The Parent Trap by Erich Kästner for #1949Club
Simon and Karen’s classics reading weeks are always a good excuse to pick up an older book or two. The mistake I sometimes make is to have just one option lined up; if I don’t get on with it, I can’t participate. I read the first 20 pages of Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, which promised to be a psychologically astute picture of awakening to homosexuality in a repressive culture (“in this house it was tacitly required that I act like a boy. The reluctant masquerade had begun”) but also had the makings of a queer tragedy, which I couldn’t bear just now. Then I found a nearly new copy of The Parent Trap in the Little Free Library a few days ago and spotted that the twins share my birthday! Of course, I could have reviewed it for German Literature Month and Novellas in November, as I did with Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives last year, but instead I treated myself to the delightfully cosy, if far-fetched, story.
You likely know the story from a film adaptation starring Hayley Mills or Lindsay Lohan. I don’t think I’ve seen either, though they are culturally familiar to me. In Kästner’s original, separated twins are rejoined by chance at a summer camp in Bavaria. Luise Palfy has come here from Vienna, where she lives with her single father, a music director. One day an additional group of 20 little girls arrives from southern Germany, including Lottie Körner, who resides in Munich with her single mother, a journalist. It’s immediately evident that the two nine-year-olds are identical twins – same birthdate and -place – but with different hairstyles and their own personalities. They decide to switch places, partly as a trick to teach their parents a lesson, but partly to regain a long-lost and much-missed mother / father.
The girls have to be quick studies to cover up that ‘Lottie’ has ‘forgotten’ how to cook and that ‘Luise’ has suffered a horrendous decline in her handwriting and schoolwork. But there’s no fooling some, such as the doctor’s pug, Peperl, who is suspicious of a blonde stranger pretending to be an old friend. The girls are canny and stubborn, envisioning a new future and then doing whatever it takes to achieve it, but the emotional strain starts to show. I found myself upset with the parents’ Solomonic decision to split up their twins at their divorce. It’s just cruel; who would do such a thing?! In a sense, the whole premise of the novel is as hard to believe as the fantasy ending (“Catching up with lost happiness as if it were a missed lesson at school”), yet I gave myself over to it. Kästner’s tone is just right, shrewd and playful, and Walter Trier’s illustrations are charming. I recommend reading something middle grade every once in a while as an antidote to the awfulness of adulting and the occasionally depressing nature of modern literature. [Translated from German by Anthea Bell] (Little Free Library) 
(The whole Pushkin Children’s classics range is brilliant – see also From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsberg and The Murderer’s Ape by Jakob Wegelius.)
Here are other famous 1949 titles that I’ve read (just 3 of the top 20 on the Goodreads list of the most popular books published that year):
- The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
- A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
- 1984 by George Orwell
I’ve previously participated in the 1920 Club, 1956 Club, 1936 Club, 1976 Club, 1954 Club, 1929 Club, 1940 Club, 1937 Club, 1970 Club, 1952 Club, 1925 Club, and 1961 Club.
Get Ready for Novellas in November! (#NovNov26)
Novellas: “all killer, no filler”
~Joe Hill
Hard to believe it’s nearly that time again. For the SEVENTH year in a row, Cathy of 746 Books and I are co-hosting Novellas in November as a month-long blogging and social media challenge celebrating the art of the short book (we include nonfiction, too). A novella technically contains 20,000 to 40,000 words, but to keep things simple we define it as any work under 200 pages.
This year’s buddy read is a 2024 novella translated from the Japanese last year:
Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan [translated by Jesse Kirkwood] is the author’s fourth novel and won the Akutagawa Prize. An architect named Sara Machina is assigned to design a city skyscraper meant to house criminals in comfort. While trying to navigate a middle way between compassion and recrimination – complicated by her own past victimhood – she converses with an AI chatbot. This engaging exploration of language, creativity and conformity comes with high praise from writers ranging from Helen Phillips to Bryan Washington. (134 pages)
Please join us in reading this any time between now and the end of November!
You might like to start off the month with a My Year in Novellas retrospective looking at any novellas you have read since last year’s NovNov and finish with a New to My TBR list based on what short books others have tempted you with.
It’s always a busy month in the blogging world with Nonfiction November, German Literature Month, Margaret Atwood Reading Month and SciFi Month. Why not search your shelves and/or local library for novellas that could count towards multiple challenges?
From 19 October a link-up post will be pinned at the top of my site so you can add your planning posts and book lists. Keep in touch via Bluesky (@bookishbeck.bsky.social / @cathybrown746.bsky.social) and Instagram (@bookishbeck / @cathy_746books) and feel free to use the terrific feature images Cathy has made plus our new hashtag, #NovNov26.
20 Books of Summer, 17–20: Jaouad, Kim, Merwin, Piñeiro (#WITMonth)
It’s time to draw a line under 20 Books of Summer so I can focus on hosting Short Story September. I’m technically not quite finished with these first two I’m technically not quite finished with these first two [70 pages to go in the Jaouad and 46 in the Kim], but I’ve read enough to form an opinion and will pop back later to add in final thoughts and ratings. My final four are a memoir of cancer in young adulthood; a page-turning courtroom drama about experimental autism treatment gone wrong; gorgeous nature poems; and a novella in translation that comments on disability, motherhood and mental health issues. Skip to the end for my one DNF of the challenge and a look back at some stats plus my most successful reads.
