2026/137: Dinner with King Tut — Sam Kean

... artifacts sitting on a shelf, behind glass, can take us only so far into the minds of other people. To reach them on that deeper level, we need to inhabit their world -- to endure their frustrations and revel in their joys, to touch and smell and taste everything they took for granted.

Subtitled 'How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations', this is an account of human history which emphasises the human experiences of distant times and places. It begins seventy-five thousand years ago in Africa, and explores continents and cultures from Polynesia to Alaska. 

Kean blends archaeological evidence and practical experiments with thoughtfully-reconstructed fictions: a day in the life of a female hunter in the Andes, of a Viking leech, of a Roman slave, of a Polynesian navigator... Each detail in the stories has a sound basis in archaeology, and Kean throws himself into experiments that attempt to recreate the realities of other times. He knaps flint, drinks beer made with ancient Egyptian techniques, tans hide using urine, and collects bruises playing the Aztec ball game. There are in-depth discussions of Roman hairdressing (and concrete), giant sloths and Viking salves.

I am not 100% convinced that this constitutes 'rogue' archaeology, and I was not as surprised as the author seemed to be by some of the discoveries: but this audiobook, read by Derek Sterling (who conveys Kean's enthusiasm for his subject very well) was a delightful listening experience, and I'll likely re-listen at some point. Also, kudos to Kean for featuring so many female characters in his vignettes of ancient life.

Read because: on offer, looked interesting, and I was intrigued by the notion of blending fiction and non-fiction.

2026/136: As We Fall Through Time — Claire North

We are not, in fact, victims of a great pre-written fate. Time -- all of it, all of human history -- is a great big messy conflagration of connectivity, of people making choices and choosing outcomes and all of it just tangling together until what could be coalesces into what is -- but still, people choose. [loc. 4553]

Time travellers exist. Often (always?) there is something indefinite about their birth: Cal, our protagonist, was born, a medieval peasant, 'in a moment of temporal uncertainty', to a mother 'pregnant/not pregnant from an affair with a man who had/had not passed by'. 

Cal is indeterminate in other ways, too: sometimes male, sometimes female. They have a refreshingly cavalier approach to time travel (another time traveller is able to track them down via a cache of discarded asthma inhalers in a 17th-century manor house) and know how to close a rift in time by using an amaranthine, best described as a chronological paradox. And they, like all time travellers, are wary of the ghosts and witches ('fathomless creatures of unlived realities') that threaten those who move through time -- and, perhaps, threaten time itself.

The plot of As We Fall Through Time loops and layers confusingly, but at its heart is a love story (Cal falls in love with a French soldier named Olivier in 1789), a murder mystery (an archivist named Fadimatu causes a major paradox by encountering her own corpse in the Museum of the Unmasked Conspiracy), and a quixotic attempt by a time traveller named Bede to fix the climate catastrophe. The ways in which these three plots knot together is a twisty adventure, told by a mysterious first-person narrator in a resolutely non-linear sequence. It's the literary equivalent of a jigsaw puzzle, if the jigsaw puzzle sometimes made you laugh with delight at a new connection or a plot twist. And it was just as good on second reading: I found whole new angles of plot opening up.

Read because: Claire North has become one of my favourite authors -- from the 'Songs of Penelope' trilogy to the awesome Slow Gods. Obviously I read this as soon as it landed on my Kindle....

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 13th October 2026.

2026/135: The Exorcist — William Peter Blatty

The terror drifted over Georgetown like the sun over a blind man's eyes.

I have not seen, and have no intention of seeing, the film. The novel is another matter. Set in Washington DC, it focuses on Regan O'Neil, who's twelve years old, and her mother Chris, a famous actress. Regan starts playing with a Ouija board, talking to an entity she calls 'Captain Howdy'. Soon, her behaviour changes dramatically. Meanwhile, Chris's director is murdered, and there are instances of desecration at a local church.

Chris seeks the help of Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit who's struggling with the death of his mother and the loss of his own faith. Karras applies rigorous methodology to the task of determining whether Regan is truly possessed. Meanwhile, Detective Kinderman is investigating the murder and the desecration, and suspects Karras himself...

