2025/114: The Scandalous Letters of V and J — Felicia Davin

...on the way over Aunt S said, “The people we’re about to meet may tell you shocking things about me.”
“Shocking things like how you’ve aided your niece-nephew in perverting the social order and defying nature itself?” I asked.
“Oh, is that what you’re doing?” Aunt S said. “The social order seems intact to me. And if it’s your goal to defy nature, you might have to put in a bit more work.” [p. 172]

A young person -- 'I'd rather be Victor than Victorine' -- is evicted from the family home, and moves to Paris with their Aunt Sophie. In a run-down boarding house they encounter art student Julien, who is also Julie and who doesn't want to be trapped into being 'one or the other when I've always been both'. 

Julie(n)'s transformation is magical, achieved by painting self-portraits: they're very proud of their hands. Victor, it turns out, is also capable of changing the world: when he writes a strongly-felt letter with a particular pen, the recipient believes what's written. (Cue a bloodless heist of ten thousand francs.) But Julie knows more about magic than Victor does, and is keen that Victor destroy the 'cursed artifact'. Victor, though, is intrigued by this new hidden world, and realises that his mother's death -- and perhaps also his father disowning him -- is also due to magic...

Also, they are in love. And in lust.

I'd enjoyed Davin's SF M/M romance trilogy (Edge of Nowhere, Out of Nowhere and Nowhere Else) though I note that I purchased this novel well before I discovered those! The Scandalous Letters of V and J -- first in the 'French Letters' series: I've wishlisted the other two volumes -- is quite different in tone and setting (Paris in the 1820s rather than mysterious space stations), but the prose is as assured and witty as in the Nowhere books. V (transmasc) and J (non-binary) are fascinating characters with very different personalities and beliefs, and with distinctive voices. The magic system, and the abuses perpetrated using magic, are thoughtfully explored and well-integrated with the romance. And I especially liked the stories-within-the-story, told (usually as a prelude to, or a part of, a sexual encounter) by V.

This is a very steamy book and I wasn't really in the mood for the steam, which seems a waste. But even skimming the sex scenes I could appreciate how much they contribute to the plot and the characterisation.

2025/113: Emperor's Wrath — Kai Butler

The sky was blue, and three ravens sat on the wall above me, each looking deeply judgmental.
“Poor showing,” Terror said.
“Is this really the one we’re putting our faith in?” Dawn asked.
“I ate the mother mouse,” Ratcatcher said. “Haven’t had time to tell you yet.” [loc. 2302]

Second in the 'Emperor's Assassin' series, which I discovered while reading this volume is a trilogy with the finale due in autumn 2025 (aargh). Airón and Tallu are married, and Airón is beginning to understand Tallu's plan -- and the fate awaiting the last Emperor. The ravens are delightful; there are airships, elephants and ghosts; and there are several powerful, intelligent and deceptive women. Another big revelation at the end, and months to wait until the series finale!

Butler's prose is very readable, and her pacing is excellent: I really liked the touches of humour (which made a particular character's death all the more affecting) and the Machiavellian machinations of the various factions. And I do like Airón, though I'd love to read Tallu's perspective on events. (And to meet the rest of Airón's family, including the sister we glimpsed all too briefly at the beginning of the series.)

I expect I'll be rereading this and Betrothed to the Emperor later this year, in preparation for Shadow Throne King...

2025/112: Betrothed to the Emperor — Kai Butler

I felt as taut as a bowstring pulled, ready to release the arrow and realizing that I had to build the target I needed to hit. [loc. 1690]

Airón, prince of the Northern Empire, has been raised as an assassin: his twin sister Eonai is to marry the Emperor of the fearsome Imperium, after which Airón will kill his new brother-in-law. He doesn't expect to survive, but the Imperium must be destroyed. Except it all goes horribly wrong when Eonai and Airón are presented to Tallu, 'a viper' reportedly responsible for the deaths of his parents and younger sibling. Because Tallu decides that he will, instead, marry Airón...

Classic enemies-to-lovers plot, with the addition of a hilarious raven named Terror (Airón can talk to animals, part of his Northern heritage), some half-starved sea-serpents in the palace lake, a dragon egg -- which Airón does not treat with nearly enough care -- and a supporting cast of servants, nobles and soldiers. Because the story's told as Airón's narrative, we know as little as he does about the Emperor's true motives, which keeps Airón wrong-footed and the reader intrigued. The worldbuilding was intriguing, and the budding romance credibly slow.

I enjoyed this a great deal and instantly read the next in the series...

2025/111: Return to the Enchanted Island — Johary Ravaloson (translated by Allison M. Charette)

He got sent to a cell... went before the judge, did three months of community service at the Garches hospital, was all the same spared extradition—a random impulse would never extinguish his luck.[p. 96]

Translated from the French, this novel is the first I have read by a Malagasy author. It interweaves Malagasy heritage and history with the story of Ietsy Razak, privileged son of a wealthy family, named after the 'first man' in Malagasy myth. Ietsy is sent to France to 'continue his education' after a misadventure with drugs in which a schoolmate dies. There, he meets and falls in love with Ninon, and is devastated at the end of their affair. He becomes an illegal alien when he forgets to renew his visa. 

Despite being lazy and prone to depression, Ietsy tends to fall on his feet. He has good (and patient) friends, and seems to get away with a great deal. It's a clash of cultures -- Madagascan nobility versus modern, democratic France -- and only by returning to Madagascar can he find peace and happiness.

I don't think the audiobook -- capably narrated by Ron Butler -- was the best way to appreciate this novel. I found it difficult to understand the parallels between the mythic and the real Ietsys, and I didn't really warm to the protagonist, a spoilt slacker exploiting his social status to get away with ... well, with causing the deaths of others. But Return to the Enchanted Island did offer a portrait of Malagasy life, culture and history, and in that respect was interesting.

I note that the original title, Les larmes d’Ietsé, translates as 'The Tears of Ietsy': perhaps a more descriptive and less generic title than the rather vague Return to the Enchanted Island.

2025/110: Mythica — Emily Hauser

It’s also cuttingly symbolic of our hunt for Late Bronze Age women that the eponymous lions of the Lion Gate have been systematically misgendered as male – when they’re actually a fierce and gorgeous pair of female lions. (If you visit Mycenae, I encourage you to annoy as many people as you can by pointing out that this is, in fact, the ‘Lioness Gate’.) [loc. 5624]

An examination of the role of women in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and in the wider realm of Greek myth. In her introduction, Emily Hauser says she's exploring 'what new discoveries about the real women of history can do to help us understand Homer – not what Homer can tell us about the Late Bronze Age' [loc. 819]. And she points out that, although women are treated as secondary, as property, as lesser, they are essential to the stories. The Iliad begins with two men quarrelling over an enslaved woman (Briseis): the Odyssey ends with Odysseus going home (via Calypso, Circe and Nausicaa) to Penelope.

In chapters titled for the different women -- human and divine -- who power the stories, Hauser examines archaeological evidence, ancient DNA, linguistics (I am now mad keen to read about Linear-B!), the changing geography of the eastern Mediterranean, the ways in which the women of Greek myth have been reimagined in literature (I hadn't realised Briseis is the source for Chaucer and Shakespeare's Cressida), the histories of other civilisations in the Late Bronze Age, and the practicalities of women's lives in that period. She also presents a fascinating overview of gender roles, as typified in burials (traditionally graves with mirrors were assumed to be burials of women, and those with swords burials of men: this turns out to be overly simplistic) and in pronoun use in the Odyssey, where Athena, in disguise as Mentor, is referred to by the gender-neutral term 'min'.

There is so much fascinating detail here: the Hittite stories which may have been one of Homer's sources; Schliemann asking his Greek tutor to find him 'a black-haired Greek woman in the Homeric spirit' and choosing his wife Sophia, famously photographed wearing 'Priam's Treasure', from a selection of photographs; the length of time it takes to weave a sail for a ship (four years: possibly Calypso, instead of bewitching Odysseus for seven years, couldn't wait to see the back of him but had to provide a sail before he could leave); Γ58, the skeleton of a woman found with an immensely valuable electrum death-mask... Hauser is an excellent communicator (also a novelist: I shall look out for her fiction) and the occasional colloquialism (Cassandra as 'a Greta Thunberg of ancient times', for instance) doesn't distract or detract from the accessible, well-referenced account of women's roles in the centuries around the Late Bronze Age collapse.

I'm tempted to buy this book in paper form: I think it will be an invaluable reference, as well as an excellent read.

2025/109: 1983 — Tom Cox

At the end of the day, when the shops closed, the city felt like the bottom of a glass that too many people had been drinking from. [loc. 1830]

Set in a village on the outskirts of Nottingham ('the UK city where you're statistically most likely to be assaulted by a stranger') in the early Eighties, this is the story of Benji, an only child aged seven, who spends his time playing with the ZX Spectrum at school, building a nuclear fallout shelter in the woods, listening to The Teardrop Explodes and waiting for the aliens to come and return him to his home planet. (He glimpsed the aliens, which can shapeshift, during a hospital stay some years earlier.) 

