2025/154: I Who Have Never Known Men — Jacqueline Harpman (translated by Ros Schwarz)

I ... have no memories of my own childhood. Perhaps that’s why I’m so different from the others. I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human. [loc. 1546]

We first encounter the nameless narrator near the end of her solitary life, determined that her story will not die when she does. Gradually we discover her history: that her first memories are from an underground prison where she, and thirty-nine adult women, were held captive for years. She can't recall anything from before the prison, and none of the women can tell her much: just screams, flames, a stampede... The guards are all male, and don't speak to or interact with the prisoners, except to pinish them for talking, for touching.

Then a siren blares, the guards flee, and the women escape. (It is not as simple as that.) They find themselves in an empty world; they find other bunkers, where all the prisoners are dead; they argue about whether this is Earth, about why they were imprisoned, about what happened. And eventually there is only our narrator, much younger than the others, alone in a refuge of her own.

In some ways this is a bleak novel: in others, it's surprisingly uplifting. I admired the narrator's pragmatism, and her ability to fantasise. It's clear that she does love, and does suffer, even if not in the same ways as the older women. (I could make an argument for her being something other than human, but that interpretation feels too glib.)

Translated from the French, this was a novel for the Prix Femina in 1995. Jacqueline Harpman was a Belgian Jew whose family fled the Nazis (many of her relatives died in Auschwitz): later in life she became a psychoanalyst. I'd like to read more of her work.

The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking. [loc. 2358]

2025/153: All of Us Murderers — KJ Charles

"Gideon and I have nothing to be ashamed of. Or perhaps I do. Perhaps all of us Wyckhams are murderers, by Act or proxy or inaction or just heredity..." [loc. 2943]

Zebedee Wyckham is invited to visit his cousin's remote country house. Expecting a warm welcome from a cousin he only vaguely remembers, Zeb is horrified to find himself thrust into the company of his relations: his estranged brother Bram, Bram's wife Elise, Zeb's cousin Hawley, a new-found young cousin called Jessamine -- and, worst of all, Zeb's own ex, Gideon, who he hasn't seen since they both lost their jobs due to Zeb's behaviour. 

As if the company weren't bad enough, the food is vile, there are rumours of ghosts walking the hallways, and nobody can leave. There's a family curse (of course), a legacy to be bestowed upon whoever marries Jessamine, and a huge garden full of ominous follies: the cousins' grandfather, Walter, was a notorious Gothic novelist, and the house he built reflects his work. As do the events playing out there...

Zeb, who has what we'd now call ADHD ('It's always stop fidgeting and pay attention, as if that wasn't what fidgeting was for' [loc. 2348]: I feel seen!) and his family don't have a high opinion of him. Nor does Gideon, for quite different reasons. But unravelling the tangle of scandal, death, disappearances and injustice is a task for two.

Excellent explorations of class, neurodiversity, toxic families and the roots of the family's wealth: All of us Murderers has a distinctly KJ Charles flavour (I was reminded, at various points, of Think of England, Masters in this Hall, and Death in the Spires) though I think is more explicit about the appalling ways in which the rich acquire and maintain their wealth and status. That makes it a darker novel than many of this author's works, but there is plenty of humour and a modicum of reconciliation. And a delightful epilogue which felt like a frothy meringue after the horrors of the main narrative.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 7th October 2025.

2025/152: Giovanni's Room — James Baldwin

As for the boys at the bar, they were each invisibly preening, having already calculated how much money he and his copain would need for the next few days, having already appraised Guillaume to within a decimal of that figure, and having already estimated how long Guillaume, as a fountainhead, would last, and also how long they would be able to endure him. The only question left was whether they would be vache with him, or chic, but they knew that they would probably be vache. [p. 53]

I read about James Baldwin's life and work in Nothing Ever Just Disappears, and it sparked the urge to read one of his novels: Giovanni's Room is perhaps the best-known: a short novel about an American, David, who goes to Europe to 'find himself', takes up with Giovanni but fears and rejects his own sexuality, and ends up with emptiness. David's first-person narrative begins, he tells us, on 'the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life': the morning on which Giovanni will be executed. 

Gradually, we discover that David has been sexually attracted to other men since his teens; that he and Giovanni, a bartender, met in a gay bar to which David had gone with an older gay friend; that David's fiancée Hella is travelling in Spain; that Giovanni's eponymous room in a cheap boarding-house is chaotic and filthy, and comes to symbolise everything that David is trying not to be.

Baldwin packs a great deal into this short novel: issues of race, class, toxic masculinity, traditional gender roles, the transactional nature of gay sex in the bar scene... Ultimately I think it's about David's inability to accept (or even recognise) his own feelings. He loves Giovanni but won't admit it even to himself. ('With everything in me screaming No! yet the sum of me sighed Yes.') He keeps trying to assert his heterosexuality at the expense of his homosexuality: and in the end he is left with nothing, nobody.

Not a cheerful novel, but a masterpiece of first-person narrative: a narrator who doesn't really know himself, and doesn't seem to believe in the reality of other people.

What’s the good of an American who isn’t happy? Happiness was all we had.’ [p. 165]

2025/151: Is a River Alive? — Robert Macfarlane

...the Mutehekau Shipu’s mode is, surely, purely flow, I think, and its grammar of animacy is one of ands and throughs and tos and nows, of commas not full stops, of thens not buts, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings, silver-blues and grey-greens and mist-drifts and undersongs, process not substance, this joined to that, always onrushing, always seeking the sea and here and there turning back upon itself, intervolving, eddying in counterflow to cause spirals and gyres that draw breath into water, life into the mind, spin strange reciprocities, leave the whole world whirled, whorled. [loc. 4333]

If a corporation can be treated as a person, why can't a river? Macfarlane explores three river systems -- the Rio Los Cedros in Ecuador, the Mutehekau Shipu in Canada, and the three rivers braided through Chennai -- and combines poetry, spirituality and adventure in a philosophical discussion of what constitutes 'life' and how a river is part of the 'polyphonic world', important and valuable not just for how it can be exploited but for its own intrinsic qualities.

The book starts in Cambridge, with the chalk springs at Nine Wells: and ends there, with Macfarlane imagining his children remembering him there after his death. The book describes three expeditions: to the Ecuadorian rain forest (with a spiritual mycologist who seems connected to the fungal world, and can locate and identify hitherto-unknown species of mushroom with uncanny accuracy), to Chennai (with activist and author Yuvan Aves) to explore the dead rivers of the city and their ecological importance, and to Canada to kayak down the Mutehekau Shipu (with 'the only person in history to have been buried alive on opposite sides of the planet', geomancer Wayne Chambliss) and fulfil the instructions of Rita, an Innu poet and activist. 

Macfarlane is very aware of the natural world around him -- even in Chennai he finds joy in turtle eggs and an 'avian Venice' -- and open to the ideas of his friends and companions: his accounts of conversations are fascinating. And there's an underlying theme of the Epic of Gilgamesh: 'Gilgamesh and Enkidu’s hesitation on the edge of the Cedar Forest is the moment when human history trembles on the brink of a new, destructive relationship with the living world. They might still turn back. They might leave the forest and the river intact and alive. They do not.' [loc. 1505]

Things I learnt from this book:

• 'lacustrine': 'of, relating to, formed in, living in, or growing in lakes'
• 'the Three Gorges dam project on the Yangtze River in China impounded so much water that it has measurably slowed the rotation of the Earth' [loc. 507] -- discussion of this.
• Ecuador was 'the only place where rain continued to fall during the ice ages' [loc. 1254]

The spiritual and poetic dimensions of this book will not appeal to all readers: but there's solid science (50 pages of notes and references) and a refreshing sense of the author's humility and openmindedness, which I found inspiring. A beautiful and accessible read: I'm tempted to buy the paper version just to see the author's photos in colour.

Irritatingly, the Kindle version told me I'd 'finished' well before the 'Acknowledgements and Aftermaths' section, which details further developments in the stories of each river. The Mutehekau Shipu has received legal protection, multiple Rights of Nature cases have been fought and won in Ecuador, and various songs co-written by Macfarlane and his fellow travellers are available.

2025/150: The Last Gifts of the Universe — Riley August

I have been viewing her last stand wrong. Like so many things, it is an issue of translation... It is not a stand — defensively — but a stance. A position. The last one they give to their loved ones, or the world, before they die. [loc. 1776]

Scout and Kieran are siblings, and Archivists -- interstellar archaeologists, searching for whatever killed every other civilisation humanity has ever found. Together with their adorable, plot-relevant ginger cat Pumpkin, they land on yet another dead planet (where Scout, breaking the rules, plants some seeds: 'it doesn't have to be dead forever') and find a recording made by one of the last survivors of an ancient civilisation. In turn, that leads to other planets, and a breakneck race against Evil Corporate Verity Co, who want to secure any data for themselves.

It was the cat that lured me in, obviously: but I kept reading because -- despite some clunky metaphors ('so irreversibly damaged that the data print amounted to Wingdings': really, centuries from now, people still remember Windows fonts? Why?) -- it's a sweet and thoughtful exploration of grief and loss: not only the dead civilisations and the woman in the recordings, but Scout and Kieran's mother, who's recently died.

