Tag Archives: poetry

20 Books of Summer, 17–20: Jaouad, Kim, Merwin, Piñeiro (#WITMonth)

By Rebecca Foster on August 31, 2026 | 14 Comments

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)

July Releases by Carson, Du Bois, Humphreys, Nolen & Watkins

By Rebecca Foster on July 31, 2026 | 15 Comments

This month I have novels set in the Mojave Desert and a Northern Ireland that never was; poetry about food and cross-cultural identity / adolescent boys and self-harm; and a short nonfiction book offering ideas for how to reconnect with nature. Repeated themes include environmental damage, Bible imagery and toxic masculinity.

Few and Far Between by Jan Carson

“So this is all true.”

“Historically true or made-up true?”

“What’s the difference?”

This was my first from Carson – and her U.S. debut – though she’s well known in Northern Ireland for her novels and short story collections. (Our own Cathy of 746 Books gets a mention in the Acknowledgements!) Her fourth novel is a work of alternative history with subtle magic realist touches. In 1958, Terrence O’Neill (shortly to be elected Prime Minister) proposed draining Lough Neagh to give Northern Ireland a seventh county. That never happened, but in the world of Carson’s novel it did, creating “the Ark,” an archipelago of islands in the large lake. It was primarily a refuge for people fleeing the Troubles – and also happens to provide a nice raft of allusions to the Book of Genesis. In 2017, middle-aged siblings Marion and Robert-John Connolly are two of the last few remaining residents of the Ark, working as caretakers. They grew up here with their overbearing anthropologist father and German mother. Rumour has it that the government will soon flood the lake to deal with an algae bloom. The Connollys hope that the arrival of Alex Anderson, a homegrown academic writing a history of the Ark, will be their chance to defend their home.

Carson has given careful attention to her worldbuilding here. Along with the previously inhabited islands are four on the “Far Side” that seem more metaphorical: Middle Flat houses “the Sleepers,” who are in a coma due to trauma (cf. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s The Sleeping Beauties); Church Flat is a sort of bardo for the “Almost Dead”; Tom’s Hard is a suicide spot; and Eglish Flat is where people go to bury things they don’t want anyone to know about. Except, like the return of the repressed made physical, all that detritus has been resurfacing. Excerpts from Alex’s manuscript in progress treat this all matter-of-factly, and before long it all feels completely natural. Flashbacks to the 1970s and 1990s fill in backstories for the oddball central characters, whose off-kilter upbringing keeps them tied to an island chain that harbours as many bad memories as good ones. This was intriguing for its blend of realism and fabulist elements; I never knew what was going to happen next. I’ll read more by Carson for sure.

With thanks to Scribner for the proof copy for review.

Eating Air by Suyin Du Bois

In this yummy debut poetry pamphlet, food is wrapped up with memory and serves as tokens of a mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian identity. Sometimes when Du Bois is travelling in Asia, people assume that she is a total foreigner and bring her a fork instead of chopsticks, or remark on her bravery in trying dishes that are an acquired taste. In fact, she’s up for eating anything, no matter how spicy or unusual. Food can be about travel and adventure, but also about comfort and a sense of home. Family chats and celebrations revolve around good meals and drink: “We sate silence with stories / of firm favourites and elusive treats we long for”. A trip to London’s Chinatown entails more of that delicious alliteration and sibilance: “a pile of slender leaves serenades me with its many names: / eng chai, ong choy, kangkong, water spinach, morning glory.” I particularly loved the clever blend of cookery and family tradition in “Ode to Kaya,” where the quest for the perfect egg jam made with palm sugar and coconut milk brings back memories of a departed relative: “Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed / into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked / regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe.” These 19 poems are a feast, ranging widely across places, languages and cuisines.

With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.

Unwilded: Finding Our Way Back to Nature by Alastair Humphreys

I discovered Humphreys’ work through his previous book, the Wainwright Prize-longlisted Local (and he’s now a judge for this year’s nature writing race). His wry, sometimes silly tone is reminiscent of Lev Parikian, and the two authors share a clear passion for the natural world and for enthusing others about its everyday wonders here in England. Humphreys opens with two recent events that reassured him that people care about nature: the public outcry that greeted the illegal cutting down of the famous Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian’s Wall, and the joyful (if competitive) response to sightings of the Aurora Borealis. The former also serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when people are disconnected from nature: The two men convicted for the Sycamore Gap incident retorted that it was “just a tree.”

Humphreys doesn’t point fingers but acknowledges that the issue is systemic and affects all of us, even avowed countryside-lovers: “Our busy indoor lives, the moth-like lure of bright screens and shopping centres, and restricted access to much of our remaining green space all combine to make us more disconnected from the natural world than any previous generation.” Short chapters give strategies for various activities that, in as little as 15 minutes, could get people more engaged with the outdoors: litter picking, photographing the same tree every week for a year, foraging for blackberries, testing the water quality in a local stream, wild swimming, planting trees, and joining in a parkrun. I liked his idea of marking each full moon by enjoying a different spot by night. He also worked outdoors for one hour per day for a week, and dabbled in performance art through graffiti reading “15 Minutes to Nature” with an arrow or “NOTICE THIS TREE.” It’s easy to become disheartened by the scale of environmental problems, but Humphreys suggests choosing five to focus on, and then joining up with other local concerned citizens to work towards five corresponding mitigating actions. This is a readable and practical book written with a light touch. Like Lucy Jones’s Losing Eden, it ends with a utopian epilogue imagining humans living in harmony with a restored natural world. Let’s all keep living in hope, and doing our bit to make it a reality.

With thanks to the author and Eye Books for the free copy for review.

Afterlight by Caleb Nolen

Nolen’s debut collection won the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry (the same award that my old blogger friend Carolyn Oliver won for her first book, Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble). It reflects on an early life marked by male friendship, addiction and other self-destructive behaviours, including suicidal ideation. The poet barely knew his father, who had a new wife and kids and treated meetings with his older sons as begrudged obligations. He and his high school friends snuck beer, weed and prescription pills. There were other even more dangerous things around, too –

from “First Gun”

A pistol, wrapped in an old shirt, hidden behind a panel

in his parents’ basement. When he brought it out to show us,

he held it carefully in both hands.

I was reading this collection at the same time as Michael Amherst’s The Boyhood of Cain, and the two chimed for their equation of expected masculinity with violence –

from “Letter to Cain”

My first consolation, my first friend,

tell me what you learned when the blood cried out:

who are we the keepers of, we who were not kept?

Nolen is 40, too young to have four dead friends – Bobby, Mike, Jonathan and Troy – threading through his memory. The book is rife with biblical references (“Jonah Years,” “Killing the Fattened Calf”), including letters addressed to particular figures: Abel, Job, the Woman Taken in Adultery, Paul the Apostle, Judas, the Man Possessed by Demons. Personal and religious history mesh, such that the quartet of departed friends are included alongside Mary of Oignies and the like in an Appendix of Hagiographies.

You’re making a life out of scribbling

the names of your dead friends.