Benji's parents are outsiders in the village, due to their Penguin paperbacks and modern jazz records, despite his dad having been born less than ten miles away. Benji, though he has plenty of friends and is happy at school, is a bit of an outsider too. He is aware of, though doesn't understand, the sense of social change and industrial decay, the rise of Thatcherism and the rage of the underclass.

But that's an undercurrent, considerably less foregrounded than the crew of shapeshifting aliens from the planet Vozkoz, who need to abduct a particular human whose essence is the only thing that can save their world. Another plot thread involves neighbour Colin, who builds robots out of scrap and whom Benji is convinced (after research conducted with the library's microfiche archive) is actually Bruce Lacey, as featured in the Fairport Convention song 'Mr Lacey'. (You can hear the robots at around the 2-minute mark in that video.)

Intercut with Benji's narrative are various uncaptioned photographs, and diverse other voices: Benji's parents, a headmistress, Benji's cousin, an alpaca, Colin, a drunken fuckwit, some daffodils... All contribute something to the story, though it's Benji's voice, and the events of that one year, that pull it all together. I enjoyed it immensely and nostalgically, and I loved Cox's inventiveness and the discursive winding of the story. The fantastical elements were (mostly^*) cleverly woven in and, frankly, made just as much more sense as nuclear war or Margaret Thatcher. And there's a strong sense of affection blooming through the novel: a love of life with all its imperfections.

^*I don't believe you could buy six blank cassettes for 49p in 1983, even in Nottinghamshire.

2025/108: Code Name Verity — Elizabeth Wein

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old. [p. 114]

Reread after The Enigma Game, which features a younger and considerably more cheerful Julie. (My review from 2013.) This is still a very harrowing read, even though I know what happens. 

This time around I especially noticed the marvellous portrayal of Engels, the translator/guard, who Julie portrays as monstrous because to reveal her acts of kindness would get both of them in trouble. It's a masterclass in unreliable narration and in why you should consider the audience, as well as the author, of a text.

Maddie and Engel are talking about cigarettes:

‘Never gave any to Julie!’ Engel gave an astonished bark of laughter. ‘I damn well gave her half my salary in cigarettes, greedy little Scottish savage! She nearly bankrupted me. Smoked her way through all five years of your pilot’s career!’
‘She never said! She never even hinted! Not once!’
‘What do you think would have happened to her,’ Engel said coolly, ‘if she had written this down? What would have happened to me?’ [p.310]

Also spotted a friend's name in the Acknowledgements: hope to discuss it with her soon.

2025/107: The Enigma Game — Elizabeth Wein

People being nice to you after someone has made you feel like a criminal or an enemy is just like sticking cardboard in your window after a bomb has blasted all the glass out of it. The hole is stopped up, but the glass is still smashed and you can’t see through the window any more. Everything in the room is uglier and darker. [loc. 2523]

Louisa Adair is fifteen and orphaned: it's 1940, her English mother died in the Balham bombing, and shortly afterwards her Jamaican father was killed when his merchant navy ship was torpedoed. (He couldn't enlist in the Royal Navy because he wasn't born in Europe.) She telephones to answer an advertisement for someone to look after an elderly aunt -- the advertiser, Mrs Campbell, can't tell from Louisa's 'polite English accent' that she's biracial -- and finds herself escorting the redoubtable 'Jane Warner' (actually Johanna von Arnim, a former opera singer) from an internment camp on the Isle of Man to a pub in a small Scottish village.

Stationed at the nearby airbase is Flight Lieutenant James G. Beaufort-Stuart (who also appears in Code Name Verity), nineteen and pretty good at keeping his squadron alive, despite their clunky Blenheim bombers and a CO who seems determined to ignore Jamie's input. And working as a driver at the airbase is Volunteer Ellen McEwen, of Traveller heritage, who appeared in The Pearl Thief. The narrative switches between the three protagonists, all of whom become involved in the acquisition and operation of a secret Enigma machine.

It's a great adventure story: it's also a depiction of period-typical racism (the little boy who thinks Louisa must be a German because he's never seen anyone like her before; Ellen instinctively reacting to an insulting comment about Louisa because she's all too familiar with the same kind of insult). And, poignantly, it features Jamie's 'wee sister' Julie. The Enigma Game is set years before Code Name Verity and is not nearly as harrowing, though there's plenty of peril and not everyone makes it to the end. I liked it very much, not least because of Wein's fantastic gift for writing about aviation: she's also very good at evoking the sheer inconvenience of wartime life.

Bonus Ancient Greece angle: code names in this novel include Odysseus and Calypso (Louisa being mistaken for the latter).

2025/106: Moira's Pen — Megan Whalen Turner

He should have recognised the danger when the king insisted on a formal introduction every time they met, forcing his sullen attendants to recite the diplomatic courtesies again and again, always with the pretense of never having heard them before, always with that same look of gleeful idiocy on his face. Beyond petty, beyond tedious, it was ridiculous. What kind of a king makes a mockery of himself? Melheret wished he'd seen the answer sooner... Only a king who was very sure of himself could afford to be laughed at. ['Melheret's Earrings, p.124]

A collection of short stories woven in and around the canon of the Queen's Thief series (which I have recently devoured and fallen in love with) plus maps, essays on archaeology and historical inspirations, and some beautiful illustrations. I'd read some of the stories and essays before, appended to the novels, but it is nice to have them all in one place. Even if that place is a hardcover book...

I was most intrigued by the last story in the book, 'Gitta': the protagonist is Princess Gittavjøre, a descendant of Gen and Irene, and she's reading the books that Pheris wrote about the life and times of Eugenides the Great. There are many hints about how matters played out in the Little Peninsula -- now Ephestalia - after the end of the series: some sad, some tantalising. If Turner ever decides to write a novel about Gitta, I'll definitely buy it.

Moira's Pen is not a long book, and most of the stories are quite slight: character studies or outsider viewpoints. It's as interesting for the insights into Turner's creative inspirations as for the extra glimpses of Gen, Helen and Irene. (And Laela!)

2025/105: Breaking the Dark — Lisa Jewell

Her whole life has been a slow-motion multiple pileup. She lives on the edges of everything, at the sharp pointy corner of existence between normality and extraordinariness where she is neither one thing nor, truly, the other. She can do extraordinary things, but she doesn’t like doing them. But she can’t be normal either, she’s too broken, too other. [loc. 1217]

I'm not familiar with Jewell's thrillers, but I am a fan of Marvel's Jessica Jones, and had listened to an audiobook of another story featuring her, Playing with Fire. So, for the challenge involving two books in the same shared universe...

In Breaking the Dark, Jessica is recruited by a wealthy socialite who believes that something weird has happened to her children, Lark and Fox, while they stayed with their father in Barton Wallop, a small village in Essex (the UK version). They used to be normal (if privileged) teenagers, but now they just keep talking about everything being 'perfect': they're polished, glossy and uninterested in their old friends and hobbies, and they're obsessed with the Lloyd Cole song 'Perfect Skin'.

Jessica's broke and in a rut: she needs the money, so agrees to investigate. In England, she discovers a self-professed 'AI witch' who also talks about being (or at least looking) perfect, as well as a run-down farmhouse where a girl named Belle seems to be living in the thrall of an older woman named Debra.

In a parallel plot thread, a woman named Polly targets a young man named Arthur -- and his parents Ophelia and John, who have (a) an elderly cat and (b) a big secret. Polly wants to be a big-name beauty influencer, and has created a product line called Beauty X. But there's been some outcry about her ingredients, and she jumps at Arthur's suggestion of using quantum physics to achieve similar effects. Jessica (with the help of teenaged sidekick Malcolm, and longterm friend-with-benefits Luke Cage) uncovers Polly's dastardly plot, and the secret of that farmhouse: she also undergoes a change of her own.

This was a fun read, well-paced and suspenseful: Jewell's Jessica is very much the character I recall from the Marvel TV show, and I found her changing perspective on life very credible. Happy endings for the deserving few (though I felt very sorry for Mr Smith) and no lasting damage. And by the end of the novel Jessica's life is transformed: not perfect, but good.

...my husband said that this is the hardest he’s ever seen me working in all the twenty-five years I’ve been at this job! [Author's Afterword]

2025/104: Oracle — Thomas Olde Heuvelt

In both timelines there was a chain of events triggered by a smaller event on the North Sea. At Doggerland, it was the annual sacrifice they pushed off in a canoe. In the eighteenth century, it was the five sick hands they threw overboard to drown. ‘It’s been awakened,’ Grim uttered. ‘That thing from below. Its hunger was aroused, and now it’s demanding more . . .’ [p. 280]

I've enjoyed Heuvelt's previous novels (HEX and Echo: supernatural horror in the modern world, with layered narrative and unreliable narrators. Oracle -- in which an eighteenth-century plague ship suddenly appears in a tulip field -- ties together Doggerland, oil rigs, smallpox epidemics and oppressive regimes. The protagonists are Luca Wolf, aged thirteen, who watches his best friend Emma vanish into the ship (they're the first to see it) and, later, his father; Robert Grim, who appeared in HEX; Eleanor Delveaux, who heads a shadowy government department tasked with investigating weird phenomena; and Vincent Becker, a damage assessment inspector investigating a disaster at a North Sea oil rig called Mammoth III. This is not the only mammoth we will encounter.

