Transcription by Ben Lerner

*Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Liquid Reflections by Liliane Lijn

*Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (audio)

Hidden Portraits: The untold stories of six women who loved Picasso by Sue Roe

*The Blush by Elizabeth Taylor

*Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark by James Bailey

Lázár by Nelio Biedermann (trans. Jamie Bulloch)

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (audio)

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

Berg by Ann Quin

The Eights by Joanna Miller

*My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

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This is America

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

To be honest, I wasn’t that excited by the premise of Yesteryear – that an internet ‘Trad wife’ gets to experience life as a homestead-era wife. I can easily enough imagine how restrictive / boring / hard women had it some 150 years ago. But Yesteryear has been so popular, I didn’t want to miss out. I’ll admit, it is compulsive – I kept squeezing in moments to listen. Racing towards the end, I wondered how Burke was going to land it – sadly, it felt like a bit of a cop-out, missing a chance to interrogate Natalie’s motivations, as well as the millions of women who chose to follow, buy from or idolise this kind of influencer.

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

Set in the heart of a Black community in Mississippi, Priscilla is the Baptist minister’s wife, with all the status and scrutiny that carries. Manny is her son, the beloved golden child. There’s also poor Diamond, one of Manny’s many love interests. Though I don’t know anything about Southern Baptist communities, Citchens is a keen-eyed guide through its social strata – a sharp, funny writer. Dominion’s weaker points, though, echo those of Yesteryear. Manny’s actions are central to the plot, but his motivations are opaque. Like its fellow Women’s Prize shortlisted book The Mercy Step, it’s an interesting but imperfect debut, and I look forward to reading what Citchens does next.

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash

Cash takes us to a dysfunctional family in a dysfunctional town in a dysfunctional country. Meet the Flynns: mom and dad on the verge of breaking up and three daughters, in varying stages of crisis. If you must have characters that you like in a book to enjoy it, Lost Lambs won’t be for you – Cash enjoys rubbing our noses in the grubbiness of contemporary America. There are corrupt priests, blood-seeking millionaires, war criminals… Zippy and fairly amusing (tempered by its casual Islamophobia and treatment of disability), it feels more froth than depth – satire, but to what purpose? There’s also the unnecessary insertion of the letter ‘G’ every time a word includes ‘nat’ – just to remind you that the town’s church has gnats. Gnaturally, this is extremely annoying. It’s Dua Lipa’s current book of the month – I’m waiting to be convinced there’s something I’ve missed...

Buzzy books

Transcription by Ben Lerner

The first Ben Lerner novel that I’ve read, Transcription opens with someone preparing to interview their mentor. When the interviewer breaks his phone, he pretends he’s recording instead. It turns out to be the mentor’s last ever interview. That event is then refracted in other ways, with links, parallels and contrasts rippling through the novel. As someone who interviews, transcribes and edits interviews regularly, this not only reinforced my perpetual panic about my recording device, but also made me reflect on the whole transcription to editing process and whether a presentation of an encounter is ever ‘true’. I read this on a flight in one stint. That meant quotes, events and characters stayed fresh in my mind. Though, that said, I’m sure I’d take away more if I read it again. While I didn’t love it, it has wormed its way into my brain, so a re-read and a reassess is tempting.

Lázár by Nelio Biedermann (trans. Jamie Bulloch)

Biedermann got lots of press for being so young (22 when this came out) and producing something so accomplished. It’s a polished, glittering thing, following a Hungarian aristocratic family through the upheavals of the 20^th century. That plot description would normally guarantee at least a 500-page doorstopper but Lázár is more like 300 pages. It has the sweep, but not the detail, giving tantalising glimpses of things or characters that turn out to be inconsequential as we whizz past. Lázár moves so quickly, it’s hard to keep track of the generations. Of books that I’ve read recently, it most reminded me of the fable-like The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns. Partly inspired by Biedermann’s own family history, I wonder if that’s subject matter that he’ll continue to mine – or switch direction entirely.

This is how you do it

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier

For my new year reading resolutions, I wrote two lists: women writers that I wanted to read, and women writers that I wanted to read more of. Du Maurier was on the second, previously having read only Rebecca so long ago that only the broadest impressions remain.

Now, having read My Cousin Rachel, I’m greedy for more. The narrator, Philip, has been raised on a Cornish estate by his uncle Ambrose, in a house lived in and worked only by men. When Ambrose unexpectedly marries in Italy, and swiftly, unexpectedly, dies, it raises Philip’s suspicions about their mutual cousin Rachel, who soon comes to join him in Cornwall. Told through Philip’s viewpoint, we see all of his flaws – arrogance, prejudice, possessiveness – and how they colour his presentation of Rachel. While Rachel is morally ambiguous, it’s obvious that she’s playing a game for her survival in this male-controlled world.

Now what du Maurier should I read?

Berg by Ann Quin

Ann Quin featured on my first list of reading resolutions, one of the authors name-checked in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout-19. First published in 1964, Berg is set in a seedy British seaside town (one of my all-time favourite settings). From the start you know Berg’s there to kill his father – who’s renting the room next door in the boarding house with his lover, only separated by a flimsy partition – but keeps getting sent off course by drink, women and cowardice.

It’s violent and disorientating, with the perspective shifting from first to third person sometimes sentence by sentence. It’s also impossible to skim – deliberately bewildering even if you’re playing close attention. Berg convinced me that Quin deserves all the accolades, while also being something I struggled through.

The Blush by Elizabeth Taylor

Another Taylor short story collection, and possibly even better than the collection that I read in June. The disadvantage of reading a Taylor each month is that she’s so good and so consistent that I struggle to say something new each time. The title story of this collection is particularly excellent – about a middle-class housewife whose world shifts with one tiny, telling detail. I was also interested to learn that The Letter Writers – two people who have struck a close correspondence via letters that they almost dare not jeopardise by meeting in real life – is drawn from Taylor’s own experience (she uses the same detail in A Wreath of Roses).

The sweetener

The Eights by Joanna Miller

A fictionalised account of the first women to be admitted to Oxford, I picked this up needing something softer and sweeter after Berg. With many books I consider pitched at women like me (middle aged, middle class), there’s often something that rubs me the wrong way (Lessons in Chemistry: the dog, Still Life: the parrot, The Correspondent: the Joan Didion letters). Thankfully, with The Eights, I don’t feel the need to grump all over everyone’s enjoyment. Though I described the book as sweet, that’s not entirely true. It’s set in the 1920s, and the trauma and upheaval of the First World War can be felt everywhere. The twists are fairly obvious, but it does a good job of showing what these women went through for their education, and the legacy we owe them.

Family affairs

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (audio)

In this memoir, Roy tells her story (and narrates it in the audio version), focused on her relationship with her mother, Mary. Mary Roy was a remarkable woman – prepared to take on the world for what she believed, but also unbearably cruel to her children. As Roy memorably describes her, she’s both shelter and storm. It’s a clear-eyed, beautifully written account. Roy allows all her mother’s complexities, admiring her fighting spirit and refusal to conform to expectations, while seeing how that both benefitted and failed her. With every character, you feel Roy’s care in conveying them in a way that’s precise, unique and true. People are fallible and selfish but also loving and comedic. There’s lots I didn’t know about Roy’s own career – her training in architecture, then her work in film before the publication of The God of Small Things – and her strong, unshakeable voice on Indian politics.

Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne

Most families have their own lore. Here, Dunthorne digs into his own, the story of his mother’s Jewish family, who – he always thought – left Vienna in 1935 for Turkey, because of the rise of Nazism. His great-grandfather was a skilled chemist, known for his radioactive toothpaste. While there’s truth in that broad outline, it’s only part of the story. The truth, where it can be uncovered, is much murkier – the degree to which his great-grandfather collaborated with the Nazi regime, his work in the development of chemical weapons, and the horrific legacy of that in Turkey – complicate the story further. Taking the reader with him as revelations unfold, Dunthorne’s gentle humour is a welcome counterbalance to the subject matter, which explores some of the very worst things that humanity has done. At the end, despite what’s been brought into the open, there’s a sense much more remains to be unearthed – issues that not only remain unspoken among families but also on an international scale.

The artistic life

Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark by James Bailey

I loved Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark and was intrigued that another Muriel Spark biography came so hot on its heels. Bailey’s biography is slightly more conventional than Wilson’s and also looks at more of Spark’s life, though still using an episodic approach. Getting to grips with Spark and her huge output seems to be a battle, and Bailey proves a worthy combatant. Pleasingly, he presents the same playful, wilful, infuriating Spark that we get in Wilson’s. One disappointment: a story, told by Spark about her own early life, which Wilson interrogates and which Bailey takes at face value. Otherwise, a sparky, sparkling read.

Dora Maar by Pablo Picasso

Hidden Portraits: The untold stories of six women who loved Picasso by Sue Roe

This book was well-timed. While in Switzerland, we visited Lucerne’s Rosengart Collection, which includes many Picassos. There’s Jacqueline, I thought glimpsing one portrait, her face familiar enough that I recognised her at a glance, despite knowing nothing about her. Here, Roe tries to fill in the background of six of Picasso’s muses / lovers, some more well-known in their own right than others: Dora Maar recently merited her own retrospective at Tate, while I’ve read Françoise Gilot’s memoir, Life with Picasso. But I became aware of my incuriosity about the others – why didn’t I know, for example, that Olga had been a dancer in the Ballet Russes?

Hidden Portraits conveys the messy, sprawling nature of Picasso’s relationships – the enmeshed relationships, children, homes, mistresses seemingly scattered everywhere. There’s a fantastic description of Maar’s contribution to the creation of Guernica (1937), and a bit of a righting of Jacqueline’s reputation. But, though it’s interesting to learn more about these women, Picasso looms so large that it remains hard to get a convincing sense of their personalities.

Liquid Reflections by Liliane Lijn

In contrast to Hidden Portraits, here we get to hear from a woman artist in her own words. Lijn – still alive, still creating – lived an international 20^th century artistic life, moving from the States to Paris in 1958 via Switzerland. Lijn crossed paths with many now legendary names, such as André Breton, Man Ray, William Burroughs. She married the artist Takis and they built a home near Athens and had a son, all the while charting her artistic development, her experiments with new materials – including wax, Perspex, oil and water – and ideas – kineticism, poetry, as well as the misogyny that she faced. Liquid Reflections concludes in 1966 when she moves to London. So much happens over the preceding 8 years, it’s hard to believe that she’s only 26 at the book’s conclusion. I hope a second volume is coming...

Books that I bought in July:

Laura was over from Canada, so we had the fun of book club in person. Afterwards, we giddily ran around Foyles – I bought The Makioka Sisters. For my birthday, I was given As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee and The Raptures by Jan Carson

Also this month:

I went to Switzerland. There for a family gathering, we tacked on a couple of days in Lucerne for hiking, lake swimming and gallery going. I saw the Beta Band and Super Furry Animals play on a glorious evening in Finsbury Park. And I went to Yorkshire to visit the Brontë parsonage. We also visited Sylvia’s grave, and made trips to Bradford and Saltaire, Halifax and, on my birthday, Manchester, including a very enjoyable walking tour.

The books that I read in June, in the order that I read them (* = favourites)

The Silver Book by Olivia Laing

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash (trans. Izidora Angel)

Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern

*The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet (audio)

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

Hester Lilly by Elizabeth Taylor

*Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains by John Grindrod (audio)

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (trans. Lin King)

William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever by John Higgs

The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons

*The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns

*Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

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From the 1940s…

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford

Time travel meets the occult in the 1940s. Fantasy isn’t my favourite genre, but I am partial to a London Blitz story. I loved the setting – I could picture it so clearly – and I loved the heroine, Iris. Spufford is clearly having such a great time, it’s impossible to resist.

The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons

Before her novels, Gibbons was a journalist. That shapes my perception of her writing – funny, perceptive, responding to the times but also, possibly, somewhat bashed out to meet a looming deadline. This feels true of The Matchmaker. I was intrigued by its setting in a Sussex village in the aftermath of the Second World War. A family moves there temporarily having been bombed out of their home and the surrounding farms are still worked by Land Girls and Italian prisoners of war. The plot is flimsy – the matchmaking of the title only comes about halfway – and Gibbons throws in ideas about battery hens, the education of women, class and even a ‘something in the woodshed’ aside, referencing her own masterpiece, Cold Comfort Farm. The ending is sentimental, and at odds with the rest of the novel, but I found it very moving.

… to the 1950s

Hester Lilly by Elizabeth Taylor

This 1954 short story collection was my Elizabeth Taylor read for June, a genre in which Taylor excelled. In the novella length title story, a headteacher’s wife’s position is threatened by the arrival of an unsophisticated young relative. Marriages, relationships and children provide the substance throughout, while the Second World War’s shadow looms large, most explicitly in ‘Gravement Endommagé’. An excellent way to sample her style.

And the 1960s

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker

It’s the early 1960s and Cassandra is driving across California because her twin sister, Judith, is getting married. After so many English writers, I appreciated the clear, mid-century American voice, and the uniquely American blend of vast landscapes and oppressive mental states. Most of the novel is seen through Cassandra’s eyes – though a clever switch to Judith’s viewpoint midway reveals the gulf between how Cassandra perceives herself and how the world perceives Cassandra. When we discussed this for book club there was surprisingly little to say, other than to appreciate its craft.

The 1950s women graduate…

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark

I began the year taking an evening class in 1950s British women writers – this month, I revisited a couple of the novelist a few decades on from their debuts. The Driver’s Seat, from 1970, follows Lise, who’s heading abroad to find a man to murder her. It was Spark’s favourite of her novels but while one biographer, James Bailey, admires it too, another, Frances Wilson, dislikes it. The novel is Spark in concentrate – her eye for human foibles and cruelty, ideas of control and predestination. Although Spark’s writing always dazzles, I found this too bleak, too cruel.

The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym

It’s a substantial leap from Excellent Women to this 1978 novel. Excellent Women’s hint of sadness, with gentle social commentary, here becomes full melancholy. Given Pym’s spinsters and vicars reputation it may be a surprise that one of the main characters, James, is bisexual – a fact accepted by her characters without comment. Leonora, a splendid older spinster cultivates an ambiguous, possessive relationship with him, rejecting a more conventional arrangement with James’ uncle, Humphrey. She swiftly dispatches a younger rival, Phoebe, only to run up against the much trickier prospect of Ned… It’s skilfully told and, having read the biography, The Adventure of Miss Barbara Pym, earlier this year, reflects some of Pym’s own tortured relationships.

The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns

Although I didn’t read Comyns on my course, she was first published in 1947 and feels worthy of sitting alongside Pym and Spark. The Juniper Tree was among a raft of novels that Comyns published in the 1980s (along with Mr Fox, which I read in February). Bella is a single parent, disfigured from a car accident, with a mother worthy of Gwendoline Riley and – like many Comyns heroines – she’s passive, naïve, but determined to keep going. Especially notable with the twists in fortune in this fable-like tale – the title references a particularly grim Grimms’ fairy tale. Completely spellbinding.

The city and its suburbs

Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World by Leslie Kern

I almost studied urban geography for my undergraduate degree. If I’d read Feminist City then, I undoubtedly would have done. Through a feminist lens, Kern explores many ways the city could be better for women. Kern, an academic, writes accessibly, drawing on her own experiences. For example, housing is still built with the idea of heterosexual nuclear families as its inhabitants, rather than all the other ways women live. There’s the need for accessible, affordable places – from lesbian bars to creches – for women to meet friends, lovers, neighbours. Then there’s transport – have you considered the financial toll on women who are more likely to have to do multi-stop trips, with nursery and school pick-ups and drops off part of their commute? Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are many more ways a city can be more feminist.

Tales of the Suburbs: LGBTQ+ Lives Behind Net Curtains by John Grindrod (audio)

A brilliant companion to Feminist City. While there are countless stories of gay flight to the city, Grindrod explores LGBTQ+ experiences in a place less associated with queer life: the suburbs. Grindrod grew up in a suburb of Croydon and gathers stories from others who were teenagers in similar places or choose to live there now. The tales are presented with a great eye for a telling detail – funny, often shocking or sometimes tragic. Interwoven are the bigger, nationwide events that impacted gay rights and life, such as Section 28. A piece of British social history that could easily be lost, carefully, tenderly, brought into the spotlight.

Prize mop-up

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash (trans. Izidora Angel)

Long listed for the International Booker, this book has an amazing premise. Based on the traditions of the Kanun in Albania, Bekija escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a “sworn virgin” – that is living as a man. The horrific implications of this decision affect Bekija’s entire family. She Who Remains is powerful but ultimately disappointing – its resolution too easily reached after all the violence that preceded it.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (trans. Lin King)

And the book that won the International Booker. The novel is set up as a travelogue, written by a Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, while touring Taiwan (then a Japanese colony) in late 1930s. It’s framed by various notes about its ‘discovery’ and translation, with footnotes of explanation about Taiwanese culture from a fictional translator interspersed with those from real life translator Lin King. Then there’s the food – so many descriptions of food. Initially, I read more from duty than pleasure, until about 75% when something finally clicked. By its conclusion, I appreciated its cleverness and flicked straight back to the start to see how it’d been set-up.

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet (audio)

This book made me cry, as did watching Doucet’s winner’s speech online at the Women’s Prize. It’s centred on the Intercontinental hotel in Kabul, where she stayed as reporter, spanning the 1960s to today. Through the hotel’s staff, we see Afghanistan’s changing politics – moments of both hope and despair – and how those changes impacted lives: sometimes brutally, as with the massacres that took place in the building, sometimes perniciously like the women losing their jobs under Taliban rule. Doucet writes about the characters – some of which she knew over decades – with compassion, while the food descriptions made me even hungrier than Taiwan Travelogue did. Perhaps the set-up means that you miss a wider historical lens, instead there’s an immediacy to its telling. I loved Hotel Exile, also on the Women’s Prize shortlist, for its careful archival reconstruction; The Finest Hotel in Kabul demonstrates a different but equally valuable approach: the work of good journalism.

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson

Like its protagonist, Mercy, this is a blast of energy. Beginning in her mother’s womb, we follow Mercy – the daughter of Windrush generation parents in Northern England – through childhood. I’m intolerant of twee and, despite Mercy’s precociousness, this just stayed on the right side of it, as well as containing some very dark moments. While the momentum doesn’t quite carry all the way through, it’s a debut, so I look forward to seeing what Hutchinson writes next.

Creative explorations

William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever by John Higgs

I became a Higgs devotee after his KLF book and earlier this year appreciated his overview of David Lynch. Like Lynch, Blake produced challenging yet wildly popular work, and William Blake Now is a similarly short (under 100 pages), intelligent book that cuts through some of the complexity, but never diminishes it. Higgs’s persuasive discussion of Blake being the kind of artist to counter the omnipresent pull to AI feels so timely that I was surprised to discover this was published in 2019.

The Silver Book by Olivia Laing

Set in 1970s Italy, The Silver Book fictionalises the films and lives of directors Fellini and Pasolini. I’d seen very few of their films and knew nothing about their lives, leaving plenty of imaginative space for Laing to inhabit. As with their non-fiction, the writing is beautiful, enveloping you in the artifice of filmmaking. It’s seductive. But there’s almost too much surface and when it came to the grit of the story, I was less moved. I’ll remember it more for its imagery than its story.

The books I bought in June

From my first visit to Camberwell’s Lala Books: The Juniper Tree (as above) and William Blake Now (also above) from Walthamstow’s Unsworth’s Books. My local charity shop bore rare fruit: more Pym (A Glass of Blessings and No Fond Return of Love), Sue Roe’s Hidden Portraits and Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. After reading about Fay Weldon’s Female Friends in the NYT’s Saturday books email, I spotted it in Oxfam books the very next day.

What else I did in June

A walking tour run by the Migration Museum as part of the festival of architecture. Listened to Olivia Laing reflect on 10 years since The Lonely City. Played pick a favourite pattern at William Morris Gallery. Hung out at my partner’s mum’s beautiful allotment.

And also…

Joan Barfoot’s amazing Gaining Ground is being reissued by Faber at the end of this month: I read it in March last year, and am very pleased that it’s getting a wider audience.

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My May in books began in possibly the loveliest way – a bookshop crawl from Oxfam books in Hampstead to the Keats Community Library sale (where I bought seven books), via Amnesty and Oxfam Books in Kentish Town to Walden Books, in its full wisteria beauty, where I bought a further two books (see below).

Unintentionally, my reading featured a lot of big names, from Emily Brontë to 20th century greats such as Alba de Céspedes, Muriel Spark and Elizabeth Taylor, to contemporary big swingers Deborah Levy and Gwendoline Riley.

What books I read in May in the order that I read them:

(* = favourites)

Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain by Zakia Sewell

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (trans. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley*

The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason Burke (audio)

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes (trans. Ann Goldstein)

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: a fiction by Deborah Levy*

Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (trans. by Ruth Martin)

The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (trans. Martin Aitken)

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü (trans. Maureen Freely)

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (audio)

Troubles by J.G. Farrell

Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The lives and loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China’s Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins by Barbara Demick (audio)

The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor*

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly

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Hot houses

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley

Asked about the inspiration for The Palm House, Riley told the New York Times that she wanted to explore “a little collection of people working somewhere … doing something that’s a little bit under siege.” The “somewhere” is the rarefied atmosphere of a literary magazine, somewhat insulated from modern life until the arrival of a brash new editor. Edmund – the friend of the narrator, Laura – takes it particularly hard.

Laura sits outside of that collection of people – she works elsewhere – and, in contrast to Edmund’s falling apart, you realise how determinedly she’s holding things together, despite her terrible mother, an abusive teen relationship and certainly no financial cushion. Riley’s characters, like her dialogue, are sharp and spikey, and you see Laura adapt herself to those around her and her circumstances. The life she’s managed to create for herself – her own space, friends, convivial trips to the pub – may seem modest, but it’s actually a triumph.

The Abbess of Crewe by Muriel Spark

This, Spark’s 13th novel, fits Riley’s “collection of people” description exactly. It’s a convent and the nuns are under siege from the media, after Alexandra’s contested appointment as Abbess. As in many of Spark’s novels, it’s as much about ego and push for power as anything else. Alexandra, it’s immediately clear, isn’t driven by her faith. She recites the likes of Marvell rather than matins and has trained nuns in electrical engineering in order to bug the convent and control her rivals. While there’s plenty of Spark’s trademark witticisms, I felt I was missing something – that, being Spark, there’d be something else happening. Turns out this novel is her take on the Watergate Scandal, which happened two years to its publication – and, if you know about that in sufficient detail (I don’t), the novel’s characters take on a more symbolic form. Even without that knowledge, it’s still hugely enjoyable. Plus, how exquisite does Spark look in her author photo?

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (trans. Martin Aitken)

From a convent to a coven. The Wax Child, translated from the Danish, is based on a real witchcraft trial from the early 1600s. Events are relayed by the wax child itself – a kind of magical ‘poppet’ made from beeswax by a noblewoman. Densely written and sensuously atmospheric, Ravn requires you to pay attention: leaving you to intuit events, rather than lay them bare.

Through a Glass, Darkly by Helen McCloy

Part of Penguin’s new ‘Mermaids collection’, Through a Glass Darkly takes us to another all-female environment: the boarding school. Such establishments provide rich detective fiction fodder – Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, for example. Here, it’s the early 1950s at a school in upstate New York, where a young teacher, Faustina, is under suspicion. She seems have an uncanny ability to be in two places at once… This combines good old mystery with the period’s interest in psychology, with unsettling results. A bonus, as Gillian Mcallister writes in the introduction, are the gorgeous depictions of clothes.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (trans. Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

We’re back in 18 November and Tara Selter is surrounded by many others who’ve found themselves reliving the same day on repeat. The ‘I’, to which readers have become accustomed, is now a ‘we’: a bewildering sea of names. Rather than visiting her husband, Tara is swept up in all the resulting industry, the endless challenges (and endless meetings about the challenges) of organisations and resources, and the more abstract discussions – even a conference – about their predicament. As with the other books in this series to date, you never quite know where it’ll next lead – except that it’ll be enjoyable to read.

Heading East

The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason Burke (audio)

When it comes to 1970s politics, there’s lots I only know about in the broadest terms (see also Watergate). The Revolutionists helped fill some gaps and contains much that continues to be relevant to world politics. It covers those of all political persuasions who wanted revolution in the 1970s, whose motivations varied hugely from Palestine to communism to Islam to personal fame, spanning the world. That global focus, Burke argues, wasn’t really understood by contemporary analysis. Sometimes how these cultures came together is mind blowing – you get left-wing, free love advocating hippies at military training camps with Palestinian fedayeen groups. Clear and engaging, I’ll probably retain a fraction of the information in here – my fault, not the book’s – but I’ll know to refer back to a print copy if needed in the future.

The Nights are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (trans. by Ruth Martin)

One of the last events in The Revolutionaries is the Iranian Revolution and how left-wing activists believed it was an opportunity for them too, pragmatically working with Islamist fighters to overthrow the Shah – achieving the short-term goal, before being brutally supressed by the new regime.

The Nights are Quiet in Tehran humanises those politics. Bezhad is an idealistic communist, who – post revolution – flees Iran to live in Germany with his wife, Nahid, and children, Laleh and Mo. The novel moves through viewpoints of family members at ten-year intervals, from 1979’s revolution to 2009’s Green Movement – to show how exile effects every generation and how that dreams for a different future are never extinguished.

Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China’s Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins by Barbara Demick (audio)

Demick explores China’s One Child policy – the cruel and invasive, violent and degrading role it played in citizen’s lives and how its effects are felt worldwide – using the story of twins Fangfang and Shuangjie. One unintended effect was a surge in adoptions in North America and Europe responding to stories of abandoned female children. This in turn created such a demand, with economic incentives attached, that children were forcibly taken to fulfil it – like Fangfang, snatched from her family and adopted (in complete ignorance of this back story) by an American family. Amazingly Demick identifies Fangfang, now Esther, via online photos and, through a long, careful process, the twins – now young women – establish a relationship and meet. That tentative relationship is again subject to the whims of policy – such as the anti-China sentiment in the States during the Covid Pandemic. At times it feels a little padded but it’s an extraordinary story, grappling with complex issues and complex emotions.

Fifties proto-feminists

The fashionable past life of my secondhand copy

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes (trans. Ann Goldstein)

It’s post-war Italy and, although Valeria is not living the middle class lifestyle she grew up expecting, she presents herself as happy – married to Michele with two grown-up children. That shifts as she buys herself a notebook and begins recording her thoughts about her day. The more Valerie writes, the more aware she becomes of her frustrations and limitations, and her dissatisfaction with her life. For a reader, however, it’s not only the situation that’s frustrating but also how Valeria responses to it – despite her own unhappiness, we see her pushing her daughter to follow a similar path. Published in 1952, it’s a full 11 years ahead of The Feminine Mystique.

The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor

Published in 1953, The Sleeping Beauty shares similar concerns. Reading Elizabeth Taylor’s books in order helps me appreciate her responses to changing times. In this era of 1950s consumption, recent widow Isabella follows the diets and beauty treatments dictated by her women’s magazines and defers to their agony aunt pages. An old friend, Vinny, is lined up as her romantic interest – Vinny, meanwhile, has fallen for Emily. Taylor shows the dangers of boredom and loneliness – how clever women end up behaving foolishly, ruining their own, and others’, happiness. There is, of course, also Taylor’s beautiful imagery – never has a pair of bare heels going up the stairs felt so erotic as she makes it here.

