Tag Archives: Roland Buti

Book Serendipity, August to September

By Rebecca Foster on October 9, 2026 | 9 Comments

From Jennifer Croft’s superb Notes on Postcards (forthcoming in November):

I’d heard that story of Horace Walpole and the etymology of “serendipity” before. Tying together dangling threads is a good description of what I try to do with these posts, which arise from my reading.

I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I have 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!

The more accurate keyword would probably be “synchronicity,” which according to Carl Jung, who “believed in a universe of mysterious connections,” is “a meaningful coincidence in which an internal mental state somehow attracts a real-world parallel” (quotes from The Spirituality Gap by Ali Millar). An intriguing idea, that: somehow, by thinking about these ideas or details, I might be … luring repeat incidents to me?!

The following are in roughly chronological order.

What’s in a name?

Girlfriends named Maddie (in Year of the Drought by Roland Buti) and Mattie (Tom’s in Pardon Our French by Alex Durand and Tom Carles); plus a granddaughter (in The Typing Lady and Other Fictions by Ruth Ozeki) and niece (in The Land and Its People by David Sedaris) named Maddy.
A character named Hattie in Leaving the Yellow House by Saul Bellow and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.
A character named India in Leaving the Yellow House by Saul Bellow and Family Family by Laurie Frankel (our second The Marriage Plot/Literary Wives club read this year in which the protagonist was named India, after Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell).
A daughter named Rebecca in Switzy by Emma Cline and Family Family by Laurie Frankel (where she’s known as Bex); and sisters named Rebecca (known as Becks) in one story of The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales by Kirsty Logan and The Long Road to Holy Island by Austin Suggs. Those are both nicknames I’ve had, by the way. The one nickname I detest is Becky.
A mother named Monica in The Summerhouse Trilogy by Alice Thomas Ellis and Apt Pupil by Stephen King.
A Hilda in The Given World by Melissa Harrison and one story of Self-Help by Lorrie Moore.
A Clare in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin, The Leveret by Anna Goldreich and The Given World by Melissa Harrison.
A Sergio in Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong and a Serge in So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak.
A son named Silas in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin and So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak.

Compensation for run-over chickens in Year of the Drought by Roland Buti and Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller.

“Enough is enough” is a slogan in The Land and Its People by David Sedaris (where it’s also an essay title) and Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins.

Telluride, Colorado features as a setting in Almost Animal by Amy Irvine and in one essay of The Land and Its People by David Sedaris.

A trip from Paris to see Chartres Cathedral in The Magician by W. Somerset Maugham and Shadow of a Man by May Sarton.

Fleeting references to the Donner Party in Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins and The Nightingales by Emil Wilson.

An essay about an Icelandic sheep ram, and the idea that one should ride geldings because they’re calmer and more reliable than mares, in Animals Taught Me Everything by Pam Houston and The Land and Its People by David Sedaris.

The protagonist’s work performance declining due to dementia, and a tweed jacket, in Switzy by Emma Cline and Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer. (There’s also a tweed jacket mentioned in Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami.)

German artist Käthe Kollwitz is mentioned in Seed Corn Must Not Be Ground (the title is from one of her works) by Pat Browne and The Book of Mating by Laksmi Pamuntjak.

Child brides and incestuous rape are mentioned/feature in Almost Animal by Amy Irvine and The Book of Mating by Laksmi Pamuntjak, both of which I was reading early for Foreword Reviews.

The keeping of goats in Almost Animal by Amy Irvine and American Daughter by Era Bell Thompson, both of which I was reading early for Foreword Reviews.

In August I unwittingly started rereading two books that I’d first read in April 2013 (is 13+ years the ideal interval?!): I Feel Bad about My Neck by Nora Ephron and Flush by Virginia Woolf.

Men by the name of Christmas: the narrator’s parents wanted to name him Noel (but the German state didn’t allow it?!) in Botany of Madness by Leon Engler; and a main character is named Joe Christmas in Light in August by William Faulkner.

To the narrator’s question of whether something awful has happened / they’ve done something wrong, a reply of “it very likely had but she hadn’t heard about it yet” in Our Spoons Came from Woolworths by Barbara Comyns and “Most likely. You know that better than I do” in Botany of Madness by Leon Engler.

