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]