Pumpkin is a delight, and so is Scout's love for him. The bond between the siblings, with its amiable friction, feels very real. And Scout is, subtly and in passing, revealed as trans: which does not change anything about the plot, except that the Verity Co. mercenary can show off her research with a simple deadnaming.

The SFnal trappings might not stand up to hard scrutiny, but the emotional arcs are solid. Also, cat in space! "...cats are magic in any universe." Truth.

2025/149: Sir Hereward and Mr Fitz: Three Adventures — Garth Nix

Self-motivated puppets were not great objects of fear in most quarters of the world. They had once been numerous, and some few score still walked the earth, almost all of them entertainers, some of them long remembered in song and story.
Mister Fitz was not one of those entertainers. [loc. 137]

Two novellas and a short story featuring Sir Hereward, mercenary knight and artillerist, and his former nursemaid Mister Fitz, a sorcerously-animated puppet who is centuries old and wields arcane magic needles. They roam a fantasy landscape (more Restoration than medieval) and are tasked -- by the Agents of the Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World -- with destroying specific extra-dimensional entities ('godlets') which may manifest as Lovecraftian horrors or as apparently-benign forces enriching their domains at the expense of neighbouring fanes. If the godlet is on the list, out it goes.

Sir Hereward is young, something of a dandy, the only male offspring of the Witches of Har 'these thousand years', and an admirer of women, especially those with facial scars. Mister Fitz is the competent one, who would roll his eyes a lot if they were not painted on. In these stories they encounter a leopard-shifter, some malevolent starfish, and a pirate crew. Godlets are expelled, villains dispatched, and ladies considered. 

Great fun, with an ambience reminiscent of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories by Fritz Leiber -- and very good at plunging the reader into the middle of a well-built world without describing it in any detail. (The gradual revelation that the battle-mounts are not horses, for instance.)

Irritatingly this version is no longer available from Amazon -- they instead guide me to an expanded version with eight stories rather than three. I confess I am tempted, because I'd like to know more about the origins of Sir H and Mr F... but I don't want to pay again for the content I already own.

2025/148: The Mirror and the Light — Hilary Mantel

...he has no one to talk to, except Christophe and his turnkey and the dead; and with daylight the ghosts melt away. You can hear a sigh, a soufflation, as they disperse themselves. They become a whistling draught, a hinge that wants oil; they subside into natural things, a vagrant mist, a coil of smoke from a dying fire. [loc. 13141]

The finale to the trilogy that began with Wolf Hall and continued with Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror and the Light covers the last four years of Thomas Cromwell's life, from the death of Anne Boleyn in 1536 to Cromwell's own execution in 1540. Cromwell is more powerful and successful than ever, but he's haunted by the dead: Cardinal Wolsey his mentor, Thomas More, the men and women he's condemned and sent to the scaffold or the pyre. At 900-odd pages, there's a certain amount of repetition, and the tension is uneven: but stitch by stitch, Cromwell's enemies collate the information that will lead him to the executioner's axe.

We get a strong sense of Cromwell's determination to improve England, even if it means going against his king's wishes. He is clear-eyed about royalty, describing princes as 'half god and half beast', inhuman creatures. When Cromwell praises Henry as 'the mirror and the light of other kings', he is aware that the light might turn away from him and leave him in darkness. It's no accident that the axe, at the end, is inscribed speculum justitiae: mirror of justice.

Though this is a patriarchal world, there are women with agency: among them are three daughters. Dorothea, Wolsey's daughter, tells Cromwell that she believes he betrayed her father, wounding him to the quick; he cultivates the Princess Mary, even though closeness to her might attract charges of treason; and his own unexpected daughter seems to repudiate him. By the end of the novel, he is alone except for the dead, and his loyal servant Christophe -- one of the few wholly fictional characters in the trilogy, and one whose final words in the novel are a splendid denunciation of Henry's justice. And we've come full circle from Cromwell's father yelling at him 'so now get up': but we end knowing so much more of his rise, and his fall.

Mantel's prose is precise and beautiful -- I especially liked Cromwell's description of Crivelli's Annunciation, quoted below -- and the final pages are incredibly powerful. I especially liked the sense of antiquity, of London's and England's history: and the sense of inevitability as Cromwell's enemies close in. Splendid, moving: but I could not fully immerse myself for the whole novel, due to its length, and I feel my experience was lessened thereby.

Perhaps you have seen, in Italy, a painting of a house with one wall removed? The painter does this to show you the deep interior of a room, where at a prie-dieu a virgin kneels, surrounded by bowls of ripening fruit. Her expression is private and reserved; she has kicked off her shoes and she is waiting to be filled with grace. Already you can see the angel hovering above the rooftops, a blur of gold on the skyline, while below in the street the people go about their business, and some of them glance upward, as if attracted by a quickening in the air. In the next street, through an archway, down a flight of steps, a housewife is hanging out washing, and someone is rising from the dead. White pelicans sit on rooftops, waiting for Christ’s imminence to be pronounced. A mitred bishop strolls through the piazza, a peacock perches on a balcony among potted plants, and striated clouds like bales of silk roll above the city: that city which itself, in miniature form, is presented on a plat for the viewer, its inverse form dimly glowing in the silver surface: its spires and battlements, its gardens and bell towers. [loc. 2668]

2025/147: Volkhavaar — Tanith Lee

From the Great City Square came a noise like two armies, four bull-rings, eight orchestras, sixteen taverns. Every color and every sound and scent known in the Korkeem — and a few not known. Wonders opened like flowers and the fans of peacocks, and dusts and incenses spread before the sun chariot in a mauve gauze, as it galloped into the morning. [loc. 1690]

Short, standalone fantasy novel by Tanith Lee -- probably my most-read author in my teens and twenties, though I haven't engaged as much with her more recent work. I first read Volkhavaar when I borrowed it from the library, at a tender and impressionable age: as usual when rereading, I'm surprised by what I remember and what I'd forgotten. I remembered the black stone idol, and the flowers, and the bronze sword. I'd forgotten the rather downbeat ending (which I think would have impressed me massively at the time -- what, you don't have to have a HEA?) and the excellent cat, Mitz.

The setting is what I think of as typical Lee: medieval-ish, demons and a multiplicity of gods, an Arabian Nights ambience, supernatural creatures who are more benevolent than their usual fictional depictions, enterprising young women and gorgeous young men. Our heroine, Shaina, is a slave who's never lost her pride: our hero Dasyel is an actor, clearly under the spell of our villain Kernik (whose villainy stems from injustice and abuse, plus a nasty streak all his own). Also a likeable vampire and the aforementioned excellent cat, who belongs to the rather feeble Princess Woana. Shaina falls in love with Dasyel without ever speaking to him, and enlists the help of a witch. Things do not work out as planned -- but there are happy endings all round, though not necessarily the traditional ones.

Volkhavaar made a powerful impact on me when I first read it: the vivid descriptions, the exuberance of the prose, the strong determined heroine. And perhaps the inversion of gender roles, with Shaina falling for Dasyel simply because of his looks, and doing her best -- through peril and pain -- to win him: just like a knight, an adventurer, the hero of a hundred fairytales... 

I've read a lot of fantasy novels over the intervening decades, but I still think Tanith Lee, with her glorious excesses and her subversions of genre tropes, is one of my favourites. I probably do need to read more of her later works -- many of which are out of print. 

The cover on the Gateway edition is appalling so I'm showing the cover of my old paperback copy, which ... is less appalling, and bears at least some resemblance to the novel within.

2025/146: Kings of This World — Elizabeth Knox

'In the 1980s we coined the term P, for Persuasion, which turned into P for Push when people stopped being so polite about it.' He paused a moment and pursed his lips, as if pleased with himself. [loc. 178]

Knox's latest YA novel is set in her fictional island nation of Southland, and references both Mortal Fire and the Dreamhunter Duet. Unlike the earlier books, it's set in more or less the present day: there are cellphones, EVs, the internet. And there is P (for Persuasion): a coercive / perceptual ability possessed by the Percentage, 1% of the population -- and a divisive issue in Southland society.

Vex Magdolen, sole survivor of a massacre at an 'intentional community' known as the Crucible, has strong P. After a childhood in the fosterage and state care system, she enters Tiebold Academy, where 75% of the students (though not Vex's roommate Ronnie) have P. Within a few weeks she's made friends and found her people ... but after a disturbance at the Compulsory Senior Year Morgue Visit, Vex and four of her classmates -- plus an adult assistant -- are kidnapped and imprisoned by mysterious masked captors. Was the original target Hanno, son of the richest man in Southland? Or was it one of the others -- Vex, Ari the senator's son, Taye who seems immune to Pushing?

The story alternates between the teens' captivity and Vex's first weeks at Tiebold Academy: and it doesn't end with the kidnapping, but with a confrontation that also reveals unexpected truths about Vex's past. There's love, zealotry, loss, treachery, and politics, and adults who think they know what's best for the young people under their care.

But most of all there is Knox's refulgent prose, vivid and simple (the promise of which was why I went to considerable lengths to acquire a copy of this book, not yet available in the US or UK). I loved the additional details of Southland's history and culture -- 'plague, the Place, and P' -- and am now eager to reread the other Southland novels: and Knox has said she intends to write another two novels set in Southland. Hurrah!

