In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak

I need to begin with a caution I don’t usually give: Elif Shafak’s engrossing new novel spoils the ending of “Madame Bovary” in its opening pages. Many readers have asked whether they should read Flaubert’s classic first, and if you want its ending kept intact, the answer is yes. That said, I don’t think it’s essential. Shafak has said she wanted readers unfamiliar with Flaubert or the 19th century to connect with the story, and I saw one Goodreads reader who had never read “Madame Bovary” name this among her favourite books of the year. Having read Flaubert’s novel twice myself, I found it heightened my appreciation. The book opens with Emma Bovary speaking back to her creator and puts him on trial for the way he portrayed her. Much of what follows plays on that porous boundary between the creator and the created, and on where imagination lies in between.

The novel spans the whole of Flaubert’s life, from a childhood in a Rouen household that was part home, part hospital, part morgue, to his death at Croisset in 1880. He became a writer in defiance of parents who wanted him to be a doctor, then a lawyer, and he was branded the “family idiot” even though he went on to become one of France’s greatest novelists. His life is told in close third person across five life stages, each chapter named after a colour and an object. Interspersed with it are thirty sections in the voices of women, some human, some not, some living, some dead. They include Eleanor Marx, the first to translate “Madame Bovary” into English, George Sand, an Egyptian belly dancer whom biographies treat as a footnote, and, in typical Shafak fashion, the city of Istanbul, syphilis and even a camel. These voices question Gustave’s judgement and memories while forming a web of surprising connections. All of them are caught up in an age of political upheaval and face the social pressures of the time differently. The bird on the gorgeous cover of this novel is the Simurgh of Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds”, the poem that gives the novel its title. It’s also the vision Gustave sees during his epileptic fits, and it holds a secret that only becomes clear at the end.

What moved me most was the portrayal of Gustave himself, especially as a lonely, bookish child. Shafak has described this as a book about loneliness and otherness, and she has spoken of being a lonely child who found companions in books. It’s funny how young Gustave feels so connected to his father’s library that he literally starts consuming the books. The tender bond with his nursemaid Julie, whose fabulous tales spark his imagination, is a reminder of how much children need to be told stories. Shafak depicts him as a synaesthete who can taste words. Some critics have speculated about this, though it has never been proven. It recalls Arthur in “There Are Rivers in the Sky”, and it ties in with the colours that frame the novel. His perceptions are also shaped by his epilepsy and later by syphilis, and Shafak notes the period’s misconceptions that blamed epilepsy on the mother or on too much masturbation. Gustave’s fantastical sensibility, mirrored in his early reading of “Don Quixote”, blends imagination with reality. I loved the description of him wanting to be a literary lizard, warming himself all day in the sun of inspiration, which sits nicely beside his painfully slow way of writing. Above all, he is an empathetic, romantic spirit who stops to ask downtrodden people about their lives, and their stories gradually feed into the creation of Emma Bovary. As Shafak writes, “Nothing human can ever be alien to literature.”

Shafak also explores the blurred lines of gender, a recurring theme in her work and no doubt one reason Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” is among her inspirations. A tutor presents as a man in order to move through the world and achieve professional success. In a wonderful childhood scene, Gustave and his sister swap clothes to feel what it’s like to inhabit another gender, something he later carries into slipping into the skin of Emma Bovary. There are terrifying sections too, set during revolution and mass starvation, which show how turmoil can drive mobs to act out their fears on outsiders and scapegoats. Gustave witnesses the execution of a woman wrongly convicted of murder. “Is there anything more dangerous than certainty born of ignorance?” Shafak asks, which recalls the “Malady of Certainty” in her “Three Daughters of Eve”. The novel also considers how writers take revenge: “not with punches or swords but with words.” That idea runs from Emma’s opening tirade to Shafak’s own experience of being put on trial in Turkey for words her fictional characters spoke.

Where the novel falters for me is in some of the narrative voices. I understand that giving a voice to a city or a disease extends empathy beyond the confines of human consciousness, much as the fig tree did in “The Island of Missing Trees”. But some of these sections felt too laden with research, as if a writer had gathered a mass of details and packed them into a narrative, and they took me out of the story. Some critics have noted that the voices sound too similar. (Spoilers follow.) The ending offers one answer to this: Emma returns to reveal that Gustave himself wrote all thirty voices, and in Persian si-murgh means “thirty birds”. It’s a clever and artful turn that answers Emma’s opening complaint that writers betray their characters, since Gustave became each of them and turned imagination into an act of empathy. You could also see it as a fault. A novel whose premise is to decentre the male genius ends by recentring him as the author of it all, though of course Shafak wrote everything. For me, the reveal didn’t change my sense that some voices felt manufactured rather than convincing.

None of this detracted from my enjoyment, or from the novel’s insistence that without stories we’d each be much lonelier, and that solitude, as distinct from loneliness, can be a source of strength. As Shafak put it in an interview with Prospect, “I never believe fiction is a luxury—I believe it’s existential,” and in a time of so much conflict that feels especially true. Perhaps this novel isn’t as great as “There Are Rivers in the Sky”, and how much you connect with it may depend on your tolerance for her whimsy. But it’s a wonderful meditation on artistic creation and the lives of outsiders. It also does what all great literature should and sent me looking for more. I’m keen to read Eleanor Marx’s translation of “Madame Bovary” and Lydia Davis’s from 2010, having only read Alan Russell’s, as well as “Salammbô”, which Mircea Cărtărescu cited as a major influence when I interviewed him. I’d be delighted to hear what you think of Shafak’s most recent novel and whether you read “Madame Bovary” before starting it.

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

First Impressions

This is an immersive epic which I grew increasingly emotionally and intellectually involved with as it went on. When I finally closed the book I looked up and realised I'd been so lost in it that I'd lost track of everything around me. I also realised it was an incredibly rainy day in London, with rain streaming down the window, which tied in perfectly with the novel's central theme as water is at the heart of it.

Tributaries Becoming a River

What I find extraordinary about this novel is how Shafak takes characters who seem quite different from one another, living in very different places and periods, and gradually brings their stories together in a deeply touching way. They begin to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or, more fittingly given the theme, like tributaries and bodies of water that slowly join to form one flowing river. I won't give away any spoilers, but I can sketch out the main threads.

The novel opens in Mesopotamia in the seventh century BC with Ashurbanipal, a despotic leader and military commander who was also an intellectual. He amassed a great library of clay tablets, many taken from other cultures and countries, and it's from tablets in that library that we know the "Epic of Gilgamesh." That ancient tale runs through the whole novel, and it feels miraculous that it survived at all, given how many transformations it went through along the way.

In Victorian London we meet Arthur, born into extreme poverty to a mother who scavenged valuables from the city's wastewater, and nicknamed "King Arthur" by the other scavengers. He feels like a Dickensian character, rising from humble beginnings to an intellectual career thanks to an extraordinary memory that lets him recall the distant past in precise, picture-perfect detail. He's also a synaesthete, experiencing tastes and smells when he sees words. These gifts are a double-edged sword: they open doors for him, but they also make him an outsider and an object of curiosity. It's fitting that Charles Dickens himself makes a brief appearance in a couple of scenes, while looking for a new publisher, which is a fun touch.

The next thread follows Narin, a Yazidi girl who is about to be baptised on the banks of the Tigris in 2014, while her family and culture face growing pressure and real danger from military and political forces and the prejudice against them. And in 2018 in London we follow Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who has left her husband after marital difficulties and is moving onto a houseboat on the Thames at Chelsea. She comes from a very privileged, wealthy family. As the novel moves between these very different characters, their stories gradually link up.

Outsiders Who See Clearly

What connects them is that each experiences a great deal of loneliness and isolation, and each has a special ability or intelligence. They are slight outsiders, and I think that's why they see more clearly what's happening around them and begin to question the larger society, in which people are exploited and displaced. The final main character is a drop of water itself. We follow it through the centuries, with a consciousness and a memory, in a book premised on the idea that water holds memory as it passes through its many transformations. Water is so essential to life yet so misunderstood.

Whimsy and Wonder

This is where readers may divide. Shafak walks a fine line between whimsy and absurdity, especially in her recent novels. "The Island of Missing Trees" is partly narrated by a fig tree and by an insect, and some readers feel that tips too far into absurdity. For me, and for others, it's whimsical and a wonderful way of thinking outside the boxes of identity and consciousness we normally work within. That's what I find so moving about Shafak's writing: a heartfelt humanity runs through all her books, along with real sympathy for outsiders and people who don't conform to standard ideas of how a person should live or identify.

I read her whimsy as a way of saying we don't have to be stuck inside a narrowly human consciousness. We can become so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a human race that dominates and controls the planet, when there are many workings and mysteries we don't understand, outside the mainstream narrative, that steer our lives in unexpected and fantastic ways. The novel has a great sense of wonder, playfulness and humour. One example is the lamassu, the Mesopotamian sculptures with a human head and a lion's body, which also have five legs. Several of them, along with many of the tablets from this famed lost library, now sit in the British Library. I want to read more about that, and about how the "Epic of Gilgamesh" has been passed down across centuries, both orally and in writing.

Hidden Rivers and Serious Themes

Zaleekhah's storyline describes the hidden rivers beneath London and every major city. We think of London and the mighty Thames, but there were many other rivers, which have been built or paved over or repurposed, and it was fascinating to see a map of them. For all its whimsy and humour, the novel also takes on serious themes through water. There's a lot on climate change and pollution, and on how we imagine we control rivers when we don't. Humanitarian crises are so often about a lack of water, with people in disadvantaged areas dying of thirst, and as climate change continues, water will become a major issue for many nations.

The Yazidi genocide is also depicted in the story, which I found heart-wrenching and which made me want to learn more. The theft of cultural artefacts features too, both in the ancient Mesopotamian library and in the contemporary British Museum, whose holdings were taken from so many cultures and remain a hotly debated subject. And there's organ farming, in which very wealthy people who need a transplant bypass the medical system and buy organs from impoverished or displaced people.

I think Shafak mostly strikes a good balance, handling these subjects while keeping the reader involved in the characters' lives. I felt so close to them that what they gradually saw around them, I was seeing too as a reader: the larger things at stake for many people, and the ways we are implicated in systems that should be questioned more. We become complacent because we're born or work our way into certain circumstances, or inherit a cultural outlook that makes us assume this is simply how the world is, and only gradually do we realise how it disadvantages others and what more sinister things we are part of without noticing.

