2026/060: Titanium Noir — Nick Harkaway

“You’re the shock absorber. From the Titans’ point of view, you stop the masses from realising the extent of their subjugation. You relieve them of the need to exercise raw financial and political power in the protection of their interests where those interests collide with the law. But ... you also protect ordinary humans from the consequences of that subjugation as best you can. Yours is an equivocal profession. But I hear you’re not entirely an asshole.” [loc. 2879]

Cal Sounder, consultant detective, is hired to investigate the murder of a reclusive scientist, Roddy Tebbit, who died in his own home and apparently by his own hand. Complicating the matter is the fact that Tebbit was a Titan -- a recipient of a genetic therapy called T7 (possibly something to do with telomeres) which reverses ageing, increases muscle and bone density, and incidentally makes Titans literally larger than life. On the downside, it's extremely expensive; it affects memory; and the process can be very painful.

Being at least in part a noir novel, the city features prominently in Titanium Noir. (It's unclear what the city is called, or where it's located. All we know is that it lies on the shore of Lake Othrys.) Cal knows everyone in the city's murky underworld: bar owners, weapons dealers, criminal masterminds. He also knows some of the Titans: his ex-girlfriend, Athena, is the daughter of Stefan Tonfamecasca, the man who discovered T7, and is a Titan herself. And as Cal's investigation develops more twists and complications, he needs to talk to Tonfamecasca himself.

I enjoyed this a lot, despite the genre-typical violence. There are satisfying twists and surprises, a good use of SFnal ideas, and some fascinating minor characters. (At one point Cal is lectured on the Titans by a Marxist bar owner -- see the quotation at the head of this review). I liked the blend of noir dialogue, near-future setting and elements of Greek mythology. 

I've owned this book for several years: now congratulating myself on buying the sequel, Sleeper Beach, when it was on offer.

2026/059: A Legacy of Spies — John Le Carré

...how much of our human feeling can we dispense with in the name of freedom, would you say, before we cease to feel either human or free? [loc. 3719]

Published in 2017, and very much a post-Brexit novel: at one point Smiley says to Peter Guillam "was it all for England, then? Of course it was... But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I'm a European."

Told from Peter Guillam's point of view: he's an old man now, retired to his family's farm in Brittany, but he's called back to London to explain his actions during Operation Windfall (as told in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which unaccountably I have not read in the last two decades) and refute the accusation that he's a 'professional Lothario hired by the British Secret Service, [who] roped in susceptible girls as unwitting accomplices in hare-brained operations that fell apart at the seams'. 

To some extent this is true (parallels can be drawn, as Le Carré reminds us, with the spy cops scandal) but Guillam nevertheless denies everything. He does not accept responsibility -- at least, not out loud -- for the deaths of other operatives or innocent dupes. His interrogators are dogged, but Guillam is still a professional, and still loyal to the mysteriously-absent George Smiley.

Le Carré's prose is in a class of its own: reading his work is a delight. He is the master of the balanced sentence, and his depiction here of an ageing intelligence operative, looking back on love and danger and subterfuge, is as compelling in its recreation of 1960s spycraft as in its exposition of Guillam's emotional landscape. I liked Guillam as a character, and found his inventive rebuttals of accusations very satisfactory. One interrogator tells him 'I'm trying to read your emotions. I can't. You either have none, or you have too many.' The latter, I think, is more accurate.

2026/058: Hidden in Snow — Viveca Sten (translated by Marlaine Delargy)

All these fucking men, exploiting vulnerable women. [p. 386]

First in a new series of crime novels set in the Swedish town of Åre, a quiet ski resort surrounded by mountains and forest. Hanna Ahlander's life has imploded, both professionally and personally: her boss has 'sent her home to think things over' and clearly wants her gone, and her boyfriend has broken up with her -- leaving her homeless. 

Salvation comes in the form of her sister Lydia, who suggests that Hanna spends some time at Lydia's lodge in Åre. Hanna finds herself helping the local police with a missing-person case, a young woman who disappeared on her way home from a party. She works with Detective Daniel Lindskog, who's recently become a father (though seems to prioritise his job over his family). Soon, she's asked if she'd consider transferring to Åre...

There were some interesting themes here -- the influx of migrants in Swedish society, the multiple ways in which men abuse and prey on women, the grandeur of nature -- but I disliked both Hanna (who takes a lot of risks, not all of them legal) and Daniel (who is prone to fits of rage, can't deal with the press, and keeps complaining of the effort of fatherhood while his girlfriend is left to do almost all the work). Sten's prose style (at least in translation) failed to engage me, and I wasn't a fan of the 100+ short chapters. I also felt that there wasn't enough foreshadowing of the villain: and I wasn't a fan of opening with the discovery of a body, in a flash-forward, before introducing the characters and the missing-person case. One last niggle: Hanna's ex is (justifiably) furious that she destroyed his clothes and shoes before leaving. He's threatening to report her to the police. But she has a minor car crash, and 'when he heard about the accident, all his anger melted away.' Yeah, right.

Oh, and the Kindle edition has some weird formatting -- place names in bold italic...

Lovely wintry atmosphere, great sense of the dangers of the natural world: but I would prefer it without these people in it.

2026/057: You Dreamed of Empires — Álvaro Enrigue (translated by Natasha Wimmer)

It never occurred to them, of course, that half the sauces of the dishes they had just eaten were moderately hallucinogenic, and thus their delectable sense of relaxation was in truth a welcome to the esoteric between-place where the Colhua permanently resided. [loc. 278]

I had been expecting a fictionalised account of Hernán Cortés' 'conquest' of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the so-called Aztec empire. (Enrigue points out that the inhabitants 'identified as Tenochca, the descendents of Tenoch': 'Aztec' is lazy shorthand by 19th century historians.) My expectations were subverted, exceeded and left by the wayside, for this is a manic and unpredictable novel: set on a single day (9th November 1519) when Cortés and his soldiers enter Tenochtitlán and meet Moctezuma.

Cortés, here, is less a conquistador than a slaver and pirate. His intentions have been overtaken by ambition, and by the support and influence of the local tribes. He has no idea whether they will be allowed to leave the city (which is a Borgesian labyrinth of corridors and rooms), and he doesn't realise that Moctezuma is less interested in the Spanish than in the cabuayos they rode in on. Moctezuma, meanwhile, is permanently high -- his shaman somewhat exasperated by his craving for more hallucinogens -- but sharp enough to deal conclusively with vexing family matters as well as with his barbaric guests.

Enrigue has immense fun with the scenario. He switches tenses, shifts focus, editorialises from his twenty-first century perspective, and has Moctezuma hearing T Rex's 'Monolith' -- perhaps what Enrigue was listening to himself, when he wrote.

I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can’t imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year’s festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn’t place, though in a possible future we would have recognised it. It was T. Rex’s ‘Monolith’. [loc. 1886]

(The lack of quotation marks, indeed of any conventional marking of speech, is a quirk of style that made me pay more attention to who was speaking, rather than on the rhythms of dialogue.)

You Dreamed of Empires strays far from the usual remit of historical fiction, but it's gloriously counterfactual and immense fun, vividly described (for instance, the reek of dried blood from the priests who sit near Captain Jazmin Caldera at dinner; the difficulty of cutting one's toenails with a dagger; the shadows cast by floating flowers in a pool) and exuberantly revolutionary.

2026/056: The Luminous Dead — Caitlin Starling

“That was the look of somebody resigned to being the monster they knew they were.”

Gyre lives on Cassandra-5, a planet with immense mineral wealth but little else to commend it. She takes a contract to explore a particular cave system -- dangerous, because the caves are often collapsed by native beasts called Tunnellers -- which will pay enough money for her to get off-world and search for her mother. She's been surgically fitted into a life-support suit, and she expects to find a full team supporting her by comms. Instead, she gets a single person: a woman named Em.

Neither Gyre nor Em has been wholly honest. Gyre's lied about her experience: Em hasn't revealed the true purpose of the mission, or the number of failed (and fatal) attempts already made. But it's Em who's in the position of power. She can order Gyre's suit to dispense drugs, sedating her: she can even manipulate the suit remotely, dragging Gyre along.

In the darkness of the caves, Gyre keeps feeling that she's not alone. That she's being watched. And she catches glimpses of things that can't be there -- that Em assures her aren't there. But she can't trust Em...

This is an immensely claustrophobic novel: Gyre imprisoned in her suit, unable even to touch her own skin; repetitive conversations between Em and Gyre; the physical dangers of the cave, and the possibility that Gyre has been exposed to something psychotropic. Gyre has no friends, and only the memory of her mother to motivate her. Em is an orphan, who's sent many to their deaths and seems likely to do the same to Gyre.

I found this slow, and often repetitive. There are only so many sumps Gyre could swim through before it felt tedious: there are only so many arguments that Gyre and Em can have about the earlier expeditions, and about whether Em is telling Gyre the truth. Perhaps if I had read the ebook rather than listening to the audiobook (excellently and emotionally read by Adenrele Ojo), I'd have skimmed... Psychological horror, in a science fictional setting, with just two characters: it's a bold debut, despite its flaws. I'm interested to read more by Starling.

