty Dumpty Club form a constellation of care: they help each other out by driving to hospital appointments, picking up prescriptions and groceries – and, when worst comes to worst, planning funeral services.
Often, the short chapters are vignettes starring one or more of the central characters. When Joan has a fall down her stairs and lands in rehab, Kitzi takes over as de facto HDC leader. A musical couple’s hoarding and cat colony become her main preoccupation. Emily deals with family complications I didn’t fully understand for want of backstory, and Arlene realizes dementia is affecting her daily life. Susie, the “baby” of the group at 63, takes in Joan’s cat, Oscar, and meets someone through online dating. The novel covers four months of 2022–23, anchored by a string of holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas); events such as John Fetterman’s election and ongoing Covid precautions; and the cycle of the Church year.
O’Nan encourages affection for his salt-of-the-earth folk who vote Democrat, support the Steelers and attend liberal Protestant churches as a matter of course. They lead simple lives and cope with failing health with as much dignity as they can. There’s something to be said for celebrating older, ordinary people, who don’t often get a look-in in contemporary fiction. But I struggled with the ensemble nature of the cast – well over halfway through I was still trying to work out who everyone was; it doesn’t help that there are a Gene, a Jean and a Joan – and the extreme verisimilitude. The Humpty Dumpty Club exists in real life, but these women could be your aunt or choir director from Any Town, USA. Were my mother still around, this would be her, running errands and helping neighbours in suburban Pittsburgh, and I would be visiting the area annually. That combination of the mundane and the too close to home conspired to make this more of a slog than expected. I also feel I gleaned no distinct understanding of O’Nan as a writer – especially as other novels of his that I own (The Night Country and A Prayer for the Dying) are classed under horror. I’ll just have to try more.
First published in November 2025 by Atlantic Monthly Press in the USA. With thanks to Grove Press UK for the free copy for review.
While these were much anticipated reads for me, I ultimately found them a little underwhelming. I think I wanted a bit more raging against the dying of the light.
Have you read either or both of these authors? What can you recommend by them, or what will you seek out?
Most Anticipated Books of 2026
Later than intended, but here we are. I’ve narrowed it down to the 25 books I’m most looking forward to in January–September, though no doubt I’ll have heard of many more unmissable titles before that time is up. My list is dominated by fiction, which I tend to find out about earlier. Also on my radar are novels by Sharon Bala, Freya Bromley, Mary Costello, Louise Kennedy, Ben Lerner, Paula McLain, Liz Nugent and Tom Perrotta; short stories by Jess Gibson (Margaret Atwood’s daughter); and nonfiction from Margaret Drabble, Cal Flyn, Siri Hustvedt and Anne Lamott.
In release date order, with UK publication info given first if available. The blurbs are adapted from Goodreads. I’ve taken the liberty of using whichever cover I prefer.
Fiction
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes [20 Jan., Vintage (Penguin) / Knopf]: (Currently reading) I get more out of rereading Barnes’s classics than reading his latest stuff, but I’ll still attempt anything he publishes. He’s 80 and calls this his last book. So far, it’s heavily about memory. “Julian played matchmaker to Stephen and Jean, friends he met at university in the 1960s; as the third wheel, he was deeply invested in the success of their love”. Sounds way too similar to 1991’s Talking It Over, and the early pages have been tedious. (Review copy from publisher)
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy [20 Jan., Fourth Estate / Ballantine]: McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, was stranger than fiction. I was so impressed by her recreation of her childhood perspective on her dysfunctional Mormon/hoarding/child-actor/cancer survivor family that I have no doubt she’ll do justice to this reverse-Lolita scenario about a 17-year-old who’s in love with her schlubby creative writing teacher. (Library copy on order)
Our Better Natures by Sophie Ward [5 Feb., Corsair]: I loved Ward’s Booker-longlisted Love and Other Thought Experiments (though the follow-up, The Schoolhouse, was a letdown). “Amid the chaos and political upheaval of 1970s America, three very different women must accept the world as it is, or act to change it. Phyllis Patterson is a housewife in White Plains, Illinois. … Andrea Dworkin is an activist in Amsterdam. … Muriel Rukeyser is a poet in New York.” (Library copy on order)
Brawler: Stories by Lauren Groff [Riverhead, Feb. 24]: (Currently reading) Controversial opinion: Short stories are where Groff really shines. Three-quarters in, this collection is just as impressive as Delicate Edible Birds or Florida. “Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region (New England to Florida to California) these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.” (For Shelf Awareness review) (Edelweiss download)
