2026/101: Tuyo — Rachel Neumeier

Every man is glad to stop looking for the truth when he’s handed a lie he likes better. Sorcerers are no different in that. [p. 129]

Ryo InGara is nineteen years old, a warrior of a nomadic tribe that dwells in the winter country. At the beginning of Tuyo, he's been left as a kind of sacrifice to the opposing army -- the Lau -- in a minor skirmish: he expects to be killed slowly and painfully, and it is a matter of honour that he meets his death bravely.

Instead, he finds himself given guest-right by his captor, Lord Aras Eren Samaura, who says that Ryo is more useful alive than dead. Aras is trying to determine the cause of the recent unrest between the Ugaro (Ryo's people) and the Lau (Aras' people). He suspects sorcery is involved -- and Ryo comes from a culture where sorcery is punished by death. Ryo does indeed encounter sorcerers, plural: his memories are changed without his consent, and only his own strength of will -- and his trust in Aras' essential good nature -- saves him.

What I liked most in this novel was Ryo's narrative, and the close examination of the changing relationship between Ryo and Aras. (NB This is not a romance.) Neumeier depicts the minutae of Ryo's emotional landscape, and the evolution of his understanding of Aras, credibly and without sentiment.

The worldbuilding is fascinating, too: it's clear almost from the start that this is a radically different cosmology. A river separates the winter lands of the Ugaro from the summer lands of the Lau. In the winter lands, the moon is always full, but in the summer lands it ('she', the goddess) has phases. There are stories of another land beyond the winter land, lit by starlight, and a sunless sea; and Aras has travelled beyond the summer land, where jackal-headed sorcerers dwell. 

One brief complaint: there is a great deal of story-telling in this novel, but we don't get the stories themselves.

Ryo and his culture reminded me of Ariantes, the Sarmatian narrator of Island of Ghosts, one of my favourite novels: I was pleased to read Neumeier's post on that novel, which acknowledges it as an influence.

Read because: I'd read a sample after seeing it recommended (and I'd already enjoyed The Year's Midnight by the same author). Amazon stealthily offered me a month of free Kindle Unlimited, and I bit.

2026/100: The Killing Time — Elly Griffiths

It’s hard enough being a woman in 2024, what must it be like when you’ve almost no agency and are imprisoned by your clothes? [loc. 3368]

In this, the second of the Ali Dawson time-travel thrillers, Ali is confounded by bureaucracy. After the problems of her previous expedition to 1851 -- and the disappearance of star physicist Jones, presumed lost in the nineteenth century -- the Cold Cases Unit is banned from further excursions. 

Ali distracts herself by investigating the contemporary case of a young man who fell to his death after being told by a charismatic psychic that he could fly. Prepared to find a fraud, Ali is unnerved when the psychic, Barry Power, seems to convey a message from Jones. And Ali already knows that she'll return to the 1850s... though she doesn't expect it to happen when she's trying to go back just a few minutes to close the cat flap and prevent her beloved kitty from escaping. 

This excursion was less harrowing than the first, although I was anxious about Terry the cat. (Naturally he has landed on his feet.) And there are hints of the directions the series might go: the connections between the members of the Cold Case Unit, Ali's romantic entanglement, the collective unconsciousness, Jones' new life. I remain intrigued. 

Read because: I enjoyed The Frozen People, and was eager to discover what happened next...

2026/099: Around the World in 72 Days — Nellie Bly

"It is impossible for you to do it... In the first place you are a woman and would need a protector, and even if it were possible for you to travel alone you would need to carry so much baggage that it would detain you in making rapid changes. Besides you speak nothing but English, so there is no use talking about it; no one but a man can do this."
"Very well," I said angrily, "Start the man, and I'll start the same day for some other newspaper and beat him." [chapter 1]

Inspired by Jules Verne's novel (and desperate to write about something interesting), New York World reporter Nellie Bly suggested to her editor in 1888 that she might attempt to recreate the fictional journey of Phineas Fogg. (Her editor's initial reaction is quoted at the top of this review.)

Bly's only luggage was a single bag: she'd commissioned a lightweight dress, but refused several society invitations on her travels due to lack of the proper attire. She sailed to England, then took the boat train to France, where she met Jules Verne himself; then another train to Brindisi, a ship through the Suez Canal, a stay in Ceylon: then Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Japan, a Pacific crossing, and a breakneck railway journey on a specially-commissioned train -- greeted everywhere by cheering crowds -- from San Francisco to New York. 