This charming man?

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly

Kingfisher’s narrator is a male writer, in a long term same-sex relationship, but pursing an older female writer, the ‘poet’. She’s in remission from cancer, later discovering its return. Shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize, I struggled to immediately determine my feelings about Kingfisher. Food for thought comes with its probing of the power dynamics of the various relationships, and it’s undeniably propulsive – I tore through it over a weekend. However, I’m not convinced that it all came together. The writing was sometimes beautiful, sometimes hackneyed. Most of all, it suffered because I read The Sleeping Beauty straight after. Both novels contain male characters that we’re told are charismatic. But, while that’s reinforced in Vinny through every gesture and sentence, we’re simply expected to believe it about Kingfisher’s narrator on little evidence. Interesting but uneven.

London, Paris, Istanbul

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: a fiction by Deborah Levy

When I posted this photo of my library pick-up on my Instagram Stories, it triggered a deluge of likes. Rather than being a Levy aficionado, like many of my Insta friends (I’ve only read Hot Milk!), I wanted to read it after enjoying the Francesca Wade biography. My Year in Paris is great fun – another brilliant way to learn more about Stein. It focuses on a trio of friends, one attempting to write about Stein. The other two women could possibly be stand-ins for Stein (or Stein and Alice B. Toklas): one fiercely intelligent but somewhat underestimated; another a forthright lesbian. There’s also a missing cat, ‘it’, for some linguistic playfulness. The book is stuffed full of brilliant lines.

Stein and Toklas were Americans who established their home and reputation in Paris while attempting new ways of living and creating in the 20^th century. Though they view displacement and destruction daily through their phones, Levy’s trio are the privileged rootless of the 21^st century, who are attempting to establish something for themselves.

Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü (trans. Maureen Freely)

This 1980 novel, translated into English only a few years ago, is brief but powerful, following its narrator from childhood to adulthood, including periods of psychiatric treatment. It’s not conventionally told, with disorientating slips between times and places, from her childhood home in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, through to Paris and Berlin. One paragraph you’re reading about the horrors of electroshock treatment; the next the fleeting beauty in a moment of city life.

Artists, Siblings, Visionaries: The lives and loves of Gwen and Augustus John by Judith Mackrell

I’m well versed in the artist Gwen John – having read Sue Roe’s biography, and Margaret Foster’s Keeping the World Away, based on her painting, and visiting the 2023 Pallant House exhibition and was curious what else this biography offered. It was actually her brother Augustus that I most enjoyed reading about – in their lifetime, the famous, brilliant one, so famous that his name became a short-hand for a certain kind of bohemian living. Interesting not only for its exploration of his womanising (yes, he was horrific and morally dubious), and his boozing and partying (yes, also true), but also in his frustrated ambitions, his evolving relationship with his sister and steadfast support of her art.

Visions of Britain

Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain by Zakia Sewell

I loved Sewell’s Radio 4 series My Albion, which contains the seed of this book. Sewell has a long-standing love of folk but – in her own words – “being mixed-race and from inner-city London, for a long time I wondered why.” Finding Albion explores this while asking if an alternative, folk-centred idea of ‘Albion’ could offer a more inclusive, forward-looking alternative to many British myths. It’s structured around key dates in the Wiccan ‘Wheel of the Year’– the solstices, the equinoxes and the festivals in-between, such as Beltane and Lammas – where Sewell joins different celebrations and traditions. The Wheel of the Year – though referencing older traditions – is a 20th century invention, just one example of how folk customs are more complicated than they appear. Finding Albion contains many beautiful, inspiring moments, as well as ugly encounters with racism and colonialism. Sewell advocates learning from the past – and being honest with ourselves about it – in the hope of a better future. She also provides plenty of encouragement for getting out, exploring, celebrating and reinventing Britain’s curiosities. I started reading on a beautiful May Day, and aim to carry this hopeful, thoughtful vision with me through the year and beyond.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (audio)

Ahead of going to Haworth next month, I thought I’d remind myself of the original, actual Wuthering Heights. Every time I’ve revisited it, it’s weirder than I’ve remembered, and crueller, too.

Troubles by J.G. Farrell

A book club pick, I left it close to the deadline, arrogantly convinced I’d speed through it. However, deliberately meandering and disorientating, Troubles resists speed reading. Set in 1919, a shell-shocked English major arrives at the crumbling Anglo-owned Majestic Hotel in County Wexford, Ireland. He’s visiting the daughter of the hotel owner, who somehow considers herself his finance. Taking place against the backdrop of the Irish War of Independence, it reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, due to its dream-like feel. It’s claustrophobic, with an all-pervading sense of dread, a seemingly endless set of rooms and characters and that sense of frustration that the important thing is never directly dealt with. It’s heavy on the symbolism, but the social commentary and humour help it from becoming too overwhelming. As Laura in my book club said, it’s not an easy book to get through, but you’re pleased that you did.

The books I bought this month

Thanks to the Keats Community Library sale: Cold Nights of Childhood and Through a Glass Darkly, as mentioned above, as well as A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin, The Sweet Dove Died by Barbara Pym and The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, and a couple for my Virago Modern Classics collection. The Abbess of Crewe came from Walden Books, where I also picked up Elizabeth Taylor’s A Dedicated Man for later in the year.

Also this month

Visited some brilliant exhibitions including Schiaparelli, Tracey Emin and one about the Chinese community in Limehouse. A walking tour about the art produced during the Blitz and IWM’s Beauty and Destruction: Wartime London in Art dislay. Dutifully tallied up the number of books I’d read on the Guardian’s best 100 novels (53) and contributed to an alternative list.

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We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown *

Carter Beats The Devil by Glen David Gold *

Clear by Carys Davies

The Women Are Not Fine by Hope Reese

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness by Cal Flyn

The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang (audio)

Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy, an Irish Writer in New York by Angela Bourke

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin) *

Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry *

Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin

A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor *

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur (trans. Faridoun Farrokh)

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Immigrants and exiles

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (trans. Ross Benjamin)

A related read to Hotel Exile in March. Here, Kehlmann fictionalises the story of one Second World War exile. Film director G.W. Pabst leaves Austria for France, gets to LA – and then decides to go back to work in Nazi Germany. Suitably for a novel about film, the story unfolds in a sequence of scenes you can imagine on a big screen – emigrees sweltering in European woollen suits under a Californian sky; a muddled, menacing television interview; a book club for Nazi housewives; a sinister castle complete with a monster-like caretaker lurking in the cellar – with walk on parts from Louise Brooks, Leni Riefenstahl and PG Wodehouse. Somehow it manages to be terrifying and tragic, while being hugely entertaining and never trite. Discussing it with my book club made me appreciate it even more.

Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur (trans. Faridoun Farrokh)

From historical exiles, to an actual writer in exile: Shahrnush Parsipur. Women Without Men was originally published in 1989 and banned by the Iranian Government – this English translation came out last year. Set in the 1950s, we meet women in various positions in society: an unhappily married older woman, a sex worker, younger women aspiring to be married – another woman who wants to remain a virgin. Their different situations show the hypocrisies around issues such as sex. All-too-real aspects such as violence, murder and rape, sit alongside elements unmoored from reality, such as the virgin who turns herself into a tree. Eventually all the women end up living together. Despite the novel’s title, they’re never entirely without men – and it’s more about how the relationship between men and women can be changed, rather than promoting a women-only utopia. Magic realism isn’t my thing but some of this is so shocking and so blackly funny, it’s not going to be forgotten quickly.

Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy, an Irish Writer in New York by Angela Bourke

I read The Long-Winded Lady a couple of years ago, a compilation of Maeve Brennan’s New Yorker pieces, and wanted to read this biography after learning she’d worked at Harper’s Bazaar under the legendary editor Carmel Snow. Brennan’s family story is intertwined with the fight for Irish independence: her father was deeply involved, later becoming the Irish ambassador to the States. This political background and its influence on family life is a large section of the book. It’s four chapters before Brennan leaves Dublin and move to New York – though, from what I know about her short stories – she never entirely leaves Dublin behind.* In New York, Brennan seems to discover the 20^th-century’s immigrant knack for invention, dressing as precisely as she writes, though moving from place to place, never able to settle. Meticulously researched, I hope to revisit this book after reading more of Brennan’s work.

* Backlisted just republished their episode on her collection Springs of Affection.

The Loneliest Americans by Jay Caspian Kang (audio)

Found on my library app, while looking for something to listen to. From what I understand, it’s expanded from an article Kang wrote in response to anti-Asian racism during Covid, looking at how ‘Asian Americans’ fit into the race relations of the USA, and whether that term is even useful. Kang, who grew up in the States with Korean parents, draws on his own experience, as well as broader historical moments. It’s interesting on the history of immigration, as well as various efforts by members of Asian communities to echo the political language of the Civil rights movement. There’s also a peer into the murky depths of the online Asian American Men’s Rights forums. Although I learned a lot from The Loneliest Americans, I wasn’t always convinced by Kang’s arguments.

Teen dreams

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown

Now I live in London, I often see places that I know represented in fiction; my childhood town of Grimsby: never. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh might be the closest I get – based in Doncaster, around the millennium, following three teenage girls. My school sometimes took us on trips to the Doncaster Dome, a very 1980s leisure centre with swimming flumes and ice rink. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh includes a scene on that same ice rink – such a giddy thrill, I can only imagine how electrifying this novel would be if you’d grown up in Donny. The author Colwill Brown did, and this reads like an insider’s perspective, able to acknowledge a place’s faults, while writing about it and its inhabitants, with love and fondness. It’s all done in a Doncaster accent, too, and it fizzes with the energy of three bright, frustrated teen girls. Possibly the ending is too clean cut, but I’d forgive almost anything for the pleasure of that Dome scene.

A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor

I’m up to 1951 with my Elizabeth Taylor a month and immediately recognise the stultifying drawing room atmosphere of her novels. Somehow whatever happens in them – affairs, financial scandals – back we go to that room, as the mantlepiece clock ticks on. Rather than the lost innocence of A Wreath of Roses, this focuses more on lost hope. Harriet is the daughter of Lilian, whose life’s defining moment is having gone to prison for the cause of women’s suffrage. Harriet isn’t interested, and hasn’t seized the opportunities open to her in the way her mother may have hoped. Without much ambition, she meets Vesey, the nephew of Lilian’s close friend, Caroline, another character who doesn’t quite fit the mould of what society expects. Harriet and Vesey share an innocent first love – and this becomes the defining moment of Harriet’s life. When they meet again after the Second World War, Harriet is respectably married to a solicitor, Charles, with her own daughter, but the affair seems inevitable. What might we be if our earliest dreams are realised? And, in the likes of Charles’ mother, a former successful actress, what do we become when they are?

Sisters by a River by Barbara Comyns

To date, I’ve loved everything I’ve read by Barbara Comyns (like Mr Fox in February) and wanted to read more by her before picking up Avril Horner’s biography. This was her first novel, published in 1947, based closely on her own childhood. You can see it as a starting point for her style, with the naïve voice that features in later novels, here emphasised with deliberate misspellings. And, while the likes of Mr Fox are essentially a series of incidents rather than heavily plot driven, I didn’t enjoy the episodic nature of this book as much. Though her debut, it wouldn’t be the best Comyns to read first.

Lost landscapes

Clear by Carys Davies

In 1843, a priest who has broken from the Church of Scotland is employed to ‘clear’ a remote Scottish island of its only inhabitant – one of the many land clearances of the period where wealthy landowners evicted tenant farmers for more profitable sheep farming. Fearing for his safety, not knowing how he’ll be received, he’s followed by his wife. It’s short (160 pages) but beautifully conveys the atmosphere and geography of the island, with a poetic use of Norn, a lost local language. Where it failed for me is how swiftly, and relatively smoothly, the main characters settle their relationships to each other – a resolution brought about in a way that felt anachronistic.

The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness by Cal Flyn

When writing about Somebody is Walking on Your Grave last month, I noted that Mariana Enriquez’s enthusiasms are the opposite to mine. In a different way, so are Cal Flyn’s – she longs to spend time as remotely, as alone as possible. Like her very enjoyable Islands of Abandonment, Flyn explores places where most tourists never venture. Here, her exploration of our idea of ‘wilderness’ takes her to wildlife reserves in Mozambique, to Brazilian rainforests and even Antarctica. The subtitle of this has changed since my proof copy – now ‘How we made the wilderness’, the artificial, human construct of ‘wilderness’ is evident throughout, such as how conservation is funded by the wealthy American game hunters in places such as the Niassa Reserve (a version of that chapter is online here), or how creating ‘conservation’ areas often means the people who have lived there for hundreds of years are evicted (a contemporary parallel to Clear’s story). There’s something to chew over in each chapter and, while I won’t be turning into a hermit any time soon, Flyn’s boldness does makes me want to be a little bit more adventurous.

Sprawling pleasures

Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold

This was everywhere in the early noughties (it was published in 2001). I bought it in a Vinted bundle, curious if it deserved that flush of popularity. And it does still stand up: a romp of 608 pages. Inspired by a real life magician of the 1920s*, it also includes the death of a President and the birth of TV, idiotic CIA men, brawling women, lions, dogs and, despite these cartoonish elements, pulls off the trick of conveying a sense of place and time. It sagged a little in the third quarter, but I’m prepared to believe that a deliberate shift by the author, ahead of it all coming together in a triumphant finale. Great fun.

*For wonderful historical depictions of Carter and his contemporaries, see this post by Laura McLaws Helms.

Small but perfectly formed

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry

The set-up of this novel is a complete delight, with a narrator whose job is to assemble the scenes in historic buildings – you know, the pies on a kitchen table, the burnt-down candle, quill and papers that suggest that an Elizabethan occupant has just left the room. Though I’ve encountered many such scenes, I’ve never considered how they came together. (Is it a real profession?! I don’t want to ruin the magic by finding out.) Something significant – though we’re not told what – has happened in the curator’s life, when they’re invited to dress a historic palace for a significant anniversary. In the palace archives, they select a king whose story to stage – and so, inside the curator’s story, there’s also the king’s story. Perry is a poet and it shows, particularly the beautiful food descriptions (whether fake pie or real) but also in the confidence not to tie everything up in a bow. Much as I might have wanted it to be, it’s the gaps in the story that are the important bits. So slim, I read it over one day’s commute, but I’ve been thinking about it since.

The surprise… in a good way

Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin

I thought I was done with Austen – I’ve visited Chawton and Bath and read all the novels. But I was lent this, and I can never turn away a book… Turns out, I really enjoyed it, and it made me want to revisit the novels. Tomalin lives up to her reputation as a skilled biographer, conjuring the time and people of Austen’s world. There are so many children, and – depressingly – death in childbirth, topics that largely don’t seem to loom so large (if I remember correctly) in the fiction. Austen’s family were also subject to so many swings of fortune – although not in the same form – that surely must have expanded the sense of possibilities for her characters.

The surprise… in a less good way

The Women Are Not Fine by Hope Reese

The Women Are Not Fine has an intriguing premise. It explores the incredible true story of poisonings undertaken by women in a Hungarian village in the early 20^th century. Up to 300 people were poisoned – motivated by frustration with violence and drudgery in some cases, and malice in others. It’s a frustrating read, however, which seems to skirt around the incidents for most of the text and never quite looks at them directly. Perhaps a different structure might have helped, or maybe there was never enough material to make for a book in the first place. That all said, I can’t help but admire the design of the paperback.

OTHER STUFF THIS MONTH

Two brilliant talks about Muriel Spark: the first, by Frances Wilson at the inaugural Barnsbury Book Festival (I read and loved her book in February); the second by James Bailey about his new biography, Like a Cat Loves a Bird. A couple of London walks: around Clerkenwell and Smithfield with Katie of Look Up London (a bonus was coming across Four Corner Chess in action) and around China Town through Chinatown Collective. My favourite Dawn Powell, A Time To Be Born, is being reissued next month – the Marlowe Granados introduction means I’m considering getting a new copy.

BOOKS THAT I BOUGHT THIS MONTH

Like a Cat Loves a Bird. While in Hatchards for the talk, I also bought Gwendoline Riley’s The Palm House. I found Winter Sonata by Dorothy Edwards secondhand for my Virago Modern Classics collection, and attempted to buy Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck from Kate’s secondhand stall at the Barnsbury Book Festival – she kindly gave it to me instead.

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Nine of the 12 books that I read in March are non-fiction and I’d say that includes two of the best books I’ve read so far this year. Though the proportion of non-fiction here is out of the ordinary, it’s always an essential strand of my reading. There are just so many people, events and places I’m curious to know about. Do you prioritise non-fiction? And, if so, who are your favourite authors and books?

The books that I read in March, in the order I read them (*=favourites)

The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time by Catherine Taylor

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (audio)

*Second-hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (trans. Bela Shayevich)

The Microcosm by Maureen Duffy

Black Teacher by Beryl Gilroy (audio)

Somebody is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys by Mariana Enriquez

Giacometti in Paris by Michael Peppiatt

*A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor

A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke (audio)

*Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska

The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker

I Shock Myself by Beatrice Wood

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A polyphonic spree

Second-hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (trans. Bela Shayevich)

Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War was a favourite last year, though it took me ages to pick up (finally doing so with my random tactic). Likewise, I had to brace myself for this, which centres on the collapse of the USSR – and the Soviet dream – in the 1990s and the fall-out. As before, it’s told through a montage of stories, each relayed in the first person, with skeletal background information.

Having previously read Alexievich’s work I knew what to expect from the format, although the less familiar politics it covered was a different challenge. I’d tried Putin’s People last year, which spans a similar period… and abandoned it as it made me despondent. What I did stomach, however, proved useful background.

As with The Unwomanly Face of War, there’s a remarkable array of experiences, which Alexievich has somehow amassed and assembled into this whole. There’s a lot of violence and heartbreak and – surprisingly – salami, with change happening at a rate and a scale that’s hard to comprehend. As a glimpse into that moment, it’s unforgettable.

Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska

I was reading this when the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction shortlist was announced (I got a proof copy through my work) – it’s a worthy winner.

Having read a lot about Paris around the Second World War, I expected it to recap over familiar territory – in fact, Hotel Exile was something far more revelatory.

It’s organised into three sections – Paris before, during and after the German occupation – with a huge cast of characters. Pre-war, it shows Paris as a hub for exiles, those who have left Nazi Germany because of their political beliefs, as well as their faith. Some of these are known (Walter Benjamin and Heinrich Mann); others Rogoyska has unearthed from archives. As more people seek sanctuary and war creeps closer, anti-immigration sentiment and antisemitism grows. Many exiles live in poverty, lacking the language skills or necessary qualifications to work. At this point, the hotel of the title, the Hotel Lutetia, is only a small part of the story. It hosts political meetings for the exiles, just as it hosts all kind of occasions – wedding parties, work dos – that are a part of Parisian life.

However, when the Nazis occupy Paris in June 1940, the hotel becomes the HQ of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence and, by extension, a network of informants to make your skin crawl. As the Germans take control, the exiles are among those most in danger, and Rogoyska shows how comprehension of what they face occurs to them at different moments and speed. There are heartbreaking tales of families where their fate turns on one decision – often where elders jeopardise their own futures in service to their children’s.

In the aftermath of the German withdrawal, the hotel becomes a kind of processing centre for those returning from concentration camps. No-one is adequately prepared for what they’ll witness, and those staffing the centre must perform a complex mix of bureaucracy and care for the deeply traumatised returnees. Outside the hotel, people post messages and photos of missing loved ones – or simply wait in the desperate hope they will return. It is, needless to say, harrowing, and also extremely moving.

The volume of research is incredible – as is how Rogoyska has constructed it to give new perspectives to a story at risk of feeling too well told.

The Microcosm by Maureen Duffy

Though, like the books above, a collage of different, fragmentary stories, The Microcosm is fiction. However, it’s drawn from Duffy’s experiences, centred on the lesbian bar, The Gateway Club, on London’s King’s Road, here called The House of Shades.

I’ve read Duffy’s later titles Capital and Change that use a similar technique but was especially interested in this after The Secret Public last year. Jon Savage uses it as a source for what lesbian life was like in this period (The Microcosm was published in 1966), because so little else survives. Without today’s visibility and acceptance – or, simply, accessibility of information – it conveys the hopelessness some women must have felt. There are stories of hope: like Cathy who moves to London because of rumours there are other women like her there. Thanks to a gay colleague, she’s taken to The House of Shades, and, from there you sense that her life will improve infinitely.

However, for every Cathy, you imagine the loneliness those who can’t find their way there, while the community found at the bar still are restricted by societal expectations. Of the three Duffy books that I’ve read, this was the most challenging, while also the most worthwhile.

Post-war women

A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor

In my chronological monthly Taylor read, I’ve reached the end of her 1940s, something I’m slightly sad about as she’s so good at capturing post-war uncertainty. Here, that nagging sense of unease erupts into full-blown alarm.

On her way to her traditional annual summer holiday with her friend Liz at the house of Frances, Liz’s former governess, Camilla meets Richard. His character – and specifically the attraction he holds for Camilla – seems a product of the war years, danger and death as part of everyday life. The certainties of the class system no longer hold up, and it’s entirely possible to reinvent yourself as someone else.

A Wreath of Roses doesn’t only show a society trying to reassemble after immense upheaval, it’s also echoed in the friendship of Camilla and Liz, their relationship altered after Liz’s marriage and baby. Meanwhile, it’s apparent that Frances, a gifted artist, is becoming physically unable to paint…

And the backdrop to all this darkness? The beauty of a full-blown English summer. Magnificent.

Black Teacher by Beryl Gilroy (audio)

Originally published in 1976, Gilroy’s memoir recounts her experiences teaching in London, from her arrival from Guyana in 1951 to the 1970s and becoming a head mistress – in fact, London’s first Black head teacher. As Bernardine Evaristo says in her introduction to the reissue, it’s a rare and wonderful thing to have a women’s account of the Windrush generation, to read alongside the likes of Sam Selvon and ER Braithwaite. For me, having recently read a lot of post-war books by women, I appreciated adding an immigrant experience to that mix.

Like Barbara Pym or Muriel Spark, Gilroy’s London fifties also contained bedsitters and bombsites. But the prejudice and ignorance she faced is jaw-dropping – from children, parents, fellow teachers to even the teaching board, as she struggles to find her first position. Gilroy often gives a perspective different to what I might have expected or reveals something I may never have considered – the merits of good memoir.

Local heroes, part 2

A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke (audio)

As I wrote last month, I love finding books that are set close to me – the actor and comedian Kathy Burke grew up in a block less than five minutes from my flat.

Burke (who narrates the audio) is brilliant company. Her story is often very funny although also quite dark: her mother died when she was very young, and her father struggled with alcoholism, and most of her upbringing fell to her admirable older brothers and wider community.

It was extra pleasurable for me in knowing lots of the places she talks about, and imagining the young, bright Burke experiencing them too. One of her local sanctuaries was my local library (which she found a lot more enjoyable than Joe Orton did – incidentally, she was also fascinated by him, as a local hero). When it finished, I instantly missed her company.

Hit the north

The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time by Catherine Taylor

Often, we expect memoir to come with a famous name or extraordinary experience. Taylor shows what can be drawn from an ‘ordinary’ life by a thoughtful author. It now seems unbelievable that millions of women were told to stay home after dark for their own safety while the serial killer, known as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, was at large. Taylor, a teenager in Sheffield at the time, was one of many women for whom this must have shifted how they felt about themselves, and about men, and there’s a thread of ever-present male violence through the book. As the daughter of separated parents, the least-well off at a posh school, also dealing with illness, Taylor sees other prejudices come to the fore. At the same time, it feels like a bigger rupture is happening in society, with the likes of the miner’s strike destroying any faith in the powers that be. Taylor becomes more political, joining the women protesting at Greenham Common. These events all shape the woman she becomes, just as gigs and books and friendships do too.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (audio)

I listened to this in a bid to read more Brontës ahead of my Haworth visit this summer. Despite its 25-hour-plus length, goodness, I was gripped. Though the major plot points can be seen a mile away, I still wondered how Anne would pull them off. While the religious morality at its core is challenging for this 21st century reader, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall does show how limited women’s lives were in the mid-19th century – not just in having to get married to be able to do anything, but also how that marriage could leave you trapped and vulnerable. Looking forward to more Brontës in the months ahead.

Art world exploits

I Shock Myself by Beatrice Wood

I first learned about Wood, and this memoir, in Lottie Whalen’s eye-opening Radicals and Rogues: The Women Who Made New York Modern. Wood is nicknamed ‘the mama of dada’ because of her connections to the likes of Marcel Duchamp. What’s amazing is that’s a mere fraction of her story. She lived from 1893 and 1998 and made the most of her 105 years, eschewing conventions and later celebrated in her own right as a ceramicist. While famous people’s memoirs can tend towards the tedious, I enjoyed Wood’s company throughout, even her enthusiastic endorsements of the likes of theosophy.

Giacometti in Paris by Michael Peppiatt

I appreciate a tight timeframe or geographical setting – where it evokes how a person lives in a place. Following the artist Alberto Giacometti’s life in Paris from 1922 to 1966, mainly in one small run-down studio in Montparnasse, Peppiatt undeniably does that. However, sometimes there’s the danger that knowing more about an artist’s life makes you admire them that little bit less, and that’s unfortunately the case here. More a reflection of my scruples than Peppiatt’s intentions.

The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker

Giacometti is unquestionably art world establishment, but do you need the art world to be an artist? That’s one of the questions raised in Tucker’s portrait of his uncle, Eric. Just before his death, he revealed hundreds of paintings in his Warrington home, his working class surroundings captured on canvas. Tucker probes Eric’s motivations and his not-all-together straightforward family relationships, while remaining a steadfast champion of his work. And there are also issues such as ‘what does art celebrate?’ ‘who is art for?’ ‘who gets to make it?’ ‘who get to judge it?’ to mull over. That’s all a light touch, though, and it’d be hard not to be cheered by this story – a victory for an idiosyncratic oddball and their bloody mindedness.

And something completely different…

Somebody is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys by Mariana Enriquez

I’ve a friend who is fascinated by every gothic, macabre thing about death. I’m a wuss, who only choses to think about life among the living. Mariana Enriquez is like my friend and this book charts years of her visits to different cemeteries around the world. I’ve not read any of Enriquez’s fiction, but she makes an engaging tour guide (‘MARIANA’S YOUR KINDRED SPIRIT!’, I messaged my friend). And, having said I’m not into death, I was surprised how many of these cemeteries I’d visited, including Highgate, La Recoleta in Buenos Aires, Bonaventure in Savannah, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, so a by-product of reading was remembering all those great trips. Death, it turns out, is an interesting way to discover more about a place and its history. An enjoyable, alternative travelogue.

What books I bought this month

Just one: Feminist City by Leslie Kern, through Vinted. However, I maxed out my library reservations with the International Booker and Women’s Prize longlists, which will probably influence April’s reading.

Also this month

Two favourite films: Left-handed Girl for contemporary Taiwan / The Testament of Ann Lee for 18^th-century Manchester / America.

The guided walk I took this month was centred on writers of the 1920s and included the discovery that my favourite China Town supermarket was once a club (fictionalised by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited) owned by Kate Meyrick (fictionalised by Kate Atkinson in Shrines of Gaiety).

My Bloody Valentine at the Royal Albert Hall: loud, brilliant.

