This Is Where the Serpent Lives by Daniyal Mueenuddin

First Impressions

“This Is Where the Serpent Lives” is an impressive epic, one that's extremely immersive and evocative in its descriptions, with several dramatic scenes that kept me completely compelled. And yet, while I was reading it, I felt quite conflicted about it, especially in the way it's structured. By the end, though, I felt like it all came together. I call it an epic even though it's only just under 350 pages — not especially long — but because of how the story is put together, it feels much more expansive and larger than it actually is.

A Proviso Before You Start

I have to give a warning up front, the kind of thing I wish I'd known before starting: this isn't really a traditional novel. It's structured more like four interlinked novellas that move between different stories and it's worth knowing that going in so you can adjust your expectations about where the story goes. It begins with an extremely engaging character named Yazid, born into poverty, found on the streets without parents, who has to work his way up in the world — a very Dickensian story of a boy finding his place and his livelihood. The author has described him as something like a Falstaff figure out of Shakespeare: physically large, but also large in personality, personable and lively. I wanted to stay with him, and I was genuinely sad when the story moved on to focus on other characters. Yazid continues to play a role throughout, staying pivotal in the background, but the narrative shifts its attention elsewhere.

It also feels like an epic because the novel opens with a list of principal characters and descriptions of them, which is genuinely useful to refer back to as the story moves backward and forward in time across its sections, starting around 1950 and moving up to roughly the present. It isn't a linear narrative in the way you'd traditionally expect from a novel. I didn't find that especially confusing — it's fairly straightforward to follow, and even with quite a few characters, they're distinct enough to be easy to keep track of. My hesitation wasn't with the structure's clarity; it was that I found Yazid's story so compelling I just wanted to stay with it.

Class, Power, and a Farm

By the end, I understood why Mueenuddin structured the book this way — it works to present different levels of Pakistani society. The story centers largely around a farm: its owners, the people who run it, and the people who work it, each shown within their own class. Many of these characters are well-meaning and aspirational, genuinely wanting to see class divisions break down and allow more movement between them, but when push comes to shove, they tend to maintain the status quo, and things carry on as they always have.

Even though I hadn't read any reviews of this novel before picking it up, I was drawn to it partly because of its cover, which I think is one of my favorites among books published so far this year: a garden party scene painted by the artist Salman Toor. What I love about it is that after finishing the book, the cover feels much more meaningful — I noticed details that speak to the novel's central themes. It has the texture of a classical scene, but look closer and some of the figures are clearly modern; one is on a smartphone. At the very center is a servant with his head down, diligently working while groups of people converse around him, and prominently in the foreground is a figure either napping or simply exhausted by all the conversation. It captures a lot of what the novel is doing: showing people who feel very much of a piece with one another, while invisible walls, not physical ones, but social ones, determine who gets to interact, achieve power, or find companionship.

Characters Caught in the System

Even though I felt critical of quite a few characters in this novel, many of them come across as well-meaning and likeable — I wanted them to do the right thing, and it stung when, faced with conflict, they reverted to old ways of living. That feels like the novel's central tragedy: people locked into the positions they're born into, with very little room to move out of them. Even some of the most powerful characters, powerful in terms of money and influence, had lived outside Pakistan for a time and come to hold different values, only to find themselves reverting to old patterns once they returned. Part of that is simply how the society is structured, with corruption running through local police and local power brokers, shaping business dealings, personal relationships, and the position of women.

We follow Hassan and his wife, Sharaz, whose relationship carries high drama, alongside the running of the farm and business — they're generous in a lot of ways, but they've also learned how to work the system they sit on top of. One of the most compelling characters is Sakhawat, born a servant boy, the son of the estate's gardener, but intelligent and ambitious. We follow him as he's nurtured by the owners and apprenticed to Yazid, harboring grand ambitions to move up in society. His story, and how the book ultimately resolves it, is genuinely gripping. Though there's some hope in the novel, I think what it's ultimately saying is that whether characters want to stay where they are or aspire to rise, there are barriers and limitations that will always come into play because of rigid structures that have persisted for decades.

Where the Structure Frustrated Me

I found the overall meaning of the novel quite impactful — it says something much bigger than just these individual stories. But there were certain characters and storylines I was so engaged by that I wanted the author to stick with them rather than moving on and letting them recede into the background. That's really where I struggled with this book. At the same time, I can see why he structured it this way: moving backward and forward between characters and time periods lets the reader see how the layers of this society function, and why it's so difficult for people to break out of the roles they are born into.

I was also slightly frustrated that the novel focuses almost exclusively on its male characters. We get compelling glimpses into the lives of women like Sharaz and Ghazala, and we can see they're complex individuals, but we never really get their points of view. I found myself wishing for a companion novel, alongside a possible full novel about Yazid, that followed the female characters and offered a real counterpoint to what's presented here.

Verdict

Overall, I was very impressed by this book, especially its dialogue, which carries a lot of the humor in the story — it's not all just the drudgery of farming life and class conflict. The dialogue brings the characters to life and lets you feel everything left unspoken beneath the surface of what they're actually saying. The descriptions also gave me such a strong sense of place: the food, the plants, the busy atmosphere, all amid the intensity of the heat. It's an impressive novel, but I found myself longing for what it might have been as a more straightforward, single-through-line narrative.

I haven't read Mueenuddin's earlier short story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders”, and this is actually his debut novel, though that first collection was widely acclaimed and shortlisted for a number of prizes, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer, some time ago. This novel has been a long time in the making, and it's genuinely poignant to hear him describe, in interviews, how for a long stretch he was working on a different book altogether — one inspired by the loss of his mother, trying to capture the full complexity of her life. I think he has it in him to write a much fuller book centered on the female characters in this story, and part of me hopes he'll return to it, even though he'll likely move on to something else entirely next.

I'd recommend this book, but with that proviso up front: it's more a set of interlinked novellas than a novel in the traditional sense. Knowing that going in would have saved me from feeling so quickly pulled away from Yazid's story and wishing to return to it. If you've read it, I'd love to know what you thought, and whether you found the structure successful or wished it had been arranged differently.

The Fertile Earth by Ruthvika Rao

Premise and Structure

"The Fertile Earth" is a debut novel by Ruthvika Rao, set in a small town in southern India. It's structured with a very brief opening section set in 1970, when something thrilling and violent has just occurred, before the novel moves backward in time to 1955 and gradually builds back up to that opening moment. It follows a village and two sets of siblings: two daughters from a very wealthy and powerful local landowning family that presides over the entire village and serves as its main employer, and two brothers, sons of a single, working-class mother. The four children form a real connection and friendship, each with very distinct personalities, especially around a dramatic early episode when a man-eating tiger is on the loose in the surrounding jungle, prompting them to take it upon themselves to track it down and hunt it. Something very dramatic occurs in the course of that hunt, with repercussions that follow them for the rest of their lives.

Consequences and Change

The novel is about the long-standing consequences of that formative episode, but more broadly about the sweeping changes taking place in India during this period. It follows two of these four children in particular, one of the boys and one of the girls, as they grow and change over the years, influenced by major political events occurring in the country, moving through very different experiences and environments, including the universities they travel to, as the country shifts from a more feudal, caste-driven system toward a different way of organizing society and government. Communist-inspired revolutionary groups are active during this period, and the novel traces the violent upheavals and major alterations to the social structure that follow, and how these characters become entangled in, or are affected by, the consequences of these groups' actions, both personally and within their families and wider community. There's also romance running through the story, and family secrets that surface as it goes on.

Atmosphere and Craft

What's immediately striking about this novel is how atmospheric and sensory-driven it is. It hits every sense: Rao's descriptions of the community, the vivid colors of the orchard, the surrounding jungle landscape, but also its smells and the taste of its fruit, are so vivid and clear that they made the reading experience genuinely pleasurable on a purely sensory level. That same finely detailed quality extends well beyond the village itself, into the wider environments these characters move through as adults, including the universities they attend. Alongside that, the novel delves into these characters in their full complexity, and to feel the challenges that emerge in their relationships with each other as time passes and political and revolutionary events keep intervening in their lives.

Verdict

This is such a rich and involved story, so atmospheric and finely detailed, that I became completely wrapped up in it and genuinely, emotionally connected to the journey of these characters. It's a really fantastic debut novel, and a genuinely powerful, very special book that was such a pleasure to read.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi (translated by Lin King)

I don't think I've ever had this experience reading a novel before. The food descriptions in this story were so evocative and vivid that I literally had to go out and eat to satisfy the hunger this book made me feel. “Taiwan Travelogue” is a very clever book in a number of interesting ways. At its center is Chizuko, a successful Japanese woman writer in the late 1930s who gets the opportunity to go on a year-long lecture tour of Taiwan. She's paired with Chi-chan, a woman who speaks both Taiwanese and Japanese and accompanies her throughout the year. The novel follows their relationship, the ongoing effects of colonialism on Taiwan, and the two of them eating their way around the country, sampling an enormous range of dishes.

Of course, not every dish sounded appealing to me, there were definitely some I wouldn't want to try, but plenty of others sounded genuinely wonderful, and reading this left me so hungry that I went out and found a Taiwanese restaurant in London called Mr. Bao, where I kept reading while eating a yuzu salad, grilled broccoli, smacked cucumbers with chili, and delicious fluffy filled bao. It was deeply satisfying to actually taste this food while getting more and more descriptions of everything the characters were sampling along the way, since the Japanese author-narrator has a genuinely insatiable appetite, describing it at one point as a monster in her stomach that can never be satisfied.

