Special Agent Will Trent is with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, (GBI). He has a “soft spot for angry, damaged women.” But it is the women that take centre stage here; some are victims, some are survivors and all have a backstory. His GBI partner is Faith Trent, a single mother and a “damn good cop”, who “forcibly” mothers “everybody in her orbit.” Will’s relationship with Faith is currently better than his romantic relationship with Sara Linton, a medical examiner with the GBI. After a pretty lacklustre attempt, by Will, at some sort of marriage proposal, their relationship is going through a rough patch. Sara is currently not speaking to Will, infuriated by his passivity. She’s not playing games; she just has nothing to say and has no intention of becoming Will’s “silent wife.” They still have to work together.

At the time of the original attack, Jeffrey Tolliver, was the chief of police for Grant County. He was in charge of the original investigation but has been dead for five years. Murdered, we are told, because of Lena Adams, the “only ever” female detective on the force. Another complex female character. Jeffrey Tolliver, was also married to Sara Linton, twice. She couldn’t tell him the real reason she moved back to Grant County; she has her own emotional damage. But she talks to him a lot about sexual violence. She talks about women being too damaged, or too afraid, to report rape. She shows how women are scared of being judged, of not being believed and often blame themselves. A young student is warned not to go out jogging at “rape o’clock,” highlighting the everyday threat that women live with.

Grant County is a fictional rural community. This is small town America. A gripping, disturbing tale of sexual violence and murder, as well as families, relationships and marriage. It moves between the past investigation and the present. The characters are developed and the plot is compelling. The perspective of a female writer may be what also delivers such a sharp social commentary on the impact of sexual violence and rape. At one point, Sara says to a rape victim, “we need to stop asking rape victims what they did wrong and start asking men why they rape.” And two female characters remind us that this is a country where “6.5 percent of all women report their first sexual experience is rape” and “roughly 300,000 women and girls are reported missing every single year.”

Although this is the 10th book in the Will Trent series, set in Atlanta, it is written in such a way that it is not necessary to have read any of previous ones to understand the key characters and relationships.

Vic promptly decamps to his remote Italian villa, in Lake Orta, secretly marries Bella-Mae and then suddenly dies in a bizarre accident. Over the course of that long, hot Italian summer, the relationships between the four siblings start to fracture, as they search for the truth. Secrets are revealed and the family dynamics change. Bella-Mae remains an outsider, as she watches the family unravel. Who is she, though, really? She claims to be a struggling artist, and now a grieving widow. What about her mysterious cousin Laszlo, who is already at the villa when the siblings arrive? Nobody is who they first seem. Or is it just that people change, as do families? As do the stories we tell ourselves, especially when a major life event happens, such as losing a parent.

Vic’s parenting was shaped by his need to create his art, and the loss of Martha, the siblings’ mother, years before. Netta, the eldest, was only seven when their mother died. Vic focused on his work and a series of affairs while the children bonded in the resulting “bedlam.” His work is popular online. So what if it is copied from photographs and borrowed from other artists? And is it erotic or pornographic? His posters, T-shirts and coasters are everywhere but his work has never been in a public gallery. Some critics call it “amateurish.” But his final painting is expected to attract a lot of attention, if anyone can find it. Vic was meant to be finishing it at the villa, and now it seems to have disappeared. What has this “homemade god” been hiding?

This is more than a mystery; it is a story about grief and family relations. In the aftermath of their father’s death, these four siblings must work out who their father was, as well as who they really are, and who they want to be. The themes and the characters are complex. Goose, the only son, also once dreamed of being an artist. Iris, the youngest, who modelled for her father as a child, lacks direction and struggles with the advantages of her father’s wealth. Netta, now forty and a successful lawyer, is always the “leader.” She drinks too much and has her own reasons for being cynical about marriage. Susan, the “glue that stuck them together,” is busy cooking for everyone. She has been “living in cruise control,” navigating her own rather dull marriage to an older man. Everything is about to change.

Beverley, Margot and Elsie were once married to serial killers. They are now friends. Their co-operation with the police, to get a conviction, has not stopped people pointing fingers and judging them. Why didn’t they know what their husbands were up to? Beverley, a former model, and a mother of two, is now hyper vigilant; she keeps a scrap book detailing every local crime against women. Margot, a former politician’s wife, who once hosted glamorous parties at her house in the Hamptons, is now significantly poorer but refuses to feel guilty, or see herself as a victim. She’s trying to move on. And Elsie, a put-upon, personal assistant to a newspaper editor, who longs to be a writer, is stuck taking messages, organising meetings and filling her boss’ drinks cabinet.

Beverley has just finished making a speech at the LAPD’s annual gala when a police officer interrupts the Chief to tell him that they have found a body, and he’s “not going to want to miss this one. It’s … unusual.” But the head of the California Major Crimes Investigation Unit insists on looking in the wrong direction for answers. Beverley, Margot and Elsie are determined to do something about it. Beverley has her scrap book and a relationship with someone high up in the LAPD. Margot uses her own connections to get close to the evidence. Elsie makes herself vulnerable to enlist the help of the new female reporter on the newspaper. What these three women have in common is that they have all shared a bed with a killer and they all believe they can solve the crimes before the cops do.

The women are smart and likeable. Margot enjoys using sex to tip the “scales of power.” They think they can profile the killer, but they have to take risks to get to the truth. Beverley goes on TV to warn women and then has to question, “how the opinion that male violence is a danger to women can be controversial.” Elsie doesn’t trust the police and thinks that the LAPD chief, is “as bent as a right angle.” They are all cynical about how the media report these stories. How many column inches are given to the murderers? The men? When women are given space, it is usually only “to make clear that they had brought their own murders upon themselves.”

