The Delusions by Jenni Fagan

First Impressions

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

A Premise That Earns Its Weight

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

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

The Cosmos and a Sense of Play

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

A Bureaucracy With No Comfort

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

Verdict

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

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan

First Impressions

“The Renovation” is a brilliant debut novel whose profundity develops gradually over the course of the story. On the surface it has a fairly straightforward, symbolic premise: a woman has her bathroom renovated, and instead of a bathroom, the workers leave behind a prison cell. Some readers quite rightly will label this as surreal, or Kafkaesque, but for me it carried such real-world emotional weight that I connected with it on multiple levels at once.

Premise

We follow Dilara, who moved to Italy from her native Turkey about a decade ago with her husband and her father. He has now moved in with them as he’s developing Alzheimer's. The renovation happens to make more room for him, but when the construction finishes, Dilara finds a Turkish prison cell where her bathroom should be, eventually revealed to be modelled on Turkey's real Silivri Prison. On one level, this obviously mirrors how caring for her father has come to feel like its own kind of imprisonment, and how living in exile from a country she and her family had to flee for their safety carries its own confinement. But the novel builds far more nuance than that reading alone would suggest, as Dilara finds herself drawn back into this cell again and again, encountering guards and more and more prisoners, even as she keeps stepping back out into her ordinary life caring for her father in Italy.

Caregiving and the Loss of Memory

There are so many harrowing, heart-rending scenes of her father's decline, and the novel occasionally slides into second person when addressing the larger experience of caregiving directly, as though reaching out to any reader who has lived through something similar: the emotional toll of watching someone you love become a husk of who they were, and the way that tragedy doesn't erase the ordinary, complicated tensions that were already present in a family. There's a lovely, devastating image of family love as a kind of orbit, everyone circling each other in connection and familiarity without ever fully touching, and the novel asks what happens to that orbit once the shared memories holding it together start to disappear. Dilara herself starts losing her grip on her own memories under the sheer exhaustion and stress of caregiving; there's a striking moment where she vividly recalls a family gathering, certain that photographs exist of it, only to find the actual photos show something quite different from what she remembers.

The story doesn't shy away from the practical wreckage either: dwindling money, her husband eventually leaving after the Turkish cell triggers real fear that their old government has somehow found them, and Dilara left alone, unable to find work despite once having been a practicing child psychologist. Her sense of her own identity grows slippery too, especially once her father begins mistaking her for her own mother, who died suddenly years earlier, a contrast that throws the slow, grinding nature of his decline into sharp relief.

Exile, Language, and Nationhood

There's a poignant nostalgia woven through the sections set in the cell, particular tastes and objects such as coffee and marzipan that briefly transport Dilara back to Turkey before slipping away again, a past she can never fully recover. That resonated with me personally, as someone who has lived outside my own native country for my entire adult life; a certain sensation can transport me back there in my mind but whenever I return to the United States now it's a genuinely different place from the one I left. For Dilara, that displacement is sharpened by real political danger back home, and the novel captures how ordinary people get swept into extraordinary circumstances almost without realising it, including one darkly funny aside about a relative bringing unpaid parking tickets to a protest just to find a policeman to sort them out. Language becomes another marker of that drift: Dilara and her husband mostly speak Italian together, and she finds herself forgetting Turkish words, only reconnecting with the language inside the cell itself, talking with guards and prisoners. Her father, meanwhile, keeps repeating one phrase throughout the book, insisting that what he's experiencing "is not correct," a line that works on the level of his own disorientation but also as a much larger judgment on the state of his home country and his family.

Verdict

I connected with this novel on some simpler levels too, like Dilara's friends back in Istanbul teasing her for only ever reading depressing literary fiction, which is very much my own reading diet. But beyond that, what struck me most is how the book extends the idea of imprisonment well past its literal setting: when someone is caught in circumstances entirely outside their control, they can become a kind of prison cell themselves. There’s a tension throughout about whether Dilara might literally be in a Turkish prison cell and her life in Italy is purely an escapist fantasy. I found real echoes in this novel of Kafka and Beckett, but most powerfully of Georgi Gospodinov's “Time Shelter”, in how both novels braid together the experience of dementia with a country's oppressive political history. For anyone who has cared for a family member, partner, or friend through Alzheimer's, I'd also strongly recommend Sam Mills's memoir “The Fragments of My Father”, which captures the physical, emotional, and financial toll of that experience in unflinching detail.

I was genuinely so impressed by the nuance and complexity with which this novel handles memory and identity, and by how strongly it resonated with me. Orhan previously published a short story collection, and I understand this novel actually grew out of one of those stories, which makes me want to go back and read that prior book. If you've read this one, or have other recommendations of literature that grapples honestly with Alzheimer's and caregiving, I'd love to hear about it.

Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli

First Impressions

“Beginning Middle End” follows a mother and daughter in Sicily. The mother has recently published a book and gone on a European book tour, and she's also recently divorced. She and her daughter are staying in an apartment belonging to the mother's new lover, a musician currently away on tour, while the mother works on a new book whose shape she hasn't yet figured out, and the two of them read from classical literature together. They also carry with them a mosaic depicting theGreek god Proteus who is associated with knowledge of the future and the past. The mother's own grandmother found this artefact on an archaeological dig and kept for herself.

Where We Stand in Time

This novel is really about trying to locate ourselves in relation to time: where we've been, where we're going, and what it means to be in the middle of your life, uncertain whether you're heading toward a new beginning or already locked onto a path toward the end. It’s poignant how she feels a “nostalgia for the present” which can “warp time strangely”. All of that gets folded into the mother's own writing process and her thinking about narrative structure. There's a section where she considers Aristotle's rules of plot, the basic beginning-middle-end shape, and reconsiders what "the middle" actually means and “perhaps a defence of the middle is needed, a revindication of being in the middle, because eventually we have no choice but to be in the middle, caught in the middle, no longer able to swim back to shore, but realising the other shore is also still very far away: and where do we go from here?” I know a novel about the process of writing a novel can feel like a cliché, but I found Luiselli's handling of it genuinely poignant.