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• The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits

• The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne

• The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski

• Mr Fox by Barbara Comyns

• When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter

• When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Women and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow

• Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lahr

• The Comforters by Muriel Spark

• Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

• Maeve Gilmore by Lucy Scholes

• A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

• Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

• Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

• Electric Spark: the Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson

• The Beautiful Visit by Elizabeth Jane Howard

• A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney

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Local heroes

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life by Anna Funder

In January, I read a book about Orwell’s 1984 but didn’t mention that my interest is partly due to living very close to a former Orwell residence (see above). His wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, also briefly lived there, which led me onto Anna Funder’s biography. Wifedom divides opinion: is it “a daring mixture of memoir, fiction and fact” or does it “strip[s] her of agency all over again”? I lean towards the latter, though less stridently.

The ‘daring’ bit is Funder’s use of fictional scenes – as if Eileen and George were characters in her novel and she’s the omniscient narrator – rather than sharing known facts and leaving room for speculation. These scenes undermined the book’s strengths, for example, when Funder painstakingly reinserts Eileen into the events recounted in Homage to Catalonia. By the end, I was skipping them all.

But I was delighted to see that one of Eileen’s few surviving REAL letters describes her moving in Canonbury Square, where she lived for a tragically short time before dying at age 39 during an operation.

“We have a flat in Canonbury Square – at least we shall have it, unless the bombs beat us to the post which is rather likely,” she writes. “I rather like it, in fact in some ways I like it very much indeed.”

Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton by John Lahr

One of my regular running routes passes the flat where the playwright Joe Orton lived with his partner, Kenneth Halliwell for 7 years – and where Halliwell murdered him in 1967. Their famous defacing of library books took place at my local branch.

I knew more of Orton’s notoriety than his work. This biography charts his meteoric, four-year rise. I’ve not seen any of his plays – and would have got more from this if I had – but the extent of rewrites while already in production was incredible. Raw talent being harnessed in live time, almost, with faith sustained even while productions were flopping or canned by critics.

The Victorian Chaise-Longue by Marghanita Laski

Orton lived almost on the Regent’s Canal – this 1953 novel is set a bit further west along the canal in Fife Terrace, according to the Persephone Books reissue. Melanie is recovering from tuberculosis in her house overlooking the canal – one of the households helping change the area: “How much she and Guy had enjoyed the informed superiority with which they had worsted out the protesting parents, able to point out that already an artist and an architect had bought and reclaimed homes in this hidden forgotten Regency row.”

Fitting this bourgeois take on bohemia, they fill the house with antiques. Melanie falls asleep on the chaise-longue and wakes to discover that she’s leapt back in time, into the body of a sick woman almost a century earlier. As well as the horror of bodily displacement, there’s the suffocating constraints of women’s lives – especially striking, as we earlier saw modern day Melanie casually manipulate gender roles. All this in less than 100 pages, too. There’s a very good Backlisted episode on it.

Magical Muriel

The Comforters by Muriel Spark

I’d thought that I’d read a lot of Muriel Spark. In fact, I’d only read 7 (now with this – read for my evening class – 8) of her 22 novels. This is her debut from 1957 and feels amazingly fully formed. There’s not a wasted word, her wit and trickery keeping you on your toes. A novel within a novel, its big themes of faith and creativity are enclosed (like the diamonds in the bread of the sub-plot) by jewel thieves, car crashes and mysterious voices. I was grateful for doing this in class – otherwise, there would be a temptation to finish quickly and think about briefly – as it rewards the attention.

Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark

Enthused by The Comforters discussions, I suggested to my book club that we should read some Spark – and we picked 1981’s Loitering with Intent, partly because it was nominated for The Booker Prize. (In the year Midnight Children won.) It’s an excellent companion piece, in many ways a rewrite, as the heroine Fleur struggles to take control of the narrative. As her character sits in a churchyard, “in the middle of the twentieth century”, on the cusp of her first novel being published, she feels “how good it was to be a woman and an artist” – it’s tempting to read it as Spark’s own story.

Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson

Those two novels are great groundwork for this – along with A Far Cry From Kensington, read a few years ago. I’d also recommend listening to this episode, which conveys some of the issues biographers have with Spark. Having read Wilson’s Dorothy Wordsworth, I wasn’t expecting a conventional approach, and her style, coupled with all the challenges and wonder of Spark, is a brilliant, invigorating combination – even if you’ve not read all 22 novels. There’s a Spark readalong on Instagram at the moment, #22monthswithMuriel, organised by @literary.woman. It began in January, so there’s time to catch-up.

More excellent women

The Adventures of Miss Barbara Pym by Paula Byrne

I re-read Excellent Women for the same class last month. If the life of her heroine Mildred – who might be thought of as a Pym stand-in – feels limited, this biography shows how Barbara chafed against such constraints. It has some truly eyebrow-raising stories – from her time in Oxford, falling in love with Nazis, her longings for impossible men and true stalkerish behaviour. Things would have been much easier and happier for Pym if she’d been born some 30 years or more later.

The structure is quite contrived – very short chapters headed by Capitalised Summaries of the events that happen to ‘Miss Pym’ (and certainly annoyed a previous reader of my library copy, see above!) A minor grumble, though: Bryne’s energy pulls you through, even when Pym is at her most frustrating.

A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney

This was the last title we read for my course – written when Delaney was 19 and first performed in 1958. It’s set in Salford, and the unconventional relationship between teenager Jo and her mother Helen, and the various ways men get in the way. It’s witty, charming and touching, reminiscent of the best of old Coronation Street – and that’s meant as a massive compliment. There’s a good radio production of it here.

Mr Fox by Barbara Comyns

Set in wartime, though not published until the 1980s, this still feels very much of its time. Mr Fox is a spiv, who takes Caroline and her daughter under his wing. They are constantly on the move – Caroline always seems to be distempering a new space. There is never enough money and various schemes always embarked upon to raise it, from the legal – like Caroline getting work in the homes of wealthy women (an echo of Other People’s Houses) – to the wheezes, like a scheme selling on secondhand pianos. Caroline is a classic Comyns type – naïve, artistic, always hoping for the better.

Maeve Gilmore by Lucy Scholes

This is my fourth volume from Eiderdown Books, who specialise in slim introductions to the work of women artists. I’ve been interested in Gilmore ever since I read her memoir of her husband, Mervyn Peake, A World Away and have loved her work in exhibitions at Studio Voltaire and Alison Jacques. A bit like a Barbara Comyns novel (who also was trained as an artist), she has a surrealism that’s rooted in the domestic. I hope the momentum around her continues to build – my dream is for a Dulwich Picture Gallery retrospective, like they did with Tirzah Garwood.

A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor

Published in 1947, this is Taylor’s third novel, the second I’ve read for my Taylor-a-month resolution. Again, it’s grey, postwar Britain, where everything has shifted, though its residents haven’t yet caught up with this new world. Set in a seaside town, where everyone knows each other, though – despite the constant neighbourly surveillance – various secrets bubble away beneath the surface, particularly that the husband of novelist Beth, and their neighbour, Beth’s best friend, are having an affair. Bertram, an ex-Naval Officer who’s trying his hand at painting is the stranger in town, who – rather than merely survey the scene – gets too involved. There’s no grand revelation – more the tiny shifts and rhythms of daily life. A mini masterpiece.

The Beautiful Visit by Elizabeth Jane Howard

This was Howard’s debut, following a young girl in the 1910s as she gropes her way to adulthood. The visit of the title is a stay with the glamorous Lancing family, who appear to offer everything her own family doesn’t. There’s an underlying theme of just how little women had to aim for in this period outside marriage – later amplified by the First World War. The ending feels like a cop-out, unfortunately, but there’s all the sensitivities and details that would go on to make the Cazalet Chronicles so successful.

2025 big hitters

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits

My partner complains about it in TV programmes; my friend, Laura, in fiction – the dominance of stories about wealthy professional middle-aged Americans, maybe doctors or professors. Probably about marriages under pressure. Maybe that’s why this novel – a law professor debating leaving his wife after dropping their daughter off at university – was the Booker shortlist title that interested me least. Sorry, Ben Markovits.

However if you’re in the market for that kind of tale, there’s lots here to recommend it. There’s the sense of time – how it compounds grievances; the worn grooves of a long relationship – and of someone used to feeling right (or at least righteous) realising he’s now out of step with the world. Then there’s a lot of basketball... It’s a classy read – just probably the wrong class for me.

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

I felt I was possibly the last Londoner to read this fixture of indie bookshop top tens. Focusing on a childless, urban couple, as a childless half of an urban couple I worried it might sting. It echoes many ‘original’ thoughts I’ve had over the last couple of decades – should I move to Berlin? What about Lisbon?

But Perfection read less like a criticism of the couple themselves and more a critique of the limited framework that informs us what we should want. As Latronico directs us to the cultural markers that we surround ourselves with, the remove is something like that of a screen. I didn’t end up living in Berlin but their life / hobbies / furniture / plants are instantly recognisable, and are already starting to become history.

American glamour

When the Going Was Good by Graydon Carter

After Mr Fox and The Victorian Chaise-Longue, I needed glamour and I never tire of the behind the scenes at Conde / Hearst genre. Carter, editor of Vanity Fair for more than two decades, does bring the gossip – and gobsmacks you with the budgets of media companies in the 90s / 00s. Though a good companion, I wasn’t as invested in it as Tina Brown’s Diaries or even Amy Odell’s book on Anna Wintour. Those felt more like an insight into their editorial vision, the canny decisions and sheer talent that’s needed to make a good magazine. Carter just didn’t sell it to me.

When Women Ran Fifth Avenue: Women and Power at the Dawn of American Fashion by Julie Satow

This, though, delivered the glamour. Satow explores the stories of three women who led department stores on New York’s Fifth Avenue: Dorothy Shaver (Lord & Taylor), Hortense Odlum (Bonwit Teller) and Geraldine Stutz (Henri Bendel). Even without the nostalgia those names might have for a North American reader, it’s a great read.

There’s real pleasure in smart women doing smart things – figuring out ways to innovate and stand out. For example, without the buying power to compete for French couture, Henri Bendel instead focus on bringing the new wave of European boutique fashion to the States. They’re also complex figures: Embittered Odlum warned against becoming a ‘working woman’, while Stutz was unashamedly sizeist. My favourite kind of fashion history book because it makes you want to go shopping – albeit in the past.

Books I bought in February

My first visit Books in Peckham – recommended after my London secondhand books post – yielded the Maeve Brennan biography I’d wanted for ages, plus Alba de Céspedes’ Forbidden Notebook and a wartime-set Stella Gibbons, The Matchmaker. From secondhand saved searches, Maureen Duffy’s The Microcosm and the artist Beatrice Wood’s memoir I Shock Myself. At work, proofs of Hotel Exile by Jane Rogoyska (longlisted for the Women’s non-fiction prize) and The Savage Landscape by Cal Flynn. Meanwhile, I was lent Clear by Carys Davies and The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker, with enthusiasm.

And also this month…

I went up to Scotland for friends and the cultural double whammy of indie nostalgia, and seeing Jodie Comer in Prima Facie. Plus, a lovely long train journey for reading.

My partner’s birthday at the end of February always feels like the official end of hibernation. This year, celebrations involved Mangal II, the Tamil Crown and playing tourists at St Paul’s Cathedral.

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The books I read in January 2026, in the order that I read them

Limelight by Helen Gee

The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey (audio)

Gunk by Saba Sams

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal

Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang (audio)

The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century by Ariane Bankes

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors by Edward Hollis

Lynchian by John Higgs

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

Homework by Geoff Dyer (audio)

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1950s women

Limelight by Helen Gee

This was a hangover from my New York binge over Christmas. From 1954 to ‘61, Helen Gee established and ran a Greenwich Village café-cum-gallery devoted to photography. Her memoir of that time is a gossipy take on many of the names of the era – Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, Edward Steichen – at a time when they just weren’t as revered or certainly collected as much as today. Though it’s also about the Village in flux, you probably need to have a bit of photography history knowledge to fully appreciate it – just try not to be too frustrated when you find out the low prices at which you could have bought works by those names back then.

The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing

In this year’s reading resolutions, I wrote that I wanted to find the English equivalent of my 1950s New York women. On a browse, I found an evening class offering almost exactly that: eight weeks of classes on four novels by British women published in the 1950s. Lessing, of course, grew up in what was then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), but moved to the UK in 1949 – this was published the following year. It’s set in Southern Africa with the white colonisers and black local population, and what happens when the various rules that governed expectations and behaviour are crossed. My only previous experience of Lessing was wading through The Golden Notebook – in contrast, this felt direct and immediate. Though of its time, Lessing is clear-sighted in how she portrays events and, while it does have first novel flaws, it stood up to two evenings of robust discussion and made me want to try some more of her work, maybe even reattempt The Golden Notebook, we’ll see…

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym

This was the second, contrasting, book we discussed on the course. It was the second time I’d read it and while during my first read, I’d politely tittered, I properly guffawed this time. Pym’s voice is so infectious, I began seeing all kind of events through her prism as inevitably ridiculous. Mildred Lathbury (I love that her name is so close to another comic genius, Marian Leatherby, of The Hearing Trumpet) is an ‘excellent woman’: unmarried but a staple of church and community. In fact, you suspect, much would grind to a halt without the legions of such excellent women. While it’s a hoot, reading it closely made me appreciate how well-crafted it is, and the specificity in its portrayal of woman in a certain class and place. The War hovers at its fringes – a still bomb-damaged church, the absence of men – while you can feel class expectations shifting. Mildred has a bit of money, but has a flat in the wrong side of Victoria (as did Pym) with a shared bathroom and works, part time, at a Society for the Care of Distressed Gentlewomen. Inevitably, I now want to read more Pym too.

And back to the 1940s

The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey (audio)

This is why I embarked on a not-so-festive listen to 1984. I really enjoy this kind of deep dive: The Ministry of Truth spans what influenced Orwell, the mechanics of writing 1984 and the aftermath of its publication, including its long tail of influence. I particularly enjoyed the bit dealing with the hoo-ha about Orwell’s marriage to Sonia Brownell. However, I did not enjoy the audio narrator who had the habit of making every single sentence ponderous, even if discussing something relatively light-hearted (there’s a lot of pop culture in this). But, like the best books, it made me want to read more around it. (Can you sense a theme with all these books so far?)

The Quality of Love: Twin Sisters at the Heart of the Century by Ariane Bankes

This book helped scratch that itch. It’s very much a family story – it just so happens that Bankes’ family story interlinks with some of the key cultural figures of the mid 20^th-century. Bankes’ beautiful and charming mother was Celia Paget, one (!) of the women Orwell proposed to after death of his first wife, Eileen. Celia had an equally beautiful and charming twin Mamaine, whose lovers included Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus. The book draws on the letters that Bankes found in her family attic, showing the network of influences that the Pagets were plugged into. More commonly asides, or a few paragraphs in biographies of ‘great’ men, this book feels refreshing for being able to genuinely shine a light on these women in their own right, and – given Bankes’ care to reflect the wishes of her mother – on their own terms.

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor

Book 1 in my 2026 Taylor-a-month project. Published in 1947, Palladian pre-dates Excellent Women by five years but it was fascinating to read them side-by-side, as both play on the idea of the marriage plot and nod to other women writers – the orphaned heroine in Palladian is called ‘Cassandra Dashwood’ for goodness’ sake. Here, Cassandra plays by the expected fictional rules: first moving to an estate as a governess and ultimately marrying its owner, Marion. Beneath that apparently traditional plot, however, there’s a lot going on, with the same sense of unease and displacement as in her first novel, At Mrs Lippencote’s – the estate is crumbling, the master is no longer carrying out his duty to the local populace. Taylor places Marion and Cassandra in a past whose certainties no longer apply in a post-war world.

Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal

This is almost memoir, though Segal classed it as a novel because she discovered that her memories didn’t withstand scrutiny. Segal was born into a well-to-do Austrian Jewish family in 1928 – and comes to Britain on the kindertransport aged 10, after the Nazi annexing of Austria. She’s moved between various household, which she recounts through her curious eyes. Despite housing a Jewish refugee, many characters seem oblivious to what is happening in Europe, and their lives remain incredibly parochial. Amazingly, Segal’s parents get to England not long after via a domestic staff visa, working for the likes of the family in Palladian – far removed from their former status in Vienna. Partly a glimpse at England through an outsider’s eyes, really, at its heart, it’s a loving tribute to her mother’s charm, courage and tenacity.

A flavour of 2025

Gunk by Saba Sams

I’d been curious about this since I saw Sams interviewed with Natasha Brown at an event last year, bought it on offer for my Kobo, and eventually started it because I was having trouble sleeping, and this was the shortest book I happened to have on there. Gunk is set in Brighton, in a dingy dive club, and Sams captures the city in all its crusty beauty. Jules runs the place, with her ex-husband, Leon. Nim starts working at the club, and… well, a lot of things happen that you think might, but somehow Sams makes it feel more expansive than the key plot points may suggest. There’s a lot about changing ideas of what it might mean to ‘mother’ or be part of a family, and I’d have given this a rave review, except that towards the end Sams starts spelling out her ideas a bit more than feels necessary. Still, it makes me want to try her short stories, Send Nudes.

Lynchian by John Higgs

I really enjoy the way John Higgs thinks – his KLF book was brilliant. I also watched a lot of David Lynch films over the Christmas break. So, this slim volume seemed like a no-brainer (not a term that could be applied to either Higgs or Lynch). In it, Higgs outlines some of Lynch’s key themes and beliefs, what makes something ‘Lynchian’ – and also the challenges with his work. With someone like Lynch there’s a high risk of getting lost in the mire, but this has both clarity and brevity. An excellent primer.

Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang (audio)

I can’t remember when I read Jung Chang’s Wild Swans, but I remember it completely expanding my concept of 20^th century Chinese history, especially because it was seen through the personal lens of one family. I was curious how much this book, a ‘what happened next’ of sorts, could add. The answer is 35 more years of Chinese history and politics, taking us into the 21^st century. It revisits some of the same ground, with Jung Chang’s mother – Bao Quin – the heart of this volume. However, it’s also about how Chang came to England to study, how she set about writing Wild Swans, and its reception, what she did next and the resulting relationship to the Chinese State – and the many shifts this has subsequently taken. Illuminating, but you do really need to read Wild Swans first – though, with 20 million copies sold, chances are you already have done so.

Heart the Lover by Lily King

I’ve read and enjoyed Writers & Lovers, which this is linked to – although I don’t remember enough to know how! What I do remember, however, is how warm and intelligent King’s writing is – how it feels rooted in everyday life.

We meet Casey (nicknamed Jordan) in college and her early formative relationships – there’s romance, but they also awake something in her, that a life of the mind is something worth earnestly pursing. Then we meet her again in her 40s, now a successful writer with children.

The novel deals with some of those ‘could-have-beens’ or ‘what if’ moments that surround you in mid-life. Not necessarily looking back with a sense of regret, but – from a position now as a grown-up with responsibilities – understanding how events and people have shaped you.

It has a reputation for being sad – and yes, I did cry, over my sandwich in public. And I would do the same again.

Homework by Geoff Dyer (audio)

I’ve realised that there’s something of a parental theme in this month’s reading. While Segal and Chang pay tribute to their mothers, here’s Dyer’s nod to both his parents. In one way they’re a type, solidly English working class, but he also enjoys the idiosyncrasies that made them – and all of us – unique and worthy of attention. Dyer charts his journey through childhood and off to college, particularly the transformative effect of passing the 11-plus to get into grammar school and its associated ambition (a later echo of my dad’s story). While Dyer’s family generations don’t tally with mine – he’s younger than my parents, significantly older than me – there was plenty in here that prompted childhood memories, particularly the ritual of elaborate card games at Christmas, a tradition that withered after the deaths of my grandparents. No doubt, it’ll be even more poignant if you are of Dyer’s generation. Fond and funny.

Stumbling block books

The Book of Love by Kelly Link

We read this for my book club – I was looking forward to something a bit different to my usual, something hopefully page-turner-y for January. The Book of Love follows a group of teenagers who’ve been bought back from the dead. They must learn how to use magic and… basically, it was frustrating. The pacing is weird, you learn the same things on repeat, and it took a lot of effort to get through its 672 pages. One of the group had read Link’s short stories (this is her first novel) and raved about them, so maybe this just isn’t her format.

The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors by Edward Hollis

I found this in a charity shop, off the back of reading The Undercurrents and hoped for something similar. It’s a beautifully packaged book and I was intrigued by the premise – that all interiors are ‘lost’ as they never stay static, though the influence of some far outstay their physical existence. The Memory Palace is divided into sections, each centred on different lost interiors, such as Versailles and the Crystal Palace. The writing is dense, bordering on opaque (I was relieved to read this review and realise that it wasn’t just down to my reading comprehension), so I ended up reading it in very short segments, a little each night. Too stubborn to give up on a book, that meant that it lingered on my bedside table for most of January, and I was very pleased when I finally reached the end and could banish it from my sights. Not one to remember…

Books I bought this month

From the charity shop, Wifedom by Anna Funder, a logical next step in my Orwell reading. The Beautiful Visit by Elizabeth Jane Howard, also from the charity shop, because she’s never let me down to date.

Also in January:

A scoot round various exhibitions before they closed, including the fabulous Kerry James Marshall at the RA and The Medium is the Message – essentially artists who believed they were channelling some kind of spirit with their work – at the College for Physic Studies. I worked very near this institution for a decade and never realised it was here, a London quirk I was glad to step inside. We also saw Into the Woods at the Bridge – so much fun.

Another 2026 ambition: a guided walk a month. January’s was in Upper Holloway.

For work, I’d commissioned a piece from Jenna Wigger, who came up with the concept of Winter of Care and Repair. Basically, from the winter to the spring equinox, it’s trying to do a daily task of care, mending or repair. While I haven’t managed to do something every day, it has brought focus to spare minutes, and finally doing things like sewing on buttons, taking things to be cleaned or altered. Very satisfying.

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My 2025 was a good year for reading. Although not my aim, I read slightly more books (two more!) than last year. My main aim for 2024 had been to get through a guilt-inducing stack of TBR fiction – and completing that meant a lot more freedom to read as I fancied. My final total this year was about 57% fiction / 43% non-fiction, though that’s probably skewed by my main reading aim for 2025 being to tackle my guilt-inducing stack of TBR non-fiction. Looking back on my best of post from last year, I also said I hoped I’d get to Celia Dale, Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife and Ann Schlee’s Rhine Journey. They were ticked off in April, December and January respectively. Mostly I’m proud of succeeding in writing *something* about every book that I’ve read, thanks to a year of writing this Substack. Thanks for joining me.

So, to the main event, my favourite books of the year. It’s a mix of new books and backlist, fiction and non-fiction, and I’ve failed to get it down to ten, or put them in any kind of ranking – they’re listed here in the order I read them.

Street Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence by Will Hodgkinson (audiobook) (January)

This taps into two of my book sweet spots: eccentric English characters and people walking around towns and cities. Plus, I always had a soft spot for the band Denim, so probably a bit of nostalgia as well. The year music journalist Will Hodgkinson spends trailing should-have-been pop star Lawrence is entertaining, sad and has lots of things to say about fame, creativity and value, so you’ll likely enjoy it even if you have no clue who Lawrence is. Later on in 2025, I went to an event with him and Will and it was every bit as entertaining as this book. I was, however, too shy to go and meet Lawrence – maybe the year’s biggest regret?

Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido (January)

Instant book adoration for me, with such a clear, narrative voice I can almost hear in it my head as I type. Suburban Catherine gets swept up into the lives of the Goldmans to her own instant adoration. Such a delight, I’m already looking forward to a re-read.

Anita Brookner x3

Given that December concluded two years of working my way through Brookner’s output, she had to be on this list. Hard to pick just one novel though (and truthfully, they’re all worth a read). Possibly Family and Friends (1985, read in January), a historical sweep through a family album; Brief Lives (1990, April), 60-something Fay looking back over her life, particularly her entanglement with the attention-demanding Julia; and A Family Romance (1993, June), which pits Jane against her aunt Dolly.

Absolutely & Forever by Rose Tremain (January)

Another brilliant first person narration, this strikes similar notes to Brother of the More Famous Jack, about another bright, lost girl, Marianne, raised in the 1950s and somewhat ill-equipped to cope with the shifts that come in the 1960s. I still feel for Marianne a year after reading. It reads like an instant classic.

Assembly by Natasha Brown (February)

I enjoyed Natasha Brown’s Universality this year, but it was her debut that really made me sit up and pay attention. A kind of Mrs Dalloway, following a Black woman preparing for a party at her boyfriend’s family home. Race, class, money, status – Brown takes on all of these in her 112 pages, while still leaving space for complexity. It makes my mind boggle that, with all this skill, Brown says that one day she might go back to working in finance…

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The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich (May)

One of those books that forever shifts how you think about a particular moment in history – in this case, the 800,000 women who served as part of Soviet forces in the Second World War. While it’s impossible to remember all the stories recorded as part of the book, there are the details that build into a mosaic portrait – the scale of how much people have dealt with, and then been expected just to go on with regular, daily life.

On the Calculation of Volume vols i to iii by Solvej Balle (June, July and December)

I love being part of the On the Calculation of Volume club – where you just have to mention 18 November, and people know what you mean. Each volume of this book has made me laugh, given me something to chew over and made me marvel at its inventiveness. I expect it to continue that way. And, joy, turns out we only have to wait until April for volume four.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (July)

Can a book where you don’t understand at least a third of it be a favourite? Yes, in the case of The Hearing Trumpet. This book was so funny and nonagenarian Marian Leatherby such a brilliant protagonist that its off-the-wall charm won me over entirely. My Carrington crush continued with reading Joanna Moorhead’s biography in November.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (October)

I read this while on sick leave, and having the time to stay with it, with nowhere else I had to be, was possibly the ideal reading experience for this big, baggy tale. It continues to live with me: I can’t think of Ilan de Toorjen Foss without a shudder, my heart aches for Sonia and a huge, white ghost hound haunts my imagination. As I’ve heard others say, you can feel the 20-year writing period in the weight of every sentence – and, although it’s big, I’d love to reread it someday, as I’m sure there’s so much I missed my first, greedy time around.

My Friends by Hisham Matar (November)

This is a book where place and memories intertwine – and, appropriately enough, will probably always be tied to me reading it on a sleeper train in Thailand. There are beautiful descriptions of family and friendships and the pain of exile. I loved its London descriptions too – how the friends seek out the plaques of fellow exiled writers in London, such as Joseph Conrad. Whenever I see this plaque, I’ll not only think of Conrad but of Khaled and his friends as well.

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (December)

I knew I’d enjoy this – turns out I loved it. All the glamour and the grit of New York courtship in the 1920s, with brilliant clothes. And it feels all the more authentic for being written almost at the exact moment it was set. I try to be tolerant with my reading choices, but if you don’t like this, I really do think we might not be able to be friends.

The re-reads

Some of my favourite reading experiences this year were books that I’d already read. Angel by Elizabeth Taylor (July): what a monster Angel is – what a creation! The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (August) – I managed to enjoy this Parisian escapade more the second time around. Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell (December) completely different reading circumstances drew out different aspects of this gorgeous memoir for me, and Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (December) was like the fine port to finish off two years of very satisfying Brookner reading.

