Paris in July, III: Dundy, Maugham, Sarton Novels; Nonfiction by Durand & Carles, Gopnik
All in all, I’ve reviewed 13 books (a mix of fiction and nonfiction) for #ParisInJuly2026; see also Part I and Part II. It’s been such a fun escapist project for the summer – thanks to Emma of Words and Peace for hosting! I’m squeaking in at the last minute with a final set of five made up of a few obscure classics and two sets of essays that veer between autobiographical reflection and social observation, with a bit of self-help thrown in. A shared theme this time is differences between the USA (or England) and France. Here’s a quick paragraph on each.
Fiction
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (1958)
“The world is wide, wide, wide and I am young, young, young, and we’re all going to live forever!”
Sally Jay Gorce is determined to live it up in Paris. After all, now that she’s lost her passport, it doesn’t look like she’ll be going back to the States any time soon. With her dyed-pink hair, self-deprecating sense of humour, and heavily notched bedpost, she’s an endearing and impulsive protagonist. She’s always falling in and out of love and embarking on new projects, from acting on stage or as a film extra to posing as a painter’s model. I found her turns of phrase amusing – “To my chagrin, I found all my clothes … splitting themselves resolutely up into three categories: Tyrolean Peasant, Bar Girl, and Dreaded Librarian”; “It was dessert now, and I was deserting” – but did weary a bit of the meandering plot. This work of autofiction seems ahead of its time what with the protagonist’s promiscuity. I’ve always been intrigued about the title and learned that it arises from a love interest’s likening of American girls to avocados (“A hard centre with the tender meat all wrapped up in a shiny casing … so eternally green”) plus his mishearing of Sally Jay’s “dead” for “dud.” Somewhere on a continuum between I Capture the Castle and Nina Stibbe, this comic novel was a pleasant distraction. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury) 
A linking passage: “Boy, we met a real nut on the beach today. A skinny young American with a fierce black moustache called Hugo McCarthy. He’d just left the South of France a couple of days ago, where he’d been kicked out of Somerset Maugham’s villa in Cap Ferrat for the third time.”
The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham (1908)
“There’s no place like Paris for meeting queer folk.”
Who knew Maugham tried his hand at supernatural horror? The nearest thing I’d read from him before was Up at the Villa, a suspense novella. An autobiographical fragment preceding the text explains that Oliver Haddo, the villain of the piece, was inspired by a poet Maugham met in Paris, Aleister Crowley, who dabbled in Satanism and the occult. Arthur Burdon, an English surgeon in Paris, is engaged to marry Margaret Dauncey. Margaret’s roommate, Susie Boyd, is fascinated by Haddo, who looms large in personality and body. Margaret, on the other hand, says, “I’ve never met a man who filled me with such loathing.” Arthur and others of their acquaintance don’t know whether to take him seriously or not. This means that they underestimate the threat he poses to their happiness – and perhaps their lives. It’s rare to encounter a story of demon possession these days, and hard to know quite what to make of it. I found this reasonably compelling but melodramatic, plus it felt distasteful how Haddo’s weight increases to match his evil. Do read Maugham if you haven’t yet – he is reliably readable and a number of his works are short – but maybe not this one first. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles) 
Shadow of a Man by May Sarton (1950)
I’d not heard of Sarton’s third novel before I picked it up at random in a used bookstore. For those of us who discovered Sarton through her journals or poetry, I suspect her fiction will always fall short. The psychology of her characters’ relationships tends to lack subtlety, and plotting isn’t always her forté. I enjoyed this one well enough, probably because I could relate to the main character’s feeling of being adrift after his mother’s sudden death. After the funeral is over and done with, twenty-six-year-old Francis Chabrier decides to spend the summer in Paris. He’s half-French and thinks some time away from Boston might do him good. Except when he gets there he promptly falls in love with a family friend, Solange, and that’s complicated because she’s a 45-year-old widow whose late husband was shattered by his time in a concentration camp. It’s clear their romance will be short-lived. Francis’s stepfather, Alan, describes the young man as “a comet on the loose,” and the purpose of the months in Paris seems to be to set him on a more stable course. It grated that Solange is portrayed as almost an old lady (I’m only just over two years off her age now!), and that their affair only serves as a prelude to a more sensible relationship back home. However, the Paris setting (and coastal Maine later on) is delicious, and I marked out plenty of lines about Francis and his mother’s family dynamic. (Secondhand – Wonder Book & Video, Hagerstown)
Nonfiction
Pardon Our French: Parisian Lessons for a Happier Life by Alex Durand and Tom Carles with Allie Kingsley Baker (2026)
Durand and Carles moved to the USA to play college soccer and went viral on social media for their “AT Frenchies” videos about French language and culture. (I’ve not actually seen any.) Although they’ve come to admire aspects of the American lifestyle, such as ambition and individualism, they still prize traditionally French values of curiosity, privacy and a more relaxed approach to time management. Chapters on romance, food, style, friendships, green living, the arts and rituals bring out the best of what France has to offer. “L’histoire d’Alex” and “L’histoire de Tom” memoir sections alternate with more generic self-help advice. I expect Baker had a lot to do with the vernacular prose, which can be slick and clichéd. Still, it’s a good-natured, chatty book and it’s always worthwhile to be reminded to live in the moment, savour small pleasures, and insist on quality.
To be published by Penguin Life on September 8. (Read via Edelweiss)
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik (2000)
Longtime New Yorker writer Gopnik lived in Paris in 1995–2000 with his wife and young son; their daughter was born just before they left to return to New York City. Like other New Yorker regulars such as Elizabeth Kolbert and Susan Orlean, he is an excellent essayist. His book on French cuisine is a favourite of mine, and on this reread I most appreciated the pieces on food, and the general observations on being an expat:
Fish and plugs are the two great differences, the two things that are never quite alike from country to country. … This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop
We have a beautiful existence in Paris, but not a full life, and in New York we have a full life and an unbeautiful existence. (= his wife’s conclusion)
everything about moving to France has been wonderful, and everything about emigrating to France difficult.
That summary of French bureaucracy, so at odds with the cultural experience of living in Paris, reminds me of what David Lebovitz has to say on the subject. There is too much about politics and sports in this book for me, but I loved his close attention to his son’s development and the customs they create around Christmas but also in the everyday, such as an ongoing bedtime story about a baseball player (“The Rookie”) and cake and hot chocolate after swimming. (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)
My original rating (2016): 
My rating now:
Some apt quotes about Paris I encountered this month:
Adam Gopnik: “Paris in July is pretty much left to the tourists and the people who look after them” & “Perhaps in the end this is why Paris is ‘romantic.’ It marries both the voluptuous and restricted.”
David Lebovitz: “Like New Yorkers, Parisians have a complicated relationship to their city. They appreciate the beauty and excitement, but as Romain told me, Paris is dur (hard). That things aren’t easy—l’administration, the neighbors, the brusqueness, the fact that it’s not a perfect place—is what he likes about Paris.”
May Sarton: “I think Paris makes everyone wise … All Americans fall in love with Paris. It’s the coup de foudre.”
Overall favourites: the whole of my first batch!
- Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
- My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein & Real Estate by Deborah Levy
- Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens
Book Serendipity, June to July
Life can have odd confluences. Esme will not say serendipity: she loathes the word. But sometimes she thinks there must be something at work, some impulse, some collision of forces, some kinks in chronology.
~The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell
Unlike Esme Lennox, I love the word serendipity! You probably know by now that I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away!
Thanks to Kay for posting about her own book serendipity moments here!
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- A woman gets on a flight even though she’s technically too pregnant to do so in one poem of Family Lines (ed. Armitage and Bower) and Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan.
- A mention of a Spanish cat in one poem of Family Lines (ed. Armitage and Bower) and Tsi-Tsa by George Mikes.
- Rum and coke is mentioned in I Sing to the Greenhearts by Maggie Harris and Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe.
- A character named Gladys in Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates and Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe.
- A character named Celia in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid and Commencement by J. Courtney Sullivan.
- A girl holds her breath until she faints in Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash and Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s performance as a father appears in one poem of Family Lines (ed. Armitage and Bower) and one essay of Frog by Anne Fadiman.
- A cat scratches a tatami mat in Letters of Note: Cats (ed. Shaun Usher) and I Am a Cat by Natsume Sōseki.
- A Freudian explanation of the collector’s obsessive impulse in The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting by Robert Irwin and The Butterfly Season by Lea Korsgaard.
- A book/other arts coincidence, this: I first saw the actress Anya Taylor-Joy in The Menu, which I watched on my sister’s TV streaming system in the US, and then realized she’s pictured on the Netflix tie-in cover of a book I borrowed from the library, The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis.
- Manhattans are drunk in Furnishing Eternity by David Giffels and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
- A main character has a history of living in an orphanage in Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates, Buckeye by Patrick Ryan, and The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis; and in children’s homes in Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller.
- An in-law named Fran(cesca) in The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell and The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout.
- A scene of visiting one’s grandmother in a dementia ward in The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell and Black Lake by Emily Skaja.
- Eating spoons of sugar straight from the jar/box in Depression Cooking by Sonali Menezes and The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout.
- Young people living in a squat in Sunset Park by Paul Auster and then Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller.
- A people-trafficking plot in Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash and The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel.
- Someone who doesn’t want to be recognized says “I don’t know what you’re talking about” / “I have no idea what you’re talking about” when someone identifies them in Apt Pupil by Stephen King and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
- A woman suffers from insomnia despite having done all the ‘right’ things, sleep hygiene-wise, in one story of Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu and Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami.
- A future blonde bombshell actress gets married off at age 15 in Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid.
- A homosexual encounter takes place in a public bathroom in What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. (Plus heterosexual ones in a private shower in Partita by Barbara Kingsolver.)
- A reference to Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” in The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel and Black Lake by Emily Skaja.
- A character named Manny in Dominion by Addie E. Citchens, Partita by Barbara Kingsolver, and one story of The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki.
- A female character named Mick(ie) in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and Partita by Barbara Kingsolver. (There’s also a male Mick in Few and Far Between by Jan Carson.)
- Shoplifting takes place in Receipts from the Bookshop by Katie Clapham, The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, one story of The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki, and The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout.
- The medical necessity of ironing all one’s clothing, especially nappies/underwear, is mentioned in L’Appart by David Lebovitz (a Greek person told him that) and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (de rigueur in 1970s Rhodesia).
Remarking on how quiet/noisy a French dishwasher is in Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik/L’Appart by David Lebovitz and a mention of one’s good fortune in getting a store to accept a returned appliance.
- A mention of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline in Receipts from the Bookshop by Katie Clapham and Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat.
- Characters are robbed in a motel room in Dominion by Addie E. Citchens and The New People by Andrea Uptmor.
- Living in the space above a garage in one story of The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki and The New People by Andrea Uptmor.
- Scenes of a woman/girl reassembling a gun, and a gun amnesty, in one story of Lesser-Known Monsters of the 21st Century by Kim Fu and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller.
- The use of a typewriter in Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat, Apt Pupil by Stephen King, A Long Game by Elizabeth McCracken, one story of Night, Neon by Joyce Carol Oates, and The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki.
- Thousands of dollars being stored in/under a mattress in Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat and The New People by Andrea Uptmor.
The smell of vetiver: a cologne in Year of the Drought by Roland Buti and fabric softener in Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat.
- I encountered sections on the sense of smell at about the same time in Life in Five Senses by Gretchen Rubin and Wearing God by Lauren Winner.
- A person bites someone else’s finger in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller, one story of The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki, and The New People by Andrea Uptmor. (And an ear in The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy.)
- Eating an omelette in a Paris café in The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik, and Moveable Feasts by Chris Newens. (I suppose these things will happen if I read multiple Paris-set books at once!)
- The fact that “Pas mal” (“not bad”) is high praise in French is explained in Pardon Our French by Alex Durand and Tom Carles and L’Appart by David Lebovitz.
An insistence that the soles of a woman’s feet not be shown in A Rough Guide to the Heart by Pam Houston (etiquette in Bhutan) and Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (when Norma Jeane Baker, aka Marilyn Monroe, is having early nude photos taken).
- A nude photo shoot takes place in The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel and Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates. There are also nude portrait sittings in The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy and The Original by Nell Stevens.
- A man has glass embedded in his face in Few and Far Between by Jan Carson and The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel.
- The idea that one will be cursed for touching a stranger’s grave appears in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller and Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami.
- I find myself rereading two childhood memoirs of wartime life at the same time: Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Paris in July, II: Beauvais, Brown, Elkin and Lebovitz
July has been one long heat wave here in southern England. Luckily, it’s a bit cooler than it was earlier in the month, and we’re developing strategies for coping with what seems to be the new normal – until it gets worse again. My main tactic has been doing very little on most days apart from sitting on the couch or reclining on a mattress with a stack of books to hand. So it’s been good for one thing (maybe two): finishing books – and watching swifts. Following on from my first set of four Paris reads, I have another four (and five more coming up before the end of the month): a teen novel about overcoming peers’ prejudice, an essay anthology about the enduring appeal of the city for authors, a fragmentary memoir composed on a phone during a bus commute, and a record of a chef’s home renovation journey from hell.