Between Two Kingdoms: What Almost Dying Taught Me about Living by Suleika Jaouad (2021)
{Updated on 7 September} Jaouad wrote a New York Times column about going through leukaemia treatment in her early twenties and what came next. After months of itching and fatigue, she fell properly ill while working her first postgraduate job in Paris and her blood test results were so bad that she flew home to New York. She would be in and out of hospital for the next five years, enduring multiple rounds of chemo and a bone marrow transplant from her brother. It’s a terrific granular account of the physical and emotional rigours of illness, as well as the strain it put on her relationships – being her primary caregiver was too much for her boyfriend, Will. But she also found a community of young cancer patients, many (like Max Ritvo) now dead. After 60% of the book’s length, as the title – its metaphor taken from Susan Sontag – suggests, the new challenge for Jaouad was resuming life. “I’ve spent the past fifteen hundred days working tirelessly toward a single goal—survival. And now that I’ve survived, I’m realizing I don’t know how to live.” She decides to undertake a cross-country road trip punctuated by visits to people who wrote to her through her column: fellow cancer survivors, a mother who lost a son to suicide, a man on death row in Texas. At first I thought this content felt tacked on and should have been a sequel, but ultimately it illustrates why she wouldn’t edit out her illness if she had it all to do again. I hadn’t heard of Jaouad before I stumbled on this book; from Instagram, I learned she’s now (at age 38) weathered cancer three times. (Little Free Library)
Miracle Creek by Angie Kim (2019)
{Updated on 7 September} After enjoying Happiness Falls so much, I wanted to go back to Kim’s debut, for which she won an Edgar Award. (There’s an autistic boy and discussion of therapies in that second book as well.) The bulk of the novel is set during the four days of an August 2009 trial. It’s been a year since a horrific accident at Pak Yoo’s “Miracle Submarine,” a rural Virginia hyperbaric oxygen chamber where regulars came for twice-daily treatment of autism, cerebral palsy, and infertility. Meanwhile, protesters gathered outside to draw attention to what they believed to be a dangerous and unproven technique, the equivalent of child abuse. Someone with Camel cigarettes and matches from a local 7-11 set a small fire under an oxygen tank; the resulting explosion killed two and seriously injured two more. The mother of one of the autistic boys was arrested for suspected arson and attempted murder, but as the trial goes on suspicion seems to shift to members of the Korean American family who ran the HBOT operation. There’s a lot to sink the teeth into here. Each character has secrets, and little revelations are emerging all the time, such that the prosecutor and defence lawyer are always having to adjust their approach. Like I’ve experienced with Kim before, this was intelligent, thought-provoking, and absorbing. It’s just the sort of crime-adjacent fiction I like. An author Q&A at the end reveals a couple of autobiographical inspirations: working in her immigrant parents’ convenience store near Baltimore as a teenager, and taking one of her sons, who had neurological deafness and chronic illnesses, for HBOT. (Gift from my wish list)
The Vixen by W.S. Merwin (1996)
it seems that the world is made of a single
summer as it always has been (from “Entry”)
I took this off the shelf because Merwin was one of the POV characters in The Daffodil Days, Helen Bain’s excellent novel about Sylvia Plath’s final years. I had no idea what to expect, and it took me a while to get used to his entirely unpunctuated verse. Only by reading aloud or in my head was I able to split the text blocks into meaning-rich phrases. The fox is a revenant flitting through many of these poems as they pinpoint natural rhythms and human traces across the seasons and centuries. A lot reference summer, in particular, so this was a perfect choice for the challenge. There are a few historical portraits but most of the pieces feel timeless, evoking a countryside locale where the speaker returns to find derelict dwellings given over to birds and trees. Mostly it feels like this could be England, but sometimes a dry aridity suggests the Mediterranean. There is a strong sense of temporality, especially of afterness – the close of a day, the tail end of a season, the still-resonant emptiness after life has left or activity has finished. But there is also the hint of an eternal present:
Seen from afterward the time appears to have been
all of a piece which of course it was but how seldom
it seemed that way when it was still happening (from “Completion”)
In a long book (~65 pieces), there were only a few poems that washed over me without making any impression. The run-on pace, alliteration, and close attention to the natural world made this utterly mesmerizing. I’ll be sure to read more by Merwin. (Secondhand – Bridport Old Books) 
Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro (2007; 2021)
[Translated from Spanish by Frances Riddle]
Piñeiro is an Argentinian author known for infusing her detective novels with a political conscience. Elena Knows is a mystery of sorts, in which the title character devotes herself to investigating her daughter’s death (Rita was found hanging in the belfry of a church). But several elements make this atypical for crime fiction: Elena has Parkinson’s disease – “that f—ing whore illness,” she calls it; refuses to accept the police’s conclusion that Rita died by suicide – she would never have gone there in the rain, she insists; and drags her uncooperative body across Buenos Aires to confront an acquaintance she thinks might be able to shed some light. It’s a circadian narrative, divided into sections by Elena’s pill schedule, but expands its timeline through flashbacks to consider the complications of the mother–daughter relationship as Elena became more physically dependent. The eventual encounter with Isabel presents a contrast in the form of a woman who didn’t want to become a mother but had to because of a prohibition on abortion, which was only legalized in Argentina in 2020. While the approach and themes were appealing, I found this repetitive and the long blocks of dialogue in italics were challenging to read. This was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, though I thought it had a better chance in that year’s Barbellion Prize race (returning this year!). (Gift from my wish list) 
And a DNF:
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000)
Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.
Sigh. Between February and July I read about 200 pages, then skimmed another 100 or so, then finally gave up. (My third Oates DNF. I don’t think she and I are meant to be, though I seem to have better luck with her short stories and own another couple of her books to try.) I engaged most with the early pages about her childhood with a vain, neglectful mother who ends up in a mental hospital; and then with her teenage marriage to Bucky Glazer and involvement in the war effort.
