2026/128: The CIA Book Club — Charlie English

"A book was like fresh air. They allowed us to survive and not go mad.”

During the 1980s, the Solidarity movement in Poland (expanded from the original Solidarity union) was the main opposition to the Soviet-backed Communist regime. Even before martial law was declared in 1981, the CIA were quietly funding the import, publication and distribution of subversive literature, from Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago to Orwell's 1984 ... as well as fashion magazines, the Guardian Weekly, and novels by Vonnegut and Le Carre. America also funded underground printing initiatives, such as Mazovia Weekly and Kultura.

English's book is well-researched yet reads like a thriller, with vivid characters (ex-pat Jerzy Giedroyc in Paris, whose CIA codename was QRBERETTA; Mirosław Chojecki, self-appointed Minister for Smuggling; Helena Łuczywo, editor of Mazovia Weekly, who relied on the innate chauvinism of the secret police to keep her and her mostly-female team safe) and a compelling account of the key events of the period, from the founding of the Solidarity union to the election of Lech Wałęsa as President in 1990.

I remember some (though not all) of the major events covered in this book, but very much from the perspective of a teenager with little interest in politics and less understanding of what it might be like to live under an oppressive regime. I certainly wouldn't, then or now, have associated the CIA with such a hands-off, benevolent approach to undermining communism! (It's harder to imagine it happening in 2026.) And I found English's account of underground activism uplifting, even inspiring: people's time, money, effort, even lives, dedicated to a greater cause.

Narrated by James Parsons, who (as far as I can tell) pronounced Polish names correctly and clearly, and highlighted the occasional black humour of the book.

Read because: I bought the ebook when it was on offer -- I think it was at a time when my interest in the Cold War peaked -- but didn't get around to it until I noticed that the library had the audiobook. I combined the two, which worked very nicely.

2026/127: Yield Under Great Persuasion — Alexandra Rowland

...maybe finally he’d be a different person, someone he liked more than the person he was now. Someone who could let sweetness and softness happen to him without his throat closing up in fear and suspicion. Someone who could be loved. [p. 163]

Tam Brocken runs a tea shop in a village. He's lonely, if you discount -- as he does -- the more-or-less weekly occasions on which he has sex with Lord Lyford. He always leaves hastily, and it's just sex, so that's all right -- even if Lyford (who he's hated since childhood) keeps flirting with him. And then Tam and Lyford are assigned to run the matchmaking tent at the village festival. Together.

Then Tam, trying to escape the village gossips, meets the goddess Angarat on the road, and she imparts a few home truths ... including that Tam is stuck in a rut of his own devising, and that he should keep an open mind about Lyford, and give him a chance to redeem himself.

This is a story about second chances, divine favor, and trying to be a better person. It's a sweet story, though Tam is often far from sweet: and it's also a rural idyll, with gods walking the world and interacting with humans, and with a really strong sense of Lyford and Tam's love for the land. A gentle and life-affirming novel that's often very funny and (usually at other points) very steamy.

Read because: wishlist hit, plus I'd just finished a book by Rowland's fellow Serpent Freya Marske. Though the two are very different writers, there's a commonality of timbre. I also felt that the explicit sex scenes qualified this as a fill for the 'erotic fantasy' prompt on a book challenge. Also, 'set at harvest time'.

2026/126: Bodies of Magic — Freya Marske

Perhaps a body was all you ever were.
Perhaps a body was the least of what you were.
They were days away from becoming a fully-fledged healer and they still didn't know which was true. Or if both were, somehow. [loc. 2776]

Five medical students at the Academie of the Grand Duchy of Sieuxerr are about to begin their final exam -- a week-long trial of five medical cases, which the five healers will have to work together to diagnose and perhaps treat. They will pass together, or fail together. And this particular exam group (randomly chosen, of course) comprises five very different individuals, each with secrets, each with complicated emotions towards the others. Moyna is the daughter of ambitious parents who moved to Sieuxerr so that Moyna could be trained in the healing arts, and serve her community. Alys is an aristocratic beauty with little magical aptitude. Estiene is the son of the Head Healer. Jehan comes from a working-class, single-parent family. Clement is non-binary, and the best friend of the most gifted student of their year, Ysabel Caudotte ... and Ysabel is found, dead, in their exam chamber on the first day of the exam.

