Summer Reading 2025: Anthony, Espach, Han & Teir
In the UK, summer doesn’t officially end until the 22nd, so even though I’ve been doing plenty of baking with apples and plums and we’ve had squashes delivered in our vegetable box, I’ve taken advantage of that extra time to finish a couple more summery books. This year I’m featuring four novels ranging in location from Rhode Island to Finland. I’ve got all the trappings of summer: a swimming pool, a wedding, a beach retreat, and a summer house.
The Most by Jessica Anthony (2024)
I can’t resist a circadian narrative. This novella takes place in Delaware on one day in early November 1957, but flashbacks and close third-person narration reveal everything we need to know about Virgil and Kathleen Beckett and their marriage. I’m including it in my summer reading because it’s set on an unseasonably warm Sunday and Kathleen decides to spend the entire day in their apartment complex’s pool. The mother of two drifts back in memory to her college tennis-playing days and her first great love, Billy Blasko, a Czech tennis coach who created a signature move called “The Most,” which means “bridge” in his language – the idea is to trap your opponent and then drop a bomb on them. Virgil, who after taking their two boys to church goes golfing with his insurance sales colleagues as is expected of him, loves jazz music and has just been sent the secret gift of a saxophone. Both spouses are harbouring secrets and, as Laika orbits the Earth overhead, they wonder if they can break free from the capsules they’ve built around their hearts and salvage their relationship. The storytelling is tight even as the book loops around the same events from the two perspectives. This was really well done, and a big step up from Enter the Aardvark. (Public library) 
The Wedding People by Alison Espach (2024)
You’ve all heard about this one, right? It’s been a Read with Jenna selection and the holds are stacking up in my library system. No wonder it’s been hailed as a perfect summer read: it’s full of sparkling banter; heartwarming, very funny and quite sexy. And that despite a grim opening situation: Phoebe flies from St. Louis to Newport and checks into a luxury hotel, intending to kill herself. She’s an adjunct professor whose husband left her for their colleague after their IVF attempts failed, and she feels she’ll never finish writing her book, become a mother or find true love again. Little does she know that a Bridezilla type named Lila who’s spent $1 million of her inheritance on a week-long wedding extravaganza (culminating in a ceremony at The Breakers mansion) meant to book out the entire hotel. Phoebe somehow snagged the room with the best view. Lila isn’t about to let anyone ruin her wedding.
What follows is Cinderella-like yet takes into account the realities of bereavement, infidelity, infertility and blended families. Because of the one-week format, Phoebe’s depression is defused more quickly than is plausible, but I was relieved that Espach doesn’t plump for a full-blown happy ending. I did also find the novel unnecessarily crass in places, especially the gag about the car. Still, this has all the wit of Katherine Heiny and Curtis Sittenfeld. I’d recommend it if you enjoyed Dream State or Consider Yourself Kissed, and it’s especially reminiscent of Sorrow and Bliss for the mixture of humour and frank consideration of mental health. It’s as easy to relate to Phoebe’s feelings (“How much of her life had she spent in this moment, waiting for someone else to decide something conclusive about her?”; “It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for someone to save us”) as it is to laugh at the one-liners. “Garys are not wonderful. That’s just not what they are meant to be” particularly tickled me because I know a few Garys in real life. (Public library)
The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han (2008)
Every summer Belly and her mother and brother have joined her mother’s best friend Susannah and her sons Conrad and Jeremiah at their beach house. She’s had a crush on Conrad for what’s felt like forever, but she’s only ever been his surrogate little sister, fun for palling around with but never taken seriously. This summer is different, though: Belly is turning 16, it’s Conrad’s last summer before college, and his family seems to be falling apart. The novel kept being requested off me and I puzzled over how it could have eight reservations on it until I realized there’s an Amazon Prime Video adaptation now in its third and final season. I reckon the story will work better on screen because Belly’s narration was the main issue for me. She’s ever so shallow, so caught up in boys that she doesn’t realize Susannah is sick again. Her fixation on the brooding Conrad doesn’t make sense when she could have affable Jeremiah or sweet, geeky Cam, who met her through Latin club and liked her before she grew big boobs. He’s who she’s supposed to be with in this kind of story, right? I think this would appeal to younger, boy-crazy teens, but it just made me feel old and grumpy. (Public library) 
The Summer House by Philip Teir (2017; 2018)
[Translated from Swedish by Tiina Nunnally]
The characters are Finland-Swedish, like the author. Erik and Julia escape Helsinki with their children, Alice and Anton, to spend time at her father’s summer house. Erik has just lost his job in IT for a large department store, but hasn’t told Julia yet. Julia is working on a novel, but distracted by the fact that her childhood friend Marika, the not so secret inspiration for a character in her previous novel, is at another vacation home nearby with Chris, her Scottish partner. These two and their hangers-on have a sort of commune based around free love and extreme environmental realism: the climate crisis will not be solved (“accepting the grief instead of talking about hope all the time”) and the only thing to do is participate in de-civilisation. But like many a cult leader, Chris courts young female attention and isn’t the best role model. Both couples are strained to breaking point.
Meanwhile, Chris and Marika’s son, Leo, has been sneaking off with Alice; and Erik’s brother Anders shows up and starts seeing the widowed therapist neighbour. This was a reasonably likeable book about how we respond to crises personal and global, and how we react to our friends’ successes and problems – Erik is jealous of his college buddy’s superior performance in a tech company. But I thought it was a little aimless, especially in its subplots, and it suffered in comparison with Leave the World Behind, which has quite a similar setup but a more intriguing cosmic/dystopian direction. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
Any final summer books for you this year?