Karras may not be the titular Exorcist -- he's deemed lacking experience, and an older priest, Father Merrin, is brought in to perform the ritual -- but he is the central character of the novel. Trained as a psychiatrist, he's adept at applying the scientific method to matters of religious doctrine. He's also a man who cannot turn aside from someone in need (one can read events at the end of the novel as the story of someone driven mad by lack of sleep) and whose loss of faith has left him profoundly lonely.

Precise, characterful dialogue throughout: Blatty (a professional screenwriter) fleshes out secondary characters such as Chris's housekeeper Karl, and conveys each character's story through their speech and actions rather than description. The scenes featuring early 1970s electronics (for instance the tapes used to record the demon's utterances) gave me a shudder of familiarity. And it is plain, in this novel, that good and evil are real. I found the story compelling, and the characters fascinating: I would happily read more of Blatty's fiction.

Read because: I recently read another novel in which a character reads The Exorcist aloud, to entertain. Coincidentally, this audiobook (read by the author) was on offer...

2026/134: The Old Drift — Namwali Serpell

Trust our biology, it teaches you better. If you grip too tight, you'll lose the fight. If you stay in one place, you'll fester and waste. When young ones grow full, they must drift from the pool, lest it turn to a watery grave.

The Old Drift tells the entwined, tangled stories of three generations of Zambians. It begins in 1902, with 'Percy M. Clark, a wanderer, a brute, a cad, the forefather who started it all.' (When I first acquired this novel in Kindle form, I never got past that section.) The rest of the novel, though, focuses on more intriguing individuals, spanning the years from 1939 to 2023 -- which was, when this was published, The Future.

There are Italian immigrants, one with magic-realist hair; a blind girl who falls for an engineering student without knowing that he's black; the Zambian 'Afronauts'; sex workers, revolutionaries, immigrants, doctors... The novel is split into three sections -- 'The Grandmothers', 'The Mothers' and 'The Children' -- each with three viewpoint characters: this structure made it easier for me to appreciate each section individually, as well as the wider context in which the characters overlapped. The focus is very much on women and girls, though in 'The Children' two of the three protagonists are young men. And throughout the novel there's a strong sense of seizing possibilities, of repurposing and reworking the legacies of colonialism. A swarm of mosquitoes provides a lyrical, omniscient chorus bracketing each section. (They're quoted at the top of this review.)

I was ignorant of Zambia's history, and found this educational as well as immersive. I found myself drawn into stories that I would normally not have wanted to read, and appreciated Serpell's knack of blending historical and cultural facts with well-paced plots. And, on reflection, I think the sense of dissatisfaction I had with the final few chapters was because the time at which they're set (2023) is already in the past: the future depicted in those chapters felt, feels, as though it would be further away, maybe mid-21st century, but of course that wouldn't work with the 'three generations' structure.

Brilliantly narrated by Adjoa Andoh, with Richard E. Grant (doing Percy) and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (doing mosquitos): Andoh produced a myriad of distinct voices for the characters, and made them easy to distinguish.

Namwali Serpell's New Yorker piece on the Afronauts can be found here.

Read because: this novel won the Arthur C Clarke Award ('for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year') in 2020: I purchased a copy as soon as I learnt that it featured, among other narrators, a swarm of mosquitoes... but bounced off the initial 'white male colonist' section. I found the audiobook more accessible.

2026/133: The Mischievous Letters of the Marquise de Q — Felicia Davin

... what etiquette exists for an androgynous novelist paying a visit to the escaped convict she’s hosting at her lover’s request... [p. 205]

Second in the series that began with The Scandalous Letters of V and J (which I really should have reread before starting this): it's the story of Delphine, in love with scandalous androgynous novelist Camille Dupin ... and also with the father of her child, Ari, who vanished mysteriously before she could break the news of her pregnancy. Delphine is married to an abusive husband, but after his death she's free to be with Camille. And then Ari returns...