She was a sweet kid but so emotional. Wanting love all the time. She was immature and unreliable and I guess so was I; we were too young. If she’d been a better cook and not so emotional, it might’ve worked out.
Except that people were dying and being injured and the world filling up with smoldering rubble, Norma Jeane liked the War. The War was as steady and reliable as hunger or sleep. Always, the War was there.
In the part that I skimmed, she is starting to become known in Hollywood, with a nude photo shoot (for which she only earned $50), bit parts in films, and her famous stage name.
In the introductory Author’s Note, Oates writes, “for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation.” So, for instance, instead of multiple foster families, we just get one. Always, there was unwanted male attention, including molestation. I was surprised to find that the pick-and-choose, fact–fiction hybrid approach became a problem for me. I wanted to know if she really married a man named Bucky and wrote poetry. Yet I didn’t want to have to be verifying every fact either.
Oates’s kitchen-sink style involves imagined scenes and dialogue plus retrospective commentary and knowing asides; long, looping sentences and short ones; direct and indirect speech; lots of exclamation points. Lots of everything. The repetition will be deliberate, for effect, but I kept longing for a streamlined version that cut, say, three of every five sentences.
Anyway, this was certainly a project worth undertaking for Oates; you can see why it was irresistible to unearth the reality behind a legend. Norma Jeane is intriguing for her simultaneous childlike innocence and cultivated sensuality. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
20 Books Statistics:
14 fiction
4 nonfiction
2 poetry
7 by BIPOC
3 towards WIT Month (for which I reviewed 8 in total, with library reads and Foreword reviews)
3 rereads
I’ve learned this year that it’s important, momentum-wise, to build in a number of shorter books (6 of novella length + 2 poetry collections) and best to avoid doorstoppers. I was wise to pick some addictive, undemanding novels that tread the line between popular and literary fiction (Kim, Mantel, O’Farrell, Reid, Sullivan); anything that feels like hard work (Oates!) is definitely not a summer read.
I only read a risible 4 of the specific books I set out as options in my planning post, plus 1 of my additional ideas. (It’s ironic that I struggled to finish this set of 20 when I could have labelled anything from my shelves part of the challenge – in total, I read 39 of my own books this summer.)
My favourites of the 20 were Strange Weather in Tokyo, Prodigal Summer & The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (both rereads), and The Vixen. But What Belongs to You, Miracle Creek, Mitz, The Employees, Commencement, and Flush were also great reads. To be able to single out half of the books equals a huge success!
I also completed a 4-book diagonal on the Bingo card!
- Summer in the title (PRODIGAL SUMMER)
- A classic you’ve been meaning to (RE-)read (FLUSH)
- Features a family holiday (MITZ)
- Published in summer (ELENA KNOWS – July 2021)
20 Books of Summer, 8–9: Greenwell and Reid for Pride Month
As part of my Pride Month coverage (more coming up in Love Your Library on Monday), I’m reviewing a sophisticated gay novella that’s celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, and a gossipy pastiche of a Hollywood tell-all that I read for Wednesday’s upcoming book club. SPOILERS APPEAR IN BOTH, so if details of what happens bother you, you may want to skim or skip over some of what follows. In fact, it might be a spoiler just to include the Reid under this heading…
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (2016)
Greenwell’s third novel, Small Rain, was my novel of 2024, so I wanted to go back to his debut and trace the development of his talent. This, too, is autofiction and shares a preoccupation with the profound uncertainty produced by illness and a newfound awareness of mortality. There are also, through flashbacks, glimpses of the author’s strict, religious Kentucky upbringing in both. But What Belongs to You mostly arose from the years Greenwell spent teaching English in Bulgaria. A version of the first section was published in 2011 as a standalone novella called Mitko. This is the name of the mercurial, possibly mentally ill and unhoused sex worker that the American teacher meets in the bathrooms of Sofia’s National Palace of Culture and keeps encountering—sometimes willingly, sometimes not—in the years to come. “Never before had I met anyone who combined such transparency … with such mystery,” the narrator marvels; he feels “held like his beloved, or his child; or held, I suppose it must be said, like his captive or his prey.” Their relationship is wildly imbalanced. The sex can be tender or violent. He gives Mitko money; Mitko gives him syphilis. The narrator meditates on his bodily fear, his sense of betrayal, the unknowability of others, and the deviousness of appropriating their stories for his art. I didn’t love reading about gay cruising, but the stream-of-consciousness section about his earlier life, prompted by news of his father’s imminent death, and the granular account of a train ride with his mother he spends observing a little boy and his grandmother were right up my street – masterful examples of how to translate experience directly into hypnotic prose. Greenwell is the James Baldwin of our time. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017)
I always thought this came after Daisy Jones & the Six, but instead that 2019 novel brought renewed attention to her earlier work. They are both structured around biased first-person confessions in an interview setting, as well as, here, faux documents (gossip magazine articles). Evelyn Hugo grew up the daughter of Cuban immigrants in 1940s Hell’s Kitchen and escaped to Hollywood at age 15. That was through her first marriage; the others to come were for a mixture of reasons: short-lived passion, career advantage, public scandal, or masking the truth of another relationship. Because, in fact, the real love of this blonde bombshell’s life was a woman: fellow actress Celia St. James, with whom she co-starred in a Little Women adaptation. They have an intermittent relationship over the decades, both hiding in marriages to men so they can be together in secret and so that Evelyn can have the child she longs for. (Evelyn insists throughout that she is bisexual, which bothers lesbian Celia.)