2026 reading ambitions

After my end of 2025 ‘women in New York in the late 1950s/early 1960s’ binge, I realised how I struggled to think of British equivalents – one of my aims for the year is to find some. Of the right era, but perhaps not the right scene, is Elizabeth Taylor. I read three of her books last year, and realised they were too good to binge. So, replacing my Brookner a month, I’m going to read a Taylor a month, and work through them chronologically, if I can. That should take me into next year.

Off the back of Hilton Als’ recent Jean Rhys exhibition (and not the forthcoming Wuthering Heights film), I’ve booked a trip to Brontë country in the summer. I’d like to do some re-reading before I’m there – and to fill in my Brontë reading gaps, with the likes of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Aside from that I’ve a list of authors that I’d like to try for the first time (including Stevie Smith, Ann Quin and Jane Gardam) those I’d like to read more of (like Patricia Highsmith, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns). Frankly quite ambitious for a year’s reading, but if I even manage a fraction of that, I’ll be chuffed.

And also…

Since 2009, I’ve made a yearly playlist. I compile it through the year; maybe songs I’ve associated with occasions, or with films or gigs, but mostly things I’ve heard on the radio and liked a lot. 2025 has turned out a good playlist. See if you agree here.

Although I’m sure most people have moved on by now, I’d love to know your favourite books of last year and, perhaps more timely, any reading resolutions for this. How are they going?

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Amid the family and sociability of December, I anticipate the calm of the end of the month. When work and duty is dispensed with and there’s time to sink into reading, and whatever other diversions take my fancy. I take my book selection for this final stretch of the year very seriously: this year, this Rachel Syme Instagram post happily coincided with my planning. Her “essential Peggy-related reading list … about women in NYC in the 50s and early 60s” was catnip to me, especially because I’d already previously enjoyed a chunk of them. Cue a flurry of second-hand buying and library borrowing. My 2026 began with a head full of 1962(ish), and a long list of follow-up books and projects that I hope will happen over the year to come.

What I read in December 2025, in the order that I read it:

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe by Stephen Greenblatt

The Undercurrents by Kirsty Bell

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett

1984 by George Orwell (audio)

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

On the Calculation of Volume iii by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge

The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

Uncommon People: Britpop and Beyond in 20 Songs by Miranda Sawyer

Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell

The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan by Patricia Bosworth

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

The Slip by Prudence Peiffer

Classics revisited

1984 by George Orwell (audio)

I wanted to read a book about 1984, so decided to revisit the actual novel first, especially because I haven’t read it since my teens. And, after all, nothing quite says Christmas like ‘a boot stamping on a human face’. I was amazed how much of it had stayed with me – waiting for the rats to make their entrance – and exactly how many expressions originated here. Since reading, I’ve noticed how it’s omnipresent in daily contemporary life. One thing I missed as a teen, though, what a frightful snob Orwell is!

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

I felt like I must have read this – likely at the same stage I diligently worked through modern classics like 1984. But with no recollection of it, it was a wrong I wanted to right and I found a 1980s Women’s Press edition in a Vinted Bundle. It’s an epistolary novel, with the main character Celie – a Black woman in the Deep South in the Interwar period – writing first to God, and later to her sister Nettie. Later, we get letters from Nettie too, who becomes a missionary in Africa. Celie has an undeniably hard life: raped by the man she thinks is her father, then passed on to another man who doesn’t love her to raise his children. Gradually, her situation is transformed by her relationship with Shug – a glamorous singer – and the friendship of other women. Despite all the violence and darkness, it’s immensely readable and I was surprised how happily it ended – I was poised for another tragedy to occur. It’s a love letter, essentially, to sisterhood and hope.

A period revisited

Uncommon People: Britpop and Beyond in 20 Songs by Miranda Sawyer

I was a teenager during the Britpop years, a period of music I look back on nostalgically, despite being lots about it that leaves me cold (put it this way, I wasn’t remotely interested in getting Oasis tickets). This is essentially 20 mini essays where in each Sawyer – who was a music journalist at the time – looks at a different ‘Britpop’ song and discusses its genesis and impact. The Britpop scene that emerges is far more interesting and diverse than it is often remembered. It made me want to dig out old favourites (Pulp, Ash), replay albums I hadn’t listened to for years (Cornershop) and reassess bands that I never quite clicked with, such as Suede. There are interesting reflections, too, from Sawyer on the treatment of women in bands, focused through interviews with Shirley Manson of Garbage and Louise Wener of Sleeper, and her own experiences, where bad behaviour by men was warned about in whispers, instead of confronted. A refreshing reappraisal.

A Hotel revisit

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

I’ve read an Anita Brookner each month since January 2024. To conclude two years of reading pleasure, I decided to revisit Hotel du Lac – like many, the first of hers I read, thanks to its Booker-win fame. On first read, I enjoyed it although it didn’t give me the urge to try more of her work that Latecomers (the Jan. 24 book that kickstarted my project) did. The re-read was pure pleasure. Brookner’s protagonist is a romantic novelist, Edith Hope, encouraged into exile at a European hotel by friends who are bewildered by her recent behaviour. Though only her fourth novel, Brookner advances the philosophy that runs through all her work. While in Edith’s stories (portrayed as increasingly out of step with the times), the tortoise always triumphs, in real life – as in Brookner’s own novels – we’re reminded it’s the hare who seizes all. Opening a Brookner novel always feels like that you’re in such a competent pair of hands – no doubt, much like I imagine the staff of the Hotel du Lac guiding you over to a spotless white tableclothed table, drawing back your chair before pouring you a glass of excellent wine.

People and places

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival, Christopher Marlowe by Stephen Greenblatt

Not my usual period of non-fiction, this was a book club pick. It’s an evocative, entertaining read – a rich picture of England in the playwright Christopher Marlowe’s time. Having never read any Greenblatt before, I wondered how much of this was fresh, and how much it was an 80-something scholar synthesising it from decades of research and thinking. As someone in my book club said, reading it was like being in a seminar with an entertaining, hugely knowledgeable professor – especially when it came to the close analysis of Doctor Faustus, a play I swore off (and at) in secondary school. I also enjoyed finally learning a bit more about Marlowe – I used to live in housing that backed on to the church where he’s buried, and walked past a plaque memorialising him every day.

The Undercurrents by Kirsty Bell

Bell moves into a new apartment in Berlin, but the building sags and leaks – it has a peculiar atmosphere. At the same time, her marriage begins to disintegrate. Bell’s idiosyncratic decision is to explore the history of her building – to investigate the trauma that may have taken place within its walls. It’s a kind of psychogeography, albeit rooted in the space of the home – at the same time giving a potted history of Berlin from industrial age boom, through the Second World War, the Berlin Wall and its aftermath. Bell evokes a kaleidoscope of places and people, though some of the steps she takes veer into the woo-woo. While I’m usually on team scepticism, I enjoyed being pushed on what I thought was credible. It reminded me of the (definitely not woo-woo) recent TV series of A House Through Time, which follows the inhabitants of apartment blocks in both Berlin and London, and Julie Myerson’s 2005 Home, tracing everyone who had lived in her south London house, while making me curious about the 90 years’ worth of residents who occupied our current flat before us.

Contemporary classics…

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett

I’m a huge fan of Bennett’s Checkout-19 and was eagerly awaiting this. This is the third of her books and you’ll likely either click with her writing or she’ll leave you cold. Personally, I love being in the heads of her female protagonists – how they swing from profound observations to obsessing about the mundane. Sometimes moving, equally silly and funny. This novel is centred on memories of an old relationship, leading onto fragmentary recollections of others, more than repaying my anticipation. However, I perhaps didn’t feel the pure exhilaration I experienced when reading Checkout-19. (On that note, Petya K. Grady has done the work of angels in compiling a list of every book and author name-checked in that novel here.)

On the Calculation of Volume iii by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell

Another eagerly anticipated novel: at this stage, you’re likely on the Balle train or not.

I read this on a quiet Sunday in December, the kind of day that already feels like a gift. Just when you think Balle has exhausted all the ways that you might spend an 18 November on repeat, Tara Selter discovers she’s not alone in her time loop day. First, she meets someone else – and then two more, and then... Each person brings a different perspective, even philosophy to the day. A new community is beginning to form, with its own challenges on building consensus on ways to live – it’s thrilling that it’s not even halfway through the series yet.

And classic contemporaries…

The Girl in the Polka Dot Dress by Beryl Bainbridge

A last-minute effort to fulfil my pledge to read some Bainbridge this year, I plumped for this as a 99p Kobo offer. However, I only realised after finishing that this was what she was working on while she died so it’s not fully resolved – and it unescapably feels that way. There’s lots to enjoy – odd characters, behaving in unexpected ways, scenes that feel deliberately hazy, sharp dialogue – but this wouldn’t have been my starting point with Bainbridge if I’d known. Daunt is reissuing a couple of her earlier novels next year and I think I’ll begin again with those.

The Waterfall by Margaret Drabble

The fifth in my very slow reading of all Drabble’s novels, this dates to 1972 and charts an affair between Jane – married but estranged from her husband – and James, married to her cousin. It shifts between third and first person narration, where Jane continually modifies her position and reassesses events, gradually revealing more. Jane has recently given birth when the affair starts. In its depiction of suspended time in the first days post-partum, as winter rages outsides, the opening made for particularly atmospheric December reading.

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Lost in New York

Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife by Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey

This is the first novel I read off the back of that Rachel Syme Instagram post. The premise is that Joanna’s journal – from her from her first entry in 1959 up to 1984 – has been left for daughter to read. It’s been found by her husband, David, who is also reading these entries for the first time, and who adds his own interjections. David is a playwright and Joanna becomes a novelist (look up Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey’s biography and it’s tempted to speculate how much is based on real life). Their marriage is essentially a way for a young, educated woman to escape her own family, but then her personal wants and ambitions are submerged in the service of her marriage and children, as they move between New York, Los Angeles and Dallas in the name of David’s career. I’m undecided about the format, but it’s undeniably readable, and mirrors the themes and milieu of the books that I read subsequently.

Manhattan, When I Was Young by Mary Cantwell

I’ve read this before and vividly remember when and where I was: on holiday in a beautiful place with someone while I knew our relationship was ending (we broke-up the following month). The circumstances for the re-read may have been almost entirely opposite – on my couch over the course of Christmas day – but I found it as gripping and moving as I did in 2012. What I particularly remembered from that first reading was her mental health challenges, and the breakdown of her marriage. This time, possibly promoted by just having read Joanna’s Husband and David’s Wife, it was aspects about her relationship with her family, and her initial push to marriage, not to mention her career path – from Mademoiselle (beginning the September after Sylvia Plath spent her summer there) to Vogue and back again. Fresh from The Undercurrents, I was also alert to the many rich domestic details – charting their changing addresses, their changing furniture and design aspiration – that help capture a woman’s life in this era of Greenwich Village.

The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan by Patricia Bosworth

Bosworth’s memoir aligns with both Joanna’s fictionalised and Mary’s real story. From a privileged background, she marries a down and out painter. But the ‘Men’ of the title also refers to her relationships with her father and brother, both of whom tragically die by suicide. As with both the books above, it charts a gradual realisation of self, as Bosworth works first as a commercial model, then as an actress – training at the famous Actors Studio – before becoming a biographer, her first subjects being people she’d met along the way including Montgomery Clift and Diane Arbus. In fact, her trajectory means she crosses path with many mid-century stars, so there’s plenty of interesting asides, whether your interest extends more to Elia Kazan or Audrey Hepburn, whom she appeared on screen beside in 1959’s The Nun’s Story.

The Slip by Prudence Peiffer

The Slip is a specific place on the tip of Manhattan, where a group of artists used the abandoned lofts – once used for ships and their associated trades – as a place to live and work cheaply in the 1950s. It’s the next generation on from the Abstract Expressionists (and those covered in Ninth Street Women): the likes of Robert Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, James Rosenquist, Agnes Martin and Lenore Tawney. Peiffer puts forward a convincing argument for looking at groups in art history through “shared places.” “What if,” she asks, “rather than technique or style, it’s a spirit of a place that defines a crucial moment?” The geography of The Slip, and the expanse of water surrounding it, inspired many of the artworks, but also provided somewhere conducive to work. Here, being part of the city, but not in the city, Peiffer argues, artists could have the quiet and the space to create, with fellow artists on hand if needed (far removed from the Abstract Expressionism bar scene): what she calls “collective solitude”. This was especially interesting in relation to Martin and Tawney who were defying societal norms for women in choosing to live this way. While Peiffer’s writing can be exquisitely beautiful, at times, I wished she’d had a slight bit more editing, often giving three quotes to prove a point, one would do (incidentally, she quotes Mary Cantwell a few times to summarise the spirit of Manhattan at this time). Nevertheless, it’s a book that’s a dream to escape into, one that makes you want to read twenty more and to walk these streets of a lost city for yourself.

Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott

Long before I read it, I knew Ex-Wife would be a book for me. I cannot resist smart, urban interwar women. Feed me quips and bootlegger cocktails – and new ways of living for women. Finally succumbing, it gave me all that and more. I hadn’t expected the book’s depth of sadness, the emotional underpinning to all the glamour. Patricia is the ex-wife of the title, renegotiating her way of living after separating from her husband Peter. Parrott captures the pain of a relationship, essentially the end of first love. It emphasises the importance of female friendship – Patricia is taken in hand by another ex-wife, and she later passes on the favour. Though of an earlier period than this month’s other New York books (Ex-Wife was first published in 1929), it echoes many of the issues there, from illegal abortions to career versus domesticity, while feeling specifically of its time and place. And, oh, the clothes!

The books I bought this month

The New York books off the back of that Rachel Syme post, mentioned above, and also Limelight by Helen Gee, following a recommendation in the comments. From a charity shop, John Lahr’s Joe Orton biography, which I’ve wanted to read for a long time, and Memory Palace, because it sounded a good follow on from The Undercurrents. A cheap Vinted copy of Mr Fox by Barbara Comyns, and two more non-fiction that I’ve wanted to read for a while, both from Any Amount of Books: The Quality of Love (also ties in with the Orwell reading) and The Stirrings, a book to finally take me out of the mid-century.

And also this month:

The design studio Pentagram have moved their office nearby and are holding regular exhibitions in their space, the most recent on Theo Crosby – one of Pentagram’s founders and the kind of person who spends a lifetime cropping up in interesting places, such as the 1956 This is Tomorrow exhibition. I now want to read his How to Play the Environment Game. The London Archives’ great small display about London in the Second World War, and an injection of glamour courtesy of Cecil Beaton at the National Portrait Gallery.

At the cinema, Marty Supreme dovetailed with all that NY Reading, and lots of David Lynch, both his films (Blue Velvet and Inland Empire) and films that inspired him (8 ½ and Sunset Boulevard) – great brain fodder for these quieter days of the year.

Here’s to another year of great reading!

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The books that I read in November, in the order in which I read them:

• Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

• Flashlight by Susan Choi

• Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

• Windswept: Why Women Walk by Annabel Abbs

• Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin

• Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (audio)

• My Friends by Hisham Matar

• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

• At the Hairdressers by Anita Brookner

• Chelsea Bird by Virginia Ironside

• The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead

• Now We Shall be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller

The last of the Booker

Flashlight by Susan Choi

I was slow to get going on Flashlight (Booker fatigue?), only getting to it once the library due date was pressing. I’m glad I did, because Flashlight is a solidly good read. Spanning Korea and Japan and the States, it centres on the mysterious disappearance of Serk from a beach. Shifting between the stories of his story, that of his wife Anne, their daughter Louisa, and Anne’s son Tobias, it’s about their lives up to that event and the aftermath. Even finding out the shocking truth of what happened to Serk isn’t the conclusion of the novel. Choi pulls off the trick of making you care about her characters, despite them all being annoying and reliably not acting the way that you want them to.

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood

I read Seascraper at the start of the month. Returning to my notes, I realised that I’d written just one word: atmosphere. And, oh, the atmosphere. Tom works as a shrimp fisherman in an unidentified town in an unidentified year. There’s a chance that his soaked-to-the-bones life might change with the arrival of a stranger and… I wasn’t a huge fan of the plot tbh – and I have little patience for extended dream sequences, which also feature here. But the atmosphere! Wood creates a gorgeously murky world, blurring time, sea and shore, reality and dream, or maybe reality and falsehood. I saw comments that this should have made the Shortlist; I feel (albeit with The Rest of Our Lives still to read) that the Shortlist books were stronger.

Now We Shall be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller

Although I didn’t love The Land in Winter, Miller’s Booker shortlisted title, there was more than enough that I appreciated about it for me to click buy on a 99p Kobo offer for this title from his backlist. Rather than the early 1960s as in The Land in Winter, here we’re back in 1809, following Lacroix, a privileged cavalry officer who is fleeing events in the Peninsular War. Travelling from Lisbon to the Cotswolds; Bristol to the Scottish Hebrides, like The Land in Winter, it’s populated with characters who push against their expected roles – what does it mean, or what does it take, to be free? Based on both books, I’m completely convinced Miller’s a brilliant writer, in awe of how he paints place and period detail – somehow, there’s still something about them that holds me back from full-on fandom.

The last of the Brookner

At the Hairdressers by Anita Brookner

I held out on an eReader for a long time. One big argument in favour of getting one was this: an Anita Brookner available only as an eBook, the last bit of her fiction I had still to read. Briefer even than her usual briefness, this ‘Penguin Special’ contains lots of Brookner trademarks: an older woman who lives alone, enjoys a walk, uses routine to structure her days and is reliant on the kindness of strangers. Unusually for her, however, it has a first-person narrator and, while you could never say Brookner was dialling it in, this definitely feels looser than her usual precise prose. Given that this was her last published book, I was pleased to see she finished it on a hopeful note.

The last of the Surrealists

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead

In the remarkable stories of the surrealists, Leonora Carrington’s stands out for deserting her wealthy Yorkshire background – she even was a debutant – and devoting her life herself to the pursuit of surrealist art and literature in Mexico. Moorhead, instead, knew her as ‘Prim’, the black sheep of her family. At a party, when a Mexican art historian explained the esteem in which Carrington was held in her country, Moorhead set out to South America to meet her. Then 89, Carrington’s subsequent conversations – over several years – with Moorhead informed this biography, which came out in 2017. Since then, her name and work are much better known in the UK – thanks partly to Moorhead. It is immensely readable – giving what feels like a true sense of the person behind all the remarkable works. Moorhead writes that she hopes her own daughters will see Carrington as an example to have the courage to live their lives on their very own terms, precisely the reason why I enjoy reading about these surrealist pioneer women so much.

More wild women

Here’s some wildlife – monkeys!

Windswept: Why Women Walk by Annabel Abbs

As Lauren Elkin’s Flaneuse traces the history of women walkers in the city, Abbs’ book does the same for the countryside, using portraits of their life to explain their motivations for walking. She also attempts their walks and captures a sense of the risks each one took to do it– their likely fears not lessened by Abbs doing it from the vantage of the 21^st century. I loved her selection of women – Gwen John, Simone de Beauvoir and Georgia O’Keeffe among them – their walking aiding creativity or thinking, or simply being able to step out of the norms of life.

Chelsea Bird by Virginia Ironside

I’d wanted to try this since reading Celia Brayfield’s Rebel Writers in April. Chelsea Bird came out in 1964 when Virginia was 20 and – according to Brayfield’s book – was an immediate cause célèbre. It follows art student Harriet through the various scenes and types of nascent Swinging London. I would describe Harriet as gimlet eyed, but the book frequently reminds us of how much she needs her glasses… This was a lot of fun – a reminder that you can be the grooviest kind of student, and go to the grooviest parties in the grooviest city and still not have a great time.

Plane and poolside reading

Here’s a beautiful Thai sunset, instead of a book

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Typing out the plot of Flashlight, I realised it explored similar ground to this, albeit stylistically very different, a family in the aftermath of a disaster. In this case, it’s the kidnapping of the father of a supremely wealthy Jewish-American family. Having lapped up Fleishman is in Trouble, I picked this out as my plane reading, guessing (correctly) that it would be smart and amusing and would keep me hooked. I admire Brodesser-Akner’s ability to home in on social details that feel so specific they should have no relevance to someone outside of a wealthy Jewish-American family – somehow the buoyancy of her writing carries me along, even when her characters are uniformly unlikeable. (But, I can imagine, won’t work for everyone.)

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

In this stealth summer bestseller (in the States at least), Sybil Van Antwerp is ‘The Correspondent’ of the title. In her early 70s, she spends a considerable bulk of her time writing to friends, officials, famous people… The novel is told entirely through her letters, and sometimes the responses to them, as she reckons with some of the mistakes of her lifetime. This was the most holiday read-ish of my holiday reads – and, like several books that I’d class similarly – it tipped slightly too into twee for me. Why do her correspondents have to include Joan Didion and Larry McMurty, for example? I also felt that the people who were writing back to her just didn’t come across as distinct characters. Nonetheless, that’s not to say I didn’t race through it by the pool…

Another Marvelous Thing by Laurie Colwin

This is my second Laurie Colwin – her backlist getting a bit of a push at the moment. It’s classy stuff, set in a milieu of well-to-do New Yorkers: bankers, lawyers, academics, the types that I probably should be tired of reading about by now. This is a brief novel about a not-so-brief affair that feels utterly believable, and – when looked back on at the end of the novel – feels utterly devastating.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (audio)

A lot of nature memoirs (of mixed standards) cross my desk at work, and so it isn’t a genre I normally turn to in my leisure reading. But I kept hearing how good this was. Particularly of note is how the book makes no grand claims: it is about Dalton discovering an injured leveret (a young hare) and how slowly, gently caring for it also slowly, gently changed her. Today, she is campaigning for a ‘close season’ – a season in which hares can’t be shot – which feels impossible not to support once you’ve finished this.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

I struggled to get into this – the protagonist, Cyrus, can be challenging to hang out with. He lost his mother as a young boy in Iran, while his father – who brought him to America – died soon after he went to college. He’s managed to hang around in college since then, studying drink, drugs and the meaning of life – and death. Kaveh Akbar is a poet and there are gorgeous bits of writing, especially the final revelatory scene. But the book’s big twist is barely concealed, and it reads very much like a debut: lots of good ideas and promise that will hopefully become refined over subsequent books.

And my favourite book of the month:

Here’s me reading My Friends. If only all reading opportunities came with a curtain…

My Friends by Hisham Matar

This is a wonderful book, one I think that’ll be tied in my memory to where I read most of it – on my berth on a sleeper train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. In many ways, however, it’s a London novel, structured around an element that I always enjoy – a walk through the city. Khaled has dropped off his friend, Hosam, at St Pancras to travel to Paris, and decides to walk back to his flat in Shepherd’s Bush. As happens on long walks, memories intermingle with the present, and we learn how Khaled, Hosam and a third friend, Mustafa, are bound together – from their beginnings in Libya to their journeys to Europe and the life-shifting, real life event of the shooting of protestors that happened at the Libyan embassy in St James’ Square in 1984 and resulted in the death of a policewomen, Yvonne Fletcher (I happened to walk past the memorial for this just a few weeks before reading). There are beautiful depictions of family, and friendship, in its varied, shifting incarnations. The characters feel real – just like you might happen to pass them in a London street one afternoon…

The books I bought in November

Just one! Dark Renaissance for my book club’s December meeting

This month, I also:

Went to Thailand. We did 13 days as a group tour with Intrepid, which worked out really well for us. (The above is taken from a raft house that we slept on for a night.) Then our final week was spent in Ko Lanta and near Krabi.

I did manage to squeeze in one cultural London thing before going: the Jean Rhys exhibition, curated by Hilton Als. I’ve planned a trip for next year to the Brontë parsonage off the back of it – and also hope to do some Brontë reading and re-reading.

And I’ve been ‘did you know’ every time I’ve put on anything Gore-Tex thanks to the brilliant latest new Articles of Interest Gear podcast series.

I’m now back and settling into British Christmas mode – and, of course, the final month of reading for the year.

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Here’s what I read in October 2025, in the order that I read them:

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson (audio)

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann

A Pink Front Door by Stella Gibbons

The Lowlife by Alexander Baron

Daybook by Anne Truitt

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

The Memoir: Part One by Cher (audio)

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

Marion Milner: On Creativity by David Russell

The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Strangers by Anita Brookner

Flesh by David Szalay

Greyhound by Joanna Pocock

Something in Disguise by Elizabeth Jane Howard

The Booker bit

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

I feel fortunate for having had hours to devote to this, with no other demands on my time, because it’s a book that I didn’t want to leave. It’s a hard one to summarise, though. On one hand, it’s the story of Sonia and Sunny, a longing for connection and understanding. But it’s also full of other characters, ideas, detail, imagery, somehow while never feeling like Desai is piling it on nor forfeiting how much you care about her characters. I loved it.

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

Set over Britain’s ‘Big Freeze’ of winter 1962 to ‘63 in the West Country, The Land in Winter follows four characters (two couples), Bill and Rita, Irene and Eric, each of a slightly different social standing. There’s the sense that the cold is a purge, out with the old and in with a new decade and social order (that’s also the premise of Juliet Nicolson’s non-fiction Frostquake, which I keep meaning to read). The book is rich in period detail (the food!) – there’s even a Rachman-esque landlord lurking at its edges, to align with the Baron and Gibbons books I read this month (see below), and the description of the frozen landscapes is stunning. I think I’ll remember this more for atmosphere than the plot.

Audition by Katie Kitamura

Audition is a book of two halves. In the first, a middle-aged, respected actress is approached by someone saying that he’s her son – an impossibility, she says. But in the second, he has become her son – or at least her and her husband are prepared to indulge that fantasy scenario. It has a gripping narrative voice and is painstakingly constructed, though when I finished, I thought something along the lines of “Great, it’s about the different roles we all play, what’s the big deal?” However, it’s since been playing over in my mind. As I said, it’s in two halves. The actress describes a ‘middle scene’ as crucial as bridging the two halves of the play that she’s in, also suggesting a corresponding ‘missing’ middle scene of this book, which might unravel some of its mysteries. Which of the two halves do we read as truth, and why? I’ve no doubt there’s lots more to pick up on a re-read. A book I admire rather than love.

Flesh by David Szalay

This is almost as opposite to my usual Brookner fare (see below) as you can get, though it takes the same premise as some of her works – tracing a (lonely?) life from childhood to older age, as we follow István from Hungary to London, rags to riches, and back again. I’m pretty sure “okay” is István’s most used word, and many of the book’s major events don’t appear on the page at all. Physical acts – the use of force, sex, addiction – drive the narrative forward. It’s called Flesh for a reason. It’s compelling, though so slick I wonder if it will quickly slide from my memory…

As to the rest of the Booker shortlist, I’m partly through Flashlight and currently number 19 on the library waiting list for The Rest of our Lives. I’ve never read this many from the shortlist before, and am curious as to what will win. Sonia and Sunny, surely…

The Brookner bit

Strangers by Anita Brookner

I’ve been reading an Anita Brookner book every month since January 2024, and this was the last full-length novel of hers I had to read – and also the last one she wrote, published in 2009. I therefore began it with a feeling of the loss to come, exactly as might befit one of her characters. Unsurprisingly, Strangers is not a radical departure in subject matter. Meet Paul Sturgis, someone whose problem is that he’s always been ‘too nice’, lacking the thrust or decisiveness to drive his life forward, and now he’s facing his retirement alone, his only social interactions limited to the likes of his trips to the hairdressers, the niceties of strangers. As things threaten to stagnate for the rest of a lonely life, a couple of women – a younger woman, Vicky, and an older ex-girlfriend, Sarah – enter the scene and offer seemingly contrasting options. There’s a treat of a review by Hilary Mantel here, or immerse yourself in Laura Thompson’s recent paean to Brookner.