The Reading Experience

The novel contains multitudes of stories and holds them all in one big epic tale. If you find the drop of water's consciousness, or the multiple storylines, a bit disparate at first, trust me that they all come together, and I found it incredibly moving how they form a whole.

Coincidentally while reading the novel I went to the Yoko Ono retrospective at Tate Modern, which sits right on the Thames. Looking out at the rain falling on the river, I thought of the river in this novel. Ono is such a singular conceptual artist, and some of her pieces appear as written prompts on the wall for viewers to carry out or simply imagine. One I read asks you to imagine a drop of water falling on a stone and watch until it eventually drills a hole through it, which of course would take many, many years. It connects so beautifully with this book, as another way of thinking about consciousness and narrative. Imagine being a drop of water, passing through solid and gas, rising into the sky and falling back to earth, perhaps swallowed and ingested along the way. That expands your mind beyond the limits of a single human life.

Verdict

That approach will work for some readers and not for others, and I know people who take issue with Shafak's work in this way, which is entirely fair. For me it was very moving and a wonderful form of storytelling, and I loved how the novel drew me through so many tales, periods and places to form one whole narrative. If you've read it, or want to now, I'd love to hear what you think.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

First Impressions

This is a book that radically altered my perspective, and I think it's genuinely going to change how I inhabit the world going forward. I don't say that lightly. I read a lot of books, and this doesn't happen to me very often, but there is greatwisdom in this memoir. Even though it's a very specific, individual story, it carries such a real universal application that I'd recommend it to pretty much everyone. This is a memoir about this celebrated author's life and her very difficult relationship with her mother, Mary, over the decades. But it's also about so much more than that.

A Different Way of Reckoning with the Past

I think we often reach a certain point in life where we start looking back, both on the households we were raised in and the country we were raised in, and we interpret the limitations of those things as having permanently inhibited our ability to fully inhabit the world, as having damaged our emotional well-being to the point that we feel defeated by having originated under circumstances that involved neglect, abuse, discrimination, or corruption, whether within a family or within larger institutions. It's a very seductive frame of mind to take, essentially deciding that's why we can't fully live and be as happy as we want to be. But that isn't the perspective Arundhati Roy takes in this book, and I don't think it's one she arrived at easily or lightly over the course of her life.

The way she describes growing up with her mother, whom she mostly refers to formally as Mrs. Roy, there's a real distance in that naming itself. Her mother severely emotionally abused her throughout her childhood and was constantly putting her down. Roy recounts many of the things her mother said to her, including that she'd wanted an abortion when she was pregnant with her, that she actively hadn't wanted her. For so many people, hearing something like that from a parent would confirm a deep sense of being unwanted in the world, and it would understandably lower their self-esteem and their ability to participate in and enjoy life. But Roy has such a different way of holding it. She writes that her mother was both her shelter and her storm, and that these two ways of seeing her mother can coexist: appreciating her mother and the difficult circumstances she came from, while not denying or glossing over the fact that her mother treated her, and many people around her, abysmally, and still admiring her mother's genuine accomplishments.

Mrs. Roy's Extraordinary, Contradictory Life

What her mother did was, in its own way, extraordinary. She left her husband, who'd become an alcoholic, to raise her children alone, and she campaigned to overturn a prejudiced law in India that prevented daughters from inheriting their father's property, taking her own case all the way to a higher court. She also built a genuinely progressive school from nothing. So she achieved so much in her life, while also not being a traditionally nurturing parent, often antagonistic toward her children, making them feel like nothing. Roy understood this was simply who her mother was, and still loved her and remained an active part of her life, though there was also a long period of estrangement between them, no contact at all for a stretch of time. So many people have had to sever ties, either with a parent or with their own country, because of how they were treated by one or the other, and I think that parallel is really at the heart of this memoir.

From Family to Nation

The book moves in two halves. The first focuses on Roy's childhood and her relationship with her parents, up through the point where she writes her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” which became an international bestseller and won the Booker Prize, turning her into a globally recognized figure. From there, the second half follows her engagement with Indian politics and society: calling out corruption, campaigning against prejudice, and helping to bring about positive change in India. She feels a love for her country even though she is clear-eyed about its imperfections. Interestingly, she doesn't favour being called an activist, doesn't really see a clean distinction between that label and being a writer, even though everything she does: contributing money, contributing her intellectual work, writing articles, raising awareness, protesting, engaging with different groups, reads to me as activism in every meaningful sense.

I'm not trying to draw an exact equation between someone's experience with their parents and their experience as a citizen of a nation; they're not the same thing. But there are real parallels here, because in all of this work, Roy has faced persecution from corrupt police and governmental forces, including a short imprisonment, simply for trying to stand up for what's right. For many people, facing that kind of opposition might lead them to disengage, to stop trying to enact change, or to simply leave and live somewhere else, which Roy could certainly have done. She's chosen not to. There are so many specific instances in the book, decisions she's made, mistakes she freely admits to, that add up to something like a lesson in how to inhabit one's life positively without being defeated by circumstances that, in so many cases, would make it entirely understandable to become apathetic and cynical.

A Specific, Absorbing Life

Beyond the larger message, I found this an absorbing memoir simply for the specificity of her story. She writes about the real struggles, joy, and defeat of leaving home, of a number of different relationships, of the prejudice she's faced as a woman. There's an extraordinary section where she describes how, riding public transport, it's simply accepted as the norm that men will treat attractive women as available for the taking, to grope, to make salacious comments toward, and how that's just the daily reality for so many women. There's also her time in the film industry, her development as a writer, and the overwhelming experience of “The God of Small Things” earning so much attention and love. I read that novel many years ago and really ought to reread it.

She also writes about her second novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” which came many years later, and the circumstances and inspirations behind finishing it. I found all of that fascinating, and it made me think back to when the novel was first published, when I was lucky enough to attend an event where she signed my copy. Thinking back now, knowing everything she was going through while writing it, has given me more appreciation for that novel which I felt quite mixed about at the time. I'd like to reread both at some point.

Her Father, and the Deaths That Prompted the Book

Alongside her mother, there's also her father, whom she didn't know for much of her life. There’s an extraordinary scene describing their eventual reunion. The book follows the emotional journey through to both of her parents' deaths, and I understand the initial impulse to write it came from her mother's death and the intense, complicated grief that followed, complicated precisely because Mrs. Roy was such a difficult figure. I felt genuinely devastated toward the end. There are some extraordinary coincidences she recounts around her parents' deaths that, if she'd invented them for a novel, would seem unbelievable, but they actually happened, and it's hard not to feel there's some larger meaning in them, one she's clearly sat with and meditated on, both for herself and for how she moves through the world.

Verdict

This book offers such a powerful example of how to process and emotionally reckon with the circumstances we're born into, while recognizing that we remain independent beings who can determine our own course and choose how much the past is allowed to shape what we do next. That message goes far beyond the specific details of Roy's story, even though that story is, on its own terms, enthralling: a genuinely fascinating life that left me with enormous respect for her and eager to read and reread more of her work, fiction and nonfiction alike. We live in difficult, worrying times, and I think recognizing that our influence is limited but real, that we do have agency to stand up for what we believe in and to live a fulfilling life despite the circumstances we face, is exactly the kind of message I needed right now. I was genuinely blown away by this memoir. If you've read it, or read any of Roy's other work, or have your own book that completely changed how you inhabit the world, I'd love to hear about it.

Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro (translated by Frances Riddle)

First Impressions

I spent an entire weekend completely engrossed in this book! It's the kind of novel I kept returning to in every spare moment and staying up late until I'd finished it. At its centre is a genuinely gripping mystery: the body of a teenage girl is found not only dead but dismembered and severely burned. But what makes the novel so compelling is how much larger meaning it builds around that central crime. I won't give away any specifics of how things unfold, since I think that's best left for readers to discover for themselves, but I do want to talk about how cleverly and thoughtfully the novel is constructed, along with a handful of things about it that genuinely bothered me. None of that stopped me from being thoroughly absorbed in it, and I'd still highly recommend it.

Piñeiro is a prolific Argentinian author, and her novel "Elena Knows" was one of my favourite books the year I read it; I've also really enjoyed her novel "A Little Luck". In "Cathedrals," the narrative rotates between a series of different first-person perspectives, never repeating the same one twice, all circling the death of a teenage girl, Ana, killed thirty years earlier. We meet her family at a point when that loss has long since blown them apart. Ana had two older sisters: Carmen, the eldest, devoutly and strictly Catholic, and Leah, the middle sister, who was especially close to Ana. In the aftermath of Ana's death, Leah broke entirely from her family and from the Catholic faith she was raised in, moved from Argentina to Spain, and opened a bookshop there. She's stayed in contact with her father, Alfredo, over the years, but only on the condition that they never discuss anything happening within the family, so their relationship has narrowed down to conversations about books and literature. None of this is a spoiler; we're told all of it right at the start. The novel opens with Leah's point of view in Spain, where she's built an entirely separate life for herself, until an encounter with family members drags the past, and Ana's case, back into the present. What unfolds isn't suspenseful in the traditional whodunit sense so much as in the question of why, and how the actual events played out.

A Searing Critique of the Church

This reminded me of what I admired so much in "Elena Knows," where Piñeiro also builds an overarching mystery around a death while using it to explore much larger questions about religion and women's place in society. Here, the novel offers a genuinely searing critique of the church, less of religious faith itself than of how certain organised religions are actually run, and the traditional structures built up around them that can badly warp some people's capacity for empathy, pushing them toward judgment rather than openness, with real and sometimes extreme consequences for how they treat the people around them. It made me think of another novel I read recently, "A Private Man," which examines the Catholic Church through the lens of priestly celibacy; both books dig into the history and rules that shape religious life in ways I found genuinely illuminating.

Piñeiro is also excellent on the private architecture of families: the way people behave with each other inside the family unit versus how they're perceived from the outside. One sister here is publicly affable, someone everyone instantly likes and admires, while within the family she's seen as far more calculating, her warmth read as a kind of performance. I found the resulting friction between family members, and the real venom that surfaces between them, genuinely moving, and I got quite emotionally caught up in watching that side of the family reveal itself over the course of the book.