Luca is a delight, as is his practical and open-minded girlfriend Safiya. Grim is rather two-dimensional (I don't really remember him from HEX). So is Eleanor, who was not endeared to me by the explanation '[she] knew she was hated and she didn’t care. In the male-dominated world of power, you had to be hard as nails to stand your ground. If that meant that she was perpetuating the stereotype of the unscrupulous battle axe, then tough'. 

The secondary characters, to be honest, are more interesting than most of the protagonists: a tulip-farmer haunted by the sound of a bell, a rig mechanic talking about discovering a gargantuan skull, a Guardian correspondent abducted in broad daylight... Where the novel excels is not in character depth but in visions of ancient rituals and curses, the living memory of catastrophic floods, the terrors of storms at sea: in Elder Gods, half-glimpsed horrors and human bodies metamorphosed into something dreadful. The climax is thoroughly cinematic, though the true resolution of the ancient conflict between humanity and the natural world is described only in the Epilogue.

This was a well-paced read with some evocative locations, nicely interwoven past-and-present, and the occasional echo of Lost. And there are hints that we'll see more of Grim in Heuvelt's future novels.

2025/103: Hemlock and Silver — T Kingfisher

I had just taken poison when the king arrived to inform me that he had murdered his wife. [opening line]

A new T Kingfisher novel is always a delight, and Hemlock and Silver -- a dark and occasionally horrific riff on 'Snow White' -- has brought me great joy, right from that opening line.

Healer Anja is thirty-five years old, unmarried, an expert in poisons and their antidotes. The king, having informed her that he'd murdered his wife, wants her to cure his adolescent daughter, Snow, whom he believes is being poisoned. The money is good and the offer difficult to refuse. In short order, Anja is on her way to Witherleaf, an opulent palace in the desert. She meets the young princess, who is clearly hiding something; she runs tests, the results of which are inconclusive; and she encounters an excellent cat.

I loved the worldbuilding: the beasts of heaven rose up and slew the cruel, pitiless gods, and are worshipped as saints. (There is no Saint Cat.) Anja refuses to believe in magic, and approaches her work with scientific rigour. She's a likeable narrator with a pragmatic approach and a burning urge to understand the world around her.

There are elements of horror that reminded me of some of Kingfisher's darker works, such as The Twisted Ones and The Hollow Places: there's also romance, friendship and the aforementioned excellent cat ("His Gloriousness, God-King of the Deserts, Lord of Rooftops, King of Mirrors, Heir to the Mantle of Harar, He Who Treads the Serpent's Tail, Whose Claws Have Scarred the Bark of the Great Tree") who is key to the resolution of the mystery.

UK publication date is 19th August 2025: thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my advance review copy!

2025/102: When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

[Author's Note] I thought I was writing a story about rage. I wasn’t. There is certainly rage in this novel, but it is about more than that. In its heart, this is a story about memory, and trauma. It’s about the damage we do to ourselves and our community when we refuse to talk about the past. It’s about the memories that we don’t understand, and can’t put into context, until we learn more about the world. [p. 366]

Reread for Lockdown bookclub: original review here. I liked it even more the second time around, though I found myself focussing more on the silences, absences and unspoken truths of Alex's childhood than on the natural history of dragons. Interestingly, it felt a lot more hopeful when I read it in 2022 than now, nearly three years later.

Discussed with book club. Reactions were mixed. We wanted more about knots, and whether they were actually magic.

2025/101: The Silence of the Girls — Pat Barker

I was no longer the outward and visible sign of Agamemnon’s power and Achilles’ humiliation. No, I’d become something altogether more sinister: I was the girl who’d caused the quarrel. Oh, yes, I’d caused it – in much the same way, I suppose, as a bone is responsible for a dogfight. [loc. 1596]

This is the story of Briseis, a princess of Lyrnessus who was captured when the Achaeans sacked the city. Her husband and brothers were slaughtered, and she was given to Achilles as a prize. Later, Agamemnon's prize Chryseis was returned to her father, a priest of Apollo: plague had broken out and Apollo, the god of plague, needed to be appeased. Agamemnon complained about the loss of his property: Briseis was taken from Achilles and given to Agamemnon to replace Chryseis, and Achilles then sulked in his tent and refused to fight.

Of course the story is quite different from Briseis' point of view. She's witnessed the slaughter of her people, slithered 'along alleys cobbled with our brothers', been a victim of and witness to rape (at least as a noblewoman she isn't given to the common soldiers), and she has prayed for Apollo's vengeance. Patroclus is kind to her ('I know what it’s like to lose everything and be handed to Achilles as a toy'), and she becomes friendly with other women in the Greek camp as they nurse the wounded. But these are small comforts: she has become liminal, belonging neither with the living nor the dead. And she refuses to forget her former life.

Towards the end of the novel there are some scenes from Achilles' point of view: the arrival of Priam, the loss of Patroclus, the desecration of Hector's corpse. These scenes are an interesting counterpoint to Briseis' quiet despair and loathing: they show us Achilles' resignation in the face of his fate, and his desperate loneliness after the death of his only friend, and they illuminate some aspects of the warrior life. I don't think they were necessary, though: I'd rather have stuck with Briseis.

The Silence of the Girls ends with Briseis reflecting on how people hearing of Achilles' brief and glorious life won't want to know about the rape camps and the enslavement and the slaughter. Pregnant by Achilles and married to one of Achilles' captains, she's still, effectively, enslaved. The final words -- 'now, my own story can begin' -- feel trite.

Horrific brutality, colloquial speech, glimpses of the divine and supernatural (Briseis sits with her back to a bronze mirror and feels the rage of Achilles' ghost: earlier, his mother -- the goddess Thetis -- emerges from the sea), and a determination to survive, no matter what.

We’re going to survive – our songs, our stories. They’ll never be able to forget us. Decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead, their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them. We’ll be in their dreams – and in their worst nightmares too. [loc. 3595]

2025/100: Monsters — Emerald Fennell

The best thing about there being a murder in Fowey is that it means there is a murderer in Fowey. It could be anyone. [loc. 464]

The nameless narrator of Monsters is a twelve-year-old girl, orphaned in a boating accident ('Don’t worry – I’m not that sad about it') and living with her grandmother. Every summer she's packed off to an aunt and uncle who run a guest house in the quaint Cornish town of Fowey. There, she meets Miles, also twelve, and they bond over a murder -- a local woman found tangled in fishing nets. Miles and our narrator are fascinated by the notion of a murderer... but as their investigations proceed and more bodies are found, some uncomfortable truths are revealed. (I say 'revealed': some of the nastiest truths are merely hinted at.)

Most of the reviews seem to revel in the monstrosity of Miles and the narrator, and it's true that they are amoral little monsters. But I felt desperately sorry for her: I think that line on the first page, 'I'm not that sad about it', is ... not quite a lie, but a glib response to a horrendous situation. She has nobody: her grandmother is emotionally distant, her aunt is terrified, her uncle is horrific. No wonder she's so desperate for Miles to like her: no wonder she's not always in control of her own actions. She's as much a victim as the drowned eyeless girls who wash up with sea urchin fossils in their mouths.

I liked most of the novel, especially the vignettes of local characters: superstitious townsfolk, feeble Aunt Maria, poisonous Jean. The ending, though, seemed at once hasty and inconclusive. Yes, it resolved and explained most of the murders, but it felt out of tune with the rest of the story.

2025/099: The Story of a Heart — Rachel Clarke

Depending on your point of view, the transplantation of a human heart is a miracle, a violation, a leap of faith, an act of sacrilege. It’s a dream come true, a death postponed, a biomedical triumph, a day job. [loc. 199]

Keira, aged nine, is fatally injured in a traffic accident: her heart keeps beating but she is brain-dead. Max, also aged nine, has been in hospital for almost a year because his heart is failing. This is the story of how Keira (and, more actively, her family) saved Max, and of the people involved in the heart transplant - doctors, nurses, couriers, porters... It's a compassionate and engaging work of narrative non-fiction, this is the story of a heart transplant, and of how the death of one child and the saving of another led to a significant change in UK law.

While I was reading The Story of a Heart, it was announced as the winner of the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction: I hope this will prompt more people to read it. Clarke, trained as a doctor, is an excellent communicator of medical science: she's also adept at highlighting the little details. (Keira's young sisters, both convinced that she would have wanted to donate her organs, paint her fingernails orange while she's lying in intensive care.) 