2026/055: The Weaver of the Middle Desert — Victoria Goddard

She could weave those falling descants, those trilling calls, those infinitely varied notes into her work. Could she weave sound and silence together, craft a curtain that would keep a tent silent or hold the songs of mourning or merriment within its folds? [loc. 530]

Arzu is the eldest of the three daughters of the Bandit Queen, desert nomads whose world is strongly reminiscent of the Arabian Nights. Her younger sisters, Pali and Sardeet, have each had a novella to themselves (I find that I haven't read Pali's, The Warrior of the Third Veil), so it's Arzu's turn. But she is not as young nor as ambitious as her sisters. She's already happily married to a man of the clan, and her magic is founded on the gentle arts of weaving and threadcraft.

Nevertheless, when Pali -- back from warrior training -- suggests that they visit Sardeet, Arzu is happy to embark on the journey. It turns out that Sardeet's second husband is almost as awful, in different ways, as her first, and additionally has gone a-roving. The three sisters climb a magic beanstalk to find him...

This was sweet but slight: just what I needed, halfway through an unsettling and claustrophobic novel. It's really nice to find a fantasy protagonist whose ambitions compass home and family, who is happy with who and where she is. Pali will always be heroic: Sardeet will always be beautiful (and perhaps a little too trusting): Arzu... I think her gift is happiness.

2026/054: Zennor in Darkness — Helen Dunmore

... he will cry out against Frieda if she dances in the wind with her scarf flying above her like a banner. She dances for pure joy, but the war does not recognize that kind of dancing. It knows that she’s twirling her scarf in a prearranged signal to the U-boats lying out offshore, waiting. [p.128]

This was Helen Dunmore's first novel, and some of her tropes and traits are visible: sexual tension within the family, arresting images of the natural world, the inexorable force of gossip and rumour. The setting is Cornwall in 1917, a village near Zennor: D H Lawrence and his German wife Frieda have taken a cottage there, and Lawrence is trying to farm, and to maintain his anti-war stance.

The focal character, though, is Clare Coyne, only daughter of Francis Coyne: she keeps house for her widowed father, paints illustrations for his book on wild flowers, and spends what time she can spare with her friends Hannah and Peggy. As the novel opens, the three girls are eagerly awaiting the return of John William, Hannah's brother and Clare's cousin, who's on leave from the trenches because he's going to be made an officer. Clare is secretly in love with John William.

The novel moves between viewpoints, predominantly Clare, Francis Coyne (a prurient man who, unknown to his daughter, is having an affair with a local woman, and also keeps thinking about Hannah and her Sam making love on the beach), Lawrence himself, and Frieda. Lawrence is a keen observer of the natural world. He meets Clare when she's out sketching plants, and introduces her to Frieda in the hope that the two will befriend and support one another. But after John William has been and gone, everything changes.

A novel about women, and men, in wartime, and how war warps and wrecks everything. Lawrence's Utopian schemes, Clare's hopes -- and the hopes of a million girls like her -- of marriage, Frieda's loneliness and anger, John William's despair at the slaughter. I really disliked Francis Coyne by the end of this novel: I felt very sorry for Frieda (whose cousin, I learnt, was the Red Baron himself, Manfred von Richthofen) and I admired Clare's intelligence, composure and passion. 

Dunmore's prose is a delight, full of surprising imagery ('larks scream as though they had thrown themselves against the sky and stuck there'): I knew her slightly, a friend of a friend, and wish she had lived longer and written more.

2026/053: How to Fake it in Society — K J Charles

"...in effect, you must paint what you see, and not what you know to be there. Because what we see and what is there are not always the same thing. I suppose it is important to learn that." [loc. 2026]

My initial mini-review is here: I reread the novel for this full review and can confirm that it is still an utter delight.

Titus Pilcrow is a colourman, a maker and supplier of paints and colours for artists. As the novel opens, he is in despair, because his landlord (also his ex) is evicting him. By a stroke of fortune, the client he visits that afternoon has a once-in-a-lifetime offer for him: she's on her deathbed, after a suspicious accident, and she wishes to marry to deprive her unpleasant nephew of her fortune. She has the license ready, because she was planning to marry a French count -- but he's AWOL, so Titus will suffice. 

The deed is done, Mrs Pilcrow (nee Whitecross) is dead, and Titus finds himself in possession of eight thousand a year and a plethora of conmen, beggars, representatives of charities, and other ne'er-do-wells who presume, correctly, that he has no idea how to handle his new-found wealth.

Enter Miss Whitecross's intended: Nicolas-Marc, Comte de Valois de La Motte, exquisitely dressed and outrageously handsome, and more than happy to assist Titus in refreshing his wardrobe (Titus likes bright colours, and Nico persuades him to indulge himself), entering Society, and dealing with importunate friends, relatives and hangers-on. Nico tells Titus that he is hoping to restore his mother's reputation after the scandalous Affair of the Diamond Necklace.

This, regrettably, is a lie. Nico and his beloved cousin Eve are down on their luck, pursued by brutal gangsters for a loan they can't repay. Yes, his first thought was to swindle Titus: no, he didn't expect to like him.

Titus, meanwhile, is not stupid. He is fairly sure that Nico wants something -- and Titus, a decent bloke, is happy to grant it, whatever it may be, in exchange for the pleasure of Nico's company. Nico is kind, and witty, and protective: Nico helps Titus stand up to both his ex and his older brother, and exacts vengeance on those who abuse Titus's good nature. He may be a criminal, but he is also a decent bloke.

This was a highly enjoyable novel, with a setup worthy (and reminiscent) of Georgette Heyer, a satisfying amount of technical detail about 19th-century paint and dye technology, and vivid, witty dialogue. There was a genre-typical 'dip', shall we say, near the end, but I was confident in the author's ability to resolve it in a credible and dramatic manner -- which she did, with a definite emphasis on the dramatic. 

I don't think this novel would have worked as well as it did without the dual viewpoints: it did mean that the reader knew more than the characters, but that's better than knowing less (as in, for instance, Any Old Diamonds). And I loved the supporting cast: Eve in particular, who deserves a novel of their own, and the Thorpes who keep house for Miss Whitecross and then Titus, and Titus's nicer brother Vespasian.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 30 April 2026.

2026/052: The Sapling Cage — Margaret Killjoy

“Regardless of how we're born, we get to decide who we are and who we want to be.”

Lorel has always wanted to be a witch. Growing up in her small village, and helping her mother run the stables, is not the life she wants. But there's one problem: she was born in a male body, and there are stories of what the witches do to men who try to infiltrate their ranks.

Luckily her friend Lane, promised to the witches from birth, is determined to be a knight instead -- so Lorel takes Lane's place, while Lane heads off to the city. Loren, meanwhile, has to contend with being called a 'whelp' (the witches' term for apprentices) and walking all day. And of course she can't bathe with the other girls, despite making tentative friendships with some of them. Meanwhile, a magical blight is killing trees in the forest and disrupting the natural order. [NB: As a British reader, I found the term 'blighters' insufficiently villainous. This is a term for a nuisance, not an existential threat.] And the country as a whole is being threatened by an ambitious duchess, who's moving in on the vacant throne -- much to the disapproval of the witches (who are pretty anarchic) and the Ilthurian Knights (who are, delightfully, even more so).

The novel is presented as Lorel's first-person viewpoint, which does mean that some of the other characters are a little two-dimensional. I found the pacing uneven, and I would have liked a little more detail on the world in which Lorel and the witches are adventuring. Instead, there was more telling than showing.

But there's a lot to like. I enjoyed Killjoy's subversion of common fantasy tropes -- the knights, the nobility, the patriarchy (there was little sense of this being a patriarchal society: women seemed as empowered, or disempowered, as men of the same class.) Lorel is a seething mass of resentment, romance, ambition and hubris (100% accurate teenage mindset) which was sometimes a little wearing, but she is also brave, loyal and determined. It's a queernorm world, more or less, and Lorel is attracted to both male and female characters: she's not the only queer character, either, and learning about the different issues which others have faced is part of her growth.

Good narration by Jackie Meloche, who was great with character voices and pronunciation -- though I'm not sure why 'Dame' was pronounced 'Dam', and I spent much of the book wondering if one character was really called 'RNA' (no, it's 'Araneigh').

2026/051: The Library at Mount Char — Scott Hawkins

“You shall be the thing [X] fears above all others, and conquers... Your way shall be very hard, very cruel. I must do terrible things to you, that you may become a monster." [p. 355]

On Labor Day, 1977, in the sleepy American suburb of Garrison Oaks, Carolyn's life changed. She and a dozen other children were orphaned, their homes obliterated, and they were adopted by 'Father'. Father, who seems very powerful, tells the children that they are Pelapi -- an old word that means 'librarian, but also apprentice, or perhaps student' -- and assigns each of them a Catalogue. Carolyn's Catalogue is language: all languages, human and otherwise. ("What if I don't want to?" she asks Father. "It won't matter," he replies. "I'll make you do it anyway.") 