Piglettes by Clémentine Beauvais (2014; 2017)
This was my second YA novel by Beauvais (after In Paris with You); she translated both herself and her proficiency in both languages allowed her to include wordplay that might have been lost otherwise (“I finally get what it means to have l’esprit de l’escalier, when I scream to her, from the bottom of the staircase…”). Mireille LaPlanche’s former friend Malo introduced a cruel annual tradition at their high school: a “Pig Pageant” in which classmates pick the fattest, ugliest girls – including her. She decides to team up with two other finalists, Astrid and Hakima, and show their persecutors what they can do. After a period of planning and training, they undertake a week-long cycle ride from their home in Bourg-en-Bresse to Paris, timed so that they’ll arrive on Bastille Day and crash the president’s garden party. Hakima’s older brother, Kader, who lost his legs in the Iraq War and uses a wheelchair, is their chaperone. They’ve dubbed themselves the “Three Little Piglettes” and tow a trailer full of sausages that they cook and sell at each stop. Soon they’re a social media phenomenon. This sweet, funny Cinderella story about defusing fatphobia includes good diversity rep and touches on lots of issues including anxiety, bullying, and unrequited love – all with an unmistakably French enthusiasm for wine, cheese and philosophy. (Edelweiss)
A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light, ed. Eleanor Brown (2017)
A reread that I started shortly after our trip to Paris in December 2023 but left half-finished on a shelf until this month. The roster of 18 contributors leans very much towards women’s fiction. While I probably most enjoyed the third of the book that was by authors I’d read and liked before – J. Courtney Sullivan, Susan Vreeland, Paula McLain, Julie Powell, Therese Anne Fowler and Maggie Shipstead – all of the pieces are cosy and undemanding. They tell of time spent living, working or travelling in the city. Sometimes it meets expectations; other times, mishaps and faux pas create disillusionment until a future visit grants a second chance. There are favourite foods and language struggles, art treasures and magical spots to discover, and stereotypes to confirm or overturn. The experience of Paris can vary based on who the travel companion is – an enthusiastic child, a needy parent or a soon-to-be ex. Fowler made her research trip before writing a biographical novel about Zelda Fitzgerald, while McLain only saw Hemingway’s haunts after she’d written The Paris Wife. Each essay finishes with a quickfire list of favourite Paris moments, books, sites, songs, etc. Not a bad substitute for being there! (Secondhand – 2nd & Charles)
My original rating (2017):
My rating now:
No. 91/92: Notes on a Parisian Commute by Lauren Elkin (2021)
Just imagine keeping a diary of your bus journeys in the Notes app of your phone for seven months and getting a book out of it. Elkin’s mostly unedited observations are based on people-watching and her own swirling thoughts in 2014–15. She covers obnoxious behaviours on public transport (the same the world over, it seems: “Oi. Manspreader. Bouge ton cul”); her teaching work; overheard conversations; and Paris as seen in different seasons. Her mind wanders across history and theory. The bus is a melting pot: She’s thrown into false intimacy with people she’s never seen before and hopes never to encounter again. Nothing much happens until it does. First it’s the Charlie Hebdo attacks. Then she falls pregnant but it’s ectopic and she loses the baby. And, after she’s switched to Métro commuting, the Hypercacher attacks. In the prologue and epilogue, Elkin talks about only understanding major events in retrospect. She also cites lockdown diaries as being a new subgenre her project fit into. But let’s be honest: if she’d not already made a name for herself as a cultural critic, this would never have been published. While it has some value as an in-the-moment historical document, I didn’t find it nearly as profound as, say Deborah Levy’s autobiography. (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com with SellItBack voucher)
L’appart: The Delights and Disasters of Making My Paris Home by David Lebovitz (2017)
Lebovitz is a San Francisco pastry chef who moved to Paris a couple of decades ago. We get a lot of ideas from his dessert cookbook and extensive blog archive. Like The Sweet Life in Paris, this contains lighthearted musings about cultural differences between France and the US and many tantalizing recipes (most of them sweet but also a few savoury) that I am actually likely to make. But it’s primarily about the several-year saga of buying and restoring an apartment. Lebovitz had a grand plan for the kitchen, especially: a huge space with American-style appliances that would ease his cookbook writing and testing. French bureaucracy made the purchase difficult enough as the property had to be officially reregistered as residential rather than commercial, and the seller and realtor were both antagonistic.
But that was nothing compared to the nightmare of the renovation. To start with, Lebovitz was friendly with his contractor and his workers. In fact, too friendly, his partner, Romain, warned. He called the builders “tu,” brought fresh-baked treats for them, and always paid their bills promptly. They started taking liberties: hardly ever showing up, failing to meet deadlines, replying to every concern with “pas de problème” but never fixing the issues. The shoddiness and incompetence are truly astounding: counters at the wrong height, an unusable faucet, melted fuses, an electricity leak, buckled floorboards, askew windows, an upside-down water softener. Every mistake cost time and money, such that the whole job was three times longer and more expensive than projected. (A lawyer dissuaded Lebovitz from suing because in the French legal system it could take five years and not even go his way.)
Depending on your own experience, this might be cathartic, or too close to home, or a cautionary tale. (We’d already long decided we won’t do any major building projects because we can’t tolerate noise, disruption or strangers and our house is good enough for our needs.) Keep in mind that Lebovitz dealt with all this in a second language and his fortitude is impressive. Scenes at Ikea and conversations with his contractor are amusingly surreal. But I confess I did find this a little overlong and repetitive, and every setback made me cringe for him. I’ll have to bake some frangipane plum-raspberry gratins and try to forget the pain. (Secondhand – Better World Books with Little Free Library voucher)
#ParisInJuly2026, I: Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Deborah Levy & Chris Newens
I wouldn’t want to be in Paris right now – continental Europe is far too hot in high summer and in recent years the UK has been following suit – but I am having such fun travelling there through books. I have a fantastic stack of Paris-set novels and memoirs on the go, perfect for sinking into on long afternoons and evenings while I hide from the second round of the heat wave in our relatively cool lounge. These first four selections were corkers! I mostly read them earlier: in May, or across several years, or started in January but only just finished. And what a treat they all were: an epic yet intimate queer romance, two auto/fiction hybrids about making a life as an unconventional woman, and a tour through Paris food, district by district.
Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (2026)
There has been homoerotic content in Hargrave’s previous fiction for adults, but this is a full-blown queer love story that, with its time span (1978 to 2013) and heft, feels momentous, like a future classic. Erica is an earnest 18-year-old tourist experiencing Paris before starting at UEA. She meets Laure, an older, cynical Sorbonne art history student, on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur: drawn to her not just because they’re reading the same book (A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes) but also because Laure looks so perfectly Parisian there in a louche sprawl, smoking a cigarette. Laure is a confirmed lesbian, whereas Erica was previously straight. It’s coup de foudre for sure. Laure has been with many women, including married ones, but what she feels for Erica is different, and Erica leaving at the end of the summer is such a blow that her problem drinking gets out of control.
Comparisons with One Day by David Nicholls are inescapable what with the structure of jumping ahead by a few years with each section, although I’d argue that this is more similar to The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett and The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne. Hargrave’s close third-person narration alternates between her two protagonists and occasionally documents their interactions, though they keep missing their chance to be together. On two occasions Erica doesn’t write or visit when she should; twice they resume their love affair and could have gotten back together, but by then one or both has another partner. (Erica marries a Creative Writing MA classmate and they have two daughters.) The social context is important: they lose a dear friend to the AIDS crisis and Hargrave carefully bookends the action to show an advance in LGBTQ rights: early on, the characters are caught up in an attack on a gay bar in 1978; in the last pages, France legalizes same-sex marriage.
Thirty-five years is a long time in any relationship, but Erica and Laure’s is repeatedly strained by absence and perceived betrayals. They each, separately, go through a lot, including bereavements, addiction, mental health issues, and career disappointments. I thought the novel might have a speculative element, contrasting their potential life together with their divergent trajectories. In fact, only in one brief instance does Hargrave offer an alternative version of how things might have gone. Instead, the focus is on moments when fear or negligence stopped one of them from reaching out. I quibbled with a few seeming anachronisms and errors but overall found this delicious, touching, and even strangely close to home sometimes. Paris itself is a star, its museums, bars, and streets a perfect backdrop; Monet’s gardens and the Norfolk coast are appealing settings, too. This was a sweet, sexy, sobering read I can wholeheartedly recommend. (Public library) 
A linking passage:
“They went together to the Père-Lachaise and Erica pulled a button off her shirt to put on Gertrude Stein’s grave. Laure was amazed she knew Tender Buttons but not that Gertrude Stein had loved a woman. She did not want to be the lesbian prophet to this girl, but she could not help herself.”