Where the Novel Strains

I did have a few real issues with the book. It leans a bit too heavily on coincidence in places, and the fact that this case is only being properly investigated thirty years later felt somewhat engineered to me; I kept wondering why certain conversations or investigations hadn't happened much earlier. Piñeiro does supply in-story justifications for these gaps, including a plot thread involving memory loss that edges close to soap-opera territory, but even with those explanations in place, it occasionally felt like the story had been built backward from the ending it wanted to deliver, rather than the reverse. That said, the drama it generates is genuinely effective. I was fully invested in wanting to know what had happened and why, and the ending landed for me in a way that felt truly rewarding.

The Cathedral as Metaphor

The novel's title carries real weight by the end. Leah lives in a Spanish city famous for its cathedral, and another family member travels through Europe visiting several famous cathedrals before eventually reuniting with her there. Piñeiro is careful to specify that this isn't a religious pilgrimage or an act of mysticism; it's closer to holding onto one's own sanity amid a kind of surrounding collective delirium. The cathedrals take on real emotional and symbolic weight for the family. In one striking detail, the cathedral in Leah's city turns out to be undergoing major renovation and is entirely covered, so visitors who've travelled specifically to see it can only experience it secondhand, through postcards and photographs.

The title also nods directly to Raymond Carver's short story ‘Cathedral,’ which Piñeiro references explicitly in the novel. Leah and her father Alfredo bond over literature, he mostly reads nonfiction but she's introduced him to fiction as well, and Carver's story comes to hold real personal significance for him. In Carver's story, a sighted man and his wife host a blind visitor for an evening; after they've smoked some marijuana while watching a television program about cathedrals, the sighted man struggles to describe what a cathedral looks like, so the blind man suggests they draw one together, his hand resting on top of the other man's as it moves across the page, a shared act that opens up an entirely new way of seeing for the man who could see all along. Piñeiro recreates a version of that same exercise between a grandfather and grandson in her own novel, carrying forward Carver's underlying idea about what we allow ourselves to truly see in other people, and what our own belief systems keep us from seeing, sometimes with devastating consequences for the people we're supposed to be closest to.

Verdict

"Cathedrals" tackles far bigger questions than its central case alone, even though that case is compelling in its own right. If you want a genuinely gripping story that also carries real weight and meaning, I'd recommend it highly, alongside "Elena Knows." Piñeiro is such a talented, thoughtful writer that I want to read even more of her work. I didn't love "Cathedrals" quite as much as "Elena Knows," but it's a strong, rewarding novel, and I'm glad I read it.

Anne Carson Wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature

I was so delighted to see Anne Carson named this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I watched the announcement live, cheekily typing "JCO for the win" into the comments as always. But Carson had been one of my top predictions, so when Ingrid Carlberg, in her first year as the Academy's Permanent Secretary, read out her name, I was thrilled. The Academy honoured her "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature." It was charming to hear that when they reached her by phone she was in Iceland "listening to the wind." I love picturing her running jubilantly across a glacier or, more likely, quietly sipping tea and staring out the window. She's the first Canadian to win since Alice Munro in 2013, the first poet since Louise Glück in 2020, and only the 19th woman to receive the prize. It's also one of those rare years when the betting got it right. The British bookies barely rated her, but the wider prediction markets had her as the favourite.

The only book of Carson's I've read is “Autobiography of Red”, and I found it incredibly inventive. It retells the myth of the red-winged monster Geryon as a gay coming-of-age story. She builds a modern, novel-like narrative out of the surviving fragments of the ancient poet Stesichorus. Although it's written in verse, I found it accessible and deeply moving. I connected with how she captures Geryon's alienation, his desire and his synaesthesia, and lines like "There is no person without a world" have stayed with me. My copy is even more special now because Carson signed it for me in 2019 when I saw her speak in London. It's striking how she mixes poetry, essay, translation, drama and visual art into new forms. Her elegy for her brother, “Nox”, is published as a folded facsimile in a box. She was reworking Greek myth with wit and intelligence long before myth retellings became a popular genre of their own.

This win has given me the push I needed to read much more of her work. Next I'd like to try “Nox” or “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy”. I also want to finally pick up “Glass and God”, which has been sitting on my shelf for far too long. If you've not read Carson before, I'd recommend starting with “Autobiography of Red”. Her UK publisher is Jonathan Cape, and I expect we'll see plenty of reprints in the coming weeks. Have you read Anne Carson? I'd love to hear how you feel about her winning, and which of her books you'd recommend I read next.

The Booker Prize 2026 Shortlist

I was away in Italy when the 2026 Booker shortlist was revealed last week but I did my own little reveal video beside the Mediterranean and I'm absolutely thrilled with the six the judges have chosen. Having read the whole longlist and made both a wish list and a predictions list, I'm delighted that four of the six books from my wish list made the actual shortlist. I'd braced myself to see Gwendoline Riley's "The Palm House" and "Helen of Nowhere" make the cut, so I'm quietly delighted neither did. It's a strong, satisfying group: two former winners in Marlon James and Douglas Stuart, a returning Elizabeth Strout, and three writers shortlisted for the first time.

"The Disappearers" by Marlon James left me reeling, and I'm still not done thinking about it. It's a monumental, emotionally striking novel about a group of gay men in 1980s Kingston who come together to stage a play, and the murderous homophobic attack and cycle of revenge that engulf them; James even takes us inside the attackers' minds, and the effect is devastating. Douglas Stuart's "John of John" is a beloved, heart-wrenching, atmospheric book about three generations on a remote Scottish island reckoning with buried secrets, sexuality and community — I'd joked there would be rioting if it weren't listed, so I'm hugely relieved it's here, and I'd love to see it win Stuart a second trophy. Elizabeth Strout's "The Things We Never Say" follows Artie Dam, an ageing teacher wrestling with mortality and a long-held marital secret; it's the most overtly political book she's ever written, and I've loved it enough to buy multiple copies as gifts.

Luke Kennard's "Black Bag" delighted and surprised me more than anything else on the list — a genuinely funny, cleverly built campus novel about an out-of-work actor paid to quietly sit through lectures zipped inside a bag — and comedy this sharp is rare on a Booker shortlist; I was also lucky enough to record an extensive interview with Kennard about the novel, which I'd urge you to watch, and in which we discuss the possibility of his wearing a black bag to the Booker ceremony. Rebecca Perry's debut "May We Feed the King" enchanted me, moving between the present and a medieval court as a curator builds an exhibit around an almost-forgotten, reluctant king; it's an inventive new approach to historical fiction and a thoroughly deserving Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize winner. And M. John Harrison's "The End of Everything" was the genuine surprise of the six — a strange, singular dystopia that isn't quite sci-fi and refuses to explain itself — but its mood, of us quietly surrendering our agency to the technology we've built, is one I connected with completely.

Not everything I loved survived: I'm genuinely disappointed that Kenan Orhan's "The Renovation" and Emma Cline's "Switzy," two of my very favourites from the longlist, didn't get through. But this is a rich and varied shortlist, and the storylines ahead are irresistible — if Harrison wins at 81 he'd be the oldest winner in the prize's history, if Perry wins she'd be the first debut winner since Stuart in 2020, and either James or Stuart could become only the fifth author to take the prize twice. The winner is announced on November 9th, and I honestly can't call it from this group — which is exactly what I'll be debating in future videos. I may not have time to reread all six books before then but I’d be glad to re-experience all these books.

What do you think of the shortlist? Will you read all six? Who do you want to win?

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley

First Impressions

Gwendoline Riley is a well-regarded author who's received considerable award attention over the years, and plenty of readers and critics genuinely love her fiction. I am not one of them. I'd previously read her earlier novel "First Love," which I didn't just dislike but actively loathed, and that's a reaction I don't often have to a book. Going into "The Palm House," I really wanted to give it a fair chance; enough time had passed that I wondered whether my own tastes had shifted, or whether her writing had developed. I read it with as open a mind as I could manage, and found myself bored and frustrated, and at points genuinely agitated by it.

What Actually Agitates Me About Her Writing

I've spent a lot of time trying to work out exactly what it is about Riley's prose that provokes such a strong reaction in me, because normally if a book bores or frustrates me, I just put it down and move on without much further thought. I think it comes down to the cool, cynical, detached quality of her writing, the way we get so little of her characters' inner emotional lives or reflection, so that everything stays observational, looking outward rather than in. This novel is a bit different from "First Love" in that we do get a good amount of the protagonist Laura's backstory, which suggests some kind of development in Riley's approach, or maybe it's just this particular story. Even so, so much about the book frustrated me.

The best comparison I can make is to something that used to agitate me when I first moved to England from America. I struggled for a long time to get used to pub culture, which was so far removed from anything I was used to as a fairly introverted person who'd rather be home reading. My partner and flatmates would encourage me out for a few drinks, and I'd go, have an hour or two of polite conversation with relative strangers, their workmates, people I quite often just didn't have all that much in common with. But once you're at the pub, there's this unspoken expectation that you stay at the pub: someone buys you a drink, so you have to finish it, then it's your round, so you buy drinks for others, and on it goes for hours, long after the conversation has worn down to something completely banal, until you're just drinking for the sake of it. I once tried to leave early and a flatmate told me she'd be genuinely insulted if I did. That experience of being stuck making small talk with people I had little real connection to, listening to stories about people I didn't know and didn't especially care about, is exactly what reading this novel felt like to me.

That's not an abstract comparison, either; it's more or less what physically happens throughout much of the book. People are at the pub, having drinks, opening packets of crisps. There's a small, oddly specific detail I kept noticing, how the novel describes people tearing open crisp packets at the seams rather than just opening them, something I've genuinely observed as a very English habit, and it bookends the novel at the beginning and end. So much of the story unfolds through these conversations, rendered with a kind of sharp, realistic ear for the way people actually talk, repeating themselves, dwelling on details about their own lives that aren't especially interesting to anyone else or, at least, to me. Laura, the narrator, seems to have real patience for all of this. Much of the novel follows her long friendship with Putnam, a man who's just resigned from his position as deputy editor at a longstanding arts and culture magazine, interwoven with episodic glimpses of Laura's own life: her mother, and several of the men she's been involved with over the years.

A Question of Compassion

I don't object in principle to fiction that withholds a character's inner reflections rather than spelling out how the events of their life add up to some larger meaning. David Szalay's "Flesh" does something similar, portraying how people really interact with each other while still conveying a real sense of inner life and humanity underneath it. Riley's writing, by contrast, feels muted, glum and pessimistic to me, and even though Laura never explicitly judges anyone she encounters, that flat, cold observational quality starts to feel like its own kind of judgment: an implication that everyone, and society generally, is simply mediocre, and that this is just something we have to put up with. There's a real lack of compassion in it that I think is at the heart of what agitates me so much, a refusal to find anything in people worth redeeming despite their contradictions, absurdity and ego.