And so Carolyn grows up in the Library, studying and learning to live with the other Pelapi. Nobody is allowed knowledge of anyone else's Catalogue: this is a crime with appalling punishments. Time passes, but perhaps not chronologically. And then Father vanishes, and David (whose Catalogue is war) convenes the Pelapi to try to discover whether Father is dead. And if he is, which of the other powers -- eldritch beings whose ascendance would mean the end of complex life, and possibly also the sun -- will take his place?

This is not a novel for the faint-hearted: there are some truly harrowing scenes. And it's not a novel for the easily distracted, as it's fast-paced, told out of sequence and includes a labyrinthine plot that even the plotter can't think about (due to some of the others being mind-readers). The story is peppered with foreshadowings, and with asides that indicate a very different, and decidedly more horrific, history than the one we think we know. Luckily there are a couple of Everyman characters -- wanna-be Buddhist plumber Steve, and career soldier turned special agent Erwin -- to temper the extreme weirdness and growing inhumanity of Carolyn and her siblings. 

For they are, in their various ways, losing whatever human emotions they possessed when Father brought them to the Library. Carolyn knows all languages but is laughably bad at actual communication. David is certain that violence solves every problem, and enjoys killing. Jennifer, the healer, uses drugs to soften her world. And Margaret hangs out with the dead...

The horror elements are extremely horrific: The Library at Mount Char is told, though, with black humour and a strong sense of the ridiculous. The characters are fascinating, though seldom likeable. Only near the end of the novel do we find out what really happened on Labor Day 1977: only after calamities have been averted and retribution awarded does Hawkins reveal, and conclude, the overall arc of the narrative.

Despite some pacing issues, and the ubiquitous sexual violence against strong female characters, it's a massively impressive debut novel (published in 2014: Hawkins' second novel is due in September 2026) and I would like to reread it at some stage. At least I'll be able to skip braced against some of the nastier scenes: and I'd like to see just how the overall plot is constructed, and appreciate the worldbuilding, without being distracted by atrocities.

2026/050: You-Gin One-Gin — Douglas Robinson

"I met her on the alien spaceship."
"Oh really."
"Don't take that arch tone with me, Volodya. You're dead, remember? You don't get to be arch."
"What, there's a rule? You die, you forfeit your right to rise above a situation?"
..."Hell, I don't know. Be arch. You're Vladimir Nabokov. If you're not arch you're, I don't know, Raymond Carver."
"Anything but that," I say with a histrionic shudder. I've read his work. It feels as if he wrote it with a hammer. [loc. 3018]

A riotous, fast-paced, exuberant metafiction -- or 'sort of a novel', per the subtitle -- set at a (fictional) university in Liberal, Kansas. The story starts with a stage production of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin which not only breaks the fourth wall, but features Pushkin himself as a character. Theatre professor Kip Knurl is playing Pushkin, and his immersion in the role threatens his marriage. 

Then Kip is apparently shot -- though the x-ray shows no bullet -- and the action switches to hapless playwright Douglas Robinson, along with alien-abductee barista Sherry and the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov, as they try to discover why the play (or the character) has been targetted, and whether the chair of the theatre department has really been possessed by the spirit of a medieval poet. It's at the local lingerie league football game, though, that things get really weird...

This was great fun, witty and playful. I liked the framing narrative in which the manager of the Liberal State University Press disclaims any knowledge of or responsibility for the events portrayed within: and I really enjoyed the beats of the playscript which forms the first third of the novel. Nabokov's exchanges with the character Douglas Robinson (surely not to be confused with the author Douglas Robinson) are a delight: it's Nabokov's 'joke' pronounciation of the play's title that becomes the novel's title. And I appreciated the ways in which the novel interrogated Eugene Onegin, and how that work has been reduced from Pushkin's own metafiction to just another failed romance. (See Tchaikovsky's opera for details.) 

I would have liked the female characters to be a little more independent, instead of being defined by their relationships to men, and I'm still not wholly sure about what happened at the end of the story. But a fun, clever read which blends ghosts, literary theory, alien abduction and campus life.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. Already published!

2026/049: The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires — Grady Hendrix

"He thinks we’re what we look like on the outside: nice Southern ladies. Let me tell you something…there’s nothing nice about Southern ladies.”[quote]

This does exactly what it says on the cover, and it is a delight. Patricia Campbell is a stay-at-home mother, married to Carter, who is a patronising git who cheats far from the ideal husband, though he does earn enough to keep Patricia and the kids -- Korey and Blue -- in the style to which they are accustomed. Patricia quits one book club because she'd bounced off Cry the Beloved Country and was encouraged to leave by Grace, the woman who ran the book club: instead, she joins a newly-formed book club that mostly seems to read true crime.

Which is probably why, when the charismatic James moves in next door, her initial liking quickly warps into suspicion. Kids -- Black kids -- are going missing, Patricia has been attacked by an elderly neighbour, and her mother-in-law Miss Mary is savaged by a horde of rats. ("She knew what to do if too many people showed up for supper, or if someone arrived early for a party, but what did you do when rats attacked your mother-in-law? Who told you how to cope with that?") James, though, seems so pleasant, even if Miss Mary did take an instant dislike to him. And the book club's menfolk think he's great, and that he'll bring them fortune and prosperity with the investments he encourages them to make.

When Patricia voices her concerns to Carter, his response is to prescribe her antidepressants.

The book club ladies aren't heroic, or super-powered, or even especially confident: they're also somewhat racist (though of course they'd deny that), in that it's a Black woman who has to push the plot along. There is also a great deal of misogyny in this novel, larded with religion, strict etiquette and 1990s politics: enough to make it a horror novel in a subtler key even without the revelation of James' nature.

I really enjoyed this audiobook. Bahni Turpin's narration is smooth, and the story flowed slowly but inexorably. Very impressed, too, by the characterisation of the various women, each of them an individual with a background and a life. And by the fact that their success was rooted in their domestic skills, rather than anything magical or superpowered.

Warnings for violence both mundane and vampiric; for racism (and white saviour-ism); for misogyny; for (off-page) rape and sexual assault.

Think of us what you will, she thought, we made mistakes and probably scarred our children for life, and we froze sandwiches, and forgot carpool, and got divorced. But when the time came, we went the distance.

2026/048: A History of the World in Six Glasses — Tom Standage

Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce.

Standage explores the histories of six 'period-defining' drinks, from beer in the Neolithic to cola (Coca-Cola vs Pepsi) in the modern era, and explains how each beverage has shaped history.

The drinks in question are beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Cola: there's an epilogue focussing on water, contrasting the lack of safe drinking water in parts of the developing world to the modern Western fad for bottled water -- often pretty much the same stuff as comes out of the tap.

There were some really fascinating connections and remarks in this book. I learnt that the Coca-Cola Company supplies 3% of humanity's total liquid intake; that Caligula drank century-old Falernian wine; about the role of rum in the slave trade and in the European colonisation of America; about the all-male coffee houses that spawned the Stock Exchange and Lloyds of London; that tea was initially vastly more expensive than coffee, and how it sparked the Opium Wars; about anti-Coca Cola sentiment in the Communist Bloc, and how Coke came to represent America while Pepsi cornered the Soviet market. (Krushchev was a fan.) There's also a fascinating appendix on how to taste ancient drinks, from King Cnut's Ale (St Peter's Brewery) through retsina to Fentiman's Curiosity Cola.

Again, this audiobook wasn't a wholly great experience. I missed being able to highlight interesting sentences, and I found the narrator's voice rather bland. But this was an interesting book and I'd recommend it as an accessible -- albeit Western-biased -- guide to the history of popular drinks.

2026/047: The Blue, Beautiful World — Karen Lord

The entire planet was at a tipping point, ripe for salvation or destruction, angels of deliverance or barbarians. And, in the meantime, bread and circuses made life bearable and occasionally diverting. [loc. 354]

Earth is struggling with the effects of climate change. A disparate group of people -- rock star Owen, VR pioneer Peter Hendrix, Kanoa and his friends in a World Council Global Government workgroup, the mysterious Tariq -- are trying to prepare the world for first contact with various alien factions, some of whom are already present on Earth.

Listening to this novel did not work well for me: I lost track of who was who, and didn't appreciate the abrupt changes of focus (from Owen's gigs to Kanoa's studies to Peter's discussions of identity). The narrator's various accents jarred, and for much of the time I had no idea what was going on. 

This is a problem with me, rather than with the book: but I suspect it didn't help that this is actually the third in a trilogy, a fact I wasn't aware of from the book's page on Libro.fm. I didn't engage with most of the characters (though I did like Kanoa, and what little we saw of Owen's sister) and I kept wanting more detail, more background.

I'll definitely read another novel by Karen Lord, but I will read it in (e)print, rather than listen to an audiobook.

