Paris in July, III: Dundy, Maugham, Sarton Novels; Nonfiction by Durand & Carles, Gopnik
All in all, I’ve reviewed 13 books (a mix of fiction and nonfiction) for #ParisInJuly2026; see also Part I and Part II. It’s been such a fun escapist project for the summer – thanks to Emma of Words and Peace for hosting! I’m squeaking in at the last minute with a final set of five made up of a few obscure classics and two sets of essays that veer between autobiographical reflection and social observation, with a bit of self-help thrown in. A shared theme this time is differences between the USA (or England) and France. Here’s a quick paragraph on each.
Fiction
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (1958)
“The world is wide, wide, wide and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”
Sally Jay Gorce is determined to live it up in Paris. After all, now that she’s lost her passport, it doesn’t look like she’ll be going back to the States any time soon. With her dyed-pink hair, self-deprecating sense of humour, and heavily notched bedpost, she’s an endearing and impulsive protagonist. She’s always falling in and out of love and embarking on new projects, from acting on stage or as a film extra to posing as a painter’s model. I found her turns of phrase amusing – “To my chagrin, I found all my clothes … splitting themselves resolutely up into three categories: Tyrolean Peasant, Bar Girl, and Dreaded Librarian”; “It was dessert now, and I was deserting” – but did weary a bit of the meandering plot. This work of autofiction seems ahead of its time what with the protagonist’s promiscuity. I’ve always been intrigued about the title and learned that it arises from a love interest’s likening of American girls to avocados (“A hard centre with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing … so eternally green”) plus his mishearing of Sally Jay’s “dead” for “dud.” Somewhere on a continuum between I Capture the Castle and Nina Stibbe, this comic novel was a pleasant distraction. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
A linking passage: “Boy, we met a real nut on the beach today. A skinny young American with a fierce black moustache called Hugo McCarthy. He’d just left the South of France a couple of days ago, where he’d been kicked out of Somerset Maugham’s villa in Cap Ferrat for the third time.”
The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham (1908)
“There’s no place like Paris for meeting queer folk.”
Who knew Maugham tried his hand at supernatural horror? The nearest thing I’d read from him before was Up at the Villa, a suspense novella. An autobiographical fragment preceding the text explains that Oliver Haddo, the villain of the piece, was inspired by a poet Maugham met in Paris, Aleister Crowley, who dabbled in Satanism and the occult. Arthur Burdon, an English surgeon in Paris, is engaged to marry Margaret Dauncey. Margaret’s roommate, Susie Boyd, is fascinated by Haddo, who looms large in personality and body. Margaret, on the other hand, says, “I’ve never met a man who filled me with such loathing.” Arthur and others of their acquaintance don’t know whether to take him seriously or not. This means that they underestimate the threat he poses to their happiness – and perhaps their lives. It’s rare to encounter a story of demon possession these days, and hard to know quite what to make of it. I found this reasonably compelling but melodramatic, plus it felt distasteful how Haddo’s weight increases to match his evil. Do read Maugham if you haven’t yet – he is reliably readable and a number of his works are short – but maybe not this one first. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles) 
Shadow of a Man by May Sarton (1950)
I’d not heard of Sarton’s third novel before I picked it up at random in a used bookstore. For those of us who discovered Sarton through her journals or poetry, I suspect her fiction will always fall short. The psychology of her characters’ relationships tends to lack subtlety, and plotting isn’t always her forté. I enjoyed this one well enough, probably because I could relate to the main character’s feeling of being adrift after his mother’s sudden death. After the funeral is over and done with, twenty-six-year-old Francis Chabrier decides to spend the summer in Paris. He’s half-French and thinks some time away from Boston might do him good. Except when he gets there he promptly falls in love with a family friend, Solange, and that’s complicated because she’s a 45-year-old widow whose late husband was shattered by his time in a concentration camp. It’s clear their romance will be short-lived. Francis’s stepfather, Alan, describes the young man as “a comet on the loose,” and the purpose of the months in Paris seems to be to set him on a more stable course. It grated that Solange is portrayed as almost an old lady (I’m only just over two years off her age now!), and that their affair only serves as a prelude to a more sensible relationship back home. However, the Paris setting (and coastal Maine later on) is delicious, and I marked out plenty of lines about Francis and his mother’s family dynamic. (Secondhand – Wonder Book & Video, Hagerstown)
Nonfiction
Pardon Our French: Parisian Lessons for a Happier Life by Alex Durand and Tom Carles with Allie Kingsley Baker (2026)
Durand and Carles moved to the USA to play college soccer and went viral on social media for their “AT Frenchies” videos about French language and culture. (I’ve not actually seen any.) Although they’ve come to admire aspects of the American lifestyle, such as ambition and individualism, they still prize traditionally French values of curiosity, privacy and a more relaxed approach to time management. Chapters on romance, food, style, friendships, green living, the arts and rituals bring out the best of what France has to offer. “L’histoire d’Alex” and “L’histoire de Tom” memoir sections alternate with more generic self-help advice. I expect Baker had a lot to do with the vernacular prose, which can be slick and clichéd. Still, it’s a good-natured, chatty book and it’s always worthwhile to be reminded to live in the moment, savour small pleasures, and insist on quality.
To be published by Penguin Life on September 8. (Read via Edelweiss)
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik (2000)
Longtime New Yorker writer Gopnik lived in Paris in 1995–2000 with his wife and young son; their daughter was born just before they left to return to New York City. Like other New Yorker regulars such as Elizabeth Kolbert and Susan Orlean, he is an excellent essayist. His book on French cuisine is a favourite of mine, and on this reread I most appreciated the pieces on food, and the general observations on being an expat:
Fish and plugs are the two great differences, the two things that are never quite alike from country to country. … This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop
We have a beautiful existence in Paris, but not a full life, and in New York we have a full life and an unbeautiful existence. (= his wife’s conclusion)
everything about moving to France has been wonderful, and everything about emigrating to France difficult.
That summary of French bureaucracy, so at odds with the cultural experience of living in Paris, reminds me of what David Lebovitz has to say on the subject. There is too much about politics and sports in this book for me, but I loved his close attention to his son’s development and the customs they create around Christmas but also in the everyday, such as an ongoing bedtime story about a baseball player (“The Rookie”) and cake and hot chocolate after swimming. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)
My original rating (2016): 
My rating now:
Some apt quotes about Paris I encountered this month:
Adam Gopnik: “Paris in July is pretty much left to the tourists and the people who look after them” & “Perhaps in the end this is why Paris is ‘romantic.’ It marries both the voluptuous and restricted.”
David Lebovitz: “Like New Yorkers, Parisians have a complicated relationship to their city. They appreciate the beauty and excitement, but as Romain told me, Paris is dur (hard). That things aren’t easy—l’administration, the neighbors, the brusqueness, the fact that it’s not a perfect place—is what he likes about Paris.”
May Sarton: “I think Paris makes everyone wise … All Americans fall in love with Paris. It’s the coup de foudre.”
Overall favourites: the whole of my first batch!
- Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
- My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein & Real Estate by Deborah Levy
- Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens
July Releases by Carson, Du Bois, Humphreys, Nolen & Watkins
This month I have novels set in the Mojave Desert and a Northern Ireland that never was; poetry about food and cross-cultural identity / adolescent boys and self-harm; and a short nonfiction book offering ideas for how to reconnect with nature. Repeated themes include environmental damage, Bible imagery and toxic masculinity.
Few and Far Between by Jan Carson
“So this is all true.”
“Historically true or made-up true?”
“What’s the difference?”