An Outsider Seeking Authenticity

Chizuko is something of a glutton, but she also genuinely wants to experience the real culture and food of Taiwan, which becomes a slightly complicated ambition as the novel unfolds, since much of the food and language in Taiwan at this time has been so shaped by Japan, referred to in the book as "the mainland," with Taiwan as "the island," and a real, loaded distinction drawn between mainlanders, islanders, and those of mixed background. We watch real tension grow between the two women alongside genuine affection, and both are outsiders in different ways: the Japanese author is described as physically large, loud, and endlessly curious, wanting to get past a tourist's version of the country to something more authentic, while the Taiwanese translator is much smaller and far more circumspect about what she says.

I've noticed that a lot of other readers found the Japanese narrator fairly unlikable, but I found her quite sympathetic. She's a genuine outsider herself, always reserved and bookish, someone who says she never had friends at school, and when she meets the Taiwanese translator and feels a real connection, she wants a genuine friendship, even though there's a real power imbalance between them. As they travel, we learn the translator is betrothed to a man she's expected to marry, carrying real expectations tied to her background and station, and facing prejudice from other Taiwanese people that the Japanese author instinctively wants to defend her against, even though that impulse itself complicates the possibility of an equal friendship between them. There's a faint romantic edge to their relationship too, most vividly in a moment where the Japanese author feeds peeled lychee into the translator's mouth, but for the most part the novel handles that undercurrent, and the tensions running alongside it with subtlety, building toward a dramatic crisis point later on.

A Vanished Landscape

I loved that the book opens with a map of Taiwan as it existed at the time, which I found myself flipping back to constantly as the two women traveled north and south and encountered different people and places, some of which no longer exist in the same form, like a set of waterfalls once visible from a train that can't be seen that way anymore because the transportation system has since changed. It gives the novel the feeling of capturing a bygone era, with the Japanese author self-consciously trying to preserve the essence of the country as she experiences it, while the book keeps quietly raising the question of how much that experience has already been shaped by the outside imperialism of the colonizers who imposed their own culture and language on Taiwan. That question builds gradually until the Japanese author is forced into some real self-interrogation about her own role in it.

A Gentle Read with Real Depth

I really appreciated how gentle this book was, especially having read a number of other excellent but genuinely dark books recently. This one raises real, serious issues, but in a compassionate way following these two women traveling the country, their banter, and a massive feast prepared by a female master chef with course after course brought out to them. There's even an odd little interlude at a girls' school that turns into something like a Sherlock Holmes mystery involving strange nighttime happenings. This section felt a little out of place to me at first, though it ties back later, when the Japanese author is trying to piece together the translator's true history, since she's described throughout as wearing a kind of Noh mask that conceals her real feelings, something the narrator keeps trying, with real difficulty, to see past.

A Novel About Translation Itself

Not every reader has connected with this book, and I understand some have found the prose a little too simple, but there's a layer of complexity built in how the story is presented: as if it were an actual novel written and published in the late 1930s that then passed through multiple translations, from Japanese into Mandarin and beyond, complete with footnotes from different translators across the decades who sometimes openly disagree with one another, especially as the book goes on. It's framed like a found document, tracing its own fictional history, including a detail about most surviving copies being lost in a fire, the book going out of print, being revived in a new edition altered for the political climate of its moment, then rediscovered again later. That gives a real sense of books as fragile, fallible physical objects that can be lost and transformed, especially through translation, and so much of this novel is really an interrogation of what translation actually does to a text: whether it's simply an approximation, or whether it can genuinely reach the truth of what's being conveyed, given how much cultural context can't always cross over directly. It's a question that applies to how we take in any information as it's always filtered through our own subjective point of view, but it takes on particular weight when it's happening between different nations and cultures.

Verdict

I found this a genuinely enjoyable read that left me with complex questions regarding power structures and the longterm effects of imperialism. At the same time the actual experience of reading it was pleasurable and, especially toward the end, quite emotional. I liked that the story takes place across the span of a year. It's also made me think about my own travel instincts, that familiar tourist impulse to want the "authentic" version of a place rather than a performed one, and what that impulse actually asks of the people who live there. I suspect I'll keep thinking about that the next time I travel.If you've read this book, I'd love to know what you thought of it, and whether it made you as hungry as it made me.

Since I read this novel earlier this year it went on to win the 2026 International Booker Prize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvTU6FVos9c

John of John by Douglas Stuart

First Impressions

“John of John” is extremely moving, immersive, and skilfully written. It's already received a lot of praise from other readers, and I think deservedly so. I want to explain exactly why I think it's so good, and why I finished it eager to talk about it with other readers.

This isn't just a story about secrets and repression, though there's plenty of both. Every character here is harbouring something. It isn't simply duty versus desire either — it's about the subtlety of emotion, and the real difficulty of finding a level on which we can truly connect with and understand one another, including understanding people in ways they don't realize we do, and struggling to help the people we love embrace desires they might be too afraid to embrace themselves.

Three Generations on a Scottish Island

The novel follows three generations of one family. At the center is Cal, a young man in his early twenties whose full name is John Callum — he goes by Cal because his father is also named John, hence the title. He grew up on a rural and deeply religious farming island in Scotland with a very small population, but has since left for the mainland, where he's just graduated and is struggling to find work. The novel opens with a phone call: Cal's father John tells him he needs to come home because his grandmother Ella is ill. Cal returns out of love for her, only to discover she isn't actually ill at all — he's been brought back for other reasons entirely.

Cal is at an uncertain point in his life, with limited options given his family's financial circumstances, and he ends up back working the farmland. He's full of pent-up desire, wanting to go out into the world and fully embrace life as a gay man, discovering opportunities he never had growing up on this island. That makes his return deeply conflicted. His father John, meanwhile, appears strict and controlling on the surface, guided by rigid religious belief, but is harbouring his own secret: his own repressed sexuality. That's revealed fairly early in the novel, so it isn't really a spoiler.

Subtle Expressions of Desire

What struck me most about Cal and John is how, unable to fully express their desires, they find subtle, coded ways to do so anyway. This story is set in the 1990s and Cal tries to meet other gay men through personal ads, knowing there's almost no one else on the island he could realistically connect with. His father, meanwhile, has been carrying on a long-term relationship with another man in complete secrecy, operating within a private code the two of them have developed just to allow the relationship to exist at all. I found it fascinating how the novel tracks these different levels of expression. I naturally felt frustrated with both characters at different points in this novel, wanting to shout at them to just come out to each other. But what Douglas Stuart captures so well, through dialogue and action, is exactly why that's not simple — how difficult radical honesty is within families, and especially within the constrictions of a small community with its own expectations about unwritten rules guiding their behaviour.

Ella

I loved the character of Ella, Cal's maternal grandmother, so much. She's eccentric, expressive, and caring, living in the same household as these two closed-off men. At one point she remarks that “if the women round here just left it, this place would be nothin' but men living in caves, scowling out at the sea.” There's a lovely line describing her: “somewhere deep inside, Ella was still an eight-year-old girl.” Even as an older woman starting to face real health difficulties, that sense of a girl still living inside her comes through vividly in how she expresses herself. She's harbouring her own secrets too, both about her past and her intentions for the future.

Craft and Atmosphere

Douglas Stuart gets at real nuance in these characters: what they understand about each other, what they don't, the things one person knows about another that the other doesn't even realize they've given away, alongside crucial misunderstandings, many of them shaped by the expectations placed on the next generation about how they should look, act, and conduct themselves within the community. This isn't simply a condemnation of older generations, either, but also an exploration of how those generations are themselves misunderstood, and how everyone is trying to find a way to actually connect and reach understanding.

The descriptions of life on this small Scottish island are wonderfully atmospheric: bleak, stark, and flat, which creates real practical difficulty for characters wanting to meet secretly or simply find a moment of privacy, since almost everyone can see almost everything. But Stuart also brings out how beautiful and wondrous the landscape is, and it doesn't feel like a coincidence that religion runs so deep in a community that witnesses every day how sunlight transforms a landscape to become so breathtakingly strange and gorgeous. That atmosphere extends into the work people do — John and Cal keep sheep and weave tweed, and the detail Stuart brings to that industry felt so naturally integrated into the narrative, never like research dropped in for its own sake, but like something lived.

I was also struck by the novel's use of language: characters speak both English and Gaelic, since this is one of the corners of Scotland where Gaelic is still spoken regularly, complete with translated lines. That becomes part of the plot too, since not everyone on the island speaks it, and characters sometimes switch to Gaelic deliberately to conceal what they're saying from others in the room — a quiet power play. There's also a memorable detail about neighboring adult brothers who haven't spoken to each other in something like sixteen years despite living under the same roof, forced to communicate through an intermediary. The novel captures how, in an environment this small and claustrophobic, people are either forced into ongoing civility with one another or cut ties completely, with grudges that can last decades or generations — which speaks to why religion and its rules matter so much here: without some shared order, communication in a community this reliant on itself could simply collapse.

Violence and Tenderness

I was struck, too, by the range in the relationship between Cal and John — moments of real, frightening violence sitting alongside moments of real tenderness. Their work is physically punishing, and there's a scene where Cal's hands are so sore from a day's labor that his father massages oil into them for relief. Then, elsewhere, something switches and there's genuinely horrifying violence between them. It felt true to a relationship this tense: an underlying love that coexists with real volatility, tensions that inevitably reach a boiling point given everything simmering beneath the surface.

The Peripheral Characters

Some of the supporting characters struck me just as much. Cal's lifelong best friend, nicknamed Doll, is someone he's known his entire life, their friendship partly born of necessity since there simply weren't many other young men around as they grew up in a community with an aging, dwindling population. Their dynamic is genuinely interesting because it shows Cal isn't an entirely virtuous character — he has real flaws in how he uses and manipulates his friend. There's real love there, but also a failure to fully see Doll's complexity, and I appreciated that the novel is willing to explore how gay men can manipulate straight men for their own desires, knowing those men's own desires can be leveraged — something I don't think a lot of stories, gay stories especially, get into. I felt real tenderness for Doll's predicament, and how his own options and standing in the community grew more restricted as the story goes on.