Kin by Tayari Jones [24 Feb., Oneworld / Knopf]: I’m a big fan of Leaving Atlanta and An American Marriage. This sounds like Brit Bennett meets Toni Morrison. “Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. … A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South”. (Edelweiss download)
Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave [12 March, Picador / March 24, S&S/Summit Books]: There have often been queer undertones in Hargrave’s work, but this David Nicholls-esque plot sounds like her most overt. “Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur in Paris, 1978. … The moment the two women meet the spark is undeniable. But their encounter turns into far more than a summer of love. It is the beginning of a relationship that will define their lives and every decision they have yet to make.” (Edelweiss download)
Patient, Female: Stories by Julie Schumacher [May 5, Milkweed Editions]: I found out about this via a webinar with Milkweed and a couple of other U.S. indie publishers. I loved Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members. “[T]his irreverent collection … balances sorrow against laughter. … Each protagonist—ranging from girlhood to senescence—receives her own indelible voice as she navigates social blunders, generational misunderstandings, and the absurdity of the human experience.” The publicist likened the tone to Meg Wolitzer.
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout [7 May, Viking (Penguin) / May 5, Random House]: Hurrah for moving on from Lucy Barton at last! “Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders … and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. … [O]ne day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. … [This] takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal.”
Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller [7 May, Penguin / June 2, Tin House]: I’ve read everything of Fuller’s and hope this will reverse the worsening trend of her novels, though true crime is overdone. “1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula … is invited to join a squat at The Underwood. … Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker.” (Edelweiss download)
Little Vanities by Sarah Gilmartin [21 May, ONE (Pushkin)]: Gilmartin’s Service was great. “Dylan, Stevie and Ben have been inseparable since their days at Trinity, when everything seemed possible. … Two decades on, … Dylan, once a rugby star, is stranded on the sofa, cared for by his wife Rachel. Across town, Stevie and Ben’s relationship has settled into weary routine. Then, after countless auditions, Ben lands a role in Pinter’s Betrayal. As rehearsals unfold, the play’s shifting allegiances seep into reality, reviving old jealousies and awakening sudden longings.”
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa [21 May, Faber / Sept. 22, Farrar, Straus and Giroux]: A Ghost in the Throat was brilliant and this sounds right up my street. “In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, … she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices”.
John of John by Douglas Stuart [21 May, Picador / May 5, Grove Press]: I DNFed Shuggie Bain and haven’t tried Stuart since, but the Outer Hebrides setting piqued my attention. “[W]ith little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris [and] begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian”. (For early Shelf Awareness review) (Edelweiss download)
Land by Maggie O’Farrell [2 June, Tinder Press / Knopf]: I haven’t fully loved O’Farrell’s shift into historical fiction, but I’m still willing to give this a go. “On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam [age 10], are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one.” (Edelweiss download)
Whistler by Ann Patchett [2 June, Bloomsbury / Harper]: Patchett is hella reliable. “When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. … Meeting again, time falls away; … [in a story of] adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them.” (Edelweiss download)
Returns and Exchanges by Kayla Rae Whitaker [2 June, Scribe / May 19, Random House]: Whitaker’s The Animators is one of my favourite novels that hardly anyone else has ever heard of. “A sweeping novel of one [discount department store-owning] Kentucky family’s rise and fall throughout the 1980s—a tragicomic tour de force about love and marriage, parents and [their four] children, and the perils of mixing family with business”. (Edelweiss download)
The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders [9 July, Viking (Penguin) / July 7, Henry Holt]: Sanders’s linked story collection Company left me keen to follow her career. Aubrey Lamb, 32, is “grieving the recent loss of her father and the end of a relationship.” She leaves Washington, DC for her Black family’s ancestral Tennessee farm. “But the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance … [and] the ghosts of her ancestors interject with their own exasperated, gossipy commentary on the flaws and foibles of relatives living and dead”. (Edelweiss download)
Country People by Daniel Mason [14 July, John Murray / July 7, Random House]: It doesn’t seem long enough since North Woods for there to be another Mason novel, but never mind. “Miles Krzelewski is … twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales … [W]hen his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life. … [A] luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.”