This was my first from Carson – and her U.S. debut – though she’s well known in Northern Ireland for her novels and short story collections. (Our own Cathy of 746 Books gets a mention in the Acknowledgements!) Her fourth novel is a work of alternative history with subtle magic realist touches. In 1958, Terrence O’Neill (shortly to be elected Prime Minister) proposed draining Lough Neagh to give Northern Ireland a seventh county. That never happened, but in the world of Carson’s novel it did, creating “the Ark,” an archipelago of islands in the large lake. It was primarily a refuge for people fleeing the Troubles – and also happens to provide a nice raft of allusions to the Book of Genesis. In 2017, middle-aged siblings Marion and Robert-John Connolly are two of the last few remaining residents of the Ark, working as caretakers. They grew up here with their overbearing anthropologist father and German mother. Rumour has it that the government will soon flood the lake to deal with an algae bloom. The Connollys hope that the arrival of Alex Anderson, a homegrown academic writing a history of the Ark, will be their chance to defend their home.
Carson has given careful attention to her worldbuilding here. Along with the previously inhabited islands are four on the “Far Side” that seem more metaphorical: Middle Flat houses “the Sleepers,” who are in a coma due to trauma (cf. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Sleeping Beauties); Church Flat is a sort of bardo for the “Almost Dead”; Tom’s Hard is a suicide spot; and Eglish Flat is where people go to bury things they don’t want anyone to know about. Except, like the return of the repressed made physical, all that detritus has been resurfacing. Excerpts from Alex’s manuscript in progress treat this all matter-of-factly, and before long it all feels completely natural. Flashbacks to the 1970s and 1990s fill in backstories for the oddball central characters, whose off-kilter upbringing keeps them tied to an island chain that harbours as many bad memories as good ones. This was intriguing for its blend of realism and fabulist elements; I never knew what was going to happen next. I’ll read more by Carson for sure.
With thanks to Scribner for the proof copy for review.
Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois
In this yummy debut poetry pamphlet, food is wrapped up with memory and serves as tokens of a mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian identity. Sometimes when Du Bois is travelling in Asia, people assume that she is a total foreigner and bring her a fork instead of chopsticks, or remark on her bravery in trying dishes that are an acquired taste. In fact, she’s up for eating anything, no matter how spicy or unusual. Food can be about travel and adventure, but also about comfort and a sense of home. Family chats and celebrations revolve around good meals and drink: “We sate silence with stories / of firm favourites and elusive treats we long for”. A trip to London’s Chinatown entails more of that delicious alliteration and sibilance: “a pile of slender leaves serenades me with its many names: / eng chai, ong choy, kangkong, water spinach, morning glory.” I particularly loved the clever blend of cookery and family tradition in “Ode to Kaya,” where the quest for the perfect egg jam made with palm sugar and coconut milk brings back memories of a departed relative: “Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed / into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked / regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe.” These 19 poems are a feast, ranging widely across places, languages and cuisines.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
Unwilded: Finding Our Way Back to Nature by Alastair Humphreys
I discovered Humphreys’ work through his previous book, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted Local (and he’s now a judge for this year’s nature writing race). His wry, sometimes silly tone is reminiscent of Lev Parikian, and the two authors share a clear passion for the natural world and for enthusing others about its everyday wonders here in England. Humphreys opens with two recent events that reassured him that people care about nature: the public outcry that greeted the illegal cutting down of the famous Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall, and the joyful (if competitive) response to sightings of the Aurora Borealis. The former also serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when people are disconnected from nature: The two men convicted for the Sycamore Gap incident retorted that it was “just a tree.”
Humphreys doesn’t point fingers but acknowledges that the issue is systemic and affects all of us, even avowed countryside-lovers: “Our busy indoor lives, the moth-like lure of bright screens and shopping centres, and restricted access to much of our remaining green space all combine to make us more disconnected from the natural world than any previous generation.” Short chapters give strategies for various activities that, in as little as 15 minutes, could get people more engaged with the outdoors: litter picking, photographing the same tree every week for a year, foraging for blackberries, testing the water quality in a local stream, wild swimming, planting trees, and joining in a parkrun. I liked his idea of marking each full moon by enjoying a different spot by night. He also worked outdoors for one hour per day for a week, and dabbled in performance art through graffiti reading “15 Minutes to Nature” with an arrow or “NOTICE THIS TREE.” It’s easy to become disheartened by the scale of environmental problems, but Humphreys suggests choosing five to focus on, and then joining up with other local concerned citizens to work towards five corresponding mitigating actions. This is a readable and practical book written with a light touch. Like Lucy Jones’s Losing Eden, it ends with a utopian epilogue imagining humans living in harmony with a restored natural world. Let’s all keep living in hope, and doing our bit to make it a reality.
With thanks to the author and Eye Books for the free copy for review.
Afterlight by Caleb Nolen
Nolen’s debut collection won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry (the same award that my old blogger friend Carolyn Oliver won for her first book, Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble). It reflects on an early life marked by male friendship, addiction and other self-destructive behaviours, including suicidal ideation. The poet barely knew his father, who had a new wife and kids and treated meetings with his older sons as begrudged obligations. He and his high school friends snuck beer, weed and prescription pills. There were other even more dangerous things around, too –
from “First Gun”
A pistol, wrapped in an old shirt, hidden behind a panel
in his parents’ basement. When he brought it out to show us,
he held it carefully in both hands.
I was reading this collection at the same time as Michael Amherst’s The Boyhood of Cain, and the two chimed for their equation of expected masculinity with violence –
from “Letter to Cain”
My first consolation, my first friend,
tell me what you learned when the blood cried out:
who are we the keepers of, we who were not kept?
Nolen is 40, too young to have four dead friends – Bobby, Mike, Jonathan and Troy – threading through his memory. The book is rife with biblical references (“Jonah Years,” “Killing the Fattened Calf”), including letters addressed to particular figures: Abel, Job, the Woman Taken in Adultery, Paul the Apostle, Judas, the Man Possessed by Demons. Personal and religious history mesh, such that the quartet of departed friends are included alongside Mary of Oignies and the like in an Appendix of Hagiographies.
You’re making a life out of scribbling
the names of your dead friends.
This is a sombre collection that looks back with pain rather than nostalgia. Gentle alliteration and glimpses of nature help to make the vision of the past endurable.
With thanks to the University of Utah Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins
Watkins’s fourth work of fiction exudes love for a distinctive and endangered landscape: the deserts of the American West. Rose has worked for the Sierra Club and has a preteen daughter, Juniper, who lives with her father back east. The book opens with Miles, a former lover, returning to Rose’s life. Approaching age 40 and grieving her alcoholic mother’s untimely death, she finds herself yearning for a baby even though she feels it’s morally questionable to have children in a time of climate breakdown. If Miles won’t commit, she has a backup plan called “The Swirl” whereby male acquaintances will be invited to inseminate her after signing away parental rights. (Just the sperm, thanks; Rose will take care of the rest.) Meanwhile, she’s part of a loose collective based at the Yellow Pine encampment, protesting the construction of a solar farm that would devastate local tortoise populations. The defenders’ impassioned conversations about how to work toward good in a time of corporation-driven extinctions are a highlight. It’s a bold, kooky, horny novel in the same vein as Melissa Broder’s Death Valley and Miranda July’s All Fours, but still manages an intellectual rigour and felicity of prose that I perhaps wasn’t expecting. Some sample lines:
It was surprisingly nice to be named a friend by the man who’d once poured salt on the slug of her heart
Rose and Miles sallied forth, trying again in Indian summer in a low-key failed state on a dying planet.
Love laid down a new layer. Rose’s despair patinaed with faith.
“I’m trying to be unapocalyptic. I’m trying to be practical.”
I’ve been reading Watkins since her debut story collection, Battleborn, won the Dylan Thomas Prize, though it’s her first novel, Gold Fame Citrus, to which I’m most partial. Her third book, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, went too far off the rails for me, whereas this one is a return to form. The outlook is a little bit woo-woo and I appreciated the environmental theme more than the indulgent autofiction framework. Still, it feels realistic and up-to-the-minute, positing human connection and purposeful collective action as antidotes to hopelessness. (“It wasn’t enough to be anti … You had to be for something.”)
With thanks to riverrun/John Murray (Hachette) for the free copy for review.
Which of these July releases have you read, or will you seek out now?
What am I missing out on?