These women may have been “easily played” once, but not this time. When a male lover tells Beverley not to feel bad because a “housewife can’t solve a murder,” the reader knows that such a view requires a decisive riposte. And this novel delivers. The period details are delicious: Lucky Strikes, mini skirts, pantsuits, aqua-blue eye shadow, bleach-blond hair, and Margot’s gold Oleg Cassini dress. If you fancy a compelling feminist crime novel, it’s a real page-turner.

When their youngest child, Miriam, is 18, Tom takes her to university, and decides to keep driving, west, across America, instead of home to new York. He had made a deal with himself that when Miriam went to college, he could leave too. But is that really what he wants? Tom never seems sure. This is a road trip in which he revisits the past and reflects on the intricacies of his life choices, his personal and career disappointments and his relationships. His starting point is his relationship with Amy: “what we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life.” Tom knows it is more complicated than that.

It’s hard to know what Amy really thinks. But that is not the point of the novel. We are getting Tom’s version of the marriage. And Tom is struggling to move past the affair. Although he likes to see himself as a reasonable man; he seems to recall, at the time, it was good for Amy to get some attention, “because it gave her a buzz to be flirted with.” He refers to Amy’s beauty with a mixture of pride and resentment. When they met in grad school, she was “an unusually beautiful woman but also nice about it.” She was also going out with one of his friends at the time. Reflecting on their relationship now, there seems to be less pride and more resentment. Amy’s position on everything, from ballet to parenting, is always less reasonable than Tom’s. And his focus is often subtly on her failings, and disappointments “as a mother.”

Tom is experiencing some health issues, that he refuses to deal with. He is also having some issues at work, and is currently on a “leave of absence,” which he hasn’t told Amy about, yet. Like his medical symptoms, he minimises, or misunderstands, his work issues. He puts it down to being, “a middle-aged white man who likes to teach dead white men”, and refusing to sign off his emails with a list of his preferred pronouns. He really doesn’t know why his daughter is calling him an “angry white male” and his son is telling him he is on the wrong side of history. He gradually starts to hint at some recognition of his own failings. During an encounter with a former lover, Jill, he admits to the reader, there “was just a flatness in our relationship, where she had kind of realized I didn’t have the guts to go all out for something I wanted, and I had realized about her … that this was how she saw me.”

This short novel about middle age is thoughtful and moving, its themes slowly and masterfully revealed through Tom’s narrative. At times, it is humorous too. The cattiness and the detail in Tom’s viewpoint are both smart and engaging. Tom’s illness and his flaws also make him deeply human.

The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2025.

Dickie’s car sales business is going to the wall, not helped by a dodgy member of staff stealing catalytic converters. It also becomes clear over the course of the novel that the problems with the business are not exclusively related to the financial crash. Dickie is prone to making poor choices. He drops out of Trinity College, Dublin, to take on the business from his father, Maurice, in the aftermath of the tragic death of his brother, Frank, in whose shadow he always seems to be. “Frank was their father’s favourite; Frank was everyone’s favourite, apart from their mother, who obviously preferred Dickie only out of pity and so didn’t count.” Dickie was never a salesman and, to boot, he’s now being blackmailed for the secrets he keeps.

Instead of addressing any of his immediate problems, Dickie catastrophises about the end of the world, climate change and the culling of grey squirrels. He almost appears to prefer to dissuade people from buying cars because of the impact on the environment. He then metaphorically buries his head in the woods behind his house, where he is building a bunker. Just in case the grid goes down, or there is a nuclear attack. Consequently, he fails to notice his marriage is failing and his children are dealing with their own planet-sized issues: PJ’s sudden onset of asthma attacks and Cass developing a drinking habit, “in shitty pubs in town.”

While Cass is drinking and hanging out with her highly manipulative friend, Elaine, she comes close to failing her end of school exams. Meanwhile PJ is being threatened by a local bully who believes Dickie has ripped off his dad; he is also dangerously close to being lured away to Dublin by some online-gaming catfish. And where is Imelda in all this? She is wrapped up in dealing with her own demons. She married Dickie because she had little choice at the time, having found out she was pregnant. But she also wanted to escape her own childhood fraught with trauma, including a sick mother, an abusive father and debt collectors. As well as this, Dickie is hardly the love of her life. His brother, Frank was. And the bee sting that prevents her taking any photos on her wedding day seems symbolic of the fate of the marriage.

The novel is long, and when Dickie is in the woods building his bunker, it sometimes feels it. But the chapters told from Imelda’s point of view are highly engaging. The lack of punctation in those chapters perhaps reflects her own lack of education, or her tendency to talk in a stream of consciousness. Imelda’s friends offer support and frequent, humorous comments on sex and marriage. “Married with children – the ultimate unphrodisiac” one friend calls it. “I wish someone had told me that when I was forking out two grand for a wedding dress”. It is funny, but also tragicomic. Imelda sums up the precariousness of life and happiness: “like walking on a path made of spinning tops You took a step you were spun off one way The next step spun you off another Every moment was the moment when everything changed”.

Boyne has written a number of popular and well received novels, including The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and The Heart’s Invisible Furies. With his 2019 teen novel, My Brother’s Name is Jessica, he was accused of transphobia and misgendering in the book’s title. After initially trying to explain himself he closed down his social media accounts because of the backlash. In an interview with the Guardian, at the time, he said, “it must be painful to be so woke all the time.” The response may well be this novel, well-crafted to great comic effect.

It is difficult to say which of the main characters is the least likeable. George Cleverley is a well-known talk-show host with “hard-earned Woke credentials”. He “sponsored eighteen goats in Somalia and had attended seven Pride marches in the capital, waving the rainbow flag vigorously.” He also named his eldest son, Nelson Fidel. And while he hates to think of himself as unfaithful to his wife, Beverley, he’s been having an affair with a therapist, named Angela, and is about to become a father again at the age of 60. Beverley is a writer of popular fiction, who doesn’t actually write her own books, and is also having an affair, with a Ukrainian dancer she met on Strictly Come Dancing.