May Releases, Part II (Fiction): Le Blevennec, Lynch, Puchner, Stanley, Ullmann, and Wald
A cornucopia of May novels, ranging from novella to doorstopper and from Montana to Tunisia; less of a spread in time: only the 1980s to now. Just a paragraph on each to keep things simple. I’ll catch up soon with May nonfiction and poetry releases I read.
Friends and Lovers by Nolwenn Le Blevennec (2023; 2025)
[Translated from French by Madeleine Rogers]
Armelle, Rim, and Anna are best friends – the first two since childhood. They formed a trio a decade or so ago when they worked on the same magazine. Now in their mid-thirties, partnered and with children, they’re all gripped by a sexual “great awakening” and long to escape Paris and their domestic commitments – “we went through it, this mutiny, like three sisters,” poised to blow up the “perfectly executed choreography of work, relationships, children”. The friends travel to Tunisia together in December 2014, then several years later take a completely different holiday: a disaster-prone stay in a lighthouse-keeper’s cottage on an island off the coast of Brittany. They used to tolerate each other’s foibles and infidelities, but now resentment has sprouted up, especially as Armelle (the narrator) is writing a screenplay about female friendship that’s clearly inspired by Rim and Anna. Armelle is relatably neurotic (a hilarious French blurb for the author’s previous novel is not wrong: “Woody Allen meets Annie Ernaux”) and this is wise about intimacy and duplicity, yet I never felt invested in any of the three women or sufficiently knowledgeable about their lives.
With thanks to Peirene Press for the free copy for review.
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch
“The fluke of being born at a slightly different time, or in a slightly different place, all that might gift you or cost you.” At events for Small, Lynch’s terrific memoir about how she and her wife had children, women would speak up about how different their experience had been. Lesbians born just 10 or 20 years earlier didn’t have the same options. Often, they were in heterosexual marriages because that’s all they knew to do; certainly the only way they thought they could become mothers. In her research into divorce cases in the UK in the 1980s, Lynch learned that 90% of lesbian mothers lost custody of their children. Her aim with this earnest, delicate debut novel, which bounces between 2022 and 1982, is to imagine such a situation through close portraits of Heron, an ageing man with terminal cancer; his daughter, Maggie, who in her early forties bears responsibility for him and her own children; and Dawn, who loved Maggie desperately but felt when she met Hazel that she was “alive at last, at twenty-three.” How heartbreaking that Maggie knew only that her mother abandoned her when she was little; not until she comes across legal documents and newspaper clippings does she understand the circumstances. Lynch made the wise decision to invite sympathy for Heron from the start, so he doesn’t become the easy villain of the piece. Her compassion, and thus ours, is equal for all three characters. This confident, tender story of changing mores and steadfast love is the new Carol for our times. (Such a lovely but low-key novel was liable to make few ripples, so I’m delighted for Lynch that the U.S. release got a Read with Jenna endorsement.)
With thanks to Chatto & Windus (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Dream State by Eric Puchner
If it starts and ends with a wedding, it must be a comedy. If much of the in between is marked by heartbreak, betrayal, failure, and loss, it must be a tragedy. If it stretches towards 2050 and imagines a Western USA smothered in smoke from near-constant forest fires, it must be an environmental dystopian. Somehow, this novel is all three. The first 163 pages are pure delight: a glistening romantic comedy about the chaos surrounding Charlie and Cece’s wedding at his family’s Montana lake house in the summer of 2004. First half the wedding party falls ill with norovirus, then Charlie’s best friend, Garrett (who’s also the officiant), falls in love with the bride. Do I sound shallow if I admit this was the section I enjoyed the most? The rest of this Oprah’s Book Club doorstopper examines the fallout of this uneasy love triangle. Charlie is an anaesthesiologist, Cece a bookstore owner, and Garrett a wolverine researcher in Glacier National Park, which is steadily losing its wolverines and its glaciers. The next generation comes of age in a diminished world, turning to acting or addiction. There are still plenty of lighter moments: funny set-pieces, warm family interactions, private jokes and quirky descriptions. But this feels like an appropriately grown-up vision of idealism ceding to a reality we all must face. I struggled with a lack of engagement with the children, but loved Puchner’s writing so much on the sentence level that I will certainly seek out more of his work. Imagine this as a cross between Jonathan Franzen and Maggie Shipstead.
With thanks to Sceptre (Hodder) for the proof copy for review.
Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley
Coralie is nearing 30 when her ad agency job transfers her from Australia to London in 2013. Within a few pages, she meets Adam when she rescues his four-year-old, Zora, from a lake. That Adam and Coralie will be together is never really in question. But over the next decade of personal and political events, we wonder whether they have staying power – and whether Coralie, a would-be writer, will lose herself in soul-destroying work and motherhood. Adam’s job as a political journalist and biographer means close coverage of each UK election and referendum. As I’ve thought about some recent Jonathan Coe novels: These events were so depressing to live through, who would want to relive them through fiction? I also found this overlong and drowning in exclamation points. Still, it’s so likable, what with Coralie’s love of literature (the title is from The Group) and adjustment to expat life without her mother; and secondary characters such as Coralie’s brother Daniel and his husband, Adam’s prickly mother and her wife, and the mums Coralie meets through NCT classes. Best of all, though, is her relationship with Zora. This falls solidly between literary fiction and popular/women’s fiction. Given that I was expecting a lighter romance-led read, it surprised me with its depth. It may well be for you if you’re a fan of Meg Mason and David Nicholls.