I note that I haven't said much about the plot of Kings of this World. The aspect that most intrigued me was Vex's childhood storytelling, which reminded me of the Game that Knox has mentioned in various contexts. I was also prompted to read Vonnegut's story 'Harrison Bergeron', about handicapping the gifted. And I am still thinking about Vex's family's reputation for foresight.

2025/145: The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar — Indra Das

“Why won’t you let me remember?” I dared ask.
She blinked. “You deserve to be real in this world. It’s not an easy thing to be stuck between worlds.” But stuck I was, and ever have been. [loc. 286]

Ru George grows up in Calcutta [sic] in the 1990s. He's the child of immigrants, and lives with his grandmother and his parents. Ru's father is a failed fantasy author: his novel The Dragoner's Daughter (about dragonriders on a distant planet using their mounts to traverse multiple realities) sold only 52 copies. Ru's grandmother tells him fantastical stories about his grandfather having started life as a woman (Ru can see the truth of this in old photos). Ru's mother administers the Tea of Forgetting after meals, and before bedtime. 

Ru grows up a lonely child with only the vaguest idea of who he is, and who his family are. He's prone to spinning extravagant yarns to his schoolfriends. (But are they fantastical, or true?) By his teenage years, now home-schooled, he has just one friend: Alice, the daughter of the couple who run the Crystal Dragon restaurant. Alice and Ru share enthusiasms for video games, metal music and fantasy novels. And slowly they share Ru's -- or Ru's family's -- secrets.

Like all the best novellas, this packs a novel's-worth of content into its pages. There's a story about found family, a story (or two) about refugees fleeing wars, a story about memory and forgetfulness, a story about gender. In a way, it's also about the stories we tell to ourselves and to others. Ru, the perpetual outsider, is so lonely, so rootless, and yet he hopes. And when he remembers, the story turns full circle on itself.

I know now that forgetting and remembering was a cycle I have relived many times, a snake eating its tail...[loc. 36]... “Belief is a serpent eating its tail forever, knowing that its tail is finite.” [loc. 979]

2025/144: Cinder House — Freya Marske

Scholar Mazamire's own theory was that a ghost was how a building held a grudge, because it was not human enough to do it on its own. [loc. 527]

A novella-length variation on 'Cinderella': it begins with Ella's death at sixteen, dizzy with the poison that has killed her father, falling downstairs as the house convulses at his demise. Shortly thereafter, Ella finds herself merging with the house itself. She cannot leave the property, and the only people who can see her are her stepmother Patrice and her two stepsisters, Danica (who likes to read) and Greta (who likes to get her own way). She feels any damage inflicted on the house, and she's compelled to tidy and clean and make good. She becomes an unpaid maid of all work.

She cultivates a penpal, Scholar Mazamire, with whom she exchanges long letters about magic and ghosts: and at last she finds herself able to leave the house -- though she's wrenched back home on the stroke of midnight. She wanders the streets, and can enter any public place: she visits the ballet often, and wishes she could talk about the performances with the other regulars. Nobody can see her, except for a faerie spell-seller at the night marker who introduces herself as 'Quaint'. When the royal family issue an invitation to 'all unattached ladies of the kingdom' for a series of balls before the Prince becomes betrothed, it's Quaint who makes it possible for Ella to attend.

There are some very well-executed twists here, from Ella's mirror-studded shoes to the Prince's worsening curse to the skeleton in the attic. (I applaud Marske's restraint in identifying that skeleton). Ella's situation reminded me of being housebound after illness -- the author confirms, in her afterword, that it's 'a story about chronic illness and disability' -- with that sense of being trapped, unable to change one's circumstances or make choices about one's life. I found her skin-hunger and her taste for steamy romances all too relatable!

I would love to read more set in this world: but the story fits novella-length very nicely, and the implied world-building is fascinating and credible. I especially liked the magic system, with its subjects and objects and exceptions. Perhaps Quaint could have a novel of her own...

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 9th October 2025.

2025/143: Twilight Cities: Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean — Katherine Pangonis

...in Syracuse, the ghosts feel like they raise the city up; in Ravenna, Nicola thinks they hold it back. [loc. 3703]

Pangolis explores five ancient capitals (Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch) leavening historical detail with her own impressions of each city's modern remnants: a blend of history and travel writing which works better in some chapters than in others. This book won the Somerset Maugham Award (which, I learn, is 'to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries'): Pangolis's previous work was Queens of Jerusalem, which I have not read.

One aspect of the book that I found fascinating was the intermingling of past and present: for instance, 'at least 30% of the [male] Tyrians are indeed descendants of the Phoenicians'. Though this is a source of pride, it's also been used to differentiate between Christians and Muslims. Carthage, which began as a Phoenician settlement, has an only slightly lower percentage of Phoenician genes amid its populace, but Pangolis writes that she did not 'meet a single Tunisian who describes themselves as Phoenician'. History can be a mixed blessing. As one artist in Ravenna tells the author, he grew up with  'this phantasmic history, which dwarfs everything the city is in the modern day. That trumps the reality of the city. ... Ravenna is so much more than her history, but you grow up with these ghosts.' [loc. 3699] 

Some of the cities she explores are in ruins -- more now than at the time of writing, 2023, when 'the thunder of Israeli rockets could be heard in the city of Tyre'. Massive Israeli airstrikes in 2024 destroyed much of the ancient city.  Antioch, where Pangolis had bathed in the hammam with the local women, suffered severe damage in the 2023 Turkish earthquake: the chapters on Antioch and its modern overlay Antakya are an elegy for a shattered city. 

The chapters are sometimes repetitive, and sometimes read like potted histories (lists of battles, kings, religion). Pangolis often omits the BC on dates: this confused me at first ('recent results do indeed put the foundation of the city sometime between 835 and 800') and would be more acceptable if the histories she recounts didn't span both BC and AD. And the section on Ravenna (with its lengthy description of Lord Byron's affair with a Ravennese lady) didn't quite fit with the other cities under discussion. 

Also, I think the author was confused: 'In the archaeological museum in Syracuse there can be found the skeleton of a curious one-eyed dwarf elephant. In 1914 the palaeontologist Othenio Abel suggested that the presence of these giant one-eyed creatures in Sicily gave rise to the legend of [the Cyclops] Polyphemus' [loc. 1852]. No, the elephants weren't one-eyed: their skulls, though, do have a large central opening, the proboscis cavity.

Overall an interesting read, but I would have liked more of the author's modern experiences ('the crackle of the live coral'; climbing over walls to visit the stones of Carthage) and less of the battles-and-kings history.

Some things I learnt:

• 'In 1985, the mayors of Carthage and Rome finally signed a peace treaty, officially ending the Third Punic War, which otherwise had lasted 2,131 years.'
• Justinian's Plague wiped out nearly a quarter of the population in the eastern Mediterranean
• The Marsala shipwreck 'reads like an instruction booklet for ancient shipwrights, with letters from the ancient Phoenician alphabet demarking where sections joined another, and which piece went where' [loc. 1174]

2025/142: Everfair — Nisi Shawl

He had been warned, but had thought Everfair too remote, too obscure, for Leopold's dependents to seek its destruction. He had thought that because this land had been legitimately purchased they were safe. He had trusted to his enemy's basic humanity to preserve them. [p. 95]

Everfair is a steampunk-flavoured alternate history, beginning in 1889. The Fabian Society, instead of founding the London School of Economics, purchases land in the Congo as a refuge for those fleeing the oppressive, violent regime of the Belgian government and their rubber plantations. Everfair, as the new country is called, is initially populated by African-Americans and liberal whites, as well as escaped slaves. King Mwenda, whose land it was before the Belgians stole it, is not wholly pleased with the way that Everfair is run: but he and his favourite wife, Josina -- a fearsome diplomat -- are playing a long game.

The steampunk aesthetic is strong. Many of those formerly enslaved have been mutilated: a young Chinese engineer known as Tink (his name is Ho Lin-Huang) creates artificial limbs for them. (Fwendi, a young woman who's survived the loss of a hand, revels in the fireworks and weaponry that her assortment of prosthetics provides.) There are 'air canoes' and steam-powered bikes; uranium as a power source; ingenuity and artifice.

There is also, of course, race. Shawl explores many aspects of racism and colonialism, including the white saviour / white martyr trope; the tension between Christian missionaries and the spiritual world of the indigenous people; the social consequences of having a Black grandparent; the white horror of 'miscegenation'; the unspoken assumptions and the privilege that underlies even the best intentions of Everfair's founders. Shawl's characters illustrate these tensions and tropes: a Christian preacher who becomes an acolyte of the forge-god Loango; a Frenchwoman with a Black grandfather who decides not to 'pass'; a character who's enthusiastic about the idea of a 'white martyr' to rally British readers to the cause, until the martyr turns out to be someone close to her...