She's not their case: they don't have to diagnose or treat. But each of the five has some connection to Ysabel, and each has secrets to keep, complications to manouevre, expectations and fears and hopes. As the week progresses, it's clear that Ysabel had been planning something: but what? And did it lead to her death?

The gradual fleshing-out of each of the five, as the novel rotates through their viewpoints, is brilliantly and effectively achieved. Each begins the week distrusting one or more of their fellow candidates: each ends the week with a better understanding of the others, and of their own skills and weaknesses. The medical cases are interesting, too, and the author's medical background is evident in the details of diagnostic techniques.

Marske's worldbuilding is understated but sound: I liked the little details of Sieuxerr, from the lingering horrors of a terrible pandemic (the serrage) to the almond-paste 'sweetmice' that are eaten to celebrate Mathe's feast; from the artificers' strikes to the bestselling popular novels about Healer Chambeley. The themes of class, of institutional corruption, and of medical diagnosis are thoroughly explored, but there's also room for romance(s) as well as the core murder mystery. I liked this a great deal.

Read because: I checked Netgalley as soon as I heard that Marske had a new novel on the way: I discovered her via the Be the Serpent podcast, and have very much enjoyed her other work.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 17th September 2026.

2026/125: They Bloom at Night — Trang Thanh Tran

Every generation before had a semblance of chance, but we have the end of the world. This end of the world. It’s beautiful, it’s crushing, and I wish we could think of a future without a thousand ways of how we must change to endure it.

Nhung, known as Noon, lives on a boat with her mother, making a living by selling the sometimes-mutated fish they catch. Hurricane Arlene took Noon's father and brother, and flooded Mercy, Louisiana: it also left behind a toxic bloom of weird red algae, and there have been sightings of strange sea creatures and reports of missing persons. When a marine biologist goes missing, Noon -- along with Covey, the daughter of the town's big boss -- is tasked with capturing a monster. Any monster.

Noon herself has been changing for months. After a sexual assault, her hair turned white overnight, and she's losing her fingernails. She no longer feels at home in her body. Is she a monster? What has triggered her transformation -- the assault, or something in the water?

Noon is very much alone: she's frustrated by her mother's certainty that the sea will reincarnate her lost husband and son, perhaps as sea creatures, and there's an undercurrent of lingering resentment that, as a girl, Noon was always second best. Later, she reconnects with an old friend, Wilder, and Wilder's new friend Saffy, who is trans. There's a tentative friendship blooming with Covey, too: an accomplished huntress, yes, but also a young woman rejecting her big-boss father and everything he stands for. And ultimately Noon comes to understand, and to reconcile herself to, her mother's beliefs ... and their roots in the family history.

This is as much a novel about becoming your true self as it is about the ecological, social and economic changes wrought by the hurricane and the algae. There's some stomach-turning body horror, and a pervasive sense of unease: Tran evokes the smells, sounds and motion of Noon's world with vivid sensory detail. I found Noon's prickliness very relatable, and was captivated by the ways in which various mermaid stories (not the Disney versions) were woven into Noon's story.

I read the audiobook, narrated by Nhi Do, who managed some truly unsettling vocal effects.

Read because: it was on offer at Libro.fm, and the Libro.fm 2026 Audiobook Listening Challenge has a prompt for 'a winning audiobook from our 2025 Bookseller Choice Awards': as I read, I decided it also fitted 'a BIPOC retelling of a fairytale', for the original Little Mermaid.

2026/124: Annie Bot — Sierra Greer

Doug and all the other humans talk about their lives with a myopic intensity, sharing singular, subjective opinions as if they are each the protagonist of their own novel. ... they treat their fellow humans as guest protagonists visiting from their own respective books. None of the humans are satellites the way she is, in her orbit around Doug. [p. 215]

Annie is in an abusive relationship with Doug: he says she's fat, criticises her housework, and chooses her lingerie. She's not allowed to go online without permission / supervision. He punishes her with the silent treatment.

It's all right, though </sarcasm> because Annie isn't a real woman. She's a bot -- an artificial being grown in a lab from a human embryo and mechanical components. Doug literally owns her: he purchased her, as a 'Cuddle Bunny' (sexbot), and he gets to decide everything about her, from her breast size to how high her libido is set. (One horrific scene has him setting libido to 10 and then locking her in a closet: she can't 'simulate orgasm' without him inside her, and she is desperate.) But Doug has also switched on 'auto-didact' mode, and Annie is evolving as she learns more about the world -- and about herself. She's also learnt, somehow, to keep a secret -- one that she knows would hurt Doug.

