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.