With thanks to Hutchinson Heinemann for the proof copy for review.
Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann (2021; 2025)
[Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken]
Ullmann is the daughter of actress Liv Ullmann and film director Ingmar Bergman. That pedigree perhaps accounts for why she got the opportunity to travel to Paris in the winter of 1983 to model for a renowned photographer. She was 16 at the time and spent the whole trip disoriented: cold, hungry, lost. Unable to retrace the way to her hotel and wearing a blue coat and red hat, she went to the only address she knew – that of the photographer, K, who was in his mid-forties. Their sexual relationship is short-lived and unsurprising, at least in these days of #MeToo revelations. Its specifics would barely fill a page, yet the novel loops around and through the affair for more than 250. Ullmann mostly pulls this off thanks to the language of retrospection. She splits herself both psychically and chronologically. There’s a “you” she keeps addressing, a childhood imaginary friend who morphs into a critical voice of conscience and then the self dissociated from trauma. And there’s the 55-year-old writer looking back with empathy yet still suffering the effects. The repetition made this something of a sombre slog, though. It slots into a feminist autofiction tradition but is not among my favourite examples.
With thanks to Hamish Hamilton (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
The Bayrose Files by Diane Wald
In the 1980s, Boston journalist Violet Maris infiltrates the Provincetown Home for Artists and Writers, intending to write a juicy insider’s exposé of what goes on at this artists’ colony. But to get there she has to commit a deception. Her gay friend Spencer Bayrose has a whole sheaf of unpublished short stories drawing on his Louisiana upbringing, and he offers to let her submit them as her own work to get a place at PHAW. Here Violet finds eccentrics aplenty, and even romance, but when news comes that Spence has AIDS, she has to decide how far she’ll go for a story and what she owes her friend. At barely over 100 pages, this feels more like a long short story, one with a promising setting and a sound plot arc, but not enough time to get to know or particularly care about the characters. I was reminded of books I’ve read by Julia Glass and Sara Maitland. It’s offbeat and good-natured but not top tier.
Published by Regal House Publishing. With thanks to publicist Jackie Karneth of Books Forward for the advanced e-copy for review.
A Family Matter was the best of the bunch for me, followed closely by Dream State.
Which of these do you fancy reading?
Review Catch-Up: The Swimmers, Black Butterflies, Bi, and On the Scent
I have a preposterous backlog of review copies to finish and write about (I’m going to go ahead and blame buying a house, moving and DIY for my lack of focus and diminished time, as I have done most of this year), but I’ve decided to get on top of it by pulling a quartet off of my set-aside shelf each week for short responses. I always like to feature a variety, so here I have two fiction and two nonfiction selections: novels about assisted dying and the Bosnian War that are a lot funnier and more life-affirming than you might expect, and books about bisexuality and the sense of smell – and the effect of its loss.
The Swimmers by Chloe Lane (2020; 2022)
Erin Moore has returned to her family’s rural home for Queen’s Birthday (now a dated reference, alas!), a long weekend in New Zealand’s winter. Not a time for carefree bank holiday feasting, this; Erin’s mother has advanced motor neurone disease and announces that she intends to die on Tuesday. Aunty Wynn has a plan for obtaining the necessary suicide drug; it’s up to Erin to choreograph the rest. “I was the designated party planner for this morbid final frolic, and the promise of new failures loomed. … The whole thing was looking more and more like the plot of a French farce, except it wasn’t funny.”
Lane renders a potentially maudlin situation merely bittersweet through black comedy. Erin isn’t the most endearing narrator because, Disaster Woman-like, she keeps undertaking weird acts of self-sabotage – at 26, she’s blown her first gallery curation opportunity by sleeping with her boss. Still, the picture of a different sort of dysfunctional family and the contrast between an illustrious past (Erin comes from a line of semi-pro swimmers: Aunty Wynn qualified to compete in the Commonwealth Games) and an iffy future make this fairly memorable, if not so much so as the other 2022 The Swimmers – Julie Otsuka’s.
Readalikes: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, The Inland Sea by Madeleine Watts, The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
With thanks to Gallic Books for the proof copy for review.
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris (2022)
Drawing on her own family history, Morris has crafted an absorbing story set in Sarajevo in 1992, the first year of the Bosnian War. Zora, a middle-aged painter, has sent her husband, Franjo, and elderly mother off to England to stay with her daughter, Dubravka, confident that she’ll see out the fighting in the safety of their flat and welcome them home in no time. But things rapidly get much worse than she is prepared for. Phone lines are cut off, then the water, then the electricity. “We’re all refugees now, Zora writes to Franjo. We spend our days waiting for water, for bread, for humanitarian handouts: beggars in our own city.”
When even the haven of her studio is taken away from her, she’s reduced to the bare bones of existence, with just a few beloved neighbours to keep her spirits up. Her painting, more an obsession than a hobby, keeps her human as she awaits space on a Red Cross convoy. The title has heartrending significance: ‘black butterflies’ are fragments of paper carried on the breeze after the burning of the National Library of Sarajevo, 30 years ago last month. It was especially poignant to be reading this during the war in Ukraine and think about the sorts of daily dangers and deprivation that people face in conflict zones. The pages turned quickly and I was reminded of Girl at War, one of my absolute favourites, as well as The Pianist.
With thanks to Duckworth for the proof copy for review.