It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories by Sigrid Nunez [14 July, Virago / Riverhead]: Nunez is one of my favourite authors but I never knew she’d written short stories. The blurb reveals very little about them! “Carefully selected from three decades of work … Moving from the momentous to the mundane, Nunez maintains her irrepressible humor, bite, and insight, her expert balance between intimacy and universality, gravity and levity, all while entertainingly probing the philosophical questions we have come to expect, such as: How can we withstand the passage of time? Is memory the greatest fiction?” (Edelweiss download)
Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel [17 Sept., Picador / Sept. 15, Knopf]: The synopsis sounds a bit meh, but in my eyes Mandel can do no wrong. “2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some good news: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party. Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria … Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night.”
The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain [17 Sept., Vintage (Penguin)]: “Set in 1930s England and fictionalises the inspiration behind Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel, Rebecca.” Strangely, this started life as a short story (in The American Lover), then become a screenplay authored by Tremain (the film is in production and stars Uma Thurman and Anthony Hopkins), and is now being expanded into a novel. Tremain is 82 and a survivor of major cancer; I do wonder if this is the last book we can expect from her.
Nonfiction
Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival by Trina Moyles [Jan. 6, Pegasus Books]: Out now! “When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father … brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. … After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while [her brother] Brendan worked in the oil sands … Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear”. (For BookBrowse review) (Review e-copy)
Moveable Feasts: A Story of Paris in Twenty Meals by Chris Newens [Feb. 3, Pegasus Books; came out in the UK in July 2025 but somehow I missed it!]: I’m a sucker for foodie books and Paris books. A “long-time resident of the historic slaughterhouse quartier Villette takes us on a delightful gastronomic journey around Paris … From Congolese catfish in the 18th to Middle Eastern falafels in the 4th, to the charcuterie served at the libertine nightclubs of Pigalle in the 9th, Newens lifts the lid on the city’s ever-changing, defining, and irresistible food culture.” (Edelweiss download)
Frog: And Other Essays by Anne Fadiman [Feb. 10, Farrar, Straus and Giroux]: Fadiman publishes rarely, and it can be difficult to get hold of her books, but they are always worth it. “Ranging in subject matter from her deceased frog, to archaic printer technology, to the fraught relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son Hartley, these essays unlock a whole world—one overflowing with mundanity and oddity—through sly observation and brilliant wit.”
The Beginning Comes after the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit [March 3, Haymarket Books]: A sequel to Hope in the Dark. Hope is a critically endangered species these days, but Solnit has her eyes open. “While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.” (Edelweiss download)
Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler [7 April, Faber / April 14, Harper]: I didn’t get on with the mammoth biography Paul Clements published in 2022 – it was dry and conventional; entirely unfitting for Morris – but hope for better things from a fellow female travel writer. “Wheeler uncovers the complexity of this twentieth-century icon … Drawing on unprecedented access to Morris’s papers as well as interviews with family, friends and colleagues, Wheeler assembles a captivating … story of longing, traveling and never reaching home.” (Edelweiss download)
Others’ lists whence a few of my ideas came!
What catches your eye here? What other 2026 titles do I need to know about?
#NovNov25 Final Statistics & Some 2026 Novellas to Look Out For (Chapman, Fennelly, Gremaud, Miles, Netherclift & Saunders)
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. If you want to take a look back at the link parties, they’re all here. It was our best year yet – thank you.
*For those who are 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.*
I read and reviewed 21 novellas in November. I happen to have already read six with 2026 release dates, some of them within November and others a bit earlier for paid reviews. I’ll give a quick preview of each so you’ll know which ones you want to look out for.