2026/046: Night Life — John Lewis-Stempel

I keep looking around the dark corridor for secret drinkers, then understand that the beeriness is the fermenting combination of all the midsummer scents, and it is old and original. A Neanderthal standing on the bank of the river, spear in hand, would have known it. [p.108]

Subtitled 'Walking Britain's Wild Landscapes After Dark', this is a short collection of pieces about Lewis-Stempel's thoughts and experiences of walking at night -- on the Welsh coast, in the Lake District, and on the Thames Path at Hammersmith (adjacent to the London Wetland Centre). He's a farmer, and in some of the essays there is a lovely sense of comfortable familiarity with his land. I realise that I miss having 'my' land, the places I'd walk every day, the places so familiar that I notice any change and every seasonal recurrence.

Lots of fascinating facts and observations here: I learnt that birds flying in a V formation can fly almost twice as far as one bird flying alone; that the word 'delirium' is rooted in the notion of going off track when ploughing; that brent geese are named for their dark colour, 'brent' being a corruption of the old Norse 'brantr', burnt.

I appreciated his unease when in London ('I'm fritted by the city at night') but could not help thinking that I would not be keen on walking alone, at night, along the darkest part of the Thames Path. (Men's fears are different from women's.) Overall, though, I really appreciated his observations and his sheer joy in existing as part of the natural world.

2026/045: The Casefile of Jay Moriarty — Kit Walker

"...since when do children’s authors incite hate crimes?”
“In this case, just within the last few years,” Jay said. “If Clay was a bigot before that, she at least kept it to herself.” [p. 139]

Collects the first five instalments of the 'Jay Moriarty and Sebastian Moran' series, in which Moriarty is a brilliant hacker (and trans man) and Moran is ex-SAS. Together, they fight crime... The setting is contemporary London: the crimes they fight range from a cover-up of lethally-faulty aviation software to -- as per quotation -- a transphobic children's author, Anya Clay, revealed to be appropriating money from her own charity.

I read the first of these novellas, which is available for free at Amazon, and promptly purchased the collection, because I like Moriarty (and his evolving relationship with Moran) so much. Fun, pacy, violent and cunning: highly enjoyable, though animal lovers may wish to skip 'Sebastian Moran Gets Mauled by a Tiger'.

2026/044: Tuesday Mooney Wore Black — Kate Racculia

Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming. [loc. 2810]

Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)

Then, one night at a charity event -- where Tuesday encounters local tycoon Nathaniel Arches, and maybe flirts a little -- a flamboyant old man named Vincent Pryce drops dead in front of Boston's finest. And somehow Tuesday, Dex, Nathaniel and Dorry wind up playing Pryce's post-mortem game ('an adventure of intellect, intuition and imagination that begins now and will culminate on the night of my funeral'), with a prize that might be a share in Pryce's vast wealth ... or an item from his collection of haunted artifacts.

This is a multi-layered novel: the puzzles of the quest itself; a murder mystery; Tuesday's growing, and reluctant, attraction to 'Archie'; ghosts, Edgar Allan Poe, Goth culture, karaoke bars and urban exploration. I loved how centred Tuesday was, and related to her liking for solitude. I liked the ways in which the protagonists each had something haunting them (not literally) and how each of them confronted their past and their future. The descriptions of Boston made me want to go back. (It's been decades.) And the supernatural (or magic realist?) elements -- Amelia Earhart's goggles! -- were a delight. Plenty of humour, and a compassionate and hopeful vibe.

I've owned this for years, and only got around to it because it fitted one of the reading challenge prompts ('day of the week in the title'): I loved the novel, and I'm so grateful for that prompt! Looking forward to reading Racculia's other novels...

... when you gender-flip Indiana Jones, you don’t come up with Lara Croft—the last thing Lara Croft is is a fallible everywoman—but instead an independent, knowledgeable, determined…spinster. Indiana Jones is a spinster: self-supporting and self-contained, unmarried and unlikely to pair with any one partner.... Indy’s singleness, however—if it’s remarkable at all—is aspirational, not pejorative. So Tuesday Mooney was also inspired by an attempt to play with that double standard, to investigate ideas about independence and partnership, family and friendship, and all the other forms of love and human connection that make a life full. [Excellent interview with the author (which also explains why the title is Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts in the US]

2026/043: Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef — Cassandra Khaw

Human is very similar to pork, after all. (I know, I know. Religious pundits say that cannibalism is forbidden in the Quran anyway. The ghouls say that this isn’t quite the same.) [loc. 61]

Despite the title, there's very little (if any) actual cannibalism in this novella. True, Rupert Wong (ex-mobster with a murky and karmically unpromising past) works as a chef for a wealthy ghoul family, serving up gourmet meals concocted from the bodies of hapless tourists: but that's only one of his jobs. He's also working off that karmic debt through community management: listening to baby ghosts who want to unionise, doing the accounts for the Hungry Ghost festivals, and -- the focus of this tale -- investigating the death of the Dragon King's daughter, slain by Furies. Yes, the Erinyes. Yes, they are Greek, but apparently there is a visa waiver scheme in place...

This is a fast-moving, vivid caper set in Kuala Lumpur and in the Ten Hells. Rupert is not a wholly sympathetic character (to put it mildly) but he has a degree of power (magical and mundane), and his role as seneschal gives him access to the most powerful players in the supernatural realm. I especially liked the God of Missing Persons. Khaw's scene-setting is packed with sensory detail, sometimes gruesome and sometimes revolting (nobody changes a corpse's underwear) and peppered with unfamiliar terms: I learnt kwee kia, bomoh, ang moh. There's plenty of dark humour and some tantalising hints about the wider supernatural world. And it's the first in a series, of which I own at least one more volume. 

2026/042: The Keeper — Tana French

Ardnakelty has no time for Guards. The townland will run its own investigation, spreading unseen beneath the official enquiry like ancient trailways underlie the brash modern roads; it'll reach its own conclusions, and deal out its own justice. [loc. 1069]

Third in the trilogy that began with The Searcher and continued with The Hunter. Cal Hooper's life in the small village of Ardnakelty seems settled: he's more or less engaged to Lena, and Trey is finding friends and possibly even romance. Then a young woman -- Rachel, fiancee of local big-shot Tommy Moynihan's son Eugene -- is found dead in the river. Obviously suicide, is the consensus: but there's some doubt, because the coroner's report indicates that she drank antifreeze. And Lena may have been the last person to see Rachel alive...

The dark underside of Ardnakelty reveals itself, with its 'strange intricate weavings invisible or meaningless to any outsider', the 'webs that bind people to one another, to their land, and to their past'. There are old stories here: about the ownership and inheritance of land, about the power of rumour, about dirty deals and corruption, about loyalties, memories, and fiercely-held beliefs. Cal, Lena and Trey, all outsiders in some sense, find ways of belonging (and ways in which they can never belong) to Ardnakelty. 'This place is fucking lethal,' says Trey, who may have a chance to leave.

I still don't find this series as fascinating as the Dublin Murder Squad novels, with their hints of the supernatural and their close focus on a single character: but I am impressed by French's gift of dialogue -- the rhythm of it, the idioms and the Irish -- and by her ability to make the village as much a character as Mrs Duggan, or Mart, or Bobby who used to hunt UFOs but now has a girlfriend. And her writing has immense emotional weight. Sometimes I had to pause and reread a paragraph to appreciate the nuance and the layers.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 2nd April 2026.

Rumour is one of Ardnakelty's primary weapons, the glinting flipside of its dark silences. [loc. 3618]

2026/041: Temeraire — Naomi Novik

You may value their lives above your own; I cannot do so, for to me you are worth far more than all of them. I will not obey you in such a case, and as for duty, I do not care for the notion a great deal, the more I see of it. [p. 196]

Audiobook reread: I first read this as an arc in 2005, and reread in 2019. I still love this book a great deal, and had a better sense of the pacing when I listened to the familiar procession of events. Splendidly read by Simon Vance, who gives Temeraire a very slight 'foreign' accent, perhaps hinting at his mysterious origins. I'm so tempted to buy the audiobooks of the whole series...

2026/040: Enshittification — Cory Doctorow

Compared with the climate emergency, genocide, inequality, corruption, democratic backsliding, authoritarianism and sustained racist, homophobic, misogynist and transphobic attacks, the internet is just a sideshow. But the internet ...is the communications medium we will use to organise to save our species and planet from their imminent eradication. We can’t win these fights without a free, fair and open internet. [introduction]

Audiobook, read (with vigour and enthusiasm) by the author. Doctorow's foundational argument is something most internet users will agree with: that big internet sites, such as Facebook, Amazon, and the-site-formerly-known-as-Twitter, have become much less usable and user-friendly over recent years. (I would add Del.icio.us, Vinted, Goodreads, LiveJournal...)

Doctorow tracks the process of 'enshittificaton' through case studies of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and Apple. He describes it as a process in three stages. First, the platform is good to its users; then it's good to its business partners; and finally it's good to the company itself, clawing back all profits. Some really eye-opening examples, clarifying the trend towards charging for 'premium' features that used to be standard.