Bi: The hidden culture, history, and science of bisexuality by Julia Shaw (2022)
I’m tying this in with today’s celebration of Bi Visibility Day. Shaw is a criminal psychologist; her third book is a departure for her thematically, but means a lot to her personally. Bisexuality is the largest minority sexuality group, yet bisexuals are less likely to be out because of misconceptions and stereotypes – there are fewer outward signals and less group identification – which can sometimes result in poor mental health. Shaw realized how tricky bi identity was when a German TV show wanted to base a character on her but didn’t know how to make her sexuality obvious to viewers (lingering glances/flirtations involving both men and women? a backstory about a previous relationship with a woman?), and when trying to figure out what to wear to gay bars.
The book aims to situate bisexuality historically and scientifically. The term “bisexual” has been around since the 1890s, with the Kinsey Scale and the Klein Grid early attempts to add nuance to a binary view. Shaw delights in the fact that the mother of the Pride movement in the 1970s, Brenda Howard, was bisexual. She also learns that “being behaviourally bisexual is commonplace in the animal kingdom,” with many species engaging in “sociosexual” behaviour (i.e., for fun rather than out of reproductive instinct). It’s thought that 83% of bisexuals are closeted, mostly due to restrictive laws or norms in certain parts of the world – those seeking asylum may be forced to “prove” bisexuality, which, as we’ve already seen, is a tough ask. And bisexuals can face “double discrimination” from the queer community.
It felt odd to me that a final chapter on bisexual relationships ended up being mostly about threesomes, such that my main question (as she puts it: “what are the problems with the assumed link between bisexuality and non-monogamy?”) only merited four pages. A valuable book, certainly, but one to read for information rather than entertainment or thoughtful prose.
With thanks to Canongate for the free copy for review.
On the Scent: Unlocking the mysteries of smell – and how its loss can change your world by Paola Totaro and Robert Wainwright (2022)
Totaro (co-author Wainwright is her husband) contracted COVID-19 in March 2020 and temporarily lost the ability to smell, prompting her to embark on this investigation into a 
less-understood sense. One in 10,000 people have congenital anosmia, but many more than that experience it at some point in life (e.g., due to head trauma, or as an early sign of Parkinson’s disease), and awareness has shot up since it’s been acknowledged as a symptom of Covid. For some, it’s parosmia instead – smell distortions – which can almost be worse, with people reporting a constant odour of smoke or garbage, or that some of their favourite aromas, like coffee, were now smelling like faeces instead. Such was the case for Totaro.
She visits fascinating places like the Smell and Taste clinic in Dresden and the University of Reading Flavour Centre. “Sniffin’ sticks” are used to put people’s sense of smell to the test, but it’s notoriously difficult, even for those who haven’t had their senses compromised by illness, to name a smell out of context; people generally don’t score over 50%. That’s one of the major questions the book asks: why it is quite so difficult to identify smells, or describe them in words. Totaro also considers perfume-making, the associations of particular smells (bleach, pine or lemon, depending on your country) with cleanliness, and the potential for multisensory experiences, such as releasing odours during film showings. Lots of interesting topics and stories here, but not as compelling on the whole as The Smell of Fresh Rain.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the proof copy for review.
Best of the 4: Black Butterflies
Would you be interested in reading one or more of these?
Women’s Prize Shadowing & Men Reading Books by Women
Back in April I announced that my book club was one of six selected to shadow this year’s Women’s Prize shortlist by reading and discussing one of the finalists. Our assigned title was one I’d already read, but I skimmed back through it before our meet-up and enjoyed getting reacquainted with Martha Friel. Here’s our group’s review:
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
Readability: 5/5
Characters: 5/5
Storyline: 4/5
Can’t Put It Down: 4.5/5
Total = 18.5/20
Our joint highest rating, and one of our best discussions – taking in mental illness and its diagnosis and treatment, marriage, childlessness, alcoholism, sisterhood, creativity, neglect, unreliable narrators and loneliness. For several of us, these issues hit close to home due to personal or family experience. We particularly noted the way that Mason sets up parallels between pairs of characters, accurately reflecting how family dynamics can be replicated in later generations.
Even the minor characters are fully rounded, and although Martha is not always pleasant to spend time with, her voice is impressively rendered. The picture of mental illness from the inside feels authentic, including the fact that Martha uses it as an excuse for her bad behaviour, becoming self-absorbed and not seeing how she is affecting others around her. Our main point of disagreement was about Mason’s decision not to name the mental illness Martha is suffering from. It seemed clear to several of us that it was meant to be bipolar disorder, so we wondered if it was a copout not to identify it as such.
We also thought about the meaning of the term “literary fiction”, and whether this has the qualities of a prize winner and will stand the test of time.
We had to fill out a feedback questionnaire about our experience of shadowing, and most of us sent in individual blurbs in response to the book. Some ended up in the final Reading Agency article. Here was mine:
“This deceptively light novel was a perfect book club selection, eliciting deep discussion about mental illness, family relationships and parenthood. Martha’s (unreliable) narration is a delight, wry and deadpan but also with moments of wrenching emotion. Mason masterfully controls the tone to create something that is witty and poignant all at once.”
Probably the main reason we were chosen for this opportunity is that we have a man – my husband, that is! – who attends regularly. This year the prize has been particularly keen to get more men reading books by women (see more below). So, he was responsible for giving The Male Response to the novel. No pressure, right? Luckily, he enjoyed it just as much as the rest of us. From the cover and blurb, it didn’t necessarily seem like the sort of book that he would pick up to read for himself, but he was fully engaged with the themes of mental illness, family relationships, and the question of whether or not to have children, and was so compelled that he read over half of it in a day.
