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]

2025/147: Volkhavaar — Tanith Lee

From the Great City Square came a noise like two armies, four bull-rings, eight orchestras, sixteen taverns. Every color and every sound and scent known in the Korkeem — and a few not known. Wonders opened like flowers and the fans of peacocks, and dusts and incenses spread before the sun chariot in a mauve gauze, as it galloped into the morning. [loc. 1690]

Short, standalone fantasy novel by Tanith Lee -- probably my most-read author in my teens and twenties, though I haven't engaged as much with her more recent work. I first read Volkhavaar when I borrowed it from the library, at a tender and impressionable age: as usual when rereading, I'm surprised by what I remember and what I'd forgotten. I remembered the black stone idol, and the flowers, and the bronze sword. I'd forgotten the rather downbeat ending (which I think would have impressed me massively at the time -- what, you don't have to have a HEA?) and the excellent cat, Mitz.

The setting is what I think of as typical Lee: medieval-ish, demons and a multiplicity of gods, an Arabian Nights ambience, supernatural creatures who are more benevolent than their usual fictional depictions, enterprising young women and gorgeous young men. Our heroine, Shaina, is a slave who's never lost her pride: our hero Dasyel is an actor, clearly under the spell of our villain Kernik (whose villainy stems from injustice and abuse, plus a nasty streak all his own). Also a likeable vampire and the aforementioned excellent cat, who belongs to the rather feeble Princess Woana. Shaina falls in love with Dasyel without ever speaking to him, and enlists the help of a witch. Things do not work out as planned -- but there are happy endings all round, though not necessarily the traditional ones.

Volkhavaar made a powerful impact on me when I first read it: the vivid descriptions, the exuberance of the prose, the strong determined heroine. And perhaps the inversion of gender roles, with Shaina falling for Dasyel simply because of his looks, and doing her best -- through peril and pain -- to win him: just like a knight, an adventurer, the hero of a hundred fairytales... 

I've read a lot of fantasy novels over the intervening decades, but I still think Tanith Lee, with her glorious excesses and her subversions of genre tropes, is one of my favourites. I probably do need to read more of her later works -- many of which are out of print. 

The cover on the Gateway edition is appalling so I'm showing the cover of my old paperback copy, which ... is less appalling, and bears at least some resemblance to the novel within.

2025/146: Kings of This World — Elizabeth Knox

'In the 1980s we coined the term P, for Persuasion, which turned into P for Push when people stopped being so polite about it.' He paused a moment and pursed his lips, as if pleased with himself. [loc. 178]

Knox's latest YA novel is set in her fictional island nation of Southland, and references both Mortal Fire and the Dreamhunter Duet. Unlike the earlier books, it's set in more or less the present day: there are cellphones, EVs, the internet. And there is P (for Persuasion): a coercive / perceptual ability possessed by the Percentage, 1% of the population -- and a divisive issue in Southland society.

Vex Magdolen, sole survivor of a massacre at an 'intentional community' known as the Crucible, has strong P. After a childhood in the fosterage and state care system, she enters Tiebold Academy, where 75% of the students (though not Vex's roommate Ronnie) have P. Within a few weeks she's made friends and found her people ... but after a disturbance at the Compulsory Senior Year Morgue Visit, Vex and four of her classmates -- plus an adult assistant -- are kidnapped and imprisoned by mysterious masked captors. Was the original target Hanno, son of the richest man in Southland? Or was it one of the others -- Vex, Ari the senator's son, Taye who seems immune to Pushing?

The story alternates between the teens' captivity and Vex's first weeks at Tiebold Academy: and it doesn't end with the kidnapping, but with a confrontation that also reveals unexpected truths about Vex's past. There's love, zealotry, loss, treachery, and politics, and adults who think they know what's best for the young people under their care.

But most of all there is Knox's refulgent prose, vivid and simple (the promise of which was why I went to considerable lengths to acquire a copy of this book, not yet available in the US or UK). I loved the additional details of Southland's history and culture -- 'plague, the Place, and P' -- and am now eager to reread the other Southland novels: and Knox has said she intends to write another two novels set in Southland. Hurrah!