I found this a moving, fascinating and sometimes sobering book: I think it's what I was expecting when I read Mend the Living (a novel that I thought at first was non-fiction) some years ago. They're both very good books.

interview with Rachel Clarke

2025/098: Maurice — E M Forster

He had gone outside his class, and it served him right. [loc. 2758]

A classic of LGBT+ literature, read for a 'published posthumously' challenge -- I managed to find an affordable Kindle edition. Splendid prose, intriguingly detached/omniscient narration, and appalling social tension. I felt a deep dislike for most of the characters, especially Maurice, and suspect it would have been reciprocated. ('Both were misogynists... In the grip of their temperaments, they had not developed the imagination to do duty instead, and during their love women had become as remote as horses or cats; all that the creatures did seemed silly.' [loc. 1301]. Miaow.)

Maurice forms a close friendship with Durham at university, but is repulsed when Durham declares his love. He then reads some Greek literature and decides that though homosexuality may be 'the worst crime in the calendar' he reciprocates Durham's love. There is a period of happiness, after which Durham declares that he has suddenly caught heterosexuality and is planning to marry. Maurice does not take this well. He has a liaison with a working-class man (Durham's gamekeeper Scudder) and -- after some disastrous miscommunications -- turns his back on his old life to be with Scudder.

Maurice is a sobering insight into the public (and private) attitude towards homosexuality in the Edwardian era. The Dean's translation class omits 'a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks'; Maurice rejects Durham with the words 'a rotten notion really'; a doctor refuses to discuss 'nonsense'. It's a subject 'absolutely beyond the limit'. And Forster, of course, did not publish this novel in his lifetime.

I did like Maurice's notion of life beyond conventions: 'Perhaps among those who took to the greenwood in old time there had been two men like himself—two. At times he entertained the dream. Two men can defy the world.' [loc. 1779]. And apparently, in Forster's unpublished epilogues, that's what became of Maurice and Scudder. (source)

Forster completed the first draft of this novel in 1913-14. What would have become of Maurice and Alec in the war?

2025/097: Endling — Maria Reva

"Wasn't your novel originally going to be about a marriage agency in Ukraine?"
"Null and void... I was writing about a so-called invasion of bachelors to Ukraine, and then an actual invasion happened. Even in peacetime I felt queasy writing right into not one but two Ukrainian tropes, 'mail-order brides' and topless protesters. To continue now seems unforgiveable." [loc. 1457]

The first half of Endling is the story of Yeva, a malacologist ('despite its inclusion of mollusks without backbones') who's determined to save endangered snail species. It hasn't gone well: she is down to one living specimen, Lefty, whose shell coils the opposite way to others of his species. (Yeva, similarly, coils the other way: she's asexual, though she has a passionate friendship with a conservationist.) Lefty is an endling, the last of his variant. Perhaps Yeva is too.

To finance her mobile lab, Yeva works for Romeo Meets Yulia, an agency that does 'romance tours' for Western men.You meet the most interesting people at these events. Yeva is approached by two sisters, Nastia and Sol, who also work for the agency. Inspired by their infamous mother, a flamboyant activist, they've decided to kidnap one hundred bachelors as a publicity stunt, and they'd like to use Yeva's van. It's a lab, Yeva points out, and twelve is the absolute limit.

So off they set, three women and a dozen bewildered Westerners (well, eleven: Pasha lives in Vancouver, but was born in Ukraine), on a road trip to nowhere. And suddenly there are loud noises outside...

The quotation at the top of this review comes from the middle of the book, where everything falls apart: reality intrudes, in the form of the Russian invasion of February 2022. The author also intrudes: that's her talking to her agent, trying to place this novel, to sell articles about Ukrainian humour. And the book seems to end, with Acknowledgements ('I would also like to thank Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs for including my name on their personal sanctions list of Canadians who are now forbidden from entering their country. One of the biggest honours of my literary career' [loc. 1620]) and A Note on the Type.

But we're not even halfway through, and for the rest of the novel Reva's own voice enters the novel, worrying about her grandfather in Kherson, wondering whether one can write fiction about tragedy and war. Not that Yeva and her companions vanish. Instead, Yeva's conservationist friend tells her he's spotted another left-coiling snail, a female, in the background of a teenager's video about not wanting to leave his city. The city is Kherson...

I loved the playfulness of this novel, even in the midst of horror: I warmed to Yeva and to Reva and to the activist sisters trying to lure their absent mother into view with a high-profile stunt. And somehow even the snails were interesting -- not words I thought I would ever type.

UK publication is 3rd July 2025: Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy!

2025/096: Stateless — Elizabeth Wein

...turning your back on your family, I knew, wasn’t nearly as terrifying as turning your back on an entire nation. [loc. 3643]

Stella North is the only female contestant in Europe's first ever youth air race. It's 1937, and the European powers are desperately trying to avert war: 'No one who fought here twenty years ago and survived wanted to see their sons come of age and go straight out to fight another war'. Meanwhile, the young men who are Stella's (male) competitors seem to be obsessed with the war records of their instructors and chaperones. She's especially vexed by the French pilot, Tony Roberts, who strongly resembles the German pilot, Sebastian Rainer. Tony flew in Spain, during the Civil War: Sebastian has never heard of Guernica.

On the first leg of the race, a pilot is forced out of the sky by another plane. Stella is the only witness, and she's terrified that she will be the next target. Instead, she's under suspicion ...

This is a murder mystery, but it's also about the joy of flying, and about being 'stateless' (Stella's a refugee whose parents were murdered during the Russian revolution), and there is friendship and perhaps romance. Ignore the 'young adult' labelling: this is a well-researched and immensely readable novel, with credible characters and a complex plot. Wein handles the looming war -- which the characters dread, but don't know is going to happen -- with sensitivity, and the young aviators have a variety of perspectives and opinions ... many of which have changed by the end of the novel.

Wein's afterword, 'written in a terrifying present and addressed to an unknown future', mentions some of her sources and inspirations: she also writes that 'It was impossible... to ignore that the 1937 setting was on the brink of events that would alter civilization forever. During the two years that I worked on the novel, between May 2020 and March 2022, it felt rather as if I were writing a book set in the autumn of 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.' (loc. 4791). Writing this review on the day that America has bombed Iran, I also feel that sense of being on the brink: but I've felt like this for so long now...

2025/095: Night and Day in Misery — Catriona Ward

...she understands, now, that she has not been alone these eight years, not really. She carries all that she is, and has been, within her. Stella gasps with the mercy and the cruelty of it all. [loc. 405]

Short story, part of Amazon's 'Shivers' collection: read because Catriona Ward is a favourite author and it's too long since her last novel.

Stella is visiting the motel where her husband Frank and son Sam stayed eight years ago, the night before they died when Frank's car crashed off a suspension bridge and into a river. Sam would be ten now. Stella's life has frozen: she's estranged from her mother (who advised her to leave Frank) and finds it hard to connect with her sister Dina. She blames herself for Frank and Sam's death, and just wants to be with Sam again. She writes a farewell letter and falls asleep: but dreams...

Too short, but very atmospheric: I listened to the audiobook, which was read slightly too dramatically for my taste, but still good. The prose is lovely and the story, though simple, feels organic and rounded.

2025/094: Return of the Thief — Megan Whalen Turner

Nahuseresh tells me I am not king. We’ll see if he really prefers the Thief. [loc. 3700]

Series finale, and it really delivers. The narrator, for the most part, is Pheris Mostrus Erondites, a vulnerable child who has been taught that his only safety lies in pretending to be a 'drooling idiot'. He's non-verbal, and has other traits indicative of something like cerebral palsy: his cousins have nicknamed him Monster. Eugenides (now annux, high king, of the Peninsula) has 'invited' Pheris to be raised in the palace, away from his family -- his grandfather is Baron Erondites, Gen's greatest opponent in court -- and quickly realises that Pheris' mind is as sharp as his own.

And Pheris observes a great deal. He sees that Gen is often ill; that he keeps returning to the temple of Hephestia, trying to get a straight answer from the gods; that he wants to reject his violent impulses, but also wants to go to war with the Medes. He sees, too, that Gen is willing to laugh at himself: one of the most delightful (and cheerful) scenes is a satirical play about a king named Emipopolitus, who's wasting the country's money on mad ideas. Gen clearly knows the playwright...

This is a novel about war and vengeance, treachery and death. It's presented as Pheris' 'chronicle of the high king' -- his Exordium reminded me of Thucydides* -- and though Pheris literally turns away from the most distressing scenes, there's a lot of violence. But there are also moments of joy, and several instances of divine intervention. And, unexpectedly, a happy ending for most (though not all) of the characters.

Pheris is a fascinating narrator, and a very credible character in his own right: damaged by his family more profoundly than Gen by his frequently-deplored cousins, non-verbal but fascinated by mathematics and keen to become literate under the tuition of Relius, ex-spymaster, possessed of stubborn courage and immense loyalty. I liked him a lot, and I liked the ways in which Turner showed us that his physical problems don't make him in any way lesser. 

Gen fascinated (and occasionally appalled) me all over again. He is, after all, on first-name terms with the gods -- and Pheris, fortunately for the chronicle, can see and hear them too.

And I love that the end of the series is full of hope and new life and possibility: that foreseen disasters are still in the future: that this is not a tragedy.