My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction by Deborah Levy (2026)
“Gertrude Stein said that’s enough. (I know that that’s not enough now.)”
~from “Roseability” by Idlewild – enjoy the c. 2000 Scottish punk!
Here’s the good news: You don’t need to know anything – or particularly care – about Gertrude Stein to enjoy this. Even not having read any Stein, just having read about her, it was clear to me that the style is an homage in places (repetition, scant punctuation). But where Stein’s is famously cryptic, Levy’s prose is crystal-clear as usual. There’s a gauzy fictional storyline in which the narrator is wrestling with an inchoate essay about Gertrude Stein. (Rather like Geoff Dyer trying to write about D.H. Lawrence in Out of Sheer Rage.) She has two close friends: Eva is a graphic novelist with an international background, currently separated from a husband back in Seattle; Fanny is a polyamorous French lesbian who works in finance and, no matter the topic, tells it like it is. A mystery of sorts arises in the form of Eva’s lost cat, Bob. Fanny has heard about a cat found drowned in the canal and they later meet a Frenchman whose cat was stolen. (It’s unclear whether it’s all one and the same cat.)
Cute American cover (though the British one is probably more apt).
The narrator alternates between this minor intrigue, biographical fragments about Stein, and her struggle to know how to capture her subject in words. Stein was brought up in a German Jewish household in Pennsylvania and failed her medical school exams at Johns Hopkins. In Paris she lived with Alice B. Toklas as she pleased, without apology: an artist’s muse, intellectual and author inspired by “early psychology and cubism.” Levy clearly admires Stein for pushing the boundaries of literature and of life, paving the way for so many. I wasn’t sure that the ‘story’, such as it is, matters here, or at least not as much as the biography and pastiche. Levy is very much in Ali Smith territory here. In any case, I found it playful, sophisticated and beguiling. There are so many plainly put but brilliant lines:
“Stein put her immense writing energies into making sure she was not understood. This is what interested me most about her writing. She did not believe it is worth having a conversation if everything is understandable.”
“Every century needs an artist to dismantle coherence as we have been taught it and make a space for something new to happen.”
I have a copy of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that I’m going to attempt soon…
(Public library)
Real Estate by Deborah Levy (2021)
I’m not sure why it took me so long to read the final volume of Levy’s so-called Living Autobiography. I started it in August 2022: perfect timing because that was the year we bought our first house. But I left it part-read on a shelf until April. It’s not my favourite of the trilogy – that’s The Cost of Living, which is perfect – but I appreciated it a lot more than Things I Don’t Want to Know, which felt forced. Levy paints her life as restless, nomadic; to an extent, she likes it that way. She flits between London and Paris, attends a literary festival in India and takes an extended holiday in Greece. At age 60, single and with adult daughters, she doesn’t have to answer to anyone. Yet she longs for a home of her own – a deep sense of fulfilment that perhaps can’t be bought along with a piece of property. Is it a paradox to desire grounding but also freedom? That’s the main question that Levy explores here, and you can see why Stein would become a model for her (Leonora Carrington is another in this book). “It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves.” This is incredibly quotable, and really a perfect book for every woman of a certain age as we come to resemble our mothers and ponder how to go on constructing ourselves through words and relationships.
to think and feel and live and love more freely is the point of life
So then, now that I was a sixty-year-old female character, both unwritten and constantly rewriting the script, what did I value, own, discard and bequeath?
Levy has an enviable talent for simplicity and clarity, but simultaneous impact and meaning. I’d be lucky to ever write anything autobiographical that has half as much elegance and power as her work. (New purchase – Amazon?) 
Moveable Feasts: A Story of Paris in Twenty Meals by Chris Newens (2025)
Newens, an English journalist, grew up working in his family bakery and tea rooms, so knew of the hard labour and long, early hours that daily food preparation requires. He’d lived in Paris for a decade when he decided that his strategy for getting a broader understanding of his adopted city would be through its cuisine. Arrondissement by arrondissement, he explores culinary landmarks and famous dishes, choosing one recipe from each to recreate in his kitchen. Some of these are familiar French staples such as croissants, crêpes, macarons, a goat’s cheese salad and tartiflette. Others aren’t so much a recipe as a serving suggestion: fresh oysters, an omelette with no ingredients beyond 3 eggs, pre-packaged escargots. Tourist food can be good or terrible, depending on where you go.
To get beyond clichés and give an accurate portrait of Paris, Newens realized, it’s essential to include ethnic dishes such as banh mi, couscous, falafel, kebabs (made of equal parts lamb belly and turkey thigh meat) and meen puyabaisse (a Tamil-fusion fish stew – A Waiter in Paris taught me that many of the city’s food service workers are from Sri Lanka) to reflect the many immigrant cultures that call Paris home. To mix things up, he sometimes strays from the usual format of meeting with restaurant staff and learning a dish from them. One chapter is an elegy for the family friend through whom he first discovered French food. In others he is surprised by the delicious/awful fare on offer at a Paris soup kitchen/sex club. Ultimately, he concludes that what sets the food in France apart, no matter the cuisine in question, is the quality of the produce, so his final trip is to Rungis, the largest produce market in the world, which supplies most of Paris’s food needs at some times of year. He then ties it all together by hosting a picnic where guests cook one of his 20 recipes to bring.
This is the best sort of armchair travelling, where you get to experience the deliciousness and excitement vicariously and can be relieved that you’ve avoided all the inconvenient or embarrassing realities of interviewing strangers. I also learned a fair bit about the different districts’ personalities and how tradition meets modernity in French food. Food is a daily chance at pleasure and I just love reading about it (even though I don’t cook). Newens won a Jane Grigson Trust Award for New Food and Drink Writers, and with his curiosity and sense of humour it’s easy to see why. (Read via Edelweiss)
#ReadingtheMeow2026, Part I: Chinese & Japanese Authors
I’m a couple of days late, but here we go. It’s my fourth time participating in the annual Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri. Chinese and especially Japanese authors are famous for their literary love of cats. For my first post, I’m giving brief thoughts on a couple of Japanese novels – one of them a classic that may be responsible for the entire cat craze – and two examples of cute cat-themed manga.