It’s a rollicking tour through a convincing pastiche of an Old Hollywood career, divided into sections based on the husband of the time. Evelyn comes across as cut-throat: willing to lie and manipulate people to get ahead. And yet you can’t help but admire her shrewdness; she’s also sympathetic for the poverty and domestic violence she’s endured, if not for how she’s leveraged her sensuality (her large breasts were famously almost shown in a French film). Ever the actress, she is still performative even when she claims to be disclosing the truth publicly for the first time. I wondered if she was too clichéd as a brassy Latina.
My main problem, though, was with the framing story: Evelyn demands that Monique Grant, a biracial rookie journalist, write her life story. Evelyn is 79 and strangely sure she’ll die soon, so wants to both unburden herself and set the record straight. Monique is going through a divorce and learns from Evelyn to treat this simply as the breakdown of a marriage rather than as a personal failure. She also absorbs lessons of how to be assertive and advance her own career. But early on Reid signposts a shock connection to be revealed between Evelyn and Monique. That ‘big reveal’ was a bit of a letdown. It could have just been an interview transcript (hello, Daisy Jones!) or finished ‘biography’.
In any case, writing as two characters of colour took guts from Reid, and bisexual rep is always welcome. This was an undemanding, soap opera-esque summer read. The only category on which it might fall short in our book club ratings is the writing, which is lite (but good for guzzling). Think of it as a fruity cocktail in book form. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project) 
Reading Ireland Month, Part II: Dowd, Enright, Madden & Nugent
I’m catching up with a final set of reviews for #ReadingIrelandMonth26. I read two novels set at least partially during the Troubles, one of them for teenagers; a quiet novel about adultery and bereavement; and a thriller about consent and family legacy. I also read the first half of one more novel, a sombre one about the aftermath of a mental health crisis. Between this post and my first one, I covered 6.5 novels by Irish women, which I’ll call a win.
Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd (2008)
Fergus McCann is 18 and taking A levels; if he can only get three Bs, he’ll have his ticket out of Northern Ireland to study medicine at Aberdeen. This is no ordinary summer, though. He loves running on the hills at the border and here he makes a landmark discovery and embarks on a risky mission. The plot opens with Fergus and his uncle stumbling on the corpse of a girl while cutting peats. It’s a case for archaeologists rather than the police: the body is from the Iron Age and there’s evidence that the girl was sacrificed. An acquaintance then pressures Fergus into running parcels up and down the hill, right under the noses of the British at the checkpoint. He makes friends with Owain, a Welsh soldier, but gets a horrible feeling he’s partially responsible for the bombings he soon hears about on the radio. His family is enmeshed in the IRA anyway: his brother is among the hunger strikers in the local prison. There’s every chance that Joey could die before the summer is out, as much a victim of injustice as “Mel” (as Fergus names the girl from the bog, whose story he dreams).
This was Dowd’s third novel, published posthumously after her death from cancer, and won the Carnegie Medal. I’d say it’s one of the few best young adult novels I’ve ever read. (It’s shelved under Teenage Fiction at my library.) It’s an excellent peripheral glance at history ancient and modern – Fergus’s letter to Margaret Thatcher is brilliant – and effectively recreates a teen’s divided attention: friends, schooling, family drama, the future, and romance (via the daughter of the archaeologist). I searched my library catalogue for further books on bog bodies after reading Anna North’s Bog Queen and it really paid off! (Public library)
The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright (2011)
I’ve only read a handful of Enright novels and wanted to experience more, so picked this one because it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. On the face of it, it’s a fairly straightforward adultery story, but the unshowy potency of Enright’s writing and her realistic insight into relationships set it apart. While married to Conor, Gina has an affair with Seán, who’s older and married to Aileen. Seán is part of their social circle but also someone she knows through work, and business trips are an easy excuse. “The office game was another game for us to play, after the suburban couples game, and before the game of hotel assignations and fabulous, illicit lust, and neither of us thought there might come a moment when all the games would stop. It was a lot of fun.” Gina narrates matter-of-factly, rejecting cause-and-effect language. She doesn’t defend herself, or fool herself that Seán is perfect. This new relationship involves as many challenges as her marriage, what with her mother’s death and Seán’s preteen daughter, Evie, who appears to be autistic and epileptic. The short chapters are all headed with song lyrics, mostly from love songs (“Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” “Stop! In the Name of Love”) whose ironic optimism underlines the novel’s gently melancholy tone. This reminded me most of Maggie O’Farrell’s early work, and more than justified delving into Enright’s back catalogue. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
{SPOILERS IN THE REST!!}
One by One in the Darkness by Deirdre Madden (1996)
Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses was our book club selection for March; I’d read it just two years ago, so skimmed back through and was impressed by its construction. Some were less convinced by the framing story and not emotionally engaged with Michael and Cushla’s affair, but we all appreciated it as a sideways look at Northern Irish history. One by One in the Darkness, which was also shortlisted for the Women’s (then Orange) Prize, is set close to its publication in the 1990s but returns to the Troubles through memories and flashbacks. Set over one week – Saturday to Friday – it’s the story of the three Quinn sisters. Cate is a journalist in London who flies home to Antrim to break the news that she’s pregnant out of wedlock. Helen is a lawyer and Sally a schoolteacher. They, their mother, and Uncle Brian have all gotten on with life as best they could, but their father’s murder is something they can’t forget and won’t ever get over. By saving that scene for the very last page of this novella, Madden keeps the horror of it fresh. Through one family’s story, she gives a sense of the scope of the country’s loss. But the book is not without a dark sense of humour, either. Madden was a new author for me. I found her work profound at the sentence level (see below for some favourite lines) rather than engaging at the plot level. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
“‘What’s wrong with Uncle Peter?’ ‘Two things,’ [Granny] said. ‘He thinks too much, and then he drinks too much.’”