* Pheris: "I will include in my account what I did not see and hear myself only if I learned of the events as they occurred and from those who were present." [loc. 56]
Thucydides: "Of the events of the war I have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular enquiry." source: 1.22.

2025/093: Thick as Thieves — Megan Whalen Turner

There is freedom in this life and there is power, and I was ambitious for the latter. [p. 15]

Kamet is a slave, albeit an expensive and efficient one: he is secretary to Nahuseresh, the erstwhile Medean ambassador to Attolia. Disgraced by the failure of the mission to Attolia the year before, Nahuseresh has returned to court in Ianna-Ir, hoping for a new post. Unfortunately his latest request has not been granted -- and the court is a dangerous place for a man out of favour. Fearing that he'll be blamed for Nahuseresh's death by poison, Kamet accepts the help of an Attolian soldier who's promised him his freedom. Together, they flee across the desert, the Attolian constantly lauding his king, Kamet feeling effortlessly superior. But the two are becoming friends, despite the secret Kamet can't admit.

This is very much a road-trip story. It's told as Kamet's first-person narrative, and there is a great deal he does not know. (I am unclear, though, why he refers to his companion as 'the Attolian' despite knowing his name from early on.) He's convinced of his own value, and of the barbarity of Attolia. To entertain his presumed-illiterate companion, he recites his own verse translations of the old myths of Immakuk and Ennikar, who are reminiscent of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. And he finds himself thinking differently about loyalty, freedom, power and friendship.

Not my favourite of the series, not least because the protagonists of the main arc don't appear until late in the novel: but Kamet's growth as a person, and the echoes of myth in his friendship with the Attolian, are engaging, and the various secrets -- some hidden in plain sight, others only evident in the final chapters -- are cleverly hidden and revealed. (Kamet's poor eyesight, from years of reading in bad light, is a plot point.) And it's nice to see Medes other than the oily Nahuseresh, who's been portrayed as a dyed-in-the-wool villain (the novel opens with Kamet having suffered a beating for 'overreaching') but had, it seems, some redeeming qualities.

2025/092: A Conspiracy of Kings — Megan Whalen Turner

All my life they had made choices for me, and I had resented it. Now the choice was mine, and once it was made, I would have no right to blame anyone else for the consequences. Loss of that privilege, to blame others, unexpectedly stung. [p. 79]

Sophos, the heir to the kingdom of Sounis, was one of Eugenides' companions in The Thief. He doesn't especially want to be king, though he'd quite like to marry the Queen of Eddis. But suddenly catastrophe strikes, Sophos loses everything, and Sounis is under threat. In order to save his country from civil war, he has first to save himself.

I didn't enjoy this as much as the previous three books in the series: this is partly because Eugenides is a peripheral rather than a central character, and partly because there is much more large-scale conflict. But Eugenides is there (scheming and manipulating, obviously): and Sophos, growing up over the course of the novel -- growing from Sophos to Sounis -- is a fascinating character. His resolution of the impasse between factions was stark and shocking: it would have been unthinkable to the young man at the beginning of the novel, but it is the act of a king.

Another interesting set of narrative choices, too. The first half of the novel is Sophos' first-person narration, but it becomes clear that he's telling his story to somebody. The rest of the novel alternates between third-person and Sophos' continued account.

A Conspiracy of Kings felt like a pivot to the wider world, to the pieces being placed for war. Yet the interpersonal relationships, and the character growth, are just as important as before. I'm glad I didn't read it first: I doubt I'd have appreciated just how intrinsic to the story are Eugenides and Attolia.

2025/091: The King of Attolia — Megan Whalen Turner

... what he had taken for the roughness of sleep was the king’s accent. While half asleep, he had spoken with an Eddisian accent, which was only to be expected, but Costis had never heard it before, nor had anyone he knew. Awake, the king sounded like an Attolian. It made Costis wonder what else the king could hide so well that no one even thought to look for it.[p. 219]

Eugenides has become King of Attolia, but is not well-received by the courtiers and soldiers of the city. They believe he's a barbarian who forced the Queen to marry him, and who has not consummated the marriage. (There is a rude song about this.) They put snakes in his bed and sand in his food: they regard him as helpless and inept.

But this is not his story -- or, rather, not his narrative. It's the story of Costis Ormentiedes, a young soldier in the King's Guard, who we first see trying to compose a letter to his father after having punched the King in the face.

I continue to marvel at Turner's storytelling skill. Though the focus (and, usually, the viewpoint) is firmly with Costis -- Ornon, the Eddisian ambassador, gets some scenes too, as does the Queen -- the core of the novel is Eugenides' reluctance to become King in truth as well as in name, and in the gods' determination that he will fulfil the role they've crafted for him. Keeping Eugenides at one remove from the narrative distances us from his thoughts and feelings, but there are (as ever with Turner) lots of telling details. The click of a latch, the toss of a coin, the roughness of an accent...

Costis is a likeable narrator, and his gradual realisation that Eugenides isn't what he appears feels authentic and natural. Even the minor characters have agency and agendas: even the villains have redeeming features. And there's a strong sense of the presence, the reality, of the gods: numinosity? A splendid and superbly-crafted novel.

2025/090: The Queen of Attolia — Megan Whalen Turner

“You made a mistake,” Attolia agreed. “You trusted your gods. That was your mistake." [p. 267]

Another reread: my review from 2010 is here. I remembered the shockingly violent act at the beginning of the novel, and the state of affairs at the end, but not much in between. And, unable to acquire any of the following novels -- well, back then I thought it was a trilogy! -- the characters faded away.

Eugenides is taken captive by the Queen of Attolia, more beautiful but less kind than his own Queen (Eddis, who's also his cousin). She exacts a brutal penalty for his trespasses, and sends him home. Tensions between the three countries of the peninsula (Sounis, Attolia, and Eddis) are high, and soon there is war. The Queen of Attolia is becoming increasingly vexed by her Medean ambassador, Nahuseresh. When Eugenides, tasked to 'steal peace', encounters her again, she weighs her options and proves amenable to the solution he suggests.

This is a carefully-crafted and emotionally devastating novel. The viewpoint is third person omniscient, with the focus on Gen and Attolia, though other viewpoints occur throughout the book. But the author doesn't tell us everything that's going on, every thought or plan or nightmare. As with The Thief, I found myself rereading to see how the emotional denouement was signalled: the seeds of the revelation that keeps Attolia's glaziers in business. It is beautifully done.

I also very much appreciate the two Queens, who have power and agency, and I note that the pantheon of gods is ruled by the Great Goddess Hephestia. And Eugenides, despite his imposed disability, is still competent and witty, though more vulnerable (and thus seeming younger) than in The Thief.

I must have been so frustrated back in 2010 when I couldn't read more of Eugenides' story. Luckily, that is no longer the case.

2025/089: The Thief — Megan Whalen Turner

It was a relief to explain everything to her... what I’d thought of the magus in the beginning and what I thought of him in the end. What it meant to be the focus of the gods’ attention, to be their instrument, used to change the shape of the world. And it was nice to brag a little, too. [p. 218]

A reread: my previous read (review) was in 2009, back when I was still reading print books, and acquiring them from BookMooch, which was able to provide copies of the first and second book in the series -- but not the third, or the fourth that had only just been published. They weren't available in UK editions until a few years ago. Now there are six books; I have purchased two as Kindle deals over the last few years; and all six are available via Kindle Unlimited. Sparked by a setting similar to Ancient Greece (though with definite Byzantine overtones, and more technology: watches, glass windows, rifles) I immersed myself, and have read all six in the space of a week. It has been blissful, and I'm sure I've noticed aspects and elements which would have eluded me if I'd read each volume as it became available.

At the start of the book, a young thief named Gen is languishing in the King's prison, having boasted that he can steal anything. He's still working on stealing himself out of prison when the king's magus turns up, wanting a 'proficient but anonymous thief' to help him acquire a mysterious treasure. Together with two useless young noblemen and a professional soldier, Gen and the magus set out. By the end of the book, the treasure has been retrieved, the secret agendas of the party have been revealed, the gods have made their existence known, and Gen has turned out to be the epitome of the unreliable narrator.

I didn't recall much of the book from my first reading, so I went back to the start and admired Turner's deftness with subtle clues. Nothing's explained, but everything's laid out for us to see. Gen is an immensely likeable narrator: I enjoyed his competence and self-reliance nearly as much as his deceptions. (I was reminded of Lymond, though apparently Turner didn't read Dorothy Dunnett's novels until well after The Thief was published. Rosemary Sutcliff, on the other hand, was a major influence.)

Originally a standalone novel, and marketed as YA: nevertheless, there is violence and unpleasantness, and a likeable character dies. I'd have enjoyed it tremendously as an adolescent, but I didn't find it simplistic in style or content. And, having finished it, I immediately acquired the rest of the series.