There is a lot in this novel -- which reads more like a set of connected short stories, spanning a period of around thirty years, than a single arc -- and a plethora of viewpoint characters. There is romance both queer and heterosexual; many women with agency and competence; atrocities and joys; spiritual and scientific revelations. There are also supernatural elements. (I loved Fwendi's cats!) And yet for me it fell a little flat. It felt very dense: it felt as though there was a trilogy trying to get out. And perhaps because it's so dense, some of the characters felt less realistic, less rounded, than others. That said, I'm wishlisting the sequel Kinning, which sounds splendid.

2025/141: The Nature of the Beast — Louise Penny

One person, not associated with the case, would be chosen to represent all Canadians. They would absorb the horror. They would hear and see things that could never be forgotten. And then, when the trial was over, they would carry it to their grave, so that the rest of the population didn’t have to. One person sacrificed for the greater good. “You more than read his file, didn’t you?” said Myrna. “There was a closed-door trial, wasn’t there?” Armand stared at her... [p. 34]

This was a real contrast to The Long Way Home: there's a murder in the first couple of chapters, and a plot that spans decades and continents. We learn more about some of the less storied inhabitants of Three Pines (Ruth and Monsieur Béliveau, the grocer, were activists in the 1970s: one of the villagers is a veteran of the Vietnam War) and a terrifying new -- or old -- threat is introduced.

The story opens with a small boy's discovery of something terrifying in the woods. His story isn't believed, because he's an imaginative kid and something of a fantasist. Soon after, he's found dead. Accident or murder? Gamache doubts the official verdict (the aftermath of corruption is still infesting the Sûreté du Québec) and is drawn into the investigation. 

In parallel, there's an amateur production of a play: when it turns out to be the work of a notorious serial killer, most of the actors withdraw. That might seem relatively trivial, but the ways in which these two plots intersect, and the agenda of the hapless CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) agents, is unexpected but as tight as clockwork.

There's a lot of discussion about whether one can separate the created and the creator -- Gamache thinks not: ("This is how he escapes. Through the written word, and the decency of others. This is how John Fleming gets into your head.") -- and about how those who have committed, or planned to commit, atrocities carry on with their lives. And part of a plot thread is about a horrendous plan to 'bomb Israel back to the Stone Age', which reads differently now than it would have when this novel was published.

I liked this a lot, though it's a dark novel and sows the seeds for more darkness ahead. I am looking forward to seeing how that darkness unravels, and is illuminated.

2025/140: The Long Way Home — Louise Penny

Armand Gamache did not want to have to be brave. Not anymore. Now all he wanted was to be at peace. But, like Clara, he knew he could not have one without the other. [p. 42]

After finishing the first big arc in the Gamache series last December (with How the Light Gets In) I had been saving the rest of the series for this winter: but unseasonably poor weather enticed me to read the next book. It was like coming into a warm room after a long cold journey: the familiar characters, the emotional honesty, the humour, the intricacies of crime.

The mystery to be solved, in The Long Way Home, is the non-appearance of Clara Morrow's husband Peter. Over a year ago, they separated -- Clara told him to leave -- and he was due to return on the anniversary of that separation. But Clara's had no word from him, and she's concerned. For his part, Gamache doesn't want to leave Three Pines, where he and his wife Reine-Marie are enjoying a happy and peaceful retirement. On the other hand, Clara and Peter are his friends: and Peter, his reputation as an artist suffering by comparison to Clara's recent success, was a troubled man.

This novel takes Gamache and his allies into the world of art: art schools, art dealers, artists. It also, physically, takes them to the wild coast at the mouth of the St Lawrence River: splendid descriptions of landscape, travel, and chance-met individuals. I don't think it's going to be one of my favourites of the series, but it was very nice to be back with these characters -- so nice that I instantly went on to the next in the series...

2025/139: Rainforest — Michelle Paver

... it was such a surreal experience being up there among the leaves, in that green inhuman world. I felt completely other. I didn't belong. [loc. 1123]

The year is 1973. Dr Simon Corbett, entomologist, is forty-two and in need of a fresh start after the death of his beloved Penelope. An expedition into the depths of the Mexican rainforest, hoping to find new species of mantid, seems just the thing. But Simon can't help blaming himself for Penelope's death, and he's haunted by memories of her. Discovering (he didn't read the paperwork) that the expedition he's joining has an archaeological focus, he's indignant: but despite not believing in life after death, he's beguiled by the secrets of the Maya, and fascinated with the local indigenous people ('Indians') descended from them.

It's soon clear that Simon is an unreliable narrator. He's also in a precarious state of mind, in which applying the scientific method to shamanic ritual seems eminently sensible. He begins to believe that something of Penelope remains, and can be called back...

I didn't find this as terrifying as Thin Air -- and, having reread that novel recently, I noticed some of the same signature beats. There's the first-person, sometimes self-justifying narrative voice; the silencing of the world around Simon when terror intrudes into the mundane; the childhood conflicts with his brother; the desperate attempts to apply common sense... Paver's evocation of the rainforest is immensely atmospheric: her characterisation of Simon is a masterclass in the gradual erosion of dishonesty. 

Plenty of period-typical attitudes towards indigenous people, homosexuality, paedophilia, and sexual harrassment -- but there are also affectionate and detailed descriptions of insects (especially mantids) which made me warm towards them, and several scenes in which Simon's love and respect for the natural world came close to redeeming him as a human being.

From the Afterword it's clear that Paver has been suffering writers' block: I'm glad that she was able to overcome it and write Rainforest. Though I don't think it will be as frequent a reread for me as Thin Air, it was thoroughly engaging.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy! UK Publication Date is 9th October 2025.

2025/138: The Golden Gate — Vikram Seth

.. "Dear fellow!
What's your next work?" "A novel..." "Great!
We hope that you, dear Mr Seth--"
"In verse," I added. He turned yellow.
"How marvellously quaint," he said,
And subsequently cut me dead. [stanza 5.1]

Seth's verse novel, The Golden Gate
should really be reviewed in rhyme.
A story told in lines of eight
or nine syllables: worth your time.
A tale of love, protest and cats:
and death, and homophobia -- that's
the nineteen eighties for you, in
fair San Francisco, shrine to sin.
Our characters, all young, most white,
Are John, Liz, Phil, Janet and Ed.
(Just one of them will end up dead.)
Each has a past, a hope, a plight,
In changing patterns they make play
at romance variants: het, bi, gay.

I loved the cats so much: they do
progress the plot, not just look pretty.
Illuminate character, too:
John's feud with Charlemagne (the kitty
who lives with Liz, John's paramour
and thinks John should be shown the door)
is early warning of his views --
which cats and humans don't excuse --
on homosexuality.
The close-knit group, with John and Jan
at centre, suffers diverse schisms: can
John's fragile masculinity
survive exposure to Teh Gays?
Or will he claim it's just a phase?

The book is quite extraordinary
It is, technically, juvenilia:
but nonetheless it's literary!
The author's logophilia
Springs from the page: his hudibrastic
sonnets (sometimes pleonastic)
are seldom forced. Seth's playfulness
offsets syllabic awkwardness.
A tour de force! an enterprise
evocative of that decade
before the internet was made.
(The author doesn't euphemise.

That was a time when we feared war
atomic bombs and escalation:
A time when one must wait in for
a call arranging assignation.
No (anti)social media, no
staying home to stream a show.
Seth's folk go out to enjoy plays
and concerts, films, and takeaways.)
My copy (second-hand) dates back
To that decade: it's cheaply printed
The words are blurred, the paper tinted
yellow. Yet this old paperback
is bright with index flags, and will
be reread, because it is brill.

Wikipedia on The Golden Gate

2025/137: The Dream Hotel — Laila Lalami

“I didn’t do anything.” In a whisper this time.
Lucy nods. “Right. But what’d they say you were going to do?” [loc. 400]

Historian Sara Hussein, returning from a conference in London and eager to see her husband and their two small children, is detained by authorities at LAX. Her risk score -- the likelihood of her committing a crime in the near future -- has been calculated as over 500, marking her as a potential threat to her family. She's sent to a retention centre ('not a prison or a jail') known as Madison, for 21 days of forensic observation.

Nearly a year later, she's still there.

There are several contributory factors to Sara's 'retention': she's Moroccan-American, and she was impatient with the airport security officers. Most significantly, though, she has a Dreamsaver implant, which improves sleep quality and depth (invaluable for a mother of young children) -- and also (as mentioned in the small print of the EULA) records the dreams of the user. That data is just one of the two hundred inputs to the Risk Assessment Administration's crime-prediction algorithm. Since some of Sara's dreams involve violence against, or happening to, her husband, she's deemed a potential threat to him.

The Dream Hotel is set in the near future: far enough ahead that there are cures for lung cancer and dementia, close enough that it reminded me all too vividly of current immigration detention cases in the US. In the novel, the RAA was set up after another mass shooting: 'Democratic lawmakers called [it] a “watershed moment” and demanded strict gun control, while Republicans ... argue[d] that the fault lay solely with the gunman' [loc. 790]. The RAA's algorithm has reduced US gun deaths by 42.6% in two decades, and suicides by 48%. It's spoken of as 'knowing people better than they know themselves.' And it doesn't like outliers like Sara and the other women at Madison.