This is a sombre collection that looks back with pain rather than nostalgia. Gentle alliteration and glimpses of nature help to make the vision of the past endurable.

With thanks to the University of Utah Press for the advanced e-copy for review.

Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins

Watkins’s fourth work of fiction exudes love for a distinctive and endangered landscape: the deserts of the American West. Rose has worked for the Sierra Club and has a preteen daughter, Juniper, who lives with her father back east. The book opens with Miles, a former lover, returning to Rose’s life. Approaching age 40 and grieving her alcoholic mother’s untimely death, she finds herself yearning for a baby even though she feels it’s morally questionable to have children in a time of climate breakdown. If Miles won’t commit, she has a backup plan called “The Swirl” whereby male acquaintances will be invited to inseminate her after signing away parental rights. (Just the sperm, thanks; Rose will take care of the rest.) Meanwhile, she’s part of a loose group based at the Yellow Pine encampment, protesting the construction of a solar farm that would devastate local tortoise populations. The defenders’ impassioned conversations about how to work toward good in a time of corporation-driven extinctions are a highlight. It’s a bold, kooky, horny novel in the same vein as Melissa Broder’s Death Valley and Miranda July’s All Fours, but still manages an intellectual rigour and felicity of prose that I perhaps wasn’t expecting. Some sample lines:

It was surprisingly nice to be named a friend by the man who’d once poured salt on the slug of her heart

Rose and Miles sallied forth, trying again in Indian summer in a low-key failed state on a dying planet.

Love laid down a new layer. Rose’s despair patinaed with faith.

“I’m trying to be unapocalyptic. I’m trying to be practical.”

I’ve been reading Watkins since her debut story collection, Battleborn, won the Dylan Thomas Prize, though it’s her first novel, Gold Fame Citrus, to which I’m most partial. Her third book, I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness, went too far off the rails for me, whereas this one is a return to form. The outlook is a little bit woo-woo and I appreciated the environmental theme more than the indulgent autofiction framework. Still, it feels realistic and up-to-the-minute, positing human connection and purposeful collective action as antidotes to hopelessness. (“It wasn’t enough to be anti … You had to be for something.”)

With thanks to riverrun/John Murray (Hachette) for the free copy for review.

Which of these July releases have you read, or will you seek out now?

What am I missing out on?

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: Alastair Humphreys, alternative history, autofiction, Caleb Nolen, Claire Vaye Watkins, deserts, Dylan Thomas Prize, environmentalism, grief, islands, Jan Carson, Lev Parikian, Lough Neagh, Lucy Jones, magic realism, Malaysia, Melissa Broder, Michael Amherst, Miranda July, Mojave Desert, Northern Ireland, poetry, Scribner, suicide, Suyin Du Bois, The Emma Press, trees, Wainwright Prize

The Best Books from the First Half of 2026

By Rebecca Foster on June 30, 2026 | 20 Comments

Hard to believe it, but it’s that time of year already. For a decade now, I’ve been making a first-half superlatives list. It remains to be seen how many of these will make it onto my overall best-of year rundown, but for now, these are my 15 favourite current-year releases that I’ve read so far (representing the top 23% of the 2026 releases I’ve read this year; or the top 10% of my overall reading so far). It’s been a brilliant year for fiction! Links are to my full reviews where available.

Fiction

Daffodil Days by Helen Bain: Bain’s remarkable debut novel builds a slantwise biographical portrait of Sylvia Plath through her interactions with friends and acquaintances in the last years of her life. It’s everyone from her midwife to her brother to a washing machine salesman. The vignettes proceed backward through the book’s 17-month span: a determined metaphorical move from resignation to optimism. The focus is therefore not on the end of Plath’s life but on the full flow of her genius.

The Half Life by Rachel Beanland: In Beanland’s enchanting third novel, a young Navy wife has a sexual awakening and discovers her scientific vocation while stationed on an Italian island. The title cleverly suggests both nuclear fallout and how secrets constrain people. Beanland adeptly depicts grief, homesickness, and culture shock, and illuminates American and Italian politics. Sensual and intriguing, this belated-coming-of-age story reminiscent of Beautiful Ruins and The Atomic Weight of Love is an absorbing summer read. [Forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on July 14.]

Brawler by Lauren Groff: The nine short stories in Groff’s exceptional eighth book profile women in states of desperation and probe legacies of loss and violence. Themes of midlife reinvention and latent queerness recur. There’s also a startling Jamesian fable; a 1950s Southern gothic black comedy that would do Flannery O’Connor proud; and the masterful novella-length examination of privilege and obsession. The prose is stellar and the endings breathtaking. Groff is a first-rate novelist, but her short stories are truly peerless.

Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth: This work of autofiction circles the question of becoming a mother and posits the writing life and other relationships as partial substitutes for parenthood. The narrator spends three days a week riding at a local stable and tending to a black and white mare. Haworth-Booth makes caring for an animal analogous with motherhood, but doesn’t stop at easy symbolism. Cultivating bodily bonds with other creatures is part of how we find purpose when life is threatened by chronic illness and climate breakdown.

Whistler by Ann Patchett: Patchett is a master on the subject of family dysfunction, and her 10th novel, a stepdaughter-stepfather love story, is as wise as ever on secrets, traumatic memories, and storytelling. The bittersweet tone is perfectly judged. Daphne’s banter with her loved ones is a delight. The plot whisks along, its satisfying full circle returning to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she saw Eddie Triplett for the first time in 40 years, and incorporates a clever metanarrative twist. Quiet but surprising, witty yet heartrending.

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford: A grown-up fantasy book for those of us who were Narnia-obsessed children. It’s a rollicking blend of realistic WWII-set fiction and alternative history, with some magical and time travel elements. I was impressed that Spufford voices a young woman as protagonist and takes her ambitions and sexual desire seriously. There are witty turns of phrase throughout yet never an inappropriate levity. This parallel world is cleverly imagined and carefully reasoned, and the whole is shot through with a clear love of London.

John of John by Douglas Stuart: In Stuart’s superb third novel, set on the Isle of Harris in the 1990s, Cal seeks to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family’s expectations and his devout upbringing. An absorbing, deliciously melodramatic story is built around the contrast between modernity and the old ways. The characters’ power plays and acts of desperation are heartrending, but mischief and love of colour and crafts lend lightness. Stuart’s every observation is profound; the simplest phrase is memorable for its beauty.

Nonfiction

The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly: Fennelly takes the same approach as in flash fiction: some of these 45 pieces are as short as one sentence, remarking on life’s irony, poignancy or brevity. Again and again, she loops back to her sister’s untimely death; other topics are her mother’s worsening dementia, her happy marriage, her continuing 28-year friendships with her college roommates, the pandemic, and her ageing body. One of the most in-depth pieces revisits a lonely stint teaching in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s.

Leaving Home by Mark Haddon: Eighty-seven nonchronological vignettes range across Haddon’s life and his parents’. Most are awful: his cold, invalid mother; his father’s adultery; cruel treatment at boarding school; medical crises. Impressive that he’s a functional person given the lack of love and empathy in his early life, and that he’s so honest about mental health. Haddon is also an artist and there’s a wealth of comics, portraits and family photographs here (plus cynical captions on stock photos to puncture any potential nostalgia).

Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt: Paul Auster died of non-small cell lung cancer on April 30, 2024. “I’m living in a haunted house,” his widow writes. This isn’t a straightforward bereavement memoir but moves back and forth between past and present and incorporates various documents, such as e-mail updates she sent to friends and family during Paul’s illness. It’s particularly interesting to learn about their mutual influence on each other’s work. Recommended to fans of either or both authors, as well as those interested in grief stories.

Vessel: The Shape of Absent Bodies by Dani Netherclift: One scorching afternoon in 1993, the author’s father and brother drowned while swimming in an irrigation channel near their Australia home. A joint closed-casket funeral took place six days later. Eighteen at the time, Netherclift witnessed her relatives’ disappearance but didn’t see their bodies. Must one see the corpse to have closure? she wonders. “The presence of absence” is an overarching paradox. The contradictions and ironies of the situation defy resolution.

Emmie Arbel: The Colour of Memory by Barbara Yelin: An illustrated biography of a child Holocaust survivor based on interviews. Survival is not a one-time event because trauma is complex and ongoing. In Emmie’s case, her foster father (himself a Holocaust survivor) molested her for years. The colour palette is appropriately sombre. And yet there is vibrant colour in the depiction of Emmie’s home and garden in Israel. This is a work of real courage, of speaking out in spite of a suspicion that all is bleak and meaningless.

Poetry

Visitations by Julia Alvarez: Like a miniature autobiography in verse, Alvarez’s radiant fifth collection offers snapshots from her life: a childhood in the Dominican Republic, immigration to 1960s New York City, the vicissitudes of adulthood, and the bittersweetness of later-life love. In a prose afterword, she calls the poems “visitations from selves of the past and present.” With its vivid scenes and alliterative phrasing, this gorgeous collection presents food and family, memory and companionship, as talismans to hold against the darkness.

Scrap Book by Nick Martino: Martino’s debut poetry collection draws on his mother’s journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and his father’s incarceration. The imagery spotlights Midwest farm country. Love and meaning are salvaged from family wreckage in the same way one might “look/ for fugitive beauty in the bulldozed” orchard. Free verse alternates with forms: an unrhymed sonnet, an aubade, and a “duplex.” Alliteration and assonance sparkle, and two poems employ anaphoric rhetoric.

The Way the Water Held Me by Catherine Redford: Redford was 35 with a young child when her wife died of cancer. We don’t hear so much about being widowed early, or in a same-sex partnership. Redford interrogates the expectations of widowhood through biographical poems about Mary Shelley. I loved the archival vocabulary of “Obituary” and how belongings left behind take on outsize significance. The alliteration and nature imagery are just right. From the hardest of circumstances came something tender and lovely.

Have you read any of these, or might you now based on my recommendation? What other 2026 releases should I catch up on?

Posted in: Book lists, Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: alternative history, Ann Patchett, Barbara Yelin, bereavement memoirs, Beth Ann Fennelly, cancer, Catherine Redford, Dani Netherclift, Dominican Republic, Douglas Stuart, drowning, Emily Haworth-Booth, fantasy, flash fiction, Francis Spufford, graphic novels, Helen Bain, historical fiction, Holocaust, horses, Isle of Harris, Italy, Julia Alvarez, Lauren Groff, Mark Haddon, Nick Martino, poetry, prison, Rachel Beanland, short stories, Siri Hustvedt, superlatives, Sylvia Plath

Love Your Library: June 2026

By Rebecca Foster on June 29, 2026 | 20 Comments

Thanks to Eleanor, Marcie and Skai for posting about their recent library reads!

I went to a very different sort of library early this month: Liquid Library, a cocktail bar and restaurant in Westminster, Maryland. Their cocktail menu is extensive and the prices reasonable – heaven! I had two gin-based drinks – a Lychee Fizz and a 1920s classic, Aviation (violet and maraschino liqueurs) – and my sister, for whose 50th birthday it was a belated celebration, had two vodka ones. The Prohibition theme was stronger than the library motif, but it was still fun. We’ll have to go back next time I’m visiting so I can try more!

My local library system was the key to my being able to follow the Jhalak Poetry Prize (for writers of colour) and the Women’s Prize for Fiction this year. I heartily agree with the judges’ selections of I Sing to the Greenhearts and The Correspondent! I’ve also read the Queen’s Knickers Prize nominees (that’s the Society of Authors’ prize for picture books!) that happened to be available in my library and liked the runner-up, The Tour at School, but not as much as the Bently (below).

My library use over the last month:

(links are to any book reviews not already featured on the blog)

READ

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash
The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Women’s Prize for Fiction winner)
I Sing to the Greenhearts by Maggie Harris (Jhalak Prize winner)
Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly (Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist)
A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisèle Pelicot
Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries by David Robinson

Also a few children’s picture books (which don’t count towards my year totals) from the Queen’s Knickers shortlist:

The Tour at School by Katie Clapham; illus. by Nadia Shireen – About being the new kid in school. Good diversity rep.
Ava and the Acorn by Paddy Donnelly – About the changing of seasons and the ageing and inevitable death of all things human and natural – though there’s hope of new life yet. Mawkish but well-meaning.
Bessie’s Bees by George Kirk; illus. by Ana Gómez – About making the most of ADHD rather than seeing it as a problem. Cute.

Plus my brief thoughts on a few queer books I happened to experience during Pride Month:

The Princes and the Pea by Peter Bently; illus. by Claire Powell (Queen’s Knickers Prize shortlist) – A perfect kids’ book for Pride Month! Prince Fredwin is about to turn 21 and knows he’s supposed to find a princess to marry, even though he prefers spending his time with his BFF Prince Zac. When Princess Ardwenna stumbles in sopping wet from a hike, she overhears the pair about to set up the old pea test for her and decides to play a trick back on them. The message about following your heart comes through loud and clear in this fabulous rainbow-hued page-turner.

Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters by Sacha Coward – We saw Coward give a talk at the second annual Queer Folk Festival at Cecil Sharp House at the end of May. (Also enjoyed fantastic music by Amit Chadda, Bailey and Keely, and Belinda O’Hooley.) His whistlestop rundown of mermaids (starting with his childhood fascination with Disney’s The Little Mermaid, especially Ursula the drag queen-esque Sea Witch), werewolves, witches and vampires and their historical overlap with ‘aberrant’ sexualities was very engaging, but I failed to get into his book-length account and just gave it a quick skim. He comes to the material as a museum professional. The simplified highlights for the lecture were as much as I needed. I appreciated his theory that queer people have always felt like Others or in-betweeners, buoyed by magic, storytelling, and weirdness.