The book also looks across generations of women: the grandmother, the mother, and the daughter, plus the mother's own mother back in North America, who may be in the early stages of dementia. It asks what actually gets passed down between generations, and whether it's the accuracy of what's remembered that matters, or the feeling carried by the person doing the remembering. I liked how the mother and daughter stay unnamed throughout, which gives the whole thing a sense of continuity, as though the grandmother was once the mother, the mother was once the daughter, and the daughter might become a mother in turn. This is much more a contemplative novel than a plot-driven one, though there's a genuinely gripping moment at its centre when the mother has to make a dramatic decision shaped by their circumstances, all while the volcano Etna simmers in the background, its activity triggering wildfires that add real pressure to the story.

A Continuation, Not a Sequel

I hadn't realised this going in, but the book is clearly a continuation of Luiselli's earlier novel “Lost Children Archive”, a road trip story following a couple and their respective children as their relationship comes apart. Here we see the aftermath: the mother has left that man, taking her biological daughter with her, while his biological son stayed behind with him. Luiselli has said in a short interview that she doesn't consider this a sequel and within the novel itself she resists the idea that mother’s writing is autobiographical or auto fiction. It’s true that “Beginning Middle End” isn't a continuation in terms of plot so much as a return to the same people in an entirely new moment, grappling with different concerns. It does gesture back to the earlier book though, where the daughter in “Lost Children Archive” had a harrowing near-drowning moment, and the daughter here references that scene as though it happened to her, even though it didn't, since reading about it created a kind of false memory. That's very much what Luiselli is interested in here: what becomes "true" once a story or myth takes hold in our minds, and what the consequences of that are.

A Shift Late in the Book

There's a significant shift in form toward the end of this story that I know some readers have disliked. The novel becomes something closer to a collaborative project between mother and daughter, echoing how “Lost Children Archive” incorporated photographs alongside text. Part of me thinks the book might have worked just as well if the mother had simply kept writing the story herself, but I understand the larger point Luiselli is making with that formal turn. I'd be curious whether it landed for other readers or not. There's a line I found genuinely powerful, “I’m afraid of not knowing where to begin and how to end. Beginnings and endings are confusing: they are written as if in a foreign alphabet.” This gives a sense that we are in some senses lost in a perpetual sense of the middle of life, equally disorientated by a lack of true understanding about the past or a potential future. Luiselli’s story meaningfully contemplates how to inhabit the present of one’s life. I thought this was a beautifully intelligent and reflective book.

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry

First Impressions

May We Feed the King is a really intriguing new kind of historical novel that quite surprised me. Going in, I'd seen a reader response saying it was difficult to follow, but I don't actually think that's true. I wonder if what that reader meant is that the novel deliberately withholds specificity and refuses to offer definitive answers, which can feel unsettling in its own way, but it serves a definite artistic and theoretical purpose in this novel. That was exactly what made it so enchanting, and I found myself completely intrigued by the details we are given.

A King With No Name

The novel follows a reluctant king from history who is never named. We get no character names, no dates, no country, though the setting is presumably medieval. What we do learn is that he came to the throne only because his two older brothers, both kings before him, died prematurely, making him the default heir. There's something almost absurd built into the very phrase used when a monarch dies, "the king is dead, long live the king," and the playwright Eugène Ionesco played on exactly that absurdity in one of his own plays. What it actually means, of course, is that the moment one monarch dies, the next person in line simply becomes king, as though kingship were an interchangeable role handed down a line, almost like selecting one apple from an anonymous barrel.

We're given plenty about this king's actions, his refusal to follow his council's advice, his reluctance to order executions or lead the country into war, his constant friction with a hated chief advisor who has likewise simply inherited his own role, but almost nothing about his interior life. We know he's deeply unhappy, doesn’t mind that his wife the queen is having an affair, that he barely eats and that he's essentially trapped. There's even a story of a previous king who abdicated outright, fled the palace, and was eventually caught throwing apples at the men sent to drag him back, earning him the nickname "the apple king." Our king is acutely aware that there's no real way out of his own situation, only this legend of a failed escape.

History, Curated

Alongside the king's story, the novel is bookended by a contemporary curator tasked with dressing the rooms of this same palace for a special event. She takes the job far more seriously than anyone around her expects, working with an archivist to dig into the palace's history and becoming completely engrossed in the king's story. Like the king, she's never named, but she has a real, almost fetishistic precision about which objects she selects and how she arranges them, wax apples included, believing that the right arrangement can let a visitor sense the history embedded in a room rather than just being told a flat set of facts.

I think it's very clever how Rebecca Perry builds such a strong sense of this king's identity without ever giving us direct access to his thoughts or feelings. Instead we get him only through side glances: what servants and councillors observe of him, the stories people tell about him, some possibly fabricated, possibly gossip, possibly politically motivated. That mirrors exactly how we receive history in general: we have to ask who's telling us a given story and what their motivations might be, because that shapes how we understand the facts we're given.

Judgment, Then and Now

There's a real, quiet tragedy at the center of this book: a man thrust into a role he never wanted, with no way out. And yet, he's just a king and privileged individual, exactly the sort history tends to remember over the ordinary people who lived decently and acted in small, unrecorded ways. But I think the novel's point extends well beyond monarchy. All of us are scrutinized, judged, and assumptions are made about us in ways we can't fully control, especially once we become any kind of public figure, and our own narratives can be told by others without our consent. Oddly, this made me think of Patrick Radden Keefe's recent book “London Falling” and the mystery surrounding the death of Zac, the nineteen-year-old at the center of that book, and how sympathetically Keefe reconstructs a story his grieving family still doesn't have full answers to. It also brought to mind Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, beginning with “Wolf Hall”, and the way she imaginatively fills in the interior lives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Cromwell himself, offering a new slant on history while still leaving room for readers to draw their own conclusions. Maggie O'Farrell's “The Marriage Portrait” does something similar with another real historical figure, Lucrezia de’ Medici, refusing to let the known facts limit the possibilities of her inner life. Rebecca Perry seems to be doing exactly that here, deliberately withholding names and dates so that history feels like an open field rather than a fixed timeline of accomplishments and failures.