I bought this at full price after reading a couple of reviews, and found it immensely readable and ... not quite 'enjoyable', but ... satisfying? Scary and dystopian, but with a spirit of cooperation. 'Isolation is the opposite of salvation,' Sara thinks near the end of The Dream Hotel. It's collective action that makes things change: for Sara, for us.

Historians observe the world, and scientists try to explain it, but engineers transform it. Step by step, they’ve replaced village matchmakers with dating apps, town criers with social media, local doctors with diagnostic tools. The time has come for sages, mystics, and prophets to cede to an AI. [loc. 1486]

2025/136: Summerland — Hannu Rajaniemi

'Do you remember Doctor Cummings who treated you when you had measles? Well, soon there will be no doctors. If you get sick, you will just pass over.’
‘If you have a Ticket,’ Peter said.
‘That’s right. And soon, having a Ticket will be the only thing anyone cares about. Not studying, not working, not doing the right thing. Nothing real.’ [p. 125]

The setting is an alternate Great Britain in the late 1930s. The Nazis never came to power, because Germany suffered a crushing defeat in WW1 -- partly as a result of the new ectotechnology. '...the ectotanks were created to break the deadlock of the trenches in the Great War: weapons that grew more powerful the more they killed". In the late 19th century, radio contact was made with the dead: now, half a century later, ectophones and ectomail connect the great metropolis of Summerland to the world of the living. In Summerland, Victoria reigns; in Summerland, the Presence watches every Soviet citizen. Anyone in Britain can, in theory, acquire a Ticket to prevent their dead spirit from Fading before it reaches Summerland. Anyone in the USSR knows that when they die, they will join the Presence.

There's war in Spain, the Soviet Union versus Great Britain. Rachel White is an SIS operative for the Winter Court (the living) who discovers that a mole is betraying Britain's secrets to the Soviets. Rachel's superiors regard her as inferior because of her sex, but Rachel is determined to prove them wrong. And Peter Bloom, an operative who's now in Summerland, is about to discover some unexpected truths about himself.

A spy novel crossed with a ghost story, and peppered with real-world individuals such as Kim Philby and Roger Hollis: this should have grabbed my attention from the first page until the last. But this is the second time I'd attempted to read it, and it still felt a little hollow. Several plot elements are left unresolved (the Cullers, the Old Dead, the absence of non-human spirits) as though this was intended to be the first in a trilogy. I liked the world-building very much -- Pope Teilhard! National Death Service! Edison dolls! -- but the characters felt two-dimensional.

2025/135: The Naked Light — Bridget Collins

"They kept themselves safe from the faceless ones. They warded them off. Whereas now... now the faceless ones are not a metaphor at all. Now they are real. Real men, whose faces have been shot or torn or burnt away, by other men ... [loc. 1699]

The setting is (mostly) the Sussex village of Haltington in the aftermath of WW1. Florence Stock has come to live with Dr Manning, her widowed brother-in-law who's the vicar of Haltington, and her teenage niece Phoebe. Kit Clayton, home from Paris after a year or so of creating lifelike tin and enamel masks for facially disfigured men, has moved into the Bone House: not as macabre as it sounds, but the former home of the Bone family, now extinct. 

Mrs Bone's sons all died in the War, and the old woman dies up on the downs, trying to fulfil her familial duty to the Face, which local folklore says protects the village from thurlath -- 'a wandering, hungry thing that resembles a man but is not a man. They are hollow in the sense that they have no soul, and hollow in the sense that they are hungry.' And they crave faces: they steal the appearance of a person. 'You will have noticed that there are no effigies in Haltington Church...' (That's from Dr Manning's self-published work on the mythology and folklore of the area.)

Incidental characters, such as Phoebe's teacher Beatrice, provide context for the plot, and the setting: only one girl in ten will marry, because so many men are dead. Women who worked during wartime are now at loose ends. Florence is excited to see men's shirts hanging on the line at the Bone House -- until she realises that Kit Clayton is a woman.

I've enjoyed Collins' other novels (especially The Binding) but this didn't work as well for me. Though there is a supernatural element, that aspect of the novel doesn't really bloom until the last third of the book. Florence's doomed love, Kit's solitary misery and Phoebe's smiling malice are vividly written but not especially cheering, and the focus remains very much on those three women -- which means that some plot threads, unwitnessed by any of them, are given only cursory resolutions. Some of the secondary characters feel superfluous, too, included only to explain an aspect of the plot. But there's a surprisingly, believably happy ending, and some truly scary moments along the way.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the review copy: UK Publication date is 25th September 2025.

The title comes from Eleanor Farjeon's poem Peace, which is quoted at the start of the novel:

Nations! whose ravenous engines must be fed
Endlessly with the father and the son,
My naked light upon your darkness, dread! -
By which ye shall behold what ye have done...

2025/134: No Friend to this House — Natalie Haynes

What's the point in telling the old stories all over again in the same way? [loc. 549]

Natalie Haynes, author of The Amber Fury, Stone Blind and Divine Might (and a number of works that I haven't yet read) turns her attention to the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. I expected this to be another novel about Jason and Medea, but Haynes' focus is broader: No Friend to this House, with its multitude of female narrators, explores the lasting damage caused by the Argo's voyage and her crew's actions, as well as Medea's love for and abandonment by Jason. 

There are chapters from the viewpoints of priestesses, goddesses (who are usually responsible for getting Jason out of whatever sticky situation he's blundered into), animals (including the dove sent to fly ahead of the Argo to test the Symplegades and a crow that's Hera's messenger), the women of Lemnos and the enslaved Thracian women, naiads and harpies and nymphs...

The mortal women are often powerless, lacking agency; the goddesses have power, but are as exasperated by mortal men as by the gods. There's a healthy and heartening theme of female solidarity (for instance, the women of Corinth defending Medea to Jason) and some notes on Greek grammar. "... no matter how many girls were in a room (just one, in this instance), if boys were there too, the word 'children' takes the masculine ending. And the girls disappear." [loc. 3066]

Haynes' afterword explains that this is the novel she's been preparing to write for most of her life. (The title is a line from Euripides' Medea, and refers to Jason. She discusses the marginalisation of women, and the plethora of lost children, in the myths: and she explains why her version of Medea, unlike that of Euripides, has not descended into madness.

No Friend to this House is a fascinating collection of narratives, linked by the Argo and her captain. There were quite a few myths that were unfamiliar to me (Haynes provides a good bibliography) and each narrator had a distinct character, from an indignant Erato addressing the reader directly to an enslaved Thracian woman advising Iphinoe of Lemnos how to avoid mess when murdering a man. Recommended for anyone who's bored of straightforward retellings of Greek mythology.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my advance review copy: UK publication date is 11th September 2025.

2025/133: Rose Under Fire — Elizabeth Wein

I think it is the most terrible thing that was done to me – that I have become so indifferent about the dead. [p. 317]

Reread, after a description of tipping a V1 -- the manouevre that leads to Rose's capture, and her incarceration in Ravensbruck -- in Spitfire. 

My original review from 2014 is here: I don't have anything to add, though I was surprised at how many details (mostly horrific) I had forgotten or repressed. I remembered, instead, the small kindnesses, the reunions, the love.

Unaccountably there is no UK Kindle edition available at present.

2025/132: Spitfire: A Very British Love Story — John Nichol

'...it was thrilling to down an enemy aircraft. This feeling increased with my catching sight that the German crew had bailed out. I hoped the pilot would be able to bail out as I hoped that’s how someone would think of me.’ [loc. 1623]

Nichol's aim is to tell the human story of the men and women who flew and maintained the iconic Spitfire: a timely endeavour, as he managed to interview quite a few WW2 veterans who died before the book was published.

The book is as interesting for its insights into 1930s Britain as for its accounts of aerial warfare and mechanical detail. Initially, pilots were young aristocrats -- male, of course: 'almost exclusively recruited from the distinguished drinking clientele of White’s'. There was, unsurprisingly, a lot of heavy drinking: If we were flying the next morning and still had a hangover we would plug into our Spitfire’s oxygen supply and this usually did the trick.’"

As the war progressed, 'the distinctive lines of the British class system were ... severely blurred'. Even worse: there were women flying (though ferrying planes -- the ATA -- rather than in combat). One veteran reminisces: "'Women didn’t fly aeroplanes! It shocked me so badly that I said to one of my other buddies: “My God, if a woman can fly that aeroplane, I know I can.”' Warning for period-typical sexism... "Diana simply could not accept putting her bare legs and knickers open to view," Nichol writes of one ATA pilot who, dressed in uniform rather than flying gear, wasn't enthusiastic about bailing out.

More troubling were glimpses of the unsympathetic treatment of pilots suffering combat trauma: "... a fellow pilot had broken down in tears as he went to climb into his plane. The medical officer was quickly summoned. He was clearly of the old school. ‘The doc gave him a terrific punch and a few well-chosen words,’ a 616 officer observed. ‘And we had no further trouble.’"