The Cecil Sharp House Library

My Dearest Friend by Lady Red Ego (Jhalak Prize shortlist) – This is the pseudonym of a Chinese Scottish lesbian writer. She wrote these poems for her mother, who had cancer for six years before her death in 2025. It’s a dual-language edition, with her mother Xiaoyu Luo’s translations following each poem plus an introductory letter from mother to daughter and a closing one from daughter to mother. Childhood, adjusting to a new country, mourning … there’s nothing ground-breaking here, but the poems are very readable. Lines I liked: “Grief is so clean, it rearranges / the parts of me I can’t see / like surgery.”

Holy Boys by Andrés N. Ordorica (Jhalak Prize shortlist) – His poetry is SO much better than his fiction (How We Named the Stars was a massive disappointment). He writes about his Mexican upbringing, visions of masculinity, his growing awareness of his sexuality, and his travels. Often, he incorporates Spanish phrases and biblical language and imagery.

SKIMMED

The Book of Birds by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris

CURRENTLY READING

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens (Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist)
Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller
Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami
The New Carthaginians by Nick Makoha (Jhalak Prize shortlist)
A Long Game: How to Write Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken
Night, Neon and Other Stories of Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist)
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
The Queen’s Gambit by Walter S. Tevis

CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ

Come What May: Life-Changing Lessons for Coping with Crisis by Lucy Easthope
Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath

ON HOLD, TO BE COLLECTED

Receipts from the Bookshop: A Bookseller’s Year by Katie Clapham
The Typing Lady and Other Fictions by Ruth Ozeki
Hum by Helen Phillips
The Saltwater: A Midsummer Ghost Story by E.S. Thomson

IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE

Honour & Other People’s Children by Helen Garner
The Shock of the Light by Lori Inglis Hall
Why I Am Not a Bus Driver by Ashley Hickson-Lovence
Country People by Daniel Mason
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (to reread)
Original by Nell Stevens

RETURNED UNFINISHED

Pathfinding: On Walking, Motherhood and Freedom by Kerri Andrews – Requested off of me before I could get further than the introduction. I’ll borrow it again another time.
Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett – Even the first couple of pages were so twee I knew this wasn’t going to happen for me.
Greenwild by Pari Thomson – I was enjoying this well enough but felt no need to keep going after 30-some pages. I’m not in a middle grade phase at the moment.

RETURNED UNREAD

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke – I’d read too many middling responses to bother with this buzzy novel.
Alice with a Why by Anna James – I read one of her series but it really tapered off in quality towards the end, so I’ve decided against reading more from her.
Dogs, Boys and Other Things I’ve Cried About by Isabel Klee – I guess I requested this for the title? It looks kinda dumb.

What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?

Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.

Posted in: Love Your Library | Tagged: children's books, cocktails, Jhalak Prize, libraries, library books, Library Checkout, Love Your Library, poetry, Pride Month, Queen’s Knickers Award, queer, Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, Women’s Prize for Fiction

June Releases by Fiona Mozley, Heather Sellers & Myfanwy Tristram

By Rebecca Foster on June 28, 2026 | 10 Comments

This month I have a fiction–poetry–nonfiction trio covers fake memories, Florida’s beauty and weirdness, and the past 50 years of protests in the UK. I also excerpt my reviews of five June releases I read in advance for Shelf Awareness, including one that’s in the running for my Book of the Year.

Awake Awake by Fiona Mozley

When writer Mary Mooney dives into her memories during appointments with her therapist, Sita, most of what comes up is the everyday stuff of her childhood in York: mild shenanigans with her younger brother, Jos; her friends Amelia and Eve plus Eric, a newcomer from New York City; and their wider circle. Early on, though, she warns readers that she’s untrustworthy. “In recent years, I have had difficulties with my memory,” she confesses. “It was not a sickness of forgetting. I did not have too few memories, but too many,” some of which couldn’t possibly be real – the best example being her conviction that her grandfather assassinated Hitler. She also tells Sita of a hotel fire and her rudeness to a couple of right-wing writers and journalists – things one does in dreams but not generally in real life.

The focus is on Mary and her peers’ formative teen years around the start of the Iraq War. In the final chapter, she offers a where-are-they-now for her closest friends. “Most of this is a verifiable journey through a life I really lived,” she notes, but “from hereon the fabrications begin.” This should have been an exciting revisiting of recent history in the company of an unreliable narrator, but everything about the novel is so dull that it was impossible to stay interested. It feels like pedestrian autofiction (insomuch as Mozley is from York and came of age in the same period as Mary, who is nominated for a major award for her first novel) drawing on a Blair-years upbringing. Mozley’s Elmet, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, is one of my favourite debut novels of the last decade, so it’s a real shame that her subsequent work hasn’t lived up to that potential. Hot Stew (2021) was a DNF for me, a caricature-heavy London state-of-the-nation novel, and Awake Awake reads like a half-baked debut, not a world-class novelist’s third. Unless I hear rave reviews about a return to form in future, that’s it for me with Mozley.

With thanks to John Murray Publishers for the free copy for review.

Women in Tampa Talking about Alligators by Heather Sellers

With such a title, how could you not want to read it?! In her fifth poetry collection, Sellers, a Florida native, recounts conversations with her neighbours, backyard sightings, and boat trips through swamp country. An appreciation of beauty rubs shoulders with awareness that it is threatened by climate breakdown and the state’s existential identity crisis. She describes Florida as “the thumbs-down thumb”; it “hangs on, for now, bobbing, / as she lowers into the dull warm blue sea.” Lovely poems about birds spin delightfully unexpected imagery: “watching the great white egret / stiletto across the jasmine fence, / black patent legs shining”. But they also contain barbs about the polluting influence of modern life (spot the alliteration and internal and slant rhymes):

Someone’s silvery phone gleaming underwater.

A fleet of rays flew between our little boats, skin kites on roller skates.

We discovered the things slung around the channel marker

was not a bird, just a plastic sack: the common, grey Florida Wal-Mart bag.

Cormorants dove into the chests of mangrove.

High above, paragraphs of frigates cursive-d land, land, land.

As winter and summer swap, the advantages and downsides of living in an identikit suburb mostly inhabited by retirees from elsewhere become clear. Nature is red in tooth and claw even in her garden, where crows prey on baby mockingbirds. Alligators are everywhere, and when “removed” for being a “nuisance” – in other words, interfering with human activity – their end reveals our inhumane priorities. “No? Seriously? They are euthanized? Euthanized for what, for living?” This is a terrific free verse collection at the intersection of the edenic and the diminished everyday. I would definitely read more by Sellers.

Published by Lynx House Press. With thanks to publicist Jeffrey Yamaguchi for the free e-copy for review.

Noisy Valley: The Art of Protest by Myfanwy Tristram

This is not a comprehensive history of protest but a snapshot of it over the past half-century or so, focussing on the Rhondda Valley in South Wales (not far from Cardiff), where a surprising number originated. The frame story is an exhibit of Tristram’s protest drawings at the Workers Gallery in Ynyshir, where she meets those featured. Each story is then expounded in turn, based on interviews with someone who led the protest or participated in it. We learn of miners’ strikes, a protest against a hospital closure, outrage over toxic runoff from a landfill, and a campaign to save Northern Meadows. One impetus was the worrying trend in the UK (and elsewhere) of governments cracking down on peaceful protests with overly harsh punishments.