The idea that human–animal communication/connection is deeper than that between humans because it is beyond language plays a major role in three books I read around the same time: Animals Taught Me Everything by Pam Houston, Mitz by Sigrid Nunez, and Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer. (The Houston and Orringer both publish on 13 October and I was reviewing them early for Shelf Awareness.)

The fact that children of alcoholics feel they have to make everything perfect to avoid conflict appears in Botany of Madness by Leon Engler and Animals Taught Me Everything by Pam Houston.

I encountered lines from the song “Closing Time” by Semisonic in Here We Are at the End by Sara Barnard (a specific reference to the pop song accompanied “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end” – which I was amused to learn is actually a quote from Seneca!) and Family Family by Laurie Frankel (“You don’t have to go home. But you can’t stay here.” – not attributed, but I can’t but think she had the song in mind.)

The stereotype of overachieving Asian Americans is mentioned or discussed in Family Family by Laurie Frankel, Miracle Creek by Angie Kim, and To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time by Matthew Salesses. There are Korean Americans in all three, and Korean children adopted into a white family in the Frankel and Salesses.

A young woman is aghast at her mother getting rid of loved pet(s) in Nightjar by Emily Ruskovich and The Nightingales by Emil Wilson (both titled after birds!)

A mention of the practice of buying single cigarettes from a city corner shop for 50 cents in Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad and Miracle Creek by Angie Kim.

Saving turtles from the road in Yellow Pine by Claire Vaye Watkins and then a mention of someone else doing so in To Grieve Is to Carry Another Time by Matthew Salesses.

The lines “Leave as soon as you think to yourself, ‘This is a great party. I’m having a wonderful time’” from Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck are echoed in Emma Cline’s Switzy.

A holy well is mentioned in The Given World by Melissa Harrison and Shiver by Brigid Lowe.

A sexy pastor’s wife features in one story of Hail Mary by Funmi Fetto and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw.

A flawed pearl is mentioned in Apt Pupil by Stephen King and A Desert between Two Seas by A. Muia.

A mention of hara-kiri (literal) in Death in Midsummer by Yukio Mishima and A Better Death by Jonathan Romain; and as a metaphor in What I Don’t Know about Animals by Jenny Diski.

Camel cigarettes appear in Miracle Creek by Angie Kim and Apt Pupil by Stephen King.

A woman remembers being nicknamed an “ice queen” in one story of Everest by Ashani Lewis and Plum by Hollie McNish.

A woman has to have a bowel movement in the labour ward in Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong and Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens.

The challenge of being a mother in the film industry is discussed in Family Family by Laurie Frankel and So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak.

A three-year-old gets their own cereal breakfast in Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong and So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak.

A woman feels guilty of neglect due to her eight-year-old son’s death in a lake in Under Story by Cloe Benjamin and The Correspondent by Virginia Evans.

A viral scandal where photographs/video footage are misconstrued to make a woman look bad in Hum by Helen Phillips and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw.

A misunderstanding causes a mother to be investigated for child neglect in one story of Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong and Hum by Helen Phillips.

Shirley Temples (the non-alcoholic cocktail) are mentioned in Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw.

A woman impulsively takes a dishwashing job in Under Story by Cloe Benjamin and Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.

A scene of putting out sandbags in Rattlebone by Maxine Clair and The Long Road to Holy Island by Austin Suggs.

An unwanted mince pie in Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford and I Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron.

A child in hospital with acute appendicitis in one story of Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark by Celia Fremlin and Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens (and with suspected appendicitis in Shiver by Brigid Lowe).

The Tennyson poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is mentioned in Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford and Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus.

Having to get off an elevator at the previous floor because it doesn’t go up to the destination in Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel and Blood Is Dripping onto the Courtyard by Elvira Navarro.

Realizing one’s bed is unmade in one story of Everest by Ashani Lewis and A Very British Midlife Crisis by Rob Temple.

Confusion over the name of a possibly abused dog (with special powers!) adopted from a shelter in Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus and Luna, Phoenix, Queen by Julie Orringer.

I encountered the phrase “She’s not worth it” in both Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw within 10 minutes!

Someone being pulled back into the womb in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin and Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 by Mirko Ilić.