I Am a Cat, Volume 1 by Natsume Sōseki (1905; 2025)
[Translated from Japanese by Nick Bradley]
Translator Nick Bradley makes a strong case for this as the “beginning [of] the Japanese cat book trend,” and I wondered if it was one of the earliest examples of the animal narrator, too. The unnamed feline antihero values brains over beauty: “Even though I am just a cat, I often like to philosophize. … Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have an admission to make. As far as cats go, I am no oil painting.” He’s lazy and fatalistic, contented to live out his days with the dyspeptic schoolteacher who has taken him in off the street. I’ll have to take Bradley’s word for it that this popular serialized novel (of which this is the first of three volumes) is a satire in which the cat is “a mirror to Japanese Meiji society at the time the novel was written.” The voice is amusingly lofty and snobbish, but I was uninterested in the story and set it aside at 35%, unsure whether to return to it in future. (Read via Edelweiss)
She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai and Naruki Nagakawa (2021; 2022)
[Translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori]
Shinkai is an anime filmmaker and I think this originated in his manga. I could spot the enduring influence of Sōseki in the setup of strays interacting with fellow cats and dogs. Most of these linked short stories involve young women grappling with turbulent careers and uncertain romantic relationships. When cats show up in their lives, they offer uncomplicated friendship and reliable tenderness. Narration, whether first- or third-person, alternates between owner and cat in each. I started reading this against my better judgement, as from The Guest Cat onwards I’ve found Japanese cat books bland and twee. It’s the combination of a flat style, my unfamiliarity with the context, and (magic) realism, which has worked for me with Murakami but hardly anyone else. This was a half-hearted skim. (Little Free Library)
Cat manga, though: that’s the ticket!
Chi’s Sweet France by Kanata Konami; illus. Catherine Bouvier (2025; 2026)
[Translated from Japanese by Akiko Indei and Pierre Fernande]
I had read The Complete Chi’s Sweet Home, Part 4 and really not enjoyed it (see above), but because this is a series of shorts, and set in France, it was palatable. I thought about saving it for Paris in July but ended up reading it on my computer in one sitting last month. Chi’s family (a mom, a dad and a little boy) moves from Japan to Paris. She wants to go outside and join the French cats in prowling the rooftops, but the mother says it’s too dangerous. Only when they move out to the countryside from the Paris apartment can she go outside. I don’t love the simplistic drawing style – no noses, a triangle or trapezoid for the mouth – or the cutesy writing (e.g. “Chi’s territowy”). Still, reading this was a pleasant way to spend half an hour. (Read via Edelweiss)
Mobu’s Diary: Earning Your Paté by Kathy Lam (2022; 2026)
[Translated from Chinese by Cindy Ko and Kevin Wang]
We have a winner! This comic was delightful through and through, and I hope more adventures are to come. Mobu is a three-year-old, slightly neurotic calico. This noble kitty decides she wants to earn her keep (imagine that!) and scans feline-suitable job listings: yoga teacher, massage therapist, pest exterminator, tuna sales rep… When she sees an opening at a cat café, she knows it’s right for her. The only issue is that she doesn’t really like being petted, so she mostly naps on higher shelves. All the same, just by being herself – playful, sleepy, cute and rotund – and observing human behaviour, she manages to be truly helpful. She comforts a distressed student who’s freaking out about a bad grade. She also notices and sometimes intervenes when ‘friends’ are really competing, a couple is fighting, and a boss is trying to take advantage of a worker. Her fellow cats are equally well drawn, and their antics could easily inspire a whole series. (Read via Edelweiss) Forthcoming from Andrews McMeel Publishing on 22 September.
Bonus:
Kitten by Stacey Yu – Yu’s first novel is a peculiar, endearing fable about a young Chinese American woman who identifies with her boyfriend’s cat as she works to overcome codependency issues with him and her mother. On a beach vacation, James cooks for Katie and does all the driving. “I liked being with James because he made it easier for me to be alive,” she admits to herself. James’s family pet, Silver, is the first cat she has met. James found Silver on this beach a decade before, and the cat regularly swims in the ocean with her owners. Katie is “struck by the intensity of my affection for her”—somewhere between maternal instinct and envy of the cat’s comfort and security. Yu maintains the uncomfortable ambiguity of the central relationships as literal realities and psychological explanations coalesce. That Katie’s estranged mother’s nickname for her is “Kitten” connects the novel’s major elements.
Forthcoming from Sceptre (UK) on 30 July and Random House (USA) on August 4. (See my full review for Shelf Awareness.)
Coming up tomorrow: An anthology of cat-related letters and a couple of short memoirs about life with a beloved cat.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates for #1961Club
Simon and Karen’s classics reading weeks are always a great excuse to pick up an older book or two from my shelves. I’m just back from 12 days in Portugal and Spain (about which more anon) in time to post a review for the latest one, the 1961 Club. I own the film tie-in paperback of Revolutionary Road and indeed saw the Leonardo DiCaprio–Kate Winslet film when it first came out, but had no specific memory of the plot. However, I’d read Yates’s The Easter Parade and Cold Spring Harbor and also recently experienced Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge, so I knew the sort of suburban despair I was in for.
Frank and April Wheeler appear to be the perfect 1950s American family, with a lovely home in Connecticut’s Revolutionary Hill Estates, a daughter and a son, and Frank’s comfortable New York City job at Knox Business Machines – which he is proud of getting without so much as mentioning that his father was a long-time Knox employee. But neither Frank nor April ever intended to be trapped in provincial conventionality. Frank has “made it clear, time and again, that his job was the very least important part of his life, never to be mentioned except in irony.” The ennui hiding under the surface of their marriage seeps out through alcoholism and adultery. In one fantastic sequence, Frank calculatedly seduces the office receptionist on his 30th birthday, arriving home late for April and the kids’ homemade cake.
The Wheelers begin to dream of escape, specifically moving to Paris, where April could be the family breadwinner as an ambassador’s secretary and Frank would finally be free to produce the novel he’s been toying with writing ever since he finished his military service. They start telling their acquaintances – their drinking buddies, Shep and Milly Campbell; the local real-estate agent, Helen Givings – about the plan to leave for Europe in the fall. They’re sure it’s their chance to push back at capitalist conformity, leave small-mindedness behind, and be happy and bohemian. That is, until April finds out that she’s pregnant a third time.
Yates really plays up the ironies of the situation. The Wheelers try to be avant-garde but keep getting sucked back into the same old ways of doing things. Glimpses into the main couple’s upbringings hint at their psychological motivations but don’t explain away their mistakes. The omniscient narrator’s occasional highlighting of others’ perspectives is particularly effective for contrasting radical ideas with the status quo. Shep is in love with April and has his own romantic fantasies, while Mrs. Givings hopes that the Wheelers could be a good influence on her son, John, who pays visits to them on the Sunday afternoons that he’s temporarily let out of a mental institution. It is only John, the ‘mad’ character, who truly appreciates the gravity of what Frank and April are attempting, and mocks them for faltering: “You figure it’s more comfy here in the old Hopeless Emptiness after all[?]”
Are the Wheelers revolutionary – in what they long for, in what they attempt, in what they admit to themselves? To an extent. But there’s also what they settle for, and what is possible in 1955; April, in particular, isn’t allowed to become her own person. As in Jude the Obscure, punishment seems inevitable for those who reach above their station or outside of social norms. This is a justly famous novel of ordinary angst, a tragedy so realistic it can’t be ignored. (Secondhand purchase – Wonder Book and Video, many years ago)
Here are some other famous 1961 titles that I’ve read but mostly not reviewed (I’ve now read just 5 of the top 20 on the Goodreads list of the most popular books published that year):
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (twice)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (twice)
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
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 and 1925 Club.