The Pass by Katriona Chapman
Claudia Grace is a rising star in the London restaurant world: in her early thirties, she’s head chef at Alley. But she and her small team, including sous chef Lisa, her best friend from culinary school; and Ben, the innovative Black bartender, face challenges. Lisa has a young son and disabled husband, while Ben is torn between his love of gardening and his commitment to Alley. Claudia is more stressed than ever as she prepares for a competition. All three struggle with their parents’ expectations. A financial crisis comes out of nowhere, but the greater threat is related to motivation. I was drawn to this graphic novel for the restaurant setting, but it’s more about families and romantic relationships than food. Several characters look too alike or much younger or older than they’re supposed to, while there’s a sudden ending that suggests a sequel might follow. (Fantagraphics, Jan. 20) [184 pages] (Read via Edelweiss)
The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly
I’ve also read Fennelly’s previous collection of miniature autobiographical essays, Heating & Cooling. She 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 (the title reference: “without farewells, you slipped out the back door of the party of your life”); other major topics are her mother’s worsening dementia, her happy marriage, her continuing 28-year-old friendships with her college roommates, the pandemic, and her ageing body. Every so often, Fennelly experiments with third- or second-person narration, as when she recalls making a perfect gin and tonic for Tim O’Brien. One of the most in-depth pieces revisits a lonely stint teaching in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s. Returning to the town recently, she is astounded that so many recognize her and that a time she experienced as bleak is the stuff of others’ fond memories. I also loved the long piece that closes the collection, “Dear Viewer of My Naked Body,” about being one of the 12 people in Oxford, Mississippi to pose nude for a painter in oils. Brilliant last phrase: “Enjoy the bunions.” (W.W. Norton & Company, Feb. 24) [144 pages] (Read via Edelweiss)
Generator by Rinny Gremaud (2023; 2026)
[Trans. from French by Holly James]
“I was born in 1977 at a nuclear power plant in the south of South Korea,” the unnamed narrator opens. She and her mother then moved to Switzerland with her stepfather. In 2017, news of Korea’s plans to decommission the Kori 1 reactor prompts her to trace her birth father, who was a Welsh engineer on the project. As a way of “walking my hypotheses,” she travels to Wales, Taiwan (where he had a wife and family), Korea, and Michigan, his last known abode. In parallel, she researches the history of nuclear power. By riffing on the possible definitions of generation, this lyrical autofiction comments on creation and legacy. Full Foreword review forthcoming. (Schaffner Press, Jan. 7) [197 pages] (PDF review copy)
Eradication: A Fable by Jonathan Miles
This taut, powerful fable pits an Everyman against seemingly insurmountable environmental and personal problems. Who wouldn’t take a job that involves “saving the world”? Adi, the antihero of Jonathan Miles’s fourth novel, is drawn to the listing not just for the noble mission but also for the chance at five weeks alone on a Pacific island. Santa Flora once teemed with endemic birds and reptiles, but many species have gone extinct because of the ballooning population of goats. He’s never fired a gun, but the mysterious “foundation” was so desperate it hired him anyway. It’s a taut parable reminiscent of T.C. Boyle’s When the Killing’s Done. My full Shelf Awareness review is here. (riverrun, 5 Feb. / Doubleday, Feb. 10) [176 pages] (Read via Edelweiss)
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. There are lacunae everywhere: in her police statement from the fateful day; in her journal and letters from that summer. The contradictions and ironies of the situation defy resolution. Full Foreword review forthcoming. (Assembly Press, Jan. 13) [184 pages] (PDF review copy)
Vigil by George Saunders
Impossible not to set this against the exceptional Lincoln in the Bardo, focused as both are on the threshold between life and death. Unfortunately, the comparison is not favourable to Vigil. A host of the restive dead visit the dying to offer comfort at the end. Jill Blaine’s life was cut short when she was murdered by a car bomb in a case of mistaken identity. Her latest “charge” is K.J. Boone, a Texas oil tycoon who not only contributed directly to climate breakdown but also deliberately spread anti-environmentalist propaganda through speeches and a documentary. As he lies dying of cancer in his mansion, he’s visited by, among others, the spirits of the repentant Frenchman who invented the engine and an Indian man whose family perished in a natural disaster. I expected a Christmas Carol-type reckoning with climate past and future; in resisting such a formula, Saunders avoids moralizing – oblivion comes for the just and the unjust. However, he instead subjects readers to a slog of repetitive, half-baked comedic monologues. I remain unsure what he hoped to achieve with the combination of an irredeemable character and an inexorable situation. All this does is reinforce randomness and hopelessness, whereas the few other Saunders works I’ve read have at least reassured with the sparkle of human ingenuity. YMMV. (Bloomsbury / Random House, 27 Jan.) [192 pages] (Read via NetGalley) 
#MARM2025, Part II: Bluebeard’s Egg and Book of Lives (In Progress)
My hold on Margaret Atwood’s memoir, Book of Lives, arrived in late November. It’ll be my first read for Doorstoppers in December. I’d also been casually rereading her 1983 short story collection Bluebeard’s Egg and managed the first two stories; I’ll return to the rest next year. A recent Guardian interview stated that Atwood had written in “every genre … except autobiography” and quoted her as saying “I’m an old-fashioned novelist. Everything in my novels came from looking at the world around. I don’t think I have much of an inner psyche.” Is this her being coy or facetious? Because, particularly among the short stories, there are many incidents taken from her life. Indeed, in the 140 pages of Book of Lives that I’ve read so far, there are frequent mentions of how people or events made their way into her fiction and poetry. Perhaps most obviously in Cat’s Eye, a novel about childhood bullying by girlfriends.