An apple orchard as a setting in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin and one story of Apple and Palm by Patricia Henley.

“Little Nemo in Slumberland” as an image and metaphor in Switzy by Emma Cline and Nightmares and Daydreams: A.C. 2020 by Mirko Ilić.

A lost twin sibling – lost at birth in Peck & Peck by Bonnie Garmus and H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald; lost later on in one story of The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales by Kirsty Logan.

A portal to another timeline, and characters who are doubles of each other, in Under Story by Chloe Benjamin and Exit Party by Emily St. John Mandel.

A lesbian couple moves to a new house and the one woman feels isolated and sad because she’s recently had a miscarriage in the debut novels The New People by Andrea Uptmor (reviewed for BookBrowse) and then The Leveret by Anna Goldreich.

Nagging a woman to use lotion on her hands as they’re the first place to show signs of ageing in Hum by Helen Phillips and one story of Moderate to Poor, Occasionally Good by Eley Williams.

A couple of visual ones:

I was reading The Land and Its People by David Sedaris at the same time as Country People by Daniel Mason, one of whose blurbs happens to borrow Sedaris’s title phrase.

I was reading Botany of Madness by Leon Engler and encountered this passage on the day of the solar eclipse in Europe (12 August):

What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?

Posted in: book serendipity | Tagged: A. Muia, Abi Millar, alcoholism, Alex Durand, Alexandra Fuller, Alfred Tennyson, Alice Thomas Ellis, Amy Irvine, Andrea Uptmor, Angie Kim, Anna Goldreich, Ashani Lewis, Austin Suggs, Barbara Comyns, Bonnie Garmus, book serendipity, Brigid Lowe, Celia Fremlin, Chartres Cathedral, chickens, Chloe Benjamin, Claire Vaye Watkins, Colorado, Daniel Mason, David Sedaris, Deesha Philyaw, dementia, dogs, eclipse, Eley Williams, Elvira Navarro, Emil Wilson, Emily Ruskovich, Emily St. John Mandel, Emma Cline, Era Bell Thompson, Evan S. Connell, Foreword Reviews, Francesca Hornak, Funmi Fetto, goats, Helen Macdonald, Helen Phillips, Hiromi Kawakami, Hollie McNish, Horace Walpole, horses, Icelandic sheep, Jennifer Croft, Jenny Diski, Jonathan Romain, Julie Orringer, Käthe Kollwitz, Kirsty Logan, Korean, Krystelle Bamford, Laksmi Pamuntjak, Laurie Frankel, Leon Engler, Lisa Owens, Lorrie Moore, Maggie Armstrong, Matthew Salesses, Maxine Clair, May Sarton, Melissa Harrison, Mirko Ilić, miscarriage, Nora Ephron, Pam Houston, Pat Browne, rereading, Rob Temple, Roland Buti, Ruth Ozeki, Sara Barnard, Saul Bellow, Semisonic, Seneca, Sigrid Nunez, Stephen King, Suleika Jaouad, The Marriage Plot, Tom Carles, twins, Virginia Evans, Virginia Woolf, W. Somerset Maugham, William Faulkner, Yukio Mishima

Summer Reads, Part I: Buti, Ellis, C. Foster (Reread), Itami, Thomson

By Rebecca Foster on July 29, 2026 | 26 Comments

The less said about the summer of 2026, the better. It feels like the heat wave will never end. We’ve had 4 mm of rain the whole month. Drought imperils so much. But it’s not right to complain when wildfires rage not so far away. One glance at the news headlines and there’s no avoiding the signs of climate breakdown everywhere. I can’t bear it. I just keep reading.

Year of the Drought by Roland Buti (2015; 2017)

[Translated from French by Charlotte Mandell]

How exhausting was that summer of 1976, always beating down on our heads!

This Swiss novella takes place during the infamous European heat wave that people still talk about half a century later. It’s a perfect febrile setting for 13-year-old Gus’s coming-of-age, which includes a sexual awakening and the dawning realisation that his parents aren’t perfect; that in fact his family is falling apart. The Sutters’ operations embody the move from family smallholding to an industrial model. They keep a small number of cattle but are also experimenting with large-scale henhouses holding thousands of birds. In contrast with that vast flock, about whose welfare the characters seem indifferent, is an injured white dove that Gus finds and keeps as a pet. (A wise choice by Buti: it’s easier to feel compassion for an individual, such as the dove or the old farm horse, Bagatelle, than for a faceless mass.) Helping Gus and his father on the farm is distant cousin Rudy, who has Down’s syndrome; disrupting their routines is Cécile, Gus’s mother’s friend, who has come to stay with them.