There's one scene that struck me as a rare exception: Laura talking with a friend's young child, who explains her own peculiar theory of how life began on Earth, and Laura simply takes it in, almost visibly absorbing the charm and wit of someone else's point of view. It's a small, genuine moment of warmth that stands out precisely because it's so rare elsewhere in the book. Laura's mother comes across as largely self-absorbed, as do many of the people Laura interacts with. As a teenager, Laura has a relationship with a comedian twice her age who uses her in a cold, clinical way; she never names it as abuse, simply relates what happened without visible judgment. There's a genuinely chilling moment later when her mother's own awareness of that relationship becomes clear, one of several lines in the book that land with real, sudden force.

Where the Novel Does Work

I did find myself engaged by some of the novel's later material, particularly around Laura's independence. When she's about to buy her first apartment, she has an interim period where she stays with a man who's offered her a place, seemingly out of generosity. Nothing untoward happens between them, but there's a genuinely uncomfortable scene where he seems to be quietly judging her, and it becomes clear that even a generous offer like his carries its own unspoken expectations, so that Laura only really finds freedom once she has, in effect, a room of her own. It's harder for me to square that thread of progression with the long-running Putnam storyline, which is driven partly by his own ego and partly by a changing media landscape: a new editor at his magazine wants to overhaul it entirely, leaving Putnam feeling like a relic, and though he resigns, the novel ends with him essentially going back. That's not much of a spoiler, since this isn't really a plot-driven novel so much as an attempt to trace a mood and present a grudging record of the ways we're obliged to be sociable with each other, even as Laura readily keeps showing up at the pub anyway. Putnam observes at one point that pub culture is changing, that people under forty are going out far less than they used to, which does track with a real shift in England, especially since the pandemic, even though the novel itself is set in late 2017.

The novel is carefully anchored in time and place: London's sky is described with the strange yellow hue it actually took on in 2017 from Saharan dust drifting into the atmosphere, and the story opens near the meeting of two bridges in Southwark, the same spot where Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend" begins, situating the novel within a lineage of London writing. As a Londoner myself I could appreciate nods to certain locations I’m familiar with such as The Tate and Gordon’s Wine Bar. But for all that grounding, the version of society it offers felt stripped-down and thin to me, without much real insight on offer, even as I've tried to think harder about what its themes actually amount to.

The Title and Its Symbolism

The title refers to the enormous Victorian conservatory at Kew Gardens, and I saw one mention in the Literary Review that suggests it as a metaphor for English arts and culture as something that has to be sealed off from the wider world in order to produce anything of beauty. Hands recur as a motif too: Putnam has eczema on his hands early in the novel, while Laura recalls a childhood holiday with her mother and grandmother during which she visited a palm reader who somehow caused the warts on her fingers to fall away, a small image of being made new. Inside the Palm House itself is one of the world's oldest potted plants, and a character notes that indoor plants like it need to be largely left alone in order to thrive, not entirely neglected, but close to it. That feels like an apt description of Laura's own life: left mostly to her own devices, including during that relationship with the comedian, which she entered as a fifteen-year-old fully aware of what was happening, even as you can't help wondering where any adult oversight was.

Verdict

There were individual moments and lines in "The Palm House" that genuinely landed for me, sudden and chilling in their effect. But so much of the novel is built from conversations and anecdotes about peripheral people I knew almost nothing about and had little reason to care for, which mostly just underlined a sense of mediocrity, hollowness and self-centredness in the people it depicts. That may well be my own interpretation more than Riley's intention, but it's the effect the book had on me. I don't need fiction to be full of profound exchanges, and I'm equally wary of novels that go too far the other way, the way André Aciman's characters sometimes fall into deep philosophical conversation on a casual night out, which never feels quite real either. But I want more than trivial exchanges about barely-there figures with little bearing on the larger story. I read this one start to finish and genuinely tried to meet it on its own terms, but for me it left an impression of cynicism and detachment I don't actually want more of in my life. Riley clearly isn't a writer for me, though I know plenty of readers feel very differently. I'd love to hear whether you've read her, whether I'm missing something in her work, or whether "The Palm House" might be worth your own time even if it wasn't worth mine.

The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis

First Impressions

I always find it fascinating when a book creates such a wide divide between professional critics being largely positive and everyday readers who tend to be far more judgemental, and that's exactly the case with "The Shadow of the Object". Most readers I've come across seem either mixed on it or genuinely baffled, generally agreeing that the first half draws you in while the second half drifts. I found myself feeling similarly at first: a bit baffled by the randomness and whimsy of the story, and torn between enjoying that disorientation and feeling frustrated by it. The more I sat with the book and dug into what it might actually be doing, though, the more compelling it became, even as I can completely understand why plenty of readers won't want to put in that extra work to find meaning in it.

Flora, Wilhelmina, and a Magic Lantern

The novel follows Flora, a woman originally from Mexico who hasn't been back in a long time, returning to visit her mother and stepfather. Early on she's bitten by the family dog and ends up hospitalised with a badly injured hand. There she meets Wilhelmina, an older woman with a fixation on magic lanterns and other antiquated devices for projecting light and image, objects that summon the past. I was genuinely charmed by this opening section and by Wilhelmina herself, a wonderfully odd, vividly drawn character who puts on a magic lantern show in the hospital and belongs to a small, almost cult-like circle devoted to these obsolete forms of projection. Their wandering conversations reminded me a little of Kazuo Ishiguro's short story "Nocturne," which follows two people recovering from plastic surgery drifting through hospital corridors together, and more broadly of the tradition of novels set inside institutions like Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain."

Once Flora returns to London, though, the novel drifts into stranger, more meandering territory: a chapter from the perspective of a mouse, a girl lost in an art museum, scattered lists of objects and fragments from the past. It becomes a novel less about plot than about how a distant, essentially unknowable past keeps projecting itself into the present, shaping how we understand ourselves and each other, or at least that's my best reading of what it's reaching for. Flora meets Wilhelmina's son, Max, back in London, and their relationship drifts along in much the same way, oddly bound together without ever feeling especially close, which left me wondering, quite literally, where the story was even going. It doesn't offer clear answers, though the final page struck me as a possible key to the whole thing, a point of quiet progression in Flora's life, even if I can see how that payoff arrives too late for a lot of readers to feel satisfied by it.

Where Critics and Readers Diverge

What's striking is that the very qualities critics tend to praise, its plotlessness, its refusal to resolve into a clear, defined journey, are often exactly what readers find most frustrating. I felt both reactions myself, especially once the novel left the hospital and the immediate charm of Flora and Wilhelmina's dynamic behind.

Digging Into the Title

Once I started pulling on the title itself, the novel opened up considerably. One review I came across compared it to Leonora Carrington's "The Hearing Trumpet," and interestingly, Aridjis has described having actually known Carrington personally; she comes from a deeply literary family, having met Jorge Luis Borges at one point, and clearly grew up steeped in this kind of experimental, edgy writing. A member of my own book club, Andrea, also pointed me toward a psychoanalytic reading of the title, which comes directly from a line in Freud's 1917 essay "Mourning and Melancholia": "Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object." As I understand it — and I'm no analyst — the idea is that incomplete mourning works by absorption rather than release. Instead of gradually letting the dead person go, we take them in, and the self is quietly remodelled in their image. Every grievance we could never voice to them then curdles inward, because the nearest available version of them is now us.

There's a second possible source too: a 1987 book by the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas that shares this exact title, "The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known." Bollas takes Freud's phrase somewhere slightly different, toward the idea that we carry a kind of sensory awareness of parts of our own past that we've never consciously known or remembered, things that remain just out of reach yet still cast a shadow over the present. That felt like an even closer fit for this novel, with its recurring imagery of projection, walls, light and shadow, and the sense that what's left of the past is never the thing itself, just its flickering projection, closer to atmosphere and mood than to any retrievable memory. That might explain why the novel offers so few hard specifics, whether about its own plot or about Flora's inner life and motivations. She's returned to Mexico having lost her biological father; Wilhelmina becomes something like a substitute parental figure for her; and then, since Wilhelmina's own son Max has lost his mother, Flora in turn seems to become a substitute for Wilhelmina in his life. There's a real current of mourning and substitution running underneath the novel's surface, though I should say Aridjis hasn't confirmed any of this psychoanalytic framing as intentional, so some of this may simply be my own slant on the text. Still, the title feels too pointed to ignore.

There's also real significance, I think, in Flora's profession: she polishes silver, quite literally removing the tarnish, the shadow, from metal objects to make them clear again, even as she can't seem to manage the same clarity with the actual people in her life. She returns to Mexico City after a long estrangement and promptly attaches herself to Wilhelmina, which raises the question of whether Wilhelmina is the lost object here, or simply the screen Flora is projecting her own losses onto. I don't think the novel wants to answer that for the reader.

Then there's the dog that bites Flora at the very start, named Diogenes, or Diego as a Mexican nickname. Diogenes of Sinope was the founding figure of Cynicism, a philosopher famously described as fawning on those who gave to him, barking at those who refused, and biting the rascals, which is how he earned the nickname "the dog" in the first place. Read that way, the bite that opens the novel isn't just a physical injury; it's practically a philosophical gesture, stripping away whatever illusions Flora has built around her own life. It's a nice added layer that one of Diogenes's most famous acts was wandering Athens in broad daylight carrying a lit lamp, supposedly searching for an honest human being, illuminating what was already perfectly visible, which chimes neatly with the novel's whole preoccupation with light, projection and what we choose, or fail, to see clearly.

Verdict

Digging into these layers made the novel considerably more interesting to me, though that's a different thing from it being a wholly satisfying reading experience purely as a story. This is one of those books where you largely get out of it what you're willing to put into it, and I can fully understand why it won't work for everyone. For me, it landed somewhere between cautious appreciation and positivity: I mostly enjoyed the experience, quirks and all, even while spending a fair amount of time scratching my head. I'd love to hear what you made of it, whether it worked for you, frustrated you, or landed somewhere in between, and whether there are meanings in it I haven't even touched on here.