Cal also has a friend named Isla, whom the whole island has long expected him to eventually marry and settle down with, even though both of them know that's never going to happen. Her own dilemma, navigating obligations to her family alongside wanting to fulfil her own potential, especially once she runs into real trouble of her own, is handled with great nuance. So many characters here are drawn with a level of sympathy and complexity — wanting to shake them and ask why they couldn't just say what they felt — while also understanding exactly why they couldn't, given the fears they're carrying and the smallness of the world they're operating within.

Literary Echoes

I appreciated the literary references woven through the book too. Cal is repeatedly shown reading an old copy of “The Wasp Factory”, the classic Scottish novel about a small island and a young man prone to violence, and I liked thinking about how that book plays against this one. There's also a reference to Thomas Hardy near the end, and having recently reread “Tess of the d'Urbervilles”, I could clearly see Stuart writing a kind of modern Hardy story: tales that look bleak on the surface, full of characters in a rural setting undergoing real strife because of social obligation and the expectations of their time, but shot through with clear moments of joy and love that make it feel lived-in and true.

Verdict

There was so much I appreciated and connected with here, even in a story so different from my own life — moments that made me laugh, and moments that felt genuinely heart-wrenching. I found the ending gripping, with gripping twists that kept me completely absorbed. My one small criticism is how Ella's storyline resolves — I won't give anything away, but I wished there had been a bit more of her, since I loved her character so much, even though I understand why the novel ends the way it does. The actual final pages, though, I thought were achingly beautiful.

If you've read this, I'd love to hear what you thought, whether you agree or disagree with me, and whether there's anything I didn't touch on that you'd want to discuss. I also loved “Shuggie Bain” and “Young Mungo”, and this novel only cements for me Douglas Stuart's talent for writing.

Transcription by Ben Lerner

Overview

“Transcription” gave me that wonderful experience where I felt completely mesmerized while reading it, and now that I've finished, I can't stop thinking about it. There were a couple of coincidences with things happening in my own life at the moment that made it feel like the perfect book for me to read right now, almost like the stars had aligned.

I also want to emphasize that this book contains so many ideas, and is incredibly smart and well-crafted, touching on technology, science, history, memory, art, literature, and dreams, that from descriptions alone or from other reviews, it might sound like an intimidating, intellectual novel. But I want to assure you it's also extremely emotional. There's a great deal in it about familial relationships, about anxiety for the next generation and their struggles, about fathers and daughters, and about adult men's relationships to a father figure or mentor. It's about grief, mourning, and romance.

Premise

The novel's unnamed narrator, who is 45, travels to Providence, Rhode Island to interview Thomas, a 90-year-old, weighty intellectual of both the arts and sciences, in what will likely be his last interview ever. The interviewer brings his smartphone to record the conversation, but accidentally drops it in a sink of water, breaking it. Unable to record the interview, he ends up, in a moment of quiet absurdity, setting his broken phone down anyway when Thomas insists he start recording — pretending to record while nothing is actually being captured. So everything we get from that interview is not a transcription at all, but the narrator's later reconstruction of it from memory.

Thomas's Voice

Thomas speaks in this wonderful, associative way, poetic but packed with references to art, science, and historical figures, his train of thought skipping from one thing to another almost the way the narrator of “Ducks, Newburyport” does. I loved reading his diatribes the way I love listening to some of my own favorite mentors: people so full of knowledge and ideas that it just flows out of them. Even though I probably only understood about half of what Thomas was actually referencing, I was completely mesmerized consuming it. That's part of the magic of what Lerner does here — you feel like you're really sitting attentively listening to someone speak following their winding train of thought with all its warm playfulness and humor. I found his sections extremely enjoyable.

But the way the novel is constructed calls into question everything Thomas has said, and whether what we're getting is really the truth, since the whole premise rests on an interview that technically never happened as a recording. It's smart in how it uses that situation to say so much more.

A Personal Coincidence

I happened to be reading this on a day when I was about to interview Joyce Carol Oates, someone I revere as an idol and mentor and who was about to turn 88. I felt that same thrill about being able to speak with someone I admire so much, and that same anxiety about the possibility of technology going wrong, since we've had instances before where a Zoom call wouldn't connect. Reading about the narrator's fraught relationship to recording technology while gearing up for my own high-stakes interview felt like an uncanny echo.

Unboxing Videos and Self-Consciousness Online

Later in the book, Thomas's adult son Max has a daughter, Emmy, who has almost no appetite and struggles to eat no matter what her parents try. Eventually she starts watching unboxing videos on YouTube, which lulls her into a comforting state where she's able to eat while watching, though Max speaks about these videos quite disparagingly, dismissing them as trivial. Coincidentally, I'd also made a recent video unboxing books for my own channel. So I felt very self-conscious reading a book that critiques these videos while I'm making them myself. It made me think about my own anxieties about participating in this kind of content: I know I didn't invent the unboxing video, I'd just seen others doing it and thought it looked fun, especially around books that publishers had sent me. I do sometimes worry whether I'm trivializing the experience of reading by making these casual videos rather than sitting down to formulate a more considered review — though I also know plenty of readers respond to that instantaneous, unfiltered reaction to new books just as much as, if not more than, a carefully composed one. Lerner's novel set me off on a long train of thought about performative reading online and my own place in it.

I also want to point out “Transcription”'s clever cover design: it has the appearance of a large smartphone with a record button.

Technology, Memory, and Dependence

The novel isn't condemning technology so much as genuinely interrogating it, weighing its pros and cons and situating recent technology within a much longer history of technological change. Thomas recalls getting a radio for the first time as a young man, and has strange theories about how even when a radio is off, the sound waves are technically still passing through the air, an idea that resonates with how our data now sits somewhere in "the cloud," a constant unseen presence in our lives whether we're actively engaging with it or not. There's real insight into our dependency on technology: even after the narrator's phone breaks, he compulsively keeps trying to turn it on, and keeps thinking in terms of the maps app to get to Thomas's house even though he already knows the way from memory. I recognized that in myself, too — I'll sometimes use maps to get somewhere in central London even after living here long enough to know the route by heart.

Fact, Fiction, and the Line Between Them

Because the interview was never actually recorded, what we get is not a transcription but a reconstruction, and the novel is remarkably smart about calling into question whether that reconstruction is even true, or whether the narrator has misremembered, improvised, or even fictionalized parts of it. The book is structured in three sections: the narrator's account of the interview; a section that interrogates that very interview, revealing in something like a memorial speech that it was reconstructed rather than transcribed; and a third section that shifts to Max, Thomas's son, and his anxieties about his daughter's condition (referred to in the book as "failure to thrive") alongside his own complicated relationship with his father.

I love how the title itself, Transcription, carries so much weight here — "trans" as a prefix meaning beyond or on the other side of, so that in some sense our memory itself becomes a kind of bridge between past and present, and the novel keeps asking what gets lost or altered in that crossing. There are also references throughout to literal borders, including the border between occupied France and Switzerland during the war, where Jewish refugees escaping arrest could not be captured once they crossed it — a reminder that borders are themselves agreed-upon fictions that nonetheless carry enormous real-world weight. The book uses small, concrete examples too, like the narrator touching what he assumes is an artificial flower in a hotel lobby only to discover it's real, while recalling elaborately designed glass flowers in a museum that look completely authentic but are actually constructed. All of this speaks to a larger, timely anxiety about how much we can trust the information we're given, whether online, in the news, or handed down to us as history — and the novel gently suggests this uncertainty isn't new, even if it feels newly urgent.

Voice and Connection

Set in recent times, the novel touches on the COVID pandemic, during which Thomas became seriously ill and Max feared, for a time, that his father was going to die. There's an incredibly emotional crisis point where Max speaks to Thomas on the phone believing he might be losing him, and everything spills out of him, years of tension between them, much of it rooted in the death of Max's mother by suicide when he was younger, a loss that hovers over the whole novel as an absence. It made me think about how much of what we say in moments of extreme emotional intensity is a true confession or actually authentic, and how much is shaped by the situation itself, and whether that even matters. So much of this novel is really about voice and connection: not necessarily the content of what we say to each other, but the meaning carried in simply speaking and being heard, whether that's Max on the phone with his dying father or the narrator worrying over trivial conversations with his own young daughter.

Verdict

There's so much in this book that just keeps prompting me to think further. It doesn't offer answers to the larger questions it raises about fact versus fiction, technology, memory, and authenticity, but it poses them so richly that I know I'll want to reread it. I love one line from the book: "You call this fiction, but it is more." I think that's true of the novel itself — Ben Lerner packs an enormous amount into a fairly slim book, and I found that genuinely impressive.

I absolutely loved reading this, and if you've read it too, I'd love to hear what you thought, or whether it resonated with anything going on in your own life. If you haven't read it yet, I'd highly encourage you to pick it up, and don't be intimidated by the perception that it's some grand intellectual work. It's smart, yes, but it's also, as I hope I've conveyed, deeply emotional and genuinely funny, and that combination is exactly why I loved it so much.

Since I initially posted a video about this book it’s also gone on to win the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A Singular Reading Experience

Reading this book was very beautiful and moving, but also extraordinary because it's such a singular experience. “Said the Dead” by the Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa is essentially unclassifiable — you could call it a novel, a memoir, an essay, poetry, or social history, and it is really all of those things at once.

Premise

The book follows someone, presumably the author herself, as she passes by a building that was once a mental hospital in Cork. She meditates on how, if she had been alive in the 1800s, she probably would have ended up a patient at this institution herself, given her unique personality. She becomes intensely drawn to the location, and especially to the women who were patients there for so many years, and starts haunting the structure herself, hanging around the construction site where it's being redeveloped, looking in on it. She also delves into the institution's archives, surveying censuses taken in the area to gather details about the women who lived there. Through those small details, a much larger picture emerges of the state of women in Ireland at the time.