Then there are the Gen Z offspring, addicted to their smart phones and capable of creating chaos in the world without leaving their five-storey mansion in Belgravia. Elizabeth, in particular, is possibly the most unlikable character, representing the worst excesses of social media pile-ons. She is an online troll who enjoys abusing celebrities. Her boyfriend enjoys “making sure that those with the wrong opinions are held to account.” Elizabeth admires his “indestructible conviction in his own moral superiority.” She seriously considers his suggestion of working with lepers on an obscure Indonesian island because it would be “amazing” for her brand.

Elizabeth once came up with the the idea of making a sex tape with her boyfriend and “releasing it online and then complaining about the invasion of their privacy.” By comparison, the brothers are relatively harmless. Nelson suffers from anxiety and is now in therapy with Angela, although he has no idea that she is his father’s lover; his need to dress up in professional uniforms in public, even at a speed-dating event, leads to a number of embarrassing and farcical moments. The youngest son, Achilles, still a teenager, becomes a ‘sugar baby’ for lonely older men, then blackmails them for huge quantities of money. “There were worse ways to make a living, after all.”

George makes the mistake of tweeting support for his solicitor’s receptionist, who has transitioned from Aidan to Nadia. Suffice to say he gets it badly wrong, and his daughter, Elizabeth, is the first to call out her father’s transphobia, hiding behind her “@TruthIsASword” handle; She tweets how sickened she is by the deadnaming and misgendering of Nadia. Suffice to say it all unravels from there and perhaps everyone, in the end, gets what they deserve. None of the characters are sympathetic but the effect is thoroughly enjoyable.

When the book was published in 2021, Boyne said he wanted to show up, all “the pronouns and the virtue signalling, particularly from heterosexual middle aged men.” It is a great, laugh-out-loud, read, as well.

Kate, a philanthropist, of sorts, believes she has a successful, decades-long, marriage to Jack, an architect. Amongst other shared benefits, they enjoy their own private language and secret “kinky treats”. At the start of the novel they are seen enjoying a “retro” dinner with their equally successful West London friends. They make “architecty small talk” and discuss a shared loathing for Yotam Ottolenghi; the introduction of Za’atar and pomegranate molasses on British menus has “done more damage to this country than the Luftwaffe.” They secretly think their friends’ house is vulgar, but, naturally, wouldn’t tell them that. So far, so smug.

Floating between the vol-au-vents, prawn cocktails and Black Forest gateau, Kate senses “an intergenerational dislike” from a younger guest. She is part of a group that apparently, “cruised through life sitting on the great sofa of baby boomer entitlement and economic good fortune”. And all this happens before Jack suddenly dies and Kate becomes aware of the hit TV show, Cheating, written by Phoebe, a Millennial. Watching the show Kate sees and hears her marital private language and some of her most intimate moments reflected back at her. The problem is that at this point, Jack can no longer answer for his suspected betrayal. And everyone is talking about the show, including Kate’s book club.

There are a number of digs at the boomer generation in this dark comedy. And the millennials, as Phoebe represents them, hardly them come off any better. Both seem entitled, to say the least. Taking it in turns to narrate their stories, Kate tells us how she has little time for “conspicuous displays of female solidarity.” Phoebe, during her narrative bursts, often focuses on how much she hates her mother, her friends’ mothers and “their generational narcissism.” Her other concerns include a number of aspects of modern life, such as what people did to kill time before mobile phones. She appears to have very little self awareness regarding her own faults.

Share

I can’t say too much more about the plot without giving away the many twists and turns in this story about betrayal and revenge in a digital age. Both main women are entitled. While Kate may benefit from Boomer “economic good fortune,” Phoebe is “filled with the deep, oblivious complacency of her generation.” It also includes a romp through Oxford University student antics in the 1980s, which reveals the back story of how Kate and Jack got together. It is all wrapped up in a modern satire on middle class London life, from therapy to Soho Farmhouse, and the shock of having to interact with the Police when accused of something you say you didn’t do. Then there is the pressing question of why there are so many people out there, “whose whole world view could be summed up as ‘there’s no smoke without fire’.” It is a very funny read.

When Roland makes a mistake attempting Bach’s first prelude, his teacher, Miss Miriam Cornell, cruelly pinches the inside of his leg. That is the first hint of anything sexual. Three years later, during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when Roland believes the world is about to end, he turns up at Miriam’s cottage, knowing, at age 14, that he will allow the 25-year-old teacher to seduce him. Over the course of the next sixty years, Roland will keep returning, at least in his mind, to the two-year relationship that follows. While he spends his life analysing his choices, through that lens, it becomes clear that Roland is less someone who actively makes choices and more someone who reacts to events that happen to him and unfold around him.

Share

Roland’s story plays out against a backdrop of major global and political events of the last 60 years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall, to New Labour and the Iraq war, the financial crash, Brexit and Covid lockdowns. These events impact Roland socially and emotionally. But what continually haunts him is what happened with Miriam Cornell. It seems as if he might, too easily, blame every subsequent failure, or mediocrity in his own life, on her having “meddled” with his, “over distances of time and place.” He struggles to understand the relationship and all future relationships. And many years later, when he wants to find Miriam, to hold her to account for what he then recognises as the abuse, he wonders about the joy she gave him, and if he was complicit.