20 Books of Summer, 10: Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu (2022)
These dozen short stories are gently surreal, flirting with magic realism and science fiction but never getting too weird. Adolescent girls sprout wings on their legs; an insomniac woman has an encounter with the sandman made literal; and kids find a haunted doll from a house emptied by accidental deaths and a suicide. “#ClimbingNation” is the most realistic, comparing the (sometimes fabricated) memories of those who knew a deceased climber. More often, there is a speculative element. In “Twenty Hours,” a husband and wife take turns killing each other and reprinting a new version of their spouse on a 3D printer. The title invention in “Time Cubes” offers people a chance to jump forward or reel backwards through their lives. “Scissors” first appeared in the Kink anthology edited by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell and isn’t the only story to blend sex and danger in a queasy way: I didn’t like how this and “June Bugs” undermine tenderness with violence. (And I objected to insects being used to prompt disgust in the latter; I had a similar problem with Claire Fuller’s latest novel.)
This collection was a mixed bag for me, but I’ll finish on a positive note with three favourite stories. The first and last bookend the collection nicely, imagining how technology and art might salve loss. “Pre-Simulation Consultation XF007867” is a dialogue between a VR operator and a client whose only wish is to reclaim a peaceful moment with her late mother – except the company has a rule about no dead individuals known personally. Then, in “Do You Remember Candy,” all food has become tasteless and Allie spins a business opportunity out of performance art that employs adjacent senses to evoke lost flavours. And the purest fun was “Bridezilla,” about a runaway bride attacked by a nebulous sea monster. There are great setups here, but I wouldn’t say that any of the stories features a truly memorable character.
Kim Fu, a second-generation Chinese Canadian living in Seattle, uses they/them pronouns. I loved their gender-bending 2014 novel For Today I Am a Boy and have kept trying their work but nothing since has lived up to that debut work. Although I appreciated the playful resistance to the permanence of death, I can think of other speculative collections that have handled such a theme more successfully, such as There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven by Ruben Reyes Jr. and The Man in the Banana Trees by Marguerite Sheffer. (Gift from my wish list)
20 Books of Summer, 4–7: Fadiman; Kingsolver & O’Farrell Rereads; Sullivan
I finished several of these a while ago now, but it’s been a struggle to summon up the motivation to write about them, especially during the heat wave we’re currently experiencing in the southern half of England. You’ve heard a lot from me recently as I’ve been catching up on reviews, so I’ll try to keep these responses to one (long) paragraph each.
Frog and Other Essays by Anne Fadiman (2026)
This was one of my Most Anticipated titles of the year because I’ve loved Fadiman’s nonfiction, especially the bookish Ex Libris, which I’ve read twice. Her essays are warm and fluent, braiding memoir and observation in a natural way and drawing readers in whether they share her particular preoccupations or not. “Frog” is about her guilt for not being more attentive to her children’s surprisingly long-lived pet frog, Bunky; “South Polar Times” recounts her obsession with polar exploration and what she discovered in the archives of the magazine Shackleton produced in the 1910s. At the centre of the book is a triptych on modern technology (“My Old Printer”) and language use, especially as she’s experienced it as a Yale professor trying to adjust to pandemic-era teaching (“Screen Share”) and expanded gender possibilities (“All My Pronouns,” which is mostly about getting used to “they” as a singular pronoun for nonbinary individuals). What a relief that advancing age and pedantry didn’t see her joining the anti-woke camp. The final essay, “Yes to Everything,” was – I think – the afterword to her late student Marina Keegan’s The Opposite of Loneliness (2014). For me the highlight was “The Oakling and the Oak,” about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s disappointing son (“A penumbra of impossible expectation began to settle around Hartley’s head”). There’s a tantalizing parallel here with her own sense of needing to live up to her literary father, Clifton Fadiman, that I wish she’d explored further. So: good stuff here, but only seven essays, all of which were originally published elsewhere. It feels like scraping the barrel. And why the laudatory foreword by someone I’ve never heard of (Sam Anderson)? I ordered this while in the States to get to a free-shipping limit and I’m glad I got the chance to read it, but it’s not a must. Do seek out “Frog” and “Oak,” though. (New purchase – Target.com)
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (2000)
In all her life Lusa had never seen such an oversexed, muggy summer. Just breathing was a torrid proposition.
Although I remembered this as being in Kingsolver’s top tier of novels, I recalled no details beyond a female ranger who lives in the woods, has an affair with a hunter, and studies coyotes (actually, I thought it was wolves – I was conflating Deanna’s surname, Wolfe, and Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, which has a similar setup). I’d forgotten that there are two other strands: Lusa, a Polish-Palestinian entomologist widowed young, inherits her husband’s family farm and tries to make a go of goat breeding despite others’ disapproval; and Garnett, a pious old man trying to resurrect the American chestnut after it was wiped out by blight, has an ongoing low-key feud with his organic orchard-keeping neighbour, Nannie. These threads rotate under the headings “Predators,” “Moth Love,” and “Old Chestnuts.” There are pleasing connections between the main characters, who are also thematically linked by ideological disagreements and the possibility of new life and romance when age or circumstances seemed to disqualify them. Kingsolver writes brilliantly about science, and although she gets a little preachy through Nannie, in a way that presages Unsheltered (“It’s glory, to be part of a bigger something. The glory of an evolving world”), her environmentalist messages are always right on. It’s depressing to note that, more than a quarter-century later, the issues she raises related to food production and pesticide use are worse rather than better. Like Margaret Atwood, she’s a literary prophet of our time. I’m nearly halfway through her upcoming novel, Partita, for a Shelf Awareness review and its protagonist, Livia, seems to be in the lineage of Deanna – an Appalachian girl who tries to exceed her origins. This was a big ol’ satisfying summer read. Whyever didn’t Kingsolver win the Women’s Prize for this one? (Little Free Library)
My original rating: 
My rating now: 
Poolside reading at my nephew’s graduation party.
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell (2006)
Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.
Another reread. I remembered the mental hospital element but think I may have otherwise had this confused with Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture, which also features historical family secrets and a great big twist. This was our book club selection for June, and although I missed the meeting (which was also our summer social) while I was back visiting my family, I wanted to catch up by reading it again – especially after it earned a perfect score from the rest of the group! In the novel’s present day, vintage clothing store owner Iris is having an affair with a married man and learns that she has a ‘mad’ great-aunt who will soon be her responsibility when the hospital Esme has called home for 60 years closes. Why did Iris’s grandmother, Kitty, hide that she had a sister? With Kitty on a dementia ward, she can’t ask outright. Instead, narration alternates between the sisters’ growing-up years in India and Edinburgh – where flighty, rebellious Esme caught boys’ eyes while obedient Kitty didn’t – and Iris and Esme embarking on a tentative relationship. The use of the present tense for both, as well as the fragments of memory we gradually work out are Kitty’s, create a continuous narrative so gripping that I could easily have consumed it in one sitting had I not had other commitments. Grief, parenting, male privilege, family legacies, and a freedom of spirit that might today be branded neurodivergence are strong elements. It’s appalling how women have been punished for breaking the rules, but the other ensuing betrayals are just as shocking. This must have one of THE best surprise endings out there. I can’t believe I’d forgotten the details. After a couple of lacklustre early novels, O’Farrell’s career truly took off with this one. Now to reread her other gems. (Borrowed from a book club friend)
My original rating:
My rating now: 
Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan (2009)
Smith had left its mark on her, so that the place would always feel like home
I’ve had a mixed experience with Sullivan’s novels, but this debut was a delight. Let’s start with the clever title: An American graduation ceremony is called “commencement,” so it marks both an ending and a beginning. For four friends who meet at Smith College, a women-only institution, in the late 1990s, their student experiences have effects that carry on into their ‘real’ lives afterwards. We watch how their relationships with each other, and with family members and partners, shift over the course of nearly a decade. Sally arrives on campus bereft from the death of her mother, but she doesn’t let her sadness corrode her ambition or her kind heart. Bree is engaged to a man when she comes up from Savannah but leaves in a committed relationship with a woman. April was raised by a single mother and has always been a strident feminist, but graduates with plans to go to extremes in drawing attention to the plight of sex workers. The framing story of the friends gathering for Sally’s wedding introduces us first to Celia, who is in some sense still living the student life in the small New York City apartment she brings one-night stands back to after drunken evenings. The wedding ends up in a huge fight between the four, and as the years pass they split off into pairs and trios of loyalty before a crisis brings them back together. It’s a little far-fetched how this all plays out, but I was invested enough in all four characters that I was happy to go along with it. Sullivan went to Smith (I also attended what was a women’s college at the time, Hood), so you have to wonder if anything was autobiographical for her. She weaves in various women’s issues, such as sexual assault and decisions about career and motherhood. I applaud Sullivan for mentioning support for trans men on campus, though her discussion does seem of its time and today I think the debate would be more around allowing trans women to attend. I chose this to read because my recent USA trip was for my nephew’s high school graduation. It’s perfect for Curtis Sittenfeld fans. (Secondhand purchase – 2nd & Charles)
Three I Read for Father’s Day: Faber Poetry Anthology; Giffels & Pascoe
I’m behind on reviews after a long weekend visiting friends. As I did last year, I picked out three books related to fathers and fatherhood. It’s my ideal Three on a Theme recipe: one fiction + one nonfiction + one poetry. I won a copy of a poetry anthology about parenthood and completed the trio with a memoir that’s been on my shelves for a number of years and a debut novel I bought secondhand mostly for the title.