Most Anticipated Books of 2026
Later than intended, but here we are. I’ve narrowed it down to the 25 books I’m most looking forward to in January–September, though no doubt I’ll have heard of many more unmissable titles before that time is up. My list is dominated by fiction, which I tend to find out about earlier. Also on my radar are novels by Sharon Bala, Freya Bromley, Mary Costello, Louise Kennedy, Ben Lerner, Paula McLain, Liz Nugent and Tom Perrotta; short stories by Jess Gibson (Margaret Atwood’s daughter); and nonfiction from Margaret Drabble, Cal Flyn, Siri Hustvedt and Anne Lamott.
In release date order, with UK publication info given first if available. The blurbs are adapted from Goodreads. I’ve taken the liberty of using whichever cover I prefer.
Fiction
Departure(s) by Julian Barnes [20 Jan., Vintage (Penguin) / Knopf]: (Currently reading) I get more out of rereading Barnes’s classics than reading his latest stuff, but I’ll still attempt anything he publishes. He’s 80 and calls this his last book. So far, it’s heavily about memory. “Julian played matchmaker to Stephen and Jean, friends he met at university in the 1960s; as the third wheel, he was deeply invested in the success of their love”. Sounds way too similar to 1991’s Talking It Over, and the early pages have been tedious. (Review copy from publisher)
Half His Age by Jennette McCurdy [20 Jan., Fourth Estate / Ballantine]: McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, was stranger than fiction. I was so impressed by her recreation of her childhood perspective on her dysfunctional Mormon/hoarding/child-actor/cancer survivor family that I have no doubt she’ll do justice to this reverse-Lolita scenario about a 17-year-old who’s in love with her schlubby creative writing teacher. (Library copy on order)
Our Better Natures by Sophie Ward [5 Feb., Corsair]: I loved Ward’s Booker-longlisted Love and Other Thought Experiments (though the follow-up, The Schoolhouse, was a letdown). “Amid the chaos and political upheaval of 1970s America, three very different women must accept the world as it is, or act to change it. Phyllis Patterson is a housewife in White Plains, Illinois. … Andrea Dworkin is an activist in Amsterdam. … Muriel Rukeyser is a poet in New York.” (Library copy on order)
Brawler: Stories by Lauren Groff [Riverhead, Feb. 24]: (Currently reading) Controversial opinion: Short stories are where Groff really shines. Three-quarters in, this collection is just as impressive as Delicate Edible Birds or Florida. “Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region (New England to Florida to California) these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.” (For Shelf Awareness review) (Edelweiss download)
Kin by Tayari Jones [24 Feb., Oneworld / Knopf]: I’m a big fan of Leaving Atlanta and An American Marriage. This sounds like Brit Bennett meets Toni Morrison. “Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. … A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South”. (Edelweiss download)
Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave [12 March, Picador / March 24, S&S/Summit Books]: There have often been queer undertones in Hargrave’s work, but this David Nicholls-esque plot sounds like her most overt. “Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur in Paris, 1978. … The moment the two women meet the spark is undeniable. But their encounter turns into far more than a summer of love. It is the beginning of a relationship that will define their lives and every decision they have yet to make.” (Edelweiss download)
Patient, Female: Stories by Julie Schumacher [May 5, Milkweed Editions]: I found out about this via a webinar with Milkweed and a couple of other U.S. indie publishers. I loved Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members. “[T]his irreverent collection … balances sorrow against laughter. … Each protagonist—ranging from girlhood to senescence—receives her own indelible voice as she navigates social blunders, generational misunderstandings, and the absurdity of the human experience.” The publicist likened the tone to Meg Wolitzer.
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout [7 May, Viking (Penguin) / May 5, Random House]: Hurrah for moving on from Lucy Barton at last! “Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders … and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. … [O]ne day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. … [This] takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal.”
Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller [7 May, Penguin / June 2, Tin House]: I’ve read everything of Fuller’s and hope this will reverse the worsening trend of her novels, though true crime is overdone. “1987: After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care system, sixteen-year-old Ursula … is invited to join a squat at The Underwood. … Thirty-six years later, Ursula is a renowned, reclusive sculptor living under a pseudonym in London when her identity is exposed by true-crime documentary-maker.” (Edelweiss download)
Little Vanities by Sarah Gilmartin [21 May, ONE (Pushkin)]: Gilmartin’s Service was great. “Dylan, Stevie and Ben have been inseparable since their days at Trinity, when everything seemed possible. … Two decades on, … Dylan, once a rugby star, is stranded on the sofa, cared for by his wife Rachel. Across town, Stevie and Ben’s relationship has settled into weary routine. Then, after countless auditions, Ben lands a role in Pinter’s Betrayal. As rehearsals unfold, the play’s shifting allegiances seep into reality, reviving old jealousies and awakening sudden longings.”
Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa [21 May, Faber / Sept. 22, Farrar, Straus and Giroux]: A Ghost in the Throat was brilliant and this sounds right up my street. “In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, … she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices”.
John of John by Douglas Stuart [21 May, Picador / May 5, Grove Press]: I DNFed Shuggie Bain and haven’t tried Stuart since, but the Outer Hebrides setting piqued my attention. “[W]ith little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris [and] begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian”. (For early Shelf Awareness review) (Edelweiss download)
Land by Maggie O’Farrell [2 June, Tinder Press / Knopf]: I haven’t fully loved O’Farrell’s shift into historical fiction, but I’m still willing to give this a go. “On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam [age 10], are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one.” (Edelweiss download)
Whistler by Ann Patchett [2 June, Bloomsbury / Harper]: Patchett is hella reliable. “When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. … Meeting again, time falls away; … [in a story of] adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them.” (Edelweiss download)
Returns and Exchanges by Kayla Rae Whitaker [2 June, Scribe / May 19, Random House]: Whitaker’s The Animators is one of my favourite novels that hardly anyone else has ever heard of. “A sweeping novel of one [discount department store-owning] Kentucky family’s rise and fall throughout the 1980s—a tragicomic tour de force about love and marriage, parents and [their four] children, and the perils of mixing family with business”. (Edelweiss download)
The Great Wherever by Shannon Sanders [9 July, Viking (Penguin) / July 7, Henry Holt]: Sanders’s linked story collection Company left me keen to follow her career. Aubrey Lamb, 32, is “grieving the recent loss of her father and the end of a relationship.” She leaves Washington, DC for her Black family’s ancestral Tennessee farm. “But the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance … [and] the ghosts of her ancestors interject with their own exasperated, gossipy commentary on the flaws and foibles of relatives living and dead”. (Edelweiss download)
Country People by Daniel Mason [14 July, John Murray / July 7, Random House]: It doesn’t seem long enough since North Woods for there to be another Mason novel, but never mind. “Miles Krzelewski is … twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales … [W]hen his wife Kate accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the far away forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be his year to finally move forward with his life. … [A] luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.”
It Will Come Back to You: Collected Stories by Sigrid Nunez [14 July, Virago / Riverhead]: Nunez is one of my favourite authors but I never knew she’d written short stories. The blurb reveals very little about them! “Carefully selected from three decades of work … Moving from the momentous to the mundane, Nunez maintains her irrepressible humor, bite, and insight, her expert balance between intimacy and universality, gravity and levity, all while entertainingly probing the philosophical questions we have come to expect, such as: How can we withstand the passage of time? Is memory the greatest fiction?” (Edelweiss download)
Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel [17 Sept., Picador / Sept. 15, Knopf]: The synopsis sounds a bit meh, but in my eyes Mandel can do no wrong. “2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some good news: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party. Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria … Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night.”