Nichol covers the combat history of the Spitfire through the Second World War -- Dunkirk, the defense of Malta in 1942, aerial combat in North Africa, downed pilots escaping occupied France and the Netherlands -- through to military action in Malaysia, 1957. There are some fascinating anecdotes, and some details of the plane's capabilities and technical features that I (a woman, with little or no knowledge of mechanics or mass production) found readable and interesting. I have to admit, though, that my focus was on the men and women who flew Spitfires. Fighter pilots were often very young (at least one became a squadron leader in his teens) and had a 50% chance of surviving the war. The women of the ATA (first in Britain to get equal pay) also suffered losses: they weren't taught to 'fly blind' and at least one female veteran is pretty angry about that.

Nichol's final chapter, 'The Last Salute', is a sobering description of life after wartime: of PTSD, a return to inequality for women, mourning the dead, adjusting to a changed world. There are also accounts of reunions (not always cheerful: one pilot discovered, fifty years after the event, that three of the Dutchmen who'd helped him after his plane crashed had been executed as a result of his escape) and final flights in restored Spitfires.

One aspect of the book that resonated with me is reflected in the quotation that heads this review: the mano e mano nature of Spitfire combat. The pilots don't come across as bloodthirsty (though several clearly hated the enemy): their focus was the destruction of the enemy aircraft, rather than of the people within.

Also features an account of exactly how to 'tip' a V1 bomb in mid-flight, preventing it from reaching its target: this sparked a reread of Elizabeth Wein's Rose Under Fire, in which the heroine does just that.

‘The best way to stop a V1 was to get your wingtip under its wings and tip it up, thereby toppling the gyros that controlled it, causing it to dive out of control before reaching populated areas.’ [loc. 4768]

2025/131: Creation Lake — Rachel Kushner

Neanderthals were prone to depression, he said.
He said they were prone to addiction, too, and especially smoking. [first line]

That opening hooked me, though it's not exactly indicative of the novel as a whole... Sadie Smith (not her real name) is thirty-four, a heavy drinker, a former FBI operative now employed as a translator for Bruno Lacombe, an ageing revolutionary who lives in a cave and communicates with his disciple Pascal Balmy by email. Bruno's emails are full of Neanderthals, genetics and Cagots -- this last a 'sub-human' people of the Pyrenees who Bruno likes to think are descended from Neanderthals. Meanwhile Pascal's commune of anarchist activists is determined to defeat government-backed agricultural businesses, which threaten the way of life in this corner of south-west France. 

Sadie has been employed by shadowy figures to subvert the anarchists' plots, and starts off by infiltrating the commune and embarking on a relationship with one of the men there. Luckily she's something of a sociopath: other people's realities don't impinge upon or impact her life. (Though there's the heavy drinking...) We are shown glimpses of her past, and there's some discussion of undercover agents (such as Bob Lambert) and hints that Sadie may have been let go by the FBI due to being rather too enthusiastic about convincing activists to commit violent crimes.

Bruno is fascinating, though completely batshit. We get some of his wartime backstory, too, and I found this remarkably poignant. Lucien, Sadie's erstwhile lover (from whom she's borrowing the house where she's staying) is a mere cipher, and Rene (Sadie's activist mark) is almost sterotypical in his brusque masculinity. Sadie is the focus of the novel, though: she's not exactly likeable, but I found myself admiring her detachment and, by way of contrast, her (secret) moments of humanity. Her sense of humour also charmed me. ("I thought, Fuck you, Pascal. “Having you here has meant a lot to me,” Pascal said. Like most people, he was unable to read minds." [loc. 3864]). 

A pacy novel with a surprising ending, some fascinating excursions into history and prehistory, and a narrator who refuses to be dismayed by climate change, the horrors of capitalism, or the soon-to-be-released court records from her FBI entrapment case. I'm still not sure if I liked it, but it held my attention and made me think.

2025/130: A Garter as a Lesser Gift — Aster Glenn Gray

He was not good; had never aspired to be good. He had only ever wanted to be a jolly good fellow, and to be too good, like Percy, destroyed all chance of ever being jolly. Percy would have pulled the covers up over his head before he ever let his host’s wife kiss him, let alone kissed his host. [loc. 621]

A refreshing and sweet novella, setting Gawain and the Green Knight in wartime Britain. The squadron drink at the Green Dragon, and one night a man in green appears...

Gawain chats to the Bertilaks about crime novels and the Blitz; kisses his hostess, and then his host; and returns (or is returned) to his squadron with a green armband, because he has 'been raised with a great belief in magic' and is disinclined to refuse a gift that confers protection. And when the Bertilaks come visiting (with a gift of wild boar, which hasn't been hunted in Britain for four centuries) he confronts them with his anger and grief that it was just a game...

A delightful read, which I wish I'd read at Christmas! The updated setting works very well, and Gawain is vulnerable, likeable and better at talking about his feelings than the original. But then, it is a different time.

2025/129: The Prey of Gods — Nicky Drayden

Now humankind is finally coming into its own, bending and stretching genes in the manner of gods. It was only a matter of time before they muddled their way into bending the exact right genes to reveal that they were gods. Those genes, gone dry and brittle from lack of use, are just begging for an open flame. [p. 61]

The setting is the Eastern Cape in 2064. Alphies (levitating robot assistants) have replaced smartphones; there's a new drug on the street, which seems to confer superpowers; and the roads and parks are overrun by hundreds of thousands of dik-diks.

Our protagonists are a teenage Xhosa boy named Muzikayise, a rugby star, who's secretly in love with his (male) best friend; Riya, a pop diva who keeps her MS at bay with street drugs; Wallace Stoker, cis male politician by day and cabaret superstar Felicity Lyons by night, whose mother is overprotective; Nomvula, a ten-year-old girl who looks after her mentally-ill mother and talks to Mr Tau, who may be a deity and / or her father; Clever4-1, an alphie which seems to be developing a 'spark'; and Sydney, a demi-goddess fallen on hard times who is plotting to regain her power and 'plunge South Africa into a darkness not seen since the days of apartheid. If that’s what it’ll take to get these humans to believe in something, it’s what she’ll have to do.' Each has a secret: each will emerge greatly transformed after Riya's sold-out megaconcert, the climax of this novel.

This was a fun read, fast-paced and twisty. It sometimes had a YA feel, perhaps because several of the characters are quite young, but it also reminded me of KPop Demon Hunters, which is not a bad thing. I loved Stoker, who's expecting a memory wipe, leaving himself a warning encoded in cosmetic colour names: 'Sunday Drive', 'Like a Bat Out of Hell', 'Mother of Pearl', 'Out to Get You', 'Remember', 'Concert Tee'. (I've always thought there were stories waiting to happen in cosmetic names.) I liked Muzi's desperate and misguided attempts to use his new-found powers. And I liked the origin mythology behind the story, a creator god whose children have the gifts of various animals: dolphin, peacock, crab... 

The alphies, too, are truly interesting, with character, ambition, emotion and several conflicting agendas. This novel dates from 2017, before the current AI bubble: I wonder how differently Dreyden might write the alphies now.

2025/128: A Memoir of my Former Self — Hilary Mantel

You can control and censor a child’s reading, but you can’t control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child’s heart. [loc. 5001]

A selection of Mantel's short non-fiction, ranging from book reviews (originally published in the New York Review of Books) and film reviews (originally published in the Spectator), through articles about writing and reading, to a delightful review of perfumes and a piece about stationery. ('...comrades, the hard-spined notebook is death to free thought. Pocket-size or desk-size, it drives the narrative in one direction, one only, and its relentless linearity oppresses you, so you seal off your narrative options early.' [loc. 5349]... I, with my plethora of discbound notebooks, wholeheartedly agree.) 

Also, of course, quite a bit about the Tudors: a variety of pieces written during the long gestation, writing and publication of the trilogy beginning with Wolf Hall. This volume also contains the full text of her 2017 Reith Lectures, exploring the art, craft, possibilities and constraints of historical fiction: I confess I found her voice a little grating when I listened to the Lectures, but it's much mellower in my head as I read!

Mantel the reviewer takes no prisoners. She is acerbic, informed and precise. I'm not familiar with everything she reviewed, but appreciated her admiration of Annie Proulx's 'inarticulate characters' and her critique of Wild at Heart ('not a film you should recommend to the vicar'). More interesting for me were her thoughts about writing, and about reading. She hypothesises that she internalised saintly Cousin Helen, from What Katy Did, and delayed seeking medical advice because of Cousin Helen's dictums about never complaining, never showing your pain, making a virtue of immobility... I am certain that an impressionable child (as I was) can be damaged by their reaction to a book, however innocuous the book might seem to others.

Many of these essays are available online, but it's nice to have them collected, to dip into from time to time. I intend to reread some pieces at times when the writing-well seems empty, or poisoned, or inaccessible. "You have to keep shocking your psyche, or nothing happens in your writing – nothing charged, nothing enduring. It’s imaginary encounters with death that generate life on the page..." and later, "bad art and good art feel remarkably the same, while they’re in process".

2025/127: The Haunting of Hill House — Shirley Jackson

“I could say,” Eleanor put in, smiling, “‘All three of you are in my imagination; none of this is real.’”
“If I thought you could really believe that,” the doctor said gravely, “I would turn you out of Hill House this morning. You would be venturing far too close to the state of mind which would welcome the perils of Hill House with a kind of sisterly embrace.” [loc. 1870]

Reread, for comparison to A Haunting on the Hill: my original review from 2016 is here.