Creative thinking

Daybook: the Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt

Truitt is a fascinating woman: she studied psychology before becoming a writer and, later, an esteemed artist. This is essentially her edited diary, spanning 1974 to 1980, less about the minutiae of her day, more about her grappling with big issues: creativity, motherhood, vocation, art… I read it over a distracted week, finishing it in the minutes before I was due to go into surgery, and it was a welcome balm. It feels like a book where you’ll take something different from it on each reading.

Marion Milner: On Creativity by David Russell

Marion Milner has some similarities to Anne Truitt, as an artist and a psychoanalyst, and how creativity plays a central part in her thinking. Last year, I read Milner’s 1934’s A Life of One’s Own – her ‘experiment in living’, in which she tries to find paths to a more fulfilled, creative life – and found it fascinating, though it contained lots that I couldn’t quite get my head around. I was pleased to be sent this book through my day job – it’s part of an Oxford University Press series ‘My Reading’, where different writers reflect on an author’s influence on their own thinking. Russell discusses A Life of One’s Own, and her later work (including the influential On Not Being Able to Paint), and is reassuring about bits of her work that I failed to grasp, though truthfully a lot of this went over my head too. I suspect you’ll get much more from it if you’re more familiar with Milner, and the background to her work. I realised that what I’m really after is a good biography of Milner, which places her in the context of her time – there is one, though very pricey, but – in looking for that – I came across this, which came out in May this year, and has gone on my reading list.

London’s housing crisis

A Pink Front Door by Stella Gibbons

Coincidentally, two of the books I read this month dealt with the same issue – the mid-century London housing crisis: this and The Lowlife – and both are social comedies, of a kind. Here, Daisy has a lovely home – with the pink door of the title – but spends all her time trying to fix the problems of others, including foisting homeless families on members of the impoverished upper-middle classes, unable to keep up their large houses without help. Not so in Hampstead, where Daisy lives and the novel is set, where her pink front door indicates the area’s gentrification, their picturesque row of houses inhabited by ad men and the like. I enjoyed this most as a slice of London life, as Gibbons must have observed what was happening in the streets around where she lived. To me, it feels like her young heroines are still acting like they’re from the 1930s, when Gibbons was also a young woman, but this might be my contemporary projection. Though I’m sure brilliantly educated women – like Daisy’s university friend, Katie – still were sacrificing their careers for their families.

The Lowlife by Alexander Baron

From late 1950s Hampstead to early 1960s Hackney. I’d been meaning to read this for a long time: it’s a Backlisted favourite, Jo in my book club was raving about it, and there’s a handsome new Faber edition. However, mine was an older reissue found in Skoob books. And it’s as good as everyone says. Harryboy is our antihero, whose two great pleasures – possibly even his purpose – are gambling and reading. Despite his desire for a relatively peaceful life, he gets drawn into the goings-on of his neighbours, the Deaners, and events escalate from there. If you enjoy a taste of London social history, there’s loads to relish here, on the streets of Hackney, with the waves of immigration, as the aspiring middle classes move out to Finchley and beyond. Even without that, it’s highly entertaining, walking a tightrope where it feels it might flip into the catastrophic at any point. Thankfully for stress levels, it’s also short.

More Backlisted-influenced reads

Something in Disguise by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Something in Disguise is a book in disguise, as the set-up perhaps suggests one thing, and you get entirely another. We’re at the slightly shabbier end of the British upper middle / upper class here, with May and her new-ish husband, the Colonel, along with May’s children Oliver and Elizabeth, and the Colonel’s daughter Alice. Howard treats us a party in 1960s London, a villa on the Riveria and a brilliant cat (and I’m not usually into animals in books). There are also a lot of bad relationships, another of Howard’s specialities it seems, after reading The Long View last month.

However, I knew Backlisted had picked this book for a past ‘Halloween’ special. In that episode, they implore people to find out as little about it as possible before reading it: in my case, just knowing they’d linked it to Halloween was key in framing my expectations. It’s only in the final chapters where the horror is revealed, although the clues are all in there – it only depends on whether you’ve been paying attention to (or looking out for) them, or not. I won’t say anything more, just go ahead and read.

The Weather in the Streets by Rosamond Lehmann

Lots of people whose taste I rate love Lehmann, and while I enjoyed reading about her in Harriet Baker’s Rural Hours last year, I’ve been slow to actually read her. The Weather in the Streets is the sequel to Invitation to the Waltz, which I also read last year. I don’t think it needs to be read as a sequel, however, though the same characters reoccur. Olivia Curtis, the younger sister, who we met preparing for her first dance, is now grown-up. She’s been married, but is separated when she bumps into Rollo – who she first met at the dance – on a train home to see her ill father. Rollo is married, but they embark on an affair. Whereas Kate, Olivia’s older sister, has followed the solid and steady motherly path of expectations, Olivia’s way of living feels more precarious – just about subsisting as a photographer’s assistant, rooming with a wealthy cousin – a different version of womanhood. It’s a book that makes you keep flicking back to the imprint page to check – yes – it was published in 1936. The Backlisted episode on it is here.

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American stories

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Erik Larson (audio)

This charts the story of the 1893 World Fair in Chicago – from inception to after closing day – and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer who took advantage of the period’s scale of urban change and unaccompanied women flooding into the city. I liked this best for how it gave a taste of American life in the 1890s – its ambitions and enthusiasms. Criticism of the book seems to hinge on the imaginative freedom the author gave himself in describing the murders. Given the dismissive way he talks about Jack the Ripper’s victims several times in the book, this left a bad taste. Turns out I prefer reading about Ferris Wheels to mutilated women, who knew? (I knew.)

The Memoir: Part One by Cher (audio)

This is a big old juicy memoir – and it’s only part one. My mum loves Cher, I love Cher, who doesn’t love Cher? I knew some bits about the Sonny and Cher era through my mum and also Ronnie Spector’s memoir, but her family background was all new to me and their peripatetic lifestyle set against the poverty of 20^th century America. Cher takes her time with things – there a lot of childhood stories here, some much more interesting than others. While it wasn’t a surprise what a bastard Sonny was to her – cheating on her, controlling her, conning her out of her money – her forgiveness of his behaviour is.

Greyhound by Joanna Pocock

Pocock took two journeys around the United States by Greyhound bus – the first in 2006, in the aftermath of miscarriages and the death of her sister, and a later one in 2023, to revisit the journey that she’d found transformative. The book appealed to me, because in 1998, I spent three months travelling around the States with my sister, often by Greyhound. It was a pleasure to read about the places Pocock visited, and the experience of being on that bus – bringing up so many memories of my own journey (I don’t think any kind of notes from my trip still exist, and my pre-digital photos are mostly lost.) She also introduces three more women who traversed the States by bus and wrote about it: Ethel Manin, Irma Kurtz and Simone de Beauvoir.

In many ways, the 2023 version of the States that Pocock writes about seems impoverished, not just financially (the Greyhound was always the way for those with less money to travel), but in the ripping out of urban life and so many interactions lost with the push to digital. There’s a big environmental element here too, more urgent now than a couple of decades ago. Pocock also finds she’s approached less by strangers, probably – though surely not purely – because she’s now in her fifties, rather than 40). These things are discovered on a gently repetitive loop, suggesting there may have been a better way to structure her story. But, overall, I really enjoyed this trip down some memory highways.

Also from the library…

The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

This was another chunkster that arrived with me from the library while I was on sick leave. And, again, another chunkster that I was happy to have the time to devote to it. It’s centred on three Swedish Tunisian sisters – Ida, Evelyn and Anatasia – occurring at various moments in time, from the turn of the 21^st century into the future, and across continents. The sisters believe that they’re suffering under a family curse, and the novel explores various kinds of mythmaking, not least because their story is also interspersed with recollections of them from a writer, also of Swedish Tunisian heritage, Jonas. It took me far too long to twig ‘Jonas’ was Jonas Hassen Khemiri, the author. I gobbled it for the sisters’ stories, but – should I ever have the time – re-read it with a closer eye on its literary intentions.

House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

This is a collection of fragmentary stories centred on a village in Lower Silesia. It was first published in 1998 and recently came out as a Fitzcarraldo edition. You can see aspects of Tokarczuk’s other, later work in it, such as the structure of Flights or the older, eccentric woman character, as in Drive Your Plough. And it showcases many of Tokarczuk’s usual themes, such as the challenging of divisions and borders, the focus on a deeper understanding of place.

Having recently read Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, I thought I detected its influence. Tokarczuk has written about how that inspired aspects of Drive Your Plough, but I couldn’t find anything explicitly linking it to this. There are definitely affinities, however, with Carrington’s love of alternative, feminine myths and iconography, especially in the story of Wilgefortis aka Kümmernis – a folk saint, with the body of a woman and the face and beard of Jesus. Like often with Tokarczuk’s other work that I’ve read, this is sometimes a bit disorientating, sometimes very funny – and always feels fresh and invigorating.

What I bought in October

The Lowlife, Anne Truitt and Stella Gibbons as mentioned above. Also a charity shop copy of Other People’s Houses by Lore Segal (as appears on my very ambitious Pinterest board of everything I fancy reading one day), and My Next Bride by Kay Boyle and Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood for my Virago Modern Classics collection.

What else I did in October

Sick leave re-watching of Mad Men. I got through three and a half seasons. Lots of medically mandated walks around my neighbourhood, reminding me of Lockdown times. Appreciating the beige and brown Americana of The Mastermind: my first trip ‘out’.

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My books, however, have been more far-ranging than me: two novels translated from German, two from Italian – and stories spanning those countries, as well as England, USA, France, Switzerland, the Arctic and Morrocco.

The books that I read in September, in the order that I read them:

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann

The Pretender by Jo Harkin

The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howar

Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City and the Birth of American Fashion by Nancy MacDonell

The Rules of Engagement by Anita Brookner

A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Tim Parks

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter, translated by Jane Degras

Ripeness by Sarah Moss

Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated by Lucy Rand

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

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Toxic relationships

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann

Kairos won the International Booker last year. What made me want to try it, though, was reading an intriguing couple of paragraphs from it over the shoulder of a man in front of me on the bus. Kairos follows the relationship of Katharina and the much older Hans in East Berlin in years leading up to the fall of the Berlin wall. It vividly captures the coming together of a relationship – and then its coming apart. How era-defining events may be happening but, in that moment, might not seem as important to you as an argument with your lover. Katharina and Hans’ relationship gets very dark and abusive and difficult to read (the man on the bus must have been on early pages…). You will on Katharina to make a break, time and time again, and time and time again, she returns to Hans. While there’s an emotional connection to the characters (well, to Katharina), there’s also a parallel being made to the relationship of the East German state to its people – one that made itself slightly too obvious by the end for me. A fascinating glimpse of what everyday life was like in East Berlin and, like in Lea Ypi’s Free, what happened to ordinary people in those days immediately following the fall of the wall.

The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard

If you can stomach it, here’s another terrible, controlling man. When we first met Conrad and his wife, Antonia, it’s 1950 and their marriage is clearly falling apart. It’s hard to comprehend how or why they were ever married. Howard goes back in chunks of time to show the gradual disintegration of their relationship – and the initial events that pushed them together in the first place. What seems even more terrible is that you can see how their failing relationship is being repeated – in different ways – by both son and daughter. Howard is brilliant on emotional shifts, but also domestic details. Antonia’s William Morris’ wallpapered room – the one part of the house decorated to satisfy her own tastes. The dresses Conrad picks out for her as part of his moulding process. Laura Thompson (one of my favourite literary substacks) writes about this here.

The game of life

The Rules of Engagement by Anita Brookner

The Rules of Engagement came out in 2003, the same year I got my first ‘proper’ job. I mention this because I think of Brookner characters as inhabiting a different lifetime. When, especially in later novels, her heroines say they don’t understand the young women of the day, I can see why. While part of that is class – my life is a world-away from Brookner’s husband-and-wife dinner parties in overheated Chelsea apartments – my expectations for life and love, relationships and career couldn’t be more different than the ‘rules of engagement’ shown here. Elizabeth followed what she believed was the rules, marrying an older man for financial security and accepting the associated duties that came with the marriage, while her school friend Betsy followed her heart and went to Paris, fell in love. Now in their fifties, they’re both widowed and back in London. Brookner plays her classic game of compare and contrast, as they both have an affair, following different rules for their conduct. Elizabeth is what people think of as the classic Brookner protagonist: a lonely woman. But, as she comes to realise, relationships are no barrier to loneliness and sometimes it’s better to face it alone. And, while Brookner’s generation of women is not mine, that’s a sentiment I understand.

A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau

This is a coming-of-age novel, originally published in 1954. In its implication of what it means to come of age – a rejection, or at least reappraisal, of the values of your parents – it tallies with the post-war recognition of the teenager. The book is structured as a series of different narratives, opening with Penelope, in her father’s bohemian hotel on the Riveria, enviously observing the ‘normal’ (quickly nicknamed ‘The Smugs’) Bradley family holidaying nearby. In the second section, we follow Don – son of The Smugs – as he challenges the worldview of his parents, before it circles back around to Penelope once again, including a hospital scene between lovers of the same man that’s an interesting parallel to one in The Rules of Engagement. A Wreath for the Enemy never went quite where I thought and was more interesting for it.

She’s in fashion

Empresses of Seventh Avenue: World War II, New York City and the Birth of American Fashion by Nancy MacDonell

Continuing in theme from last month’s Claire McCardell biography, this is a survey of the influential women who shaped the American fashion industry in the 1940s, whether designer, reporter, department store buyer or publicist. So, there’s Claire again, but also Diana Vreeland, Carmel Snow and all those delicious characters, plus a few more I enjoyed hearing about, such as Lois Long of The New Yorker and the uber publicist Eleanor Lambert, who I didn’t realised worked in promoting artists before she moved onto fashion. It’s a clever, readable reassembling of – in the main – various memoirs, though it feels slightly padded in places. Why does it matter that the liner on which Elizabeth Hawes once travelled to Paris was named after the relation of some long dead English royal? Ditto the full chapter on the background of the Paris couture industry. But, in the main, this is a very enjoyable overview of this period of American fashion.

Cold climates

A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter, translated by Jane Degras

I love a tale about a boldly going woman in the 1930s, even better is that this is real life. Ritter – who was an Austrian artist – moved to the Arctic to live with her husband. This book is rated highly by Laura and Kate of The Book Club Review and I’d wanted to read this for ages, so was delighted to find it in our Cornish rental property. Truthfully, this was a blessing and a curse, as I read it far too quickly in order to finish it before the end of our trip. But I know it’s a book I’d both recommend and revisit. Ritter manages to convey the magic of living in such an extreme environment, where being attacked by a polar bear, or buried in a blizzard are real risks, where you spend an entire winter without sunlight and all you’ve got to look forward to is some seal blubber soup. Though my kind of nightmare in every single way, it is refreshing to read how little humans need to live, and all the ingenious ways we find to survive.

Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Tim Parks

This brings dark chills of a different kind. Set in a postwar Swiss boarding school and translated from Italian, here the privileged students establish their own kind of court (interesting to read after The Pretender, below), with its own codes and alliances, and it’s written with the intensity such an environment may produce. Rather than ready them for the outside world, there’s a sense their school experience has left them vulnerable. This novel is very slight and disturbing.

Italian fruit

Ripeness by Sarah Moss

Ripeness switches between 70-something Edith in Ireland, and her younger self in Italy. While the younger version perhaps feels more recognisable from other fiction, older Edith is a wonderful, believable character – still sexually active, not morally pure, but morally recognisable. The big sweep of the story is about migration but, as in her other novels, there’s a lot more going on here. Moss is always great on place – be it Manchester or Northumberland; Cornwall or Japan – but here she steps away from these wet, dark mountains, fells and bogs, to immerse herself in all the sensual pleasures of Italy (though, of course, she returns to all of that in the Irish sections). I also enjoy her interest in movement – like, the runner in Summerwater – and here she explores dance, with Edith’s sister a ballerina. Like all Moss’ books, it has a lingering power, though I missed some of her usual boggy darkness.

Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated by Lucy Rand

Europa Editions sent me this as a proof – it’s publishing in March 2026. Because of how it opens, I expected a merciless set-up of the legions of privileged white women of London through the eyes of Italian, Mina. Another story to add to the Lost and Found map. However, after the death of her Moroccan father, Mina returns to southern Italy, somewhere where she never felt accepted, and the story becomes more nuanced. In contrast, her sister stayed, volunteering at a migrant centre and helping their father run his bar, itself a hub for those arriving in Italy from elsewhere. All the characters offer alternative versions of Mina, and over the course of the novel, you see her settle into a greater understanding of herself. Anechoum is acute on details – not just in depicting the terrible London types, but the care with which she describes a mint tea, for example or her grandmother’s hands.

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You’re history

The Pretender by Jo Harkin

I studied the Tudors for my History A Level, and we did not get on. It took a long, long time to get over myself and read Wolf Hall. I wouldn’t have read this – set in the reign of Henry VII – if it hadn’t been my book club pick. We first meet the main character as John Collan. But it’s soon revealed he’s Edward Plantagenet (or is he?) and a possible claimant to the English crown. We follow him as he’s moved across Europe, a pawn of the political power players of the day, and educated in the arts of nobility. The Pretender confounds expectations nicely, with a plot that turns out to be more episodic than climatic, and I admired how Harkin used historic language. I enjoyed it; some in my book club loved it – so, if you enjoy historical fiction, and haven’t been ruined by your A-Level choices, it’s worth picking up.

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

When I moved to London in the early 2000s, I gorged myself on the indie music scene here. How could I resist a love story set against that background (yes, I’m now counting my youth as historical fiction)? Well, while I enjoyed reading about Pulp and LCD Soundsystem and remembering sweaty dance floors, I found the lead protagonists both really annoying (and the third person in the love triangle is seemingly faultless… therefore also very annoying) and it just missed the mark for me. It did, however, make me put on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea at full blast, which is always a good outcome.

Books that I bought:

Empresses of Seventh Avenue, as above. In the Fitzcarraldo anniversary sale: the new Claire-Louise Bennett, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye as well as Greyhound, The Undercurrents and Second-hand Time, all of which were on my wish list.

Also in September:

I managed to catch Abstract Eroticism before it closed at the Courtauld. Along with work by two long-time art crushes Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, it included the work of Alice Adams, who I hadn’t encountered before. Her treatment of fence wire and other architectural materials as if they were textiles is the kind of thing I find very exciting. Likewise, the fashion exhibition Dirty Looks.

Open House is one of my favourite London September events. I booked onto a few tours: a Brutalist school, some ambitious social housing, and my local town hall.

Relatedly, one day I hope to train to become a London tour guide. A great excuse for my first visit to London’s newest, potentially coolest, cinema, The Nickel Cinema, to see legendary New York tour guide film, The Cruise.

And I went to Mousehole in Cornwall on a press trip (where I found the Christiane Ritter). It was wet and wild for much of the long weekend, though we got to see some gorgeous beaches, and even I – who you have to extract out of bed – appreciated getting up to enjoy this view from the front door.

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Much like July, my life in August was duty heavy. A lot of travel means a lot of reading time. I leant towards non-fiction – perhaps a reaction to those tightly packed 200-page novels that I read last month.

Here’s what I read in August, in the order that I read it:

Slipstream: a memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton

Where We Come From by Aniefiok Ekpoudom (audio)

A Look at My Life by Eileen Agar

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn

The Vanished Collection by Pauline Baer de Perignon

False Calm: A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff (translated by Katherine Silver)

Orbital by Samantha Harvey (audio)

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm

Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

Stoner by John Williams

A London Childhood by Angela Rodaway

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (audio)

Soundings by Anita Brookner

Anna: The Biography by Amy Odell

A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Chomeley

Change by Maureen Duffy

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Six lives

Slipstream: a memoir by Elizabeth Jane Howard

Like last month’s The Old Man and Me, this read was prompted by The Lives of the Wives, which discusses Howard’s marriage to Kingsley Amis. This memoir shares her side of that marriage, her other marriages, and numerous other affairs. It reads like a clear-eyed self-assessment gained only through both effort and experience – a skill on display in Howard’s novels, too. I also hadn’t realised how much the Cazalet chronicles came from her life…

A Look at My Life by Eileen Agar

There are many enjoyable things about this memoir. Agar is very honest: about the men she had sex with, about her marriage, about misogyny in the surrealist movement. She enjoyed a long career as an artist. This is not regret filled, nor self-effacing, and I realised how, of the many memoirs of successful people – usually women – that I’ve read, how rare that is. We might all try and be a bit more like Eileen Agar.

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm

Last month, I really enjoyed Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein. Two Lives is what launched Wade onto Stein. Malcolm’s discussion of Stein details the researchers circling her archive – and the guy, Leon Kratz, who’s frustrating them all. While Wade answers some questions posed here, following Malcolm on a literary hunt is always satisfying.

Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free by Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson

In my June reading notes, I listed some non-fiction topics that I always return to. Here’s another one: the Second World War and its impact on fashion, especially in America. One of that period’s key designers is Claire McCardell. Though featured in exhibition catalogues that I own, I wanted something more readable about her, with more life about it. This scratched that itch, very good at conjuring up her period. McCardell experienced the greater freedoms of the interwar period and had a career – and therefore knew how active, independent women like herself wanted to dress. Evitts Dickinson’s admirable publicity efforts have emphasised the McCardell influence on today’s clothing: pockets!, ballet flats!, separates!. A natural challenger of convention, wartime clothing restrictions played into McCardell’s skill set, while things such as her diaper swimsuits still seem lightyears ahead of the curve. Like McCardell herself, this is bright and breezy while thoughtful – highlighting who was left out of the image of the active all-American girl that was part and parcel of the McCardell charm. It passed my test for a fashion history book in that it really, really, really made me want to go shopping. What I’d give for this dress.

Anna: The Biography by Amy Odell

That’s Anna Wintour, of course. More fashion and New York. Amy Odell does a fantastically even-handed job, highlighting the qualities that make some admire and others despise Wintour, when she gets it right and when she’s way off the pulse. Like when I read about Carmel Snow (1940s and 50s editor of US Harper’s Bazaar), it triggered a tug of ambition. When the chatter happened about Chloe Malle’s appointment at US Vogue, I felt well briefed as to the background, thanks to this. Undecided about continuing onto Odell’s new subject, Gwyneth, though.

Past lives

Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton

Shapton’s Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry is a desert island book; I also never get bored flicking through Women in Clothes. For some reason, however, I didn’t pick up Swimming Studies when it came out in 2012. It’s back in print, thanks to Daunt Publishing, who sent me a copy. This is another memoir, albeit focused on Shapton’s youth competitive swimming – a strange, aquatic life conjured through all the senses. Being a Shapton book, it also includes visuals: swimming costumes and pools that she’s swum in. The reissue has a foreword by Rita Bullwinkel, whose Headshot I enjoyed in February, particularly for its psychology of competition. That’s here too. It’s also about things that you leave behind. When Shapton enters a pool, the traces of her world class swimming training are still evident, though a minor part of her life now. Recommended for even the most sport reluctant. If not swimming, you likely have a childhood equivalent – a time, for the fortunate, which allows parentally-enabled devotion to pastimes and passions.

London lives

A London Childhood by Angela Rodaway

Found in Hornsey’s Oxfam Books; bought because Rodaway grew up about 20 minutes’ walk from where I live in Islington. She writes evocatively about the area. A child in the Interwar period, her father was affected by the mass unemployment of the 1930s. Rodaway describes her family along the lines of not so poor to have holes in the toes of their shoes, poor enough to have holes in their soles, a differentiation crucial to the family’s idea of itself. I took my 1980s copy – with a watercolour by Rodaway on its cover – to her old street and tried to match it up. Best effort pictured. Her obituary, here, is worth a read.

A Bookshop of One’s Own by Jane Chomeley

Chomeley’s memoir of establishing and running the feminist Silver Moon Bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road from 1984 to 2001. It’s the warts and all (sometimes a bit too wart-ish) reality of owning a bookshop, especially when trying to run it along feminist principles. It’s evocative of both time and place – Silver Moon must have been a beacon for women in London, and beyond. The parts about author events, featuring the likes of Angela Carter, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, made me long for a time machine. Charing Cross Road is no longer a bookselling hub – this shows the political and economic reasons why. Though it no longer exists, I’m forever grateful to shops like Silver Moon for changing what is published, and how it is sold.

Change by Maureen Duffy

Like Capital, which I read last year, this is told through fragments of British lives (and monkeys) during the Second World War. It demands close attention, evocative of the upheavals, liberations, challenges and tragedy of wartime. As such, it’s very moving. The sections from the monkeys’ perspective were not for me, though, given that this came out in 1987, putting human’s and animal’s stories in parity seems ahead of its time.

‘Summer reading’

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy

Given that it was August, I wanted something a little lighter and decided to revisit this (and the Backlisted episode on it) after enjoying The Old Man and Me last month.

Pure delight. I loved romping around Paris with Sally Jay Gorce, then getting bored and frustrated in the south of France. And, pleasingly, after all that non-fiction swotting up on the period, I picked up a few extra cultural refs this time around than when I first read it, maybe 15 years ago.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

I’m classing this as a lighter read though it touches on heavy subjects: miscarriages, infertility and suicide. However, Espach’s faith in humanity and love for her characters that softens that bleakness. Phoebe intends to end her life in a lavish Newport Hotel. Instead, she becomes enmeshed in a wedding and its machinations. Picturing a rich US wedding and the people at it – and the inevitable glossy TV series – is a lot of fun. (Actually, it’s going to be a film.) The first thing I read on my birthday eReader, I’m worried I’ll more likely forget what I’ve read without a book’s physicality. I wonder if I’ll remember this in a year’s time.

Alternative geographies

Where We Come From by Aniefiok Ekpoudom (audio)

The story of British rap and grime, told through some lesser explored centres: Wales, The Midlands and South London. As when I read Dance Your Way Home, this made me think about alternative Londons. Turns out I was cheek by jowl to some of the south London rap hotspots in the early 2000s – living over the road from one namechecked estate (‘The Grey Estate’) for a time. Music history happening around me… and I was largely oblivious. If only the audio version included some of the tracks Ekpoudom eloquently describes (though there is a Spotify playlist). I also often wished I was sat with my laptop – I tend to listen to audiobooks while walking – to look up the videos he describes, often shot in streets and parks that are so familiar to me. Really, I should have read this in its physical form, as I missed a lot of detail. However, it did give me a broader, indelible sense of the personal triumphs and tragedies that built the sound.

False Calm: A Journey Through the Ghost Towns of Patagonia by María Sonia Cristoff (translated by Katherine Silver)

My March round-up included some reminiscences about my trip to Patagonia in relation to Philippe Sands’ 38 Londres Street. Born in Patagonia, now living in Buenos Aires, María Sonia Cristoff charts a different Patagonia. Not the tourist one, nor the swaggering Bruce Chatwin version. Not even the excitement of the open road, as her journeys are all subject to the vagaries of the bus system. She tells the stories of its ghost towns through their residents, an eye for the person or the detail that reveals a larger truth. These places feel out of step with the 21^st century, though its themes – isolation, environmental and societal exploitation, the gulf between rich and poor – are unmistakably of today. Published by Daunt, who kindly sent me my copy.