2025/088: The Walled Orchard — Tom Holt

...how Athens came to have the most pure and perfect democracy the world has ever seen, in which every man had a right to be heard, the law was open to all, and nobody need go hungry if he was not too proud to play his part in the oppression of his fellow Greeks and the judicial murder of inconvenient statesmen. [p. 46]

I owned a paperback copy of this novel -- actually two novels in one volume, Goatsong and The Walled Orchard -- for many years but did not read it. Suddenly, recently, the time was right and I was very much in Ancient Greek mode: and I am now much more familiar with the glories of Classical Greece, and the horrors of the Sicilian Expedition, than I was before. (See, for instance, Glorious Exploits.)

The narrator of the duology is Eupolis of Pallene, a gentleman farmer and writer of comedies, from his childhood survival of the plague, which left him scarred and ugly, to his old age. Entwined with the Peloponnesian War and the Sicilian Expedition are the triumphs and disasters of Eupolis' career as a dramatist and his ongoing feud with rival playwright Aristophanes, and his unhappy marriage to Phaedra, a young woman whom he rescues from Aristophanes and his bevy of drunken yobs. 

Eupolis loves and hates Phaedra, who is evil-tempered and keen to make her husband look ridiculous: he loves and hates Athens, her shining ideal of democracy and the idiotic voters who perpetuate it. But Aristophanes is the true villain of the piece, even (especially?) when he and Eupolis are fleeing for their lives through hostile Sicily, forced to compose cod-Euripides on the fly to entertain their hosts. 

Eupolis' fate is tied to Aristophanes', perhaps by the will of Dionysus. His innate cynicism and stubborn determination -- not to mention his true gift for rhetoric and for comedy -- help him endure the horrors of war, the PTSD afterwards, the sabotage of his final play, and the overthrow of democracy.

I found the Sicilian scenes harrowing and brutal, but extraordinarily vivid because of Eupolis' narrative voice. The minutae of everyday life in classical Greece are recounted with dark humour (though there are also moments of deep joy) and never feel laboured or over-explained. And the greater arcs of the story -- of the decline of Athens, of the horrors of war, of the flaws and failures of democracy -- feel as immediate as today's news.

Democracy is a cannibals’ harvest festival, where everyone does their best to feed the hand that bites them. [p. 519]

2025/087: How to Survive in Ancient Greece — Robert Garland

Greek religion does not promote morality. Piety towards the gods and the dead, not good behaviour, is its central aim. [loc. 350]

Read in fits and starts between other books, mostly for the fascinating factoids and descriptions of legal process in classical Greece. Presented as a handbook for time-travellers, How to Survive in Ancient Greece is good at highlighting some key differences: the improbability of growing old, the more equitable distribution of wealth (1% really wealthy, 1% really poor, 'the majority of Athenians are very poor by our standards'), the less equitable treatment of women. Entertaining, engaging, informative.

2025/086: Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole: Extraordinary Journeys into the Human Brain — Allan H. Ropper, Brian Burrell

Sadly, when it comes to ... such borderline theories, I have no spiel to offer, and sometimes revert to being a jerk. In this case, I suggested that they both might be magnetized. As an experiment, I said, he and his wife should float on their backs in their swimming pool to see if they both pointed north. I was guessing that they had a pool. I was right. They never came back. [p. 102]

There are some fascinating case studies here (ovarian teratoma, motor neurone disease, Parkinson's) and Ropper stresses the importance of listening to the patient's account of their problem, as well as observing the physical signs of it. Unfortunately Ropper presents as rather arrogant, very much the leader of any team he's in. (He does make one mistaken diagnosis: the patient dies: he doesn't tell the patient's family about his mistake.) 

He's also dismissive of 'conversion disorders' -- the modern term for hysteria and psychosomatic issues -- and rather too fond of describing his patients' physical appearance. The chapter on brain death was especially interesting, but also horrific because it read as though one patient's reputation affected how he (well, his body) was treated by hospital staff.

Interesting and well-written but I prefer the humility and compassion of authors such as Oliver Sacks. That said, I did laugh at the episode I've quoted at the top of this review... despite knowing that those people were experiencing what they perceived as a medical issue, and that they were paying for medical care.

2025/085: One Midsummer's Day: Swifts and the Story of Life on Earth — Mark Cocker

What faces a young swift is a metamorphosis no less than if it were a larval insect bursting from the chrysalis as a winged imago. What hatched as a toad-mouthed lizard has already morphed to a light-wreathed angel, but now it must go from a condition of complete reliance upon parents to independence, instantly and without alternative. It must launch itself from a dusty, dark roof and fly out to the Sun. There are no second chances. It is a one-shot deal. It must fly, but fly perfectly, having never done so. It must simultaneously learn to feed and do so immediately... [loc. 2361]

Mark Cocker frames his narrative as a single summer day, from dawn to dusk. He draws on history, physics and anecdote to support his hypothesis that 'it takes a whole universe to make just one small black bird', and his account is nature writing at its best -- discursive, poetic, emotional, scientific, full of anecdotes and unexpected facts. (He suggests, based on the writings of Pliny, that swifts did not inhabit urban environments until after the 1st century AD.) 

There's plenty of sound information about the lifecycle, the migrations and the flight of swifts, but there is also a continuo of Cocker's sheer joy in their existence, and in the complexities of the natural world. He writes of 'my ever-deepening appreciation that, as far as we know, we live among the greatest event in the universe, partaking of the deepest mysteries and the grandest miracle possibly across 100 billion galaxies' [loc. 306] and I feel an echo of the same awe. I was also fascinated by his account of avian migration: an organ in the right eye of migrant birds that somehow perceives magnetic force, and a grain of magnetite close to the olfactory nerve. And I was, am, uplifted by his sheer delight (and his use of delight as a verb) in the manifold splendours, connections and complexities of the world around him.

I read most of One Midsummer's Day in my garden, glancing up often to watch swifts circle and scream overhead in a cloudless blue sky.

The birds were engaged in their own split-second chase. Each swerve filleted a beetle from air. Their lines were smooth and effortless. They reminded me of blue tuna coursing at will among bait-balls of fry. It was chaos but compounded of clarity and exactitude, and it was exhilarating to see such purity of movement. [loc. 2286]

2025/084: Copper Script — K J Charles

You couldn’t get hot for handwriting. And yet he had ... [loc. 1329]

Set in London in 1924. Detective Sergeant Aaron Fowler, of the Metropolitan Police, is approached by his slimy cousin Paul to sort out a graphologist who's wrecked Paul's engagement by accurately reporting, to his fiancee, his infidelity. Fowler drops in on the graphologist, one Joel Wildsmith, expecting to find a con artist of some variety: but he's disturbed, and impressed, by the accuracy of Joel's analyses. (And by Joel himself: but Aaron never acts on his desires, times being what they are.) He devises a scientific test, presenting Joel with a set of handwriting samples -- and Joel's gift reveals a sociopath.

The protagonists are both fascinating characters: Aaron with his Italian heritage, union-firebrand stepfather, aristocratic connections and dedication to his career; Joel, who lost a hand in the War and hates his prosthetic even more than he despises the police (to be fair, he's a victim of entrapment, and the Met is notoriously corrupt), and whose knack for sensing a writer's personality ('I imagine being the person who wrote like that, and then I tell you what I feel like') is spookily accurate. Applause, too, for Detective Constable Helen Challice, one of the first women police officers in the Met, who's routinely handed all the 'women's' cases -- rapes, domestic abuse, paedophilia -- and is determined to remain calm and professional in the face of this onslaught.

As I've come to expect from KJ Charles, this was witty, sexy and very much rooted in the iniquities of the period. Lots of interesting details about London, too: the Indian restaurant, the plethora of mutilated war veterans (and the blandly unsupportive advice given by the Ministry for Pensions), the gangs that more or less run the poorer areas of the capital, the role of newspapers in shaping public opinion, the prejudice and double standards that pervade the Metropolitan Police.

Copper Script isn't (yet?) one of my top five KJC novels: the villain was somewhat two-dimensional, and the denouement felt hasty and downbeat (though it is probably the only happy conclusion that could reasonably be achieved). Still, an engaging and entertaining read, with a strong thread of socialist sensibility.

Minor quibble: a corpse in the Regent's Canal (freshwater, non-tidal) has not spent the night in the Thames...

The author has already had more than 25 novels scraped without payment by AI companies. The author would like AI companies to fuck off. [About the Author, loc. 3392]

2025/083: Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories — Diarmuid Hester

... this new queer writing was all about using language to weave connections: to a place (San Francisco’s Bay Area) and between people (real or imagined). All in the service of queer community politics. In the late 1970s, [Bruce] Boone and [Robert] Glück thought about calling it something. ‘How about New Narrative?’ Boone suggested as a joke. [p. 287]

Hester starts off at Prospect Cottage, Derek Jarman's house at Dungeness, with the vague notion of 'a larger project I had in mind, which would examine the importance of queer places in the history of arts and culture' [p.7]. He begins with E. M. Forster and Cambridge (where, when he arrives in 2017, there is not a single queer bar or club); continues with queer suffragettes (Vera Holme and Lady Evelina Haverfield); explores the excesses ('given a choice of either/or, she chose both') of Josephine Baker's time in Paris. 