A Puzzle Worth Solving

I found real pleasure in trying to piece together what was actually happening, in a way that felt almost like solving a puzzle where some interpretations land better than others. In the contemporary strand, there's a quietly building romance between the curator and the archivist, a growing attraction handled with real subtlety in the background. The novel also plays with different kinds of looking: tourists passing through the palace rooms today, courtiers and servants once watching the king, and, in one lovely touch, the king himself becoming a kind of tourist in his own home, wandering into the kitchens, asking how cinnamon cakes are made, and picking up an egg in its shell for what is the first time in his life, utterly struck by it. That layering of who's observing whom, and how the reader becomes another observer entering into all of it, kept the ambiguity alive without ever making the book feel murky or hard to follow.

There's a nice tension, too, in how the curator resists pressure from the palace's overseers, who just want the rooms dressed quickly and generically. She insists on arranging them as though a specific person from history had passed through only moments before, which raises exactly the questions the novel is interested in: what we can actually know about the past, what we can never know, and how much room there is to hold multiple honest possibilities about the same set of facts.

Verdict

I'm glad I got past my initial hesitation, which turned out to be based on nothing more than one secondhand reader reaction. This novel has been greatly well received this year: Rebecca Perry was named one of the year's best debut novelists, despite coming from a background in poetry rather than fiction, and while the prose itself isn't conspicuously lyrical, I think it could fairly be read as an extended prose poem. It won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize this year and has since been longlisted for the Booker, and I wouldn't be surprised if it goes further still. I found it a real pleasure, full of tantalizing details I'm still turning over. If you've read it, I'd love to know whether you agree with my read on it, or if there's more you'd want to raise about it.

Floodlines by Saleem Haddad

First Impressions

I love an engaging family epic that gets into all the messiness and drama of family life, and there's certainly a lot of that in “Floodlines” by Saleem Haddad, which follows three generations of one family, primarily three adult sisters who've mostly been estranged from one another. Living in different places, they're pulled back together partly because their aging mother, Bridget, is facing increasing mental and physical difficulties, raising immediate questions about her care, but also because of a much bigger question: what happens to their father's legacy. Their father was a very famous artist in Iraq, and the rediscovery of his paintings raises the question of who gets to be their caretaker, whether they should be sold, or displayed as a representative example of Iraqi art. We follow the sisters as they come together to argue this out, with their mother Bridget drawn into the discussion too.

Family, History, and Art

In working through all this the novel explores facets of Iraqi history I wasn't aware of before alongside a real sense of how each individual's perspective on a nation and its history depends entirely on their own experience of it. Each of the sisters grew up in Iraq alongside their parents but left at different points in their lives, which has given each of them a genuinely different point of view on the country's history, all of which feeds into their disagreements over their father's legacy. All three women are also practicing artists in their own right, each working in a different form that feels tied to their individual personalities and how they see the world. This novel engages with the complex question about what it means to create art, how art can express an individual point of view while also representing something much larger about a community or a nation's history, and how art can be manipulated for political ends, something their father discovered firsthand while creating a major commissioned piece in Iraq, shaped by the shifting governments around him.

Structure and Characters

The novel moves between the sisters' perspectives, though we actually enter the story through another character, Nizar, the son of one of the sisters. At the novel's start, Nizar is deeply disillusioned with his career as a war journalist, having traveled through the Middle East reporting on various conflicts, left physically scarred and mentally traumatized by moving through those war zones. He's drawn into his mother and aunts' conflict over his grandfather's art, and the novel moves between his perspective, the three sisters', and Bridget's. I often find myself favoring one perspective over the others in multi-POV novels like this, but here I found every account equally engaging. Most of the action takes place across the middle of 2014, though the characters frequently loop back into memory, and there are buried family secrets and old dramas that surface and reshape the present as the novel goes on, full of intriguing surprises and plot twists. Getting to know each character's backstory only pulled me in closer.

Zainab, Nizar's mother, had a very difficult early life, including the loss of her first husband, raising her child while moving between countries and struggling to get by, before eventually marrying a wealthy man and arriving at real financial comfort. She wants to establish her father's legacy and celebrate his art in the country where it was made, a position her sisters don't fully share. Her older sister, Ishtar, is strong-willed and opinionated, one of my favorite characters in the book, someone I loved reading about even though I'd never want to actually meet her, given how intimidating she is. She lives on a houseboat on the Thames in London, is a lesbian, and has this grand conceptual art project: recreating an ark to sail down the Tigris, an attempt to reconnect the region with the ancient art and tradition of Mesopotamia. We follow her on that journey, sailing through countries including active war zones, and it generates high tension throughout the book, as this family's present increasingly entangles with both world events in 2014 and the nation's history across previous decades. There's one very dramatic scene involving a dance with a historic figure at a public function that reminded me a little of Alan Hollinghurst's “The Line of Beauty”, a completely jaw-dropping moment.

Verdict

What struck me most is how tenderly the novel explores each character's backstory and their difficult, halting effort to come together as a family, moving the story from tense family arguments toward something like hope, hard-won and incomplete, but genuine. Nizar spends much of the novel in a place of deep despair, reflecting on a broken relationship with a man named Alfie, a good and supportive relationship undermined by fundamental differences in perspective between them. There's an especially moving section at the novel's center focused on Bridget, the mother, at a point in her life where past and present have started to blend together, and the memories that surface for her are rendered with heart-wrenching beauty.

I think this is a genuinely inspiring, informative book, one that offers such a different vantage point on displacement and on understanding your own relationship to nationhood from a position of remove from the country of your birth. But beyond all that, it's simply a wonderful family story with so many compelling characters that I wanted to keep reading about, and there's so much in it, too, about the richness and power of art itself. I think it's a wonderful, finely written, and very accomplished novel. This is an impressive follow-up from Haddad’s debut novel “Guapa”.