I'd forgotten a lot, of course. I'd forgotten about the vision of a long-ago picnic, and Theodora looking back and screaming. I'd forgotten about Mrs Montague, the self-proclaimed psychic who is the only person oblivious to the supernatural disturbances. ('“There’s a definite cold spot just outside the nursery door,” the doctor told his wife hopefully. “Yes, dear, very nice.”') I'd forgotten about flirtatious Luke, who will inherit Hill House... This would be such a different novel if we knew what the other characters were experiencing, thinking, feeling. Instead, we're trapped inside Eleanor's thoughts, and she is a liar and a fantasist who is desperate for somewhere to belong. Unfortunately, she has found it.

And I had forgotten the songs: Hill House does, in both novels, enjoy a song.

Eleanor turned and looked at the empty center of the room, where someone was walking and singing softly, and then she heard it clearly: Go walking through the valley, Go walking through the valley, Go walking through the valley, As we have done before ….

edit to add: who is doing the haunting? is it the house, or is it the visitors?

2025/126: A Haunting on the Hill — Elizabeth Hand

“If you’re scared, channel that into Tomasin.”
“He’s a demon. He doesn’t get scared.”
“So tap into that. You’re a demon in a big spooky house—you should feel right at home.”
“I do...That’s what scares me.” [p. 176]

This isn't exactly a sequel to The Haunting of Hill House: it's more of a tribute, with a rather different ambience. Instead of the tight third-person narrative of Eleanor, there's a first-person narrative from Holly Sherwin -- a never-quite-successful playwright working on a play about witches -- as well as third-person chapters from the perspective of Holly's girlfriend Nisa, a singer-songwriter; Amanda, an ageing actress with a murky past; and Stevie, Holly's best friend, who's acting in the play and doing the sound. Holly finds Hill House when she's on a weekend break with Nisa, and it seems the perfect place to rehearse and workshop her play -- despite the odd decor, the peculiar housekeeper, the knife-wielding neighbour... 'It felt like it was always the middle of the night, and not in a good way' [p. 198]

Gradually, the characters' flaws and failings are revealed, and tensions rise. The ambience isn't the brittle gaiety and flirtation of Jackson's original, but each of the characters experiences something strange, and each reveals a darker side. Perhaps it's the house ('demented', says Melissa the housekeeper), or the huge black hares (cue Nisa singing about hares on the mountain), or the deafening sounds that don't register on Stevie's recordings. Or perhaps it's the pressure of Holly's expectations, or the secrets that all of them are keeping.

I didn't find A Haunting on the Hill as unsettling as The Haunting of Hill House: perhaps because we know what everyone in the house (or, at least, the quartet of viewpoint characters) is thinking and feeling,  or perhaps because the setting is more modern and familiar. But I did like the way that Hand, like Jackson, never points the camera directly at the source of the unease, never tries to explain it. There are hints of the house's history going back to Eleanor, and further: deaths, suicides, a lost child, a poisoning. The novel's denouement is more explicitly horrific than Jackson's ending, more of an intrusion into the physical world. Paradoxically, this reduced the chill factor for me. But this time, at least, we get to see what happens afterwards.

2025/125: The Corn King and the Spring Queen — Naomi Mitchison

All I can say is that this is a very strange country, and that one has evidence of things occurring here which would certainly be against all the laws of Nature at home. [p. 412]

Reread, with perhaps a better understanding now of the Greek elements: I thought I'd read it quite recently, but it turns out that was in 2015 (review here).

I'd forgotten a great deal: just how murderous Erif and Tarrik are; the snake that protects Kleomenes; the death of Harn Der. And this time around, more interested in the Greek (and especially the Spartan) elements, I found Kleomenes' story fascinating. I don't think I'd noticed before that the pictures of Kleomenes' last days that Berris creates are foreshadowings of Christian imagery: 'the feast at the prison, the last eating together... three windows across the back of his picture. The King was in the centre, with Panteus beside him, leaning against his breast' recalls the Last Supper, and there's a young man on a colt riding through crowds, and a body on a stake with a cross-piece... Perhaps, in Mitchison's imagination, these pictures -- hidden away by slaves and helots -- were passed down as a kind of folk memory.

That's just one aspect of Mitchison's exploration of comparative religion. "Taking a living man and mixing him with pain and death — yes, mixing him—like a cook — and making a god," muses the dissolute Ptolemy IV Philopator, revelling in the death of Kleomenes. "I have made a god that way. A new form of god. Dionysos-Sabazios has shown himself again on one man, a torn man. Like Pentheus in the play." Erif feels a sisterly kinship with Isis, who is also a Year Queen. Tarrik, meanwhile, expects to be killed and eaten when his time is up: though perhaps, by the end of the novel, times have changed enough that the rituals will be kinder.

I was struck by this line in Mitchison's Introduction, written about sixty years after the novel's 1931 publication:

...my account of what was happening in Sparta or Athens or even Egypt, is all based on real history, but the view was moulded by what I—and many another person—was thinking in the Europe of those days, with Mussolini and his fascists in Italy and already the shadow of Hitler in Germany. [loc. 72]

2025/124: The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America — David Baron

It is an inspiring epic of human inventiveness. It is a cautionary tale of mass delusion. It is a drama of battling egos. Ultimately, though, it is a love story, an account of when we, the people of Earth, fell hard for another planet and projected our fantasies, desires and ambitions onto an alien world. [Introduction]

This is an account of Percival Lowell's obsession with the planet Mars, and its profound consequences for the human race. Following the observations of Schiaparelli -- who described a network of long straight lines on the planet, 'canali' (channels, but mistranslated as 'canals') -- Lowell, a wealthy businessman, published a number of books about his observations and his interpretation of them. He also founded the Lowell Observatory, and inspired a generation of scientists and science fiction authors.

The first part of the book, 'Century's End - 1876-1900', recounts Lowell's early life, and the context in which his astronomical work was received: his first books were published in the 1890s, in a period where science and technology were celebrated. Several reputable figures had asserted that life was not only possible but probable on other planets, and there was much discussion -- in parallel with the fashion for spiritualism -- about how to communicate with the inhabitants of our nearest neighbour. Nikola Tesla was convinced that his work in 'wireless telegraphy' (radio) would enable him to signal Mars.

In the second section, 'A New Civilization - 1901-1907', the sense of the limitless possibilities of the new century is strong. Mars became fashionable: everything from stage plays to dance tunes, advertising, and a plethora of stories in the popular press. (Meanwhile in London, Edward Maunder, an assistant at the Royal Observatory, conducted a study at the Royal Hospital School in Greenwich, showing that schoolboys perceived straight lines on images of Mars if seated at a certain distance from the pictures. Closer, and they could distinguish the lines and curves that made up those 'straight lines': further away and it was all a blur.) 

The third section, 'The Earthlings Respond - 1908-1916', describes the waning of popular enthusiasm for Lowell's ideas -- although he continued his lecture tours until his death in 1916, maintaining that "the difficulty in establishing the fact that Mars is inhabited lies not in the lack of intelligence on Mars, but rather the lack of it here." What he lacked in scientific rigour, he made up for in sheer stubborn belief.

Baron's epilogue, 'Children of Mars', celebrates Lowell's legacy. He suggests that the reason the American public were so ready to believe that Orson Welles' radio production of The War of the Worlds was real news was that many could remember all the newspaper reports about life on Mars. And, more importantly, 'intelligent eyes really had been watching human affairs keenly and closely': not aliens but children* who grew up hearing stories and theories about other worlds. A young man in Luxembourg was enthralled by Lowell's Mars: his name was Hugo Gernsback, and he is regarded as a key figure in the rise of science fiction as a genre. H P Lovecraft attended one of Lowell's lectures aged 16; H G Wells met Lowell and discussed Mars with him (this fact established by Baron's own research); and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars featured canals, deserts and dry lakes, just as Lowell had suggested. Burroughs' Barsoom, in turn, inspired another generation of writers and scientists, including Carl Sagan, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C Clarke.

This was a great read, full of fascinating detail and copious illustrations. Baron's authorial voice is unobtrusive: his accounts of his research expeditions are interesting but very much secondary to the main narrative. There's a good bibliography and extensive references. And I did like his conclusion:

... I thought I had set out to tell a tale of human folly, about how easy it is to deceive ourselves into believing things simply because we wish them to be true... I discovered another, perhaps more powerful takeaway: Human imagination is a force so potent that it can change what is true. Thanks to Lowell's Martian fantasies that helped inspire the early space age, visiting the Red Planet has become a potentially realisable goal for today's children. [loc. 3031]

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 26 AUG 2025.

* same thing?

2025/123: Drop Dead Sisters — Amelia Diane Coombs

"Should I be offended that the most you’ve ever agreed with me is over how to deal with a dead body?" [loc. 1421]

Remi works as a community moderator for a games company. She hasn't dated for a while, and she doesn't have many (any?) friends. At the opening of the novel, she's heading for a family reunion: her hippie parents are renewing their vows on their fortieth wedding anniversary, and Remi -- the odd one out, the introvert in a nest of extroverts -- is going to have to see her two elder sisters, Maeve and Eliana, for the first time in seven years. 'If our lives were a video game, we each adventured off on our own side quests nearly a decade ago and never returned to the main storyline.'