All of Roland’s relationships with women, are complicated and powerfully impactful, starting with his mother, who, it turns out, has her own secrets. Then there is his first wife, Alissa Baines. When she disappears from their London home, leaving their baby son, Lawrence, her keys and a note, she asks Roland to forgive her, because she has been “living the wrong life.” He is confused. It turns out that marriage, at least with Roland, and motherhood are stifling her creatively. She returns to her native Germany and goes on to become the country’s greatest writer. Yet still, he believes that she “held him in a headlock from wherever she was.”

Subscribe now

Roland, despite his many middle-class opportunities, turns out to be a failed writer, and a mediocre musician; in his fifties he plays lounge music on a piano in a London hotel, having once showed promise as a classical player. For much of this 500-page novel, Roland seems to judge his own inadequacies, his mediocrities, and his passive responses to almost everything, through the prism of the actions of the women in his life. His relationship with his father may have been a better place to start. Like most people, his real lessons come much later in life, in his sixties. He realises that he needs to be able to take action and make choices, not least in terms of his relationships. By then the reader is hoping it’s not too late.

In 1914 Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are classmates at Preshute, a fictitious English public school. At 17, they are too young to enlist when the war starts. Their main concerns are poetry, beauty and friendships. Friendships include sexual relations with other boys, and in some cases abuse by older boys. Gaunt, at least, accepts this as a temporary state, on an inevitable journey to maturity and marriage with “respectable young women” after Oxford or Cambridge. Gaunt believes that when the time comes, Ellwood will marry his sister, Maud, the only significant female character in the novel, (named after the Tennyson poem).

The title of the novel is a reference to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s elegiac poem, In Memoriam A.H.H that he wrote after the death of his friend, Arthur Hallam. It also references the roll call of deaths, wounded and missing former pupils in the Preshute school newspaper, The Preshutian. At the start of the novel, Ellwood is idealistic about war and the glory of empire. He knows Tennyson’s poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade, by heart and often recites it loudly, when “too tired to be interesting.” Quoting Tennyson is a way of expressing his feelings, often for Gaunt. It is a novel inspired by poetry and poets; Alice Winn has said that Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain partly inspired Ellwood and Maud.

The novel is punctuated by extracts from the boys’ school newspaper. Winn tells us that this paper is based on the Marlborough College newspaper from 1913 to 1919. Winn herself attended Marlborough College, and the issue of class and privilege often play out in the novel. While many of the school friends end up meeting in the trenches, there is only one working class officer in the novel, David Hayes. Gaunt admires how he has risen above the “crowds of sharply dressed Etonians.” And when Gaunt is made Captain, he writes to Ellwood, saying, it “seems a well-tailored uniform and the right accent make me a better candidate than Hayes, despite his years of experience.”

Gaunt, who has German family, joins the war early when pressured by his mother to do so because of rising anti-German feeling. Ellwood follows him to the Western Front, as do many of their year group. Gaunt and Ellwood avoid intimacy at school, only to find it with the sound of gunfire close by. Much of the novel is set on the front line. They live together on Divisional Rest in France, survive the battles at Loos and the Somme, lose each other, and find each other again, both broken in different ways. And as the novel progresses, Ellwood’s initial enthusiasm and optimism that the war is a necessary “injection of passion into a century of peace”, turns to bitterness. His early belief that Britain is, “the greatest empire that’s ever been,” later turns to hatred of England and the English, as “a small-minded people.”

This is a gripping and tender debut novel that is so easy to engage with, yet so powerfully devastating in its depiction of the brutality of war. Ellwood describes it as “the Hell you’d feared in childhood, come to devour the children. It was treading over the corpses of your friends so that you might be killed yourself. It was the congealed evil of a century.” On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British forces suffered nearly 60,000 casualties. The novel is reminiscent of Vera Brittain’s memoir and elegy to a lost generation, Testament of Youth. Both use poetry and a powerful love story to convey the terrible tragedy of wasted youth, lost hope and families destroyed.

The “intentional community”, Viriditas, that Ann, Clare and an old friend, Roberta, founded together has been established for more than two decades now. Women come for a mixture of retreat and therapy; they come to be listened to and healed. Clare questions the emotional honesty of what they do. Is it, selfishly, best for them, rather than the women they are supposed to be helping? Ann chooses to misunderstand, but who is she thinking of when says to one of the women guests, “you have to matter, too. If you don’t, there’s only sainthood or misery”? She left her husband, Richard, for Clare because she offered Ann a kind of freedom she had never imagined possible. However, Ann also feels guilt at having, “a hope unconnected to her children.”

Share

The narrative alternates between Peter and Ann’s perspectives. Peter’s story, told in the first person, initially focuses almost entirely on his work with asylum seekers; it is as much their stories as his. Outside of work, Peter has very little going on. He has casual sex, for a while, with a man who wants something more than Peter is able to give. Then when Peter takes on the case of a young gay man from Albania, who has escaped near certain death at the hands of his father, his story affects Peter in ways he struggles to cope with. It opens up unresolved feelings from his past. It slowly becomes clear that while the end of his parents’ marriage, and his father’s death, may be the cause of some of Peter’s trauma, something much darker, and more complicated, is holding him back.

The book explores questions about mother-son relationships, memory, the nature of truth and the stories we tell ourselves. Ann, as a mother, has found a way to exist without her son in her life. Peter has always resented the way his mother can lose herself in books, appearing to prioritise her own needs. He fails to understand that, all those years ago, she chose to protect him, even at a cost to herself. He appears way more forgiving of his father, even though he remembers fearing him during the marriage break up, and having to listen to his homophobic vitriol on his death bed. Instead, it is his mother he punishes for the longest time. Clare’s words to Ann, part way through the novel, “Always do what costs you the most. Isn’t that the Simone Weil quote?” seem particularly poignant by the end.