Back in the days of the 'good internet', there were various factors reining in the bad behaviour of big companies: competition, regulation, self-help (a.k.a. the right to repair, or at least fix issues, and to use non-approved components), and the ethical stance of the workforce. All broken now -- Doctorow mentions at one point that this book was still being written when Trump's second term began, tolling the requiem bell for regulation and anti-trust. I wish he had come up with better solutions than 'unionisation, activism, opt out'. Oh, and stop using Amazon. (Readers may note my recent book links now point elsewhere.)

Sometimes repetitive, often very funny, a horrible catalogue of appalling behaviour on the part of big business. I'm appalled, but (mostly) not surprised, though the cradle company that charges a monthly 'subscription' for formerly-standard features was a new low.

2026/039: Piper at the Gates of Dusk — Patrick Ness

The god comes screaming through the trees, shoving them to each side like matchsticks, breaking and burning them as it thrashes its way out of the woods... [opening paragraph]

In the original Chaos Walking trilogy (The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer and Monsters of Men) Todd was thirteen, dealing with life on an alien planet and the constant phenomenon of Noise -- the constant thoughts and feelings of the men (all the women are dead) in the colony -- and the threat of the alien Spackle. Piper at the Gates of Dusk starts a generation later, and focuses on Max and Ben, the two sons raised by Viola and Todd. Their world is very different to that in the first trilogy: Noise has been 'cured', the Spackle are now known as 'the Land' (except by rude racists), the colony is thriving. But then a burning god comes out of the woods, and the children of the colony start having nightmares, and there's something in the sky which might be an alien spaceship.

Ness explores gender with considerably more nuance than before: there's a trans character, and a range of reactions to that character from 'are you sure? is it just a phase?' to all-out transphobia with a religious flavour. There's also more about the natives, the Land: and, this being Ness who does not pull his punches, there are some truly harrowing scenes. Ness riffs on the legend of the Pied Piper -- who stole all the children save one from Hamelin, leaving one boy behind -- and the ways in which stories shape, and are shaped by, the societies in which they evolve.

I really liked Ben and Max, and wanted to howl at the cliffhanger ending. The political elements (a mayor elected by dubious means, who lies and scapegoats and distracts people from the truth) were a little too relevant to be comfortable. And grown-up Todd and Viola are flawed and human, but devoted to their family. I'm very much looking forward to the next in this new trilogy.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 7th April 2026.

2026/038: Broken April — Ismail Kadare (translator: John Hodgson)

The guest, the bessa, and vengeance are like the machinery of classical tragedy, and once you are caught up in the mechanism, you must face the possibility of tragedy. [Chapter 3]

A tragedy set in Albania. Gjorg Berisha is compelled by the Kanun, the ancient laws of the mountain country, to kill the man who killed his brother. The murder cements his own fate: he'll be killed in turn by one of the men of the Kryeqyqe family, in thirty days' time. (Women are generally excluded from the messy cycle of vengeance.) The feud which Gjorg is part of has been running for seventy years, since a guest -- sacrosant according to the Kanun -- was murdered. Since that murder, hundreds more men have been killed. It's unclear whether there's even a possibility of the feud ending before every adult male in both families has paid the blood-debt.

There's a dark, timeless air to the first chapter, so much so that I was shocked when Gjorg paused to watch an aeroplane fly over! Soon, though, the focus switches to more modern-minded characters: the writer Bessian Vorpsi and his bride Diana, spending their honeymoon in the mountains. Bessian spends hours explaining the Kanun and the blood feud ('at once terrible, absurd, and fatal, like all the really important things') to Diana, who is horrified. She glimpses Gjorg, on his way to pay the blood-tax, and becomes fascinated by him and his fate. Gjorg, too, is enchanted by this beautiful 'foreign' woman from the lowlands, and spends much of his remaining life-span searching the country for another glimpse of her. And Diana breaks custom and does an unspeakable thing in search of Gjorg.

Kadare recounts the story simply and powerfully, without any authorial discussion of the morality of the characters' actions. Bessian and Diana provide a twentieth-century perspective, but Bessian's at pains to insist that this is a legal code that probably predates Christianity. And he does provide an overview of the Kanun's political, agricultural, social and cultural effects. The long history and the persistence of the Kanun is fascinating -- though I was perturbed to learn that blood feuds have become common again since the end of communism. (An Albanian Boy's Life Ruined by Blood Feuds [2014].)

This was a compelling read, though not a cheerful one. I pitied Gjorg but did not especially warm to him. And the sense of each individual's helplessness in the face of tradition, Kanun and honour was deeply depressing.

Each man chose between corn and vengeance. Some, to their shame, chose corn... [chapter 4]

2026/037: Star Shipped — Cat Sebastian

Simon’s been trying to keep things friendly, neutral, light, to act like they didn’t spend two days presenting one another with secrets like outdoor cats gently placing mangled rodents at one another’s feet. [p. 205]

Simon Devereaux is thirty-four, prone to migraines and anxiety attacks, and for seven years one of the two stars of Out There, a sci-fi show described as 'Twin Peaks in space, leaning hard into the camp'. Simon's antisocial tendencies are acknowledged and accepted by the rest of the cast, and he has a comfortable enmity going with his co-star Charlie Blake, who's improbably good-looking and highly gregarious. Now Simon's thinking of leaving the show. Things hit crisis point when his ex, Jamie, moves back into his house and disrupts all of Simon's careful rituals. An opportunity for escape is provided by Charlie, who's worried about his step-dad and invites Simon to accompany him on a road trip to Arizona.

This is a delightful warm bath of a book, a slow-burn romance between two charismatic and likeable characters. Along the way, Simon -- the viewpoint character throughout -- learns to accept his mental health issues and his migraines as a form of disability (and his dachshund Edie as an emotional support animal); reassesses his relationships with co-workers, family and Charlie himself; and develops a taste for romantasy novels with dragons in them. (His favourite book as a kid was Patricia Wrede's Dealing with Dragons.) And sniping at Charlie, of course.

Star Shipped is also a love letter to fandom, from the dedication ("For the people who write the world’s most gorgeous stories about television shows I might have seen one episode of twenty years ago. You’re lifesavers.") to Simon's own background as a fanfic author (LOTR, Sherlock), and his pleasure that fans write fic about his character, and about him. There are snapshots of exchanges on an Out There fandom Discord, where the fans enthuse about public evidence of Simon and Charlie's relationship, and these are affectionate and spot-on, with a sense of the real people behind the pseuds.

I loved this: it was exactly what I needed, cheerful and funny and never demeaning or mocking Simon's mental health issues. And I loved the fandom-friendly energy, and the references to sci-fi tropes such as 'the body-swap episode', the hiding behind ruined alien temples, the interstellar bounty hunters... This felt like reading really good fanfic!

I also decided that it works for the 'a character who does Pilates' challenge prompt (at least unless something more apt comes along), solely on the basis of Simon's complaint that  'Sometimes Jamie makes me do Pilates'.

2026/036: A Great Reckoning — Louise Penny

“Not every mystery is a crime,” said the Commander. “But every crime starts as a mystery." [p. 76]

Gamache has come out of retirement to take the role of Commander at the Sûreté Academy, which has lately been turning out new police officers who are aggressive, brutal and not up to Gamache's standards. He has to root out the source of the corruption, which -- in typical Gamache style -- he does by keeping on some known troublemakers on the staff, and recruiting his old friend-turned-nemesis Michel Brébeuf as another teacher. Of course everything goes swimmingly, until one member of staff is murdered.

The focus shifts to a group of four young cadets, who have been previously tasked to work together on solving the mystery of a century-old map found in the wall of the Three Pines bistro. The map shows Three Pines, but also includes a snowman and a pyramid: and it also appears on a stained-glass window at the chapel, tucked into the rucksack of a young soldier heading off to fight in the Great War. Curiously, one of the cadets has lost her copy of the map ... which turned up in the murder victim's room. And the cadet sans map is Amanda, to whom Gamache seems to have some mysterious connection...

I mostly read these for the characters, and the vignettes of life in Three Pines, and Gamache's essential goodness and gnomic utterances (not to mention his habit of concealing his plans until they come to fruition). There were some lovely scenes in this novel, and some excellent clues, including a reference to a scene in The Deer Hunter. A pleasing, calming, engrossing read that felt like a brief holiday from reality.

2026/035: Cuckoo Song — Frances Hardinge

Trying to cling to the past, to the way things were, pretending nothing has changed. Everything changes and breaks and stops fitting – and we know that, even with our stopped clock. The world is breaking, and changing, and dancing. Always on the move. That’s how it is. That’s how it has to be. [p. 409]

Reread for book club: first read in 2014. I remembered very little except Triss' true nature and the scissors. That said, I find that my Kindle highlights match quotes from that earlier review... And I'm not sure I have much more to say about it, other than that this time around I really sympathised with Violet, who carries the winter with her, and who is definitely kicking against society's decrees about what nice girls do.