“Once when [Cate] was home she’d remarked to Helen that she thought the forecasts were often inaccurate in Northern Ireland. ‘It’s probably deliberate,’ Helen had replied. ‘If they read out the average day’s news here and then said at the end of it, “Oh, and by the way, it’s going to bucket rain for the next twenty-four hours,” it might be more than people could take.’”
“Cate had remarked once that it was only when you lived away from Northern Ireland that you realised on returning how deeply divided a society it was, and how strange the effect of that could be.”
“There’d been well over three thousand people killed since the start of the Troubles, and every single one of them had parents or husbands and wives and children whose lives had been wrecked. It would be written about in the paper for two days, but as soon as the funeral was over it was as if that was the end, when it was really only the beginning.”
The Truth about Ruby Cooper by Liz Nugent (2026)
We read Nugent’s Strange Sally Diamond for book club a couple years ago and it was a great Northumberland holiday read for me, with a deliciously off-kilter narrator whose traumatized (and perhaps neurodivergent) perspective carried the novel. Here again Nugent prioritizes unreliable women’s voices and dark happenings, but Ruby is awfully hard to like. At age 16, she falsely accuses her older sister Erin’s boyfriend Milo of raping her. Milo maintains his innocence all along, but goes to jail for the crime; after all, DNA evidence can’t lie, right? Years of his life – and a heartbroken Erin’s – are stolen, his mother dies by suicide, Ruby becomes dependent on alcohol: all of this because of sisterly jealousy and an elaborate lie that their mother upholds rather than expose the family to further shame.
Narration alternates between Erin in Boston and Ruby, who’s moved back to Ireland with their mother. For Ruby’s confession to work, readers are kept in the dark about the truth of the incident, though only for 76 pages. Together the sisters give a tedious blow-by-blow of the intervening years – until Ruby’s daughter, Lucy, is raped by her boss on a drunken night out. Ruby refuses to believe her “because if it was true, that was karma coming to bit me on the ass.” This is where things finally get interesting, as Nugent explores ironies and familial patterns. But I’m sure I won’t be the only one to find the whole thing distasteful. Nugent clearly anticipates a backlash, stating in a prefatory letter, “I need to be very clear about the fact that girls and women like Ruby Cooper are extremely rare.” Was it worth undermining the #BelieveWomen campaign to explore a certain state of mind? Nah.
With thanks to Sandycove (Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
I’d also hoped to finish one more, but ran out of time. Here are my thoughts on the first half:
Show Me Where It Hurts by Claire Gleeson (2025)
Rachel knew Tom had recurring problems with depression, but had no idea he was on the verge of a breakdown when he deliberately drove their car off the road with the intention of killing his entire family. Their two young children die in the crash but they both survive – Tom held in a psychiatric hospital and Rachel resuming her life as a nurse. The chapters alternate between “After” and “Before,” giving relative date markers in weeks, months or years out from the incident. Gleeson’s understated prose makes it possible for readers to face a tragedy so awful we’d otherwise look away; it never tips over into mawkishness.
January Releases by Julian Barnes and Stewart O’Nan
These two novels by literary lions (of the UK and USA, respectively) share themes of ageing, loss, and memory, as well as a wry and gently melancholy tone. I’ve read 23 books by Julian Barnes, some of them twice; Stewart O’Nan has also published twenty-some books, but was a new author for me.
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes (2026)
“That’s what I’ve been after all my writing life: the whole story.”
Julian Barnes has been a favourite author of mine since my early twenties. He insists this novella will be his final book. It’s a coy fiction–autofiction mixture featuring the same fixations as much of his work: how time affects relationships and memory, how life gets translated into written evidence, and how we make peace with death. The narrator is one Julian Barnes, a writer approaching age 80 and adjusting to a recent diagnosis of a non-life-threatening blood cancer. The ostensible point is to retell his Oxford University friends Stephen and Jean’s two-stage romance: they were college sweethearts but married other people; then Julian reintroduced them in their sixties and they married – but it didn’t last.
He parcels out bits of this story in between pondering involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM), his “incurable but manageable” condition, and his possible legacy. He hopes he’ll be exonerated due to waiting until Stephen and Jean were dead to write about them and adopting Jean’s old Jack Russell terrier, Jimmy. His late wife, Pat Kavanagh, is never far from his thoughts, and he documents other losses among his peers, including Martin Amis (d. 2023 – for a short book, this is curiously dated, as if it hung around for years unfinished). There are also, as one would expect from Barnes, occasional references to French literature. Confident narration gives the sense of an author in full control of his material. Yet I found much of it tedious. He’s addressed subjectivity much more originally in other works, and the various strands here feel like incomplete ideas shoehorned into one volume.