This is a polyamorous romance, and a magical adventure set in a nineteenth-century France where magical artifacts are collectors' items, and at least two characters seem to have discovered, if not immortality, at least extremely long life. It's told almost entirely through letters and diaries: Delphine's to Ari, even after his disappearance; Delphine and Camille's correspondence; Ari's melancholy journal. It features Victor and Julie(n) from the previous volume, as well as the mysterious Isabelle and some villainous aristocrats. And it has happy endings for those who deserve them ... though the third volume, which I plan to read soon, will focus on the continuing crisis of the collectors.

The author, in her afterword, describes this trilogy as 'Balzac, but horny and queer and magic': now I'm almost tempted to tackle Balzac...

Read because: I fancied a historical romance with fantasy elements, and remembered how much I'd enjoyed Scandalous Letters... though, as I quickly discovered, I hadn't remembered much of the plot!

2026/132: Other Minds — Peter Godfrey-Smith

If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over. This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. [loc. 131]

Sometimes lyrical, sometimes very technical, this is an account of octopus intelligence -- its origins, its manifestations, its implications -- by a philosopher with a scientific background and a passion for scuba-diving.

The common ancestor of humans and cephalopods has been dated to 750 million years ago (more than twice the separation between humans and any other vertebrate). If octopuses are intelligent, then evolution came up with intelligence not once but twice. Octopuses, and closely-related cephalopods such as cuttlefish and perhaps squid, show intelligent behaviour in a variety of ways: they play, they manipulate their environment, they communicate. Their brains are very different from vertebrate brains, being more distributed. And they have very short lifespans, which seems tragic.

I enjoyed Godfrey-Smith's accounts of his encounters with octopuses and giant cuttlefish, including being led by the hand by one curious individual. The philosophical elements -- what is it like to be an octopus? echoing Nagel's 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, which was a set text when I was a philosophy undergraduate -- were less interesting to me, but I read the scientific studies with fascination... while cringing at some of the experiments performed on sentient creatures. ('Sentience comes before consciousness,' writes Godfrey-Smith: and he also makes a good case for consciousness.) A truly fascinating read, with compassion and empathy as much as science and philosophy.

Narrated by Peter Noble, whose enthusiasm and warmth kept me listening through the more theoretical sections.

Read because: I've owned the Kindle version since, er, May 2018: the audio version (from the library) was easier to get into, and then I alternated between text and audio. I have wanted to read it, but I think was put off by the dense philosophising -- though, on initial reading way back when, I got far enough to make me swear off eating octopus.

2026/131: What Happened That Night — Nicci French

...while I’ve been in my own particular hell since Leo’s murder, you don’t seem to have lived the lives you longed for when we were young and full of promise. [loc. 1388]

Tyler Green has spent nearly 29 years in prison, found guilty of the murder of his friend Leo Bauer at a post-exam house party at university. He claims he is innocent, and asks a friend to organise a reunion of the guests at that house party. They haven't kept in touch, and all have changed a great deal -- Tyler's girlfriend, Ali, is now married to Will; Beatrice, who's hosting the reunion, is a KC married to an MP; Marco's musical career has descended into pub gigs. And by the end of the (horrible) dinner party, there's another death.

That's the first third of the book. Then we get to meet DI Maud O'Connor and her DS Carrie Kessler, investigating the death. Maud's bosses are convinced Tyler has struck again, but she's not so sure.

I spotted the murderer at 41%.

Good on toxic interpersonal relationships, the ways in which people change between university and middle age, and the dangers of police prejudice. I would have liked more of Tyler's viewpoint, and I felt very sorry for Conrad Bauer, crusading for penalties after the death of his son. There was some interestingly subtle clues that led Maud to her conclusion. But really, very few likeable characters and unexceptional prose -- and a couple of jarring moments, such as Maud making a veiled comment about the personal life of one of the characters, and a throwaway, improbable line intended to distract attention from the actual murderer.

Read because: one of my challenge prompts was 'two authors, one pseudonym': Nicci French ('the pseudonym of English husband-and-wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French ') seemed a popular choice, and I'd never read any of their books.