I’m not sure who I expect to be awarded the Women’s Prize tomorrow. We of West Fields Readers would be delighted if it went to Meg Mason for Sorrow and Bliss, but I’d also be happy with a win for Louise Erdrich or Ruth Ozeki – though I wasn’t taken with their latest works compared with earlier ones I’ve read, they are excellent authors who deserve recognition. I don’t think The Bread the Devil Knead has a chance; I’d be disappointed in a win by Elif Shafak in that I would feel obligated to try her novel – the kind that gives magic realism a bad name – again; and, while I’m a Maggie Shipstead fan in general and admire the ambition of Great Circle, it would be galling for a book I DNFed twice to take the title!
Who are you rooting for/predicting?
I’d like to mock you with that thought,
jeer at the man
who won’t read novels
written by women –
at least not if they’re still alive
~from The Poet by Louisa Reid
Maybe you’ve seen on social media that the Women’s Prize has been canvassing opinion on the books by women that all men should read. This was prompted by some shocking statistics suggesting that even bestselling female authors can only attract a 20% male readership, whereas the best-known male authors are almost equally popular with men and women. They solicited 60 nominations from big names and ran a public poll. I voted for these 10:
Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
Possession (A.S. Byatt)
Homegoing (Yaa Gyasi)
The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
The Sea, The Sea (Iris Murdoch)
The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
We Need to Talk about Kevin (Lionel Shriver)
Olive Kitteridge (Elizabeth Strout)
The Goldfinch (Donna Tartt)
Orlando (Virginia Woolf)
*If I could have added to that list, though, my top recommendations for all men to read would be Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (and probably a different Octavia E. Butler novel from the one nominated).
Three of my selections were among the 10 essential reads announced on the WP website. Their list was headed by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, though of her works I’d be more likely to direct men to Oryx and Crake.
I’ve seen discussions on Twitter about why men don’t read novels (at all, prioritizing nonfiction), or specifically not ones by women. Do you have any theories?
What one book by a woman do you think all men should read?
Six Degrees of Separation: From Sorrow and Bliss to Weather
This month we begin with Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason. (See also Kate’s opening post.) This is my personal favourite from the Women’s Prize shortlist and couldn’t be a better pick for the Six Degrees starter this month because I’ll be skimming back through the novel this weekend in advance of my book club’s discussion of it on Monday. (We’re one of this year’s six book groups shadowing the Women’s Prize through a Reading Agency initiative, so we then have to give semi-official feedback on our experience of the book by Wednesday.)
#1 Sorrow and Bliss is a terrific tragicomedy about sisterhood and mental health – as is All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews, with which it shares a loaded title word as well.
#2 Toews grew up in a Canadian Mennonite community, which leads me to my second choice, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen, a set of droll autobiographical essays that I read on a USA trip in 2017.
#3 During the same trip, I read Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles, a witty novel about Bennie Ford’s rather miserable life, presented in the form of his longwinded complaint letter to the airline that has treated him to an unexpected overnight layover in Chicago.
#4 Another laugh-out-loud book in the form of unlikely letters: Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher, in which Jason Fitger, an irascible middle-aged English professor in the Midwest, writes ambivalent letters of recommendation for students and colleagues.
#5 One more “Dear” book of letters – I just can’t get enough of the epistolary form: Dear Fahrenheit 451 by Annie Spence. As the subtitle states, it’s a librarian’s love letters and breakup notes to books she’s adored and loathed. Casual and amusing, with good book recs.
#6 I’ll finish with Weather by Jenny Offill, one of my favourites from 2020, which is also voiced by a librarian. Through Lizzie, Offill captures modern anxiety about Trump-era politics, the climate crisis and making meaningful use of time.
I have read all the books in this month’s chain (the links above are to my Goodreads reviews), and in a time of relentless bad news have chosen to prioritize humour and keep my descriptions short and light. These are all books that made me laugh, sometimes despite their weighty content, and half of them are built around letters. I’ve also looped from one Women’s Prize-shortlisted title to another.
Where will your chain take you? Join us for #6Degrees of Separation! (Hosted on the first Saturday of each month by Kate W. of Books Are My Favourite and Best.) Next month’s starting point will be Wintering by Katherine May – though it’s summer here, it’s winter where Kate is in Australia!
Have you read any of my selections? Tempted by any you didn’t know before?
Women’s Prize Shortlist & Reading Group Shadowing
A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post (in which I correctly predicted three of the shortlist) with an exciting announcement. My book club is one of six selected to shadow this year’s Women’s Prize shortlist by reading and discussing one of the finalists. We’d unsuccessfully applied to this Reading Agency initiative last year but this time were chosen from nearly 50 pitches!
We are lucky to have been allocated one of our preferred titles, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason – my favourite of the three I’ve read from the shortlist, and one with a good chance of winning overall. (Oh the relief of not having to attempt Great Circle a third time, or The Island of Missing Trees a second!)
Our copies will arrive next week and we then have until June 8th to read and discuss the book and send in our feedback to be featured on the website (e.g. last year’s roundup).
I’ll be sure to post more about how our shadowing goes.
What do you plan to read from the shortlist?