It’s a shame that I had just reread Talking It Over, a glistening voice-led novel of his from 1991, because it showed up the thinness and repetition of much of his recent work. (I even thought I spotted a reference to Talking It Over as Jean is warning Julian not to write about her and Stephen. “I’ll tell you the truth, and don’t you ever fucking use it, not even deeply disguised in some novel where I appear as Jeanette [Gillian?] and Stephen is Stuart.”) I see his oeuvre as a left-skewed bell curve: three of the first four novels are not worth reading and five of the last seven have also been dubious, but with much excellent material in between. It’s been a case of diminishing returns from The Sense of an Ending onwards, but I have many excellent rereads to look forward to. My next two will be A History of the World in 10½ Chapters – a typically playful take on documented history and legend – and Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his forthright memoir about mortality. If you’ve not read Barnes before, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start as you’ll get a taster of his trademark topics and dry wit, but delving into his back catalogue may well prove more rewarding.
With thanks to Jonathan Cape (Penguin) for the free copy for review.
Evensong by Stewart O’Nan (2025)
The comparisons to Kent Haruf and Elizabeth Strout in the press materials and pre-publication reviews are spot on: this is the kind of quiet American novel that appeals for its small-town ambience and cosy community of lovably quirky people with everyday problems. O’Nan grew up in Pittsburgh, the setting for this fourth book in a loose series based around the character Emily Maxwell – I did have a slight feeling of having wandered into a variant of Olive, Again partway through, but it wasn’t a major stumbling block for me. The generally elderly, female members of the Humpty Dumpty Club form a constellation of care: they help each other out by driving to hospital appointments, picking up prescriptions and groceries – and, when worst comes to worst, planning funeral services.
Often, the short chapters are vignettes starring one or more of the central characters. When Joan has a fall down her stairs and lands in rehab, Kitzi takes over as de facto HDC leader. A musical couple’s hoarding and cat colony become her main preoccupation. Emily deals with family complications I didn’t fully understand for want of backstory, and Arlene realizes dementia is affecting her daily life. Susie, the “baby” of the group at 63, takes in Joan’s cat, Oscar, and meets someone through online dating. The novel covers four months of 2022–23, anchored by a string of holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas); events such as John Fetterman’s election and ongoing Covid precautions; and the cycle of the Church year.
O’Nan encourages affection for his salt-of-the-earth folk who vote Democrat, support the Steelers and attend liberal Protestant churches as a matter of course. They lead simple lives and cope with failing health with as much dignity as they can. There’s something to be said for celebrating older, ordinary people, who don’t often get a look-in in contemporary fiction. But I struggled with the ensemble nature of the cast – well over halfway through I was still trying to work out who everyone was; it doesn’t help that there are a Gene, a Jean and a Joan – and the extreme verisimilitude. The Humpty Dumpty Club exists in real life, but these women could be your aunt or choir director from Any Town, USA. Were my mother still around, this would be her, running errands and helping neighbours in suburban Pittsburgh, and I would be visiting the area annually. That combination of the mundane and the too close to home conspired to make this more of a slog than expected. I also feel I gleaned no distinct understanding of O’Nan as a writer – especially as other novels of his that I own (The Night Country and A Prayer for the Dying) are classed under horror. I’ll just have to try more.
First published in November 2025 by Atlantic Monthly Press in the USA. With thanks to Grove Press UK for the free copy for review.
While these were much anticipated reads for me, I ultimately found them a little underwhelming. I think I wanted a bit more raging against the dying of the light.
Have you read either or both of these authors? What can you recommend by them, or what will you seek out?
Guest Review of Greene Ferne Farm by Richard Jefferies (#NovNov25)
As busy as he is as a lecturer in animal ecology at the University of Reading (and a multi-instrumentalist in several folk/Americana bands), my husband, Dr Chris Foster, managed to find time to read and review (below) something for Novellas in November. This is a random, obscure Victorian novel (from 1880) that we picked up at a book sale in Kingsclere last month.
“The 19th-century author Richard Jefferies is better remembered as a nature writer than as a novelist, and in this slight early novella (albeit published only seven years before his death from tuberculosis at age 38) it is indeed his evocation of the landscapes, wildlife and weather of rural Wiltshire that stand out most.
“Jefferies conjures atmosphere skilfully, from an uneasy night lost on chalk downland in thick fog to the lonely, dust-filled room where an avaricious old farmer looks out at the sunset from his armchair. There’s a sense of abundant nature as a backdrop for rural life that can be taken for granted, a sense of connectivity across generations – “the cuckoo came and went; the swallows sailed for the golden sands of the south; the leaves, brown and orange and crimson, dropped and died” – but also a prescient fear expressed here by a landowning squire that modern farming methods such as ‘ploughing engines’ might “suck every atom out of the soil.” The abundance of corncrakes portrayed around Greene Ferne is just one reminder for contemporary readers of how much wildlife has been lost from farmland since Jefferies was writing.
“The plot is lacklustre in comparison to the prose: a Hardyesque blend of love triangles and scenes from rural life, with no sense that the occasionally dramatic events portrayed are helping to build any narrative momentum. The portrayals of rustic village folk, complete with thick country accents, feel clichéd and idealised, especially given the decidedly un-Hardyesque happy ending, but the quality of Jefferies’ writing for much of Greene Ferne Farm is at least an encouragement to check out his other, better-known work.” [126 pages]
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (#NovNov25 Buddy Read, #NonfictionNovember)
This year we set two buddy reads for Novellas in November: one contemporary work of fiction (Seascraper) and one classic work of short nonfiction. Do let us know if you’ve been reading them and what you think!
Sister Outsider is a 1984 collection of Audre Lorde’s essays and speeches. Many of these short pieces appeared in Black or radical feminist magazines or scholarly journals, while a few give the text of her conference presentations. Lorde must have been one of the first writers to spotlight intersectionality: she ponders the combined effect of her Black lesbian identity on how she is perceived and what power she has in society.