I was surprised to find that two of the chapters had local relevance for me: the Greenham Common women’s peace camp and the Aldermaston marches (part of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). I was additionally taken aback to spot Martyn Joseph, a Welsh singer-songwriter we’re familiar with from Greenbelt Festival, turning up to sing a new bespoke version of “This Land Is Your Land” for a protest. I’m not fond of the talking heads approach to graphic nonfiction (also seen in Sexuality: A Graphic Guide and Trans History) or of the particular style here – monochrome in the main text with a few full-colour pages plus in the asides on the history of protest and changing regulations. I preferred the spreads focusing on landscapes. However, this is a worthwhile project and I particularly appreciated the below quote, which captures my feeling about the environmental marches I’ve been on in London.

You might find this a bit weird, but I never really thought that protest ever achieves its purpose. We still have nuclear weapons, you know. But it is worthwhile. My feeling is that protest is wonderful because it brings people together as a social group. The meeting of hearts and minds. I would argue that’s very positive.

~David Hurn, Aldermaston photographer

With thanks to SelfMadeHero for the free copy for review.

Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:

The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain: A remarkable debut novel about the last years of Sylvia Plath’s life. I’ve already discussed it here.

Catching Sight: How a Guide Dog Helped Me See Myself by Deni Elliott with Graham Buck: Elliott was diagnosed as legally blind as an adult, though she’d always had limited vision. She explores her relationships with five very different dogs and introduces the process of training guide dogs in this heartwarming story of human–animal connection and resilience.

Instructions for the End of the World: Homilies of Comfort and Resistance by Maggie Helwig: Helwig is the rector of inner-city Toronto’s St. Stephen-in-the-Fields. Her stirring sermons espouse a practical, progressive theology and affirm the power of solidarity and the commitment to social justice in turbulent times (including the pandemic years).

Scrap Book by Nick Martino: Martino’s formally inventive debut poetry collection draws on his mother’s journals and 1980s Polaroids to capture a Midwestern family dynamic overshadowed by divorce and his father’s incarceration.

Whistler by Ann Patchett: Patchett is a master on the subject of family dysfunction, and her tenth novel, a stepdaughter–stepfather love story, is as wise as ever on secrets, traumatic memories, and storytelling. This is one of my top three books of 2026 so far, along with Brawler and John of John.

Which of these June releases have you read, or will you seek out now? What am I missing out on?

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: Adolf Hitler, Aldermaston, alligators, Ann Patchett, birds, Fiona Mozley, Florida, graphic memoirs, graphic novels, Greenham Common, Heather Sellers, Iraq War, Lynx House Press, memory, Myfanwy Tristram, poetry, protest, protests, SelfMadeHero, Shelf Awareness, Wales, York

Three I Read for Father’s Day: Faber Poetry Anthology; Giffels & Pascoe

By Rebecca Foster on June 22, 2026 | 10 Comments

I’m behind on reviews after a long weekend visiting friends. As I did last year, I picked out three books related to fathers and fatherhood. It’s my ideal Three on a Theme recipe: one fiction + one nonfiction + one poetry. I won a copy of a poetry anthology about parenthood and completed the trio with a memoir that’s been on my shelves for a number of years and a debut novel I bought secondhand mostly for the title.

Family Lines: Poems about Parents and Parenthood, ed. Simon Armitage and Rachel Bower (2026)

Not all of the poems are about fathers, of course, but there are plenty of selections here that feel true of any family relationship: the complicated emotions, the sometimes physical realities of transformation and care, the risks of ageing and loss, and how identity is defined by a connection or an opposition. This suffered a bit from its first third – covering pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood – being very similar in scope to Night Feeds and Morning Songs (2021, ed. Ana Sampson), which I reviewed for Mother’s Day. Some of the same contributors feature, though I think only the one specific poem overlaps, Liz Berry’s “The Republic of Motherhood.” Highlights included Gail McConnell’s prose poem “Orange” contemplating lesbian motherhood and Rita Dove’s “Daystar” about never-ending domestic duties: “She wanted a little room for thinking; / but she saw diapers steaming on the line”.

Contemporary material mingles with older; Homer and Wordsworth are two of the ten poets included in a chapter on fathers and father figures. “Sleep” by Roger Robinson was the best example of the theme, a sweet tribute to a man who “for the next twenty years / … battles on his job every day / just so you could be comfortable / and have the space to be what you want.” Relevant entries from other sections were Alden Nowlan’s “It’s Good to Be Here,” about his inauspicious beginning in 1932 with a 14-year-old mother (“I’m in trouble, she said / to him. …// … they began to talk very quietly and at last he said / well, I guess we’ll just have to make the best of it”); Anne Sexton’s “All My Pretty Ones,” about going through her late father’s things and wondering if she’s inherited his alcoholism; and Hartley Coleridge’s “Lines—,” acknowledging he’ll never live up to his father’s talent: “Because I bear my Father’s name / I am not quite despised, / My little legacy of fame / I’ve not yet realized.” (Faber giveaway)

Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life by David Giffels (2018)

Losing his mother and best friend to cancer within a year, and then turning 50, got Giffels to thinking about mortality. He had a whim to build his own coffin and decided it would be a perfect joint project with his widowed father, who had a home workshop full of tools. As sprightly and driven as his father was, he was also in his eighties and had survived a couple of different cancers, so it was never far from the author’s mind that he needed to make the most of his time with his father while he could. I’m not at all interested in woodworking or DIY, but this is an unusual and likable memoir that alternates the practicalities of building the casket with memories of his relationships with his mother and friend John, who was an artist. While Giffels mentions his wife Gina frequently, he doesn’t talk about his own children as much as I might have expected to take the lessons full circle. No matter; I appreciated the middle-aged Ohio hipster’s thoughts on friendship, ageing and grief. Bereavement memoirs are more often the preserve of women, it seems, so it was good to have a different take.

This is how middle-aged friendships often go, slipping and slipping until ‘we really should get together soon’ becomes a discomforting veil for the truth—that such friendships cease to exist.

I thought a time would come when I would feel definitively like a grown-up, like I would have achieved a certain kind of acumen for making decisions and knowing what to do in unknowable situations, when I wouldn’t feel insecure in real-life grown-up scenarios (board meetings; ordering wine; delivering eulogies). Instead, I still felt like a kid. Or rather, I felt like an adult who was in the continuous loop of his youth.

death is a shattering. Grief is the chaos of wreckage. Only life can find the pattern, and only in its own sweet time. What I remember from the long season of loss was wanting each day to pass as quickly as possible. To get beyond it. I guess I missed the fact that the by-product of this wish was for my own life to rush by.

(New bargain purchase from Amazon)

Our Father Who Art in the Tree by Judy Pascoe (2002)

“It was simple for me: the saints were in heaven, and guardian angels had extendable wings like Batman, and my dad had died and gone to live in the tree in the back yard.”