The institution first opened in the early 1800s and became a state facility around the 1850s. The records mostly capture the doctors' perceptions of these women's lives and symptoms, and have to be taken with a pinch of salt for that reason. Quite often, the only note recorded about a woman over the years is "no change, no change." That phrase comes to reflect back on the narrator's own life too, since she describes herself as a wife, mother, and reader whose domestic routines can feel like they carry no change from week to week or month to month. She feels an intense identification with these women, and a sense that she can almost hear their voices reaching out to her from the past — while also feeling, in turn, that she is haunting them, peering in on their lives. She poses a striking question: “Who chooses the sight of a vision? The witness or the apparition?”

Psychological, Supernatural, Mythological

I don't personally believe in anything supernatural, but what I found so interesting is how this book plays on the line between the psychological and the supernatural. There's so much in Irish life and history that carries a sense of mythology and connection with the past — in the Fenian Cycle and broader Irish mythology, there's a sense of previous inhabitants of an area dissolving into the ground, so the land itself becomes sentient, reaching out to people in the present and helping steer their lives. I think that's a rich tradition Ní Ghríofa is drawing on here, even while she's also documenting how many of these women were genuinely marginalized figures: some clearly suffered from real mental conditions that made a traditional home life untenable, while others were pushed aside because they were suffering abuse or neglect, or because husbands simply didn't want to deal with them anymore. Some stayed only a short time before being judged "rehabilitated" and released; others stayed for years, or until their deaths.

Piecing Together Lives from the Archive

The narrator becomes a kind of diver into the lives of these women, piecing together their circumstances from doctors' notes and census records, and imaginatively building out the parts that the records can't tell her — conjuring a probable picture of these women's mindsets. Part of her access comes through a doctor at the institution named Lucia Strangman, the first woman to qualify as a psychiatrist in the British Isles, who worked there for many years and, by the book's account, had real sympathy for her female patients and tried to help them become healthier. Lucia becomes the narrator's key not just into individual lives, but into how the institution itself was run — predominantly by men, which shaped how women's symptoms were interpreted, classified, and treated.

The narrator often catches herself questioning how much she can really trust these accounts, especially from the male doctors, and how much can genuinely be gleaned from a census and the details it includes — or the details people chose to omit because they didn't want to be officially classified this way. Part of the book grapples with the real difficulty of researching these women's lives: the archive is publicly available only up to about a hundred years ago, after which point access is restricted to protect the privacy of more recent patients. That's the right call, but it also blocks her from finding out what ultimately happened to a number of the women she becomes invested in. She's also restricted from recording their real names. She invents pseudonyms but wants to record their true names, believing these women would have wanted to be properly known and remembered.

Alongside the text of the records are scattered photographs of some of these women, some reproduced in the book itself. She writes that she can't get the thought of their images out of her mind once she's seen them, and the text about their lives is layered over these old photographs, which carry an eerie sense of specters brought into the present. There's so much of this book that functions as a ghost story — though it keeps posing the question of who exactly the ghost is: the reader in the present, the author of this book or the women from the past?

Obsession and Home Life

The narrator becomes so engaged with these women's lives that she finds herself dwelling around the structure as it's being converted into apartments, having odd encounters with construction workers questioning what she's doing there, and small battles with librarians and archive keepers as she tries to find out as much as she can. She recognizes that, in becoming so obsessed with this project, she's in some ways neglecting her own home life, her family, her children — and there's a real self-questioning thread about why this matters so much to her when she feels she should be focused on her own family. But it's clearly important to her personally to honor and recognize these women, to really hear their voices and help preserve them, and there's a touching nobility to the project — most of these women would likely have been entirely forgotten if Ní Ghríofa hadn't written this account.

One of the women's stories I found especially touching is that of a woman named Dora, a committed reader who found in literature a kind of escape and a way of staying sane in a world that felt uncontrollable to her. The book also maps these women across periods of history — when the narrative reaches the early twentieth century and the First World War, there's real, palpable fear and depression among the women for family members who might be sent to fight, layered on top of whatever conditions they already carried. Many of the symptoms described, like severe depression after giving birth, are conditions we'd now readily recognize and treat, but at the time were widely misunderstood, dismissed, and used as further reason to push these women aside.

Comparison with Other Recent Irish Books

Reading this, I found myself thinking about other recent Irish literature. There's Jan Carson's novel “Few and Far Between”, set on an archipelago off the coast of Ireland, which includes a facility housing patients who have gone completely silent — comatose in the sense that they can no longer communicate, most often because of some massive trauma that has caused them to entirely mentally shut down. I also thought about Maggie O'Farrell's new novel “Land”, and the way mythology and its relationship to landscape plays such a large part in that book too. There's so much great new Irish literature being published right now, and I love how these books feel like they're partly in conversation with each other — looking at some of the same questions from different angles and different perspectives.

The Writing Itself

What Ní Ghríofa is really writing about is this connection with the past, with people from the past, and how different we actually are from them in the present — how much we can identify with those who have been lost, whose voices are mostly gone except for whatever traces in records we can find. There's a gorgeous lyricism to her writing, and a sense of creating a touchstone with history that I found incredibly moving. One line I noted down: “It was a relief to be absent from herself. If she was absent, who was present?” This question casts an eerie shadow over the book, but it's also quietly probing where the self actually exists, and who we are, if we're identifying so strongly with people from the past that there's both a strong sense of connectedness and an absolute absence of self.

Verdict

This book poses much larger questions about identity while specifically working through the records of these women's lives, and there's such a sense of compassion in it, alongside a genuine questioning of who we really are and where we fit into the past. I absolutely loved reading it, and I'd been eager to get to it ever since reading the author's previous book, “A Ghost in the Throat”, which is another extraordinary and singular reading experience — there, the author connects just as strongly with a specific figure from the past, a poet, looking at similar questions of history and psychological and social struggle that still resonate in the present. I sank into this new book completely as it's such a strange and searching experience.

Flesh by David Szalay

Why I Picked It Up

It feels to me like a lot of the large-scale political conflicts in the world today stem, in part, from a kind of crisis of modern masculinity. Over the past century or so, we've seen a gradual shift away from a predominantly patriarchal culture toward one that's much more diverse and inclusive, and for some men that shift has created real insecurity about how to be a man in the world today — insecurity that, for some, has pushed them toward more reactionary positions. We can see that reflected in certain political leaders, who are themselves reflective of large swaths of men in the population. It seemed to me like a good way to start working through and understanding this is to understand what it actually means to be a man: to inhabit a body with all its attendant desires, and to inhabit masculinity in the world today. Flesh by David Szalay is a novel that gave me a lot of insight, meaning, and poignancy on exactly that front, even though I myself have inhabited a man's body my entire life.

Premise

The novel follows one man, István, who is born in Hungary, and we follow him from adolescence and the onset of puberty through many different stages of his life: prison, war, fatherhood, and entering the upper echelons of high finance and business, all the way into his later years. Following him through these stages really tapped into what it means to inhabit a body in this way, to be a man — and I found it fascinating, especially because I think what Szalay does here is deceptively simple.

István comes across, on the surface, as very straightforward and in many ways very passive — things just seem to happen to him. But gradually he develops a lot more agency, and even though his exterior stays simple and straightforward, his personality reveals far more nuance, complexity, and interior richness the further we follow him. The novel moves through his life in distinct sections, with gaps in between that go unnarrated — spaces we have to imaginatively fill in ourselves. I read an interview with Szalay where he described wanting to give readers the sense that they'd read one great, big epic life, as if the book were a thousand pages long, even though instead we get these discrete sections and the book itself is only around 350 pages.

Surface Simplicity, Interior Depth

Part of why István seems so simple on the surface is that a huge amount of the dialogue in this book is monosyllabic — someone will ask him a question and he'll just say "okay," "fine," "fine, okay." Those are many of his actual responses. But there's so much more going on underneath which is gradually revealed over the course of the narrative, along with the varying degrees to which he actually has agency in his own life: sometimes he finds himself in circumstances that spiral beyond his control, and sometimes he takes a very active part, for good or bad. That contrast makes him a genuinely complex character despite his straightforward demeanor.

This is something I think we often see when looking at adolescent boys generally — that there may not seem to be much going on under the surface, especially through the stages of puberty, when so much is driven by sex and desire. But Szalay shows that the desires attendant to inhabiting a man's body aren't only about sexual desire and libido; they're also about a desire for power, respect, and control, and the novel shows that playing out differently across each stage of István's life. This gradually builds toward a much larger understanding of his whole being.

Fatherhood and Looking Back

One of the most powerful sections for me is when István becomes a father and starts to view his own adolescent son, seeing and understanding things about himself through his son that he didn't necessarily understand when he himself was becoming a man — when he was simply thrown into that experience and carried along by what his body demanded of him. There's a striking passage where, reflecting on his own adolescence from the vantage point of fatherhood, István describes “Eleven, twelve, thirteen... the surprising new things his body wanted, and his inability to refuse it when it wanted them... And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you're left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you're having are universal or entirely specific to you.” I found this way of looking at the gap between interior and exterior life — between what people project onto him as a "typical man" and what he's actually struggling with inside, unsure if any of it is universal or entirely his own — genuinely fascinating.

Comparisons with Other Writers

I'd previously read Szalay's earlier book, All That Man Is, and really enjoyed it — it's a collection of interlinked short stories about many different men, also exploring masculinity across a range of examples, and I remember thinking that any one of those stories could have been expanded into a full novel of its own. Flesh feels like exactly that: taking one life, István's, and giving it the same episodic, section-by-section treatment. There's real drama in what's revealed in the story's twists and turns, but there's also so much subtlety and shading to his interior life gradually surfacing alongside it.