The title’s paradox draws attention to the push and pull of solidarity and ostracism. She calls white feminists out for not considering what women of colour endure (or for making her a token Black speaker); she decries misogyny in the Black community; and she and her white lover, Frances, seem to attract homophobia from all quarters. Especially while trying to raise her Black teenage son to avoid toxic masculinity, the author comes to realise the importance of “learning to address each other’s difference with respect.”
This is a point she returns to again and again, and it’s as important now as it was when she was writing in the 1970s. So many forms of hatred and discrimination come down to difference being seen as a threat – “I disagree with you, so I must destroy you” is how she caricatures that perspective.
Even if you’ve never read a word that Lorde wrote, you probably know the phrase “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” – this talk title refers to having to circumvent the racist patriarchy to truly fight oppression. “Revolution is not a one-time event,” she writes in another essay. “It is becoming always vigilant for the smallest opportunity to make a genuine change in established, outgrown responses”.
My two favourite pieces here also feel like they have entered into the zeitgeist. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” deems poetry a “necessity for our existence … the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” And “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” is a thrilling redefinition of a holistic sensuality that means living at full tilt and tapping into creativity. “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared”.
In some ways this is not an ideal way to be introduced to Lorde’s work, because many of the essays repeat the same themes and reasoning. I made my way through the book very slowly, one piece every day or few days. The speeches would almost certainly be more effective if heard aloud, as intended – and more provocative, too, as they must have undermined other speakers’ assumptions. I was also a bit taken aback by the opening and closing pieces being travelogues: “Notes from a Trip to Russia” is based on journal entries from 1976, while “Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report” about a 1983 trip to her mother’s birthplace. I saw more point to the latter, while the former felt somewhat out of place.
Nonetheless, Lorde’s thinking is essential and ahead of its time. I’d only previously read her short work The Cancer Journals. For years my book club has been toying with reading Zami, her memoir starting with growing up in 1930s Harlem, so I’ll hope to move that up the agenda for next year. Have you read any of her other books that you can recommend?(University library) [190 pages]
Other reviews of Sister Outsider:
Cathy (746 Books)
Marcie (Buried in Print) is making her way through the book one essay at a time. Here’s her latest post.
Three on a Theme of Sylvia Plath (The Slicks by Maggie Nelson for #NonfictionNovember & #NovNov25; The Bell Jar and Ariel)
A review copy of Maggie Nelson’s brand-new biographical essay on Sylvia Plath (and Taylor Swift) was the excuse I needed to finally finish a long-neglected paperback of The Bell Jar and also get a taste of Plath’s poetry through the posthumous collection Ariel, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary. These are the sorts of works it’s hard to believe ever didn’t exist; they feel so fully formed and part of the zeitgeist. It also boggles the mind how much Plath accomplished before her death by suicide at age 30. What I previously knew of her life mostly came from hearsay and was reinforced by Euphoria by Elin Cullhed. For the mixture of nonfiction, fiction and poetry represented below, I’m counting this towards Nonfiction November’s Book Pairings week.
The Slicks: On Sylvia Plath and Taylor Swift by Maggie Nelson (2025)
Can young women embrace fame amidst the other cultural expectations of them? Nelson attempts to answer this question by comparing two figures who turn(ed) life into art. The link between them was strengthened by Swift titling her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department. “Plath … serves as a metonym – as does Swift – for a woman who makes art about a broken heart,” Nelson writes. “When women make the personal public, the charge of whorishness always lurks nearby.” What women are allowed to say and do has always, it seems, attracted public commentary, and “anyone who puts their work into the world, at any level, must learn to navigate between self-protectiveness and risk, becoming harder and staying soft.”
Nelson acknowledges a major tonal difference between Plath and Swift, however. Plath longed for fame but didn’t get the chance to enjoy it; she’s the patron saint of sad-girl poetry and makes frequent reference to death, whereas Swift spotlights joy and female empowerment. It’s a shame this was out of date before it went to print; my advanced copy, at least, isn’t able to comment on Swift’s engagement and the baby rumour mill sure to follow. It would be illuminating to have an afterword in which Nelson discusses the effect of spouses’ competing fame and speculates on how motherhood might change Swift’s art.
Full confession: I’ve only ever knowingly heard one Taylor Swift song, “Anti-Hero,” on the radio in the States. (My assessment was: wordy, angsty, reasonably catchy.) Undoubtedly, I would have gotten more out of this essay were I equally familiar with the two subjects. Nonetheless, it’s fluid and well argued, and I was engaged throughout. If you’re a Swiftie as well as a literary type, you need to read this.
[66 pages]
With thanks to Vintage (Penguin) for the advanced e-copy for review.
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (1963)
Given my love of mental hospital accounts and women’s autofiction, it’s a wonder I’d not read this before my forties. It was first published under the pseudonym “Victoria Lucas” because Plath thought it immature, “an autobiographical apprentice work which I had to write in order to free myself from the past.” Esther Greenwood is the stand-in for Plath: a talented college student who, after working in New York City during the remarkable summer of 1953, plunges into mental ill health. Chapter 13 is amazing and awful at the same time as Esther attempts suicide thrice in one day, toying with a silk bathrobe cord and ocean waves before taking 50 pills and walling herself into a corner of the cellar. She bounces between various institutional settings, undergoing electroshock therapy – the first time it’s horrible, but later, under a kind female doctor, it’s more like it’s ‘supposed’ to be: a calming reset.