The premise of this Australia-set novella was appealing enough for me to overcome my usual antipathy to child narrators. It probably helps that Simone is looking back from adulthood rather than limited to a 10-year-old’s knowledge. She tells her mother, Dawn, about the voice coming from the tree and it turns out that the two of them are the only ones who can hear her father. He tells them that he’s sorry he left, that he will always love them, that death is not so bad. Simone’s three brothers and best friend, the judgemental neighbours: they’re all clueless. The boys carry on with normal life as best they can, while Dawn has the chance to start over with “the drain man.” Meanwhile, the tree keeps encroaching on the house, undermining the foundations. It’s both a literal problem and a symbol of the enormity of grief, and the book as a whole works on both levels. Despite the early promise of magic, I found it to be a mostly realistic and reasonably touching look at the aftermath of family tragedy. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: ageing, Alden Nowlan, Anne Sexton, Australia, bereavement memoirs, cancer, child narrator, David Giffels, death, Faber & Faber, Father's Day, fatherhood, fathers, Gail McConnell, grief, Hartley Coleridge, Homer, Judy Pascoe, Liz Berry, memoirs, middle age, Ohio, parenthood, poetry, Rachel Bower, Rita Dove, Roger Robinson, Simon Armitage, Three on a Theme, trees, William Wordsworth, woodworking

Some Peripheral Reading for Joyce Carol Oates’s Birthday

By Rebecca Foster on June 16, 2026 | 13 Comments

June 16th is Bloomsday, of course, and was Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt’s wedding anniversary – as I learned from Ghost Stories. It’s also the 88th birthday of one of our most prolific authors, Joyce Carol Oates. As I wrote in my introductory post for 20 Books of Summer, Marcie (of Buried in Print) and I have embarked on a casual Oates buddy reading project starting this summer and extending into autumn’s spooky selections. (See her post from today on her early and recent experiences with JCO.)

First, an update: I’m now on page 101 of Blonde! It’s such a mammoth doorstopper that I will celebrate my every milestone.

When I scoured the public library and university library catalogues for Oates’s work, I found two oddities to explore further. One is an essay contributed to an anthology on tear-jerking poems; the other is her introduction to an art book on a particular genre of funerary sculpture.

For Poems that Make Grown Women Cry: 100 Women on the Words that Move Them (2016; ed. Anthony and Ben Holden), Oates chose “City Horse” by Henri Cole (I’ve read his 2025 collection The Other Love). It’s a melodramatic portrait of a dead horse overcome by a natural disaster. We know from the title who the poem is about, though not until over halfway through do we get an actual identification: “O, wondrous horse; O, delicate horse – dead, dead”; before that, the unnamed “she” has been simply one more element of the flood detritus (“sucked out to sea and washed up again – / with uprooted trees, crumpled cars, and collapsed houses –”), with evidence of human abuse before that (“facedown in dirt, and tied to a telephone pole, / as if trying to raise herself still, though one leg is broken”). It gets more mawkish before the end: “‘She was more smarter than me, / she just wait,’ a boy sobs”. So I didn’t love the poem as a whole, but the first line of this elegy is incredible: “At the end of the road from concept to corpse”.

In her prefatory essay, Oates extrapolates from one suffering creature to pity “for us all”: “we have been made unnatural by our increasingly mechanized and impersonal society,” and we, too, will be “used up and discarded eventually … by nature, and by time.”

From a dead horse to cities full of dead humans … I think we can safely conclude Oates is not the most cheerful of writers. Saving Graces by David Robinson (1995) is a black-and-white photographic tour through European cemeteries, mostly in London, Milan, and Paris, with a focus on a specific class of 19th-century statuary. These are mourning women: generally semi-nude or flimsily draped and often in the throes of full-body, abandoned weeping that looks like a sexual swoon. They are not angels, Robinson insists; instead, he came to believe that they represented the meeting of the Romantic infatuation with death and “the emergence of the family as the primary focus of affection” in the Victorian period. The women emphasize the finality of death and the overwhelming nature of grief, but those who commissioned the statues may also have envisioned them as “escorts on the journey ahead … posted there to watch over and take care of the deceased.” As photographs go, they’re not hugely interesting; there’s only so much one can do, composition-wise, with gravestones, and I wish he or Oates had done more to subvert the exploitation of the sensual female image.

Oates’s foreword contrasts the photography of life with “the photography of stillness—of the arrested, meditative image.” Robinson’s are the latter type, of course. She describes the book as follows:

“an assemblage of strikingly beautiful photographs that tells us much, and hints at far more, of our collective desire that death be not mere deadness—biological decay, cellular decomposition, the extinction of the ‘unique’ human personality—but Death: mysterious, ethereal, mourned, and therefore celebrated by the most attractive among us. Contemplating these images, we realize how human anxiety, human vanity, human terror of the unknown, whether male or female, may well be the unacknowledged origin of our greatest artworks”.

I’ve already encountered Death in the first chapter of Blonde, and I reckon he’ll be a common figure in much of Oates’s work to come, whether realist, Gothic or gory.

Today I picked up Night, Neon (2021), one of Oates’s many collections of suspense stories, from the library and, based on online reviews, chose two stories to read. I started with the first one, “Detour,” in which a road sign reroutes Abigail from her usual commute when she’s a mile from home. Disoriented, she ends up driving into a ditch and stumbles to the nearest dwelling for help. No one answers the door, so she lets herself in and, Goldilocks-like, makes herself at home, using the toilet and settling into a bed for a nap. When she wakes up, she’s been put into a nightgown and is locked into the bedroom by a man who claims to be her husband of 30 years and is concerned about her health. How has she entered into someone else’s life, and will she be able to get back to her own? The story ends on a note of (hopeful) uncertainty.

“Miss Golden Dreams 1949” proved to be a great companion to Blonde in that it’s voiced by a Marilyn Monroe clone/sex robot being auctioned off at Sotheby’s. Creepily, it’s addressed from her to “Daddy,” a wealthy potential buyer. Even in Oates’s short fiction, I’m finding that she uses three sentences where one would do the job, but at least the stories pass quickly.

Guardian reviewer Ben East sums up her approach nicely (“You tend to know what you’re getting with an Oatesian short – a disquieting snapshot of American life on the verge of individual or ideological collapse”) and describes her short fiction in general as “nuanced rather than neat.” This collection seems promising, so I’ll probably go ahead and read its six more stories and a novella before the summer is out.