Because of the drought, our minds were full of dreams of coolness and moisture

Dreams of rain, dreams of love, dreams of preserving some mythical family happiness that maybe never existed. Like the weather, everything goes wrong – in tragic ways. It’s all so awful I recoiled. Buti jumps ahead several decades to offer a longer view of the land, but I couldn’t ignore how casually the teenage Gus adopted his father’s violent, misogynistic ways. None of what happens bodes well for the future. The one laugh I got out of the experience was the charity shop accidentally labelling the book “Romance fiction.” (Secondhand – BHF, Newbury)

Book 1 of The Summerhouse Trilogy

The Clothes in the Wardrobe by Alice Thomas Ellis (1987)

I hadn’t had great luck with Ellis, fiction and nonfiction, before, but I’m so glad I was tempted by this omnibus edition and tried her again. This melancholy, introspective novella was right up my street. Margaret’s yearning for her Egyptian upbringing isn’t the only reason I reached for Moon Tiger as a readalike; Ellis’s tone reminded me of Barbara Comyns and Penelope Lively for its mix of cynicism and nostalgia. Margaret is soon to marry Sylvester, though she doesn’t love him at all and he’s closer to her mother’s age as well as a known womanizer. Perhaps the engagement was her mother’s idea more than her own? The title is an apt symbol for living to someone else’s expectations: “my life fitted me as ill as a garment designed for somebody else,” Margaret thinks. It’s no coincidence that she’s to be married in her mother’s old wedding dress. There are also sartorial metaphors around memory (“Did the elderly have minds like old wardrobes stuffed to overflowing…”) and resistance to ageing. I marked out so many shrewd observations and witty conversations. I empathized with Margaret’s feeling of being trapped in a life she hasn’t chosen.

It seems like one of those books where nothing will happen, but there’s actually a surprise ending that looks set to move Margaret onto a different track. As I understand it, the other two volumes repeat the weeks leading up to the wedding from other perspectives: Margaret’s staid mother-in-law-to-be; and her mother’s bohemian friend Lili, who was her bridesmaid back in Egypt and arrives in time to shake things up. I love that premise. The omnibus cover seems random, but the question of whether the cactus in the summerhouse will flower as good luck for the wedding becomes an important plot point. I’ll jump right into Book 2. (Secondhand – Regent Books, Wantage)

The Screaming Sky by Charles Foster (2021)

The only thing that has redeemed these dry, scorching days is the swifts screeching across the sky. How can it be that I was once unaware of them? How is it possible for people not to look up for these noisy acrobats whenever they’re outdoors? Somehow, I was oblivious until maybe 10–15 years ago. Now, I always have at least one eye on the sky during these crucial few months. And although this year swifts have been with me since early April (first in Portugal and then in our neighbourhood), I’m already dreading their departure for Africa in a few weeks. They’re still here! I trill to myself each morning. But soon that won’t be true. And with populations in freefall, there may come a day when they don’t return to the UK at all.

Charles Foster is a kindred spirit who sets similar emotional store by the presence or absence of the common swift (Apus apus). I appreciated this when I first read it five years ago (my review), but all the more so now. The monograph takes us through one year with swifts. In the summer, he needs travel no further than his own street in Oxford, but the rest of the time he has to chase them down in continental Europe and central and southern Africa. It’s an old-fashioned quest, a romantic pursuit, a hopeless attempt to keep hold of creatures as fast and elusive as the wind. Foster salts his narrative with all the salient facts but acknowledges that, for all we claim to know about them, these birds retain an essential magic and mystery. “Their power, freedom and joy are the way that everything really is – though we don’t usually see it. It is just that when the swifts scream through the sky, you can’t miss it. That’s how everything, all the time, is meant to be.” (Review copy from Little Toller Books)

My original rating:

My rating now:

Bonus content:

From Robert Macfarlane’s The Book of Birds (illus. Jackie Morris):