I note that I haven't said much about the plot of Kings of this World. The aspect that most intrigued me was Vex's childhood storytelling, which reminded me of the Game that Knox has mentioned in various contexts. I was also prompted to read Vonnegut's story 'Harrison Bergeron', about handicapping the gifted. And I am still thinking about Vex's family's reputation for foresight.

2025/145: The Last Dragoners of Bowbazar — Indra Das

“Why won’t you let me remember?” I dared ask.
She blinked. “You deserve to be real in this world. It’s not an easy thing to be stuck between worlds.” But stuck I was, and ever have been. [loc. 286]

Ru George grows up in Calcutta [sic] in the 1990s. He's the child of immigrants, and lives with his grandmother and his parents. Ru's father is a failed fantasy author: his novel The Dragoner's Daughter (about dragonriders on a distant planet using their mounts to traverse multiple realities) sold only 52 copies. Ru's grandmother tells him fantastical stories about his grandfather having started life as a woman (Ru can see the truth of this in old photos). Ru's mother administers the Tea of Forgetting after meals, and before bedtime. 

Ru grows up a lonely child with only the vaguest idea of who he is, and who his family are. He's prone to spinning extravagant yarns to his schoolfriends. (But are they fantastical, or true?) By his teenage years, now home-schooled, he has just one friend: Alice, the daughter of the couple who run the Crystal Dragon restaurant. Alice and Ru share enthusiasms for video games, metal music and fantasy novels. And slowly they share Ru's -- or Ru's family's -- secrets.

Like all the best novellas, this packs a novel's-worth of content into its pages. There's a story about found family, a story (or two) about refugees fleeing wars, a story about memory and forgetfulness, a story about gender. In a way, it's also about the stories we tell to ourselves and to others. Ru, the perpetual outsider, is so lonely, so rootless, and yet he hopes. And when he remembers, the story turns full circle on itself.

I know now that forgetting and remembering was a cycle I have relived many times, a snake eating its tail...[loc. 36]... “Belief is a serpent eating its tail forever, knowing that its tail is finite.” [loc. 979]

2025/144: Cinder House — Freya Marske

Scholar Mazamire's own theory was that a ghost was how a building held a grudge, because it was not human enough to do it on its own. [loc. 527]

A novella-length variation on 'Cinderella': it begins with Ella's death at sixteen, dizzy with the poison that has killed her father, falling downstairs as the house convulses at his demise. Shortly thereafter, Ella finds herself merging with the house itself. She cannot leave the property, and the only people who can see her are her stepmother Patrice and her two stepsisters, Danica (who likes to read) and Greta (who likes to get her own way). She feels any damage inflicted on the house, and she's compelled to tidy and clean and make good. She becomes an unpaid maid of all work.

She cultivates a penpal, Scholar Mazamire, with whom she exchanges long letters about magic and ghosts: and at last she finds herself able to leave the house -- though she's wrenched back home on the stroke of midnight. She wanders the streets, and can enter any public place: she visits the ballet often, and wishes she could talk about the performances with the other regulars. Nobody can see her, except for a faerie spell-seller at the night marker who introduces herself as 'Quaint'. When the royal family issue an invitation to 'all unattached ladies of the kingdom' for a series of balls before the Prince becomes betrothed, it's Quaint who makes it possible for Ella to attend.

There are some very well-executed twists here, from Ella's mirror-studded shoes to the Prince's worsening curse to the skeleton in the attic. (I applaud Marske's restraint in identifying that skeleton). Ella's situation reminded me of being housebound after illness -- the author confirms, in her afterword, that it's 'a story about chronic illness and disability' -- with that sense of being trapped, unable to change one's circumstances or make choices about one's life. I found her skin-hunger and her taste for steamy romances all too relatable!

I would love to read more set in this world: but the story fits novella-length very nicely, and the implied world-building is fascinating and credible. I especially liked the magic system, with its subjects and objects and exceptions. Perhaps Quaint could have a novel of her own...

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK Publication Date is 9th October 2025.

2025/143: Twilight Cities: Lost Capitals of the Mediterranean — Katherine Pangonis

...in Syracuse, the ghosts feel like they raise the city up; in Ravenna, Nicola thinks they hold it back. [loc. 3703]

Pangolis explores five ancient capitals (Tyre, Carthage, Syracuse, Ravenna and Antioch) leavening historical detail with her own impressions of each city's modern remnants: a blend of history and travel writing which works better in some chapters than in others. This book won the Somerset Maugham Award (which, I learn, is 'to enable young writers to enrich their work by gaining experience of foreign countries'): Pangolis's previous work was Queens of Jerusalem, which I have not read.