Marianne grows up in a privileged middle class circle in a red-brick house in Berkshire. She has friends with names like, Rowena Flectcher-Blake and Cordelia Pratt and goes to parties where they listen to Tommy Steele records and drink cider. She hopes that her life will be far more interesting than her parents; they play Scrabble and shop at the local department store, “Bartlett’s of Newbury”. On holiday in Cornwall, they drink pink gin at sunset and talk about the war with their friends, the Forster-Pellisiers. Marianne tells their son, Hugo, “I’m never going to become like the parents. I’m going to live in Paris and meet Simone de Beauvoir.”

The novel starts in the late 1950s when Marianne falls in love with Simon Hurst, a boy with “gorgeous floppy” hair and “shockingly smooth and beautiful” skin who once “behaved badly” with her friend Rowena. She declares several times in the novel that she loves him, “absolutely and forever.” You suspect quite quickly that the feeling may not be mutual. However, this first great love is what shapes the next few years of her life and the decisions that she makes. Marianne later reflects that, “I had once been lovable enough to steal the heart of the most beautiful boy in Berkshire and wild enough to lose my virginity in the back of a Morris Minor, wearing a home-made taffeta frock.” The details are all so delightful.

Mariane’s love for Simon is all consuming. She dreams of marrying Simon and travelling the world with him. When her father is angry at her for not focusing at school, she wants to tell him, “I’m never going to do anything clever or useful. I’m just going to become Mrs Simon Hurst. That is my only plan.” Of course, life doesn’t always turn out the way we would like. Simon has other plans. He wants to go to Oxford and be a writer. But when he fails his Oxford entrance exam, he thinks he will just go to Paris to hang out in jazz clubs, meet Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and “get drunk on existential nihilism.” I won’t spoil what happens next. Suffice to say, life has other plans for Marianne too, and she is often disappointed.

This was an age when parents didn’t feel the need to explain anything to their children and thought anyone under the age of sixteen had no right to an opinion. It was a post-war generation of parents that believed in getting through and struggling on. It was also an age where men held the “purse strings” and if women got pregnant, they had to marry. The novel is therefore concerned with the ongoing feminist struggle. When her History teacher asks Marianne where would women be without those who fought for women’s suffrage, Marianne responds that women have no power anyway; she cites her mother’s inability to even win a Scrabble game.

This novel is short. It is easy to read in one sitting and Marianne is a compelling narrator. For much of the novel she chooses the path of least resistance when navigating the ups and downs and tragedies of her young life. By the end of it, she finally finds her voice. At one point she despairs that she is turning into her mother. Fortunately, the novel ends on a more optimistic note.

Nick arrives home late one evening to see Gatsby’s house, “lit from tower to cellar” and Gatsby walking across the lawn towards him. Gatsby suggests they go to Coney Island or swim in his pool. Nick declines because it is late but says he has seen Jordan Baker and will call Daisy the next day to invite her to tea. Gatsby repeats that he doesn’t want to put Nick to any trouble but needs time to get the grass cut. He cagily offers Nick, “old sport,” an opportunity to make some money from a business sideline of his, “a rather confidential sort of thing.” This might be seen as a payment for services rendered in inviting and delivering Daisy to him. Nick quickly refuses the work, saying he is busy.

On the day in question, Gatsby sends a man to cut Nick’s grass and enough flowers to fill the house. Gatsby then arrives in a rather gaudy “white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-coloured tie.” It is raining and Gatsby seems nervous and distracted. When Daisy arrives, he disappears and comes back to knock gently on the front door. When Nick opens the door, Gatsby is “glaring tragically” at him. This does not bode well. But after a rocky start, in which Gatsby accidentally knocks over a “defunct mantelpiece clock,” Nick leaves Gatsby and Daisy to reacquaint. The broken clock may represent the importance of time in the novel. For Gatsby, who has not seen Daisy for five years, time has effectively stood still in relation to his feelings for Daisy, at this point. When Nick returns, all seems well and there are “twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room.”

Read more

Now aged 49, Putnam is leaving Sequence, the magazine that has been his life, after 25 years. He can’t stand the new editor, Simon Halfpenny; everything about him is wrong, starting with wanting to be known as “Shove.” Putnam sees him as a “thick-skinned philistine” who wants to turn the magazine into the New Yorker. Why? Does he think a literary magazine needs restaurant reviews for “new sushi spots?” Putnam now feels “menaced” at work, and on the “scrap heap” when he leaves. Laura tries to encourage him to stick it out, until the “inevitable fall of Shove.” He can’t, or won’t. She supports him through his post-departure misery, just months after the death of his father. Putnam doesn’t apply for any new jobs. Yet, he still complains to Laura that has hasn’t received a single job offer. She rightly observes that he seems to have, “embraced an exhilarated nihilism.”

Laura is made of sterner stuff. Where Putnam can be caustic, sometimes cruel, and lacking in resilience, Laura is facetious, and entirely lacking in self-pity. She recalls an abusive entanglement, in her teens, with a much older man, a stand-up comedian. She travels to London to meet him for sex, but, perhaps, in a sign of the times, and the parent-child relationship, she never tells her mother. Her reminiscences of growing up in Liverpool, in her grandmother’s house, as well as later relationships, or situationships, as we might now call them, are amusing but often poignant. The “relentless larkiness” of a somewhat difficult relationship with her mother, a woman who, “couldn’t even be serious about not being serious” is telling. This may have been her mother’s way of dealing with her own unhappiness or lack of fulfilment. Laura’s father is already absent when she recalls her mother making hour-long calls to her friend, Sally, from the bottom of the stairs, to“lament” date nights out at the pub and talk about men “sniffing around.”