Interviewing the Author

I had the pleasure of interviewing Saleem Haddad at a live event at Hatchards bookshop in London, and it was fascinating hearing his perspective on writing this book, which took him many years given how complex and layered the story is. I think it's impressive how he draws in so many characters and layers of history while keeping everything clear; I was never confused about what was happening, even moving between all these different perspectives.

Before our live conversation, I filmed a short segment with Haddad in the bookshop discussing books that influenced him while writing “Floodlines” which I’ve included at the end of my video review. His final recommendation was Virginia Woolf's “The Waves”, which happens to be my own favorite novel of all time, something I found genuinely touching, especially given that he discussed it at Hatchards, the historic bookshop that's actually referenced in Woolf's “Mrs. Dalloway”. Haddad said he thinks of it, in many ways, as a book about life itself. While writing the ending of his own novel, he wanted a dreamy atmosphere built around a kind of collective, polyphonic voice, and someone recommended “The Waves” to him as a model; he read it and fell in love with it, describing it as ultimately about the human experience.

If you've read “Floodlines”, I'd love to know what you thought of it.

Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest

First Impressions

“Having Spent Life Seeking” is an incredibly powerful and beautifully written novel. I felt like I genuinely lived alongside these characters and went on a journey with them, which is exactly the experience I want from fiction. This is a story about the difficulty of self-acceptance set against the pull of social acceptance, a tension I think so many of us feel, especially in childhood and our teenage years, rendered here with great impact. It's also a novel about the importance of persisting through seemingly insurmountable challenges, because there will still be beauty, joy, love, and even tranquility to be found in life, even when the world feels like it's completely falling apart.

Premise

The novel follows Rothko, who at the very start has just been released from prison after twenty years. Rothko is slowly rebuilding a life in their hometown of Edgecliff, a fictional, slightly shabby English seaside town of the kind with plenty of lifelong locals alongside weekend holidaymakers. Rothko is trying to live and work independently, but the world has changed enormously in their absence. One of the most impressive things about this novel is how little interiority or direct self-reflection we actually get from these characters; we mostly get description of experience and dialogue rather than explicit inner monologue. Normally that kind of withholding frustrates me in fiction, because I want access to what a character is really feeling. But even without much of that here, I felt like I deeply understood these characters and could connect with what they were going through, which I think is a real feat of craft: conveying all this emotion without spelling it out on the page. It reminded me a little of David Szalay's “Flesh”, where a similarly withheld interior life still lets you feel exactly what a character is going through, though the styles of these two books are quite different otherwise.

Rothko's Story

Rothko has a difficult relationship with their mother, Meg, who struggles with her own addiction and the trauma of past abuse. We get Rothko's backstory gradually, and for a long stretch we don't actually learn why they were in prison for so long, which serves a couple of purposes: real narrative tension, but also a way of resisting the instinct to judge someone based purely on incarceration, when what actually matters is understanding the circumstances that led there. So much of this novel is about connection and disconnection, especially with strangers, capturing both beautiful, unexpected moments of human recognition between people who owe each other nothing, and moments where people judge and mistreat one another on entirely superficial grounds. Rothko doesn't judge others this way, even though they are far from a straightforwardly virtuous character and has made real mistakes; when they meet someone destitute, angry, or unpredictable, they tend to meet them on a purely human level, and those moments landed with real emotional force for me.

Rothko's nickname comes from childhood: they blush deeply pink or red when embarrassed or ashamed, and as a child this was described as their face "going like a Rothko painting." It's such a strong, simple visual image that stayed with me throughout, a way of physically rendering shame without ever spelling out the internal experience behind it. There's a similarly striking scene, a memory of riding in a car with a driver who's become so emotionally unstable that it feels like the car could crash at any moment, that hit me hard, since I've had a similar experience myself of being trapped in a car with someone who seemed to have lost touch with reality, desperate just to get out even on a dangerous highway.

Family, Gender, and Identity

I also appreciated how Tempest handles Rothko's relationship with their sister. I found the line “they might have come from the same people but they had never really been coming from the same place” to be especially poignant. Though there’s a shared origin there is also a fundamental, if imperfect, mutual understanding. Part of that distance is on Rothko, for not fully opening up to their sister about who they are, something tied to their lifelong struggle with gender identity and discomfort inhabiting a body which, for much of their life, read to others as more conventionally masculine, generating real confusion, suspicion, and hostility from people around them. There's a beautiful early friendship with a teenage boy, and later a love affair with a girl named Dionne. This novel is, in part, a genuine love story, but one that follows two people developing as individuals alongside their relationship, rather than staying fixed while navigating differences between two already-formed selves, which felt like a genuinely different, truer way of depicting a long-term relationship than most fiction manages.

Throughout the book, Rothko frequently refers to other people as "normal" and expresses how they feel alienated from the general population. Much of the novel traces Rothko’s path toward a real sense of self-acceptance, toward feeling that everything about them is simply right rather than something to keep measuring against other people. There's a genuinely important, difficult scene where Rothko, just wanting a quiet pint after work, has to decide which gendered toilet to use, aware that either choice risks a reaction from other people in the pub, and the fear and humiliation bound up in a situation that should be entirely mundane. There's an echo of this too when a group of teenagers openly discuss and speculate about Rothko's gender, dialogue that felt so vivid I could practically hear it. Given everything happening around trans rights and legislation in Britain right now, I think really feeling what that experience is like from the inside matters.

Language and Structure

Tempest is also a poet and musician, and that shows in the writing: mostly grounded and realistic, but with moments of real philosophical density where a single line opens out to convey an entire lived experience. There's a striking stretch, covering a long period of Rothko's life during a low point with addiction, that shifts into an almost musical, rhyming register, compressing a huge amount of time and despair into very little space. For instance, one line that stuck with me was "Using is its own universe." The novel conveys, through both Rothko’s mother Meg and Rothko themself, just how consuming addiction becomes, and how it can override every other relationship and responsibility in a person's life.