The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

First Impressions

This was a weird and difficult one. "The Vivisectors" by Missouri Williams is a novel that has genuinely divided readers, and I've heard from people who have literally thrown it across the room in frustration, partly because its narrator is so deliberately withholding and hard to empathise with, and partly because of its unrelentingly cynical, almost nihilistic tone. Other readers I know have connected with it deeply, both intellectually and emotionally, and found it a fascinating puzzle of a book. As for me, I landed somewhere in between. This was not a pleasant or relaxing read, and I think how you get on with it depends entirely on what you want from a novel and what you're willing to put into the reading experience. There were stretches where I was genuinely engaged and turning over different ways of interpreting the story, and other stretches where I found myself growing quite literally depressed by how existentially detached the whole thing feels from the world. I think that detachment may well be the point: this is a novel that isn't trying to make the reader comfortable, which is a difficult thing to pull off successfully while still keeping people reading.

A Narrator Who Claims to Feel Nothing

The novel has several layers. At its centre is a narrator we don't even learn the name of, Agathe, until well into the book, someone who claims to be so detached from her own existence that she has no real desires beyond tracking and trying to increase her daily step count, even once her feet are sore and bleeding. The novel opens with her mother's suicide attempt, which she insists she doesn't care about, along with the rest of her family's trauma. She's similarly disengaged from her job doing most of the actual work for a professor at the university in the town where she lives, and from the wider conflicts consuming that university.

She describes her inner self at one point as being like a stone, feeling nothing and reacting to nothing beyond surface-level social expectation, and elsewhere compares herself to a house built with no doors, no windows and no staircases, with nothing inside to express. But the novel keeps raising the question of whether we should trust any of this. Early on she muses that if you want to pass judgement on someone, you should write in the first person as though you were them, which opens up a real possibility that Agathe isn't necessarily the one narrating her own story at all. It could just as easily be her father, a respected author of ideas with whom she has a fraught relationship, who claims to have written his own novels as an attempt to understand his daughter, though it's just as plausible that writing about her is really a way of keeping his distance from her. Bizarre, memorable scenes recur between Agathe and her now severely incapacitated mother, including one where she simply sits on her mother's lap in her motorised wheelchair and steers them both around as if they were out for a walk. Between the ambiguity over who's really narrating and how much of Agathe's professed numbness we can believe, the novel becomes a genuine puzzle, and I can understand why plenty of readers find that withholding quality more alienating than intriguing.

Cancel Culture, Academia, and a Muted Love Story

The larger plot concerns a conflict at the university between a student, Adam, and a young professor, Jacob, following a classroom exchange that left both of them feeling wounded, and which the university seems to secretly relish rather than resolve, since the ongoing controversy adds to its own sense of importance. The "vivisectors" of the title are the people who pick apart what others say and do to root out hidden, often unintended offence, less concerned with anyone's actual intentions than with excavating the worst possible reading of them. On its surface, the novel is about the culture wars and the impossibility of resolving a conflict when the conflict itself is the point, generating momentum rather than seeking any real answer. Over time Agathe becomes drawn into Adam's situation as he faces expulsion, and their relationship gradually functions as an extremely muted love story, offering the faint possibility of a genuine, even loving connection, or alternatively pulling her toward finally having to take a side she has spent the whole novel refusing to take.

Deliberately, we're given very little of the actual content of the dispute between Adam and Jacob, just its tone and the sense that they've fundamentally misunderstood each other. I can see this cutting two ways: either the vagueness is essential, because supplying the details would let readers project their own judgement onto it and undercut the point that these conflicts persist precisely because they resist resolution, or the vagueness is itself a failure to properly engage with the very complexities the novel claims to be raising, whether read as an allegory for cancel culture, for the state of academia, for our relationship with a changing environment, or for the nature of love.

A Landscape That Feels Like a State of Mind

The city and university town, both left unnamed, are being steadily overtaken by a creeping vegetation that a team of gardeners has to hack back with machetes every single morning just to hold it off. The setting starts to feel less like an actual place and more like a landscape of the mind. I found myself reading the vegetation as a stand-in for the overwhelming, obscuring flood of information we're drowning in now, except the novel also treats it as something natural, which raises the paradox of whether it might instead represent something essential in us that refuses to be smothered by the trends and beliefs of any given moment.

Scattered through the book are strange, somewhat tedious monologues from unnamed, numbered gardeners and students, each trapped in their own point of view and unable to really exchange ideas with anyone else. They oddly reminded me of Virginia Woolf's "The Waves," my favourite novel of all time, though here the effect felt far more static and much less rewarding. There's also an extended description of a tower built at the centre of the university, meant to represent our cultural values, which comes to seem less like a monument to anything real and more like a sinister, fruitless endeavour, hollow at its core. Much of my own frustration with the novel comes down to how specifically it seems to be an internal argument about universities themselves: I think anyone who's spent a long stretch of their life in academia will recognise its frustrations intimately, but having consciously chosen not to continue my own education because of exactly that kind of insularity, I found it harder to feel much empathy for the argument as it's staged here, even while I recognise that our academic institutions sit close to the heart of how we hold and share knowledge as a culture. The novel's critique of the university is relentless: an institution more interested in hoarding prestige and knowledge for itself than sharing it, and one willing to recruit foreign students mainly for the higher fees they pay, even as those students report feeling badly let down by what they actually receive.

Where I Landed

I feel genuinely conflicted about this novel. There's a moment where the narrator describes people becoming so locked inside their own subjectivity that eventually nothing exists outside the self and its own circular obsessions, and that's close to how it felt to read the book itself: locked inside an uncomfortable, unresolved space with no easy answers on offer. Maybe that's exactly the point, and the reader is meant to be left to grapple with the uncertainty rather than have it resolved for them. But as a reading experience, it's a real challenge, and I can imagine plenty of readers either flocking to it or bouncing off it entirely, much as they did with Williams's cult-following debut, "The Doloriad." Williams herself, a pen name, is a fascinating figure, known for things like staging a production of King Lear cast entirely with sheep, and she's clearly an author intent on unsettling her audience rather than reassuring them. I think you get out of this book roughly what you're willing to put into it, in the same way a novel like Katie Kitamura's "Audition" is a puzzle that could be read either as a genuine emotional excavation or as a purely conceptual exercise, depending on what the reader brings to it. Williams has cited Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and Plato's "Republic" as influences, and you can feel that lineage of big, abstract ideas floating somewhere above the lived, crumbling world the characters actually inhabit.

Personally, this isn't a favourite recent read. I found it genuinely challenging and strangely intriguing at once, but I lost patience with it in places, and it began to feel repetitive, a narrator who felt like she was going nowhere, whether fast or slow. It took a long time to reach any sense of real change or substance beneath the surface, though it did leave me thinking in a strange, different way about our physical environments and what we build up around ourselves. I'm going to keep turning this one over, and I'd love to hear from other readers where they landed on it, but it isn't an experience I relished, and I'd be hesitant to return to it.

The Disappearers by Marlon James

First Impressions

I've now read Marlon James's new 600-plus-page novel, "The Disappearers", and I'm still reeling from everything it stirred up in me. This is not a light or entertaining read, and it was never meant to be; James himself has acknowledged that his books aren't easy. But it took me on a journey that left me both challenged and changed. The novel has only just been published and has already been canonised by critics, with Dwight Garner in the New York Times calling it a “masterpiece and, quite possibly, the novel of the decade or even the century.” That claim has already sparked a lot of pushback and debate. Ron Charles at the Washington Post stated he was “glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it. To the extent that it’s a great novel, it’s also an ordeal.” Personally, I wouldn't call it an ordeal. The opening section, structured as a 1988 diary kept by one of the central characters, Eddy, actually charmed me: there's real humanity and humour in these entries, and a kind of innocence in how James eases us into the story through the mind of an eighteen-year-old whose day-to-day thoughts are dominated by music and masturbatory fantasies, the ordinary preoccupations of being young.

The Attack and the Many Meanings of "Disappearers"

Eddy answers an ad to join a small group of gay men planning to stage "Fortune and Men's Eyes," John Herbert's 1967 play about a young man's experience of prison, homosexuality and domination. They're meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988, in a climate of open homophobia, which makes even their private rehearsals dangerous, let alone the ambition of staging the play publicly. That danger catches up with them: the group is horrifically attacked by a homophobic mob, and not everyone survives. Many who do are left severely damaged, physically and emotionally. It’s striking that the author doesn’t allow the attackers to remain an amorphous group; their individual thoughts and each person’s sense of self-justification for committing such a horrendous act is recorded.

From there the novel’s title starts accumulating multiple meanings. There are the attackers, who set out quite literally to disappear these men from their community. There's the central mystery of two survivors who vanish in the aftermath, and the efforts of the remaining group to find out what happened to them. Because this is the late eighties and this is gay life, the novel also vividly depicts the reality of the AIDS crisis and the many people who disappeared because of it. And there's a more internal, more painful sense of the word too: queer people disappearing on each other under pressure, as when one half of a couple is arrested for his homosexuality and his partner won't risk bailing him out, afraid of what association with him might cost. Beyond that, there's the way people can disappear into themselves, silencing whole parts of who they are just to survive inside a homophobic world. James has spoken about having lived through some of this era himself, and while I wouldn't call the novel autobiographical, since its actual events aren't drawn from his own life, it clearly belongs to the world he grew up in during the 1980s, and it's steeped in the music and television of that period. I loved seeing "The Cosby Show" and "Family Ties" referenced early on, both shows that shaped my own childhood crushes on Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Michael J. Fox, so that sense of period and coming-of-age is vividly, specifically evoked, alongside an honest reckoning with how much of that same media culture was openly homophobic at the time.

A Demanding Structure With a Purpose

Much of the novel arrives secondhand, through diary entries, interviews and letters rather than immediate first-person action, and a number of readers have found that structure genuinely challenging, since it holds you at a remove from events as they happen. I'd argue that distance is doing real work: for people who disappear, all that's left of their perspective are the fragments they wrote down or the secondhand accounts others give afterward, so piecing together the truth becomes part of the reading experience itself, not just a stylistic choice. Combined with a large cast of shifting points of view and sections often written in patois, which may be more demanding for readers outside the Caribbean, I understand why this book reportedly has a higher did-not-finish rate than most. But I think the difficulty is worth taking on for where the novel ultimately takes you.