Family Lines: Poems about Parents and Parenthood, ed. Simon Armitage and Rachel Bower (2026)
Not all of the poems are about fathers, of course, but there are plenty of selections here that feel true of any family relationship: the complicated emotions, the sometimes physical realities of transformation and care, the risks of ageing and loss, and how identity is defined by a connection or an opposition. This suffered a bit from its first third – covering pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood – being very similar in scope to Night Feeds and Morning Songs (2021, ed. Ana Sampson), which I reviewed for Mother’s Day. Some of the same contributors feature, though I think only the one specific poem overlaps, Liz Berry’s “The Republic of Motherhood.” Highlights included Gail McConnell’s prose poem “Orange” contemplating lesbian motherhood and Rita Dove’s “Daystar” about never-ending domestic duties: “She wanted a little room for thinking; / but she saw diapers steaming on the line”.
Contemporary material mingles with older; Homer and Wordsworth are two of the ten poets included in a chapter on fathers and father figures. “Sleep” by Roger Robinson was the best example of the theme, a sweet tribute to a man who “for the next twenty years / … battles on his job every day / just so you could be comfortable / and have the space to be what you want.” Relevant entries from other sections were Alden Nowlan’s “It’s Good to Be Here,” about his inauspicious beginning in 1932 with a 14-year-old mother (“I’m in trouble, she said / to him. …// … they began to talk very quietly and at last he said / well, I guess we’ll just have to make the best of it”); Anne Sexton’s “All My Pretty Ones,” about going through her late father’s things and wondering if she’s inherited his alcoholism; and Hartley Coleridge’s “Lines—,” acknowledging he’ll never live up to his father’s talent: “Because I bear my Father’s name / I am not quite despised, / My little legacy of fame / I’ve not yet realized.” (Faber giveaway)
Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life by David Giffels (2018)
Losing his mother and best friend to cancer within a year, and then turning 50, got Giffels to thinking about mortality. He had a whim to build his own coffin and decided it would be a perfect joint project with his widowed father, who had a home workshop full of tools. As sprightly and driven as his father was, he was also in his eighties and had survived a couple of different cancers, so it was never far from the author’s mind that he needed to make the most of his time with his father while he could. I’m not at all interested in woodworking or DIY, but this is an unusual and likable memoir that alternates the practicalities of building the casket with memories of his relationships with his mother and friend John, who was an artist. While Giffels mentions his wife Gina frequently, he doesn’t talk about his own children as much as I might have expected to take the lessons full circle. No matter; I appreciated the middle-aged Ohio hipster’s thoughts on friendship, ageing and grief. Bereavement memoirs are more often the preserve of women, it seems, so it was good to have a different take.
This is how middle-aged friendships often go, slipping and slipping until ‘we really should get together soon’ becomes a discomforting veil for the truth—that such friendships cease to exist.
I thought a time would come when I would feel definitively like a grown-up, like I would have achieved a certain kind of acumen for making decisions and knowing what to do in unknowable situations, when I wouldn’t feel insecure in real-life grown-up scenarios (board meetings; ordering wine; delivering eulogies). Instead, I still felt like a kid. Or rather, I felt like an adult who was in the continuous loop of his youth.
death is a shattering. Grief is the chaos of wreckage. Only life can find the pattern, and only in its own sweet time. What I remember from the long season of loss was wanting each day to pass as quickly as possible. To get beyond it. I guess I missed the fact that the by-product of this wish was for my own life to rush by.
(New bargain purchase from Amazon)
Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe (2002)
“It was simple for me: the saints were in heaven, and guardian angels had extendable wings like Batman, and my dad had died and gone to live in the tree in the back yard.”
The premise of this Australia-set novella was appealing enough for me to overcome my usual antipathy to child narrators. It probably helps that Simone is looking back from adulthood rather than limited to a 10-year-old’s knowledge. She tells her mother, Dawn, about the voice coming from the tree and it turns out that the two of them are the only ones who can hear her father. He tells them that he’s sorry he left, that he will always love them, that death is not so bad. Simone’s three brothers and best friend, the judgemental neighbours: they’re all clueless. The boys carry on with normal life as best they can, while Dawn has the chance to start over with “the drain man.” Meanwhile, the tree keeps encroaching on the house, undermining the foundations. It’s both a literal problem and a symbol of the enormity of grief, and the book as a whole works on both levels. Despite the early promise of magic, I found it to be a mostly realistic and reasonably touching look at the aftermath of family tragedy. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Three Novels with (Tenuous) May Connections
Last year I read a May Sarton novel for the anniversary of her death; this year I thought I’d pick one up for her birth month. When I spotted mentions of May in the first line of two more novels from my shelves, I decided to make it a trio, however tenuous.
Hood by Emma Donoghue (1995)
First line: “Mayday in 1980, heat sealing my fingers together.”
Pen opens her story with a flashback of wandering Dublin with her girlfriend, Cara, when they were teenagers. “Why is it the most ordinary images that fall out, when I shuffle the memories? Two girls in a secondhand bookshop, hands sticky with sampled perfumes”. But in the novel’s present day, 13 years later, news has just come that Cara died in a crash on her way home by taxi after a Greek island holiday. They were only out to their lesbian friends; even Cara’s father, whose home they lived in together, was in the dark about their relationship, so Pen is in a curious position as the secret ‘widow’. “I felt such an amateur,” she confides. “About to embark on the biggest loss I could imagine, with no practice at mourning a mother or even a pop star”.
Pen requests compassionate leave for the death of her ‘housemate’ from the Catholic school where she teaches. She and Mr Wall have plenty of sadmin to do while also hosting his other daughter, Kate, who’s come back from America for the funeral. Pen keeps a lid on her emotions, seeing to household routines and attending formal and informal memorial services, but all the while she’s visited by memories from her life with Cara. (Not all happy; she wasn’t thrilled with Cara’s bisexuality and nonmonogamy.) Many are sensual: Pen is a woman with a strong appetite for food and sex, and matter-of-factly calls herself fat. The title is a riff on sisterhood but also connects to a reference to – ahem – the clitoral hood. Pen’s reliving of her lovemaking with Cara is often a little too anatomical in that way to be hot.
Last year I read Donoghue’s debut novel, Stir-fry; this was her second. Cara is more than a little reminiscent of Jael from the earlier book. I worried we would get an excruciating scene in which Pen attempts to act on her childhood crush on Kate, but luckily that’s not the case. The book is structured in seven long chapters, one per day for a week. It seemed far-fetched to me that Pen would already be clearing the house of Cara’s belongings within days of her death. While I appreciated the different angle on grief, Pen’s positive body image, and the way that liturgical and theological language permeates her thinking even though she no longer feels associated with the Catholic Church (“Grant me spiritual enlightenment through pain, sure, Lord, grand, you’re on, but not tonight”), this didn’t charm me like Stir-fry did. It felt a little too niche, like you’d need to be familiar with the 1990s lesbian scene to really feel welcome. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski (2024)
First line: “On the last Saturday in May, I drown in my sleep.”