A Small Reservation

If I have one criticism, it's that the compressed, musical section covering Rothko's addiction and much of their prison sentence skips over a lot: twenty years is an enormous span of time, and the actual lived experience of prison doesn't get fully rendered, even though it shaped so much of Rothko’s life. The novel doesn't shy away from stating that prison was a genuinely horrible experience, even while acknowledging some of what Rothko gained there, skills, one significant connection with another person, but the difficulty of reintegration afterward, in a world that's simply moved on without them (self-checkout lines being one small, disorienting example), is handled really well.

A Personal Resonance

This novel feels genuinely personal for Tempest, who has undergone his own journey with gender in recent years, now identifying as a trans man and using he/him pronouns. Rothko is referred to as they/them for most of the novel, until a single moment where he's able to say plainly, "I am a man," to another character, after which the pronouns shift to he/him. It's a tender, powerful moment, and one I felt I'd really traveled toward alongside him: something so simple for so many people to say, and so hard-won here.

I got my copy of this book from the queer library that the shop Aesop runs every Pride month in London, turning their usual fragrance shop into a stock of free queer books for anyone to take. Tempest has spoken in interviews about being given a copy of “Stone Butch Blues” by a stranger early in life, and how transformative that was, and I think that same spirit runs through this novel and through initiatives like Aesop's library. This year I also marched in a Pride parade myself for the first time, with the small Rīga Pride contingent in London, drawing on my own Latvian heritage, and witnessed one of my fellow marchers run to embrace his mother on the sidelines in tears, a moment that felt like it echoed exactly what this novel is reaching for: real joy and connection persisting alongside real struggle.

Verdict

It’d be negligent of me not to mention that there's also a wonderful thread to this story involving Rothko's dog, Donovan. So much of the book is about how fleeting, even coincidental connections with other people can matter enormously to our own journey of understanding and accepting ourselves. The novel also raises poignant larger questions about the sheer strangeness of being alive; for example, one line that struck me was "“How could a thing as weightless as life be so fucking heavy so much of the time?” Life passes through us lightly, in the moment, and yet we carry so much weight: memory, disappointment, love, heartbreak, and the world's judgment. What matters, the novel suggests, is how we feel about ourselves and how much we allow those feelings to affect the way we actually live in the world.

I thought this was an absolutely incredible book and I loved reading it. I'd highly recommend it, and I'd love to hear from anyone else who's read it, or who wants to point me toward more of Kae Tempest's work, since I've read some of his poetry but haven't yet properly explored the music.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

First Thoughts

“Departure(s)” is Julian Barnes's latest book and probably his last and I want to talk through my thoughts on it, because I didn't wholly love it. That said, I found it an extremely empathetic, moving, and wise meditation on life, love, memory, and writing — all subjects Barnes has returned to many times across his career. There's something almost ironic in calling it “Departure(s)”, since it isn't really a departure in subject matter at all. But these are huge, inexhaustible topics, and the way Barnes deepens his understanding of them here felt genuinely compelling to me.

Why "Departures"

The title works on a few levels. In the book, Barnes discusses being diagnosed with a form of blood cancer that isn't terminal, won't kill him outright, but is something he'll live with for the rest of his life, never fully defeating it until, as he wryly notes, he dies — at which point he supposes he'll have "won," except he'll be dead. It's also a departure from writing itself: he states plainly, on page nine, that this will be his last book.

The exact nature of this book is hard to pin down. I'd call it primarily a memoir, but it's also part essay and part novel, since at its center is the story of a couple, Jean and Stephen, and their particular, fascinating love story — one Barnes plays with our uncertainty over: is it true, or isn't it? He makes a wry joke about this hybrid form within the book itself, having Jean accuse the narrator (whom he names Julian) of writing these blended books when he should just pick fiction or nonfiction. Barnes's defence is that he knows exactly what he's doing, and it's true he's spent much of his career writing fiction wrapped in nonfiction, or the reverse, exploring memory, history, and the tension between subjective and objective truth.

Memory and Identity

The book opens with a fascinating psychological case: a condition called involuntary autobiographical memory, in which a specific sensory trigger, like the taste of cherries, floods someone with every memory of eating cherries across their entire life. Barnes wonders whether this might resolve the uncertainty of memory, letting us fully re-experience the past in detail, only to question whether that would actually be desirable at all, given how exhausting and how still fundamentally subjective it would remain. Other cases of vivid, detailed recall raise a similar problem: how could such memories ever really be verified?

This feeds into one of the book's central questions: what actually makes us who we are? Barnes opens by suggesting we are our memories, then complicates that immediately. If people lose their memories, as so many do with age, have they lost their essential self? Or is there something else, something to do with character, desire, and unfulfilled desire, that persists regardless?

Jean and Stephen

That question runs directly into the book's central love story. Barnes (as "Julian") met Jean and Stephen at Oxford in their early twenties and introduced them to each other; they fell into an intense relationship, then chose, as many couples do at that threshold moment after university, to end things and go their separate ways. Decades later, Barnes reconnected with both of them separately, discovered each had privately been thinking of the other all along, reintroduced them, and they married. It reads, at first, like a conventional happy ending, but that isn't where their story actually lands — old patterns resurface, and they've each lived entire, full lives apart from one another in the interim. Barnes gives the couple fictional names, explaining he'd once promised never to write about them, which only deepens the book's playful uncertainty about what's true and what's invented; he even challenges readers at points to go verify details themselves. But I don't think the factual status of Jean and Stephen is really the point. What matters is the shape of a love affair with a decades-long gap in the middle, echoing something Barnes notes people often experience late in life: vivid childhood memories resurfacing while the middle years blur and fade. A life with a hole in the center of it, made of what can't fully be known or recovered, and yet somehow still the substance of the whole thing.

A Writer Taking Stock

Barnes leans on other writers throughout, Proust especially, but also Flaubert and Woolf, quoting them frequently and acknowledging, with real self-deprecating humor, his own worry about repeating himself after so many books — he mentions fact-checking with scholars of his own work to make sure he isn't retelling the same anecdote again. There's a warm humor throughout in how he pokes fun at his own preoccupations, even while clearly still unable to move past them, because they're the questions that don't resolve.