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: anthologies, Anthony Holden, Ben Holden, Bloomsday, cemeteries, David Robinson, death, graveyards, Henri Cole, Joyce Carol Oates, Marilyn Monroe, photography, poetry, sculpture, short stories, suspense

20 Books of Summer, 1–3: Paul Auster, David Baker, Helen Ellis

By Rebecca Foster on June 10, 2026 | 23 Comments

I took the three of these on the plane to the States with me — I’ve been away for just over a week for my nephew’s high school graduation and a family party — and they proved to be undemanding and reasonably diverting company. All:

Sunset Park by Paul Auster (2010)

After reading Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories, I found myself hankering to try more by her late husband. This is a fairly good novel about sexual boundaries and the ongoing impact of secrets on families. Miles Heller is living in Florida, clearing out abandoned houses. He’s 29 and has been estranged from his parents — actress mother Mary-Lee, publisher father Morris — for seven years, moving from place to place and doing odd jobs but never letting anyone know where he’s living. He’s never told anyone that he believes his stepbrother Bobby’s death was his fault. When he falls in love with a Cuban American high school student named Pilar Sanchez, one of the girl’s older sisters threatens to call the police on him for sleeping with someone underage unless he steals them stuff from the foreclosed houses. To escape potential consequences, he joins his old friend Bing Nathan at a squat in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, right across from Green-Wood cemetery. What he doesn’t know is that Bing has been reporting on his movements to his parents all along.

The omniscient narration moves between Miles, his parents, and the three other residents of the squat, with no speech marks throughout and one section in the second person. The prose is so fluid that the pages turn incredibly quickly, but even when he’s inhabiting women’s perspectives you feel a male presence in Auster’s work. There can be something a little distasteful in his writing about sex. If being charitable, I would say that all these examples (the underage girlfriend, having anal sex to avoid pregnancy, infidelity, housemate Ellen’s pornographic drawings, a man being in love with his male best friend) are a way of exploring the lines we draw around sex and whether they are fundamental or arbitrary. But when you’re reading it, it just feels prurient.

Auster’s pet loves of baseball (Hustvedt in Ghost Stories: “Year-round, Paul yakked to me about the Mets”) and film are here through Miles’s and Morris’s shared passion for baseball and housemate Alice’s dissertation work on The Best Years of Our Lives, a charming (or should that be sentimental?) postwar movie I watched back when I was working my way through the American Film Institute’s top 100 list in my high school and college years. Between that, the glimpse of the publishing industry through Morris and Alice’s work for PEN trying to get justice for an exiled Chinese writer, there are a number of appealing elements, but they don’t all come together in any particularly meaningful way. Definitely second-tier work from him. I know I have a lot of better ones still to come. (Secondhand — Community Furniture Project, Newbury)

Whale Fall by David Baker (2022)

I’d never heard of Baker, even though he’s a prolific and well-respected American practitioner of eco-poetry. Nature poetry is usually right up my street, so I was keen to give this a try. The long title sequence intersperses statistics about whale journeys and ocean plastics with the poet’s memories of Cold War alarmism and current chronic health issues. There are descriptions of riverside and forest scenes, worries about an ageing father, references to Turner’s paintings of clouds, concerns about wildfires, and so on. I quite liked “Storm Psalm” and “Middle Devonian,” but there are not many other standouts overall. The stanza and line arrangements vary a good bit, with most poems ranging across several pages in numbered sections or parts separated by asterisks. Apart from a bit of alliteration, I didn’t notice a lot in the way of technique. I feel almost churlish for not appreciating this more, but it didn’t speak to me, and there were some sentimental tics, as in the brief poem below. (Secondhand — hospital book sale)

“Extinction”

When you are gone they will read your footprints,

if they still read, as they might a poem about love—

wandering in circles, here and there obscured,

washed out in places by weather, sudden landslide.

Keep walking, pilgrim. This is your great tale.

*Southern Lady C**ode* by Helen Ellis (2012)

That I read the whole thing on the flight tells you that this collection of 23 micro-essays was addictive in a popcorn sort of way. Ellis is more sassy than introspective when writing about her Alabama upbringing versus her married, childfree adulthood in New York City and the etiquette that she espouses. She quotes her mother’s dictums and gives translations of phrases one might use when trying to be polite: “I’m put together. ‘Put together’ is Southern Lady Code for you can take me to church or Red Lobster and I’ll fit in fine.” She writes about reality TV, reporting pornography on Twitter (but not before enjoying it privately), her belief in ghosts, and her beauty routines for an ageing body — her debt to Nora Ephron is clearest in “Seven Things I’m Doing Instead of a Neck Lift.” I especially enjoyed one essay about her affinity for gay men (I was reminded of Beard by Kelly Foster Lundquist). The best sequence of three pieces covers making kitschy 1970s finger food for her annual holiday party, tips for how to be a good guest, and the art of the thank-you note.

But, often, I found the book quite shallow, and mentions of how much she spends on outfits rubbed me the wrong way. (I’d somehow encountered the essay on accidentally switching another woman’s Burberry coat for her own before.) “Serious Women” is the least fluffy with its account of a sordid murder trial she attended because her friend was the assistant district attorney. There were other little mentions of incidents I wished she’d had the courage to take on in full, such as her rape and her and her husband’s collective loss of parents and a brother. Still, I liked Ellis’s writing enough that I’d definitely read her short story collection, American Housewife. (Secondhand — Community Furniture Project, Newbury)

So none of these were stellar books, but I’m pleased to have read them because they were all “just-because” books from my shelves. No challenge or deadline drove me to them; I picked them up simply because I felt like reading them. Which is what I think summer reading is supposed to be about.

Graduation and party pics:

My U.S. book haul (the Houston is signed; the Carson is a review copy, out at the end of July):

I couldn’t figure out how to log in to WordPress from the laptop I borrowed from my sister while I was away, so I’ll be catching up on blogs and comments the rest of this week. I read most of two other books during my trip and will write those up soon.

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: ageing, Alabama, book haul, Brooklyn, chronic illness, cinema, Cold War, David Baker, ecopoetry, essays, etiquette, Florida, Helen Ellis, J. M. W. Turner, Kelly Foster Lundquist, nature poetry, New York City, Nora Ephron, Paul Auster, poetry, pornography, rape, Siri Hustvedt, squatting, summer reading, whales

May Releases by Siri Hustvedt, Will Maclean & More

By Rebecca Foster on May 29, 2026 | 34 Comments

This month’s overarching theme is creepy and/or haunted houses! My main reviews are of a collage-style bereavement memoir and a slice of English horror. I also excerpt my reviews of four more May releases read in advance for Shelf Awareness, including one that’s in the running for my Book of the Year.

Ghost Stories by Siri Hustvedt

Paul Auster died of non-small cell lung cancer on April 30, 2024. His widow, Siri Hustvedt, wears his old clothes and still occasionally smells his cigar smoke in their Brooklyn home. “I’m living in a haunted house,” she writes, one “inhabited by a ghost Paul and I made together, a ‘we’ that doesn’t exist anymore.” This isn’t a straightforward bereavement memoir recounting the relationship followed by the loved one’s decline and death. Instead, it moves back and forth between past and present and incorporates various documents. There are glimpses of her state of mind as she keeps up with routines to get through the days but still experiences life as unreal and outside of time.

One section reprints 12 e-mail updates she sent to friends and family during Paul’s illness. She weaves through fragments of his shocking family history (familiar from The Invention of Solitude), certain events that have been memorialized in his books (such as the car accident he wrote about in Winter Journal), and brief tales of his work and its reception. There’s also Paul’s incomplete series of letters to his newborn grandson, Miles, in which he tells the boy the stories he thinks he should know about his ancestors. A notable one was about 9/11, which happened to be the day their daughter Sophie started at a new high school; she passed under the World Trade Center on the subway half an hour before the first attack.