From the Spell Songs album Let the Light In: “Swifts”

& My current earworm, also featuring Kris Drever: a more general reassurance – or at least philosophical acceptance – that change is the one constant in life, in perfect pop song form (“Change”)

And from Ugandan poet Nick Makoha’s The New Carthaginians: “in the first part of the night, I saw the coastal villages, men arguing / about the price of oil and swifts darting into shadows.” (from “Codex© of Birds”)

Kakigori Summer by Emily Itami (2025)

Itami was shortlisted for a Costa Award for her enjoyable 2021 debut, Fault Lines. Kakigori is a flavoured shaved-ice dessert and it’s a great choice of title for this bittersweet – but mostly sweet – story of three sisters raised between Tokyo and London who reunite in Japan to spend a summer together with their prickly great-grandmother, Obaachan, who’s nearing 100. Narration alternates between Rei, the oldest, who has a high-flying finance job and keeps everyone in line; Kiki, who’s a single mother and works in a care home for the elderly; and Ai, a flighty pop star now in disgrace for her affair with a married man. Although there is much joy in their banter, little Hikaru’s antics, and the pursuit of the finest culinary treats, a shadow over it all is their mother’s unexplained death. She went for a swim one day when they were girls and never came back, nor was a body ever found; they have to suspect suicide. (“Well, that’s that, then. Nothing will be all right ever again.”) This easy-reading novel affirms the goodness of life despite the reality of death. Its typically Japanese feasts and funerary rites brought to mind Bryan Washington’s similarly well-balanced Memorial. My only note would be that I’m not sure the voices were distinctive enough to warrant three first-person narrators; third person rotating would probably have done the job. (Public library)

Saltwater: A Midsummer Ghost Story by Elaine Thomson (2026)

“The dead are closer than we think.”

I hadn’t heard of the Scottish island of Stroma, so assumed it was made up. In fact, it’s real, lying between Orkney and the north coast of Caithness on mainland Scotland, but uninhabited as of 1962. Tom Torrance travels by train and boat from Edinburgh a few days before midsummer to oversee the last steps in the construction of the island’s lighthouse and meet with Mr Stevenson (of the famous lighthouse-building clan, which included novelist Robert Louis Stevenson). With him is his brother Jamie; he’s not of much practical help, but they cling to each other because they lost their mother to tuberculosis a week ago. The travelling minister Tom meets on the train gives him a rowan-wood amulet and cautions him that midsummer is a liminal time when the spirit world is close at hand. Tom doesn’t heed the warning. He arrives to find a disaster-prone construction project that has entailed serious injuries and broken machinery. Flora Christie and her grandmother, Thrawn Jean, are local women with healing powers who are treated with suspicion: women, especially those with red hair, are considered bad luck around boats. The men want to seal a “witch bottle” into the wall for good luck. He dismisses their superstitions but at the same time keeps seeing hallucinations of the dead in the waves and on the in-construction edifice. Is it grief, Flora’s special whisky, or a real taste of the supernatural?

This was highly reminiscent of Michelle Paver’s work. The typical Victorian-pastiche ghost story bores me because it’s always just the same: the narrator is a dignified gentleman who can’t possibly be seeing such things, yet documents them and his own horror with great precision. Thomson set herself an interesting challenge, writing a quartet of Scottish ghost stories set at turning points of the year. (This is the second, after Hawthorn.) I probably won’t try the others unless my library acquires them. (Public library)

Posted in: Fiction Reviews, Nonfiction Reviews | Tagged: Alice Thomas Ellis, Barbara Comyns, Charles Foster, Charlotte Mandell, chickens, Down’s syndrome, drought, Egypt, Elaine Thomson, Emily Itami, farming, ghost stories, heatwave, horror, islands, Jackie Morris, Japan, Kris Drever, lighthouse, Little Toller, Michelle Paver, midsummer, Nick Makoha, Penelope Lively, pets, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Macfarlane, Roland Buti, Scotland, Spell Songs, Stroma, summer, summer house, summer reading, swifts, Swiss literature, Switzerland, Tokyo, train travel, travel books, trilogy, wedding

Book Serendipity, June to July

By Rebecca Foster on July 25, 2026 | 27 Comments

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!