It is a fairly brief book, and the love story at its center is handled somewhat lightly — I found myself wanting more detail there — but I think its brevity serves the larger meditation on time, personality, and understanding amid the general messiness of living. There's a genuinely somber undertone here too: an acknowledgment that Barnes and his generation of writers are dying out, with references to conversations with Martin Amis, who himself died not long after this book was likely finished. Barnes gives his reason for wanting to close out his writing life deliberately: not wanting to die mid-book and leave something unfinished, citing his friend Brian Moore, who did just that with his own final novel. And yet there's also real wit in how Barnes handles arriving at this stage of life, resisting some of the old-man clichés even while acknowledging others.

Is This Really His Last Book?

I'm not sure we should take Barnes fully at his word that this is his last book. He notes himself, cheekily, that we can and should trust novelists when they tell us the beautiful lies of their fiction, but that we're allowed real skepticism when they describe their own working methods. Other authors have announced a "final" book only to keep publishing. Whether or not this genuinely is his last, though, felt somewhat beside the point to me — what's here is a real, fascinating engagement with these enormous subjects, even if I found myself wishing he'd gone further with some of them. Though, of course, an 800-page final book might have undercut the whole project; there's real craft in how compressed and anecdotal this is, jumping between memories, digressions, and different writers while still cohering. Reading it felt like sitting across from Julian Barnes as he talked through his life, which is part of why I love spending time with older writers and hearing their particular slant on meaning.

A Personal Aside on The Sense of an Ending

Barnes has explored this same terrain, fiction blurring into fact, memory versus objective history, most famously in “The Sense of an Ending”, his Booker Prize-winning novel. I reread it a few years ago, ahead of the new film adaptation, having first read it in my twenties, when it struck me as fairly thin. Rereading it in my forties, it hit me with far more force, and I found the story's exploration of a man's later-life reckoning with the unreliability of his own memory genuinely profound in a way it hadn't been the first time. I appreciated the film's own distinct take on it as well. That experience of a book changing meaning as you age with it feels like exactly the kind of thing Barnes is writing about in “Departure(s)”, and I suspect if I return to this new book in another ten or fifteen years, it'll land differently again.

Verdict

I'd love to hear from anyone who's read this: do you think it's really Barnes's last book, and do you think it ranks among his best? I hope it isn't his last, honestly, though we'll see. Whatever the case, this felt like a genuine celebration of literature and of the different ways we each read and are changed by the same books at different points in our lives — and it was a wonderful, if imperfect, experience to read.

Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke

A Wonderful Rediscovery

I loved reading this book so much, partly because it feels so singular, and partly because it's such a pure pleasure to read. It feels all the more extraordinary because this is a novel that's been around for decades, and yet I'd never heard of it until recently. Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes by Henry Van Dyke was first published in 1965. It feels like it deserves to be a modern classic, and I hope many more readers discover it.

Premise

The story opens with tragedy but quickly reveals itself to be a farce: a comic romp and a coming-of-age tale. It follows the perspective of a teenage Black boy, Oliver, growing up in Michigan, orphaned and raised in a household with two older women: his great-aunt, Harry, and Mrs. Etta Klein, a white, Jewish widow who acts as Oliver's patron, paying for his education. The main engine of the plot is a charlatan spiritualist, a self-styled warlock named Maurice le Fleur, who arrives to conduct a séance in the household. We follow the fallout of that séance alongside the mystery surrounding the death of Etta's late son, Sargent, whom Mrs Klein is desperate to contact. There is a mystery surrounding his death which occurred five years earlier in New York. But mostly, this novel concerns Oliver's point of view and sensibility, one that any modern reader would immediately recognize as latently gay, or at least a burgeoning gay sensibility. His observations are so witty and cutting that following his perspective is a real pleasure, even as he remains genuinely naive about a great deal, being only sixteen.

Household and Craft

Oliver lives with these two older women, who bicker constantly despite being close, long-standing friends. Aunt Harry, though technically the household's housekeeper and employee, is deeply close with Etta, and there's a complex history and subtle tension between them that surfaces in their arguments. Oliver's narration, full of unexpectedly beautiful, poetic turns of phrase, reminded me of Truman Capote's debut, “Other Voices, Other Rooms”, which I happened to read recently too, but it also carries all the comedy of a drawing-room farce in the mode of Oscar Wilde or Ronald Firbank.

What's fascinating is that this book came out in 1965, right in the middle of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of the sexual revolution, and yet it doesn't engage directly with either. It feels almost like it stands outside of that moment, even while it's shot through with references to racial and sexual tension. Because Oliver is receiving a good education through Etta's patronage, his aunt Harry and the cook, Della, tease him for becoming "white" in his manner and references, and Della in particular teases him about his sexual naivety; at one point she tries, to very comic effect, to seduce him, and elsewhere Oliver clumsily tries to seduce another woman himself, underscoring his general confusion. There's also a scene with Etta's other, still-living son, Jerome, drunk to the point of helplessness, where there's a charged, if not quite attraction-driven, fascination on Oliver's part as he tries to manage this inebriated naked man. The book gestures at real racial tension too: there's a convivial atmosphere and a veneer of tolerance in this community, but once events reach a crisis point, real prejudice surfaces.

A Deliberate Choice of Subject

So many other books from this period deal directly with the civil rights movement and racial tension, from James Baldwin to Nella Larsen, and others engage directly with homosexuality, from Capote to Gore Vidal to Edmund White. It's fascinating that Henry Van Dyke, a Black gay man himself, chose not to address either directly here, and instead told this comic coming-of-age story. There's something genuinely defiant in that choice: Oliver isn't defined by the circumstances or the body he was born into. He's simply feeling his way through the world, trying to figure himself out while navigating life with two older women who are, in their own bickering, rum-fuelled way, wonderful and often very funny, even as he's clearly trying to find his own path beyond them.