Rage, Justice, and the Weight of Real History

There's enormous heart and humanity here, alongside real heartache, pain, violence and rage, and I think that rage is entirely justified. James has described growing up aware of rumours of an attack like this one, and drawing on both his own memory and interviews with queer Jamaicans in shaping the novel, which makes clear this isn't an isolated invention but something many people actually lived through. It's infuriating to read about a situation where the law doesn't just look away from an attack like this but actively participates in it, where going to the police for help might just mean a different, survivable beating rather than none at all. I don't think this belongs safely in the past, either. Living in London today, I'm aware of legal protections gay people have here, but I also remember a report a couple of years ago of a gay couple attacked at a bus stop I go to regularly with my own husband. Seeing the photos of their injuries changed something in me: I still think about it every time I'm at that bus stop, and there are moments when my husband reaches for my hand and I pull away, weighing wanting to be visibly proud of who we are against a very real, very physical fear. That's just a small, present-day echo of the kind of violence this novel is reckoning with on a much larger historical scale.

The novel doesn't offer easy answers to any of this. In large part it's a revenge story, following several characters and survivors down different paths of retaliation, and reading those sections was genuinely horrific on more than one level: the immediate violence of it, but also an uncomfortable flicker of satisfaction at seeing people held to account when the wider structures of society refuse to do so. That response left me with difficult feelings of shame alongside the horror, because I know a cycle of revenge like this can't actually end well, however understandable its origins.

A Complicated, Unflattened Community

I appreciated how honestly the novel portrays the divisions within this group of men even before the attack: different ways of inhabiting queerness, real disagreements among gay men shaped by class, race and relative attractiveness, and the hierarchies those differences create, which raises the harder question of whether "community" is even the right word for what holds them together. One of the most striking sections follows a group known as the Gully Queens, queer individuals pushed to the margins of society who've built a life for themselves literally in the city's gullies. My one small criticism of the novel is that I wish it had spent more time with them; I think it matters enormously that the most marginalised are seen this clearly, even as I understand why James chose to keep his focus centred on this particular group of men. Women are largely peripheral to the story, though it doesn't look away from violence against them either, including a harrowing account of a lesbian couple attacked and a trans woman brutalised and murdered.

The violence throughout is rendered in unflinching, specific detail rather than glossed over the way it often is in film and television, where a gunshot tends to mean an instant, tidy death. James has said he thinks all violence is gratuitous, addressing a common criticism of books like this head-on, but the violence here isn't there to entertain; it's there to testify that real harm like this actually happened, and it continues to do so around the world.

In Conversation With Queer Literature

The novel also meditates on erasure and absence more broadly: one character speculates that if every gay person in Jamaica simply vanished, the society built on their labour and presence would collapse. That immediately brought to mind one of my favourite recent novels, Ibtisam Azem's "The Book of Disappearance," which imagines all Palestinian Arabs vanishing from the state of Israel overnight. It's a reminder of what fiction can do: offering a genuinely different vantage point on the world we already think we know.

Beyond its central themes, I loved how in conversation the novel is with other literature, from an early nod to Mrs. Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice" to a debate between characters over Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, and further back to queer literary forebears like John Rechy, James Baldwin and Jean Genet, writers who were pioneers not just in depicting gay experience explicitly but in modelling ways of actually inhabiting a gay identity. This novel clearly stands in that lineage, extending it with a portrait of gay life that holds real joy alongside real pettiness; there's plenty of bitchiness among these characters too, which felt honest rather than unkind, and a real sense that disappearing from an impossible situation can be freeing even as it carries its own lasting burden. I was also genuinely delighted by a passing reference to Joyce Carol Oates's short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," since Oates is my favourite author, and while I can see the argument that some of these literary references stretch plausibility for characters caught in such desperate circumstances, many of these men are highly literary people for whom reading is exactly the kind of refuge and touchstone you'd expect them to reach for.

A Culmination of a Career

Having followed Marlon James's work for over a decade, this feels like a novel he's been building toward for a long time. "A Brief History of Seven Killings" shares some structural DNA with it and includes gay characters of its own, and his Dark Star fantasy trilogy, two books in so far, also features queer characters and explicit gay sex. I had the privilege of helping judge the year "A Brief History of Seven Killings" was up for the Green Carnation Prize, an award specifically for queer writers, not long after it had already won the Booker; we debated whether a novel that had already won the Booker really needed another prize, but ultimately felt it deserved recognition specifically for how complex and fully realised its gay characters were. James has clearly been writing toward queer life for a long time, including in a 2015 personal essay, "From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself," which I'd recommend alongside the novel; you can feel ideas from that essay finding their fullest expression here.

Verdict

I found this novel mesmerising rather than exhausting, gripped by its twists and turns and by James's language, which brings out the full complexity, contradiction and sheer spark of these characters even in the most difficult circumstances. Is it the novel of the decade? I honestly don't know, but it's an extraordinarily impactful book, and I'm very glad to have read it. I raced through it the first time because I was compelled by the plot and character voices. So I'm looking forward to returning to it more slowly at some point to more deeply take in everything it has to offer. I'd recommend it wholeheartedly, but readers should know what they're signing up for: there's real explicit violence and sex in these pages, though never without purpose. If you've read it, I'd love to know where you land: masterpiece, or overhyped?

Black Bag by Luke Kennard

First Impressions

I just read "Black Bag" with my online book club, and it was such a pleasurable experience, both because the novel is genuinely fun and because it kept provoking deeper questions the whole way through, if you want to engage with it on that level. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Luke Kennard and we had a fun lengthy discussion about a wide range of subjects which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIdBHDdJmN8

The novel has a wonderfully straightforward, almost absurd premise: an unnamed, down-on-his-luck actor takes a job in a university classroom for a psychological experiment, wearing a black bag that covers his entire body, unable to speak or interact with anyone. He's just a strange, silent presence in the room, and the experiment is designed to study the effects of that. We get his first-person account of it all, written as though it's unfolding in real time.

The premise is based on an actual experiment. In 1967, Charles Goetzinger at Oregon State University seated a figure in a black bag in his class to demonstrate the "mere-exposure effect," the idea that repeated proximity breeds affection, and watched his students move from hostility to curiosity to friendship over the course of a term. Kennard has said he came across it as a footnote in a social psychology article, and that he was more interested in the actor who took the job than in the finding itself. The real study recorded the students' reactions and left no account of the man inside the bag. Kennard gives us only the inside, updated for the present day and relocated to England.

A Man Who Wants Theatre on His Own Terms

I found the narrator endearing: his passionate love of theatre, his sensitive, arty English foppishness, and his pretensions and wry observations about the state of the current world. I pictured him as a young Hugh Grant. He considers theatre the highest art form and finds it genuinely bewildering that the rest of the world doesn't share his devotion to it, yet he can barely get work as an actor and has to default to dinner theatre and cheap detective-mystery performances just to pay the bills. There's a real contradiction in him that the novel is quietly aware of: he holds theatre up as the highest art and wants everyone to be as enthusiastic about it as he is, but when he does get more serious, socially engaged roles, he's just as critical of those as pretentious. He seems to want theatre to exist only on his own terms, which of course it can't, and that contradiction makes it entirely believable that once he takes on the role of Black Bag, he lets it feed his ego and become something much bigger than the psychological experiment it's meant to be.

So taking the job as Black Bag, with its steady salary, is a real relief for him financially, but it comes to mean far more than that. The day-to-day unfolding of it is consistently amusing: I could vividly picture the farcical sight of a man stumbling around in a black bag and the whole range of ways people react to him. But because we're experiencing it from his perspective inside the bag, I could also feel how physically uncomfortable, gross and restrictive it becomes, and how nerve-wracking it must be to be so conspicuous while being completely unable to respond to anyone. I love his observation that inside the bag it starts to feel as though his face and skin have become his internal organs. And against that discomfort, there's his growing psychological sense of freedom that comes from being completely anonymous.

Visibility, Anonymity, and the Internet Age

There's something pointed in the fact that the experiment anonymises the one figure least accustomed to it: a relatively handsome white Englishman in his mid-to-late thirties, exactly the type usually granted the centre of the room and the benefit of the doubt by default. Stripping that away becomes a kind of test of what happens when his usual privilege is removed, and how that changes both his sense of self and the way society interacts with him.

It also felt more personal to me than that. I'm naturally a fairly quiet person, even though I know I talk a lot in my videos, and I felt that being Black Bag partly reflects the way people project themselves onto someone who doesn't speak, interpreting that silence in a way that says more about their own personality than about the quiet person himself. I've noticed this in my own life, and I found the range of reactions to Black Bag over the course of the novel, from people who seem worried about him to others who are instantly hostile, a genuinely sharp piece of observation about how we treat quiet presences.

The novel also reads as a real counterpoint to our internet age, where anyone with any kind of online presence is expected to be conspicuous, whether that means constantly performing a personal brand or, at the other extreme, hiding behind total anonymity to troll people without consequence. Black Bag's radical anonymity cuts directly against both of those impulses. The counterweight in the story is his closest friend Claudio, an online gamer with millions of followers who is hyper-visible in exactly the way the narrator isn't, and who has to constantly balance the expectations of his audience against staying authentically himself. I related to that pressure in a much humbler way through my own experience of having a BookTube channel, wanting to respond to feedback without simply fashioning myself for an audience. Being authentically yourself risks becoming a target for criticism, but bending to the most popular demands makes a public persona feel soulless, and Black Bag's total refusal to offer any response, opinion or distinguishing feature raises the question of whether that's a different kind of soullessness, or whether it actually preserves something essential about him.

Despite being opposites professionally, Claudio, the capitalist who has learned to make his online identity profitable, and the narrator, who believes in an art form he can't make profitable, have a fraternal bond I found genuinely moving. Some of the funniest material in the book comes out of their friendship once Claudio starts trying to help monetise Black Bag: the scene where the narrator is paid in actual cash and the two of them are almost bewildered by physical money in an age of tap-to-pay, and his first instinct once he's flush with cash is to buy new curtains, which he then hangs while humming "Master of the House" from Les Misérables. It's such a small, specific, funny detail, and it's typical of how the novel builds character through moments like that.

Justine, and What We Project Onto Each Other

While he's playing Black Bag at the university, the narrator strikes up a relationship with Justine, an older professor there, and it becomes both a sexual and a romantic one, all while he remains inside the bag. It's mutually fulfilling in some ways but was never going to be entirely satisfying, and I became very curious about her motives. Since she doesn't know anything about the actual person behind the bag, what does she really want out of the connection: a genuine exchange, or complete control over someone who must play by her rules? The way their relationship plays out raises real questions about whether we're ever loving the actual person we're with, or simply projecting our own desires onto them, and whether we can ever truly know someone we're in a relationship with.