The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain [17 Sept., Vintage (Penguin)]: “Set in 1930s England and fictionalises the inspiration behind Daphne du Maurier’s famous novel, Rebecca.” Strangely, this started life as a short story (in The American Lover), then become a screenplay authored by Tremain (the film is in production and stars Uma Thurman and Anthony Hopkins), and is now being expanded into a novel. Tremain is 82 and a survivor of major cancer; I do wonder if this is the last book we can expect from her.
Nonfiction
Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival by Trina Moyles [Jan. 6, Pegasus Books]: Out now! “When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father … brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. … After years of working for human rights organizations, Trina returned to northern Alberta for a job as a fire tower lookout, while [her brother] Brendan worked in the oil sands … Over four summers, Trina begins to move beyond fear and observe the extraordinary essence of the maligned black bear”. (For BookBrowse review) (Review e-copy)
Moveable Feasts: A Story of Paris in Twenty Meals by Chris Newens [Feb. 3, Pegasus Books; came out in the UK in July 2025 but somehow I missed it!]: I’m a sucker for foodie books and Paris books. A “long-time resident of the historic slaughterhouse quartier Villette takes us on a delightful gastronomic journey around Paris … From Congolese catfish in the 18th to Middle Eastern falafels in the 4th, to the charcuterie served at the libertine nightclubs of Pigalle in the 9th, Newens lifts the lid on the city’s ever-changing, defining, and irresistible food culture.” (Edelweiss download)
Frog: And Other Essays by Anne Fadiman [Feb. 10, Farrar, Straus and Giroux]: Fadiman publishes rarely, and it can be difficult to get hold of her books, but they are always worth it. “Ranging in subject matter from her deceased frog, to archaic printer technology, to the fraught relationship between Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his son Hartley, these essays unlock a whole world—one overflowing with mundanity and oddity—through sly observation and brilliant wit.”
The Beginning Comes after the End: Notes on a World of Change by Rebecca Solnit [March 3, Haymarket Books]: A sequel to Hope in the Dark. Hope is a critically endangered species these days, but Solnit has her eyes open. “While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.” (Edelweiss download)
Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler [7 April, Faber / April 14, Harper]: I didn’t get on with the mammoth biography Paul Clements published in 2022 – it was dry and conventional; entirely unfitting for Morris – but hope for better things from a fellow female travel writer. “Wheeler uncovers the complexity of this twentieth-century icon … Drawing on unprecedented access to Morris’s papers as well as interviews with family, friends and colleagues, Wheeler assembles a captivating … story of longing, traveling and never reaching home.” (Edelweiss download)
Others’ lists whence a few of my ideas came!
What catches your eye here? What other 2026 titles do I need to know about?
#WITMonth, Part I: Susanna Bissoli, Jente Posthuma and More
I’m starting off my Women in Translation month coverage with two short novels: one Italian and one Dutch; both about women navigating loss, family relationships, physical or mental illness, and the desire to be a writer.
Struck by Susanna Bissoli (2024; 2025)
[Translated from Italian by Georgia Wall]
Vera has been diagnosed a second time with breast cancer – the same disease that felled her mother a decade ago. “I’m fed up with feeling like a problem to be taken care of,” she thinks. Even as her treatment continues, she determines to find routes to a bigger life not defined by her illness. Writing is the solution. When she moves in with her grouchy octogenarian father, Zeno Benin, she discovers he’s secretly written a novel, A Lucky Man. The almost entirely unpunctuated document is handwritten across 51 notebooks Vera undertakes to type up and edit alongside her father as his health declines.
At the same time, she becomes possessed by the legend of local living ‘saint’ Annamaria Bigani, who has been visited multiple times by the Virgin Mary and learned her date of death. Wondering if there is a story here that she needs to tell, Vera interviews Bigani, then escapes to Greece for time and creative space. “Do they save us, stories? Or is it our job to save them? I believe writing that story, day in and day out for years, saved my father’s life. But I’m sorry, I don’t have time to save his story: I need to write my own. The saint, or so I thought.” In the end, we learn, Struck – the very novel we are reading – is Vera’s book.
The title comes from a scientific study conducted on people struck by lightning at a country festival in France. How did they survive, and what were the lasting effects? The same questions apply to Vera, who avoids talking about her cancer but whose relationship with her sister Nora is still affected by choices made while their mother was alive. There are many delightful small conversations and incidents here, often involving Vera’s niece Alice. Vera’s relationship with Franco, a doctor who works with asylum seekers, is a steady part of the background. A translator’s afterword helped me understand the thought that went into how to reproduce Vera and others’ use of dialect (La Bassa Veronese vs. standard Italian) through English vernacular – so Vera and her sister say “Mam” and her father uses colourful idioms.
Though I know nothing of Bissoli’s biography, this second novel has the feeling of autofiction. Despite its wrenching themes of illness and the inevitability of death, it’s a lighthearted family story with free-flowing prose that I can enthusiastically recommend to readers of Elizabeth Berg and Catherine Newman.
This was my introduction to new (est. 2023) independent publisher Linden Editions, which primarily publishes literature in translation. I have two more of their books underway for another WIT Month post later this month. And a nice connection is that I corresponded with translator Georgia Wall when she was the publishing manager for The Emma Press.
With thanks to Linden Editions for the free copy for review.
People with No Charisma by Jente Posthuma (2016; 2025)
[Translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey]
Dutch writer Jente Posthuma’s quirky, bittersweet first novel traces the ripples that grief and mental ill health send through a young woman’s life. The narrator’s mother was an aspiring actress; her father runs a mental hospital. A dozen episodic short chapters present snapshots from a neurotic existence as she grows from a child to a thirtysomething starting a family of her own. Some highlights include her moving to Paris to write a novel, and her father – a terrible driver – taking her on a road trip through France. Despite the deadpan humor, there’s heartfelt emotion here and the prose and incidents are idiosyncratic. (Full review forthcoming for Shelf Awareness)
& Reviewed for Foreword Reviews a couple of years ago:
What I Don’t Want to Talk About by Jente Posthuma (2020; 2023)
[Translated from Dutch by Sarah Timmer Harvey]
A young woman bereft after her twin brother’s suicide searches for the seeds of his mental illness. The past resurges, alternating with the present in the book’s few-page vignettes. Their father leaving when they were 11 was a significant early trauma. Her brother came out at 16, but she’d intuited his sexuality when they were eight. With no speech marks, conversations blend into cogitation and memories here. A wry tone tempers the bleakness. (Shortlisted for the European Union Prize for Literature and the International Booker Prize.)
Both featured an unnamed narrator and a similar sense of humor. I concluded that Posthuma excels at exploring family dynamics and the aftermath of bereavement.
I got caught out when I reviewed The Appointment, too: Volckmer doesn’t technically count towards this challenge because she writes in English (and lives in London), but as she’s German, I’m adding in a teaser of my review as a bonus. Oddly, this novella did first appear in another language, French, in 2024, under the title Wonderf*ck. [The full title below was given to the UK edition.]