This debut novel about a high school girl’s accidental death at a party is structured in two halves: five chapters headed “Pre” and another five under “Post.” Each one is narrated by a different girl or woman from a Boston-area community. They are dealing with chronic illness, loss, relationship difficulties, or career confusion. The prose is often lyrical, but the portraits don’t seem to add up to much and the character names are confusingly similar (Mona – Marina – Maureen; Layla – Lila – Lucy). I wondered if I would have preferred Grabowski’s writing in a short story collection. (Passed on by Susan, who reviewed it here – thank you!)
The Bridge of Years by May Sarton (1946)
This is miniature saga of a Belgian family in the interwar years. Mélanie Duchesne is a furniture dealer and her husband, Paul, a philosopher who’s trying but failing to write a book. Their country home seems like an idyll, but even in this small community there are those whose lives have been irreparably damaged by wartime trauma. There are passages that feel just like a still life:
The room was full of sunlight warming the orange walls, making pools of ruddy light on the copper pots and the shining blue-and-white plates that stood on a shelf at the back, but not dissipating the melancholy face, in the portrait on the wall, of a thin, thoughtful little boy wrapped up in a blue scarf, who was Paul twenty years ago.
I made it through most of Part I, “Spring,” but put this back on the shelf to try another time when I have the patience for lovely prose and less attention to plot. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
May Releases by Siri Hustvedt, Will Maclean & More
This month’s overarching theme is creepy and/or haunted houses! My main reviews are of a collage-style bereavement memoir and a slice of English horror. I also excerpt my reviews of four more May releases read in advance for Shelf Awareness, including one that’s in the running for my Book of the Year.
Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt
Paul Auster died of non-small cell lung cancer on April 30, 2024. His widow, Siri Hustvedt, wears his old clothes and still occasionally smells his cigar smoke in their Brooklyn home. “I’m living in a haunted house,” she writes, one “inhabited by a ghost Paul and I made together, a ‘we’ that doesn’t exist anymore.” This isn’t a straightforward bereavement memoir recounting the relationship followed by the loved one’s decline and death. Instead, it moves back and forth between past and present and incorporates various documents. There are glimpses of her state of mind as she keeps up with routines to get through the days but still experiences life as unreal and outside of time.
One section reprints 12 e-mail updates she sent to friends and family during Paul’s illness. She weaves through fragments of his shocking family history (familiar from The Invention of Solitude), certain events that have been memorialized in his books (such as the car accident he wrote about in Winter Journal), and brief tales of his work and its reception. There’s also Paul’s incomplete series of letters to his newborn grandson, Miles, in which he tells the boy the stories he thinks he should know about his ancestors. A notable one was about 9/11, which happened to be the day their daughter Sophie started at a new high school; she passed under the World Trade Center on the subway half an hour before the first attack.
For those of us who have read both Auster and Hustvedt, it’s particularly interesting to read about how their work intersects. “We both liked the idea of our fictional worlds kissing, as it were,” she notes. She describes their connection as “intellectual-erotic” and predicts that, given another 100 years together, they would have merged into one person. Their influence on each other’s work was mutual, she insists, rather than one-sided from Paul to her as misogynistic detractors have assumed. She’s always been more the intellectual anyway, with a literature PhD and amateur interests in neurology and philosophy; and he ‘borrowed’ her character Iris Vegan (from The Blindfold) for one of his later novels, Leviathan.
The book grows increasingly political towards its close. Paul didn’t live to see “45” re-elected as 47. Hustvedt decries the rise of anti-intellectualism and, at Paul’s memorial service nearly 10 months after his death, quoted her father’s prescient words: “when fascism comes to America, they’ll call it Americanism.” It doesn’t seem like alarmism to ask what the current regime in the US and elsewhere portends for writers committed to humanism, nuance, and more or less overt voicing of outrage (as in one of Paul’s late books, a short text accompanying his son-in-law’s photographic series on gun violence in America).
This whetted my appetite to read more by Auster and fulfils her stated goal “to bring something of the man back on the page.” I can thoroughly recommend it to fans of either or both authors, as well as those interested in grief stories and the current literary scene. (Read via Edelweiss)
Solace House by Will Maclean
I hadn’t heard of Maclean’s first novel, The Apparition Phase, which was on the McKitterick Prize shortlist (before my involvement with the Prize), but I was drawn to the descriptions of his second. The cover puff from Nicholas Binge – “The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House” – can’t be topped, and the promotional materials’ references to Piranesi and Possession are equally accurate. In the summer of 1993, Alex Lane is 19, broke and wondering what to do with himself. He seems to be the only student left at The Ridge. Except for that pale young man he’s seen screaming at a window opposite his room…
The Student Welfare Office offers him a job on a team clearing out two Victorian properties the university has acquired or is hoping to acquire. One is Marshlands, a former mental hospital, while Solace House was the private residence of the Flaynes, the last of whom recently died at age 101. Alex finds “a lifeboat of easy camaraderie” with his seven co-workers: Clive, a loud, confident stoner; Malcolm, who’s beautiful and gay; Helen, who’s super-religious; Ruth, a Goth; Leo, a mystical researcher; Adam, a weird (traumatized rich kid; and Ella, who’s clever and alluring. But none of them is prepared for what they find at Solace House. Edwin Flayne was a hoarder and the rooms are so full that they can’t move. One is completely covered in mirrors; another has creepy effigies around a table; the hall is plastered with strange paintings; and a series of ledgers with the ravings of a madman. Alex and Ella save from the burn pile one that contains an epic poem of utopian visions and musings on the disappearance of Flayne’s mother.
Flayne’s interest in the esoteric is only matched by Leo’s; add on some magic mushrooms and it’s a heady combination of the surreal as the team explores a cave on the property that the Flaynes considered a Thin Place. While high, Leo issues what seems to be a prophecy of the order in which they’ll all die. All along, we’re kept wondering how Alex’s parents both died on “The Last Day” at the hands of “The Annihilator.” He regurgitates fictional orphan plots to try to get Ella off his case, but she (and we) know he’s holding something back.
Although I wearied of the pastiche poetry that heads each chapter and at some point stopped reading it, it does have ultimate significance. (And bully to Maclean for adding “all written by me, rather than AI, before anyone asks” to his Acknowledgements.) Midway through, I was thinking to myself this should have been in the third person to legitimize the horror, as it can otherwise shade into silliness. Part IV jumps ahead in time and subverts what’s gone before, making Alex question not just the last four years of his life but the entire course of it. And now I knew why it had to be in the first person, so reliant is it on individual experience. Time, identity and memory all come into question.
At first I was disappointed, thinking that with this section Maclean had undermined the eerie power of what went before, but there’s another switchback still to come. The book is a little overlong at just under 500 pages, and sags a bit in the final 100, but it kept surprising me and it comes to a satisfying conclusion. I also got the sense of an author having fun with the 1990s nostalgia and student behaviour. I would certainly seek out his debut.
With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.
Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:
Memory House by Elaine Kraf: In this posthumous fifth novel, a novelist enters a commune for failed artists. Magic realism and metafiction coalesce in another of this unsung genius’ typically weird explorations of memory, creativity, and sexuality. It all appears to add up to a metaphorical journey, with a symbolic death and rebirth for those re-entering Society.
Mother Tongue by Sara Nović: Nović’s fourth book is a defiant memoir of parenthood achieved in spite of the troubled histories of deaf education, religious indoctrination, and international adoption. This is a fierce defense of deafness as a culture rather than a disability to be eradicated, and a beautiful exploration of the legacies of language and love.