Her account is generally witty and gossipy, poking mostly-gentle fun at fellow travellers. Obviously, it's also packed with period-typical racism and some old-fashioned attitudes. Occasionally she encounters an importunate gentleman, who she dismisses with charm. She's quite rude about British trains, but who isn't? And she does go into a little too much detail about Japanese executions.

And she leaves a lot out. In Hong Kong she's told of a contender in the 'race', another reporter who has set out to beat Bly's time. "I will not race. If someone else wants to do the trip in less time, that is their concern," she declares. And we never hear anything more about the competition -- or Elizabeth Bisland, who travelled in the opposite direction (setting out across the Pacific, returning across the Atlantic) and made the trip in 78 days. 

I would have liked more about the mundane problems -- did she wish she'd packed more clothes? what were the sanitary facilities like? did she like any of those importunate men? -- but nevertheless this was a fascinating account of travel and travellers in the 1880s.

The Librivox audiobook, which is in the public domain, was excellently narrated by Mary Reagan, whose voice suited Bly's light tone very nicely. There's a good summary here, which also includes context lacking from Bly's sometimes-breathless account.

Elizabeth Bisland's memoir of her trip is also available as a public-domain audiobook.

Read because: it fills two challenge prompts -- non-fiction published before I was born, and a work written in the nineteenth century. Bly's journey took place in 1889, and her account of it was published in 1890.

2026/098: The Frozen People — Elly Griffiths

‘Whatever you do, don’t trust Dickens.’ [loc. 696]

Ali Dawson is fifty years old, with fire-engine red hair and a son who's working as a special advisor to Isaac Templeton, a Tory MP. Ali herself works for the Cold Case Unit -- 'so cold they're frozen' -- which uses a top-secret time-travel device to investigate crimes.

Ali's first experience of time travel, in the first weeks of Covid lockdowns, went smoothly: she and her companion travelled back a single week, weren't visible to those around them, and returned to their present once they'd worked out that they had to stand exactly in the spot they'd arrived. Sent back to 1850s London to clear the name of Isaac Templeton's ancestor, things fall out rather differently.

There was a lot to like here: Ali's discoveries about Cain Templeton, presumed murderer, and the Collectors' Club of which he's a member; Jones (a.k.a Serafina Pellegrini), the brilliant Italian physicist who developed the time travel device; the subplot involving Finn; Ali's Siamese cat Terry (even though I hope the description of him as 'sleek teal' is a misprint). As long as I didn't think too hard about the time travel -- and the likelihood of it being used to solve crimes, rather than for military or criminal purposes -- my disbelief stayed manageable. And there's enough of a cliffhanger that I went straight on to the second in the series...

Read because: I'm a big fan of Griffiths' Ruth Galloway mysteries, and had bought this some time ago... then the second in the series showed up as a Daily Deal, and friends waxed enthusiastic about this first volume. After reading, it fitted nicely into a challenge prompt -- 'suspension of disbelief'!

2026/097: The Bookshop Woman — Nanako Hanada (translated by Catriona Anderson)

...you couldn’t recommend a book to someone if you didn’t know them, not really. And you couldn’t recommend a book if you didn’t know it well yourself. And moreover, you couldn’t recommend a book without a good reason. You had to want that person to read it, because you’d thought about what that specific book would mean to them. [loc. 614]

A short sweet novel about a woman who's just separated from her husband and feels alienated from her work as the manager of an alternative bookshop. Wanting to meet new people -- friends at least as much as potential partners -- she signs up for a site called Perfect Strangers, which enables 30-minute meetings between strangers (perfect or not). Her USP is her ability to recommend 'the book that's perfect for you'.

She meets the usual assortment of men trying to impress her into bed, but she also meets people who become close friends, people who change her life and people whose lives she changes. She's always viewed herself as socially inept, but she has the knack of asking the right questions and persuading the strangers she meets to reveal their own hopes and fears. And she begins to realise how judgmental she is -- how judgmental everyone is -- with the assumptions they make about people they don't know.

I hadn't realised this was biographical, but apparently Hanada did carry out this experiment as a way of reinventing, or revitalising, her life: the book was a huge hit in Japan, with its themes of urban loneliness and the pressures of work. I liked the insights into Japanese dating and socialising, and the narrator's gradual rediscovery of hope and joy. And her book recommendations fascinated me: there's a bibliography (is that the right word when it's not reference material but recommendations?) though the translator has helpfully indicated that many of the books are unavailable in English translation.

Read because: there was a challenge prompt for a book that 'revolves around a bookstore, library, or museum': also recommended by a friend.