The microaggressions start almost as soon as the sisters are reunited, but soon they have something more important to worry about: a dead body. They're not sure who committed the crime, but their attempts to cover it up are foiled when the body disappears. Then they learn that there's a fugitive on the loose, and that their (rather flaky) parents have been doing drugs in a state park... Remi's nascent crush on a park ranger named Leo seems likely to be derailed before she can do more than swap numbers with him.

This was a quick fun read: I did not guess the final twists, and I liked the happy ending. However, I can't help feeling that the authorities' response to the body's eventual reappearance was anticlimactic and, to be honest, unprofessional.

2025/122: Of Wind and Wolves — J M Elliott

"... in this country, tombs are the only permanent thing we build. Only the dead have ceased their wandering -- their bodies have, at least." [loc. 2343]

The setting is Scythia -- here spelt Skythia -- in the fifth century BC. Araiti's father has betrothed her to the ageing king of the Skythians, Ariapeithes, in order to forge a lasting peace between their tribes. Araiti, fostered by her mother's Amazon tribe, has earnt her status among her father's people, the Bastarnai: she's a formidable horsewoman and has been trained in the arts of war. The Skythians recognise her for what she is, androktones -- man-killer -- and decree that she may not marry the king until she has killed an enemy in battle and taken his scalp. She's sent out with the warband, led by the king's son Aric, to patrol the marches.

At first shunned by the Skythian warriors, Araiti gradually makes a place for herself, and revels in the freedom that few women have. She manages to conceal her 'spells', which seem to be epileptic fits, and gains respect for her wise counsel and her courage. She despises most women (it's mutual) and can't understand why Skythian women don't ride or fight -- as apparently they used to do. Creeping Hellenisation is changing their world, with Greek colonies springing up where they shouldn't be, and Aric's brother Skyles making deals with Hellenic traders.

The author is an archaeologist and a horse-trainer, and both these skills have coloured her narrative. I was fascinated by Araiti's descent into a plundered tomb, and more generally by the wealth of cultural detail.  (Herodotus is cited as a source: Ariapeithes and Skyles are historical characters.) And the horses are more vivid characters than some of the humans... 

There's a romantic element to the novel, but it's also an engaging piece of historical fiction. I did find some of the dialogue too colloquial ('What's that supposed to mean?') and some of the prose a little florid, but I enjoyed Of Wind and Wolves enough to be keen to read the second in the Steppe Saga.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 01 SEP 2025.

2025/121: The Song of Achilles — Madeleine Miller

Achilles returns to the tent, where my body waits. He is red and red and rust-red, up to his elbows, his knees, his neck, as if he has swum in the vast dark chambers of a heart, and emerged, just now, still dripping. [p. 325]

This is the story of Achilles and Patroclus, and of the war. Achilles the living weapon, the invincible warrior whose fate is to die at Troy: Patroclus who loves him, who is not much of a fighter, who befriends the enslaved Briseis and stands up for her, who dons Achilles' armour and dies and is not buried. And it's the story of Thetis, who does not think Patroclus good enough for her son: who is, at last, reconciled to him.

I bought this thirteen years ago and have attempted it several times since then: I think, in the first chapters, I found Patroclus too mild and Achilles too arrogant. This time around, I persevered, and the characters and story swept me along.

Miller's writing is simple, poetic, sometimes soaring. She uses, and explains, a few Greek words: therapon ('a brother-in-arms sworn to a prince by blood oaths and love'; apathes (heartless: used in the feminine form to reveal a disguise); hubris (pride). The gods here are real, and capable of turning the tide of battle or throwing a man down from a wall. Thetis in particular is monstrous, white as death with huge black eyes. At the novel's end, though, she offers what kindness she can to the spirit of the man she despised.

This is a love story as well as a study of the effects of fate and prophecy on the lives of heroes. It's poignant when Patroclus thinks 'I did not plan to live after he was gone': it's painful when Thetis tells Achilles of the prophecy that 'the best of the Myrmidons will die before two more years have passed... you will still be alive when it happens.’ Miller's descriptions of the natural world, and of the culture and society of Homeric Greece, ring true. Blood and honour, love and death, destiny and expectation.

2025/120: The Raven Scholar — Antonia Hodgson

"How do bears keep cool?"
Neema perked up. "They employ a variety of strategies," she began, but he was already lumbering off on all fours. "I was being rhetorical," he called over his shoulder...
So Neema created a new list – Six Ways Bears Keep Cool – and told it to the walls, because she had to tell someone. [loc. 3438]

The first time I started reading this novel, I stopped halfway through the first chapter. Yana, a young woman of noble blood, her family fallen from grace due to treachery and deception, is summoned by the Emperor. Gosh, I thought: another Chosen One. I thought I could predict at least some of her story, and it didn't interest me.

Reader, I was wrong -- and happily so. Yana is not the protagonist, though what happens when she meets the Emperor does shape the rest of the story. Our protagonist is instead Neema Kraa, the eponymous Raven Scholar: a Black woman in her thirties, lacking in social skills but extremely good at her job. She doesn't believe in the Eight -- animal Guardians who have saved Orrun seven times, but will destroy it on their next Return -- but is happy to pay them lip-service.

It's time for a new Emperor, the incumbent having served his twenty-four years: eight contenders, one for each Guardian, must compete in a series of mental and physical trials to determine who will become the next Emperor. The Raven Candidate is an old enemy of Neema's from her student days: she alone knows a terrible secret of Neema's. The Fox Candidate, Cain, is Neema's ex. And the Tiger Candidate is Yana's twin brother Ruko. When one of the Candidates is murdered, the Emperor charges Neema with finding the killer.

I liked Neema a great deal, and I loved the twistiness of the plot. There's violence but there's also affection, loyalty and kindness. And there is, in singular and plural voices, the Raven. ("Respect, that’s all we demand. Recognition of our magnificence. Offerings. Love. Fear. Trembling awe. Worship. Shiny things. Blood sacrifice, some of us very much enjoy blood sacrifice. Truly, we ask for so little." [loc. 4048]) It's a great murder mystery with elements of romance, epic fantasy, comedy and tragedy. The characters are rounded, consistent, flawed and gifted, with motivations and biases that aren't at first apparent. (Sometimes they do seem younger than they're stated to be: perhaps that's because of the whole 'tournament of trials' setup.) Also another delightful raven, Sol (short for Solitary Raven) who initially manifests as a magical book.

Having proved myself wrong about the nature of the story, I tore through this in a couple of days: I found it immensely addictive and intricately plotted, and I cared about the characters. I am so looking forward to rereading it in preparation for the sequel, probably due in 2026.

Meanwhile, I note that Antonia Hodgson has also written a quartet of crime novels set in the 1720s...

2025/119: The Secret World of Denisovans — Silvana Condemi, François Savatier (translated by Holly James)

While Neanderthals found themselves confined to a small, freezing territory during glacial maximums, Denisovans continued to thrive across an immense continent that had expanded due to decreasing sea levels, and still had enough exchanges with their northern relatives to maintain their genetic diversity. [loc. 1844]

Subtitled 'The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals', this is an accessible overview of current paleoanthropology as it relates to the Denisovans -- a human species who went extinct around 25,000 years ago, but whose DNA persists in Asian and Oceanic populations. Condemi is a paleoanthropologist, Savatier is a journalist: between them they have produced a very readable text, with boxed sections for the more technical or theoretical aspects of the story.

And it is a story: from the 2010 identification of the new species from DNA in a single finger-bone found in a remote Siberian cave, to ongoing debate about whether the Denisovans were indeed a separate species or whether they should be grouped with other extinct hominids. The species is not yet formally recognised by International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (see this article for current discussion... though Wikipedia now indicates that the Denisovans have been classified as Homo longi) but Condemi and Savatier argue that it is very much a separate species, diverging from the shared ancestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens about a million years ago -- and crossbreeding with neanderthalis (definitely) and sapiens (probably). Denisovans and Neanderthals had more in common, genetically, with one another than with Homo sapiens: the prevailing theory seems to be that Denisovans and Neanderthals had the same origin, but evolved differently in Asia and in Europe.

The book offers a good overview of the waves of human migration from Africa, and the differing environmental influences in Asia and in Europe. For instance, the effects of the ice ages were greater in Europe than in East Asia: on the other hand, there were fewer accessible sources of workable stone, which probably meant that early humans used bamboo rather than stone tools -- which won't have survived well. I also learnt that there had been a 'mega meteorite' impact somewhere in Eastern Asia around 800,000 years ago: Condemi and Savatier discuss its likely impact on human populations in the area. And I, with my European focus, wasn't aware of the 'drowned continent' Sundaland, currently below sea level but above water for 40% of the last 250,000 years. This, the authors suggest, is likely where the Denisovans evolved.

Occasionally the book does get technical -- the chapters on analysis of fossil skulls from different species were a struggle for me -- but overall it's a fascinating and very readable volume, full of the history of paleoanthropology as well as the prehistory of humanity.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 19th August 2025.