Bluebeard’s Egg opens with two Alice Munro-esque stories, “Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother” and “Hurricane Hazel,” both of which track with facts revealed in the memoir. The former draws on her mother Margaret’s Nova Scotia upbringing as the daughter of a country doctor (to avoid confusion, Atwood was nicknamed “Peggy”). Out of a welter of random stories comes the universal paradox: that she is in some ways exactly like her mother, and in others couldn’t be more different. It closes: “I had become a visitant from outer space, a time-traveller come back from the future, bearing news of a great disaster.” The latter story features a young teenage girl in a half-hearted relationship with an older, cooler boyfriend, mostly because she thinks it’s what’s expected of her. Atwood addresses it explicitly:
Let’s call this boyfriend “Buddy,” which is how he appears in a story of mine called “Hurricane Hazel.” Buddy and I broke up on the night of this famous hurricane, which flooded the Don Valley and killed eighty-one people in Toronto. Buddy wanted to go out that night, but my father, snapping out of his inattention—this was, after all, a matter of the weather, something he always kept his eye on—said it was out of the question. Didn’t Buddy know what a hurricane was? Far too dangerous!
One can also trace The Penelopiad (see my first post for Margaret Atwood Reading Month 2025) back to Atwood’s high school experiences with the Greek classics.
Who knows when an “influence” may begin? My own 2005 book, The Penelopiad, had its origins fifty years before, when I’d been horrified by the brutal treatment dished out to Penelope’s twelve maids by Odysseus and Telemachus. After being made to clean up the blood from the suitors who’d raped them and were subsequently slaughtered by Odysseus, they were hanged in a line. “Their feet twitched, but not for very long.” A line I have always remembered.
As to Book of Lives in general, I’m finding it delightful but also dense with detail and historical context. Atwood grew up between the wilderness and the city because of her entomologist father’s seasonal fieldwork. She was called “Little Carl” due to how much she resembled her handy father, who built the cabins and houses they lived in as well as most of their furniture. With her beloved older brother, Harold, she was free to explore and later, as a camp counsellor, was known as “Peggy Nature” for her zoological expertise. She could easily have become a scientist but fell in love with crafts and the humanities, sewing her own clothes and writing an opera for Home Economics class. By the end of high school, she’d decided she was going to be a poet.
A cute pic of her from her Substack
I’m impressed by the clarity of Atwood’s memories; all I remember of my school days wouldn’t fill one chapter, let alone four. It could be argued that some of this is superfluous – a whole chapter on several summers as a counsellor at a Reform Jewish camp? But it’s her prerogative to choose the content and no doubt, always the novelist, she’s seeding important facts that will come to fruition later. As ever, her turns of phrase are amusing and her asides witty. There is a wonderful trove of photographs and artefacts for illustration. Although she effortlessly recreates her experience at any age, her perspective is salted with hindsight. I can already tell, making my way steadily through, 25 pages at a time, to return this by the deadline, that I’m going to need to read it again in the future to take it all in. Ideally, I’ll get my own copy so I can use the index to return to any scenes I want to revisit.