The parents' behaviour towards their remaining children -- who they only want to keep safe -- is borderline abusive. Pen is the scapegoat, Triss is the delicate flower, and nobody must ever mention Sebastian or talk about any of the problems within the family. (Sebastian's fate is cruel: I wish we'd had more of his letters. )

Hardinge's prose is deliciously visual, vivid and arresting: a cry 'sounded the way a scar looks'; 'so dark that she seemed to hear the hiss as it sucked light out of the air'; and, when they're pursued, the pursuers are 'cold on their heels'. 

We spent quite a while wondering where Ellchester was. I thought it had a northern feel but the consensus, eventually, was that it might be Bristol-adjacent.

2026/034: The Invention of Essex — Tim Burrows

I started to recognise an intrinsic feeling of accentuation when it came to Essex, between sparseness and density, bucolic abandonment and oncoming modernity, realism and poetry, country and city, rich and poor – buzzing dichotomies that meant that, as hard as I tried to pin Essex’s story down, it always somehow slipped away. [loc. 1151]

Burrows was born in Essex^*, and moved back there from London when he and his wife started a family. He has real affection for the county, but a solid grasp of its socioeconomics, and of the TOWIE-fuelled perception of Essex as 'a land of crass consumerism, populated by perma-tanned chancers and loose women with more front than Clacton-on-Sea'. 

Essex has long been viewed as a classless, uncultured wilderness -- apart, of course, from 'Constable Country', which Burrows describes as 'a shambling pastoral scene assiduously cultivated since the days of [the painter] Constable', and which attracts the kind of tourists who would flinch at the raucous glories of Southend seafront. Dismissed as 'the rubbish dump of London', Essex is the site of multiple, often toxic landfill sites where the majority of London's actual rubbish ended up. It's also where working-class Londoners moved in the hope of a better quality of life. And Essex has long been a hotbed of dissent, individualism (utopians, occultists, political and religious extremists), experiments in new ways of living (from communes to worker-oriented 'new towns) and, of course, crime.

Burrows often writes for the Guardian, and his piece on the Broomway and the stranded Amazon van prompted me to buy this long-wishlisted book. I learnt about plotlands, which I'd somehow been unaware of despite growing up with people who lived in them! And about the ecological impact of the London Gateway megaport, dredging for which has destroyed much of the local fishing industry. Burrows is also good at putting stereotypes such as 'Essex Man' and 'Essex Girl' into context, and he's quietly scathing about the superficial glamour, and the underlying classism and misogyny that informs those stereotypes.

Some weird hyphenation throughout -- Basil-don, South-end, Med-way -- but otherwise immensely readable, informative and well-researched.

^*I was also born in Essex, but nearer the edge of the map: Burrows barely mentions the area where I grew up, though it's less than ten miles from his current home in Southchurch.

2026/033: Mercutio — Kate Heartfield

Mercutio has never been in love. Not unless you count a boy whose face he can barely remember. Not unless you count the world. [loc. 2328]

Mercutio Guertio (yes, that Mercutio) meets Dante Alighieri at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289: they are caught in a freak storm -- where they glimpse spectral armies, and becomes certain that there is a third man with them -- but stumble back to the carnage of the battlefield, and subsequently become friends. Mercurio, though, has been changed: he sees people who are not there, and does not recognise the stars in the night sky. Then Dante, grieving the death of 'his' Beatrice, is pulled into Faerie, where he wanders in a dark wood...

Mercutio does not know the way to Faerie, but he's encountered their Queen, and she tells him that he can rescue Dante if he can find a doorway. Brunetto Latini, Dante's friend and teacher, suggests that Mercutio joins the expedition of the Vivaldi brothers, who want to find a route to Asia by sailing west from Spain. Surely Faerie is on the other side of the world, and thus can be found on the way to Asia?

En route, Mercutio encounters a female pope, sailors from China and Africa, a helpful friar who supplies a medicine made of henbane, and a hermit who claims to be the son of Abelard and Heloise. He's haunted by a silent, mysterious man who people seem to think is his brother: and he's differently haunted by memories of his lost love, a boy who he called Blackbird after mishearing the other's name as 'I fly'.

This is a splendid novel, packed with cosmology, Italian history (Guelphs and Ghibellines), Tarot imagery, and perfidious fae. The fantastical elements blend folk tales, ballads and mythology: to me, Heartfield's Faerie had a distinctly medieval feel, reminiscent of Chaucer and Boccaccio. The novel also provides an origin story for Dante's Divine Comedy: and, of course, Mercutio has to get to Verona and encounter the warring Montecchi and Cappalletti factions... 

But at its heart, Mercutio is the story of the friendship between Mercutio and Dante, and the implacable vengeance of the Faerie Queen. Mercutio is vividly rendered, with a blend of self-doubt, cynicism and joie de vivre that seems fitting for the changes he witnesses in the world around him. I liked him a great deal: and I'll look out for Heartfield's other novels, because her prose is readable and this story full of surprises.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 7th May 2026.

2026/032: Maria — Michelle Moran

Dear Mr Hammerstein,
It may come as a surprise that I am writing to you, as it appears that the theater industry believes I am dead and can now make up whatever they wish about me... [opening line]

I read this for the prompt 'based on the top-grossing movie in the year of your birth'. Set in 1959, it's a novel about Maria von Trapp and her response to the forthcomming stage musical of 'The Sound of Music': her letter informs Hammerstein that she has 'several ideas about how the script can be fixed'. Hammerstein -- already ill with the stomach cancer that would kill him within a year -- is too busy (and possibly too nervous) to talk to her, so instead his secretary Fran has a series of conversations with Maria.

Moran has thoroughly researched Maria von Trapp's life, and especially her religious faith. Maria tells Fran about her unhappy childhood, her religious calling, her time with Georg von Trapp (not a martinet: apparently Maria was the stricter of the two) and the family's life in America after escaping (not over the mountains but on a train) from the Third Reich. Maria is at pains to right the record: meanwhile, Fran is wrestling with a romantic entanglement of her own. Can Maria's account of true love with Georg set her on the right path?

This was a quick and pleasant read, though I didn't really connect with either Fran or Maria. There were some interesting scenes of pre-war Austrian life, and I found the later story -- refugees in America, literally singing for their supper, with one of the children experiencing severe stage fright -- more interesting than the main narrative. It would probably have helped if I was a fan of (or even very familiar with) the film and the musical! Moran is a very readable writer, though, and the story was well-paced and compassionate.

2026/031: Frankenstein in Baghdad — Ahmed Saadawi (translated by Jonathan Wright)

‘I made it complete so it wouldn’t be treated as rubbish, so it would be respected like other dead people and given a proper burial.’ [p. 27]

Baghdad, 2005: after the American invasion and occupation, just as the sectarian civil war is kicking off. Antique (junk) dealer Hadi, trying to retrieve a friend's remains after a car bomb, finds that body parts at the mortuary are all jumbled together, with little effort to reconstruct each corpse. He begins to assemble a body, picking and choosing from the scraps of anatomy that are in plentiful supply on the streets of Baghdad. But it's only when a hotel guard is killed by a car bomb, and his spirit is wandering in search of a body to reunite with, that the creature -- the Whatsitsname, says Hadi -- becomes animate. And the Whatsitsname is keen on justice: he wants to avenge the owners of each of his constituent parts. This endeavour is somewhat complicated by the fact that those parts will rot and fall off if he doesn't complete his vengeance within a certain, undefined period of time.

Add to this Hadi's neighbour Elishva, who's convinced that St George has promised the return of her son Daniel (lost in the Iran-Iraq war) and who believes the Whatsisname is Daniel, somewhat changed by his experiences; ambitious young journalist Mahmoud, who hears Hadi's story, writes it up as 'Urban Legends from the Streets of Iraq' and isn't happy when his boss retitles it 'Frankenstein in Baghdad'; and Co lonel Brigadier Majid, head of the Tracking and Pursuit Department, is wondering why his squad of fortune-tellers, astrologers and magicians can't predict where the Whatsitsname will strike next. (I did like this conceit: "... the Americans, besides their arsenal of advanced military hardware, possessed a formidable army of djinn, which was able to destroy the djinn that this magician and his assistants had mobilized." [p. 144]

As in Shelley's original, the creature is the most eloquent of the narrators. (Interestingly, most of the people who recognise the story as Frankenstein are remembering the Robert de Niro film.) When the Whatsitsname records his account of his actions, we begin to understand that there are many shades of criminality and innocence in both his victims and those he's avenging. He hopes for an end to the killing, so that he can rest. 'I’m the only justice there is in this country,' he laments.

This is a rambling novel, often blackly comic, sometimes phantasmagorical: a commentary on the continuing conflict, a satire on the American 'intelligence' that fails to predict or prevent 'serious security incidents'. The Whatsitsname's story is as poignant as Shelley's original, and his sense of a balance to be restored, of vengeance to be wrought, gives him more purpose than most of the other characters.

Sometimes gory, often featuring grim scenes of bombs and executions, Frankenstein in Baghdad was an unexpectedly enjoyable read. Perhaps there were slightly too many viewpoint characters: perhaps the ending is overly open. But it's a window opening on a culture, a society and a city that is constantly in the news: and it made me think.