Calls May Be Recorded [for Training and Monitoring Purposes] by Katharina Volckmer (2025)
Volckmer’s outrageous, uproarious second novel features a sex-obsessed call center employee who negotiates body and mommy issues alongside customer complaints. “Thank you for waiting. My name is Jimmie. How can I help you today?” each call opens. The overweight, homosexual former actor still lives with his mother. His customers’ situations are bizarre and his replies wildly inappropriate; it’s only a matter of time until he faces disciplinary action. As in her debut, Volckmer fearlessly probes the psychological origins of gender dysphoria and sexual behavior. Think of it as an X-rated version of The Office. (Full review forthcoming for Shelf Awareness)
The 2025 McKitterick Prize Winner & SoA Awards Ceremony
Yesterday the Society of Authors’ awards were announced and the prizes handed out at a ceremony in London. As a McKitterick Prize judge, I was asked last month to give a 50-word blurb on the shortlist as a whole—
Each of these six novels has a fully realized style. So confident and inviting are they that it’s hard to believe they are debuts. With nuanced characters and authentic settings and dilemmas, they engage the mind and delight the emotions. I will be following these authors’ careers with keen interest.
—and on each individual shortlisted title:
Etymology and Shakespeare studies are the keys to solving a cold case in Susie Dent’s clever, engrossing mystery, Guilty by Definition.
Psychoanalysis, motherhood, and violence against women are resounding themes in Lauren Elkin’s Scaffolding. As history repeats itself one sweltering Paris summer, the personal and political structures undergirding the protagonists’ parallel lives come into question. This fearless, sophisticated work ponders what to salvage from the past—and what to tear down.
Clinical Intimacy’s mysterious antihero comes to life through interviews with his family, friends and clients. The brilliant oral history format builds a picture of isolation among vulnerable populations, only alleviated by care and touch—especially during Covid-19. Ewan Gass’s intricate story reminds us of the ultimate unknowability of other people.
In Monumenta, Lara Haworth braids satire, magic realism, and metafiction into a compact and surprising meditation on how we seek to memorialise the tragedies of history.
Set in small-town Ireland, The Coast Road is a subtle, compassionate novel in which the characters learn to write their own stories rather than bow to convention and fate. Alan Murrin is a must-read author for fans of Claire Keegan, Louise Kennedy, and Colm Tóibín.
Only Here, Only Now is bursting with vitality. With her broken heart and fizzing brain, Cora Mowat vows to escape her grim Fife town. Tom Newlands’s evocation of the 1990s—and of his teenage narrator—is utterly convincing. Soaring above grief, poverty, and substance abuse, Cora’s voice is pure magic.
Our winner was Tom Newlands for Only Here, Only Now and our runner-up was Lauren Elkin for Scaffolding. (What an honour to have my blurb for the former used in the winners press release, the ceremony programme, and social media publicity.)
Newlands was also a runner-up for the ADCI Literary Prize “for a disabled or chronically ill writer, for an outstanding novel containing a disabled or chronically ill character or characters.” Here’s an excerpt from his statement for the press release:
To have my debut novel recognised in these two categories is particularly meaningful for me because they are linked by my experience. I didn’t start writing until the age of 40, in large part because growing up neurodivergent I didn’t feel my thought processes or methods of working were compatible with the production of a novel. There were no role models out there publishing stories like mine, and in the end, I wrote Only Here, Only Now because I couldn’t find the novel I wanted to read – a warm, vivid and funny story that examined poverty, disability and belonging, and that featured characters rarely found in British fiction.
Looking back to early on in this prize journey (which started back in November) … here was some of my early reading:
And our longlist:
A couple of my favourite books from my reading that didn’t make the shortlist were:
Hyper by Agri Ismaïl [I longlisted it – and then shortlisted it – but was outvoted]
Following a Kurdish family across several decades, this is a zeitgeist-y story that examines questions of national and personal autonomy. With its Dubai, Baghdad, London, and New York settings, it sets the second generation’s luxury, high finance, and fully online worlds against their parents’ bitter experience of exile after a failed independence movement. With its themes of dysfunction and failures and the long view of how we got here from there, it reminded me of Jonathan Franzen’s body of work.
How to Be Somebody Else by Miranda Pountney [It had two votes to make the shortlist, but because it was so similar to Scaffolding in its basics (a thirtysomething woman in a big city, the question of motherhood, and pregnancy loss) we decided to cut it.]
This is the addictively readable story of Dylan, a late-thirties English woman who gives up her New York City advertising job and ponders authorship and motherhood while house-sitting an acquaintance’s apartment—and carrying on an affair with the married downstairs neighbour. As we see her interact with family and friends, we come to appreciate her not as some stereotypical ‘sad girl’ or ‘disaster woman’, but as an Everywoman seeking the time and space to become herself. It’s a sharp and witty novel for fans of Sally Rooney.
For the first time, I got to attend the SoA Awards ceremony in person yesterday. It was a hot day to be travelling in London, and after the oven of the Bakerloo line I was grateful to escape into the cool of Southwark Cathedral and its grounds. It was such a juxtaposition between the sleek City architecture and the ancient refuge of a church.
I worried that on such a warm and then busy day Hodge the cathedral cat wouldn’t show himself, but as I picked up my name badge he was asking to be let inside from the courtyard. He didn’t seem interested in strokes so I followed him at a respectful distance and let him settle in for a watchful rest.
Nominated authors and judges were treated to an exceptional afternoon tea, followed by the ceremony and drinks reception. It was lovely to meet my fellow judges Anietie Isong and Kathy O’Shaughnessy (author of the fantastic In Love with George Eliot, which won the SoA’s Paul Torday Memorial Prize) in the flesh as I’d only met them on Zoom before. We chatted a good bit with Lara Haworth, one of our shortlistees, and with Anne Booth, one of the Queen’s Knickers Award (children’s books) nominees, and also got to briefly meet Tom Newlands when he arrived for the ceremony. I always look out for literary ‘celebrities’ at such events and yesterday spotted Naomi Alderman, Caroline Bird, Joanne Harris and Alice Jolly.
Dean Rev. Mark Oakley gave a welcome address via video, praising authors for bringing “resonance” rather than just “relevance.” He exhorted us, in the words of David Copperfield, to “read as if for life.” Joseph Coelho then gave a terrific keynote speech celebrating words written by humans (as opposed to an inaccurate AI-written bio of himself that he once encountered) and encouraging shortlistees, especially, to take time to bask in their achievement. Rejection is an ongoing, annual thing for him even at this stage of his career – he still remembers the £50 poetry gigs, changing in library toilets and school staff rooms; and the 12 years he spent trying to get published – even after he became the youngest-ever children’s laureate in 2022. “Wait for no one,” he challenged us: no one is going to give you permission or come save you, so go out there and do what you’re meant to do.
What an all-round fantastic experience this was! I’m so grateful to the Society of Authors for the opportunity.
Other notable winners announced yesterday included:
- Ashani Lewis (the only double winner): the Betty Trask Prize and Somerset Maugham award for Winter Animals
- Hisham Matar & Elif Shafak: the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize (for a novel focusing on the experience of travel away from home), joint winners for My Friends and There Are Rivers in the Sky
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?
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 