Playing catch-up

Stoner by John Williams

My partner and I had a big book clear-out, and Stoner was on his let go pile, given a temporary reprieve as I’d never read it. He wasn’t a fan; I fell in love with it, as so many readers did in the early 2000s.

Originally published in 1965, it’s the unfolding of William Stoner’s life – a life that feels both true to an individual, and also the trends of the mid-20^th-century, where greater social mobility meant someone could move from a life seemingly predestined to be tied to the land to a more societally esteemed career in academia (almost my dad’s story).

How do we measure the quality of a life? In one way, Stoner fulfils his life’s purpose. He discovers his true love, literature, and gets to share that love. That’s tempered by the power struggles with his wife – leading to a heartbreaking estrangement from his daughter – and the games of politics at work.

If you missed Stoner’s last revival, perhaps let’s start another one? (Petya K. Grady of A Reading Life wrote about how it shaped her reading taste this week, too).

Orbital by Samantha Harvey (audiobook)

I was rooting for Percival Everett’s James to win the Booker, which Orbital took instead.

I guessed I might admire Orbital more than I loved it, which turned out to be true. It worked for me on audio, as the different stories and imagery swirled through my mind. Weirdly, for my non-mechanical brain, I particularly enjoyed the descriptions of the physicality of the space craft. I remember, a few years back, at the Science Museum’s Cosmonauts exhibition standing in front of capsule from Vostok 6, Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 space mission, not comprehending how this clunky-looking hulk of metal once safely held a woman in space.

Some audiobooks are so evocative that I recall them every time I walk the route where I heard them. There’s now a stretch of Pentonville Road that will always be Orbital.

This month’s Anita Brookner

Soundings by Anita Brookner

Something different on the Brookner front this month (I’ve read an Anita Brookner book every month since January 2024). This is non-fiction, a collection of previously published essays, largely reviews, released in the same year as the novel Visitors. Brookner main career was an art historian – oh, to pull off such second, successful career as a novelist on the side! – and that’s the focus of most of these pieces, beginning with a series of profiles of the likes of Delacroix and Géricault. Brookner excels at a first line, and it’s enjoyable seeing how she introduces Eugène Delacroix as if he’s, say, Lewis Percy. As you’d expect, Brookner is an exacting reviewer – I was cheering on the authors whose work won her measured praise.

The unresolved

Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn

I read this collection of short stories, all set in Northern Ireland for book club. In January, I read another Northern Irish short story collection, Jan Carson’s Quickly, While They Still Have Horses. That volume I described as having a dark humour, verging on simply being dark, tipping into deeply disturbing. A description that almost works for Every One Still Here though it omits the humour (unless it was so dark I missed it) and disturbance is its modus operandi. In these stories, things that seem fine on the surface – coffee vans, creative writing classes – are shown to be insubstantial gloss over deep layers of violence. They ask big questions, about personal responsibility, about society reckoning with its own trauma. It ends with a simple, impossible to overlook, list of civilians killed by the British forces in Northern Ireland, for which “nobody is ever charged”. Look forward to the book club discussion.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (audiobook)

I read this with my book club when it first came out but remembered only the broadest sweeps. It was an eye-opener then, revealing the partiality of what I’d absorbed about Northern Ireland while growing up in England. This time, on audio, though it had slightly less impact, it was every bit as gripping. Radden Keefe shows the problematic lack of resolution, just as in Every One Still Here. He writes how – in comparison to other conflicts – the peace agreement had no outline for how, say, a family could pursue justice for a child killed by a bullet fired by a British soldier. Over a quarter of a century after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement this remains unresolved: the Irish and British Government announced a new framework for it only this month.

The Vanished Collection by Pauline Baer de Perignon

Baer de Perignon attempts to trace what happened to the renowned art collection of her great grandfather Jules Strauss during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Strauss collected the impressionist greats – Renoir, Degas – as well as furniture and objets d’art. None of it remains in the family and the truth behind their ‘sale’ is extremely murky. Finding out is painstaking work, involving numerous, virtually impenetrable archives as well as unreliable family memories. Turns out renowned institutions are reluctant to hand artworks back, even when it’s pretty clear that they only have them due Nazi looting. Baer de Perignon manages to pull together the extensive paperwork to reclaim a Tiepolo drawing that worked its way into the Louvre’s collection – particularly galling when Strauss had been a major benefactor to the museum. It’s fascinating, shocking stuff. Baer de Perignon is not a particularly likeable narrator: she seems to judge many people – including family – quite harshly. That said, I came to admire her honesty. She could have painted a much more sympathetic portrait of herself. Instead, you get a portrait of a ‘normal’ (albeit supremely well-connected) woman and the challenge she’s up against.

What I bought:

A London Childhood (see above); Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View, after reading Slipstream and then seeing it in a charity shop; A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau: it’s been on my ‘would-like-to-read’ list for so longer, I can’t remember where I saw it recommended. This is the recent Daunt reissue, from the charity shop.

Also in August:

I ate really well: Café Cecilia and Mambow as part of my birthday celebrations; the new Singburi, because we’ve wanted to go for ages.

I visited Kenwood House for the first time, mainly to see the Sargent exhibition on American heiresses – I hadn’t realised how great their permanent collection is, too. Plus, second-hand bookshop!

Our book purge: almost hundred left our flat. I’m not sure I can tell.

And I made my first t-shirt! A small step forward in learning to sew stretchy fabrics. One day, I hope to never have to buy hideous – likely unethical – activewear again.

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Here’s what I read during July, in the order that I finished them:

The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
Changing Places by David Lodge

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford

On the Calculation of Volume, Book II by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland

Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley

The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (audio)

Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble

Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy

The Next Big Thing by Anita Brookner

I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf

At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

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Why I started writing this each month

Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble

I bought this at St Giles bookfair, part of the same glorious 1960s series in which I own Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage. How nice I thought – knowing her books are roughly autobiographical – to have read her first three and to now progress on to number four. Part way through, however, I had a nagging feeling. Clelia as a character name – why did that sound familiar? Had I heard it on a podcast, or… Yes, the answer is that I’d read this before (in August 2023 to be exact) and had forgotten that I’d done so. I read quickly and I read a lot and, as a result, details of books sometimes don’t stick to the sides, but this was an all-time low, even by my apt-to-forget standards. I began this, writing something about everything I read in an attempt to pause and hopefully cement enough details in my memory that I can hang on to.

Anyway, Clara is a bright girl, using first the academic route to escape the misery of her Northern home, and then the social route, through the glamorous Denhams – of which Clelia is one. In my defence, it’s quite similar in plot to Hilary Mantel’s An Experiment in Love, which I read around the same time (interestingly, it even says this on the Wikipedia page). Drabble captures how limited the options were for bright young women of the period – your desirability needing to be worked as much as your brains. My feelings towards Clara and her choices were slightly more sympathetic the second time around. And now I know that for a chronological reading of Drabble, the next one I need to pick up is her fifth book, The Waterfall. Let’s hope we’re not back here in another two years.

Re-reading and reappraising

The Soul of Kindness by Elizabeth Taylor

This month also saw some deliberate re-reading and revisiting of authors. Elizabeth Taylor is someone who seems to be a real author’s author, and while I’d read a couple of her books in the past, I’d never quite got it. Finally, with The Soul of Kindness, enlightenment dawned. Flora is that soul of kindness – she’s always on the lookout for the welfare of others and knows what’s best for them, even if they don’t concur. Blinkered by her own righteousness, Flora’s ‘kindness’ is destructive. Taylor, of course, is not remotely blinkered, and can spot a human foible 200 metres away. Each word, each sentence, is carefully placed and considered and she expects the reader to keep up. Like lots of my favourite books, not a huge amount happens plot-wise but, by the time you finish, you realise you’re in a completely different place to where you started from.

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor

Because I enjoyed The Soul of Kindness so much (and prompted by the Backlisted episode) I decided to revisit Taylor’s Angel, which I read about 15 years ago, and remember not quite knowing what to make of it. Sometimes I find myself much preferring books on a second attempt: it’s probably about getting on the right foot with them. That’s what happened with Angel, which I adored from the off on this re-read. Just like Drabble’s Clara, the protagonist Angel is determined to escape her working class background. She does so through the force of her imagination, becoming a lady novelist equipped with florid prose, a devoted fanbase and utter determination and complete self-conviction. On one hand, she’s terrible and monstrous; on the other, she’s brave, self-reliant and industrious and – on this reading anyway – I found myself feeling sorry for her. My library copy had an introduction by Hilary Mantel, yet another strike in making it one of my most enjoyable reading experiences this month.

At Mrs Lippincote's by Elizabeth Taylor

I intended to space out my Taylors to give them the attention that they deserve. But, stuck on a stationary train for an hour with this in my bag, the temptation was too much.

At Mrs Lippincote's is Taylors first novel. Set in the Second World War, Julia is an officer’s wife who is trying to home-make in a home that is not her own. I’d immense sympathy for Julia who – rather than doing all the things expected of an officer’s wife – would rather be reading. Unlike many other Home Front novels, the War doesn’t make itself felt physically, rather you see its effects in the fracturing of relationships, a feeling of displacement and disjunction. So much happens below the surface.

The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy

My interest in Elaine Dundy (most famous for The Dud Avocado) was reignited after listening to The Lives of the Wives by Carmela Ciuraru last year, which details the terrible time Dundy had married to Kenneth Tynan. Somewhere along the way I’d picked up the impression that this – her second, and second to last, novel – wasn’t considered very good. Instead, it’s another zippy romp (albeit with a slightly darker kind of zip than The Dud Avocado), and another young American woman abroad in not quite Swinging early 1960s London. The ‘old man’ of the title is C.D. McKee – based on Cyril Connelly – who has something our heroine ‘Honey Flood’ (may not be her real name) wants, and she’s on a mission to get it. Full of pubs, dive bars, jazz, terrible restaurants, smog, with trips to central-heating-lacking country houses to see the class system in action, it’s gossipy, grimy London literary lowlife at its most enjoyable.

The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Being a fan of interwar proto-feminist quirk, of course I’ve a special place in my heart for Lolly Willowes. I’ve also read some Sylvia Townsend Warner short stories, and The True Heart – and loved her appearance in Harriet Baker’s beautiful The Rural Hours. But I’d never read this, widely referred to as her best novel – and mooted as possibly one of the best historical novels of all time.

It’s set in a medieval convent and is a sweep of 200 years of history. Essentially the convent is the main character: when a nun enters the convent, she becomes part of the book; if she leaves, she’s gone from the narrative. Sometimes the nuns are dealing with petty squabbles, sometimes era defining events such as the Black Death. The mundane and shocking sit side by side. All the place names and descriptions seemed to me to suggest those of Lincolnshire, where almost all my family originate, adding to a sense of the setting. (It actually seems to be Norfolk – though still Fenlands.)

Following the theme of July’s reading, I’d like to go back and re-read this now that I understand that it’s written as a more of a survey than a conventional story – that threw me off for the first 50 pages or so, a significant amount in a 200-page book.

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More 200-page heavyweights

The Children's Bach by Helen Garner

When I was reading the Taylor novels, I was admiring their economy. That description also fits Garner, but it’s like Taylor has had another forty years worth of editing down applied to her – The Children's Bach is so sparse and stripped back. Like Taylor, it’s a domestic world, albeit transported from England to Melbourne. It examines the delicate relationships that exist between couples and in families, the routines that can nurture or stifle them. Garner has Taylor’s sometimes hidden sense of humour, the eye for the details that can convey a whole scene. This was the first Helen Garner I read, and I’ll try more.

The Next Big Thing by Anita Brookner

I’d describe Brookner and Garner as sharing a precision of language and a plot dependent on shifting relationships. However, while with Garner, the reader is shown all of that from the outside, Brookner is almost entirely interior focused. In The Next Big Thing, we’re in the head of 73-year-old Julius Herz. For most of his life, his role has been to ease the difficulties of those around him. But without his immediate family, separated from his wife, albeit with a comfortable financial cushion, what’s his ‘next big thing’ going to be? We see him focus on one thing after the other, an inappropriate longing for his young neighbour, a flit to Paris, reuniting with a cousin. But it all comes back to this aching pit of loneliness that it’s hard to see him being able to escape, despite his best efforts and desire to put strategies in place. Brookner captures loneliness so well, I only recommend picking this up if you’re feeling emotionally robust.

I Am Clarence by Elaine Kraf

This was sent to me by Penguin Classics – who also sent me Kraf’s amazing Princess of 72^nd Street (1979) last year. I Am Clarence was originally published a decade earlier, but like Princess, its characters are people on the outside of society and challenges with mental help. The main character is the mother of a son with disabilities, Clarence. We mainly see him through her eyes, but different sections also take different perspectives, such as her brother or her lovers. Kraf’s cleverness is about what’s hidden in these viewpoints as well as revealed (as Sarah Manguso explores in her excellent intro). It’s not an easy read, but it’s so original. Kraf was also a practising visual artist – she’s excellent at creating imagery and sensations that linger.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington

I first encountered Carrington through her visual art, though I tend to think surreal art – and, by extension, literature – doesn’t do much for me. But there’s definitely a British kind of surreal comedy that I can’t resist. And I was pleased to discover this book is very, very funny. Hard-of-hearing nonagenarian Marian Leatherby and her best mate Carmella (apparently inspired by the artist and Carrington’s best mate Remedios Varo) are on the trail of wrong ‘uns in the old people’s home – Richard Osman, Leonora was here first. Though the first half is pretty fanciful, the second takes a leap into symbolism and the fantastical, and I really had no idea exactly what was going on for a lot of the time. That doesn’t necessary bother me when reading – after all, I’m sure I understood what was happening somewhere in my subconscious. That’s the way surrealism works, right? Either way, something I thought might be a bit of a slog turned out to be great fun.

And a 200-page lighter-weight

Changing Places by David Lodge

We read this for my book club, and I think everyone enjoyed it? This is Lodge’s first novel, in which an unfocused Middle England academic swaps (roles and partners) with a dynamic Californian counterpart. Of course, this is also a classic Alison Lurie set-up, who was writing around the same time. Lodge’s story is set in 1969, so campus protest and unrest acts as the colourful background to the humour. And there are literary games aplenty in there too. Although it’s not a must read, I’d definitely pick up more of Lodge’s books knowing that it’ll be good company.

Encounters with the greats

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud by Martin Gayford

I began this year with the ambition to get through my non-fiction TBR. This was the last book on my shelves that’d been there for over a year. My thoughts about Freud are roughly: great painter, problematic man. So, I never really fancied spending the time with him that this book seemed to offer. In fact, Man with a Blue Scarf is extremely readable, with Freud filtered by Gayford with lots of insights on what it’s like to sit for a portrait and meaning of portraiture, alongside how Freud approaches them. Some of my favourite bits were stories from Freud’s life, post-war, when he was starting out as an artist and lived among (and sometimes painted) members of a criminal underbelly that today seems like a completely lost era.

Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street by Darryl Pinckney

Pinckney takes us back with him to the late 1970s, early 1980s and his friendship / mentorship with the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick. While Come Back in September is beautifully written, come prepared with your literary whose who. The likes of Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag and Robert Lowell flit across its pages. In fact, there’s a link to the previous book: Hardwick was Lowell’s second wife, Caroline Blackwood his third, while Freud was Blackwood’s first husband; Lowell her third. I particularly enjoyed how Come Back in September presented artistic New York as a whole – I’ve read countless things about the New York downtown scene, but this showed how the likes of Pinckney and his friend Lucy Sante could be conversing with literary greats on West Sixty-Seventh Street and then partying downtown with the likes of Keith Haring. The worlds continued each other.

London loves

Consider Yourself Kissed by Jessica Stanley

This is such a lovely London novel. While it’s kind of being sold as a romance, it’s more about what happens next: sustaining a relationship while having kids. I don’t have children, but everything else in this novel felt tailored to me, from the bookish references like the Cazalets, or the nod to The Group in the title (hey, more Mary McCarthy) to the streets in which it is set – instantly recognisable to anyone who has spent time in East London. And I lived through London during the turbulent times in which Consider Yourself Kissed is set – Brexit, Lockdown, Truss… What’s so delightful about this book, however, is that you feel its love through every word – it’s pure hearted and tender, and cares about people. And given all that turbulence listed above, it's so nice to spend time with an author who cares about people.

Seasons greeting

On the Calculation of Volume, Book II by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland

We’re back with Tara on 18 November. In Book I (read in June) Balle used this groundhog day to explore how we think about time in terms of units of days, weeks, years, Book II expands on to the seasons, which Tara is trying to build into her day. She begins moving according to world weather patterns to experience what she thinks of as each of the four seasons. ‘Spring’ turns out to be spent in south-west England. Despite it being November, the supermarket offers an abundance of produce that are fitting of spring (and therefore completely out of whack with the real season).

I probably think about seasons more than the average person. I work for a magazine that pays close attention to the seasons: what’s happening in the natural world, on our plates, folklore and customs. Sometimes that means a slight seasonal whiplash, as we’re always working slightly ahead: our first meeting about the Christmas and winter issues happened this month. I loved how Balle prods our construction and expectations of the seasons in how we understand a year. Book 3 is out in November, and it looks like she’s planning on going even bigger with her timescale…

Personal and political

Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi

I ordered this from the library after the International Booker win. It’s challenging in many ways. The twelve short stories all focus on women, specifically in Muslim communities in Southern India, and the tales of injustice and cruelty are hard to read. The stories date from between 1990 and 2023 and it’s difficult to discern where within that range each story falls because any improvements are so unnoticeable. Deepa Bhasthi’s decision to not translate several of the Kannada, Urdu and Arabic words was also disorientating – reminding me, as a native English speaker, just how much I assume language will be centred on my own experience.

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (audio)

Because this was so discussed on its release, I almost felt like I didn’t need to read it. Supremely silly because what’s admirable in Coates’ writing is not just his conclusions but being with him as he works to get there. This series of essays covers topics such as school book bans, Coates’ visit to Senegal and also, in the concluding essay, Jerusalem and the West Bank. Coates shows how the power relationship between Israel and Palestine plays out, the injustices suffered by Palestinians in everyday life and he not only questions his own previous unquestioning acceptance of the situation, but that presented by journalists he admired and learned from. The Message was released in autumn 2024 – since then we’ve increasingly seen the press and politicians contort themselves into unsustainable positions alongside the ongoing horrors. In contrast, this book makes you feel like you can think more clearly.

What books I bought this month

Four 50p Viragos from my new favourite place (see below), including A Pin to See the Peepshow, the first Virago Modern Classics I remember reading. And Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s Claire McCardell biography: I love the 1940s period of US fashion and it’s been getting rave reviews.

And also…

Although there’s been no summer beach holiday, I’ve managed a weekly swim at London Fields Lido. Doing a few lanes is both sanity restoring and brilliant people watching. I’ve been to see the sea a couple of times too – up in East Yorkshire and on a day trip to Kent. In Ramsgate, I discovered my new favourite place: a second-hand bookshop in Ellington Park, run by volunteers. It’s open on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons in good weather from April to October. “Tell people in London”, they told me as I enthused. Consider this a general telling…

July is my birthday month, and I was given an e-reader. How will this change my reading habits? Interested to see.

And two recommendations for online reads. Patricia Lockwood on Sylvia Plath and Laura Thompson on Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Jane Howard (I’m currently reading the latter’s memoir).

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No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami

On the Calculation of Volume Book I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Age 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend (audiobook)

Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife by Francesca Wade

The Gulls Fly Inland by Sylvia Thompson

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

Kiki's Memoirs edited by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

Men and Monuments by Janet Flanner

Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank by James Campbell

Babylon, Albion by Dalia Al-Dujaili

A Family Romance by Anita Brookner

Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World by Paul Baker (audiobook)

Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt

A WOMAN, ALONE

On the Calculation of Volume, Book I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J. Haveland

There was a specific week earlier this year when this seemed to feature on every other Instagram post – no doubt thanks to its International Booker Prize short listing. That, and its premise – a woman, Tara, reliving 18 November over and over – meant it went on my library reservation list. It’s a slim volume, but Balle somehow manages to dig into the details of the same 24 hours and keep extracting something new about the day. Sometimes Tara’s fate seems almost enviable – she can devote herself to new enthusiasms free of any responsibilities – other times you intensely feel her loneliness. I admired this more than I loved it, though hang around for when I’ve posted July’s reading, and you’ll discover that – spoiler alert – Book II completely won me over. (Book III is being released in November, so a while to wait…)

The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff

Groff is one of the few writers I trust to entertain me with topics I’m not interested in – like, with Matrix, nuns (I’m now fully committed to nun books). So, I took a leap of faith with this survivalist account from the 17^th-century in the ‘New World’. The unnamed protagonist is on the run from a British colony. While she escapes Tara’s fate of reliving the same day over and over, she must cope with a relentless daily cycle of meeting certain needs: finding food, water and shelter, while avoiding predators, man and beast alike. You admire her for her resourcefulness, her reckoning with the stories she’s been told. I’ve heard Groff describe the ending as a kind of communion with a bigger idea of God; I read it as woman needs something more than herself to make life worthwhile, which – as I type it out – may be reaching towards the same thing?

FAMILY SAGAS

The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji

This is three generations of women from a wealthy, formerly influential Persian dynasty, divided between those who have left for the States – a country indifferent (at best) to them, though happy for their money – and those who have stayed. None of these women could be described as conformist – Niaz’s story gives you a sense of what rebellion might look like for a young woman in Tehran, while Elizabeth falls in love with the chauffeur’s son – but the character who leaps off the page is the love or loathe Auntie Shirin, who we met directly after being arrested for soliciting on the family’s annual vacation in Aspen. What happens is a slow unpicking of all the stories / lies they’ve been telling themselves, going back to the hero / villain ancestor who established their status. It touches on big ideas – you surely can’t be British and read about the role that BP played in Iran without burning-up in shame – while being slyly funny. At the book’s end, there’s slivers of possibilities: the family begins to look beyond themselves and may even actually begin to understand each other.

A Family Romance by Anita Brookner

This came out in 1993, and definitely fits the Brooknerian’s description of her “settled magisterial 90s”. There are many typical Brookner elements: the more reserved Jane set against the rapacious Dolly, her aunt. But when it comes to Brookner ‘types’, Dolly’s backstory may not make her sympathetic but does make her more understandable. Jane, likewise, manages to act with purpose, without being caught in the quagmire of indecisions that sometime trap Brookner’s protagonists. As ever, the book’s genius is the charting of subtle shifts in emotions, compressing years of family life into about 200 pages.

SOME LIGHT RELIEF

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Age 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend (audiobook)

I was dutifully trying to make my way through something far more serious and important, but world news was so terrible, I kept finding excuses not to listen. Somehow, I’d never read this, though feels so much part of the English psyche I probably could still have told you what it was all about. Should you need a blurb, it’s 1980s Britain and, in the Midlands, Adrian is grappling with the challenges of the early teens – crushes, spots, squabbling parents, outdoor pursuits – while earnestly pursuing his desire to be ‘an intellectual’. Maybe as a pretentious teenager I’d have found it too close to the bone? As an only slightly less pretentious 40-something I found it extremely funny. First shout out to Leicester in this month’s reading.

I’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

What are the topics you come back to again, and again? When it comes to my non-fiction reading, one is 20^th century Paris, whether that’s the Americans abroad, WWII, the fashion industry – from Poiret through to Yves Saint Laurent – or the whole Beatnik scene. A weekend in Paris at the end of the month gave me a reason to focus on some of the Paris-based non-fiction I already owned – and an excuse to buy the new Francesca Wade book.

No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami

Souhami uses four different lesbians to make the argument of her title: Sylvia Beach, Bryher, Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein. While I completely buy her argument, I was less convinced by the quartet she uses to make it. Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare and Co., yes – for publishing Ulysses and her support of writers; Bryher deserves her place for her generous financial support and Gertrude Stein for linking art and literature, and becoming the (lesbian) face of modernism to the world. The Natalie Barney section – the woman I knew least about – was the most disappointing. Souhami includes her because of her salons, fair enough, but the argument for her significance gets a bit buried among all the charting of different romantic entanglements. But I enjoyed it hugely – and it’s a refreshing take on the time if you’ve heard enough about Joyce, Hemingway, Picasso et al.

Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife by Francesca Wade

I love Wade’s Square Haunting – I tip my hat to her every time I walk through Mecklenburgh Square, the geographical basis for her group biography of five women writers. With that pedigree, how could I resist a book where the first 100 or so words that read like this:

“She came to Paris, she said, to kill the nineteenth century. Her weapons were a pencil and a supply of softcover notebooks, her targets dullness and cliché. She chopped off her long coils of hair and dispensed with punctuation: she spent her mornings asleep and her nights writing furiously, tossing loose scraps of paper to the floor as she went. She rubbed her head with both hands when she was excited and sat with her knees planted far apart, taking up as much space as possible. She loved driving fast cars, especially through tunnels, and stepped out into roads without looking, long skirts flapping in the breeze.”

(I could have easily ended up typing out the whole book…)

Wade splits her story in two: first Stein in her lifetime, for me adding detail to the outline Souhami provided, followed by Stein’s ‘afterlife’, the legacy she hoped to establish, and the various scholars and archives attempting to wrangle it into some kind of shape, and – of course – the woman whose life with forever be intertwined with hers, Alice Toklas. Wade is a great guide through all of Stein’s contradictions and moods, enjoying her company, not excusing her bad behaviour.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading non-fiction like this is the unexpected links that pop up. Here, in 1940s New York, we met Claude Fredericks, one half given the responsibility of printing some of Stein’s unpublished work after her death. If you’ve listened to Lili Anolik’s juicy Once Upon a Time in Bennington College podcast, you’ll recognise his name as the Bennington professor who became the model for Julian in The Secret History.

Kiki's Memoirs edited by Billy Klüver and Julie Martin

Kiki of Montmartre is a legendary figure of Parisian artistic bohemia, model and muse. I’d wanted to read her memoirs for a long time – especially after being disappointed by the recent Kiki Man Ray book. I finally found a cheap copy but my frustrations with Kiki Man Ray – that she remains elusive – continue with this. Her actual memoirs are charming but only last for less than 100 pages, with really, really big spacing. You also have to work through five introductions before you get to them (including one by Ernest Hemingway). What I did really enjoy about my copy was that it’s stuffed full of illustrations – some of Kiki’s own artwork (exhibited under her actual name, Alice Prin), alongside paintings and photographs where she is the model. A constant chameleon, they feel like they give a greater indication of her spirit than the copy itself.

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Men and Monuments by Janet Flanner

When we’re thinking about Modernism’s lesbians, Janet Flanner can’t be ignored – she was The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent for 50 years beginning in 1925. This book, however, very much focuses on the deeds of men. It includes profiles of author and politician Andre Malraux, then three of modern art’s biggies: Picasso, Braque and Matisse. The final section details Nazi art looting and its later recovery. I ended up skipping the section on Malraux – it assumed a fair bit of knowledge that I don’t have. I enjoyed the artist profiles a lot more – including details that are flattened out in general art history, or things that perhaps couldn’t be said in their subjects’ lifetimes (this book came out in 1957, when Picasso and Braque were both still around). For example, Picasso’s relationship with Marie-Thérèse is alluded to, but Flanner says can’t be mentioned. And the section on both the art stolen by the Nazis – especially Goebbel’s rapacity – and its later recovery was fascinating.

Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, and Others on the Left Bank by James Campbell

Much of my Parisian reading falls into the interwar period, so this trod some new ground. The ‘Others’ of the subtitle turned out to be as interesting as the men listed, especially those involved in publishing material prohibited in the UK and USA, ranging from high modernism to the lowest pornography. Academic but highly readable, it was originally released in the 1990s and reissued in 2003 – however, some of its language today feels dated. It made me want to revisit Louis Menand’s incredible The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, which I listened to in 2023 on audio, and fully intended to buy in physical form to refer back to in moments exactly like this...

The Gulls Fly Inland by Sylvia Thompson

This, although fiction, fitted nicely into the Parisian theme. It’s the story of a transatlantic love affair, first thwarted by other people and then the Second World War. I bought my copy in the Handheld Press closing down sale. I’ve often found their list more informative than entertaining, so it was a pleasant surprise to be genuinely moved by it.

MEMOIR

Babylon, Albion by Dalia Al-Dujaili

Al-Dujaili is of Iraqi heritage, born and raised in Surrey in the UK. In this memoir, she uses her love of mythology and nature to link the two places. While the English landscape she describes feels familiar to me, I realised how ignorant I was about that of Iraq – the Mesopotamian Marshes, drained for political reasons but the water so fundamental in its myths; the activists fighting to protect its palm trees. While appreciating the beauty and uniqueness of both places, she’s firmly anti category, particularly drawing on the idea of native and invasive species. Just think of the quintessential English rose – actually, most of our breeds come from Asia. She encourages us all to pay close attention to the land, and lose our ideas of ownership.

Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt

I’ve met Lovatt through my pal Terri-Jane, and so had this on pre-order when it was released earlier this year. It’s a mix of memoir – Lovatt grew up in Leicester (second Leicester shout-out!) – and British lesbian history, using the logbooks of a Lesbian phone line she found in a London archive. The phone line was volunteer run – one of many throughout the country before the birth of the internet – and sounds like it was part agony aunt / part social guide. You can feel the love and thought that has gone into every page of this book. How to give voice to underrepresented people in the archives without compromising their anonymity? How to acknowledge community and the brilliant things these lesbians did, while acknowledging their failures – when it comes to issues such as race, disabilities, trans needs? The questions Lovatt asks are all still relevant, while also making our shared 20th-century history feel that bit wider.

GONE CAMPING

Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World by Paul Baker (audiobook)

All About Eve, Wizard of Oz, Kenneth Williams, Liberace. All present and correct in this, Baker’s overview of camp. But there’s also plenty included that I wouldn’t immediately class as camp – Agatha Christie or Nancy Mitford, for starters. It just highlights one of the difficulties in talking about camp – its definition sometimes lies in the eye (or ear) of the beholder. Baker is great at celebrating the joy of camp, while not making you feel too stupid if you haven’t grappled with Susan Sontag, Judith Butler and other gender theorists, showing it as a tool of resistance as well as fun.

As the decades have gone on though, Baker argues, the more of us that are in on the camp joke, the more complicated it has become – especially with the deadly humourless camp of the current president of the USA. Funny and thoughtful, this was an unexpected treat.

OTHER GOOD THINGS FROM JUNE

Paris, of course. Highlights included David Hockney, the Waterlilies and a delicious meal here.

Seeing the AIDS quilt at Tate Modern.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Royal Albert Hall. Karen O forever.

The woven silk ribbons of Papilionaceous, discovered via Fashademic, with donations going to Médecins Sans Frontières.

Is this photo heaven or hell to you?

Next to actually reading books, searching for them second-hand has got to be one of my favourite hobbies. Like all vintage hunts, it’s about the magic of discovery – you never know what you’ll turn up. In my twenties, my searching was more free-ranging, I had more time (and perhaps was slightly less fussy) and it led to some brilliant discoveries, such as coming across my first Virago Modern Classic, A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse, in Balham’s My Back Pages (RIP). Now, a couple of decades on, I’m more conscious of my already groaning bookshelves, and tend to be guided by various lists I’ve made on my phone. That doesn’t stop me looking, however…

In my years of book shopping in London, I’ve established a few favourites, which I’m sharing here in the hope it inspires you to have a rummage too.

THE CHARITY SHOPS

Amnesty: Hammersmith & Kentish Town

The gold standard for me. Both are extremely well stocked, and slightly cheaper than Oxfam. Sadly / luckily, they’re slightly inconveniently located for me – well, actually, the Hammersmith one is extremely inconvenient. I’d determined to go back, however: on my first and only visit there I bought 7 books (including multiple Virago Modern Classics and a Dean Street Press volume, pictured above on the tube home), and could have bought many, many more. I saw on The Bookclub Review’s Instagram that the Hammersmith one is at risk of closure. You can sign a petition against that here.

Oxfam Books & Music

These always have a great edit of books, though you pay a bit more for that convenience. I visit the one on Upper Street the most (it’s also where I donate books) but I’m also very fond of the Bloomsbury branch. Though they’re not books focused, I have also found some gems in the basement of the Goodge Street branches and in the Marylebone one.

Any and every charity shop

Can you ever risk passing by one without going in? Especially when my best ever charity shop book find was from a regular neighbourhood shop one Tuesday lunchtime. My theory is that the best finds are clustered in places that are also served by a good independent bookshop – such as Balham (thanks to Backstory), Crystal Palace (The Bookseller Crow) and Kentish Town (Owl Bookshop). Where I work in Oxted, Surrey, has the greatest number of charity shops on the high street that I’ve ever come across, especially in such a well-heeled place, but is dire for book finds… no bookshop, see.

THE BARGAIN BASEMENTS

New books + old = my idea of heaven.

Housmans, Kings Cross

A radical not-for-profit bookseller, I love buying new books here, too – there’s always something of which I’d otherwise not have heard. Then there’s their basement room of second-hand books that have been donated to support them, which therefore have a slightly wider / random scope than the books upstairs. My favourite find from here was my Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own, for a couple of quid.

Burley Fisher, Haggerston

Probably my most used indie, and likewise great for an unusual recommendation. Chances of me leaving without something are decreased further by their second-hand stock – both outside the shop and, if you’re prepared to tackle some fairly steep stairs, in the basement. I bought a great copy of Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death here.

Pages of Hackney

I was ignorant of its second-hand section, until I went to a talk there and was sat right beside a distracting selection of books. I’ve since righted that wrong several times over.

Waterstones Gower Street, Bloomsbury

A slightly more student-y vibe than the usual Waterstones, it has trolleys of second-hand books outside, which always waylay me when I’m meant to be on my way elsewhere. Next to Rymans in the basement is a whole section of vintage books, including some very nice and quite pricey first editions. But there are more regular books on the shelves too: I’ve picked up a fair few Anita Brookners here.

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THE DEDICATED SECOND-HAND BOOKSHOPS

My regulars

Any Amount of Books, Westminster

One of the last few remaining second-hand sellers on Charing Cross Road (Helene Hanff would weep). I think they must buy directly from reviewers as there’s always a good selection of recent-ish books for sale, plus a (slightly naughty, as you’re not meant to sell them on) proofs section in the basement corner, where I bought The Secret Public, among other things. I’ve also found some great art and design books there, such as a lovely edition of the King Penguin Popular English Art by Noel Carrington and Clarke Hutton.

Skoob Books, Bloomsbury

For the last couple of years, I’ve had a membership at the Bloomsbury Curzon, and this has become a regular stopping-off point. It’s great for a rummage, with loads of literature along with more academic section. Staff are young and friendly. The only strike against it is that you can’t get a signal there, meaning I have to prep for a visit with my various reading lists already loaded on my phone…

Judd Books, Bloomsbury

Extremely crammed, and involves a lot of “excuse me”-ing with other customers. Fiction is all upstairs (which makes a change from the usual basement trip). They carry lots of heavily discounted remaindered books.

House of Hodge, Highbury

A well organised charity bookshop, which gives its money to animal welfare. Combine with a visit to the nearby Ink84 and BookBar for a short but satisfying Highbury book crawl.

If I’m in the neighbourhood…

Hurlingham Books, Fulham

I’ve a soft spot for Hurlingham Books – when I first came down to London to do work experience, this was on my route home. The window display remains as crammed as it always did. Only enter this shop if you enjoy a dig (I love a dig): everything is stacked deep and high, and having just three other people in it feels a tight squeeze (it’s the shop pictured at the very top of this post). But it rewards perseverance – I came away with a fairly rare Angela Carter on my last visit.

Archive Bookstore, Marylebone

Another proper old school, it’s all about the hunt place, all the more charming for being in such a plush part of town. You do feel like you might get taken out by a falling book at any time, but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take. Bring cash.

Bookmongers, Brixton

One of Brixton’s treasures, it’s been around since 1992, and I wish didn’t now live so far from it. Spacious, well organised, well priced, and nice and calm. There are even sofas. Last time I was there, I bought a Henry Green compendium and the Elizabeth Smart journals for about £3 each.

Walden Books, Chalk Farm

As pretty as you’d hope a Chalk Farm second-hand bookshop would be. On my last visit, I picked up a handful of Virago Modern Classics before I’d even got inside the building.

A DATE IN THE DIARY

St Giles Bookfair

One of my favourite places to buy books. They always have a wide ranging, well-sorted selection and friendly volunteers who’ll indulgently chuckle over your purchase of an extravagant number of books, plus it’s in a church so it feels calm and orderly. I’m not sure how frequently it pops up, but it usually lasts around a fortnight, and they keep the stock topped over up its run. The church – which sits in the middle of the Barbican complex – has lots of literary links. John Milton is buried there, for example, and it also features in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness. The fair is next on from 15 August to 3 September 2025.

OVERRATED AND OVER-PRICED?

In my 20-something years of buying second-hand books in London, I’ve never bought anything from the stalls under Waterloo Bridge – they’re quite pricey, and don’t really seem to cater to my taste. It doesn’t stop me looking though….

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Where do you like to buy second-hand books in London? Have I missed any favourites? Please let me know and help me indulge my hobby.

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich

Good Girl by Aria Aber

Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (audiobook)

Universality by Natasha Brown

Dawn Powell at Her Best (Dance Night, Turn, Magic Wheel & short stories)

Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor by Emma Warren

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie

Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking by Maddie Ballard

The Beautiful People by Marylin Bender

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

Bohemian Lives: Three Extraordinary Women by Amy Licence

Fraud by Anita Brookner

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I began highlighting my favourites on my list but quickly realised that this was such a stonking reading month, it’s far easier to suggest the two that I wouldn’t bother with: The Beautiful People and Bohemian Lives. For a slightly more detail, read on…

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Hot stuff

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

An arctic explorer is brought back to life – and forward by some 180 years or so – by the British government for perhaps not altogether honourable purposes. This novel was exactly as people sold it to me: fun, charming, smart, romantic, albeit slightly falling apart at the end. I read this during a very stressful week, and it was pure, delightful distraction.

Good Girl by Aria Aber

I’ve been trying to read all the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist this year (The Persians and Tell Me Everything to go). This is the one that most intrigued me, a coming of age set in Berlin. Nila – the only child of Afghan parents – is struggling against the idea of being a good girl, and her family’s expectations versus her own desires and shifting ambitions, with a wider background of the West reconfiguring its own identity after 9/11. Aber is fantastic at capturing the intensity of being in your early 20s, and the feeling of being lost. She’s also convincing on the clubbing, drugs and sex – of which there’s a lot. Contrary to what that subject matter might suggest, it moves at quite a languid pace, the alternative time zone of the afterhours world. It perhaps feels like there’s one night out too many (isn’t there always?), and that not all Aber’s ideas have come off – but ambition wins over playing it safe for me every time.

The Coin by Yasmin Zaher

While I had this out from the library, it won the Dylan Thomas prize, beating the likes of Glorious Exploits and The Safekeep. It’s centred on a young, orphaned Palestinian woman in New York, who is generally failing to adapt to its dirt, capitalism and ambitions. Zaher describes her protagonist as ‘despicable’ – and the book falls into that Ottessa Moshfegh groove. Though I enjoy Moshfegh, The Coin becomes arguably more interesting, and disturbing, underpinned by the trauma of her displacement. If Good Girl perhaps contained one idea too many, this multiplies that tenfold – in an exhilarating way. I wish it’d been a book club book, as I’m still trying to work it all through. Tell me if you’ve read it!

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Another slow pace, as dream-like as title suggests. It switches between the stories of four women – three from Nigeria, one from Guinea – reflecting and reckoning with their stories and relationships. It really is centred on the women – to the extent that I found myself rooting for at least one slightly less terrible man to enter the picture. At its most powerful when centred on a story echoing the sexual assault claims against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the book felt like it had points to make, and didn’t make them in the subtlest way. That said, if Adichie wants to tell me a story, I’ll always want to listen.

Universality by Natasha Brown

Brown’s Assembly was a knock-out punch. This is more of a ducker and a diver, unfolding different perspectives on a single incident, essentially a take on the modern British media. No one – including the reader – escapes guilt free, although you are rewarded with some sharp and savage one-liners. I read it twice (it’s only around 150 pages) to try and make sure I’d squeezed the most I could out of it. It’s great fun – and very, very different from Assembly.

Book club extra reading

The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie

Christie is one of my comfort reads, so when I found Natasha Brown had mentioned The Thirteen Problems as an influence on Universality, I was intrigued to see how that might be. The Thirteen Problems is a series of short stories, set around two different dinner parties, where guests recount mysteries from their past. There’s no surprise (for the reader at least) when Miss Marple can crack the case each time, based on her observations of village life. The stories are short and satisfying, I just need Marple (or perhaps Natasha Brown) to come back and unravel its link to Universality for me.

Playing catch-up

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (audiobook)

The film coming out was my prompt to finally read this. I’m a fan of a long walk book (hello, Wild) and felt somewhat guilty for not tackling The Salt Path, given that it takes place closer to home. It feels easy to describe such stories as ‘inspirational’ and gloss over the hardships that sit at their roots. Winn and her husband Moth walked because they had lost everything, and had more loss – in terms of Moth’s health – looming. Like a good walk, this book offers a shift in perspective. It’s a non-glossy depiction of homelessness in the UK, one that differs from the assumed urban one. You feel like you’re with them every step, every sleep and pasty, of the way – and I’m almost surprised at its popularity because it’s not a kind Britain that you encounter through their story – finishing the book sunburnt and salt crusted.

Always a pleasure

Dawn Powell at Her Best

Sometimes I feel like I’m cheating my numbers by reading very, very short books. This volume goes someway to balance the books, as it includes two novels by Powell (Dance Night and Turn, Magic Wheel) as well as some short stories. Powell never quite broke through fame wise, although once you discover her, you tend to become a devotee – for example, while reading this volume, I saw Rachel Syme extolling A Time to be Born: one of my favourite New York novels. Powell’s books can be hard to get hold of, so this was a lucky charity shop find earlier this year. The novels – six years apart – reflect two aspects of Powell’s life: her childhood in Ohio in 1930’s Dance Night – where big dreams met small town claustrophobia – and her New York life (and friendships with the likes of Edmund Wilson and Ernest Hemingway) in Turn, Magic Wheel. Often considered her masterpiece – including by the likes of Syme – it’s centred on the city’s publishing industry. The book’s heart lies in Effie, the first wife of a Hemingway-style figure, while Powell fires shots at the likes of literary magazine editors, everything-is-copy hacks, the society hostesses and so on.

Fraud by Anita Brookner

Fraud begins with a typical Brookner heroine: middle-aged, never married Anna Durrant, devoted carer to her mother until her recent death. There’s an unexpected twist: Anna is missing, her whereabouts unknown. Rather than going down the Christie route, however, Fraud proceeds to deftly pick apart both Anna’s psychology, and that of those in her circle. While often Brookner enjoys setting up characters in contrast to each other, here there’s three single women to compare to Anna. Though it doesn’t tread the path of a traditional thriller, she does pull off something of a twist with its ending. I was reading the Brooknerian blog, which divides her output into the “vital 80s; the settled magisterial 90s; the bleak, experimental 2000s.” This one came out in 1992 and backs-up that description.

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The non-fiction TBR report

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich (time on TBR shelf: 8 years)

I was sent this on its 2017 publication by Penguin Classics and it’s stayed on my shelf all this time – when do you find yourself in the mood to read a big thick book about war? But, of all the books that I’ve hung on to for so long, this has been the most rewarding, made especially relevant as I was reading it over the VE day anniversary. Alexievich shares the testimony of some of the 800,000 women who served as part of Soviet forces in the Second World War. Through the many different women and stories, she builds up a mosaic of experience and emotion. Horror, destruction and death, but also the humanity. The details that get left in the usual regaling of ‘war’ tales.

You get a sense of individual personalities – such as the woman who slept in her earrings, as it was the only time she could wear them – but also their similarities. What’s particularly striking is their eagerness to fight, such was the complete conviction in their country and communism that many of the women lied about their age to volunteer or spent weeks begging to be sent to the front. Or their shared dreams of how they imagined life would be once the war was over. When love would triumph over conflict, and there’d be a better future for all. Devastating.

Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick (on TBR shelf: 4 years)

This examines the idea of illness and its place in our culture, through the lens of Hattrick’s and their mother’s ME / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Hattrick also pulls in the likes of Virginia Woolf, Alice James and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to examine how they lived with their ill health. As an able-bodied, essentially ‘well’ person, this confronted my assumptions in the best kind of way. Rather than setting things in binary terms – well / unwell – Hattrick opens up possibilities.

Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through the Dancefloor by Emma Warren (time on TBR shelf: 6 months)

A kind of history of dance culture in the UK at the end of the 20^th century and into today, Warren considers dancing in its widest applications – going all the way from the dancing that takes place in house parties, youth clubs and teen discos to the highest level of choreography. In Britain, especially, she argues we get hung up about being ‘bad’ dancers – an inhibition that serves no purpose other than stopping us enjoying ourselves. It’s also a personal history of her own dancefloors and, as Warren mainly danced in south London, it frequently overlaps with areas that I know well, though not on the same terms. I’m fascinated by how people move through the city, how they make spaces their own – and this is another aspect of that. Thank you to Roxanne – one of my long-time dancing buddies – for giving this book to me. It came in a month where I did dance – on a proper night out and at a family wedding. I tried to live Warren’s words about abandoning the idea of “bad dancing” (and I may have drunkenly tried to tell a few people about it too), and I did feel more liberated for it.

The Beautiful People by Marylin Bender (Time on TBR shelf: 13 years)

Published in 1967, the cover states the books premise: ‘A candid examination of a cultural phenomenon - the marriage of fashion and society in the 60s.’ It’s safe to say that Bender – a writer for the New York Times – wasn’t a fan of any of this. She talks about how this causes a deterioration in the quality of clothes, and lack of style, when hype and fame become more important – basically, for the main, she could be describing today’s fashion world. There are some interesting bits, but it’s hard to stay engaged with a rant that lasts for 300 plus pages. “Only the most desperately out-of-it eager and name-hunters will stick with it all the way,” declared the New York Times in its review. There’s me told for persevering. Though a name I did hunt out was Caterine Milinaire – one of the authors of my favourite style guide, Cheap Chic – for more of which see below.

Bohemian Lives: Three Extraordinary Women by Amy Licence (Time on TBR shelf: 8 months)

Licence’s ‘three extraordinary women’ are Ida Nettleship, Sophie Brzeska and Fernande Olivier. While they individually justify that description, I’m not really sure why they appear in a book together – they’re not really linked other than by the concept of ‘bohemian’ and their relationships with male artists, through which they all suffered badly. As you’re forced to hop between the three of them. I most enjoyed reading about Ida Nettleship, wife of Augustus John, thanks to a curiosity about John’s women kindled by Margaret Forster’s book, Keeping the World Away. (I see there’s a new book coming out, all about the relationship between Augustus and Gwen.)

Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking by Maddie Ballard

I like, when I can, to make my own clothes. I’m not particularly good at it yet, but I’m getting better. I like doing it because it allows absorption and creativity, while being a way to skip some of the hell of the contemporary fashion system. I’ve rarely found people writing about clothes-making in a way that reflects my interest in it – there’s the ever-inspirational Charlie Porter, and, coincidentally, I also saw this post from Alice Hattrick this month, and now there’s Bound. Ballard centres different periods of her life around the garments she makes. If you sew, no doubt you’ll recognise some of the names of the patterns she uses. I loved how she outlined the choices she made with each garment, and how each item of clothing was folded into her life.

What books I bought in May

Assembly and Bound (see above) and Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein, all new. Babylon Albion by Dalia al-Dujaili from the proofs section at Any Amount of Books. From the always reliable St Giles bookfair, Margaret Drabble fourth book (and the fourth I’ll have read by her) Jerusalem the Golden and Elizabeth Jane Howard’s memoir, Slipstream.

It was also Offprint this month, Tate’s annual independent publishing fair. I bought a beautiful Green Man zine from Erin Jackson Raynes and You Gotta Keep Your Head Straight About Clothes, a smart, thoughtful ode to Cheap Chic (hey, Caterine Milinaire!) by Dal Chodha, complete with a mini Jerry Hall bookmark. It’s filed next to my four copies of the book itself.

What else I enjoyed in May

Dancing! Noah Davis at the Barbican. A trip to a model village.

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Linked, probably, is that after a few months of feeling despondent about my TBR challenge, I got through five of my languishing non-fiction books, which spurred me to on read more. Here’s the full list of what I read this month: I’ve put stars by my favourite five.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

Perspectives by Laurent Binet

To the River by Olivia Laing (audiobook)

*The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Lost Pilots: The Spectacular Rise and Scandalous Fall of Aviation's Golden Couple by Corey Mead

*Brief Lives by Anita Brookner

*A Spring of Love by Celia Dale

Rebel Writers: The Accidental Feminists by Celia Brayfield

Let me tell you about a man I knew by Susan Fletcher

Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You by Candice Chung

The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties by Harry Hopkins

*Peter Hujar's Day by Linda Rosenkratz

Plain Girl by Arthur Miller

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings by Geoff Dyer (audiobook)

Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show by Rachel Shteir

*Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter

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Memory lane

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro

When I first moved to London, when I had very little cash and knew even less people, I spent a lot of time in a local second-hand bookshop. The kind that’s brilliant for people whose main currency is time, an assault course of books. Kazuo Ishiguro was one of the authors who appeared among their piles a lot and I worked my way through most of his back catalogue, subsequently buying Never Let Me Go when it was first released, as new. But I somehow missed (or was too intimidated by) The Unconsoled, so when it came up as a Backlisted pick.

I decided to plug that gap. It centres on Ryder, who’s in a strange mitteleuropa town for a performance. But people are always bothering him for other favours, so he’s constantly pulled off task. The novel follows a dream logic, and has that same stressful and disorientating, vividness of dress. Continually frustrating but also very funny, it reminded me of what a supreme pro Ishiguro is, and made me want to revisit the rest of his backlist.

(If you’ve read the book, you may appreciate the nod to its plot in that my photo was taken on the train. Alas, no breakfast buffet on this one, however.)

(… but an extravagant – non-plot-related pastry in this photo, mainly included to show of the dream book + sunshine + baked goods combo).

Perspectives by Laurent Binet
Since we’re on memory lane, Perspectives had me casting even further back, to university and History of Art 1 and anything I could recall about Vasari and Mannerism. This is an epistolary murder mystery set in 16^th-century Florence, using Vasari and many other art history stars. But while some background knowledge helps a bit, Binet gleefully leaves the truth behind. It made me laugh a lot and was a fun palate cleanser after the heavier stuff I’ve been reading. However, given its highbrow set-up, I took it on a very shallow level. I discovered what great fun Binet is in interviews, such as on the Hatchards podcast, and perhaps enjoyed listening to these as much as I did the book itself.

This month’s Brookner, and women looking for love

Brief Lives by Anita Brookner

Published in 1990, this feels part of a Brookner golden period, coming on the heels of Latecomers (the novel that started me on my Brookner-a-month mission) and Lewis Percy, which I read last month. Sometimes Brookner’s heroines feel they’re swimming against the tide of their times. Fay, here, feels exactly a product of her time: brought up with the expectation of marriage, and that’ll bring her both obligation and love. She dutifully marries, putting her in contact – and in contrast to – another woman, Julia. In Julia, the lessons of femininity have been learned in a different way. She’s beautiful, expectant of worship and care, with nothing to fall back on but gossip.

Fay is the solitary woman that Brookner is so good at, capturing those moments of intense loneliness – but also sometimes the pleasure that can be found on a sunny day, spent by yourself, wandering a city. She’s not entirely adrift, like some of them can be: she has a reliable, capable female friend, and learns to find some fulfilment through voluntary work. Fay herself says she aspires to a normality; in fact, it’s her apparent ‘normality’ that makes her loneliness feel even more painful.

A Spring of Love by Celia Dale

Brookner’s Fay is the daughter of a cinema manager in Camberwell; Evelyn – the heroine of A Spring of Love – is the grand-daughter of a shopkeeper in Camden. Evelyn, like Fay, is dutiful and capable and shares her deep longing for love. Into Evelyn’s well-ordered life of routine and simple pleasures comes Raymond, seemingly offering Evelyn all she’s longed for and never dared voice. Dale brilliantly builds a feeling of unease. Like Evelyn, we aren’t witness to the full truth until it’s too late, second guessing what’s going on, and how worried we really should be… Trying a Celia Dale was one of my year’s reading ambitions – thanks Sian for giving this one to me – and now I just want to read more.

Life and art and more

Let me tell you about a man I knew by Susan Fletcher

I was lent this after visiting the National Gallery’s Van Gogh exhibition. It imagines Van Gogh’s time in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and the origin of his portrait of Jeanne Trabuc, the warden’s wife. So, perhaps the pacing and tone are a little one note, and I suspect I’ll remember little about it in a few months. And, thanks to Van Gogh being such a prolific letter writer, he’s someone whom we have a fair idea of how he expressed himself, it’s maybe not that convincingly reflected here… However, it’s extremely readable (I read it in a day) and has brilliant reviews online, so go for it, if you like the premise.

Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter

Bought new, because people kept recommending it to me, and the library didn’t have it. I loved both of Porter’s non-fiction books, so was intrigued about his first fiction. Nova Scotia House has an immediacy that blurs past and present as Johnny looks back on the life and death of his lover, Jerry, from an AIDS related illness two decades on. The death bit is devastating but the life bit is equally important, as Johnny attempts to find a way to live that continues Jerry’s principles. It questions how gay / alternative communities might be rebuilt after such destruction, what alternative ways there could be, while letting you feel the layers of loss, the weight survivors carry, the supreme cruelty of it all.

Sometimes his characters do seem to fall into talking as manifesto, but it skilfully conjures place – housing estates, pubs, saunas. (Porter writes about his places for World of Interiors, here.) There’s a point that the text just stops, replaced by photos of real panels from the UK AIDS memorial quilt – thanks to Porter’s initiative the Quilt will be going on display at Tate Modern in June.

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Keeping things brief

Peter Hujar's Day by Linda Rosenkratz
One of my highlights from Raven Row’s recent Peter Hujar exhibition was a series of rooms showing the photographs Hujar took over the course of one day, Easter Sunday, 18 April 1976. He begins among the worshippers at St Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown, moves down to the cruising piers along the Hudson, and finishes up on the World Trade Center viewing platform on the tip of Manhattan. Who wouldn’t want to spend a day like that, with such a generous, observant guide to people and place? What pleasure, then, to discover that I could spend another day with Peter Hujar with the book Peter Hujar’s Day, thanks to Daisy Buchanan’s recommendation on the Book Club Review podcast.