Like the palm house at Kew that Laura and Putnam always planned to visit with his father, but never did, there is a simmering hothouse of emotional intensity in the discussions between these two friends. Where Laura tries to be positive, and supportive, Putnam appears steadfastly negative and introspective. When they talk about the hopes Putnam’s dad had for love later in life and the inevitable disappointment, they don’t discuss the death of Laura’s father at all. And when Laura tries to talk to Putnam about her relationship with her mother, he shuts it down by responding with how he hates the “annihilating flippancy” he writes off as, “Northern.” This book gently and humorously observes the cultural shifts in London life between generations, such as how nobody under forty likes to drink much any more and the death of old-school, “nineties” vegetarianism. It is a highly engaging meditation on friendship and how class and upbringing shape us as people.

As Salo becomes less and less engaged with his marriage and more obsessed with his growing art collection, Johanna does not understand the art, any more than she really understands him. Her main preoccupation is nurturing the delusion of the perfect family, the Oppenheimer triplets: Harrison, Sally and Lewyn, born of her “fateful” “fertility journey.” The painful birthday photographs every year, belie the miserable truth, that “they were five humans cohabiting. That they were not, and never had been, a family.” The children cannot stand each other; they barely acknowledge each other, even when two of them are living in adjacent dorms on campus at Cornell.

Salo and Johanna buy a house in the Brooklyn Esplanade in the late 1970s, at the start of the “Great Hipster Renaissance,” before gentrification. They send their children to the Walden School, a liberal establishment in Brooklyn, with prohibitive (for most) fees, an unironically socialist ethos, and a “culture that handed out participant trophies, in which making a show of your personal suffering passed for debate.” The school provides some of the funniest passages in the book, not least when Harrison makes a speech about the “the bright shining lie of progressive education.” It is a school where they are “taught to genuflect before the notion of free speech while shunning anyone who didn’t agree with them.”

This family’s story is a roller-coaster of lies, conflict and journeys of self-discovery. It starts with a tragedy and includes a secret affair, hidden art and a love-child. And along the way, when Johanna begins to feel the “sharp emptiness of abandonment, the fog of purposelessness,” as the triplets can’t wait to leave home, the final frozen embryo, becomes the ‘latecomer,’ Phoebe: “the one whose absurdly late appearance screamed family crisis.” As a narrator, Phoebe is witty and engaging, the one who draws the characters together and helps them find redemption. Just as well because Johanna’s major in child psychology does not give her much insight into any of her older children.

This is a great read, but also a hilarious and insightful novel that touches on a number of social themes such as marriage, education, class, race and privilege. As well as the nature of art and why we collect it. The chapter headings are playful. For example: “Existentially Defrauded: In which Sally Oppenheimer achieves one of her therapy goals” and, “A Bit of a Bastard: In which Harrison Oppenheimer explains what negotiation is for.” The themes are deep but the tone is comic and light, and highly enjoyable. Phoebe observes her parents’ failings but does not judge.

There is also a change in style. Instead of the novel being driven by dialogue, Rooney allows the reader access to the interior lives of her characters thorough a stream of consciousness at times. This is mostly how we understand Peter Koubek, the older of the two siblings. He is a 32-year-old barrister living in Dublin who doesn’t much like his life: “Meaningless existence, false scaffold of morality assembled around nothing.” As a character, Peter is not that easy to like. “Even medicated he feels it: the white light of his own righteousness.” This is possibly not helped by the fragmented and disjointed sentences in the chapters that tell his story.

Peter self-medicates with prescription drugs; he has difficulty sleeping and suffers from depression. He often reflects on his failures and mistakes, “people he has let down. Self-disgust. Defeat.” He has complicated relationships with two women. Sylvia is his soul mate from his college days, now a professor of Literature. They were together until she had a serious accident that left her in chronic pain and unable to have sex. She doesn’t want him to suffer on her account and has, unselfishly, told him to move on. They still have a strong bond. Peter is also involved in a sexual relationship with Naomi, who is ten years younger, a poor student and occasional sex worker.

Peter’s younger brother, Ivan, is 22; he’s a socially awkward chess ‘genius’ who has fallen out of love with chess and “gets shy around the opposite sex.” When he unexpectedly falls in love, it is with an older woman, Margaret, a 36-year-old with an alcoholic ex-husband. His stolen moments with her are mostly hidden from public view because of prevailing attitudes in rural Ireland where she lives and her feelings of shame. Despite that, all of the “unhappiness that life has visited on them both: dissolved however briefly in that feeling, shared image of that quiet contentment.” The title, Intermezzo, is the name of an unexpected chess move in a sequence. Interpret this as you will in terms of the unpredictability of life and relationships.

Rooney addresses philosophical issues and religion explicitly in this novel. She is also, as ever, interested in class and in the power dynamics between different groups. Marianne in Rooney’s second novel, Normal People, “never believed herself fit to be loved by any person.” Relationships are complicated and possibly always potentially exploitative. Sylvia apologies to Peter for letting him go while feeling jealous of him moving on. Peter gives Naomi money, while at pains to stress this is not for sex. However, his relationship with her appears, in many ways, to be merely transactional. He admits that what he likes about her is that she doesn’t have to be asked to play out his fantasies: “Just act desperate, sort of humiliate yourself.” While Peter does later fall in love with Naomi, it is Ivan’s relationship with Margaret that is much more instructive, tender and compelling. Perhaps the real intermezzo of the story. Margaret, though, unlike Peter, worries about how she will be viewed as a “a middle-aged woman taking advantage of a naive grieving boy, and for what, for her own gratification, her own pleasure.”

The angst in this novel is not so much about the collapse of human civilisation in a dying world, as in her third novel, Beautiful World, Where are You. A shared angst and preoccupation of many of her generation. It is wonderfully and more narrowly focused on the human condition itself. Ivan thinks that, “nothing will ever bring his father back from the realm of memory into the reassuringly concrete world of material fact, tangible and specific fact: and how, how is it possible to accept this, or even to understand what it means?” It is deeply moving. The characters are complicated and the women are particularly interesting, as the brothers’ evolving attitudes towards towards women and indeed their understanding of feminism. The overall message is one of acceptance, connection and the healing power of love that makes it all worthwhile. It is the longest of her novels at over 400 pages and well worth the read.