Wellwater by Karen Solie: The Canadian poet Karen Solie’s intricate sixth collection (which won the T. S. Eliot Prize), gilds the natural and human worlds with religious imagery and an environmentalist conscience. The work toggles between the material and the abstract; quotidian experiences fuel meditations on concepts such as intuition, kindness, and fate.
John of John by Douglas Stuart: In Douglas Stuart’s superb third novel set on the Isle of Harris (Outer Hebrides), a young man seeks to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family’s expectations and devout upbringing. Intriguing in its particularities but timeless in wisdom, it offers hope that relinquishing shame creates freedom to be true to oneself. (I also got to interview Douglas Stuart! This is one of my top three books of 2026 so far, along with Brawler and Whistler – forthcoming in June.)
12 Days in Portugal and Spain & What I Read
It’s the second time we’ve braved the 20+-hour ferry crossing from the south coast of England to Santander in the north of Spain. Four years ago, we stayed on the edge of the Picos de Europa national park in Spain. This time we prioritized Portugal, spending a night in Spain on the way out and back. (In Léon, we acquired a taste for vermouth – and the free tapas that come with it. So cheap, too. What a fun eating-out culture!)
Portugal was a new country for us and we thoroughly enjoyed getting a taste of it. Spring seemed to be a month ahead of the UK and blossom was abundant. We stayed in three places in the north: Guimarães, the Douro Valley, and the Côa Valley. We took our new-to-us EV and found the distances manageable and charging cheaper and easier than in the UK. Going by car made packing easy and allowed us to bring back some port, Mr. F’s favourite tipple. However, there were hairy drives along confusing city streets and narrow mountain roads.
Our first stay was at Pousada de Santa Marinha, overlooking Portugal’s oldest city. One of a chain of state-restored castles and convents, it was originally a 12th-century monastery. We relished the bountiful breakfast buffet and manicured grounds but wished for more free time to relax in the grand common areas. Mostly we used this as a base for the first of two day trips to Porto, where we got good views from the cathedral tower, had delicious coffee and veggie snacks at 7g Roaster, and did a tour and tasting at Taylor’s port house. Portugal does a good line in doorstep cats. We also had our first sighting of swifts for the year on the 7th, flying above the azulejos (painted tiles) and cobbled streets of Guimarães before a traditional taverna meal of bacalhau (salt cod) fritters and bean stew with vinho verde.
Quinta dos Murças was, if anything, even more luxurious than the pousada. We were the only guests on our first of three nights at the winery, and after a private English-language cellar tour and wine and port tasting, a sit on the wisteria-covered balcony, and a three-course meal in the dining room, we were feeling like royalty. Along with grapes, they grow almonds, olives and several types of citrus. The lemon trees were dripping with the biggest fruits I’ve ever seen, and the smell of the orange blossom was truly intoxicating. The next morning we got up early and took a pack-up picnic on the train back into Porto, which was so hot and busy that we wondered why we’d bothered – though we did have an excellent tasting experience at a smaller producer, Poças, that included white and red wine, several ports, and a cocktail of white port, lime juice, and blood orange tonic served with a salt rim.
Portuguese is significantly more challenging than Spanish, so I was pleased with myself for managing an all-Portuguese transaction with the conductor on the rural branch line. The old-fashioned train carriages were spacious with comfortable seats, though the ride was not what one would call speedy. The journey back was fraught because we found ourselves pressed to catch the final train of the day (at just after 5:30 p.m.!), couldn’t figure out how to buy tickets at the station machines, were short of cash to pay the conductor on board, and arrived 2 hours late after a car collided with a telegraph pole and left the track blocked for an hour. The following day, what did we do? Got back on a train! (In the opposite direction, with tickets we’d carefully purchased ahead online.) This time we traveled toward the eastern end of the scenic Douro Valley so that we managed to see the whole river in pieces. The village of Tua had no particular sights, but we had a pleasant amble along its river boardwalk.
We’d earmarked the Côa Valley because it’s home to a sizable rewilding project. On the way, we stopped at Penascosa, an outdoor rock art site with etchings of ibex, aurochs and deer – and even ancient attempts at animation! The Rewilding Centre, where we stayed, is similar to a hostel and has an industrial kitchen because it also operates as a café for the villagers. In cities, we had tended to find English speakers, but the centre manager here had no English, so we happily switched to French (a true lingua franca!) to communicate with her.
The accommodation may have felt like a step down after our two previous splurges, but we’d booked a different treat to selves: an English-speaking guide from Wildlife Portugal who took us out in a Land Rover and found us loads of eagles, vultures and warblers. Bee-eaters and black storks were particular highlights. We were impressed by the array of landscapes: vines and olive groves, granite boulders, high cliffs, pools created by former mining, and green glens. At the hostel we met an English couple (one half a botanist) who are exploring Europe on Interrail passes during a three-month sabbatical, and they joined us for the second day of wildlife tourism; we discovered that Fernando is just as good with plants as with birds.
It was a varied, comfy, boozy trip. There was the touristy experience in Porto and parts of the Douro Valley, but also the ‘real’ countryside. Things ended on something of a sour note due to a rough return crossing of the Bay of Biscay. We’ll be back in Spain next summer to meet up with my sister and our nephew on his school trip to Barcelona, but that jaunt will be by train!
What I Read
En route: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King, which I’ll review for a spring-themed post as it’s the first in a quartet of loosely seasonal novellas. You likely know this prison story from the film version.
In Portugal: three Portugal-set novels I’d proudly sourced, including two in translation. My only previous knowledge of Portuguese literature had been a DNF of a José Saramago novel.
The Migrant Painter of Birds by Lídia Jorge (1998; 2001)
[Translated by Margaret Jull Costa]
The title figure is Walter, a former soldier who wanders the world and sends his bird paintings back to his daughter at the Dias family home in (fictional) Valmares. His actual visits are few and clandestine: Jorge keeps returning to a scene of him holding his shoes in his hand so he can soundlessly climb the stairs to see his daughter. You see, his daughter is officially his ‘niece’, born of an affair Maria Ema had with her husband Custódio’s brother. That act of adultery is the foundation of the novel but so tacit that it influences everything, including the language and narration. “Walter’s daughter” narrates – in third person or first – and frequently refers to herself as “Walter’s niece” instead.
The slippery narrative moves back and forth in time, pausing at a few landmark years. Very little happens, per se, apart from Walter’s daughter having a liaison with her mother’s therapist and then going to find her father in Argentina, but throughout we are invited to observe the family’s shifting dynamic and understand the narrator’s growing bitterness – “so bruised are we all by the passing of time.” I found the writing intermittently beautiful (“the sun was setting, persimmon red, behind the smooth fields”; “A tangle of living ghosts, the magical cortège of all tyrannies”) but sometimes pretentious or obfuscating to no purpose (“I invoke the decade of irony, the decade of silence pierced by the oblique laughter of cynicism”). (Interlibrary loan)
The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel (2016)
I knew of Martel’s obscure fourth novel through The Bookshop Band’s song “Why I Travel This Way,” about a bereaved man who starts walking backwards. What I didn’t realize is that the book is essentially three linked novellas and that song responds to just the first one, “Homeless.” Within a week, museum curator Tomás’s son, common-law wife, and father all died. Tomás sets off in his uncle’s early motorcar (this being 1904) to find a religious relic he learned about from a 17th-century priest’s journal written in São Tomé. But he has no idea how to drive, and accidents and persecution continue to beset him. A Job-like figure, he has set “his back to the world, his back to God” as a way of “not grieving” but “objecting.” Next, pathologist Eusebio and his wife have a high-minded discussion of the morality of murder mysteries in the 1939-set “Homeward.” Eusebio then undertakes an unexpected late-night job when an old woman arrives with her late husband’s corpse in a suitcase. Every cut reveals the substance of the man’s life rather than the reason for his death.