2026/030: White Eagles / Firebird — Elizabeth Wein

I was born in a nation at war. I grew up in the shadow of war. And, like everyone else my own age, I had been waiting all my life for "the future war". [Firebird]

Two short novels written for less-confident readers, featuring young female pilots in the Second World War: I listened to the audiobook, read clearly and evocatively by Rachael Beresford.

In White Eagles, 18-year old Kristina Tomiak is called up to join the Polish air force -- the White Eagles. Her twin brother Leopold is envious that his call-up papers haven't arrived. A damaged plane lands at the airfield, reporting an encounter with the Luftwaffe: the pilot is injured, the passenger is dead. Kristina needs to get precious information to Lvov -- and it's the end of August, 1939.

The rest of the story deals with Kristina's escape from the Nazis and flight across Europe, accompanied only an unexpected stowaway who's determined to get to England. It's an exciting and inspiring tale, told in the third person, with lots of grounding details (a pilot charging across a bed of marigolds to get to his plane; a friendly mechanic who's happy to be paid in Hannukah chocolate and apples) and all the peril, violence and terror that goes with the territory.  I enjoyed this, but loved Firebird more.

Firebird, set in 1941-42, begins with young fighter pilot Nastia (short for Anastasia: 'Naystia', not 'Nastier') defending herself to a tribunal: 'I am no traitor'. She's a loyal citizen of the Soviet Union, a true revolutionary: her father was involved in the execution of the Romanovs, and her mother was a spy. Now, as the Second World War descends on Russia, she must fight to defend the glorious Motherland. But all is not as it seems and when the battles begin, secrets are revealed and everything that Nastia once knew is challenged.

Despite having more flight experience than anyone else in her cohort, she's relegated to training pilots while the lads go off to the front line. But the Chief -- the only other woman instructor at the Leningrad Youth Aero Club, 'an abrasive, loud woman with bleached blonde hair... and a face that was always heavy with powder and lipstick' -- points out that new pilots must be trained. When they finally go to war, it's the Chief who inspires Nastia, and the Chief who Nastia follows in a desperate air battle. And when the Chief parachutes from her damaged plane, Nastia makes the decision that brings her in front of that tribunal.

The twist in this story delighted me: I've just listened to the final few chapters again. It's cleverly foreshadowed and thoroughly pleasing (and, as Wein acknowledges in her afterword, historically implausible). Nastia's first-person narrative, coloured with all the emotions of wartime, felt really immediate and compelling.

There's a third book in the 'War Birds' series, The Last Hawk, which I hope to be able to read soon. Though the novellas in this series were written for younger, less confident readers, Wein pulls no punches: there is brutality, assault and peril. And, alongside those, there is a strong sense of hope, pride and joy.

2026/029: Bread of Angels — Patti Smith

How can we leap back up? Get back on our feet, grab a cart, and start gathering the debris, both physical and emotional. Crush it into small stones, then pulverize them and as the dust settles, dance upon it. How do we do that? By returning to our child self, weathering our obstacles in good faith. For children operate in the perpetual present, they go on, rebuild their castles, lay down their casts and crutches, and walk again. [loc. 2494]

Another memoir from Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train (the latter of which I have not read). Bread of Angels (the title refers to 'unpremeditated gestures of kindness') covers Smith's childhood, her years as a pioneering punk artist, and her 'walking away' from success to have a real life, marrying Fred 'Sonic' Smith and having children. That period is mostly elided: 'Our life was obscure, perhaps not so interesting to some, but for us it was a whole life' and later, 'The trials and challenges that Fred and I suffered were our own'. 

Then came a catastrophic period when she lost several of the men close to her -- Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Sohl, Fred, and her own brother Todd. This sparked her return to music, and recording, after an absence of 15 years. Further touring, and another series of deaths, revelations and reunions: and travel, and touring. I saw her on the tour commemmorating the 50th anniversary of Horses ('bred in an innocent time and we did our best to now deliver it infused with experience') and she was marvellous -- exactly as I'd expected.

There are many, often abrupt, shifts of tone and language in Bread of Angels: from simple accounts of her childhood and family life to exuberant evocations of performance ('my whining Fender Duo-Sonic drew altruistic swords with the mournful wailings of Lenny’s Stratocaster, Richard Sohl introduced an unexpected melodic shift creating the melancholic beauty of Abyssinia'). Sometimes you can hear the voice of the woman who wrote the lyrics to 'Horses': sometimes she's talking about the boat in their back yard (I can sympathise!) or the beauties of the natural world, the 'many tongues of nature... the language of trees, and the clay of the Earth'.

A fascinating read: I'm now more inclined to read M Train, which apparently focusses more on her life with, and grief for, Fred.

2026/028: The Kite Runner — Khalid Hosseini

"There is only one sin, and that is theft... When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.”

This novel, by an expatriate Afghani author, explores guilt, betrayal and redemption in Afghanistan. The narrator is Amir, son of a wealthy Pashtan father ('Baba'), whose mother died giving birth to him. His closest friend is Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant Ali: his mother ran away when he was little. The Hazara (the ethnic group to which Hassan and Ali belong) are oppressed, discriminated against and mocked. Baba, to young Amir's horror, treats Hassan as well as he treats Amir himself. The boys enjoy the traditional Afghan sport of kite-fighting, and Hassan is Amir's 'kite runner', pursuing the conquered kites with preternatural accuracy.

Amir's greatest kite-fighting triumph -- when Baba will finally be proud of him -- is overshadowed by Hassan being attacked and raped by a local bully, Assef. Amir witnesses the attack but is too scared to intervene. He's unable to reconcile his guilt and their friendship, and becomes cold and cruel towards Hassan. Eventually he fakes a theft and forces his father to dismiss Ali and Hassan.

Five years later comes the Soviet invasion: Baba and Amir escape, ending up in California. And fifteen years after that, Amir -- now married, though childless, and still racked with guilt -- receives a letter from a family friend, asking him to come back to Afghanistan: 'There is a way to be good again'.

This was a fascinating insight into Afghani life, and a harrowing story. (I listened to the audiobook, very well read by the author: I think I might have stopped reading if I'd had a print/Kindle copy.) Hassan's unrequited loyalty was pitiable: Amir's cowardice -- which extends into his adult life, in some respects -- was contemptible: I sympathised with both. At the heart of it, for me, was Amir's relationship with his father, and his fragile sense of superiority when it came to Hassan. Amir is shattered when he realises that his father, who's always insisted that theft is the worst crime and that a lie is theft of the truth, turns out not to have been wholly honest with him.

The final third of the novel, set in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, is horrific. Power corrupts, and bullies don't change... There is a happy ending of sorts, but that doesn't stop The Kite Runner being tragic, distressing and harrowing. It's also an excellent insight into life as a refugee in America, though sadly things seem to have been easier for immigrants in the 1980s than they are now.

One drawback of audiobooks is that I can't keep a record of the bits I really liked. But there were some excellent descriptions of daily life and of landscape, and the various journeys out of and back to Kabul were rivetting.

2026/027: Nonesuch — Francis Spufford

...here they still were, since they were not the dead ones, under the weary yellow lighting, sharing the unspoken knowledge that, every night the bombers came, ten thousand possible exits from life opened silently, and unpredictably, and without appeal, down which anyone and anything could fall. [loc. 4817]

My initial review: rereading for this 'proper review' was sheer delight, and I am eager to read the second half of this duology.

The story begins in August 1939. Iris Hawkins lives in a Clapham boarding house, works at a City brokerage, and is fascinated by economics. One evening, she flees a disastrous date and ends up at a bohemian dance club, where she encounters the other two protagonists: Geoff Hale, a gawky engineer who works for the BBC, and Lall Cunningham, the icy recipient of Geoff's unrequited love. Iris intends her seduction of Geoff to be a one night stand, but things become more complicated when she's pursued by a monstrous, inhuman creature which turns out to have something to do with Hale Senior's role as archivist of an occult society.

Spufford's depiction of London in the first year of the Second World War is tremendously evocative, often cinematic. The beauty of silently-falling incendiaries contrasts with the squalor of piss-reeking shelters: the ironwork of Leadenhall Market (still a working market back then, stinking of blood) with the soda-water effervescence of a liberated spirit. Did I mention that this novel has strong elements of the fantastical? There are Biblically-accurate angels in the architecture, and indications that history has been changed in the past -- and could be changed again.

I loved Iris, who is competent, intelligent and sensual. Her interest in economics made it interesting to me -- even the fluctuations of the Stock Exchange index, reflecting events in the wider world, felt integral to the story. (I think Spufford's said that she was partly influenced by C S Lewis' Susan: Iris demonstrates that you can like stockings and lipsticks and boyfriends, and still be clever and resourceful.) But I also found myself warming to Lall, despite her fascist allegiance. She too is smart and quick-thinking: she too is brave and determined. Though she's technically the villain of the piece, I kept cheering for her -- for instance, when she's confronting a pair of elderly perverts in pursuit of initiation into an esoteric order. (Also, she saves the cat.) Geoff, seen through Iris' eyes and her growing appreciation, is also intriguing: I'd have liked more of his viewpoint, and his engineering work for the war effort.