Then to Jersey for Claude Calhoun and Marcel Moore, who in 1937 'packed up their stuff, put their cat in a Hermès handbag and bid adieu to France': in Jersey they used their special middle-aged-woman powers of invisibility to distribute surrealist anti-German propaganda, and were sentenced to death, but walked free after Germany's defeat.

I was less familiar with James Baldwin, Jack Smith and Kevin Killian, the other artists featured in Nothing Ever Just Disappears. Hester's curiosity about their lives and deaths, his pilgrimages in search of forgotten queer spaces, and the ways in which queer artists imagined those spaces differently, kept me reading, and made me think about how artists use their art to carve out and transform spaces. I hadn't previously encountered the concept of the New Narrative: authenticity, honesty, subjectivity, and the identity politics of the (often queer) author. Feels quite punk...

2025/082: The Bull from the Sea — Mary Renault

The fire leaped high; it shone down the long stone-lined cutting into the mound, showing the painted doorposts of the burial vault, the new bronze hasps of the open doors, and the Erechthid snake upon the lintel. But it did not pierce the dark beyond; sometimes when my back was turned I could feel him standing in the shadows beyond the doorway to watch his rites, as they show dead men in the funeral pictures. [loc. 336]

Sequel to The King Must Die: I think as a teenager I read this first, an old paperback from the jumble sale. Narrated again by Theseus, it's the story of everything that happens after his return from Crete: his father's funeral, becoming king, his friendship with Pirithoos the Lapith (a Bad Influence, to be honest), his relationship with the Amazon Hippolyta, their son Hippolytus and Theseus' frustration with his chosen life... There are curiously primitive Kentaurs, an encounter with Oedipus, and a foreshadowing of Paris's Judgment: also a fleeting encounter with a young Achilles. And through it all, warp and weft, Theseus's sense of the gods: his religious and spiritual practices. 

Again, though there is nothing that's definitely supernatural or mystical, those beliefs shade every experience he has. He attributes the stroke he suffers to Poseidon, though others say it was the Mother ('I had stolen two of her daughters out of her shrines, and tamed her worship at Eleusis') or Apollo ('I was struck without pain, as men are killed by his gentle arrows; and as I was only half to blame for his good servant’s death, he left me half alive.'). 

Though there are moments of great happiness, this is not a happy book. It's about pride and downfall, about misjudgements and poor choices. I had less patience with Theseus' piracy and war-making than with his bull-leaping: I was angry at his dismissal of his mother's valid concerns about how he might have offended the Great Mother, and especially his dismissal of abandoned Ariadne ('Do you know how the Wine King dies? She took to it like a fish to the sea, though she had been reared softly, knowing nothing of such things. There is rotten blood in the House of Minos' [loc. 661]); his treatment of his son is horrific, though he does realise this in the final chapter of the novel.

Renault's writing is superlative. I especially like her descriptions of landscape, and her ability to craft sentences that sound as though they have been translated from an ancient text. I'm saving my last unread Renault historical, The Praise Singer, for when I want to really immerse myself in her evocation of ancient Greece.

Man born of woman cannot outrun his fate. What need, then, to trouble his short morning with the griefs of time? He will never live to know them. [loc. 3831]

2025/081: The King Must Die — Mary Renault

‘Listen, and do not forget, and I will show you a mystery. It is not the sacrifice, whether it comes in youth or age, or the god remits it; it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all.' [p. 17]

Definitely a reread, and I can remember when and where I first read it: in the library during study period in my third year at secondary school. I also remembered encountering the quotations from this novel in the chapter-headings of Watership Down, my favourite book when I was nine or ten years old... I remembered most of the details of The King Must Die, despite not having reread in the last couple of decades: I had forgotten (or never noticed) just how many hints of other myths -- Orpheus, an anachronistic Agamemnon, Jason -- are present, and how much they are woven into the theme of goddess-worship.

Theseus grows up in the citadel of Troizen, where his grandfather teaches him about moira, '‘The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end.' [p. 15]. He doesn't know who his father is, but decides after experiencing 'earthquake aura' that it must be the god Poseidon. When he's seventeen, his mother tells him that his father is Aigeus, the King of Athens. Theseus sets out to find him, encountering many adventures en route, and becoming Year-King (doomed to death next year) in Eleusis: and when he reaches Athens, his father's wife Medea tries to poison him.

When it comes time for the tribute to Minos, Theseus is one of the party: seven youths and seven maidens, sent to Crete to die in the Labyrinth. There, he forges a loyal and lucky bull-dancing team; falls in love lust with Minos' daughter Ariadne, a living goddess; foments a rebellion; foresees an earthquake; and elopes from the ruins of Minoan civilisation with Ariadne, who he abandons on Naxos.

All true to the myth: but with the possible exception of the earthquake aura (a sensitivity that many animals possess) none of it is supernatural or mystical, except that Theseus interprets it so. Renault's ancient world is rooted in archaeological evidence and in the tension between the 'sky gods' and the ancient matriarchal religion. Theseus seemed heroic to my teenage self: now I read him as misogynist, violent, arrogant and hot-tempered. (So: heroic!)

I still love this novel: and I still wonder, as I have wondered for nearly fifty years, exactly what Ariadne has in her hand after the Bacchic revels. 

Great introduction by Bettany Hughes, too: 'not fact-bound chronicles, but respectful dances with antiquity' [loc. 155]. She stresses that "The ancient Greek muthoi, myths, does not mean fairy-tales, but rather points of information – things seen or experienced to be shared for the benefit of humankind."

2025/080: Glorious Exploits — Ferdia Lennon

[They say] that keeping them here in the pits is too much, that it goes beyond war. They say we should just kill them, make them slaves or send them home, but ah, I like the pits. It reminds us that all things must change. I recall the Athenians as they were a year ago: their armour flashing like waves when the moon is upon them, their war cries that kept you up at night, and set the dogs howling, and those ships, hundreds of ships gliding around our island, magnificent sharks ready to feast.[loc. 131]

I reviewed this back in December 2023: prepublication review. Since then, I've been puzzled by readers saying they'd expected something light-hearted and humorous -- then I discovered that it won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2024, and that it was being promoted as 'bold and funny', 'Fierce, funny, fast-paced', 'hilarious' etc. Reading these plaudits, you may be surprised to find that the novel's mostly set in a concentration camp, where prisoners (chained and starving) are regularly beaten to death.

Reread for book club, where we discussed the tension between humour and horror, and I discovered the story behind the mysterious Tuireann: we felt he was a collector, but his story was only broadly hinted.

There's some glorious prose here, too, that reminds me to look forward to Lennon's next novel.

It’s an eerie walk this morning. The moon is still up, a slender blade that’s larger and crisper than the frail sun. Theros is long gone. The leaves don’t so much fall as rip from the trees. All of them are red, and they skitter along the roads like bleeding stars under that knife of moon. [loc. 1366]

And here's an interview which gives some background to the novel: .

...thousands of Athenian prisoners being flung into a quarry outside the city of Syracuse. ... a couple of years later, I was reading Plutarch’s Life of Nicias, where he describes how some of those defeated Athenians survived by quoting lines from Euripides. Ferdia Lennon: ‘I was tired of Merchant Ivory accents’ (Observer)

2025/079: Funeral Games — Mary Renault

‘All those great men. When Alexander was alive, they pulled together like one chariot-team. And when he died, they bolted like chariot-horses when the driver falls. And broke their backs like horses, too.' [p. 308]

At times heartbreaking, and at others profoundly unpleasant, this is the story of how Alexander's empire fragmented after his death. There are a lot of strong and deadly women in this novel: Roxane, Alexander's widow (and pregnant with his son when he died), later murders his other wife and her unborn child; Olympias, Alexander's mother, murders quite a few people before being stoned to death; Kynna raises her daughter Eurydike as a warrior, and dies as one herself. I was fascinated by Eurydike, the warrior queen of Macedon, and her grudging care for her husband Philip II (Alexander's half-brother, who had 'learning disabilities': I applaud (and wince at) the scene where Eurydike's political ambitions are shattered by the sudden arrival of her period.

Bagoas, narrator of The Persian Boy, grieves for Alexander and plots with Ptolemy (now Pharoah in Alexandria, Egypt) to redirect Alexander's mummy and bier, which was to be buried in Macedon but is cunningly diverted to Egypt. And at the end of the novel, in 286BC, Ptolemy -- who Renault presents as Alexander's half-brother -- has finished his History of Alexander, and is sitting with his cat Perseus in a sunny room, looking out at the gold laurel-wreath on the tomb of Alexander. That's the happiest moment of what is often a very dark book. There are moments of calm and joy, and even justice: but history does not permit many.

2025/078: The Persian Boy — Mary Renault

The living chick in the shell has known no other world. Through the wall comes a whiteness, but he does not know it is light. Yet he taps at the white wall, not knowing why. Lightning strikes his heart; the shell breaks open.
I thought, There goes my lord, whom I was born to follow. I have found a king.
And, I said to myself, looking after him as he walked away, I will have him, if I die for it. [p. 130]

The narrator of The Persian Boy is Bagoas, a Persian nobleman's son enslaved and gelded as a child. After years of abuse (not all of it sexual) he catches the eye of Darius the Great, King of all Persia, and is for a time the king's favourite. But Darius flees before the armies of Alexander the Great, and Bagoas is given as a gift to Alexander by Nabarzanes, a lesser king who rebelled against Darius and then surrendered to Alexander. 