After religious parable and magic realism, “Home” initially seems more straightforward with its story of a widowed Canadian senator who buys Odo the chimpanzee from a research centre and relocates to rural Portugal. If you’ve read Life of Pi and/or Beatrice and Virgil, you know that Martel really goes in for his animal allegories. Odo might be considered symbolic of simplicity and joy in life. There are apt connections with the other novellas: not only an overarching theme of grief, but the specifics of one northern Portuguese village and its events that have become legend. And, yes, chimpanzees. A line from the first part serves as Martel’s mantra: “We are risen apes, not fallen angels.” Weird but satisfying. (Public library) 
The Piano Cemetery by José Luís Peixoto (2006; 2010)
[Translated by Daniel Hahn]
It may be premature, but I feel I can pinpoint some trademarks of Portuguese literature based on the few examples I’ve now read (plus Martel’s pastiche): narrative trickery, family dysfunction, metaphors of blindness, philosophical and religious dialogues, and a fine line between life and death. Unfortunately, in this case I found the appealing elements buried under an off-putting style. The Lázaro family are carpenters in 1910s Lisbon with a back room housing busted pianos that they use for their instrument-repair side business. To start with, the narrator is the dead patriarch of the family, who remembers how he met his wife at the piano cemetery and keeps watch over his children and grandchildren in the present day. There are also two long sections of stream-of-consciousness memories of his son Francisco as he runs the marathon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Francisco Lázaro was a historical figure who died in that athletic pursuit, but the family backstory of estrangement, domestic violence, and adultery that Peixoto builds around him is fictional. Punctuated by distance markers (“Kilometre one” and so on), Francisco’s fragments are decontextualised and often don’t join up or even form complete sentences. Add in the father’s fatphobic attitude toward one of his daughters and the laughably circuitous phrasing (“my thick hand in a single movement, like an impulse, but not even an impulse, like a desire you have for a moment and which becomes concrete in that same moment, another person’s desire within me, a desire which is not thought, but which rises up like a flame” – huh? can I blame the translator?) and you might see why this was a slog for me. (Secondhand purchase – Awesomebooks.com) 
Plus a partial reread of a delightful teen novel we both read the last time we were in Spain:
The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius
[Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves]
Talk about a risen ape! Sally Jones is an animal narrator extraordinaire: a ship’s engineer who meets every challenge that comes her way with aplomb, traveling from Portugal to India and back just to clear the Chief’s name after he’s falsely accused of murder. She happens to be a gorilla, but her only real limitation is that she can’t voice human language; she understands and writes it perfectly, and can beat most people at chess. This doorstopper never feels like one because it races along on a tide of adventure and intrigue. The technology suggests a 1920s date. All the settings are evocative, but historical Lisbon is especially enticing (and not dissimilar to Peixoto’s): Sally Jones lives with Ana Molina, a famous fado singer, and works in her neighbour Signor Fidardo’s instrument workshop repairing accordions. 
Plus the latter half of another novel or two I had on the go, and most of a couple of pre-release e-books for Shelf Awareness reviews: the odd Kitten by Stacey Yu, about a cat-identifying millennial Disaster woman, and The Half Life by Rachel Beanland. Set in 1970s Sardinia, this was a perfect summer read – intelligent as well as sultry – about a young Navy wife’s sexual coming of age and casual investigation into the ongoing effect of American nuclear submarines on the island’s natural environment.
Reading Ireland Month, Part I: Wendy Erskine and Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin
St. Patrick’s Day is a good occasion for my first set of contributions to Cathy’s Reading Ireland Month. Today I have two 2025 debut novels by women, one about the ripples caused by a sexual assault; the other about grief, queerness and unease with the Catholic Church. Both come with a Women’s Prize seal of approval. As I write, I happen to be listening to the new Foy Vance album I picked up today, which has inspired me to choose a few relevant (Northern) Irish songs to accompany each book.
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine
I loved Erskine’s short story collection Dance Move so was looking forward to this before it appeared on the Women’s Prize longlist. We’re introduced to three middle-aged Belfast women whose 18-year-old sons are charged with sexual assault: Frankie Levine, stepmother to Chris; Miriam Abdel Salam, mother of Rami; and Bronagh Farrell, mum of Lyness or “Line-up.” Frankie grew up in care but is now rich beyond her wildest dreams, Miriam was recently widowed by a car accident, and Bronagh heads a children’s services charity. Misty, the classmate who accused the boys of the assault at a party, lives with her stepfather, cab driver Boogie. As rumours spread, the mothers have confabs to prepare a united front. At one level they’re horrified by what their sons were capable of (Rami used a bottle), but on another they’ve decided that it’s just a hullabaloo – Bronagh’s word – that will die down soon.
Slut-shaming of Misty starts early: she has a “Bennyz” amateur porn account and did phone or video chats, very mild stuff, with men all over the world. It’s uncomfortable, though realistic, how money and class steer what happens next. The book’s title comes from the soft-porn site, but in a wider sense invites the question of who funds lifestyles and so who’s really in control. People who have compassion in general can’t find it in this situation. Erskine intersperses short sections from anonymous voices, such as policemen and partygoers, with the narrative. These are well done, and sometimes quite funny, but Erskine’s meta joke – “There can be just too many perspectives” – proves true in that the interludes add little we haven’t already grasped about the direction of the local gossip. Apart from Misty, I felt I’d hardly gotten to know any of the characters by the end. The novel also suffered from being the second novel about the aftermath of a gang rape I’ve read in three months (after Who Killed Bambi? by Monika Fagerholm, translated from Swedish). But I reckon its blend of grit and heart is likely to please readers of Colin Barrett and Lisa McInerney.
Northern Irish songs for Misty:
- “Collect Yourself” by Iain Archer
- “At Least My Heart Was Open” by Foy Vance (beware the F-bomb)
& an Irish one: “The Blower’s Daughter” by Damien Rice
Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin
This was one of my Most Anticipated titles in 2025. It was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize Discoveries Award (for manuscripts in progress) in 2022 and won the PFD Queer Fiction Prize. Jacinta, who prefers to be known as Jay, is in her late twenties, living in London, working in marketing and half-serious about her relationship with her girlfriend, Lindsay. She tries not to think about Ireland, religion, or the past: her mother’s mental health struggles, her extended family’s casual homophobia, and the fact that her older brother, Ferdia, who was a trainee Catholic priest in Rome, died in a freak accident when she was 16. But it all comes back for her when her parents tell her that there is a campaign to have Ferdia canonized. While her mother scurries around making speeches and verifying miracles, Jay seeks the opposite for her brother: to be remembered as a normal, flawed and perhaps closeted human.
It took me ages to read this, despite the undemanding first-person, present-tense narration, because the early London material is so monotonous. Unlike the Erskine (probably because that is her third book), this felt very much like a debut, where a lot of earnest apprentice work has had to go into getting characters from A to B, literally and emotionally. Any time the author wants to advance the plot, she has Jay meet someone in a bar for a conversation. Without fail, there will be drinks involved. This felt to me like a stereotype of the Irish. It’s only really in the last quarter, as Jay has honest conversations with both parents, deals with her grief over Ferdia and accepts how much Lindsay means to her, that the book soars. For me, that was too little too late, even though the themes were irresistible.
A Northern Irish song for Jay:
- “Freewheel” by Duke Special
- and (for Jay and Lindsay) “Crack the Shutters” by Snow Patrol
& an Irish one: “The Trailing Skirts of God” by Bell X1
I loved the premise of both of these novels, but the execution left me slightly disappointed. Still, I wouldn’t discourage you from picking them up if they’ve caught your eye; I know that some blogger friends have liked one or the other much better than I did.
I’ll raise a cheeky glass of Bailey’s tonight to the greatness of Irish literature. Speaking of which, I’ll have another, bigger batch of reviews coming up before the end of the month!
Three on a Theme for Mother’s Day: Baker, Diski and Sampson
It’s Mothering Sunday in the UK today, so, like last year, I’m featuring three very different books about mothers and motherhood: a memoir, a novel and a poetry anthology. There are complex emotions at play in the first two due to grief, abuse and disability. The poems are cheerier (thankfully) and reflect on the experience of motherhood but also of being mothered. On that last point, I’ve added my response to a relevant short story I happened to read today.