One aspect of the book that I found fascinating was the intermingling of past and present: for instance, 'at least 30% of the [male] Tyrians are indeed descendants of the Phoenicians'. Though this is a source of pride, it's also been used to differentiate between Christians and Muslims. Carthage, which began as a Phoenician settlement, has an only slightly lower percentage of Phoenician genes amid its populace, but Pangolis writes that she did not 'meet a single Tunisian who describes themselves as Phoenician'. History can be a mixed blessing. As one artist in Ravenna tells the author, he grew up with  'this phantasmic history, which dwarfs everything the city is in the modern day. That trumps the reality of the city. ... Ravenna is so much more than her history, but you grow up with these ghosts.' [loc. 3699] 

Some of the cities she explores are in ruins -- more now than at the time of writing, 2023, when 'the thunder of Israeli rockets could be heard in the city of Tyre'. Massive Israeli airstrikes in 2024 destroyed much of the ancient city.  Antioch, where Pangolis had bathed in the hammam with the local women, suffered severe damage in the 2023 Turkish earthquake: the chapters on Antioch and its modern overlay Antakya are an elegy for a shattered city. 

The chapters are sometimes repetitive, and sometimes read like potted histories (lists of battles, kings, religion). Pangolis often omits the BC on dates: this confused me at first ('recent results do indeed put the foundation of the city sometime between 835 and 800') and would be more acceptable if the histories she recounts didn't span both BC and AD. And the section on Ravenna (with its lengthy description of Lord Byron's affair with a Ravennese lady) didn't quite fit with the other cities under discussion. 

Also, I think the author was confused: 'In the archaeological museum in Syracuse there can be found the skeleton of a curious one-eyed dwarf elephant. In 1914 the palaeontologist Othenio Abel suggested that the presence of these giant one-eyed creatures in Sicily gave rise to the legend of [the Cyclops] Polyphemus' [loc. 1852]. No, the elephants weren't one-eyed: their skulls, though, do have a large central opening, the proboscis cavity.

Overall an interesting read, but I would have liked more of the author's modern experiences ('the crackle of the live coral'; climbing over walls to visit the stones of Carthage) and less of the battles-and-kings history.

Some things I learnt:

• 'In 1985, the mayors of Carthage and Rome finally signed a peace treaty, officially ending the Third Punic War, which otherwise had lasted 2,131 years.'
• Justinian's Plague wiped out nearly a quarter of the population in the eastern Mediterranean
• The Marsala shipwreck 'reads like an instruction booklet for ancient shipwrights, with letters from the ancient Phoenician alphabet demarking where sections joined another, and which piece went where' [loc. 1174]

2025/142: Everfair — Nisi Shawl

He had been warned, but had thought Everfair too remote, too obscure, for Leopold's dependents to seek its destruction. He had thought that because this land had been legitimately purchased they were safe. He had trusted to his enemy's basic humanity to preserve them. [p. 95]

Everfair is a steampunk-flavoured alternate history, beginning in 1889. The Fabian Society, instead of founding the London School of Economics, purchases land in the Congo as a refuge for those fleeing the oppressive, violent regime of the Belgian government and their rubber plantations. Everfair, as the new country is called, is initially populated by African-Americans and liberal whites, as well as escaped slaves. King Mwenda, whose land it was before the Belgians stole it, is not wholly pleased with the way that Everfair is run: but he and his favourite wife, Josina -- a fearsome diplomat -- are playing a long game.

The steampunk aesthetic is strong. Many of those formerly enslaved have been mutilated: a young Chinese engineer known as Tink (his name is Ho Lin-Huang) creates artificial limbs for them. (Fwendi, a young woman who's survived the loss of a hand, revels in the fireworks and weaponry that her assortment of prosthetics provides.) There are 'air canoes' and steam-powered bikes; uranium as a power source; ingenuity and artifice.