The book focuses on an earlier day in his life – 18 December 1974 – when Linda Rosenkratz asked him to record his activities and relay them to her in a phone conversation. This is much more of a working day – an editor from French Elle comes to Hujar’s home / studio, then he heads to the Lower East Side to photograph Allen Ginsberg for the New York Times. Hujar’s ‘read’ on Ginsberg is fascinating, indicating his understanding of human psychology that probably made him such a good portraitist (but also if you’ve – like me – recently seen Ginsberg pop up in the One-to-One: John & Yoko film, in footage from a few years earlier). But Hujar just seems like someone who it’d always be enjoyable to chew the fat with, who’d always find something interesting to report from even the most average workaday day. Read it in the morning, then go for your own city walk.

Plain Girl by Arthur Miller

Another factor in the book total this month: short books. Thank you to Sara for sending me this novella. Janice, waking up next to her dead partner, recalls moments from her life that led her there. She’s someone in love with art and beauty – however, as the title suggests, her own personal appearance, we’re told, is plain. While that might feel a negligible issue, it’s one that matters to Janice (and presumably Miller). I enjoyed this most as a portrait of 1940s New York, from someone who was there, and has the skill to distil its essence.

A baggier affair

The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings by Geoff Dyer (audiobook)

This is about all sorts of endings: finishing – or not finishing – books, ‘last chances’, physical deterioration, late phases. I was favourably inclined from the outset, thanks to his use of a choice Anita Brookner epigraph. Dyer refers to a few more of my literary faves along the way – Jean Rhys, Eve Babitz – as well as lots of things I’m largely indifferent to, such as Nietzsche or tennis, and some things that I never expected to have to form an opinion on, like his (thwarted by the pandemic) aim of never buying shampoo again, furnishing himself from hotels instead. Reading reviews, there’s lot of criticism of its rambling nature, but – divided into very short chapters – the structure suited to the way I listen, in snatches on a walk or the bus and, in each chapter, I’d always find something that made me think or laugh… or roll my eyes.

For transporting yourself to an English summer’s day…

To the River by Olivia Laing (audiobook)

I saw Laing speak about The Garden Against Time, and they specifically mentioned language: how The Garden Against Time was their first book to deliberately employ lusher language since To the River. Listening, it’s impossible not to hear the sensual, squelchy liquidity of the prose, following Laing walking the length of the Ouse. The walk takes place around midsummer and the whole thing seems to shimmer in that magic (the listening experience enhanced by also taking place in the sunshine). It pulls in nature, local histories, myth and industry. There’s a lot about Virginia Woolf too, the Ouse being where she died, and Laing moves Woolf away from her sometimes virginal images, reinstating her sensuality. For places that I’m reasonably familiar with, it makes you want to stride out and explore for yourself, scratch the surface a little deeper. It’s also interesting seeing earlier echoes of some of the concerns of The Garden Against Time here: the depictions of the plant life, the private ownership of the landscape.

For making yourself very hungry

Chinese Parents Don't Say I Love You by Candice Chung

Published by Elliott & Thompson in April, I was sent this to look at for my day job, but it became a book that moved from the ‘work’ category and into ‘pleasure’. Chung is a food writer, and food and meals are a major theme in this memoir. Do not read it when hungry! Although partly about her relationship with her parents, as the title suggests, it’s as much about the rebuilding that takes place after the end of one romantic relationship, and the hard, hopeful leaps of embarking on a new one. Warm and tender and all round delicious.

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The non-fiction TBR progress report

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky (approx. time on shelves 18 months)

My boss lent me this, I think because we were talking about books that kick-started publishing trends. Anyway, when this came out in the mid-90s and was hugely successful, it inspired countless more quirky, one-topic non-fiction books. This is part how cod changed the world, part recipe book. I grew up in Grimsby – a port once made wealthy through cod fishing – and remember the lingering resentment towards Iceland (the country, not the shop) for that trade being wiped out in the ‘Cod Wars’. That's all succinctly explained in here, without the bonus resentment and without making my eyes glaze over as they did when it was recounted to me as a kid. Zippy and surprisingly engrossing, given its subject matter.

The Lost Pilots: The Spectacular Rise and Scandalous Fall of Aviation's Golden Couple by Corey Mead (approx. time on shelf: 7 years)

I’ve almost cleared this book out many times but the fact it’s about one of my favourite topics – the golden age of aviation – as well as being reasonably short meant I never could quite do it. It’s the true stories of pilots Jessie Miller and Bill Lancaster. It’s got record-breaking flights, romance and even a murder trial, but despite those rich ingredients it doesn’t quite take off. It’d have been better as a long article, rather than a book – but, whoosh, it’s finally off my shelves.

Rebel Writers: The Accidental Feminists by Celia Brayfield (approx. time on shelf: 7 years)

While the 1950s was known for its ‘Angry Young Men’, this profiles women writers of the period who also had something to say: Nell Dunn, Shelagh Delaney, Edna O’Brien, Lynne Reid Banks, Charlotte Bingham, Virginia Ironside and Margaret Forster. That’s a great list of writers. But it’s not entirely clear why she’s picked these seven over others. She mentions, but dismisses, Margaret Drabble for example. Then what about someone like Ann Quin, just off the top of my head? While the structure of the book doesn’t work in its favour – plot points are recapped several times over – it did make me want to read or revisit all these authors. I dipped back into Nell Dunn’s always fascinating 1964 Talking to Women, which includes an interview with O’Brien. And then there’s Blue Road, the marvellous Edna O’Brien documentary, which I watched this month, which really makes the case – in a way Rebel Writers never quite does with such clarity – for her rebel writer status.

The New Look: A Social History of the Forties and Fifties by Harry Hopkins (time on shelf: six months)

I acquired this because of its name and great cover. Dior’s New Look does get a look in, but it’s just one aspect of this ambitious book covering the personal and political in Britain in the 1940s and ‘50s. It came out in 1964, so a lot closer to the time period than we are now – when it got a near rave review in the New York Times. Though he’s an enjoyable narrator, not all Hopkins’ pronouncements have held up. For example, his proclamation that “in the old battle of ‘Women’s Rights’ little remained but mopping up operations.” The book is best at some of the smaller details that have more likely faded from view from our vantage point: the introduction of ballpoint pens, UFO crazes, the fact that in the 1950s more British households had budgies as pets than dogs. It’d be a goldmine for someone wanting to set a novel in the period.

Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show by Rachel Shteir (Time on shelf: about a decade?)

Apologies to my friend’s old flatmate who lent me this and I never got around to reading it… until now, when friend and former flatmate are no longer in touch. Published by Oxford University Press, it’s academic – footnotes aplenty. Fair play to Shteir, as she does make it accessible for a general reader and makes a convincing case for the striptease being a great American art form. I appreciate the research involved (and if I were a NYC tour guide / historical novelist, I’d take so many notes from this) but it’s not the kind of book you race through – nor is it particularly racey, if that’s what you’re after.

The books I bought this month:

I held out for most of the month, except for picking upChange by Maureen Duffy from a charity shop, after enjoying Capital last year, and seeing this one was set in the Second World War (like the 1920s, a big reading tick for me, though I’ve since learnt at least part of it is narrated by monkeys). Then, because I was doing so well on my targets, I bought Nova Scotia House (see above) and let myself visit the Amnesty bookshop in Kentish Town. I came away with No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhamiand Come Back in September by Darryl Pinckney: both non-fiction, but on my sprawling reading wishlist for a long time.

Other things:

I’ve been clicking away on this map of descriptions of London by non-English speaking writers (then getting frustrated by the books mentioned not being available in English and my own terrible foreign language skills).

However, my main clicking focus has been my library reservations. I’ve such promising books on order, I keep refreshing hourly in the hope one might be ready waiting for me…

What’s been the best thing that you’ve read this month? How many books is too many books? And what are you looking forward to picking up next?

Blue in Chicago by Bette Howland

38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands

1-2-3-4 The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown (audiobook)

A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford

Memoirs of the Forties by Julian Maclaren-Ross

Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson (audiobook)

Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot

Truth and Consequences by Alison Lurie

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus

Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner

Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson (audiobook)

Curtain’s up
A Compass Error by Sybille Bedford

“When one’s young, everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.”

My former, brilliantly inspiring, first boss proper recently died. That period – my early twenties – is now half my lifetime ago. While I didn’t throw myself into youthhood with complete abandonment, I did tick all those insecure young person boxes: often foolish, unthinking and naïve. What could, should I have done differently? By being bolder, more outrageous or a bit smarter, what might have happened? How would I be different today? A Compass Error – as that quote above suggests – brilliantly captures the gulf between then and now. The narrator, Flavia, is looking back on her 17-year-old self. She’s of a European privileged class, virtually left to her own devices in France, as she studies for her Oxford entrance exam. Younger Flavia is also foolish, unthinking and naïve – and she’s cruelly punished for it by adults that should behave better. I read one of Bedford’s memoirs, Quicksands, last year and borrowed this after it was featured on Backlisted. A case of the book stars aligning and getting the right book for my mood in the moment.

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Two brilliant writers that you’ve likely not heard of

Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot
Another Backlisted-linked read, this one picked by Rose Ruane (who wrote the wonderful Birding). Written at the tail-end of the 1970s, the book is entirely in the voice of Abra, a housewife, with a handsome, reasonable husband, a nice big house, two children, and domestic help, if required. Over just a few days, she decides simply to drive away and set up life on her own in a cabin in the Canadian wilderness. Morally her actions are extremely suspect, but Barfoot helps you conclude that it’s what she might have to do, mentally. It reminded me of Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own, a non-fiction account from 1934 in which she dissects moments from each day and her nighttime dreams to figure out, on her own terms, what gives her happiness. This working through of thought and emotion is what Barfoot puts on the page for Abra too. Like Mrs Caliban (which I read in January), it’s kind of a fantasy of escape – no sexy frog men here, but probably equally unattainable in real life.

Blue in Chicago by Bette Howland

While this year I’m doing a big push on my TBR non-fiction, last year I tackled my fiction piles. Blue in Chicago escaped 2024’s cull because I thought it was non-fiction essays. Then, picking it up this month, I thought it was fiction, short stories. The confusion is not entirely me being dizzy – when you read about Bette Howland, one discussion about her work is how deliberately unclassifiable it was. She’s also much praised and awarded, but somehow neglected – I was given my copy when it was reissued by Picador about five years ago. Anyway, Howland is terrific, one of those writers where you immediately know you’re in good hands. My favourites were – like the title essay / story / who knows – the ones that took their cue directly from Howland’s working-class Jewish Chicago family over the mid-century (this collection was originally published in 1978, meaning there are some echoes – though not in style – of last month’s Hello Beautiful). The essays / stories / who knows can twist away from you in unexpected ways that feel thrilling – you can’t not be paying attention. But why wouldn’t you be, when the writing is this good?

And while we’re in Chicago…

Constructing a Nervous System and Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson (both audiobooks)

Critic Margo Jefferson also grew in post-war Chicago (born 1947 to Howland’s 1937). Jefferson’s childhood, however, was spent in what she calls ‘Negroland’ – the city’s upper-middle class Black community. This came with expected standards of behaviour, achievements and ambitions, and also a precariousness, when exposed to the period’s ingrained, everyday racism.

Jefferson lived the changes of the second half of the twentieth century – her class making her one of the first to attend previously all-white prestigious schools; could rally behind the ‘Black is Beautiful’ mantra of the late sixties, in her early 20s, and later – initially seeing it as a secondary consideration to race equality – feminism.

In Constructing a Nervous System (which I listened to first), she examines the shaping of her cultural sensibilities as a Black woman of her generation and class. She considers the likes of Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather and Josephine Baker; Gone With the Wind and Ike Turner – what they could or couldn’t offer her, how they helped construct her idea of self, how to “imagine what can’t imagine you”. Her responses are nuanced, in complete charge of her material. I’d like a hard copy to read her references, many I know I’ve missed.

Picked by my book club, I remember this book on the shelves of friends back from Antipodean backpacking. It won the Booker Prize in 1985, though not without controversy.

Hulme creates vivid portraits of place and people (though she’s slightly too much in love with the eccentricities of her female character), which I read with enjoyment and curiosity about where it going to go for most of its 547 pages. Then, relatively close to the end, there’s an incident so brutal, with a comeback that’s so unsatisfying, that the reconciliatory conclusion entirely failed for me and, in fact, makes it hard for me to understand why the book beloved of so many. At book club, I cruelly compared it to Where the Crawdads Sing (for which I’m sorry Keri, you’re undeniably an infinitely superior writer), however, there is something about the conjuring of place proving so captivating that the story itself is forgiven that both books seem to share.

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A TBR non-fiction progress report

I inch forward…

38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands (on my TBR bookshelf for 4 months)

Picked up at a press preview, it’s very not my usual reading scope. My photo shows a link to it, taken in Punta Arenas, in the southern Chilean part of Patagonia a few years ago. We were there to see penguins. It’s also, I discovered thanks to this book, where the Nazi Walther Ruff – known for his ‘innovations’ in using mobile gas chambers – lived out later his days, never facing trial for his crimes.

Sands charts Ruff’s story in parallel with the legal battle to extradite Pinochet (which Sands was involved in) to face trial for crimes that took place during his military dictatorship in Chile. Pinochet and Ruff knew each other, and Sands explores Ruff’s links to the torture and disappearances characteristic of Pinochet’s regime.

I wish I’d read this before going to Punta Arenas. Our penguin trip was cancelled, and rattled around town for a long, dissatisfying day. I grew up in an end-of-the-line coastal town – Punta Arenas felt like a supercharged version, standing in the biting wind, watching boats depart for Antarctica. It’s so end of the earth, it almost feels unreal, underlined by the myths recounted in Bruce Chatwin’s On Patagonia (which even mentions Ruff). 38 Londres Street shows how real it all was: stories of everyday dread, places of torture turned back to faceless government buildings without note. There are many horrors of the 20^th century in this book, and it highlights the careful work and willingness required to bring them to life.

Memoirs of the Forties by Julian Maclaren-Ross (TBR time: just under two years)

These are very funny tales of Maclaren-Ross time as a writer-cum-barfly of Fitzrovia around the Second World War. This volume brings together both the memoir and the stories he talks about pitching to various publishers within them: a fascinating contrast. Some of the stories are great – like ‘I Had to Go Sick’, a wartime farce with Catch-22 sensibilities, though the most referenced section is likely his run-down of Fitzrovia of London pubs in the period – essential reading for any London tour guides (incidentally, an occasional ambition of mine).

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century by Greil Marcus (time on my TBR shelf: 18 months)

This was a re-read, after a short course where the tutor said this book changed his thinking. I’d read it about 20 years ago, knowing its cult status, and not got on with it. Was it a better experience this time around? Kinda. Marcus charts a history of the 20^th century through looking at the impulses that created punk: creation meets destruction, a new world through oblivion. He looks at Dada and the Situationists and, when convenient, people from way further back, such as John of Leidon (great name, when you’re talking about The Sex Pistols, right?), searching in the debris of pop culture that had been overlooked. I enjoyed it more this time around because my expectations were lower, my general knowledge a bit better, and I’m probably a slightly better reader, too. Times have slightly caught up with this book – it surely must have felt much more innovative when it came out in 1989 – with the internet opening up archives and routes of alterative research, and the task of reconstructing what’s not there in history seized and built on by the likes of Saidiya Hartman.

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown (audiobook)

In a month of heavy reading, a much-needed tonic. While I appreciated Brown’s multiple ‘glimpses’ method in his book about Princess Margaret, Ma’am Darling, I really do not care about the royal family. So, having that approach applied to a subject for which I’ve a real fondness was pure delight. Using three different narrators, one of which is Brown himself, it worked surprisingly well on audio (though I’ll likely buy myself a hard copy at some point because I enjoyed it so much) Talk about archive crawling, I love the details that Brown puts under the microscope – be it Jane Asher’s dad’s medical papers in The Lancet, or the fate of other acts who were also on the Ed Sullivan show when the Beatles made their US debuts. And there’s a hilarious account of Brown (also a fan) visiting Paul and John’s childhood homes. I probably could have kept listening infinitely. Now, every time I come across a piece of Beatles trivia – I’m currently extra attuned to it – I want to hear Brown’s take on it. Pure joy.

This month’s Anita Brookner

Lewis Percy by Anita Brookner

I’ve said before that Brookner writes a killer opener, here’s one. As well as Madame Doche and her camembert, it introduces – like last month’s Brookner (Altered States) – a male protagonist. Lewis is not quite of his time, brought up by his mother, who dies early-ish in the novel (meaning he must also abandon the comforts of Mme Doche and her cheese). He sleepwalks from academia to a steady library job, living in his same untouched, childhood home in suburban London, while every other young person gets on with the bohemian of the 1950s and swinging 1960s. Things cannot stay the same, however. His wife, for starters, discovers women’s lib. But when Lewis does start to allow change, it results in what’s for Brookner a happy ending – at least one with hope. Delightful.

Now we face the final curtain

Truth and Consequences by Alison Lurie

Alongside Brookner, I’ve been trying to read everything by Alison Lurie, another academic turned novelist. Lurie’s written a lot less, however, and I regretfully finished her last novel this month. Lurie’s novels take their cue from Jane Austen in terms of social commentary, albeit with everyone having sex with people they’re not married to, usually within the setting of her prestigious East Coast ‘Corinth’ university. Everything falls apart, until it comes back together, concluding with everyone happier than they were before. That’s essentially the plot of this one, throwing some visiting fellows into the mix, and it does the job nicely. Overall, though, I prefer it when Lurie allows her visitors to wander off campus slightly: relocations to London and LA in Foreign Affairs and The Nowhere City or the lush, loving The Last Resort, set in Key West.

Some good non-book things from March…

I love the film Eighth Grade – a tender, funny portrait of a girl at the point of teetering between being a child and a teenager – and rewatched it at a screening with a live soundtrack by Anna Meredith. What a treat. I also finally saw the stage adaptation of The Years with a good friend, which was beautifully moving (yes, they had to stop my performance), and made me want to talk long into the night about memory, history, womanhood, and everything really…

What books I bought

Loads of Virago Modern Classics including The Mother’s Recompense by Edith Wharton and The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby. Peter Hujar’s Day after hearing about it on The Bookclub Review podcast, and visiting the exhibition at Raven’s Row.

Tell me about your month in reading – what was the best thing you read? Where should I go next with my Beatlesmania?

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Here’s everything I read over February:

The Ladies of Llangollen by Elizabeth Mavor

Assembly by Natasha Brown

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick

The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi

Headshot: A Novel by Rita Bullwinkel

The Wheels of Fashion by Phyllis Lee Levin

Army Without Banners by Ann Stafford

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty by Robert Lacey

Altered States by Anita Brookner

I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke (audiobook)

Bloomsbury Pie by Regina Marler

The knockout blows

Headshot: A Novel by Rita Bullwinkel

This has such a smart set-up: it follows the format of a knock-out tournament, with teenage girl boxers gathered to compete. We’re introduced to them match by match, competitor by competitor. Each girl feels fully formed, with glimpses into their past and future. But we’re also there in the moment, in the ring, in the down-at-heel gym, watched by bored coaches, more interested in the evening of drinking that lies ahead. Headshot conveys what it might feel like to box, physically and psychologically – the key moment that decides each match. And its scope is much bigger than what happens in the ring: women in sport, the expectations surrounding these young women, the possibilities open to them – or not. You don’t have to be interested in boxing to appreciate it (I needed to scan the Wikipedia page for the rules, I’ve previously been so uninterested in it).

Assembly by Natasha Brown

While I’d wanted to read this since its release in 2021, I finally got a copy when I realised Brown was on the press for a new book, Universality. Assembly follows a successful – by all contemporary measures – Black woman, preparing for a party at her boyfriend’s family home. I’d heard it was spare, sharp and shocking – I wouldn’t question any of that. It was also unexpectedly sad. A taut, tense 112 pages.

Revisiting a favourite

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick

I was delighted to discover Daunt were publishing this in the UK, Gornick’s tightly edited memoir framed around decades of working the sidewalks of New York. Even better, they put Amy Key on foreword duty, whose Arrangements in Blue I loved. Better still, if you can believe it, when I was sent a copy (in relation to my day job), replacing the scruffy second-hand US edition on my bookshelf. I read Key’s introduction on the way to see her speak about the book. Then I started on the actual book, continuing all the way there, all the way back, and into the evening, until I’d re-read the whole thing. Key’s introduction talks about being an ‘odd woman’ and her hope of finding an alternative model of living through Gornick, one strand of the book, but it’ll likely strike different notes at different points in life. I look forward to future re-readings.

The ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ reminder

The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi

This caught my eye when I visited the Booker Prize Library in January. Long-listed for the prize in 2000 (the year that The Blind Assassin won), it was a female author I’d not heard of, with a very pretty cover. Naturally, I bought it when I saw it in a charity shop a few weeks later. Set in the Maltese Community in Tiger Bay, Cardiff in the 1960s, The Hiding Place is undeniably well written. It’s also extremely grim: no happy endings for anyone involved here. While I can usually stomach that, I came to this completely wrong-footed. Recommended, but be ready.

This month’s Brookner

Altered States by Anita Brookner

From 1986, Alan is an upstanding solicitor, in the finest Brookner tradition, who pays due respect to his widowed mother. Apart from his obsession with his cousin Sarah, that is, another Brookner type: selfish and petulant, prepared to trample over delicate sensibilities. In Brookner novels, the plot often swings on a key event – here, it’s something more shocking and upsetting as anything I’ve come across in her books.

And also…

I Wanna Be Yours by John Cooper Clarke (audiobook)

If you know anything of John Cooper Clarke’s work, you probably have his voice in your head as soon as you read his name. And, if you don’t, head straight onto YouTube. His memoir was surely designed to be listened to. And he makes for great company, with an incredible recall of details of post-war youth culture (making it interesting companion reading to last month’s The Secret Public). Normally the kind of thing I race through (and, as an audiobook, drift in and out of slightly), here each sentence is so packed with detail – a poet at work – I really had to pay attention.

Army Without Banners by Ann Stafford

Bought in the closing down sale at Handheld Press. Handheld also published Ann Stafford’s delightful romantic comedy Business as Usual. No romance here, just the realities of wartime London. It’s a fictionalised account of her time in Blitz as ambulance driver, though it does seem to verge on educational output at times, as she diligently takes her protagonist round to different volunteer organisations to note the women do their work there.

Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

A favourite Christmas tradition is picking out a pile of books for my sister’s gift. It’s also a good excuse to buy things that have been popular and borrow them back. I couldn’t resist this novel, given that it references one of our childhood staples, Little Women. I expect you’ll know the plot by now, given it’s been a huge seller – four sisters growing up in Chicago from the 1970s on, primarily focusing on two of them: the plan-it-out Julia, and the feel-it-out Sylvie. From a critical distance, I can see Napolitano is a Tell-er, not a Show-er, and also that some characters remain just sketches. However, it’s a book that sucks you in – my sister told me she spent several nights up too late over Christmas snivelling over it and I know I’d have been the same if I could have, that urge only tempered by real life obligations.

The non-fiction TBR progress report

The Ladies of Llangollen by Elizabeth Mavor (time on shelf: 9 months)

In 1780, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby escaped their wealthy families in Ireland and set up home in Wales together. They were notorious even in their own time, visitors to their carefully constructed domestic idyll ranged from the Duke of Wellington to William Wordsworth.

Then, and now, the exact nature of their relationship has been much speculated. Mavor goes for ‘romantic friendship’ – more than friendship, nothing sexual. They lived together for 50 years, signed letters together, engraved their glassware with both their initials. There’s so much to admire from a distance but what Mavor’s book really makes clear is how annoying they could be, especially when it comes to money. They refuse to economise and are astounded when other people don’t just furnish them with money. A book that subtly reworks presumptions about historical times.

The Wheels of Fashion by Phyllis Lee Levin (time on shelf: 12 years, to the month!)

As my copy was an old library book – previously on the shelves at the University of Delaware – and missing its dust jacket, picking it up felt as if I’d be tasked to write an essay at the end of it. Reading it wasn’t taxing at all, however – it’s a zippy account of the US fashion industry as it was in 1965, beginning with this prototype Devil Wears Prada opener.

Levin profiles the likes of a couturier, an American manufacturer, a union leader, a fashion editor (Diana Vreeland), a photographer (Richard Avedon) to assemble an ensemble picture of the industry. Particularly striking was a section on a $17.85, USA-made, ‘instant’ dress. The $17.85 ‘instant’ dress is abundant today, though I doubt it’s US-made, and it would illustrate a whole other fashion industry at work.

Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty by Robert Lacey (just under 6 years)

When I blogged, I read and wrote a fair bit about the history of modelling. You don’t get far with that before coming across Eileen Ford and her Ford Model Agency. It’s a workaday biography – facts all in order and verified – but disappointing given its subject matter. It opens with a set piece: a show-down with a rival agency – John Casablancas’ Elite (yes, he’s the father of The Strokes’ Julian Casablancas) – coming to America to challenge Ford’s supremacy, but in the end that doesn’t really seem that significant. I’d have liked it to be more gossipy (though if you want that, there’s always Michael Gross’ Model) or, at least, atmospheric – c’mon it’s modelling, it comes readymade with characters, couture, setting… Looking at the acknowledgements, Lacey seemed to have access to almost everybody, which is even more of a letdown. Although perhaps a sense of duty to his sources may have actually dulled his subject matter.

Bloomsbury Pie by Regina Marler (approx. length of time on shelf: 6 months)

This came out in the mid-90s, about the ongoing fascination and commercialisation of the ‘Bloomsbury group’. Marler talks about the popularity of Virginia Woolf, pilgrimages to Charleston (it was given to me by a friend who pilgrimaged to Charleston with me), and more and more Bloomsbury books – something that only seems to have mushroomed since then. I read it after trekking to Milton Keynes to see their Vanessa Bell exhibition, and it was fascinating to see the polarised opinions on Bloomsbury that Marler outlines in the book played out in reviews of the show – both a ‘sidelined figure’ finally getting her due and and ‘overwhelming mediocrity’. For my two pennies’ worth, I loved some of her earlier work in the show – the monumental Iris Tree! – but was indifferent to the later stuff. I lingered longest in the room of Bell’s decorative work: dust jackets, screens, stools, fireplaces (some of which is shown above), which made me want to repaint my flat and traipse back to Charleston.

What books I bought
As seen above: Assembly and The Hiding Place. A Dawn Powell compilation I hadn’t seen before (A Time To Be Born is a much loved New York novel, and it’s often hard / expensive to get hold of her stuff). And, brand new, Elizabeth Lovatt’s Thank you for Calling the Lesbian Line.

I also buy vintage Virago Modern Classics whenever I find them second-hand. This month, I acquired Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, Rose Macaulay’s Told by an Idiot and In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor. Which should I read first?

And some other good bits from February…

I got an overlocker for Christmas and have playing around with that. I hope to use it to make T-shirts and exercise gear, the stuff that’s really tedious to buy and often both expensive and unethical.

I also recommend the film I'm Still Here, based on a real story of a high profile disappearance in Brazil during the military dictatorship. I’ve been playing this from the soundtrack a lot.

And I can never see enough Alice Neel – the current display of her work, curated by Hilton Als, at Victoria Miro felt like the visual partner of The Secret Public.

Tell me about your highlights of February, reading or otherwise. And if there’s something that you think I’d enjoy reading, please do let me know.