First publish in 2019, it was a Reese Witherspoon book club pick in 2024. Set in suburban Chicago, “Oak Park: the land of wide lawns and narrow minds,” the novel focuses on the internal dynamics of the family; very little is said about the wider community. The Sorenson marriage is essentially a happy one, something the four daughters at times struggle to relate to. Such a tight focus on the emotional lives of a small group of people gives the reader a sense of intimacy with the family; it gradually draws you deep into the Sorenson world.

The novel opens at the wedding of Wendy, the eldest Sorenson daughter. She is marrying an “old-money academic”, with whom she is madly in love. When tragedy quickly befalls Wendy, she is left wealthy but bitter. At one point she tells her mother, Marilyn, “we’re all emotionally stunted because you and Dad love each other more than you love us”. It is Wendy’s closest sister, Violet, that will suffer most from Wendy’s bitterness, as she seeks out the secret child that Violet gave up for adoption many years earlier. Driven and smart, Violet now works on her apparently perfect marriage and wonderful home, instead of the legal career she gave up to look after her two young boys. With the arrival of 15-year-old Jonah that all changes.

While all four daughters are impacted differently by the belief that their parents’ perfect marriage may be difficult to replicate, relationships are never that straightforward. David tells Marilyn he misses her when she is out of his sight for half an hour. And after almost forty years, they still embarrass their daughters with their inability to keep their hands off each other. While David has had a successful career in medicine, Marilyn is, at times, resentful over her own choices; she often struggles with motherhood. She did not finish her degree in English Literature because of it. That was her choice, she reasons, but David secretly sees no value in such a degree anyway. And despite appearances, Marilyn is often bored with thoughts such as, “I’m just this vessel. I barely exist.” These are, however, fleeting moments in a much longer emotional and psychologically complex journey.

The novel shifts in time between the past and the present, between the early days of the marriage, the impact of having young children and the longer-term ramifications of every past decision. The continuum between choices and events over time means that tensions between the past and present are slowly revealed and connected. Philip Larkin famously said, “Man hands on misery to man”. But families can be dysfunctional and emotionally rewarding at the same time, as this epic novel shows. Marilyn realises that relationships are often about, “choosing to be kind even when you may not feel like it.” And, there is “no such thing as winning, as a parent.”

This is an ambitious novel. It is about desire, compromise, regrets, resilience and the rewards of a long-term commitment and family. At the beginning, Marilyn images marriage would be one long sleepover, but then realises that instead, it is, “a strangely pleasurable power game, a careful balance of competing egos, conflicting moods.” In essence, it is a book about life, love and about being human.

Dr Ferdinand Draxler MBE, FRSA, (Ferdie to his wife and close friends), an English Jew, is the headmaster of Strawberry Fields, a non-denominational primary school in South London. The day after the October 7th 2023 massacre of Israeli Jews, the moral clarity in Ferdie’s world is gone. He struggles to comprehend the response in the media and on the streets of London. The rules on hate no longer apply to Jews. He wonders, “in the history of hate, had there ever been anything like this rush of clerks and scholars to embrace savagery?” In this he sees a “crime still more iniquitous” than Holocaust Denial. And so begins his slow unravelling, as he grapples with, the, “existentially absurd.”

As his world falls apart, Ferdie reflects on what it means to be Jewish. He is being undermined in the staffroom by his deputy, Max Axelberg, a convert to Judaism who clearly doesn’t like Ferdie, or Ferdie speculates, any other Jews that were born Jewish. Axelberg will not acknowledge the crimes of October 7th and, instead, seems to be calling on Ferdie to make a statement of solidarity with the murderers. The school janitor, Hasheen, is “running wild, radicalising toddlers.” Ferdie’s own daughter, Zoe, a student at Oxford, refuses to believe any “Zionist propaganda” and is now regularly attending what he calls the “peace marches”; she is spotted on TV ripping down and defacing a poster of an Israeli hostage, laughing.

As Zoe moves into the “Liberation squat” across the road, waving a Palestinian flag, Ferdie’s wife, Charmian, normally so good at diffusing family tensions, struggles to deal with the fall out. At one point she has to throw a sheet over the television, after Ferdie stays up all night arguing with it. Ferdie is shocked to find that his brother, Isak, the sort of religious Jew that Ferdie has very little time for, and whom he hasn’t seen for 20 years, has returned from Israel, now wearing jeans and a Rolling Stones T-shirt. He plans to join the marches too. Meanwhile, Ferdie’s mother, Mutti, as he calls her, a Belsen survivor, is having her house daubed with antisemitic graffiti. Ferdie’s answer is to chase the anti-semites around London with a small tin of grey paint.

Mutti, or Agata, herself is a fascinating character. She claims to have survived Belsen by baking cakes for the Nazis. Her “greatest culinary triumph” is a Polish dish called chlodnik, a cold beetroot soup beloved by Josef Kramer, the commandant of Belsen. She made it for him the night before liberation, and apparently urinated into it, in an effort to create “a chlodnik to end all chlodniks.” When Ferdie is born, his red face reminds her of the soup and she nicknames him, Chlodnik. If only he had made full use of the name, he muses, while Mutti tells him stories from the camp and engages in semi-serious discussions of the lessons of history. But, it is just not clear how much of her story is actually true. Charmian has some issues with her too.