There is also, of course, race. Shawl explores many aspects of racism and colonialism, including the white saviour / white martyr trope; the tension between Christian missionaries and the spiritual world of the indigenous people; the social consequences of having a Black grandparent; the white horror of 'miscegenation'; the unspoken assumptions and the privilege that underlies even the best intentions of Everfair's founders. Shawl's characters illustrate these tensions and tropes: a Christian preacher who becomes an acolyte of the forge-god Loango; a Frenchwoman with a Black grandfather who decides not to 'pass'; a character who's enthusiastic about the idea of a 'white martyr' to rally British readers to the cause, until the martyr turns out to be someone close to her...

There is a lot in this novel -- which reads more like a set of connected short stories, spanning a period of around thirty years, than a single arc -- and a plethora of viewpoint characters. There is romance both queer and heterosexual; many women with agency and competence; atrocities and joys; spiritual and scientific revelations. There are also supernatural elements. (I loved Fwendi's cats!) And yet for me it fell a little flat. It felt very dense: it felt as though there was a trilogy trying to get out. And perhaps because it's so dense, some of the characters felt less realistic, less rounded, than others. That said, I'm wishlisting the sequel Kinning, which sounds splendid.

2025/141: The Nature of the Beast — Louise Penny

One person, not associated with the case, would be chosen to represent all Canadians. They would absorb the horror. They would hear and see things that could never be forgotten. And then, when the trial was over, they would carry it to their grave, so that the rest of the population didn’t have to. One person sacrificed for the greater good. “You more than read his file, didn’t you?” said Myrna. “There was a closed-door trial, wasn’t there?” Armand stared at her... [p. 34]

This was a real contrast to The Long Way Home: there's a murder in the first couple of chapters, and a plot that spans decades and continents. We learn more about some of the less storied inhabitants of Three Pines (Ruth and Monsieur Béliveau, the grocer, were activists in the 1970s: one of the villagers is a veteran of the Vietnam War) and a terrifying new -- or old -- threat is introduced.

The story opens with a small boy's discovery of something terrifying in the woods. His story isn't believed, because he's an imaginative kid and something of a fantasist. Soon after, he's found dead. Accident or murder? Gamache doubts the official verdict (the aftermath of corruption is still infesting the Sûreté du Québec) and is drawn into the investigation. 

In parallel, there's an amateur production of a play: when it turns out to be the work of a notorious serial killer, most of the actors withdraw. That might seem relatively trivial, but the ways in which these two plots intersect, and the agenda of the hapless CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) agents, is unexpected but as tight as clockwork.

There's a lot of discussion about whether one can separate the created and the creator -- Gamache thinks not: ("This is how he escapes. Through the written word, and the decency of others. This is how John Fleming gets into your head.") -- and about how those who have committed, or planned to commit, atrocities carry on with their lives. And part of a plot thread is about a horrendous plan to 'bomb Israel back to the Stone Age', which reads differently now than it would have when this novel was published.

I liked this a lot, though it's a dark novel and sows the seeds for more darkness ahead. I am looking forward to seeing how that darkness unravels, and is illuminated.

2025/140: The Long Way Home — Louise Penny

Armand Gamache did not want to have to be brave. Not anymore. Now all he wanted was to be at peace. But, like Clara, he knew he could not have one without the other. [p. 42]

After finishing the first big arc in the Gamache series last December (with How the Light Gets In) I had been saving the rest of the series for this winter: but unseasonably poor weather enticed me to read the next book. It was like coming into a warm room after a long cold journey: the familiar characters, the emotional honesty, the humour, the intricacies of crime.

The mystery to be solved, in The Long Way Home, is the non-appearance of Clara Morrow's husband Peter. Over a year ago, they separated -- Clara told him to leave -- and he was due to return on the anniversary of that separation. But Clara's had no word from him, and she's concerned. For his part, Gamache doesn't want to leave Three Pines, where he and his wife Reine-Marie are enjoying a happy and peaceful retirement. On the other hand, Clara and Peter are his friends: and Peter, his reputation as an artist suffering by comparison to Clara's recent success, was a troubled man.

This novel takes Gamache and his allies into the world of art: art schools, art dealers, artists. It also, physically, takes them to the wild coast at the mouth of the St Lawrence River: splendid descriptions of landscape, travel, and chance-met individuals. I don't think it's going to be one of my favourites of the series, but it was very nice to be back with these characters -- so nice that I instantly went on to the next in the series...