Bluebeard’s Egg – Little Free Library
Book of Lives – Public library
#NovNov25 and #GermanLitMonth: Kästner, Kehlmann & Kracht
Our trip to Germany in September whetted my appetite to read more German-language fiction, and November also being German Literature Month (hosted this year by Caroline of Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat and Tony of Tony’s Reading List) was a perfect excuse. K names only this year, please. (Perhaps next year I’ll make it S and finally get to those Sebald and Seethaler novels I have on the shelf.) These three works – a children’s classic, a set of linked short stories about the writer’s craft, and a mother–son spending spree – have coy metafictional touches, plus there’s a connection I wasn’t expecting between the Kehlmann and Kracht. All: 
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner (1929; 1931)
[Translated by Eileen Hall]
If only I’d realized this was set on a train to Berlin, I could have read it in the same situation! Instead, it was a random find while shelving in the children’s section of the library. Emil sets out on a slow train from Neustadt to stay with his aunt, grandmother and cousin in Berlin for a week’s holiday. His mother gives him £7 in an envelope he pins inside his coat for safekeeping. There are four adults in the carriage with him, but three get off early, leaving Emil alone with a man in a bowler hat. Much as he strives to stay awake, Emil drops off. No sooner has the train pulled into Berlin than he realizes the envelope is gone along with his fellow traveller. “There were four million people in Berlin at that moment, and not one of them cared what was happening to Emil Tischbein.” He’s sure he’ll have to chase the man in the bowler hat all by himself, but instead he enlists the help of a whole gang of boys, including Gustav who carries a motor-horn and poses as a bellhop, Professor with the glasses, and Little Tuesday who mans the phone lines. Together they get justice for Emil, deliver a wanted criminal to the police, and earn a hefty reward. This was a cute story and it was refreshing for children’s word to be taken seriously. There’s also the in-joke of the journalist who interviews Emil being Kästner. I’m sure as a kid I would have found this a thrilling adventure, but the cynical me of today deemed it unrealistic. (Public library) [153 pages]
Fame by Daniel Kehlmann (2009; 2010)
[Translated by Carol Brown Janeway]
I’ve been equally enchanted by Kehlmann’s historical fiction (Measuring the World) and contemporary metafiction (F is one of my all-time favourites) in the past. These nine linked stories feature writers and their characters, actors and their look-alikes, and are about how life translates into – or is sometimes transformed by – art. Ralf Tanner starts to feel like he doesn’t exist when his calls gets diverted to someone else’s phone and an impersonator is more convincing at playing him than he is himself. Leo Richter’s new girlfriend is curiously similar to his most famous character, Lara Gaspard, a doctor working for a medical charity. Crime writer Maria Rubinstein takes Leo’s place on a cultural exchange to Central Asia and gets stuck in a Kafka-esque situation without a visa. Leo’s fan and Ralf’s call recipient are subjects of their own stories. References to Miguel Auristos Blanco’s spiritual self-help books recur and he, too, eventually becomes a character. I liked the pointed little jokes about what writers have to put up with (“Do you know how often I’ve been asked today where I get my ideas from? Fourteen. And nine times whether I work in the morning or the afternoon,” Leo complains). Mostly, these stories struck me as clever yet had me wondering what the point was. My favourite was “Rosalie Goes Off to Die,” in which Leo’s character travels to Zurich for an assisted death but he the writer decides to interfere before she can get her last wish. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) [206 pages – but fairly large print]
Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (2021; 2024)
[Translated by Daniel Bowles]
This was longlisted for the International Booker Prize and is the current Waterstones book of the month. The Swiss author’s seventh novel appears to be autofiction: the protagonist is named Christian Kracht and there are references to his previous works. Whether he actually went on a profligate road trip with his 80-year-old mother, who could say. I tend to think some details might be drawn from life – her physical and mental health struggles, her father’s Nazism, his father’s weird collections and sexual predilections – but brewed into a madcap maelstrom of a plot that sees the pair literally throwing away thousands of francs. Her fortune was gained through arms industry investment and she wants rid of it, so they hire private taxis and planes. If his mother has a whim to pick some edelweiss, off they go to find it. All the while she swigs vodka and swallows pills, and Christian changes her colostomy bags. I was wowed by individual lines (“This was the katabasis: the decline of the family expressed in the topography of her face”; “everything that does not rise into consciousness will return as fate”; “the glacial sun shone from above, unceasing and relentless, upon our little tableau vivant”) but was left chilly overall by the satire on the ultra-wealthy and those who seek to airbrush history. The fun connections: Like the Kehlmann, this involves arbitrary travel and happens to end in Africa. More than once, Kracht is confused for Kehlmann. (Little Free Library) [190 pages]
Spotted in my local Waterstones…
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 