For those of us who have read both Auster and Hustvedt, it’s particularly interesting to read about how their work intersects. “We both liked the idea of our fictional worlds kissing, as it were,” she notes. She describes their connection as “intellectual-erotic” and predicts that, given another 100 years together, they would have merged into one person. Their influence on each other’s work was mutual, she insists, rather than one-sided from Paul to her as misogynistic detractors have assumed. She’s always been more the intellectual anyway, with a literature PhD and amateur interests in neurology and philosophy; and he ‘borrowed’ her character Iris Vegan (from The Blindfold) for one of his later novels, Leviathan.

The book grows increasingly political towards its close. Paul didn’t live to see “45” re-elected as 47. Hustvedt decries the rise of anti-intellectualism and, at Paul’s memorial service nearly 10 months after his death, quoted her father’s prescient words: “when fascism comes to America, they’ll call it Americanism.” It doesn’t seem like alarmism to ask what the current regime in the US and elsewhere portends for writers committed to humanism, nuance, and more or less overt voicing of outrage (as in one of Paul’s late books, a short text accompanying his son-in-law’s photographic series on gun violence in America).

This whetted my appetite to read more by Auster and fulfils her stated goal “to bring something of the man back on the page.” I can thoroughly recommend it to fans of either or both authors, as well as those interested in grief stories and the current literary scene. (Read via Edelweiss)

Solace House by Will Maclean

I hadn’t heard of Maclean’s first novel, The Apparition Phase, which was on the McKitterick Prize shortlist (before my involvement with the Prize), but I was drawn to the descriptions of his second. The cover puff from Nicholas Binge – “The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House” – can’t be topped, and the promotional materials’ references to Piranesi and Possession are equally accurate. In the summer of 1993, Alex Lane is 19, broke and wondering what to do with himself. He seems to be the only student left at The Ridge. Except for that pale young man he’s seen screaming at a window opposite his room…

The Student Welfare Office offers him a job on a team clearing out two Victorian properties the university has acquired or is hoping to acquire. One is Marshlands, a former mental hospital, while Solace House was the private residence of the Flaynes, the last of whom recently died at age 101. Alex finds “a lifeboat of easy camaraderie” with his seven co-workers: Clive, a loud, confident stoner; Malcolm, who’s beautiful and gay; Helen, who’s super-religious; Ruth, a Goth; Leo, a mystical researcher; Adam, a weird (traumatized rich kid; and Ella, who’s clever and alluring. But none of them is prepared for what they find at Solace House. Edwin Flayne was a hoarder and the rooms are so full that they can’t move. One is completely covered in mirrors; another has creepy effigies around a table; the hall is plastered with strange paintings; and a series of ledgers with the ravings of a madman. Alex and Ella save from the burn pile one that contains an epic poem of utopian visions and musings on the disappearance of Flayne’s mother.

Flayne’s interest in the esoteric is only matched by Leo’s; add on some magic mushrooms and it’s a heady combination of the surreal as the team explores a cave on the property that the Flaynes considered a Thin Place. While high, Leo issues what seems to be a prophecy of the order in which they’ll all die. All along, we’re kept wondering how Alex’s parents both died on “The Last Day” at the hands of “The Annihilator.” He regurgitates fictional orphan plots to try to get Ella off his case, but she (and we) know he’s holding something back.

Although I wearied of the pastiche poetry that heads each chapter and at some point stopped reading it, it does have ultimate significance. (And bully to Maclean for adding “all written by me, rather than AI, before anyone asks” to his Acknowledgements.) Midway through, I was thinking to myself this should have been in the third person to legitimize the horror, as it can otherwise shade into silliness. Part IV jumps ahead in time and subverts what’s gone before, making Alex question not just the last four years of his life but the entire course of it. And now I knew why it had to be in the first person, so reliant is it on individual experience. Time, identity and memory all come into question.

At first I was disappointed, thinking that with this section Maclean had undermined the eerie power of what went before, but there’s another switchback still to come. The book is a little overlong at just under 500 pages, and sags a bit in the final 100, but it kept surprising me and it comes to a satisfying conclusion. I also got the sense of an author having fun with the 1990s nostalgia and student behaviour. I would certainly seek out his debut.

With thanks to Atlantic Books for the free copy for review.

Reviewed for Shelf Awareness:

Memory House by Elaine Kraf: In this posthumous fifth novel, a novelist enters a commune for failed artists. Magic realism and metafiction coalesce in another of this unsung genius’ typically weird explorations of memory, creativity, and sexuality. It all appears to add up to a metaphorical journey, with a symbolic death and rebirth for those re-entering Society.

Mother Tongue by Sara Nović: Nović’s fourth book is a defiant memoir of parenthood achieved in spite of the troubled histories of deaf education, religious indoctrination, and international adoption. This is a fierce defense of deafness as a culture rather than a disability to be eradicated, and a beautiful exploration of the legacies of language and love.

Wellwater by Karen Solie: The Canadian poet Karen Solie’s intricate sixth collection (which won the T. S. Eliot Prize), gilds the natural and human worlds with religious imagery and an environmentalist conscience. The work toggles between the material and the abstract; quotidian experiences fuel meditations on concepts such as intuition, kindness, and fate.

John of John by Douglas Stuart: In Douglas Stuart’s superb third novel set on the Isle of Harris (Outer Hebrides), a young man seeks to reconcile his sexuality and artistic goals with his family’s expectations and devout upbringing. Intriguing in its particularities but timeless in wisdom, it offers hope that relinquishing shame creates freedom to be true to oneself. (I also got to interview Douglas Stuart! This is one of my top three books of 2026 so far, along with Brawler and Whistler – forthcoming in June.)

Posted in: Doorstopper of the Month, Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews, Poetry Reviews | Tagged: 1990s, 9/11, adoption, Atlantic Books, bereavement memoirs, Canadian literature, cancer, deafness, doorstoppers, Douglas Stuart, Elaine Kraf, epistolary, grief, homosexuality, horror, Isle of Harris, Karen Solie, magic realism, memory, mental hospital, metafiction, Outer Hebrides, Paul Auster, poetry, Sara Nović, Shelf Awareness, Siri Hustvedt, Will Maclean

Love Your Library: May 2026

By Rebecca Foster on May 25, 2026 | 21 Comments

I hope everyone is having a good Memorial Day / Bank Holiday weekend. It’s far too hot here in southern England!

Thanks so much to Eleanor, Marcie, and Skai for posting about their recent library reading!

Here’s Audre Lorde on the importance libraries had in her life (from Zami): “I learned how to read from Mrs. Augusta Baker, the children’s librarian at the old 135th Street branch library. … If that was the only good deed that lady ever did in her life, may she rest in peace. Because that deed saved my life, if not sooner, then later, when sometimes the only thing I had to hold on to was knowing I could read, and that that could get me through.” In a neat echo of her early life, the Epilogue then has Lorde graduating from library school.