The 19-year-old is obsessed with the notion of purity. She has a couple of boyfriends but decides to look for someone else to take her virginity. Beforehand, the asylum doctor prescribes her a fitting for a diaphragm. A defiant claim to the right to contraception despite being unmarried is a way of resisting the bell jar – the rarefied prison – of motherhood. Still, Esther feels guilty about prioritizing her work over what seems like feminine duty: “Why was I so maternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to baby after fat puling baby? … I was my own woman.” Plath never reconciled parenthood with poetry. Whether that’s the fault of Ted Hughes, or the times they lived in, who can say. For her and for Esther, the hospital is a prison as well – but not so hermetic as the turmoil of her own mind. How ironic to read “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am” knowing that this was published just a few weeks before this literary genius ceased to be.
Apart from an unfortunate portrayal of a “negro” worker at the hospital, this was an enduringly relevant and absorbing read, a classic to sit alongside Emily Holmes Coleman’s The Shutter of Snow and Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water.
(Secondhand – it’s been in my collection so long I can’t remember where it’s from, but I’d guess a Bowie Library book sale or Wonder Book & Video / Public library – I was struggling with the small type so switched to a recent paperback and found it more readable)
Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965)
Impossible not to read this looking for clues of her death to come:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
(from “Lady Lazarus”)
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
(from “Years”)
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment
(from “Edge”)
I feel incapable of saying anything fresh about this collection, which takes no prisoners. The images and vocabulary are razor-sharp. First and last lines or stanzas are particularly memorable. (“Morning Song” starts “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”; “Lady Lazarus” ends “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”) Words and phrases repeat and gather power as they go. “The Applicant” mocks the obligations of a wife: “A living doll … / It can sew, it can cook. It can talk, talk, talk. … // … My boy, it’s your last resort. / Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.” I don’t know a lot about Plath’s family life, only that her father was a Polish immigrant and died after a long illness when she was eight, but there must have been some daddy issues there – after all, “Daddy” includes the barbs “Daddy, I have had to kill you” and “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two— / The vampire who said he was you / And drank my blood for a year, / Seven years, if you want to know.” It ends, “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Several later poems in a row, including “Stings,” incorporate bee-related imagery, and Plath’s father was an international bee expert. I can see myself reading this again and again in future, and finding her other collections, too – all but one of them posthumous. (Secondhand – RSPCA charity shop, Newbury)
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (#NovNov25 Buddy Read)
Seascraper is set in what appears to be the early 1960s yet could easily be a century earlier because of the protagonist’s low-tech career. Thomas Flett lives with his mother in fictional Longferry in northwest England and carries on his grandfather’s tradition of fishing with a horse and cart. Each day he trawls the seabed for shrimp – sometimes twice a day when the tide allows – and sells his catch to local restaurants. At around 20 years old, Thomas still lives with his mother, who is disabled by obesity and chronic pain. He’s the sole breadwinner in the household and there’s an unusual dynamic between them in that his mother isn’t all that many years older, having fallen pregnant by a teacher while she was still in school.
Their life is just a mindless trudge of work with cosy patterns of behaviour in between … He wants to wake up every morning with a better purpose.
It’s a humdrum, hardscrabble existence, and Thomas longs for a bigger and more creative life, which he hopes he might achieve through his folk music hobby – or a chance encounter with an American filmmaker. Edgar Acheson is working on a big-screen adaptation of a novel; to save money, it will be filmed here in Merseyside rather than in coastal Maine where it’s set. One day he turns up at the house asking Thomas to be his guide to the sands. Thomas reluctantly agrees to take Edgar out one evening, even though it will mean missing out on an open mic night. They nearly get lost in the fog and the cart starts to sink into quicksand. What follows is mysterious, almost like a hallucination sequence. When Thomas makes it back home safely, he writes an autobiographical song, “Seascraper” (you can listen to a recording on Wood’s website).
After this one pivotal and surprising day, Thomas’s fortunes might just change. This atmospheric novella contrasts subsistence living with creative fulfillment. There is the bitterness of crushed dreams but also a glimmer of hope. Its The Old Man and the Sea-type setup emphasizes questions of solitude, obsession and masculinity. Thomas wishes he had a father in his life; Edgar, even in so short a time frame, acts as a sort of father figure for him. And Edgar is a father himself – he shows Thomas a photo of his daughter. We are invited to ponder what makes a good father and what the absence of one means at different stages in life. Mental and physical health are also crucial considerations for the characters.
That Wood packs all of this into a compact circadian narrative is impressive. My admiration never crossed into warmth, however. I’ve read four of Wood’s five novels and still love his debut, The Bellwether Revivals, most, followed by his second, The Ecliptic. I’ve also read The Young Accomplice, which I didn’t care for as much, so I’m only missing out on A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better now. Wood’s plot and character work is always at a high standard, but his books are so different from each other that I have no clear sense of him as a novelist. Still, I’m pleased that the Booker longlisting has introduced him to many new readers.
Also reviewed by:
Annabel (AnnaBookBel)
Anne (My Head Is Full of Books)
Brona (This Reading Life)
Cathy (746 Books)
Davida (The Chocolate Lady’s Book Review Blog)
Eric (Lonesome Reader)
Jane (Just Reading a Book)
Helen (She Reads Novels)
Kate (Books Are My Favourite and Best)
Kay (What? Me Read?)
Nancy (The Literate Quilter)
Rachel (Yarra Book Club)
Susan (A life in books)
Check out this written interview with Wood (and this video one with Eric of Lonesome Reader) as well as a Q&A on the Booker Prize website in which Wood talks about the unusual situation in which he wrote the book.
(Public library)
[163 pages]
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