Women’s Prize Longlist Reviews (Erdrich, Mendelson, Ozeki) & Predictions
Tomorrow the Women’s Prize shortlist will be revealed. I’ve become much more invested in this prize over the past few years and will be following the 2022 race especially closely – look out for a related announcement soon. In recent years the nominees have tended to cluster thematically, which can feel redundant. This longlist has a notably high ghost quotient. Two novels I review below feature unquiet spirits, an appearance by the author, and the magical powers of books. The third is a straightforward contemporary dysfunctional family story.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
My second from Erdrich (I gave Love Medicine, her first novel, 5 stars in 2020). I will be revisiting this in June because it is our first pick for my tenure in the Literary Wives online book club. For that post I’ll focus on the relationship between Tookie and Pollux, which I won’t mention in this more general response. I was worried that a take on very recent events – this is set in Minneapolis between 2019 and 2020 and covers the first six months of the pandemic plus local protests following George Floyd’s murder – would seem either rushed or dated. I’m still unsure how I feel about encountering Covid-19 in fiction (vs. I’ve read 20 or more nonfiction records now), but I think this novel functions as a sturdy time capsule.
Tookie, the narrator, has a tough exterior but a tender heart. When she spent 10 years in prison for a misunderstanding-cum-body snatching, books helped her survive, starting with the dictionary. Once she got out, she translated her love of words into work as a bookseller at Birchbark Books, Louise Erdrich’s Minnesota independent bookshop (Louise herself is an occasional character). Bibliophiles are sure to enjoy the mentions of the books she presses into customers’ hands; there’s also a fun appendix of recommendations on particular topics.
However, the central mystery about Flora, a dead customer who haunts the store until Tookie figures out why she died and how to exorcise her, struck me as silly. I only appreciated this storyline to the extent that it explores authenticity (Flora may have fabricated her Native heritage) and the inescapability of history. I preferred real life: Tookie getting locked down with her stepdaughter and baby grandson and filling book orders from a closed shop.
Erdrich weaves in Indigenous customs naturally and the banter between the characters, including young shop employees, makes this hip and lighthearted, even as it deals with serious subjects. I smiled at the bookish lingo, like Tookie’s division of her reading into a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack (“books I would avoid reading until some wellspring of mental energy was uncapped” – my occasional and set-aside titles could comprise the latter) and the “cowbirds,” self-published titles secreted on the shelves that aren’t found until inventory day. There’s also an excellent passage on novellas that I’ll be bringing out in November.
Like a vintage armchair, this is a little overstuffed, but so comfortable you’ll want to stay a while. (See also Laura’s review.) (Public library) 
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
~SPOILERS IN THIS ONE~
Artists, dysfunctional families, and limited settings (here, one crumbling London house and its environs; and about two days across one weekend) are irresistible elements for me, and I don’t mind a work being peopled with mostly unlikable characters. That’s just as well, because the narrative orbits Ray Hanrahan, a monstrous narcissist who insists that his family put his painting career above all else. His wife, Lucia, is a sculptor who has always sacrificed her own art to ensure Ray’s success. But now Lucia, having survived breast cancer, has the chance to focus on herself. She’s tolerated his extramarital dalliances all along; why not see where her crush on MP Priya Menon leads? What with fresh love and the offer of her own exhibition in Venice, maybe she truly can start over in her fifties.
Ray and Lucia’s three grown children, Leah, Patrick and Jess, are all home for Ray’s new exhibition. They’re mere sketches: Leah is Ray’s staunchest supporter and is infatuated with the no-show caterer; Patrick’s mental health is shaky, interfering with his job prospects; Jess, a teacher in Edinburgh, is pregnant but not sure she’s committed to her boyfriend long term. I wanted more depth from all the characters, but especially the offspring. I also expected a climactic late scene on Hampstead Heath to come to more.
Still, the build-up to the exhibit (followed by a laughably pitiful reveal) and Lucia’s inner life form an adequately strong foundation for Mendelson’s sardonic prose. The dialogue, full of interruptions, is true to life. This is her fifth novel and called to mind Jami Attenberg’s and Claire Fuller’s work. (Liz found shades of Iris Murdoch. Susan loved it, too.) I wouldn’t say I’m compelled to seek out more by Mendelson, but this was a solid read. (Public library)
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
A Tale for the Time Being is one of my favourite novels of the century (and one of my most popular Goodreads reviews ever), My Year of Meats was a terrific backlist read a couple of summers ago, and I’m eager to catch up on All Over Creation. So I’d built up this fourth Ozeki novel in my head, thinking a library setting and magic realist elements presaged something deliciously Murakami-esque.
What I actually found, having limped through it off and on for seven months, was something of a disappointment. A frank depiction of the mental health struggles of the Oh family? Great. A paean to how books and libraries can save us by showing us a way out of our own heads? A-OK. The problem is with the twee way that The Book narrates Benny’s story and engages him in a conversation about fate versus choice.
When Kenji Oh, a jazz musician, is run over by a chicken truck, Annabelle finds herself a single mother to Benny, a troubled teen who starts to hear everyday objects speaking to him. His voices and Annabelle’s hoarding habit jeopardize the viability of their household: Benny spends time on a psychiatric hospital ward for minors and Annabelle is threatened with eviction. For Benny, the library and the acquaintances he makes there – a fellow pedi-psych patient named Alice who calls herself The Aleph, an Eastern European philosopher who goes by The Bottleman (= Slavoj Žižek?), even the Ozeki figure tapping away on her laptop – may be his salvation; for Annabelle, it could be the book Tidy Magic (modelled on Marie Kondo’s work), written by a Buddhist nun. But until then, their stories get very dark indeed.
Concern for the principal pair and their relationship kept me reading even though this is too long and I wearied of Ozeki’s habit of literalizing metaphors (books speaking to people; being crushed by one’s belongings; crows playing a protective role). I’m still sympathetic to Ozeki’s aims, even if she doesn’t quite pull it all off here. If I pit the rather similar The Sentence and The Book of Form and Emptiness against each other, Erdrich comes out ahead. 