I loved the atmosphere Van Dyke creates around the household in the fictional town of Green Acres, Michigan: the layout of the house, the sound of Della singing old blues lines like "how long, how long has that train been gone" from another room, and Oliver's pet peacock, which rarely flourishes its full colors, functioning as a quiet, effective metaphor for Oliver himself, still feeling his way toward his own self-expression. He has such clever, wide-ranging private thoughts, but he's growing up in genuinely isolated circumstances, and I felt a real longing throughout the book for him to get out into a wider world with people more like-minded than the sheltered, privileged but limited household he's confined to.

The Dialogue

So much of this book comes alive through dialogue. Each character's personality, prejudices, and desires really emerge through how they speak. Della wants to be so much more than a cook, but her options are severely limited, and when the medium arrives, she sees him as a possible gateway to the city and a different kind of living, even if that means sex work, one of the few paths she believes is open to her; she has real desires of her own, and describes being drawn to certain white men in her own vivid terms. Aunt Harry has a rich, complicated history that surfaces once the plot reaches its crisis point. Etta Klein is a closet drunkard, hiding bottles of rum around the house, carrying palpable grief and loss that she channels, in part, into treating Oliver as a substitute for her dead son Sargent. And Jerome, her surviving son, is something of a boor but also quite funny, chummy with Oliver and full of jokes, though his own deep-set prejudices resurface when things come to a head. I appreciated how, following Oliver, the novel also shows him wrestling with his own sense of right and wrong. At one point he lists out all of his own dishonorable deeds so far, working out his own code of justice as he tries to protect the women who've raised him from the charlatan they've invited into their home.

Verdict

What I loved most about this book was the sheer mood it creates through its descriptions and dialogue. It isn't a perfect novel: some sections feel a bit repetitive, and the ending plays out in a way I think catches some readers off guard. But it captures Oliver reaching a real point of independence, becoming his own person and stepping out into the world, and there's something genuinely beautiful in that.

Coming across this book for the first time, recently republished by Faber alongside a number of other rediscovered older titles, has made me newly curious about Henry Van Dyke himself: born in Michigan but raised for much of his childhood in Alabama, acutely aware of the civil rights movement through his parents' own involvement in it, and someone who wanted to become a pianist before eventually moving through the army and into a long career teaching creative writing. He was a contemporary and friend of Iris Murdoch, which I found surprising, though he never really broke into wider popular literature during his lifetime. There's a great piece about him written by his nephew that was published on Lithub a year or two ago, worth reading for anyone curious about his life. He wrote a sequel to this novel and a couple of other books, though they're apparently quite hard to find now, and I hope more of his work gets republished. If you've read this book, or if you've read any of Van Dyke's other work, I'd love to hear about it.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

On Location

Since I'm lucky enough to live in London I went walking along the Thames to the actual location where this book begins. Across from the MI6 building is the luxury apartment complex Riverwalk which is the location of the tragedy at the centre of Keefe's investigation. This book reads very much like a true crime story which is extremely thrilling as it relays a very specific mystery before expanding out into a much larger story about how London has transformed, especially over the past few decades.

The Case at the Center

In November 2019, 19-year-old Zac Brettler was caught on CCTV footage falling from the balcony of an apartment in Riverwalk. The mystery surrounding his death, and the circumstances that led him there, are explored within the book through Keefe's journalism: extensive records, video footage, and interviews with many people connected to the case, especially Zac's parents and their long search for justice and answers. It's an account full of twists and turns — there were individuals surrounding Zac that I felt sympathetic to at first but who became more suspicious as the story revealed more, and questions kept being raised right through to the end.

A City Transformed

What makes this book all the more gripping is that it's entirely true, and happened very recently in the city I've lived in for over twenty years and love deeply. The book gave me a genuinely different perspective on London, revealing a darker underside to how it's changed and transformed over the past couple of decades. Keefe grounds the story in London's shift from an industrial and maritime city to a financial and technological hub, a place where wealthy people buy up expensive property purely as investment, treating it almost like a security deposit box. He notes at one point that the more expensive a property in the city is, the more likely it is to sit empty, held purely as capital for very wealthy owners — a genuinely revolting fact to sit with, given how difficult it is for so many people to find housing here while some of the city's grandest residences stand completely unoccupied.

Zac's Story

These economic transformations have reshaped the culture and the kinds of people the city draws in, and Zac is an example of a young man who became fascinated by wealth and power. He came from a comfortably well-off, middle-to-upper-class Jewish family in London, but spun an elaborate web of lies, posing as the son of Russian oligarchs to gain access to privileged social circles and pursue his own financial ventures. As a teenager, he watched films like The Wolf of Wall Street and, rather than viewing it as a cautionary tale about a man transforming into a monster, he idealized its high-powered businessmen and wanted to become one himself. The book charts his journey into that culture and how it drew him into a far more nefarious London underworld, ultimately leading to the tragic circumstances of his early death.

Meticulous, Compelling Research

I found this such a fascinating, meticulously researched book, with information released carefully over its course as things are revealed: what the parents uncover about their son and the case, questions around aspects the police didn't pursue, and the deeply questionable backgrounds of some of the figures surrounding Zac. There's a probable case and sequence of events that emerges, but so much will always remain unknown, partly because the people at the center of this story, Zac included, were serial liars who'd fabricated so much about their lives and backgrounds that real certainty may never be possible. Even so, this book is compelling from start to finish. I woke up in the middle of the night at one point still thinking about aspects of the case, and found myself getting up to keep reading because I needed to know what happened next.

Zac himself comes across as a deeply conflicted figure, someone who sadly bought into the lie, glamour, power, and wealth the city seemed to be offering. I felt sympathetic toward him to a heavy extent, while also being critical of the path he chose, and it feels like this is a culture that's been building in the city and across the UK for decades, culminating in this tragic story as only one example. Keefe's skill in compiling this case and all its surrounding information, working toward some probable truth of why and how it happened, is genuinely excellent journalism. I also loved his earlier book, “Empire of Pain”, about the pharmaceutical industry and the family behind it, and what it revealed about our larger culture. He has a real gift for focusing on a specific story that ends up saying something much bigger about society, especially its darker, more nefarious workings.

