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)