With thanks to Canongate for the proof copy for review.
I’ve gotten to six books from the longlist so far and have a few more on order at the library. The others I’ve read, with ratings and links to my reviews, are:
Build Your House around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason 
I’m also partway through The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton, which is enjoyable enough but, alas, suffers in comparison to Daisy Jones and the Six, whose format (a composite oral history of a fictional 1960s/70s musical act) it repeats. The addition of the race issue doesn’t feel sufficient to call it original.
I’ve also DNFed a few from the longlist, two of them multiple times, so I have my fingers crossed that they don’t advance!
- The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
- The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
- Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
My attitude to the rest of the longlist is…
- The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini – No plans to read.
- Salt Lick by Lulu Allison – I might read this from the library. I’m leery of dystopias, but I’m there for a chorus of cows.
- Careless by Kirsty Capes – No plans to read.
- Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey – I would happily read it if it’s shortlisted, but at over 500 pages I fear it’ll be too dense.
- Flamingo by Rachel Elliott – Maybe. Sounds like pretty standard Sarah Winman-type stuff, but it could go down well with a book club.
- This One Sky Day by Leone Ross – No plans to read.
- Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé – I was actually pretty keen to read this one, so I have it on reserve at the library. Egyptian mythology makes a change from the overdone Greeks, and the Washington, D.C. setting is a big draw. Laura’s review has tempered my expectations, but I might still give it a go.
My ideal shortlist (a wish list based on my reading and what I still want to read):
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Build Your House around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton
Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé
vs.
My predicted shortlist:
Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
This One Sky Day by Leone Ross
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
An overall winner? Gosh, it’s too early to tell. But maybe The Sentence, Sorrow and Bliss or The Island of Missing Trees.
See also Laura’s shortlist predictions.
What have you read from the longlist so far?
Which of these books are calling to you?
Quick Thoughts on the Women’s Prize 2022 Longlist & My Reading Plans
Tuesday is my volunteering morning at the library, but at 9:45 I nipped onto one of the public access PCs so I could find out which books were on the Women’s Prize longlist. I just couldn’t wait until I got home! It’s a surprising list. Those who thought Rooney and Yanagihara would be snubbed were absolutely right. Debuts and historical fiction aren’t as plentiful as forecast, but there are two doorstoppers on there, plus another 450+-pager. And it is great to see a list that is half by BIPOC women.
Of my wishes and predictions, 1 and 2 were correct, so I got 3 right overall, with my wildcard choice being the only nominee I’ve read in full so far. I’m currently reading another 2 and have 3 more set to read – the moment I got the news I marched over to borrow a couple more.
Fair play to the judges – I hadn’t even HEARD of these SIX titles:
- The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini
- Salt Lick by Lulu Allison
- Careless by Kirsty Capes
- Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey
- Flamingo by Rachel Elliott
- Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé
I haven’t had a chance to look into these half-dozen, but will do so later on. I’m only likely to pick them up if a) others rave about them and/or b) they’re shortlisted.
Read:
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason: They say turning 40 can do weird things to you. Martha Friel gets a tattoo – so far, so stereotypical – but also blows up her marriage to Patrick, who’s been devoted to her since they were teens and met as family friends. In the year that follows, she looks back on a life that’s been defined by mental illness. As a young woman she was told she should never have children, but recently she met a new psychiatrist who gave her a proper diagnosis and told her motherhood was not out of the question. But is it too late for Martha and Patrick? Martha’s narration is a delight, wry and deadpan but also with moments of wrenching emotion. Her relationship with her sister, Ingrid, who gives birth to her first child on their aunt’s bathroom floor and eventually has four under the age of nine, is a highlight, and it’s touching to see how their mother and their aunt, both initially standoffish, end up being pillars of support. (My full review) 
Currently reading:
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith – I’m just over half done, and loving it. A weird and magical and slightly horror-tinged story set in Vietnam past and present, it builds on her debut ghost stories. Sort of plays the role Our Wives Under the Sea would have had on the longlist (though I dearly wish it could have been nominated as well).
Set aside last year because it’s twee and annoying, but will now continue (ARGH + le sigh):
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
Own and will read soon (this was a treat to self with birthday money last year):
The Final Revival of Opal and Nev by Dawnie Walton
Borrowed from library:
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
DNFed last year (twice); will not attempt again:
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
On request from the library:
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
Not interested in reading:
This One Sky Day by Leone Ross – I saw Ross speak about this and read an excerpt as part of a Faber showcase. I have a limited tolerance for magic realism and don’t think this appeals.
Above: my reading plans. Plenty to be getting on with before the shortlist announcement on 27th April!
What have you read, or might you read, from the longlist?
Women’s Prize 2022: Longlist Wishes vs. Predictions
Next Tuesday the 8th, the 2022 Women’s Prize longlist will be announced.
First I have a list of 16 novels I want to be longlisted, because I’ve read and loved them (or at least thought they were interesting), or am currently reading and enjoying them, or plan to read them soon, or am desperate to get hold of them.