The Swedish Daydream and the Family He Won't Describe

To survive the lectures he has to sit through as Black Bag, which are themselves reproduced in places in the novel and cover the psychology of our current social atmosphere, the narrator invents an entire alternate life for himself in his head: a simple, humble existence in rural Sweden, complete with a sawmill job, an injury, and a woman named Birgitta who feeds him cake. These daydreams take up more and more space in his emotional life. It's genuinely strange and moving that some of the narrator's most honest emotional moments in the whole book happen inside a fantasy he's constructed and it says something real about how much of our imaginative life can end up carrying more weight than our actual lived experience, which felt like another quiet comment on how we live now, half in reality and half online or in our own heads.

It's a striking contrast to how he treats his own family: when he visits his parents, he refuses to give any real details about them at all, referring to them only as two stone pillars, guarding their privacy even as he's spilling every detail of his invented Swedish village. His imagined exchanges with the family dog, Elliot, who has a very funny personality of his own in these daydreamed conversations, felt like another way of the narrator talking to himself.

Where the Novel Gets Shakier

As the story develops, it edges into something closer to a conspiracy plot, almost a cult story and the narrator’s performance as Black Bag gets tangled up in a vague cryptocurrency scheme. This is where the novel felt slightly shakier to me, striving to do a bit too much. I can see the justification for it, though, since we're only ever inside the narrator's head, and he doesn't fully understand this secret order of people or the financial mechanics behind Claudio’s financial schemes any more than we do; his own information is limited to a slightly ridiculous spying mission. I think these elements of the novel mostly work as a kind of ego-check for him: a way of forcing him to recognise that he isn't special, that he isn't even the original Black Bag, however much he's come to believe otherwise.

His ego does grow across the novel, until he starts to think of himself as the original Black Bag, almost a prophet, which is a real irony given that he has no identity left to speak of. At one point he asks himself, "Isn't it time someone rescued me from the cult of myself for deprogramming?" The ending of the novel presents a real challenge to the narrator’s conception of himself and it leaves open whether affection that arrives purely through exposure is worth having at all.

Form and Style

On a practical level, the novel is built from very short, punchy chapters, rarely more than four or five pages, which keeps the whole thing moving at a brisk, pleasurable pace even when the narrator gets lost in his own ruminations about the death of serious theatre or his romantic failures. It's a world away from the density of something like "The Melancholy of Resistance," which my book club read together earlier this year. Kennard also doesn't use quotation marks for dialogue, and readers in my group responded to that differently, from finding it pretentious to barely noticing it anymore given how common it's become in recent literary fiction. There's even a case to be made that stripping the marks which usually identify speech mirrors what the novel does to its narrator, removing every marker that identifies him, though it didn't add much extra meaning for me personally; I don't think the novel would have lost anything by including them.

I read the book first in print and then went back through the audiobook, which Kennard narrates himself. A number of people in my book club who'd listened to the audio first told me it really adds to the experience, and I found that to be true: his own performance of the material brings out a layered quality in the reading. Rereading it that way, already knowing the plot, let me sit with the larger questions in more detail. This year's Booker chair, Mary Beard, has said her bar for a book is whether it's worth reading more than once, and I think "Black Bag" clears that easily.

Verdict

I found "Black Bag" an extremely enjoyable, genuinely clever read, funny and strange in equal measure, with far more going on beneath its absurd premise than it might first suggest. It raised so many questions for me about visibility and privilege, about how much of ourselves we perform online versus withhold, and about what we're really responding to when we love someone, whether that's another person, an anonymous man in a bag, or a life we've only ever imagined. I'd happily read this one again, and I'm curious now to seek out Kennard's other novels and his poetry.

On the Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell)

First Impressions

I want to give my thoughts on book III without spoilers, since this continues the journey of Tara as she’s caught in a time loop while the same day in November repeats itself. I’ve followed this story across the two previous volumes of Book I and Book II. I read this while visiting my parents’ home which felt strangely appropriate as I naturally reflected on my childhood and revisited places I knew so well growing up. So much of this book is about the process of memory, the weight of it, and the way our relationships to other people, and to objects, change over time even as our subjective sense of the world tells us things will largely stay the same.

The Plot Moves On

This third instalment does progress the story, and there's a real sense of momentum. Tara is still ageing within the loop even as the wider world resets around her each day, and the book keeps exploring the mechanics of that situation: how objects disappear or persist, what changes and what doesn't. All of that is genuinely interesting, but as with the previous two books, it still feels less about the mechanics of the time loop itself and more about what it reveals about our relationship to time, space, and other people.

Tara and Thomas

The section I found most touching was Tara revisiting her husband, Thomas, who isn't caught in the loop with her. He simply lives the same day over and over as if it had never happened before, unaging, essentially frozen. Tara, meanwhile, has aged considerably and had countless new experiences; she's become a genuinely different person from who she was. I love how the novel uses this to explore the dynamics of long-term relationships and how partners change, sometimes at wildly different rates. It reminded me of how that plays out even in ordinary relationships, where one person starts to shift and grow while another is content and wants things to stay exactly as they are, and how much conflict that mismatch can generate.

There's something almost eerie about how the book renders Thomas: he becomes like a photograph or a video looping on repeat. Tara still feels a strong connection to him, but because she keeps changing and he doesn't, that connection inevitably shifts too. I found this such a poignant way of thinking about how we look back on old photographs or memories and can slightly idealise the person and the relationship we were in at the time, while the passage of time gives us a more objective view than the intensity of the subjective experience allowed for in the moment. Watching Tara try to reconnect with Thomas while she keeps ageing and changing is genuinely moving.

A Different Register

The book also traces how Tara's relationship to the physical world shifts as she notices sounds and details she wouldn't have paid attention to before, the way we're all usually too caught up in our own heads to notice everything around us, except that her circumstances force that attentiveness on her. The novel introduces several new characters here too, each with a strikingly different perspective on what's happening and on where the world is generally headed, some more optimistic, some more pessimistic, and I liked how that underlines how differently people navigate both their own existence and the larger state of things.

This volume was translated by different translators than the first two books, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, and I'm not entirely sure why the change happened, but it did shift the tone slightly. The prose here felt a bit more clipped and direct than in the earlier books, though still just as readable, engaging, and thought-provoking.

A Series Worth Starting at the Beginning

As with the second book, this is very much not a place to start the series. There's a lot of assumed knowledge here, and honestly I'm glad the book doesn't pause to re-explain everything for new readers, since that kind of throat-clearing can get laborious across a series. But it does mean I'd recommend starting with book one rather than jumping in here. I still find myself wondering whether these need to be published as separate volumes at all, since they're each fairly short and could plausibly have worked as one longer book, though Balle is still writing further instalments in Danish that haven't been translated yet, so there's something nice about following the series as it comes out in something close to real time. It’d be lovely if there will eventually be a big omnibus edition once the whole thing is complete.

Verdict

This was a genuinely moving, meditative reading experience, made all the more resonant by my own circumstances at the time: travelling back to see my family, hearing old stories, revisiting familiar places, and tasting dishes I hadn't had in a long while since living away from America. I'm looking forward to continuing with this series. If you've read this book, or you're following the series as it comes out, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

First Impressions

"Buckeye" is an utterly absorbing family epic, and although it spans multiple generations, it's really centred on two couples living in a small Ohio town, followed from the beginning of the Second World War through to the end of the Vietnam War. I spent that whole long stretch of time getting to know, care about and love all four of these people.

Four Equally Loved Characters

What struck me most is how the narrative moves between all four central characters, both their interior lives and their tangled relationships with each other, and I was equally invested in every single one of them. Usually in a novel that rotates between multiple points of view, I end up with a favourite and find myself impatient to get back to them. Here I loved all four so much that I actually made a t-shirt with their names on it, in the spirit of the famous "A Little Life" shirt with Jude, JP, Willem and Malcolm's names printed on it, even though that novel is really only about Jude and Willem. "Buckeye," by contrast, genuinely belongs to all four of its central characters: Cal, Becky, Margaret and Felix.

Cal and Becky

Cal, who we meet at the very start of the book, was born with one leg significantly shorter than the other, which causes him physical difficulty throughout his life and a lot of self-consciousness, including keeping him out of the military during the war. He also comes from a family where almost everyone has died except his father, leaving the two of them alone together in a dynamic that's claustrophobic and toxic, even though Cal still loves and cares for him. His father is a strange, memorable peripheral figure in the novel, a hoarder who writes complaining letters to American presidents and officials, letters that are reproduced in the text and capture both his personal quirks and a more universal sense of ordinary citizens' powerlessness to be heard. Cal himself is a hugely sympathetic character, a comic-book reader who falls for Becky, whose father owns the local hardware store where Cal goes to work, tying the two families together.

Becky is smart and sympathetic in her own right, and she's also given what's genuinely one of the more challenging elements of the novel for me: she can communicate with the dead, and the book takes this ability completely seriously. As someone who doesn't believe in anything outside the tangible and provable, I found it a real stretch at times to read a character who wholeheartedly believes in her own psychic gift, and that gap between her conviction and Cal's skepticism becomes a genuine source of tension in their marriage. Becky isn't a fraud or looking to profit from it either; she sees it almost as an obligation to the many grieving people around her. Early in the novel she also writes a letter to her future sixty-year-old self and gives it to Cal to keep sealed until then, a small mystery planted at the start whose contents, once revealed late in the book, feed back into everything the novel has been asking about her ability.

Margaret and Felix

The second couple, Margaret and Felix, are almost a golden couple on the surface, both strikingly good-looking, but each is carrying private secrets they never share with each other, and the novel traces the toll that takes over decades. Margaret was raised an orphan and longs for a wider world even as she finds herself settled in this small town; Felix is handsome, lands a promising job, goes off to fight in the war, and carries deep internal struggles that create real friction between them. The novel is remarkably attuned to the cost of everything we withhold from the people closest to us, and there's a striking line about how a lie carries its own unbearable solitude and that “you're alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.” That sense of isolation runs through both couples as they try to live authentically within the constraints and expectations of their era.