This novel reminded me of a lot of great literature exploring manhood. There's something of Dickens in it — a coming-of-age story of someone from humble beginnings rising into the upper echelons of society, and charting both that rise and his eventual fall. There's also something of Dostoevsky's gradual moral inquiry into the choices people make and the agency we have to enact change in our own lives and the world around us. And in its use of dialogue, it reminded me enormously of Cormac McCarthy's The Road — there's a great deal of dialogue in Flesh, but not much is actually being said, and what is said is simple and plain, yet becomes so charged with emotion, and with everything left unsaid, that I don't think I've encountered dialogue used quite that way in a novel since The Road.

Flesh also builds a powerful sense of place: István never quite feels he can naturally inhabit either Hungary, where he grows up, or London, where he eventually moves, and there's real discomfort in both physical spaces. So much of the novel becomes about where he might find a sense of home — through his relationships with women, but also in a literal, physical sense of home, alongside inhabiting this sense of manhood itself. That also brought to mind a more recent novel, Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter), which explores a very similar border between an interior and exterior life for a man — there are lines in Solenoid about the mind and body, and about how the army shapes a young man's isolation and introversion rather than simply "making him a man," that felt like they could have been lifted straight from Flesh.

Verdict

Overall, I think this is a genuinely extraordinary novel. On an initial read it might feel deceptively simple in what it's doing, but it left me with a lot of questions to keep turning over, and it has a real haunting quality to it — following the life of a man who seems fairly ordinary, and who vacillates between wanting to be the hero of his own story and falling back into a kind of insubstantial, anonymous ordinariness. I think the way it explores that tension is fascinating and very well done.

I'd love to know if you've read this and whether you agree or disagree with me, or if you've read anything else by Szalay — so far I've only read this and All That Man Is, but I want to read much more of his work now, because I think he's an incredibly talented author of a similar stature to the writers I've mentioned here.

Since I recorded my original thoughts on Flesh it went on to win the 2025 Booker Prize, making David Szalay the first Hungarian-British writer to win the award: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ05mayaISU

Land by Maggie O'Farrell

First Impressions

“Land” is Maggie O'Farrell's tenth novel, and this is clearly a skilled writer at the height of her powers. She's already a beloved, award-winning author, but she's having quite the year: alongside this major new book, she received an Oscar nomination for co-writing the adapted screenplay for the “Hamnet” film with Chloé Zhao.

I read “Land” with my online book club, and we've had some really great discussions about it. It was such an immersive, atmospheric experience — first off, this is a family saga, and I have a passion for good family sagas. I wouldn't say I unreservedly loved this novel; I did have some issues with it, which I'll get to. But it's genuinely impressive how O'Farrell balances so many things in this story and packs so much into it, and the quality of the writing at a sentence level is such a pleasure to read.

Premise

The novel opens in 1865 on the west coast of Ireland, a decade after the Great Famine. We follow Tomás, an Irish mapmaker working for the British Ordnance Survey, and his reluctant ten-year-old son Liam, as Tomás sets out to map a certain section of the country. Their dynamic felt especially moving to me: quite quickly, Tomás undergoes a transformation that destabilizes their relationship, and Liam — who'd previously hated the work and didn't even want to be on this trip — suddenly just wants things to go back to normal, because he realizes he can no longer rely on the parent he'd always depended on. There's something so heartbreaking about a child recognizing that.

That split motivates the very different directions Tomás and Liam's lives take afterward, and it casts a shadow over the whole story. At first, Tomás's sudden change of course felt like it came a little too easily, but as the novel digs into his backstory, it becomes clear his turn is rooted in trauma from his own difficult past rather than being arbitrary.

It's a dramatic, surprising opening, and there's real suspense throughout — surprises I didn't see coming, both narratively and in terms of plot. O'Farrell sustains real tension across a relatively long book, though I think it could have been even longer, honestly, since there were other elements I'd have gladly read more of.

This novel is about so many things at once: a family story, emigration from Ireland, the relationships between family members and how they transform over time, connections and breaks within families, the history of Ireland and British colonialism, mythology, and the psychology of its characters. It intertwines all of these elements into a genuinely riveting tale.

Details in the Cover

One of the joys of this book — at least the UK edition — is that there are design elements embedded in the cover that click into place once you've read it. I have to credit members of my book club for pointing some of these out. Renee spotted a small embossed gold fish on the back cover, which turns out to carry real weight once you know the mythology underneath this novel (more on that below). Nancy noticed that if you turn the cover on its side, the black shape in the middle looks like a dog sitting at rest — and there is indeed a dog in this novel, part of a lineage of dogs that matters a great deal to the story. I love how O'Farrell included a non-human animal this way; the land in this novel doesn't just belong to the humans, but to other inhabitants too, living, dead, and mythological.

The Weight of History

It's impressive how O'Farrell balances the real history of people who suffered through the Great Famine with the rest of the story. We see a village that's been decimated, and there's a very moving early scene where Tomás meets a local widow while trying to remap the area — she recounts, house by house, which homes are empty and which have only one or a few survivors left. There's a heartbreaking moment where she sorts through clothes she made for her now-deceased family, conveying the scale of the collective grief in that community.

The occasional references to the Viscount are genuinely chilling — a figure of imperial greed who holds sway over the locals' lives while living in his own separate, privileged reality, physically close to Tomás and the villagers but worlds apart socially and financially. It's a legal requirement of tenancy, we're told, for locals to salute the Viscount whenever they encounter him — which is absolutely outrageous, and it made me think about how the demarcation of borders on a map isn't just an abstract exercise in geography. It has legal ramifications that shape the tangible, daily reality of whoever lives on that land.

Early on, the book also carries real Dickensian notes, especially in the sections touching on Tomás and his wife Phina's early life together and the hardships they endured.

Part of the emotional anchor of this book, as O'Farrell has discussed in interviews, is her own strong connection to it. She was born in Ireland (though raised mostly in Scotland and Wales), and her great-great-grandfather — also named Tomás — was commissioned by the British Ordnance Survey to map the land, just like the character. He also had a son who became a Jesuit, which is the basis for Liam's storyline.

She's exploring her own family history and imagining what life must have been like for these ancestors — something I think most of us wonder about, usually with only scattered fragments of information to go on. That's really at the heart of this book: wondering about people from the past, the struggles they faced, and putting ourselves in their shoes. It ties into Ireland's long history of diaspora, where economic and political hardship forced people to leave and try to build better lives elsewhere, fragmenting families across the world.

A major theme of the book is disconnection, and O'Farrell renders it in some genuinely moving ways — there are several instances throughout the novel of family members who lose touch, or who come close to each other without ever realizing it, because of everything that's been severed by displacement and time. It's a far-fetched kind of coincidence in places, but this sort of thing has probably happened many times throughout history — so much gets lost between generations as people move and family connections are severed. O'Farrell uses this to show how large historical forces and institutions can transform a family from a single unit into disconnected individuals struggling to survive on their own. There are also moments where connections are painfully, movingly reformed, and even with the coincidences involved, it felt believable to me given how common this kind of dispersal actually was.

A Note on Tone

Some people in my book club found this book, while an excellent reading experience, quite depressing overall, and I'd agree that a few specific moments feel almost overwhelmingly sad, on top of the reverberating effects of the Famine that shadow the entire story. I think it's partly a somber book because it's representing the lives of people caught up in real historical tragedy, both on a large scale and an individual one.

But O'Farrell tempers this with instances where hope is possible. There are several moments where things could easily have gone much worse for these characters than they actually do, and O'Farrell includes a real amount of hope alongside the awfulness. It builds genuine dramatic tension — I couldn't predict how things would turn out for these family members, and I mean that as a compliment.

Structure

Technically, this novel is quite unusual — O'Farrell puts it together in a structurally ambitious way, but it never left me confused, even when I was surprised by where it went. It's broken into parts rather than chapters. The first part switches between three timelines: Tomás and Liam in 1865, Tomás's own childhood, and a future point involving Liam. It keeps moving between these until you really understand these characters, and it builds a larger, more complex picture of Tomás.

At another point, the narrative plunges into the deep history of the land itself, centered on a sacred spring in a copse that Tomás and Liam stumble across — I found this section genuinely inventive and fun, and it clearly shows the influence of “North Woods” by Daniel Mason, which O'Farrell has cited in interviews: if you've read it, you'll know it centers a single house as its own protagonist across centuries of inhabitants. O'Farrell has taken this kind of experimental approach to narrative and time before, too — most notably in “Hamnet”, which tracks the bubonic plague's journey as it reaches England.

Later, O'Farrell springs a genuinely clever structural surprise involving the siblings that I didn't see coming and won't spoil here. Techniques like this add a great deal of suspense to the reading experience, and it's part of why I think this book works so well specifically as a novel, and not just as a cast of characters waiting to be brought to life on screen, which was a criticism Melissa Harrison raised in her Guardian review of the book.

Irish Mythology Woven Through

O'Farrell folds a handful of Irish myths into this family saga so that the prehistoric past and 1865 feel like the same ground remembering itself. It's a poignant detail that the author's father used to read her these myths when she was a child — something she resented at the time but is grateful for now. I've been enjoying reading more about these and how they might have inspired O'Farrell in writing this novel.

The spring that Tomás and Liam discover draws on the legend of the Salmon of Knowledge: a salmon that eats the hazelnuts of wisdom that fall into a sacred well, so that whoever eats the salmon in turn gains all the world's knowledge — this is how the boy Deimne becomes the hero Fionn mac Cumhaill. It's a lovely detail that the golden fish embossed on the back cover turns out to be a quiet key to the whole novel once you know this myth. The spring the family finds isn't just a pretty piece of landscape — it's the well of wisdom from the oldest layer of Irish myth, and the cover is quietly signalling that from the start.