Jacobson recognises the novel contains “an undercurrent of nostalgia” for a possibly idealised and vanishing England. But this is not a novel of absolutes. Ferdie sees antisemitism everywhere. But, as a narrator, he also has his doubts and, at times, his own behaviour is questionable; two of the female characters, Charmian and Mutti, on the other hand, seem totally grounded, and provide a number of very humorous moments, as foils to his anxieties. The novel is thought-provoking but never preaches.

In the summer of 1922, “the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.” Nick keeps a note of the names of everyone who comes to Gatsby’s house that summer, making a long and varied list of people who accept Gatsby’s hospitality. There’s a man named Klipspringer, known as “the boarder” because he is there so often; he will appear again later in the novel.

In late July, Gatsby turns up to take Nick to lunch in New York City in his “gorgeous,”“monstrous,” “swollen,” “rich cream” car. Nick’s initial impression of Gatsby as “a person of some undefined consequence” has turned to disappointment, as he realises Gatsby has little to say; he talks in cliches and doesn’t finish his sentences. Gatsby tells Nick about coming into money from his people in the Midwest, his education at Oxford and his glamorous life, before the war. He shows Nick his WW1 medal, to “Major Jay Gatsby,” for “Valour Extraordinary” and a photograph of him playing cricket in Oxford. Nick begins to doubt Gatsby; he finds the way he speaks laughable. Gatsby says he doesn’t want Nick to think he, “was just some nobody.” He plans to ask Nick a favour that Jordan will explain later, at tea.

Read more

Nick receives an invite to a party at Gatsby’s house. The chapter starts with some extended, sensuous description of the opulence of the parties, the colours, the sounds, the excesses of food and drink and the people there, who barely know Gatsby at all. There are tables “garnished with glistening hors-d’hoeuvre” and “harlequin” salads, an orchestra playing “yellow cocktail music” and champagne served in “glasses bigger than finger-bowls.” Most people are not invited; they just turn up. Many of the guests have never met their host but that doesn’t stop the idle gossip and rumours about Gatsby being a German spy, who once killed a man. Nick bumps into Jordan Baker and joins her group.

Nick starts talking to Gatsby, who invites him out on his hydroplane the next day, before Nick realises who he is. Inside Gatsby’s Gothic library, Nick meets a man he calls “Owl Eyes,” who is drunk and seems impressed that all the books are actually real. Jordan and Gatsby disappear into the library for an hour, to talk. Jordan later teases Nick that she has learnt some interesting gossip and asks him to look her up back in New York. In the early hours of the morning, there is “a bizarre and tumultuous scene,” involving some sort of car accident outside the house, as the drunken, careless drivers attempt to leave. Nick, who is one of the last to leave, sees Gatsby alone again, on his porch.

Nick then tells us something of his work life in New York. He admits he spends much of his time working but is getting to know Jordan Baker, and is a little in love. He realises what a terrible, careless driver she is too and then remembers a story about her dishonesty at a golfing tournament. Unlike Jordan, who is “incurably dishonest,” something he doesn’t seem to mind in a woman, he owns up to being, “one of the few honest people that I have ever known.” He realises he will do the right thing and “tactfully” break off a romantic “tangle back home” so that he can be free to pursue Jordan. This raises questions about his own honesty and reliability as a narrator.

Deep Dive: Gatsby’s Character

In this chapter, Nick remembers his first impressions of Gatsby and the reader hears Gatsby speak for the first time. He repeatedly uses the phrase, “old sport”. Perhaps, to counter some of the rumours, he wants to give the impression of sophistication and class, using an expression he picked up in his Oxford days. Jordan tells Nick that she does not believe Gatsby, “was an Oxford man.” While Nick can see that Gatsby appears to pick “his words with care,” he is impressed by him. He can see “nothing sinister in him.”

Read more

When Katharina and Hans meet, she, at least, believes she has found everything she will ever need in a relationship. Even though he is much older, married with a child, and also in a relationship with someone else, she believes that they are meant to be together; she sees them as two individuals merging and becoming, “completely and utterly one.” Her memories of the days spent with him, overlay all other memories. She longs for a child with him and they talk about baby names. Privately, he is more cynical. He is already looking towards the end that he knows,“likes to set its roots first imperceptibly, then ever more boldly, in the present.” He struggles with the memories from his youth, Germany’s Nazi past and his own guilt, even though he was so young at the time of the war. For him, “as the German expression has it, hope is pushing up the daisies.”

When Hans’ wife finds out about Katharina, he moves in with her for six months. But the relationship is already, inevitably, in decline. He is a writer struggling to write, as he deals with his own demons. Hans is attracted to Katharina’s youth and her innocence. He also wants to control it. Katharina submits to his desire to hurt her with increasing violence. And even when Hans goes back to his wife, their bond remains strong. The humiliation and abuse escalate when Hans finds out that Katharina has been involved with someone else, in Frankfurt. He punishes her by sending her cassette tapes detailing “her transgression” and his “disappointment and disgust.” He issues increasingly Stalinist instructions on how to respond to him and how to behave. Only with the end of the communist ideal, when the Berlin Wall comes down, in 1989, does something in the relationship really shift. While Hans loses his job, and seems defeated, Katharina looks towards her freedom, albeit with unanswered questions about the new consumerism and about Hans.

This novel, translated from German by Michael Hofmann, won the International Booker Prize in 2024. It is a story about guilt and innocence and our complicated relationship with the past. A recurring theme in the novel, the past is always present. Katharina says early on that “in Germany, death is not the end of everything but the beginning.” And for a German, that means walking “over skulls, eyes, mouths, and skeletons, that each step stirs these depths, and these depths are the measure of every path, whether one wants to or not.” This is about more than a failed love affair, that started with hope and ended as abusive and destructive. The novel mirrors and tracks the final days of the GDR, and the complexities of reunification between East and West Germany. This is about memory and identity, as much as personal relationships.

Share