But the focus is always on Iris. This is a distinctly female-oriented, and feminist, novel. I was impressed by Spufford's sex scenes, written from Iris' perspective, and the ever-present practicalities of contraception. And I also enjoyed the ways in which Iris, denied agency by the double standards of the time, claims that agency by demonstrating her intelligence, courage and wit.

There's a lot more I could write about here: economics, and John Maynard Keynes, and the homoerotic murals in artist Eleanor's Sussex farmhouse; fascism ('practical patriotism') on the streets of Chelsea; the precarious calm and magic of Midnight Mass in 1940; the demographics of the clientele of a brokerage firm that's partly Jewish-owned. But instead I urge you to read this novel, because despite the setting and the stakes it is brimful of joy.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 24th February 2026.

2026/026: Cleopatra — Saara el-Arifi

"They'll tell stories of you in years to come," Charmion continued.
Centuries. Millennia.
"I hope so."
I did not understand what it was I wished for. I hoped to become a legend, but I forgot what all stories must have: a monster.
I could not have known that monster would be me. [loc. 452]

Cleopatra narrates her own story from a perspective that remains obscure until the end of the novel. The novel begins with the death of Cleopatra's father Ptolemy XII and her own ascent to the throne of Egypt as the last Pharaoh: and it ends, of course, with her death.

Cleopatra, in this account, is a clever, learned woman, sometimes ruthless but also driven by love -- and not only romantic love, but also love for her children, her country, and even her siblings. The Egypt in which Cleopatra lives and rules is a magical land: the Ptolemies have been gifted by the gods, each having a birthmark and a magical talent bestowed by their patron deity. Cleopatra's patron is Isis, but she hasn't manifested any gift. In order to be accepted as a divinely-sanctioned ruler, she studies healing in secret.

El-Arifi's prose is sweeping and emotional, filling in the gaps in the historical accounts of Cleopatra's life. Cleopatra herself is aware of these accounts, and comments wryly that 'history is a disease, masquerading as truth'. Even in her lifetime she encounters prejudice based on the stories told by Romans and dissidents: she reminds Anthony that 'you must always know the story of the storyteller'. 

Throughout the novel, Cleopatra speaks directly to the reader, commenting on her lack of foresight or her growing ruthlessness. Her siblings have plotted against her, and her lovers haved wives to return to. There is war, famine, and civil unrest. The breaking of the 'fourth wall' is at first intrusive, but becomes easier to accept as the story progresses -- though its rationale isn't clear until the devastating finale.

I didn't find it easy to warm to Cleopatra, though her love for her children (and to a lesser extent her lovers, Caesar, Marcus Antonius, and Charmion) made her more likeable. I also found the pacing uneven: major events in the final third of the novel were skimmed over, while Cleopatra's disguised adventures among commoners became repetitive. There were also some vexing typos: 'familial' rather than 'familiar', coins 'exchanging' hands rather than 'changing' hands. And when Cleopatra and Anthony admire some flowers, they're apparently looking at bougainvillea -- an anachronism, as it's native to south America.

Overall, though, this was an interesting and engaging novel. I liked the touches of magic realism, and the mundane trickeries that helped Cleopatra convince her people that she and her children were blessed by the gods. I also liked the emphasis on Cleopatra's intelligence and her taste for learning: 'the Library of Alexandria was my haven'. And that ending!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 26th February 2026.

2026/025: The Dispossessed — Ursula Le Guin

... all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal. [p. 130]

Technically a reread, but when I read this at the age of 14 or 15,  I didn't really understand it: I recalled very little of characters, themes or incidents.

The brilliant physicist Shevek comes to realise that the collectivist society of Annares, a moon colonised by an anarchist movement, is not conducive to his work. He travels to the 'home world', Urras, which is ebulliently capitalist. Eventually he realises that Urras, too, stifles his scientific creativity.

That's a brief and reductive summary of a complex novel, in which two separate timelines -- the years before Shevek's departure for Urras, and his time on Urras itself -- are twisted together, in alternating chapters, to show how neither cold, bleak Annares or lush, corrupt Urras nurture those who dwell there.

To me, the setting had a Cold War flavour: there's even a Wall between Annares and (access to) Urras. It borders the spaceport: does it keep the Annaresti in, or the Urrasti out? Annares' collectivism, and the relative lack of sexism, reminded me of Soviet Russia, as seen through the lens of Spufford's Red Plenty and Pulley's The Half Life of Valery K. Anarchists and revolutionaries on Urras dream of being reincarnated on Annares: 'a society without government, without police, without economic exploitation': there's little sense of the reverse being true, despite the kinder physical environment of Urras. And Annares society doesn't always adhere to its lofty ideals: academic infighting is part of the reason why Shevek has to leave.

This was written in 1974, and in some ways shows its age. The term 'Terran' feels dated, a golden-age word for Earthlings. And there's one scene, in which Shevek sexually assaults a manipulative socialite, that really jars my modern sensibilities. Nothing happens as a consequence: we never see the woman again: Shevek apparently forgets the incident. I wonder if Le Guin would have written that scene differently now?

Still not sure I fully appreciate the political elements, but I'm fascinated by the ways in which Odo's Revolution colours Annaresti life: in language, in custom, in the ways it's acceptable to speak. (No 'egoising', even for children. No private ownership: 'the handkerchief that I use' rather than 'my handkerchief'.) And how it has shaped Shevek, a man who will not compete for dominance and is thus indomitable [p. 116].

On Anarres he had chosen, in defiance of the expectations of his society, to do the work he was individually called to do. To do it was to rebel: to risk the self for the sake of society. Here on Urras, that act of rebellion was a luxury, a self-indulgence. [p. 271]

2026/024: Wolf Worm — T Kingfisher

Some thoughts burrow into your mind as thoroughly as a wasp larva burrows into an unsuspecting caterpillar. [loc. 3387]

Set in North Carolina in 1899, this novel taught me more than I ever wanted to know about various parasitic insects. The narrator, Sonia Wilson, is a scientific illustrator who's accepted a position with the reclusive Dr Halder, who lives in an isolated, decaying house in the woods. En route, Sonia's local guide warns darkly that he's seen the Devil in these woods, but Sonia has been raised by a scientist and discounts this as mere superstition. 

She's not wholly charmed by her new employer, who won't tell her about the artist who painted half of his collection but wants her to finish the job. Sally, the maid, has a nice line in lurid tales of blood thieves, and local Native midwife Hezekiah Kersey says darkly that the land is 'alive and all of a piece'. But despite the Gothic ambience and Dr Halder's paranoia ('Are you spying on me, girl?') Sonia is determined to work hard, painting botfly larvae and certainly not following her employer as he sneaks out to the woods at night.

Sonia is an excellent protagonist. The author's afterword mentions that she was formerly a scientific illustrator, and that depth of knowledge shows in the descriptions of Sonia's work: how to blend watercolours, depict an insect's eye, and use a patented caterpillar inflator. I won't go into the specifics of the creeping horror pervading this novel, because I don't want to think too closely about that. But I will say that it's extremely effective, refreshingly unusual and thoroughly revolting. Ah, nature in her manifold glories!

Kingfisher's prose is smooth and readable, and often very funny: her imagination is ... unsettling, and her characters odd and interesting. I really enjoyed Wolf Worm, while simultaneously wanting to stop reading because ewww. Happy endings for many, though!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 26th March 2026.

2026/023: Universality — Natasha Brown

What allowed some people to ‘make it’ while others faded away, as Hannah herself almost had? She knew it wasn’t a matter of hard work; she couldn’t have tried any harder than she did those last few years. Luck was a possible answer, but it seemed too callously random. Increasingly, Hannah felt another, truer word burning in her throat: class. The invisible privilege that everyone tried to pretend didn’t exist, but – it did. Hannah knew it did. She recognised it, and saw its grubby stains all over her own life. [p. 63]

A short novel about class, truth and culture wars. It begins with a 'long read', journalist Hannah's account of a lockdown-busting rave on a farm at the height of the Covid pandemic, and the drug-fuelled attack in which a radical anarchist is bludgeoned by a young man named Jake, wielding a gold bar. Except, of course, it's not quite as simple as that. Hannah's article takes considerable liberties with the truth, ruins the reputation of the farm's owner -- wealthy banker Richard Spencer -- and attracts the attention of anti-woke columnist Lenny, who is Jake's mother.

This short novel unravels and recolours the events described in Hannah's article, and shows us Hannah, Richard, Lenny and Jake in their natural habitats. (Also Pegasus, the victim of the attack.) Unfortunately, I didn't find any of them likeable, and though I appreciated Brown's satirical take on late-stage capitalism and cancel culture, I didn't find this an enjoyable read. Structurally interesting: mercifully short.