Maybe, just maybe, the day will come when one person picks up this book of mine and recommends it to someone else. It could be the start of an infinite loop … Well, sort of. The story would be circulating, anyway – and that’s pretty incredible. In fact, I can’t think of anything more wonderful. [loc. 2307]

2026/096: I May Be Some Time — Francis Spufford

Romantic vocabulary, and Romantic hopes and horrors, remained important ways of negotiating the perceptual maze of the polar regions. They helped; they answered to the experience of light and motion, dark and stillness. They described the shock of finding nature other than you thought it was. [p. 93]

Recently the subtitle has changed to 'The Story Behind the Antarctic Tragedy of Captain Scott', but I prefer the original, which is much more accurate: 'Ice and the English Imagination'.

Spufford's first book is a social and cultural history of the great age of British polar exploration, from the Admiralty's push for Arctic expeditions after the Napoleonic Wars to the Edwardian explorations of Scott and Shackleton. He explores the Romantic notion of the sublime, the attitudes of the women left behind, and -- with compassion -- the vainglorious dreams and arrogant incompetence of the explorers themselves.

There is a vast amount in this book, and I read it very slowly, enjoying the cadences of Spufford's prose, his gentle mockery of Victorian ideas and ideals, and his clarity. The final chapter of the book, a fictionalised account of Scott's solitary death, moved me to tears but also exasperated me: as Spufford suggests, there's a sense of 'a fatalism so profound it became a kind of violence, a spiteful refusal to look out for themselves' (p. 346). Scott had opium tablets but did not take them to ease his passing. Instead, only 12 miles from the nearest camp, he lay with his dead companions and died in agony.

Spufford also explores perceptions of the Inuit ('Eskimos') and the ways in which their existence complicated the narratives of exploration: the Arctic was not, after all, pristine and empty, and some people did know how to survive there. Not, of course, that a British explorer would take advice from the locals... And he writes about the divisions of social class on board pole-bound ships: "the tasks [the officers] do on board are so far beneath their class’s roster of possible destinies that doing them does not feel like any conceivable backward step, it feels like a holiday" (p. 302). Polar exploration, and the myths around it, had a vast influence on everyday culture. For instance, I learnt that 'north', previously slang for 'clever', came to mean 'strong' in terms of drinks. 'Too far north', once slang for 'too clever by half', came to mean 'desperately, incapably drunk – ... hopelessly lost up there in the ultima Thule of booze.' (p. 237).

It’s too big, too silent, too cold. It’s all too much. ‘Coo-ee!’ shouts Ponting. Pause. Moonstruck immensity. ‘Coo-ee!’ replies the Barne Glacier. A perfect echo! [p. 326]

Read because: it's been on my wishlist for ages, and I have a long-standing interest in Arctic and Antarctic exploration. This was my bedtime read for well over a month: the cadences of Spufford's prose, and the lengthy excerpts from Victorian accounts of expeditions, were very soothing.

2026/095: The Gate, the Girl and the Dragon — Grace Lin

“Jin was carved face upward, looking at the sky. Watching people is not in his nature.”
“Watching people is in the nature of all Gongshi,” Ba protested. “Protecting and caring for people is the purpose bestowed on us by the goddess!”
Jin winced… People! There were so many of them, rushing around and squeezed together in their gray, grubby world... Watching people was the most boring thing ever. [loc. 500]

Jin is a Gongshi, a stone spirit dwelling in a statue: he's also a young lion cub who's passionate about zuqiu, a soccer-like game, and is forever being told by his parents that he's irresponsible. One day, in a fit of pique after a match is stopped just as he was about to score the winning goal, he accidentally kicks the Sacred Sphere, a relic of the Goddess, through the magical City Gate and into the human world. Rushing after it, he finds himself trapped in mundanity -- and nobody can come to his rescue, because the Gate is closed.

Jin was exasperating, but I felt very sorry for him, and was glad when he found a friend. Lulu is a human girl who nobody else seems to be able to see. She's very sad. The two also meet a worm who claims to be a dragon. And, in a secondary plotline, there's a sculptor who wishes his two masterworks would come alive: after all, they were carved from stone that used to be a dragon's pillow.

There's lots of excitement and tension, woven through with retellings of Chinese legends and folklore, but the core of the story is Jin growing up a little, learning to empathise and work with others. I understand the print version is beautifully illustrated -- a shame to have missed out on that -- but the audio was clearly and sympathetically read by Mesmi Chu. (Jin's voice did grate occasionally, but that fitted the character!)

Read because: challenge prompt for 'middle-grade novel by non-Caucasian author' -- this was in the Libro.fm sale and looked fascinating -- and it was.