Sacred wells with healing powers are an important strand of real Irish folk practice, and this was clearly a major influence on O'Farrell, who has described visiting a number of these wells scattered around Ireland. There's also the legend of Oisín, a man who leaves for the Otherworld and returns to find centuries have passed, aging instantly the moment he touches Irish soil again — I think this legend was on O'Farrell's mind while writing the novel's emigration strands, even if (as I get into below) those sections abroad aren't quite as engaging as the ones set in Ireland.

The family dog is named Bran, after Fionn mac Cumhaill's own legendary hound — and in the myth, Bran isn't an ordinary dog at all, but a transformed human, born to a woman who was turned into a hound while pregnant. O'Farrell draws on that myth in a way that blurs the line between human and animal, in exactly the way the cover's hidden dog silhouette hints at.

Irish folklore is also full of people turning into animals, and of changelings — uncanny children who carry a wisdom beyond their years. That idea is embodied in Eugene, the novel's nonverbal son, who can be read simultaneously as a child with a real, grounded condition and as something more mythic. There's a genuinely satisfying payoff to this thread by the novel's end, which I'll leave for you to discover.

Where It Loses Some Steam

O'Farrell has said she deliberately set out to write a different kind of Irish emigration story, since there are already so many excellent ones. The novel follows Liam and Enda as they move abroad, and how their individual stories unfold is genuinely surprising. Enda, who has natural musical talents, has a story I found fascinating, if harrowing. Liam's strand — training with the Jesuits — I found less engaging; it felt more plodding, and I kept wanting the book to return to the main family story back in Ireland. I suspect O'Farrell became especially invested in Liam's section because of how directly it mirrors her own family history: her great-grandfather joining the Jesuits (a significant thing for a rural boy at the time) and later leaving the order (also significant). It's understandable she wanted to imaginatively fill in so many details about this occurrence, but I felt it did pull focus from the stronger core of the book.

Characters and Where It All Lands

I was deeply engaged by Tomás and Phina's relationship, which changes over time as circumstances pull the two of them in different directions. The split between Tomás and Liam is painful, but it's moving to watch how their relationship evolves over the rest of the book. I also appreciated the tense, prickly relationship between Tomás and Enda, which shifts in some rewarding ways as the story goes on. Rose, understandably, has real friction with Enda over the course of the novel, and following where that relationship goes was one of the more affecting threads for me.

There's also a lovely recurring object: a shawl connected to Phina's side of the family, which survives only as a single tassel by the story's end — the kind of small, seemingly inconsequential object so many families keep passing down long after its original meaning has been lost.

Where the novel ultimately lands is dramatic and genuinely hopeful — O'Farrell gives the story real emotional light amid the tragedy and puts a clever new spin on the mythology she's built up throughout its final pages. Even with some reservations, and a few coincidences that stretch credulity, I was completely swept into this novel and really enjoyed the experience. What Maggie O'Farrell has done here is genuinely impressive.

If you've read this book, I'd love to know what you thought: what were your favourite elements, what did you make of the structure, did the mythology woven through it work for you? And if you're thinking about reading it, or have another favourite Maggie O'Farrell novel, I'd love to hear about that too. Of her other books, a couple I've found completely immersive are “The Marriage Portrait” and “This Must Be the Place” — though “Land” might now be my favourite of hers. It's a great achievement, and I had such a wonderful time reading it.

My Top 10 Books of 2026 So Far

We're at the halfway point of 2026, so it's time to go through my favorite books of the year so far. I've read 64 books in total, but as always, it's not about the quantity of what you read — it's about the quality of the reading experience. Plenty of those 64 have been great, but these 10 in particular are the ones that have really stuck with me: I keep thinking back on them, they linger in my mind, and I keep recommending them to other people. You can also watch a video where I discuss all these books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0535jLdmHA0

A Family Matter by Claire Lynch

This novel follows a fractured family across two timelines: a present-day thread in 2022 following a man named Heron who is struggling to tell his adult daughter Maggie that he has a terminal diagnosis, and a thread 40 years earlier following a young mother named Dawn who falls in love with another woman. The ending is so emotional it brings me to tears just thinking about it, and the pacing is so beautifully calibrated that I was gripped at the end of every chapter, desperate to know what happens next. It also raises a devastating piece of relatively recent history: in the 1980s, courts would routinely strip custody from mothers deemed "unfit" simply for being in a same-sex relationship, shattering families in the process. This novel deservedly won the Gold Prize at the Nero Book Awards.

Floodlines by Saleem Haddad

This sweeping family epic follows three estranged adult sisters in 2014 who are pulled back together to decide what to do with the legacy of their late father, one of Iraq's most famous artists. Each sister and the wider family — their mother, and one sister's son — are drawn so richly and distinctly that I can still recall them all clearly, and the novel is packed with dramatic, messy family-dinner-party energy alongside its meditation on art, politics, and Iraq's recent history. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Saleem Haddad at Hatchard's Bookshop, where he named The Waves by Virginia Woolf — my own favorite novel of all time — as one of his inspirations, which made the whole experience even more special.

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje, translated by David McKay

Set in the aftermath of the First World War, this immersive novel follows a soldier who has lost his memory and Julienne, a woman who arrives at his hospital claiming he is her long-lost husband and takes him home with her. What follows is a rich, complex exploration of whether she's telling the truth, threaded through with real insight into memory, identity, and the lingering damage of war. A story about amnesia could easily tip into soap-opera territory, but there's nothing gimmicky here — I was completely gripped, and its exploration of love and romance under such strained circumstances is remarkably nuanced. I honestly couldn't believe this didn't make the International Booker Prize shortlist this year.

In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević, translated by Anđelka Raguž

Set in the Bosnian countryside in the summer of 1993 as war sweeps through the region, this novel follows two adolescent girls and renders their daily lives with such poetic, evocative writing that it creates an overwhelming sense of place. It captures how the war gradually reshapes the individual, sensory lives of everyone in this village, and while the subject matter sounds like it would be relentlessly bleak, the writing instead gives real dignity and grace to ordinary people caught up in much larger events. The prose struck me as startlingly, piercingly beautiful — I found myself thinking of comparisons to Toni Morrison in how closely it ties environment, memory, and human relationships together. It was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award this year, and I think it deserves a much wider readership.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

This year's winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction — somewhat contentiously, though I was thrilled by the result — is told entirely in letters, and I fell head over heels for it. It follows Sybil Van Antwerp, a woman with a steely, reserved exterior but a real hunger to connect, and the novel slowly reveals the whole web of her relationships, including an unlikely, moving friendship with a struggling teenage boy. It took me a little while to adjust to the epistolary format, but once I was in, I couldn't put it down, especially as Sybil confronts a crisis point in her life while losing her sight. I loved all the literary references threaded through it too, since Sybil is a voracious reader who corresponds with a number of authors.

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

This one really took me by surprise: set in a small Mississippi town, it follows the wife of a local reverend and a teenage girl who falls for the reverend's son, known as Wonderboy, with the dual perspectives slowly revealing who this young man really is. It's about the tense, evolving relationship between the two women at its center, and about stripping away the façade of the town's supposedly pious men. The structure — moving between the women's voices and documents establishing the town's history — is genuinely clever, and it shows how deeply religion is woven into the community and how that has constrained these women's lives in different ways. The writing throughout is sharp and precise; it's just a wonderfully clever book.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

This nonfiction book investigates the life and death of Zac Brettler, a teenage boy who was filmed falling from the balcony of a luxury London apartment complex and died in the Thames in 2019. Keefe traces how Zac got pulled into a murky criminal underworld, becoming increasingly unknown to his own family before his death, and the family's subsequent search to understand what actually happened to him. I read it at an increasing pace, desperate for more detail, and Keefe's research is as diligent and thorough as ever, raising genuinely intriguing questions about the case itself. It also becomes a wider lens on how commerce and politics have shaped London over decades.

Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke

This reprint of a novel first published in 1965 was an amazing discovery for me, centered on Oliver, a teenage Black boy in Michigan living with his aunt and her close friend, a wealthy white Jewish woman who is also his patron and is funding his education. I loved following Oliver's precocious observation of these two women — who bicker and reconcile constantly, often fuelled by copious amounts of rum — especially once a charlatan medium arrives claiming he can contact the patroness's deceased son, and Oliver becomes determined to protect both women from being conned. Underneath the surface-level farce there's real feeling in how the novel explores Oliver's Blackness and his latent queerness. I had a particularly special experience with this one: I read the entire book aloud to my husband on a trip around Scotland, and it made me want to seek out much more of this author's work.

John of John by Douglas Stuart

So many people have been reading and loving this one, and rightly so — it's an emotionally complex story following a young man named Cal who returns to the remote Scottish island where he grew up, to his devoutly religious father John and his eccentric grandmother. The novel is steeped in the atmosphere of their daily work with textiles and sheep, and in a particular form of claustrophobia that comes from living in an isolated village where everyone knows everyone else's business, leaving little room for privacy or self-expression. It explores repressed desire and the real, tangible limits of living somewhere with so few options, and I got completely emotionally wrapped up in it. Visiting Scotland and seeing that coastline for myself afterward brought the novel back to life all over again.

Transcription by Ben Lerner

This is a short novel that packs in an enormous amount: it initially feels almost random, told in three distinct parts whose destination is genuinely surprising, but it all coalesces into something that left me with so much to think about regarding memory, technology, and how we live now. It opens with a man traveling to interview his 90-year-old mentor — a hugely respected intellectual figure — only to drop his phone in the sink before the interview, leaving him unable to record it. What follows explores how knowledge and ideas are actually passed down and altered across generations, rather than existing in some pure, unchanging form, all wrapped in an unexpectedly emotional story about fathers and their children. This deservedly won this year's Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

A bonus mention: The Frenzy by Joyce Carol Oates

Before wrapping up, I have to mention Joyce Carol Oates' most recent short story collection, which is full of stories that are incredibly gripping and engaging. It was a genuine pleasure and honor to interview her about this collection — Joyce Carol Oates just turned 88 and is still so sharp, with so many ideas, that talking with her was truly inspiring.