Reading My Mother Back: A memoir in childhood animal stories by Timothy C. Baker (2022)
Baker is a lecturer in Scottish literature at the University of Aberdeen. His first non-academic publication is a curiously beguiling novella-length reappraisal of favourite children’s books. “To misquote Heraclitus, you cannot read the same book twice.” While he’s sheepish about including so many 19th- and early-20th-century white male authors, he can’t do otherwise as these are the texts that first taught him about death, loneliness and friendship: Charlotte’s Web, The Wind in the Willows, The Magician’s Nephew and Watership Down. (Also The Secret Garden.) Baker grew up in Maryland and Vermont, lonesome and closeted, with parents who briefly joined a cult. In his memory, his mother (who had been abused) always suffered with chronic illness and pain. In each chapter, he weaves together a discussion of a plot with stories from his early life and critical opinion on the value of rereading. It helped that I was familiar with six of the nine books Baker features (and others by Gallico, though not The Man Who Was Magic); I’d not even heard of Merle the High Flying Squirrel or The Book of the Dun Cow.
I spotted this in the Wigtown Festival Shop* on our 2023 visit to Scotland’s Book Town and could hardly believe it existed because it seemed so perfectly suited to me: I loved animal books, especially Watership Down, as a child; I’ll read any bereavement memoir going; I grew up 30 miles from Baltimore, where Baker spent his early life; he and I both had strict religious upbringings; and his mother experienced kidney failure (after eating a foxglove??), a link to my family’s history of kidney disease. There are plentiful differences, too, of course, but Baker emphasises connection. “If reading these books has taught me anything,” he concludes, “it is that all of my stories are individual, and all of them are universal. What we share is the unshareability of our grief … [but also] the joy of knowing that we have loved.” And for such a seemingly niche book (from Goldsmiths Press), I have actually found myself mentioning it to two blogger friends in recent days, so that’s proof he was right.
[*As to how the book finally came into my possession: I added it to my wishlist and an acquaintance (a former mayor of Newbury, in fact) bought it for me for my 40th birthday. However, he forgot to bring the gift to our joint party and it took another 2+ years to extract it from him – through explicit reminders when we invited him to join us on a quiz team.]
Like Mother by Jenny Diski (1988)
I’ve enjoyed the late Jenny Diski’s travel memoirs (Skating to Antarctica and Stranger on a Train) and essays (On Trying to Keep Still). This novella was my first taste of her fiction and, while it’s dark as hell, I admired the psychological acuity and playfulness with narration. Occasional chapters introduce a dialogue between Nony and an imaginary interlocutor whose role is to listen to the story of her mother, Frances, a former dancer. That family history is the substance of the rest of the book, which is in an omniscient third person. The artificiality of the setup is blatant, though; Nony can neither think nor speak, having been born without a brain (hydranencephaly). Nony’s full name, Nonentity, is thus Frances’s cruel joke.
By necessity, the story stretches back to Frances’s parents, Ivy and Gerald, whose postwar optimism soon ceded to the reality of addiction, adultery and the attrition of love. A semiferal Frances escaped her unhappy home for the streets of London and engaged in sex play with Stuart on a bombsite. This went on for years. For Stuart, it blossomed into genuine love, but the numb Frances could never return his feelings and only used him. There are some really painful scenes here, such as Stuart stealing ether from the chemistry supply cupboard so she can huff herself into temporary oblivion, and a drunk Ivy molesting adolescent Frances. “Like mother, like daughter” is a bitter confirmation of inherited trauma. Nony might well be a symbolic manifestation of Frances’s desire to cultivate nothingness. To the extent that she is a literal baby – I’m really not sure – Frances does seem to love her and care for her physical needs, even as she’s grateful that the relationship will be short-lived.
Diski draws attention to the falsity of her narrative technique at the very end. It’s a disturbing yet intriguing novel that I think must be trying to make a wider point about postwar disillusionment. (Enough to make one question one’s growing antipathy towards Boomers?) I was reminded faintly of Nutshell by Ian McEwan, which is from the perspective of a fetus, and I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf, a troubling story of a mentally ill mother and her disabled son. I have another novella plus a short story collection by Diski on the shelf, and I daresay after those I’ll have to seek out everything else she wrote. (University library)
Night Feeds and Morning Songs, ed. Ana Sampson (2021)
“I crossed the border into the Republic of Motherhood
and found it a queendom, a wild queendom.”
~Liz Berry
It would have been easy to make such an anthology samey and sentimental, so kudos to Sampson for curating a solid mix of contemporary and period work. The poems are grouped into loose categories covering pregnancy, the sleepless nights of early motherhood, the power of womanly solidarity, the legacy (or absence) of one’s own mother, and the milestones of life as a child grows up and moves away. (Jackie Kay marvels that her baby boy is now a 6-foot-2 world traveller.) However, there are almost as many emotional approaches and poetic forms as there are contributors. Exhilaration meets exhaustion; guilt and grief threaten to overwhelm the good times. Sometimes the infant is addressed directly. The tone might be sombre, outraged or satirical. A few excerpts:
from “Labour Ward Prayer” by Vicky Thomas
Give us this day our daily miracle.
Exchange our offering of sweat and tears
and, most of all, of blood,
for new life, crumpled as a new leaf bud.
from “The Visitor” by Idra Novey
…more dragon
than spaniel, more flammable
than fluid …
All wet mattress to my analysis,
he’s stayed the loudest and longest
of any houseguest
from “What My Kids Will Write about Me in Their Future Tell-All Book” by January Gill O’Neil
They will say that no was my favourite word,
More than stop, or eat, or love.
That some morning, I’d rather stay in bed,
laptop on lap, instead of making breakfast
…
They will say they have seen me naked.
Front side, back side – none of which
were my good side.
I enjoyed re-encountering work by some personal favourite poets such as Caroline Bird, though most entries were new to me. Sampson’s section introductions aren’t particularly illuminating and often reference poems that aren’t actually in the part in question. Some of the 19th-century and earlier material is quaintly twee, but I did love discovering Christina Rossetti’s “To My First Love, My Mother.” This is the poem that made me cry, though:
(Little Free Library)
And a bonus short story:
“Egg Mother” by Kim Samek (from I Am the Ghost Here): I’m two stories into Samek’s gently surreal collection. This second story combines the themes of parenting and grief prevalent above. Her openings are knockout: “At thirty-six I turn into a scrambled egg. It happens a few months after I give birth.” In therapy, the narrator discovers that she’s been repressing her grief over her mother, who died of cancer when the narrator was 13. The therapist suggests that she and her husband hold a joint ‘funeral’ for her mother and her younger self in a graveyard. But even after the ritual, she doesn’t return to herself. It’s a sobering but realistic message: some things one just doesn’t get over.
“Every story that I read becomes the story of my mother.”
~Timothy C. Baker
Last night, we saw Brooklyn expat singer-songwriter Annie Dressner (and Sean Duggan of Steady Habits) in concert at a church hall. I was mostly underwhelmed by her quirky confessional songs and little-girl voice, but a couple of songs stood out for me. One, “I Just Realized,” includes the line “And I hope that I can be just like my mother.”
Today was a more emotional day than I was expecting. I got a sweet posy from church, but having a whole service focussed on mothers and mothering was hard for me. I had to mostly switch off to get through it.
Just in my current stack, there are so many books about mothers or mothering…
the loss of a mother (Eva Luna by Isabel Allende; The Memory of Borrowed Books by Meg Anderson; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon; Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl; I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith) – so common an element in novels that I have to think it’s shorthand for a character who has to pluckily rely on their own psychological resources- mothers’ protective instinct (The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine)
- emotional distance from an unstable mother (Carrie by Stephen King; First Rain in Paradise by Gwyneth Lewis; Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates; The First Day of Spring by Nancy Tucker, which also includes the struggle to be a good mother in turn)
- mixed feelings about the inability to have a child (Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth)
- a mother’s grief at the loss of a child (Ordinary Saints by Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin)
I know it’s a subject I’ll be reading and thinking about for the rest of my life.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 