An American Ideal Under Pressure

Patrick Ryan captures something I felt very sympathetic to: that postwar American ideal of the nuclear family, the sense that conformity to a certain mould was supposed to guarantee happiness, and how, as we've since learned across the decades, that was never really true for a lot of people. At one point the novel invokes Norman Rockwell's idealised paintings of American domestic life directly, and shows how thoroughly these two couples fail to live up to that image. It also captures the way wartime creates an emergency that swallows up everything, deferring personal struggles that then take years, sometimes generations, to actually surface and be dealt with, including a thread about repressed sexuality and the quiet, cumulative damage of pushing something essential about yourself down for decades. Even though the novel is set in the past, it felt genuinely timely to me, saying something about our own more divided and anxious present.

The writing is full of vivid period detail, whether it's oddly coloured wartime rations or a genuinely terrifying combat scene that put me right inside the panic and consequences of it. The title itself grows in meaning over the course of the book: a buckeye tree is planted in one of the couples' yards early on, and its slow growth, beautifully echoed on the cover, mirrors how the choices, secrets and ruptures of this generation ripple forward into their children's lives. Ryan is so good at showing that most of these people are simply doing what they think is right in the moment, even as it quietly stores up trouble for the people who come after them, the way every family sets something aside meaning to deal with it later, only for it to compound instead.

Space, Astronauts, and a Personal Connection

There's also a recurring fascination in the book with outer space and the NASA program, which resonated with me personally since one of my own strongest early memories is the Challenger explosion, a kind of rupture in that whole postwar dream of progress. It isn't addressed directly in "Buckeye," but it's a preoccupation Ryan has returned to before, notably in his short story collection "The Dream Life of Astronauts," which includes a story about the Challenger disaster and features some of the same loosely connected characters as his earlier interlinked story collection "Send Me," which came out twenty years ago now. I read "Send Me" as a debut and fell completely for his writing back then, and I actually had the honour of meeting Patrick at Edmund White's apartment not long after, where he signed my copy. We became friends and corresponded a lot over the years, though we haven't been in close touch recently. I want to be clear that none of that affects my reaction to this book; if I hadn't loved it, I'd simply have read it quietly and moved on rather than talked about it here.

Verdict

I'm thrilled to see Ryan get this kind of attention after clearly working on this novel for a long time, and it's entirely earned. As Ann Patchett says on the cover, it's a glorious sweep of a novel, and it completely swept me up too; at around 450 pages, I honestly wished it were longer, since I would have happily stayed with these characters and their children's generation for much longer still. If you've read it, I'd love to know whether you felt the same pull toward all four of these people, or whether one of their stories won out for you over the others.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Patrick Ryan about his novel and you can watch our discussion here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISEekR287EU

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman

First Impressions

Is it a novel? A play? An essay? Does it try to be all three at once and not quite land any of them? “Helen of Nowhere” is a slender novel at just over 150 pages that nonetheless took me a surprisingly long time to get through. Much of it felt like a slog, both because it's so abstract in what it's actually discussing and because I found long stretches of it simply tedious. Even though critics have widely praised its ambition and structure I know plenty of readers have found it gimmicky.

Structure and Premise

The novel is composed like a play in six acts, built from extended monologues delivered by four different individuals, though who exactly is "composing" these monologues is itself an open question the book keeps circling back to. At its centre is a disgraced academic who travels out to the countryside to consider buying a house, where a realtor tells him about the property's former owner, a woman named Helen. Throughout, he's also reflecting on his own marriage. My sense is that this novel is about love, power imbalances, and the tension between urban and rural life, interrogating the whole tradition of "returning to nature," from the transcendentalists onward, as either a search for purity outside the trappings of civilisation or a form of escapism from the complexity and judgment of the wider world that this man has found himself mired in.

A Deeply Flawed Narrator

We spend most of the book inside this man's perspective, and he's a genuinely flawed, often misogynistic figure, even as he insists, defensively, that he loves and admires women. He objectifies his wife even while professing devotion, judging her as having faded with age, even though she was once his student, went on to eclipse his own academic career, and now provokes in him a tangled mix of resentment, desire, and something close to punishment. There's a real possibility, hinted at early on, that the entire structure of the novel is itself the wife's construct, a play written to interrogate her husband from the inside, which adds a genuinely compelling layer if you have the patience to unpick it.

Where It Lost Me

For long stretches, I found myself growing impatient. The book gets genuinely surreal and strange in places, particularly once Helen's spirit is channeled into the narrative to put the husband on trial, before the story turns around and puts Helen herself on trial too. Goodman has spoken in interviews about her background editing agricultural texts, which shows in how fluently the book handles ideas about the natural world alongside academia and shifting intellectual fashions. Helen, now elderly and in care, once tried to build something like a commune on this land, rejecting her own privilege for a simpler life, only to come into direct conflict with local people and face her own legal and moral scrutiny, a genuinely interesting complication of the book's ideas about how ideals curdle once they're actually put into practice.

My frustration mostly came from how much of the book stays at a remove. We only get fragments of the husband's disgrace, of the couple's evolving careers, and of how his wife has advanced professionally while also being held back by both sexism and unacknowledged labor, raising real questions about whether a relationship that began as teacher and student can ever reach true equal footing. The novel also leans hard on constant binary categorisations of people, takers versus doers, golden eggs versus plain eggs, kites versus anchors, even while a line elsewhere in the book seems to undercut the whole exercise, suggesting that any such distinction is really just a construct of the mind. That self-awareness didn't stop the categorising from feeling repetitive to me, especially once the realtor's own lengthy monologue arrives. I found this section in particular largely tedious and only tangentially connected to the story, other than emphasising the realtor’s idolatry of Helen through contradictory accounts. Perhaps this relationship is meant as a counterpoint to the Man and the Wife’s, but this feels like a surface point rather than something which adds any depth to the story.

Does It Work as a Novel, Play, or Essay?

Part of my frustration is that the book seems to be attempting three different forms at once without fully succeeding at any of them. As a novel steeped in psychology, it's mostly telling rather than showing, with fairly slight actual action. As a play, it would likely be static and hard to sit through performed aloud; nor does it especially work as a drama to be read. As an essay interrogating nature versus urban life and academic power struggles, it handles those ideas in a way that felt too slight to come across as fully satisfying either. Perhaps it’s meant to function as a modern counterpoint to “The Odyssey”. But, other than following a man searching for a home that involves a woman named Helen, I didn’t readily discern any interesting parallels to that classic.

Verdict

I can admire aspects of this novel, and I don't mind books that feel like a chore when they're genuinely wrestling with complex ideas in an ambitious way. But “Helen of Nowhere” never quite goes far enough in any of the directions it gestures toward, and I came away unsure what I'd actually gotten out of it and doubtful that a reread would change that. On the whole this was an unsatisfying reading experience for me personally, though I know plenty of other readers share that reaction while others find it genuinely daring and radical as an interrogation of a man lost in his own self-justification, and I can appreciate that reading too, even if it isn't mine. If you've read this one, I'd love to hear where you landed on it, positive, negative, or somewhere in between.

The Delusions by Jenni Fagan

First Impressions

I absolutely loved this novel by accomplished Scottish writer Jenni Fagan. The story follows a woman named Edi who works in the afterlife, processing the recently dead. She holds a kind of admin position, and the queues she has to work through keep growing longer and longer. Her job is to confront each individual about what they actually did in their lives, since she has access to all of their secrets, and to extract from them their own self-delusion about who they believe themselves to be. It's an extremely painful process: extracting someone's delusion is described almost like pulling a thorny vine out from inside them.

A Premise That Earns Its Weight

On its own, this could read as a fairly fanciful construct, a morality tale dressed up in afterlife bureaucracy. But I found it so much more poignant than that, especially because I read Fagan's memoir “Ootlin” last year, which describes her own harrowing experiences growing up in the care system, where her whole existence was effectively reduced to paperwork, to being shuffled from place to place. Knowing that about her background gave this novel's premise a real emotional charge for me. I don't know how much that context matters to a reader coming to this book cold, but personally, it deepened everything.

Edi has held this position for forty-seven years, all the while hoping her son will eventually pass through her queue, since he was still young when she died. Her own death was horrible: she had cancer, went through an experimental treatment, and was essentially treated as a research subject by a doctor who mismanaged her care. That thread of real anger at medical malpractice reminded me of Sinéad Gleeson's excellent memoir “Constellations”, about an Irish woman contending with serious illness and the callousness of some of the doctors she encountered, a book that, like this novel, also finds a strange beauty in describing the cosmos.

The Cosmos and a Sense of Play

I loved the descriptions of the afterlife itself here, genuinely gorgeous passages about the universe and the movement of the cosmos, handled with real playfulness alongside real beauty. Animals pass through the afterlife too, and at one point an enormous wave of cats moves through, which explains the cat silhouette on the cover alongside the constellations. I was so taken with these descriptions that I ended up visiting the Science Museum's "Starstruck" VR exhibit in London, which walks you right through the cosmos. My headset was clamped on a little too tight, so I came out with a red mark on my forehead that lasted for ages, but it was a fun experience, standing at the edge of a virtual black hole and looking down on a volcanic planet. I'm fairly geeky about the science of space in general, so the novel's cosmic imagery really brought the story alive for me.

A Bureaucracy With No Comfort

There were stretches in the novel where the pacing dragged a little, since Edi spends a lot of time simply complaining about her job, and even given the extraordinary nature of that job, after a while it can start to feel like anyone grumbling about tedious work. But it builds to a powerful and dramatic ending, as changes on the planet start affecting the afterlife's operations, and Edi herself remains part of a system she doesn't fully understand, unsure exactly where the people she processes actually go. It's less a comforting afterlife than another layer of faceless, controlling administration, with no more say for the dead than they had in life. There's a line late in the book that struck me hard: “We have so much more to give and receive than the structures of humanity even vaguely allow.” That feels true of far more than just this story.

Verdict

I found this a really excellent, beautiful, and poignant novel, and it was interesting to read alongside George Saunders's recent novel “Vigil”, which also follows someone guiding the recently dead through a reckoning with what they actually did in life. I think “The Delusions” handles that shared premise in a more dynamic and creative way, though I'd say both novels have their own strengths. In Fagan’s story the people who have committed horrific crimes must face true justice in the afterlife by truly owning what they have done, but also the virtuous must wrestle with untangling the fiction they’ve created regarding their own lives. I appreciated the artful and complex way this novel meditated on these deeply personal issues.