Wishlist
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (my review)
Ghosted by Jenn Ashworth (my review)
These Days by Lucy Caldwell
Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson – currently reading
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xóchitl González – currently reading
Burntcoat by Sarah Hall (my review)
Early Morning Riser by Katherine Heiny (my review)
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson (my review)
Devotion by Hannah Kent – currently reading
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith – currently reading
When the Stars Go Dark by Paula McLain (my review)
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka – review coming to Shiny New Books on Thursday
Brood by Jackie Polzin (my review)
The Performance by Claire Thomas (my review)
Then I have a list of 16 novels I think will be longlisted mostly because of the buzz around them, or they’re the kind of thing the Prize always recognizes (like danged GREEK MYTHS), or they’re authors who have been nominated before – previous shortlistees get a free pass when it comes to publisher submissions, you see – or they’re books I might read but haven’t gotten to yet.
Predictions
Love Marriage by Monica Ali
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Second Place by Rachel Cusk (my review)
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Free Love by Tessa Hadley
The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris (my review)
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
The Fell by Sarah Moss (my review)
My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (my review)
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman
Still Life by Sarah Winman
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara – currently reading
*A wildcard entry that could fit on either list: Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason (my review).*
Okay, no more indecision and laziness. Time to combine these two into a master list that reflects my taste but also what the judges of this prize generally seem to be looking for. It’s been a year of BIG books – seven of these are over 400 pages; three of them over 600 pages even – and a lot of historical fiction, but also some super-contemporary stuff. Seven BIPOC authors as well, which would be an improvement over last year’s five and closer to the eight from two years prior. A caveat: I haven’t given thought to publisher quotas here.
MY WOMEN’S PRIZE FORECAST
Love Marriage by Monica Ali
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xóchitl González
Matrix by Lauren Groff
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Devotion by Hannah Kent
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
The Fell by Sarah Moss
My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Pandora by Susan Stokes-Chapman
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara
What do you think?
See also Laura’s, Naty’s, and Rachel’s predictions (my final list overlaps with theirs on 10, 5 and 8 titles, respectively) and Susan’s wishes.
Just to further overwhelm you, here are the other 62 eligible 2021–22 novels that were on my radar but didn’t make the cut:
In Every Mirror She’s Black by Lola Akinmade Åkerström
Violeta by Isabel Allende
The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews
Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi
The Stars Are Not Yet Bells by Hannah Lillith Assadi
The Manningtree Witches by A.K. Blakemore
Mary Jane by Jessica Anya Blau
Defenestrate by Renee Branum
Songs in Ursa Major by Emma Brodie
Assembly by Natasha Brown
We Were Young by Niamh Campbell
The Raptures by Jan Carson
A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp
Scary Monsters by Michelle de Kretser
Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline
Infinite Country by Patricia Engel
Love & Saffron by Kim Fay
Mrs March by Virginia Feito
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
Tides by Sara Freeman
I Couldn’t Love You More by Esther Freud
Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia
Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Listening Still by Anne Griffin
The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett
Mrs England by Stacey Halls
Three Rooms by Jo Hamya
The Giant Dark by Sarvat Hasin
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
Violets by Alex Hyde
Fault Lines by Emily Itami
Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim
Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda
Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka
Paul by Daisy Lafarge
Circus of Wonders by Elizabeth Macneal
The Truth About Her by Jacqueline Maley
Wahala by Nikki May
Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
Chouette by Claire Oshetsky
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
The Anthill by Julianne Pachico
The Vixen by Francine Prose
The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade
Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Cut Out by Michèle Roberts
This One Sky Day by Leone Ross
Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber
Cold Sun by Anita Sivakumaran
Hear No Evil by Sarah Smith
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Animal by Lisa Taddeo
Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan
Lily by Rose Tremain
French Braid by Anne Tyler
We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida
I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
Book Serendipity, November to December 2021
I call it Book Serendipity when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something pretty bizarre in common. Because I have so many books on the go at once (usually 20–30), I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. I’ve realized that, of course, synchronicity is really the more apt word, but this branding has stuck. This used to be a quarterly feature, but to keep the lists from getting too unwieldy I’ve shifted to bimonthly.
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- The received wisdom that, in a medical school interview, when asked why you want to become a doctor, you should NOT say “because I want to help people” turns up in The Cure for Good Intentions by Sophie Harrison and Head First by Alastair Santhouse.
- The fact that long-time couples don’t use each other’s first names anymore is mentioned in The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos and The Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici.
- A rare and thus precious letter from a father in Generations by Lucille Clifton and The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos.
- The fact that woodpeckers will eat songbird chicks was mentioned in Orchard by Benedict Macdonald and Nicholas Gates and Light Rains Sometimes Fall by Lev Parikian.
- Reading two books with covers featuring a partial head-on face at the same time: Taste by Stanley Tucci and Behind the Mask by Kate Walter.
- The fact that some of a baby’s cells remain within the mother even after she’s given birth is mentioned in The End We Start From by Megan Hunter and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black.
- The author’s body is described as a conundrum in Conundrum by Jan Morris and Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black.
- The potoo (a bird like a nightjar) is the subject of an essay in World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil and a poem in The Store-House of Wonder and Astonishment by Sherry Rind (coming out in January 2022).
- Reading a second memoir this year by an English woman whose partner works for Lego in Denmark: first was A Still Life by Josie George, then The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell.
- A mention of the disorienting experience of going into a cinema while it’s still light and then coming out to find it dark in Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason and then in the 2022 novel Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield.
- A detailed account of making a Christmas cake appears in Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, read late in the year, and the Santa Rosa trilogy by Wendy McGrath, read early in the year.
- After Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living in November, I read a proof copy of a February 2022 essay collection called Cost of Living, by Emily Maloney, in December.
- Surviving Home by Katerina Canyon has a poem entitled “No More Poems about My Father” while The Kids by Hannah Lowe has a poem (“The River”) that opens with the line “Not another poem about my father”.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 