Annie's growing self-awareness, and her understanding of her situation, is powerfully conveyed. I am not sure I liked this novel, but I did want to keep reading to see how Annie evolved. Because it's a first-person narrative, embedded in Annie's physical and mental experience, it has an immediacy that's lacking in some other works with comparable themes. And Doug, for all his many faults, isn't a two-dimensional villain. He changes (perhaps even grows) over the course of the novel. He based Annie's appearance on his ex-wife Gwen, and it's possible to infer the story of Doug and Gwen's relationship from Doug's reactions to Annie. But even at his best, he's pretty bad.

Read because: this book won the Arthur C Clarke Award, and I was curious.

2026/123: The Edge of Memory — Patrick Nunn

Literacy is tyrannical, for it encourages us to undervalue our pasts –- the knowledge amassed by those countless ancestors of ours who could neither read nor write.

Subtitled 'Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World', Nunn's thesis is that preliterate societies encoded and passed down observations of natural disasters in folk tales. He opens with a discussion of Klamath stories about Crater Lake in Oregon. According to the stories, there was a demon who dwelt in a mountain and terrorised the local people with earthquakes and falls of hot rock. The demon was defeated by a spirit who pulled the mountain down and made a lake instead. This is, according to Nunn, a fair fictionalisation of what actually happened when the caldera was formed ... 7,700 years ago. If the story is an account of actual events, it's been passed down for 300 generations.

The bulk of the book deals with Aboriginal myths that include information about sea level rise and coastal drowning. Nunn recounts more than twenty of these, which began to feel a bit repetitive: but he believes each story explains a local phenomenon, such as the disappearance of an island or the flooding of a bay. He also discusses similar stories from India, and from north-west Europe: Doggerland, and especially the Scillies, which were once rather higher above water (and thus had fewer distinct islands). There's also an intriguing mention of a folktale from Italy which seems to record a meteorite impact in the 4th or 5th century, which disrupted a pagan ritual and convinced the locals to convert to Christianity. (I am unable to access the article on which this is based, but there's more about the theory on wikipedia.)

I wasn't wholly convinced by some of the interpretations, but I do accept the core tenet that folk tales can be fictionalised accounts of actual events, and can be passed on for many generations. And it's certainly true that 'our ancestors', as in 'prehistoric humans', lived through some drastic geological, astronomical and meteorological events. I'd like to read more on this topic.

Excellent narration by Peter Silverleaf, who sounded engaged and enthusiastic throughout.

Read because: I'm fascinated by the notion of stories being passed down, specifically from prehistoric/preliterate times, as a way of remembering important events.

2026/122: The Smart Neanderthal — Clive Finlayson

[the] sweeping statements made by some archaeologists, such as birds are fast-moving prey or hard to catch, are gross overgeneralizations which reveal an absence of natural history understanding, an understanding that intelligent Neanderthals would have had. [loc. 1382]

Finlayson is a keen ornithologist and archaeologist who lives in Gibraltar: much of this book is devoted to his excavations at the Gorham's Cave system, and to his ornithological expeditions in Gibraltar and southern Spain. His aim in this short book is to prove that Neanderthals were cognitive equals to modern humans: 'they made blades; they made complex tools; they had personal ornaments in the form of eagle feathers; they used ochre either to paint themselves or to make paintings, or both; they made engravings in cave walls; and they had sophisticated economic and social organization that included detailed planning of hunting activities at specific times of the year for particular prey. The prey often included birds.' [loc. 2678].

Though his prose is occasionally lacklustre, the sense of scientific excitement comes across strongly -- as does the grind of archaeological excavation, the care which must be taken with each specimen. His descriptions of observing eagles, vultures and corvids in the wild, acquiring an understanding of their habits and behaviour in the same way as Neanderthals may have done, are compelling. And I gained a better understanding of how climate change (the Ice Age and its aftermath) would have affected Neanderthal populations, fragmenting their territory and isolating communities.

Read because: I've been fascinated by Neanderthals, and by their differences to modern humans, since I first read The Clan of the Cave Bear (which was impeccably researched, though some of the data is dated now).