Verdict

I'd highly recommend this book. If you've read it, I'd love to know what you think, and what conclusions or theories you drew from the evidence presented. Reading it inspired me to take this walk along the river myself, past Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, on a beautiful sunny day that reminded me what a gorgeous city this is to live in. At the same time, this book, alongside other reporting I've read on the case, made me aware of a criminal underworld operating alongside it, with some very powerful, wealthy people at the center taking advantage of the system in ways we should stay vigilant about. There's a double-sidedness to this beautiful city that I've come to love, and this book brought that into sharp focus for me.

The End of Everything by M John Harrison

Not Your Usual Dystopia Novel

I've been feeling quite anxious lately, both about things in my own life and about the wider world. So I turned to this book that I wouldn't necessarily call consoling, but that offered me a different way of looking at things when it feels like the world is collapsing. This is unlike any dystopian novel I've read before. Yes, it's about technology outpacing the human race and reshaping society, but most dystopian fiction gives you a sinister, controlling government or a fascist dictator running the show. Here, set in a near future on the Kent coastline, there's no mention of government or any real governing body, no real police force. People are left largely to their own devices, living on the fringes, while the capital, London, has effectively been taken over by something referred to only as "the iGhetti" — possibly an alien force from outer space, possibly something that emerged out of the internet, it's never entirely clear. Its presence has pushed humans to the margins of their own society, left scurrying through the routines of their old lives while everything around them grows steadily shabbier.

I wouldn't just call this a dystopian story, either — it's literary science fiction, and it gets genuinely surreal in places, with sections that read more like a philosophical essay meditating on consciousness and what it means to be alive and human in relation to technology. There's a character named Hampson who leaves behind diary entries, since he's one of the few people who's actually gone into London and observed the iGhetti up close. He raises the unsettling possibility that the iGhetti may not even be aware humans exist — that people feel taken over, but no one is really clear on how, or whether, it's actually controlling the landscape at all. There's a pervading sense that rather than becoming alarmed at the world's deterioration, everyone has simply gotten used to the apocalypse — which felt very true to how it can feel being aware of huge, global problems while feeling powerless to do anything about them: accepting higher average temperatures, increasingly ineffectual governments and technology running our lives in ways nobody is actually steering.

Characters Over Plot

The novel doesn't have an urgent plot thrust so much as it spends time with a small group of characters. There's Philip, a man scraping out a living on the coastline by salvaging things from the channel and selling them, and his much older aunt, Marnie, an artist who has to leave her home and community early in the novel after a genuinely shocking event. There are surprising moments of violence in the story — not gruesome, but sudden, emerging out of nowhere in a way that makes them land harder — alongside a lot of weird, uncomfortable humor. It's a very strange book, and I won't pretend the central meaning or premise feels entirely graspable. I wasn't always sure what I was reading, but it produced a sensation that resonated with the current climate of things: this uncomfortable sense of sliding into a future we can't control and are just passively accepting.

Even without fully grasping it intellectually, I felt a real emotional connection to the story. One of the main threads follows an object Philip salvages from the channel early on, which he calls an "artifact" — something part robot, part humanoid, that grows and regenerates itself. As he spends time with it, it takes on more human qualities: it starts dressing in clothes, becomes more conversational, and seems to want an emotional connection with the people around it. I found it strange and moving how much empathy I developed for this biological gadget simply because it exhibits human traits, even though it isn't human — and there are startling moments when that distinction becomes brutally clear, including one where a character starts slicing pieces off it and eating them.

Marnie, Brexit, and Disconnection

I think part of the beating heart of this novel is Marnie, who drifts through the story staging her own quiet protest, at one point brandishing a placard reading "How can you misplace a continent?" — a reference to the sense that the UK has become disconnected from Europe and the rest of the world because of the iGhetti's presence. That obviously draws comparisons to Brexit, but it also gestures at something broader: even though we tend to believe technology and the internet have brought the world together, we're probably more disconnected from each other than ever. I found myself oddly, deeply engaged with this story even though I couldn't always say exactly what was going on — and I don't think it's meant to resolve into something fully clear. So much of it carries an underlying resonance with the current state of the world rather than commenting on it directly. Part of the real tragedy here is the sense that people's morality has been lost, that there's no governance driving our humanity anymore, and people are simply left to fend for themselves and take what they can. It's a gloomy story, but also compellingly weird as it gets more surreal — there's a later moment where a girl seems to transform into Shirley Temple, an absurd invocation of an old celebrity figure that becomes its own strange little beacon of optimism in this gray, deteriorating landscape.

In the Author's Own Words

The publisher kindly sent me a copy of the book along with a letter from Harrison discussing his thinking behind it, and I want to share some of it. He wrote that he started the novel in 2010, as "a disaster story told from the basis of a prolonged catastrophe, one that would to its victims seem to unfold so slowly that they were like the proverbial frogs in the pot, not noticing that their world is changing." He describes wanting to mirror our current situation through themes of environmental degradation and cultural change, with Brexit-linked subthemes and a strand that presents alien invasion as gentrification. The book is set along the seaside arts towns of the southeastern UK, from Hastings to Margate, where gentrification and generational change represent their own slow disaster for the culture of the original inhabitants. He wanted the book to be dark, both tragedy and comedy, landscape-oriented, with strong satire, parody, and mischief; a limited cast of characters and a simple picaresque structure, a journey along a coastline being geographically changed; a collision of the Gothic, the road movie, and the seaside novel. He said he hoped readers would feel empathy for Marnie and her nephew Philip in their confused attempt to understand a world that's no longer understandable, no longer theirs, and a creepy delight at the behaviour of alien overlords whose origins and motives are impossible to pin down. I think he really delivered on that.

Verdict

I really appreciated how this novel gave me a kind of touchstone for the underlying anxieties I've been feeling lately, offering a genuinely creative and different perspective on them. I'd recommend it, though I'm sure it won't be for everyone. If you've read it, or if you've read other books by M. John Harrison you'd recommend, I'd love to hear about it — he's a well-established author with a long body of work, and I want to read more of his fiction now.

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.

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.