Those are my favorite reads of 2026 so far — there's so much more to say about all of them. I'd love to hear if you've read any of these, if any of them have caught your interest, or what your own best reads of the year have been so far.

The Frenzy by Joyce Carol Oates

In this arresting new short story collection, Oates evokes the lives of a diverse group of characters, many of whom have reached a crisis point in their lives, in such a mesmerising way that I felt swept up in the momentum of these tales. From an abusive affair gone wrong, to strained parent-child relationships, to individuals who've lost their spouses, we witness the worlds of these characters being completely upended. The book is divided into three distinct parts, which move from stories that are piercingly realistic to the more hallucinatory or surreal. Some take place over a compressed amount of time, while others span a lifetime. Of course, each tale can be read individually. However, I read the book from start to finish, and when read together, these stories enter into a kind of conversation with each other. The result is very engaging, moving and haunting.

I especially enjoyed how there are many powerful descriptions of the natural world throughout these stories (especially of the sky and bodies of water). For example, in different tales Oates describes "Wintry Atlantic churning, frothing, glittering like a gigantic skin shaking itself, great galleon-clouds passing overhead torn and tattered by winds"; "mists rise languidly as exhaled breaths"; "the vast shimmering river... of the hue of molten metal, that could not possibly move swiftly, treacherously. But it does." I've read so many descriptions of rivers and skies throughout Oates' many books, yet she always has a way of presenting them from a unique angle which is packed with emotion. This creates an atmosphere akin to a stage upon which the various dramas of these stories unfold.

Some of my favourites include the title story, 'The Frenzy,' which details an ill-advised affair between a middle-aged man, Cassidy, and his friend's daughter, Brianna. Cassidy's affair is partly about longing for his own youth and how his options have narrowed at this point in his life. The end of this particular tale is so satisfying. 'The Bicycle Accident' also has a disturbing quality, in which a mother named Arlette is so concerned with social status and throwing a party that she neglects to truly see the challenges her daughter, Evie, is going through until it's too late. The stories 'The Call', 'The Return' and 'The Redwoods' have a fascinating way of considering alternative paths in life through a variety of narrative techniques and unique situations. 'Night Fishing at Antibes' poignantly considers two individuals' different approaches to grief and how they find an uneasy camaraderie with each other. The later stories also have a reassuringly hopeful quality, given how much hardship the characters endure.

It was a pleasure to interview Oates (who recently turned 88 years old) about this book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVNf6uh3vww

Son of Nobody by Yann Martel

The most noticeable thing when starting to read “Son of Nobody” is how the story is divided into The Psoad, an imagined newfound epic poem which follows the Trojan war from the point of view of a foot soldier from Midea, and footnotes by their translator, the Classics academic Harlow Donne. I usually read footnotes in books if they are brief and interesting enough not to disrupt the flow of the story. Of course, in Martel's novel these footnotes are an integral part of the novel since Harlow's personal tale runs alongside and, in a much more humbler and more domestic way, mirrors the dramatic tensions raised in this alternative version of the Greek-Trojan war myth recorded on pottery fragments. I enjoyed how much space was given to these notes on the page to emphasis how they really need to be read. I was also glad the book included some maps of these ancient regions alongside (maybe less necessary) illustrations of animals. Once I got into the rhythm of the story I enjoyed going back and forth between these sections and how The Psoad comes to take up more space towards the end.

Of course it's not necessary to have read “The Iliad” to read and enjoy “Son of Nobody”. In fact, Martel wrote this novel mindful that many readers probably won't have read it. In some ways “Son of Nobody” could serve as a helpful primer for going to read “The Iliad” afterwards since he gives a useful breakdown of which Gods support which side of the war and goes to great lengths to explain the overall story and context of Homer's epic. I started reading “The Iliad” for the first time a couple of weeks ago, but I'm experiencing it through the complicated process of both listening to the Emily Wilson translation on audiobook and reading sections of the translation by E.V. Rieu (revised and updated by Peter Jones and D.C.H. Rieu) and I'm enjoying it immensely. I think it helps that I had some familiarity with the Greek Myths and the overall story of Homer's epic before going into it. I won't go into much detail about my reaction to “The Iliad” here but, as Martel points out, the only voices we hear in “The Iliad” are almost exclusively from leaders or Gods. “The Iliad” does give small insights into the lives of many others and I've been most struck by descriptions of soldiers on the battlefield knowing they are probably about to die. While I enjoy rolling my eyes at the pettiness and arrogance of many of the authority figures I have found myself longing for the points of view of common people caught up in this drawn-out war.

In recent years there has been a slew of novels whose stories revise the famous Greek myths, many of which focus much more on a female or queer point of view. But I like that Martel has taken a slightly different approach focusing on class rather than gender. I appreciated the (mostly) believable imitation Martel gives with The Psoad as it matches the tone and manner in how the famous epic sounds as it began as an oral tale. I especially liked how The Psoad creates a sense of atmosphere and drama, the anticipation of the soldiers reaching Troy and the tragedy of ships initially lost in the approach. There's one story about a citizen of Troy and his table which is gradually left with four empty sides which was especially poignant. The choice to reveal the bard of this epic as Thersites was clever as he's the sole voice of dissent and a representative of the common people in “The Iliad” questioning the authority figures. It was especially pleasing the way that the voice in The Psoad slyly mocks the arrogant powerful figures calling the shots, especially when Hades enters at one point to deliver hilarious views and comments on these supposedly great men. I really like how Hades enters Martel's narrative because he's always struck me as one of the most interesting Greek gods. He never initially wanted to rule over The Underworld but it was the realm he was obliged to oversee so he feels like a fascinatingly conflicted figure. The end of “Son of Nobody” is especially poignant and I like how it ties back in with the beginning of The Psoad.

Then there are the footnotes which are a combination of Harlow writing to his daughter Helen/reflecting on the disintegration of his relationship with his wife Gail and commenting upon the text of The Psoad. While there are some emotional moments in the story of Harlow's family life the majority of this aspect of the novel felt a little thin to me. The novel's structure didn't allow him to get into too much detail because it would overwhelm the footnote. So, while I appreciated Helen's pluckiness demanding a story from her father, the intimidating professor Franklin Cubitt and a harrowing storyline about illness and loss, I didn't feel as engaged by his family drama and the way Martel sometimes strained to draw parallels between Harlow's life and the lives in the epic. However, I did find it interesting to think about Harlow's dilemma pursuing his passion as opposed to staying with his family. It made me think about the way I spend so much time on my own reading in isolation rather than engaging with my partner or friends. Despite this, I was more drawn to Harlow's analysis of “The Iliad” vs The Psoad. He makes a lot of good points about inconsistencies and illogical aspects of Homer's epic and the actions of the Greeks and Trojans. It made me eager to return to “The Iliad” and newly consider aspects of it. As much as I appreciated this it also slightly distracted from my enjoyment of The Psoad because it came to make this poem feel more manufactured and gimmicky to suit Martel's points about egalitarianism rather than making it seem like an authentic found document.

Overall, I mostly enjoyed “Son of Nobody” and admire its big ambition (Martel really took on a huge task with creating both a classic and contemporary story) but some parts did feel a bit flimsy. I appreciate how this book prompts thoughts on the nature of storytelling and the role it plays in our civilisation, whose stories get told and why, and the way it points the reader back to “The Iliad” because there is a reason this tale is a foundational text in Western society. It's also fascinating to think about the point that so little in “The Iliad” or the gospels of the Bible can be verified: “It is curious how two stories that have so changed history are so very hard to place in history.” As Martel describes, the point of such stories aren't really about fact or fiction but serve another purpose in being a touchstone to the human condition. But “Son of Nobody” doesn't have the space to get into the full complexity of trying to connect the Bible and “The Iliad” including how it might have played into the formation of the gospels. So the links Harlow strives to make towards the end feel like a big stretch! But, of course, given the way professor Cubitt is so dismissive of Harlow's work perhaps we're supposed to question the rigour of his research and his findings. However, I reckon that Martel is more on Harlow's side with his sense that the traditional academic rigour applied to studying the classics can be too limiting. I felt “Son of Nobody” was an engaging and entertaining read. I was glad I read it but it's not a new personal favourite.

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang

It took me a little while to settle into this debut novel though the author establishes some intriguing mysteries from the outset. At the beginning we meet Qianze who works a demanding job in New York City when her long lost father Weihong suddenly reappears. Where has he been? What is the prophecy that he's forgotten? Why is Qianze keeping Weihong's return a secret from her mother and boyfriend? What's the meaning of the apparitions which appear to Qianze? I really felt the monotony and claustrophobia of Qianze and Weihong's routines in her small NYC apartment with her gruelling financial office work days and his excessive drinking. Weihong's resentment towards her father abandoning them but her begrudging sense of obligation to look after him were palpable. I was glad when the story moves to Weihong and his mother Ming's history in China. However, as the narrative slides between periods of time I was initially confused about how this family tree fit together. It was only as more about their backstories were revealed that it made sense to me.

I felt it was impactful how the novel shows the terror of these periods of Chinese history including foot binding, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the Cultural Revolution. Though I was familiar with these aspects of the country's past, reading about them in this story and looking up brief overviews of them felt no less shocking. The widespread violence, betrayal, starvation, rape and murder which occurred during these upheavals is staggering. I felt the author did a good job of immersing readers in particular examples of these periods of time showing how it impacted her characters. In addition to the resentment her parents have that she was not born a boy and being betrothed to the physician's son from birth, Ming experienced the effects of food shortages and the Japanese reforms that were responsible for “turning girls' education into a sham”. The terrible emphasis and pressure placed upon her to “become a woman” and start getting her periods was particularly striking.