Bagoas becomes Alexander's lover, wracked by jealousy of the King's former(?) lover Hephaistion: 'Maybe, since their youth, desire had faded ... but the love was there, public as marriage' [p. 147]. Bagoas is Alexander's companion for the next nine years, until Alexander's death in Babylon soon after Hephaistion's. He accompanies the army through Persia and all the way to India, and observes Alexander's conquests, the wife he marries in Bactria, and the eventual refusal of his men to push further East.

It's a romance, but it's also a keen-eyed account of Alexander's career, his personal relationships^* and military prowess, and his desire to unite the Greek and Persian lands over which he rules. Bagoas is a delightful narrator: a competent aide, a jealous lover who sets aside his jealousy because it is more important that Alexander is happy, a seasoned courtier, a man set on vengeance for his murdered family. He is courageous, cunning and resilient: and his first-person narrative reveals a complex and passionate emotional landscape.

As ever with Renault, the historical aspects of the novel are impeccable. I learnt a lot about Alexander's campaigns, in a format I found more congenial than a history book, and about the world in the fourth century before Christ: for instance, I hadn't known of the Canal of the Pharaohs. Though this is a very different novel, in timbre and scope, to Fire From Heaven, I found it even more enjoyable.

^{Renault's theory about the sexual dynamics between Alexander and Hephaistion, and Alexander and Bagoas, is clear without being explicit.}

2025/077: Fire from Heaven — Mary Renault

'Man’s immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.’ The rose-red on the hilltops changed to gold. He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, I am not afraid. It was better than music or his mother’s love; it was the life of the gods. No grief could touch him, no hatred harm him. Things looked bright and clear, as to the stooping eagle. He felt sharp as an arrow, and full of light. [p. 120]

This first volume of Renault's 'Alexander' trilogy covers the life of Alexander the Great from childhood (he's four years old in the first chapter) to the death of his father, King Philip of Macedon. It explores the conflict between his parents: Olympias, fierce and domineering, an acolyte of Dionysus and perhaps of darker goddesses, and Philip, drunken and lascivious but still a fearsome warrior and charismatic leader. Olympias tells Alexander that he is descended, via her, from Achilles: and she likes to hint that Alexander is not Philip's son at all.

Alexander is intelligent, good-looking and determined. Whatever he sets his mind to -- playing the kithara, taming a horse, making his way across country to kill his first man in battle -- he achieves. (Philip rarely appreciates his son's accomplishments.) Hephaistion loves him helplessly, though not hopelessly: their relationship does become sexual, though it's clear that Alexander could as easily have remained chaste. Ptolemy, who may be his half-brother, swears blood-brotherhood with him. 

This being Hellenic antiquity, the women get a rough deal. "...at the best? The loom, the bed, the cradle; children, the decking of bride-beds, clacking talk at the hearth and the village well; bitter old age, and death. Never the beautiful ardours, the wedded bond of honour, the fire from heaven blazing on the altar where fear was killed." [p. 246]. There's a scene between Alexander and his sister Kleopatra, when Philip's arranging for her to marry her maternal uncle: she says 'The gods are unjust to women.' ‘Yes,' says Alexander. 'I have often thought so. But the gods are just; so it must be the fault of men.’ [p. 338] There is a girl who flirts with him: his mother is implicated in her death. And he loses his (heterosexual) virginity to another girl, whom Olympias has sent to him. His heart, though, is given to Hephaistion. 

The prose is dense: Renault writes tremendously evocative scenes, full of sensory detail and of the characters' response to their environment. She can say as much in a wordless scene as with a page of dialogue. Fire from Heaven is told in omniscient third person, with characters' thoughts described as freely as their actions. Its centre, though, is always Alexander, and the historical and psychological forces that shaped him. 

I found Renault's depiction of ancient Hellenic society and culture -- with its constant brutal violence and danger, its appreciation of beauty and learning, and its religious and spiritual practices -- compelling, coherent and very different to post-medieval life. Alexander is the centre of the novel, and the epitome of a Macedonian prince. To modern eyes, he is monstrous: a calm, efficient, brutal killer. But Mary Renault makes him heroic, and makes us see him thus.  I was occasionally reminded of Dorothy Dunnett (whose Lymond novels also centre on a gifted young man and the forces that shape him): there's something about the style (perhaps a convention of mid-20th century novels?) and especially the descriptions. Perhaps they are both mythologising.

I purchased this copy in 2019: I'm pretty sure I read the novel decades ago, and did not especially appreciate it. Now, with a reignited interest in Ancient Greece, and a better idea of the politics / warfare of the region, I found it fascinating -- and Renault's prose is addictive.

2025/076: Knave of Diamonds — Laurie R King

I'd planned this. (I plan everything, so you can bet I'd worked on how to do this.) (Not, mind you, that I'd entirely decided just how much to tell her.) (And about whom.) [loc. 602]

I was an avid reader of Laurie R King's Mary Russell books (in which an elderly Sherlock Holmes marries a young woman of considerable talents) -- my enthusiasm waned around Pirate King, and though I've read and enjoyed several novels in the series since then, there are definitely others I've missed. No matter! This, the nineteenth novel in the series, more or less stands alone (though there are clear and rather intriguing references to earlier books) and I found it engaging and fun, though (again) Russell and Holmes are separated for a good part of the novel.

The year is 1926. Mary has just returned from a wedding in France (cue a lot of namedropping: Hemingway, 'Scotty' Fitzgerald, Picasso...) when she's visited by her long-lost Uncle Jake, who she hasn't seen since before her parents died. Uncle Jake is a confidence trickster, a joker and a thief: and it turns out he has a story to tell about the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels back in 1907. Trouble is, Sherlock Holmes investigated that theft, and Jake has no desire whatsoever to encounter him. Luckily, Holmes is in London visiting his brother Mycroft -- so Jake and Mary head for Ireland, where there are safes to be cracked, old ladies who are tougher than they look, Irish wolfhounds, coverups at the highest levels, Ernest Shackleton's brother Frank, and several reunions.

Great fun, though the accounts of zig-zagging across the Irish Sea and placing faith in railway timetables were perhaps too evocative, and actually quite stressful! The story is told by three narrators: delightful though parenthetical Uncle Jake (who's almost certainly gay) and Mary Russell in first person, Holmes in third. There is period-accurate but open-minded discussion of 'homosexual rings': the author adds, in her afterword, 'one can only hope that the repercussions of being outed will continue to lose their power to destroy'. And between and around the excitement and adventure, there is character growth and reconciliation, as well as some delightful dialogue.

Yet again, this is a novel 'anglicised' by changing 'ize' to 'ise' and to hell with the consequences. (Sise, seise...) Publishers, please do a spell-check as well as a global replace!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 10th June 2025.

2025/075: Bee Speaker — Adrian Tchaikovsky

It is truly amazing how many flavours of dumb an apocalypse can spawn. [loc. 1990]

Third in the series that began with Dogs of War and continued with Bear Head. The time is about two centuries after the events of Bear Head, and three generations after the fall of the Old ('the world that once was') due to failure of the global information network, in a 'deluge of artificially-generated false testimony' exarcerbated by climate disaster. Human existence on Earth is now rather dystopian, as a group of Martians discover when they respond to a distress call.

The Crisis Crew team consists of two humans (Tecomo and Ada) and two Bioforms -- genetically and biologically engineered animals, originally created to serve humans, now regarded as people and part of a thriving Martian society. One of the Bioforms is a Dogform, Wells, who is overwhelmed by the sheer sensory input of Earth: the other is a Dragonform, Irae, who is the best character in the book. (Not in a moral sense. Definitely not in a moral sense.)

The call they answered came from the Factory, which still makes dogforms (though their process is more brutal, less high-tech, than the original Bioforms). Cricket, a young monk from the Apiary (where they cherish and worship Bees), encounters the 'monsters' on his way to the Factory, and finds himself involved in momentous events. The inhabitants of the Griffin Bunker are determined to fight to preserve their feudal society; a Distributed Intelligence is roaming the countryside in a number of bodies; the monks have a secret, and the Bunker another.

I'm not super-keen on post-apocalyptic stories, but this was fun. There are nine narrators, each with a distinctive voice (an achievement in itself) and a different set of prejudices, beliefs, and traits. Four of those narrators identify as female, and there's a non-viewpoint character who is clearly trans. Though almost all of the story takes place on Earth, we get a good idea of how the Martian colony has evolved and transformed. Earth, meanwhile, is not devoid of Old People, which in this novel means a person from before the apocalypse.

Fascinating characters, clever plot, themes of transformation and of personhood -- and, of course, a close-knit team dealing with an alien, technologically-backward culture.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 5th June 2025.