Equally the author shows in Weihong's upbringing that joining the Red Guard was a matter of survival for him, but also partly the result of inherited trauma taking the form of violence. The scenes where students butcher members of the community was horrific, but I felt one of the most striking sections in Weihong's tale was when he came after his sister Kangmei's beloved chicken. Though the shifts in time made it challenging to always know how this family fit together, it felt unique how the author braided the stories of these different generations to show that the past can't simply be forgotten because it manifests in their personalities and in the supernatural encounters they experience. The cumulative meaning of this only became clear to me towards the end of the novel. I don't think it was entirely successful for me, but the author was effective in making me feel the way this traumatic history severely wounded each individual and was carried between generations.

It was creative how the author incorporated mythological/magical realism into the story where supernatural elements appear, but some instances felt jarring to me. I appreciated the scenes where Qianze is “haunted” by nightmares and real world encounters in a subway station. It also felt effective when Ming first encountered an ominous hare with horns. However, I was less convinced by Weihong and Kangmei meeting the mysterious woman in the alley and how the woman's voice has a continued presence in Weihong's mind. Weihong's encounter with a man who sees people's auras was odd. And I was really put off by Ming's encounter with The Oni/demon while she's trapped in a comfort house and an odd scene where she seems to turn into a preying mantis. I suppose this could be a result of the massive amounts of opium she was imbibing, but I didn't know what to make of her reencountering this figure later and the role he plays in the plot. It felt like too much of a stretch for me to take this storyline seriously.

There are some powerfully evocative moments in this novel and I mostly enjoyed her prose style. However, parts of it felt overwritten. For instance, I got a real key into Weihong's character when it's stated “He was damned to continue circling his wounds like tub water around the drain, the old emotions still raw... his past resisted chronology. It looped. It wound.” but it felt unnecessary to further describe this as a “Fibonacci sequence” (which, of course, I had to look up to understand.) I felt the author used dough and hand-pulled noodles as a metaphor too often. A line I appreciated was when Weihong initially leaves his wife and daughter and Qianze hears “That creaky screen door that could never hide anything.” This really immersed me in what it was like to live in this house where certain sounds are so well known. I felt all the main characters of Qianze, Weihong and Ming were well developed. But I wanted to know more about some of the more peripheral figures such as Kangmei (who disappears for so long until the very end) and Ming's mother-in-law whose character/motivations could have been elaborated upon.

After all the horrors and heartache in this story I was glad the author also offers some hope but the ending felt a little too neat to me. Overall, I appreciated this novel and its ambition, but its somewhat convoluted structure wasn't entirely successful for me. I love a family saga and I understand why she used so many time shifts, but part of me longed for a linear tale. It was interesting to learn in an interview that she initially wrote the stories of the different generations separately and I wonder how its impact would have changed if she'd simply fitted them together chronologically. Nevertheless, it's impressive how much she did in this first novel and I think she's a promising writer.

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

For the past several years Strout has created a beautiful tapestry of novels about the intersecting lives of a number of her characters – most notably Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge and Bob Burgess in titles such as “Oh William!”, “Lucy by the Sea” and “Tell Me Everything”. So it's notable that she has written a new novel which is entirely outside of this set of books – although keen readers will notice there is an easter egg within “The Things We Never Say” that refers to a previous Strout novel and definitively establishes that this story is entirely outside of that fictional universe. Though the setting and characters are somewhat different, Strout's characteristic style of fiction persists. We follow idiosyncratic characters having conversations and privately contemplating the world. The narrative dips into the past and gives small snapshots into the future. The author has such a moving way of representing her characters' thoughts where memories intrude upon the present to produce a ruminative and lightly philosophical sensation. The genius of Strout's writing is that it is both highly relatable and profound as it guides the reader through what matters the most.

This new story focuses on Artie Dam, a history teacher who lives on the coast of Massachusetts. He's been married to his wife Evie over thirty years, has an adult son and enjoys taking meditative solo afternoon sailing trips. And in this strange new post-pandemic world Artie finds himself preoccupied with a sense of loneliness and the question of whether we really have free will. Not only does he contemplate the possibility of incompatibilism but he boldly raises this issue in casual conversation. Naturally many people are quick to bat away discussing such a ponderous question. Gradually Artie finds truer understanding with the people in his life by daring to speak about things which aren't normally verbalised, but this isn't a sure method of achieving real connections. The results are both surprising and humbling as the story concerns the nuances of human communication. Sometimes his exchanges are tenderly moving and sometimes they're just awkward in a way which is true to the ebb and flow of our personal networks. Some friends turn into strangers and some strangers become close friends. The central father and son relationship in this story is especially poignant. There is also a narrative tension as Artie discovers a dramatic secret about his family which may or may not completely upend his life.

The novel begins in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential elections and Artie has a terrifying feeling about what the result will be. In a conversation it's remarked “He's going to win, you know... People want authority. They crave authority. And she doesn't have the kind they want, and he does. In his cult following kind of way.” Everyone who has lived through this recent period of time will know exactly what is being said here. Though Strout possesses a seemingly gentle style of storytelling this novel is also excoriating about the present state of the country and the very real threats we may face in the near future. It's no coincidence that Artie is a teacher of history and his class openly discusses the lives of ordinary people from the Civil War and WWII. The anger and frustration with the state of our present times is palpable in this story. Artie witnesses bursts of violence and firm political lines being drawn. Yet surprising love can also be found between people who are seemingly diametrically opposed. What can we talk about and what can't we say? At one point it's stated: “to say anything real was to say things that nobody wanted to know. Or if they wanted to know, they would not care in the right way. Or even understand. It was a private thing, to be alive.” Though Artie is preoccupied with the question of free will, Strout seems more concerned with the question: what's happened to decency?

The Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 shortlist

Here are the 6 novels on the Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 shortlist! A new video is up on my YouTube channel reacting to each title as it is revealed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3ziiBgasQ4

I managed to read 13 of the 16 longlisted novels and I've read the entire shortlist. This is an interesting group of books with a few surprises. I was very much rooting for “The Correspondent”, “Flashlight” and “Dominion” to become finalists. I absolutely loved Virginia Evans' epistolary novel which balances several compelling plot lines and it's a many-faceted celebration of the power of the written word. Susan Choi's novel has already received a lot of praise – and rightfully so – as this story gradually explores a complex family dynamic and hidden cross-national history. Addie E Citchens' debut novel is so accomplished in how it explores the perspectives of two women in a predominantly patriarchal community. It's both a meditation on the impact of religious faith and the sometimes misplaced faith we have in those closest to us.

When I first started reading “Heart the Lover” I thought the story of a young woman's academic life was fine, but the second half of the novel completely hypnotised me as it meditates on the road not taken, longterm secrets and explores life going forward. “Kingfisher” is such a surprising novel as it follows a creative writing academic in a gay relationship who lives a very passive existence until he discovers a passion for an older female poet/essayist. It's refreshing how this story gives a reversal of the familiar older man/younger woman romance tale. “The Mercy Step” is a moving episodic story that follows a young woman of Caribbean heritage from the womb to a point in her life when she's establishing independence from her tight-knit family unit and abusive father. I loved her first experience going to a panto and how she becomes a passionate reader spending all her free time in the library.

I was disappointed that “Gloria Don't Speak”, “A Guardian and a Thief” and “The Benefactors” didn't make the shortlist. These were such wonderful, surprising reading experiences and I'd highly recommend them. In particular it's been great to see debut novelist Lucy Apps and talented Northern Irish writer Wendy Erskine getting some well-deserved recognition.

What do you think of the shortlist? Are there any titles on the list you're eager to read? Any novels which you were hoping would be a finalist?

The International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist

The International Booker Prize 2026 shortlist has been announced and what an interesting group! It's a female strong group of authors with five out of the six being women, and four of the six translators are female. Two debut novels feature on the list including “She Who Remains” and “The Nights are Quiet in Tehran”. Two authors have been listed for the award previously including Daniel Kehlmann for “Tyll” and Marie NDiaye.

I'm thrilled that both “The Director” and “She Who Remains” have been shortlisted! Kehlmann's story powerfully describes what happens to an artist that becomes trapped in a tyrannical government and Karabash's novel follows the dilemma of an individual who has been living in an extremely isolated conservative community. I also greatly enjoyed the gentle, evocative and tricksy tale in “Taiwan Travelogue” which also says something much larger about inherited privilege and translation. Following the fates of a family forced to leave their native Iran in “The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran” is a moving experience in itself, but reading it in the context of the current conflict in Iran makes it all the more poignant. Just yesterday I finished reading “On Earth As It Is Beneath” and it's such a disturbing and impactful story about humanity at its worst (and best) as individuals struggle to survive in an isolated prison run by a mad man. I'm looking forward to reading “The Witch” but it's not published yet.

I'm most surprised that “The Remembered Soldier” hasn't made the shortlist! It's a brilliant and complex story that's thrilling and emotionally impactful. Also, “Women Without Men” was such a surprising discovery and imaginative tale. “The Wax Child” was also a great surprise as this novel is about so much more than a historical witch trial. While I ultimately appreciated “We Are Green and Trembling” and love that it fictionalised a fascinating figure from history I'm not surprised it didn't make the shortlist as its narrative style is a bit frustrating. I'm currently reading “The Duke” and really enjoying it!

What do you think of the shortlist? Are there any which didn't make the list which you were really hoping to see? Will you be reading any from this group of six books? Let me know your thoughts!