6 Soothing, Quiet Novels for When the World Feels Like Too Much

The world has felt pretty heavy lately, and while I’ll always love a bracing piece of literary fiction, sometimes what I really need is a quiet novel — something to steady me. By “quiet” I don’t mean slight or simplistic. I mean contemplative, reflective books where nothing too dramatic or tragic happens, but which still explore identity, memory and the shape of our relationships in genuinely absorbing ways, written plainly enough that you can sink straight into them. Here are six I turn to for solace — and I’d love to hear yours.

“Whistler” by Ann Patchett
Patchett’s lovely new novel follows Daphne, a teacher who reconnects with a long-lost stepfather after many years, and the instant, tender rapport that springs up between them. It’s a warm, perceptive look at what actually makes a parent, and at how our understanding of our own families — a beloved sister, a more complicated mother — keeps shifting as we uncover the past. Full of hopeful, funny, deeply human moments, it was a real balm to read.

“Ladder of Years” by Anne Tyler
One of my favourite books of all time. A wife and mother simply walks out of her life one day, with no grander plan than to find a quiet room where she can sit and read for as long as she likes. Tyler is unmatched at writing people who’ve built lives they’re largely content with but can’t stop wondering about the road not taken — and here she gives one such woman the chance to test the waters of a new beginning. Gentle, wise, and quietly radical.

“Nora Webster” by Colum Tóibín
Following a minor character from “Brooklyn,” this is the story of Nora, a somewhat older woman in a small Irish community, grieving the sudden loss of her husband and slowly reckoning with the life she did and didn’t lead. Tóibín writes so beautifully about how we’re held — and gently hemmed in — by the communities we belong to, and about the new avenues (for Nora, a real passion for music) that can open even late in life. A woman who seems hard-edged on the surface turns out to have a rich, complex inner world.

“Love” by Hanne Ørstavik (translated by Martin Aitken)
A short, singular Norwegian novel told in a dual narrative, following a mother and her son as they separately wander out into the night — on, of all days, the boy’s birthday. They should be together, but instead each drifts through solitary encounters with strangers, brushing up against things they can’t quite say to one another. There’s something profoundly meditative about these parallel journeys, and a depth of feeling about family and longing that simply couldn’t exist if the two were sitting together in one house. Extraordinary.

“Leonard and Hungry Paul” by Rónán Hession
This one follows the rhythm of ordinary life so finely, through the friendship of two gentle young men who spend most of their time together playing Scrabble and Connect Four. In that easy companionship they quietly turn over the big questions — ambition and the lack of it, family, and how our chosen friends become the people with whom we can most freely be ourselves. One character even takes a job at a place literally called the Quiet Club, which says it all: this is a novel that cherishes all the unshowy parts of life that fiction usually overlooks.

“Absence” by Issa Quincy
A beautiful, unusual book with no conventional plot and a narrator we barely come to know, who travels the world meeting people and listening to the stories of their lives. As they narrate themselves, these strangers reveal far more than they intend — and Quincy treats each of them with such curiosity and human respect. There’s a warmth and humanity running through it that I found genuinely heartening.

What all six share is that sense of solace: when life gets hectic, or the wider world feels like too much, these are the books I come back to for quiet insight. There are plenty more I could have added — almost anything by Elizabeth Strout, or even a classic like Anthony Trollope, whose characters are so often just trying to get along in their communities. But I’d love to hear yours: which quiet novels do you reach for in times of strife? Let me know in the comments.

Partita by Barbara Kingsolver

First Impressions

There's a piano in my library that I almost never play. It belonged to my husband's sister, who used to play it but no longer had room for it, so we took it into our home. Learning to play it was one of my lockdown resolutions, and like a lot of lockdown resolutions it didn't last. These days it mostly serves as a place to stack the prize books I'm meant to be reading. But learning to play properly has always been a long-term goal of mine, and Barbara Kingsolver's "Partita" has made me want to lift the lid and start practising again.

It also arrives with enormous expectations. This is Kingsolver's first novel since "Demon Copperhead", which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2023, and which I found enthralling and utterly convincing. "Partita" is a very different kind of book: quieter, more personal, and built around music. It took me a while to settle into it, but by the end I found it a moving and involving experience.

A Week of Preludes

Livia is a former piano prodigy who now teaches music in her rural hometown. One day she gets a phone call from Sigurd, the man she loved in college and hasn't spoken to in twenty-seven years. The present-day story covers the week before he comes to visit, while Livia clears out her late mother's hoarded house and relives the past, still haunted by her brother's suicide. It's a tightly contained story, with the past folded into Livia's present.

The novel is built like a piece of music. The present-day chapters are seven "Preludes", one for each day of the week. The past is told in dance movements (Allemande, Toccata, Sarabande, Fugue) until the pattern breaks with "Pathétique". The final two chapters are performance instructions, "Da Capo" (go back to the beginning) and "Al Fine" (play to the end). At one point Livia gives Sigurd the definition the whole book rests on: a partita "will never be all happy rondos, or all andantes in a minor key… The parts are all different, and the artist's work is to make them all add up to a something that feels whole."

I'll admit it took me a while to get there. We're plunged straight into Livia's predicament, and it took time, and a lot of backstory, before I understood the stakes. I trusted Kingsolver to guide me in, and as the story built I found myself gripped. When I finished, I went back and reread the opening section, and it had a much stronger resonance the second time. This is a novel that rewards going back to the beginning, which is exactly what its final chapters instruct.

A Novel with a Soundtrack

"Partita" offers something I rarely see in a novel: a playlist. A Listening List at the back of the book ties fourteen pieces to the pages where they're played, "so the reader may listen to it while reading." I can't listen to music while I'm reading, as I find even instrumental music too distracting, so instead I listened to each piece at the end of the chapter where it appears. It was poignant to hear how the music struck an emotional chord with what had just happened in the story. Several members of my book club said they wished they'd known about the list before they started, so if you're about to read it, take a look at the back first.

I don't play an instrument and know only a little about classical music, but I loved learning the stories behind the pieces. I especially loved Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude, which is so eerie and beautiful. Kingsolver told the San Francisco Chronicle it's her own "broken-heart song, the one I always go and play when I'm sad." It reminded me of an interview I once heard with Joyce Carol Oates, who named the "Raindrop" as one of her favourite pieces and played the notes in the air while she listened to a recording.

What struck me most is how the mood of the music mirrors the ebb and flow of Livia's life. She can't confront or speak about her emotions directly, so they have to pass through the filter of music. That's part of what makes the novel so distinctive: we often learn how Livia feels from what she plays rather than from what she says.

Who Gets to Own Beauty?

One of the novel's biggest themes is the class divide in America, written by someone who knows Appalachia from the inside rather than through its stereotypes. I was moved by how frankly "Partita" presents Livia's money worries as a scholarship student from a low-income background: the government-surplus cheese, the work-study jobs, the three-dollar egg salad she orders at a diner out of loyalty to the staff. It's also sharp about how privilege makes people invisible to each other. Waitressing at Gorgo's, Livia serves her own biology lab partner, even says his name, and he never recognises her. But university also opens doors. The African singers at an anti-apartheid rally introduce her to a musical tradition that breaks every rule she learned in theory class, exactly the kind of discovery higher education can offer.

Livia and Sigurd's romance dramatises the divide. He has a theoretical commitment to equality, while she has the lived experience of a working-class upbringing, and his bright revolution is something she "never could find myself in." That gap in understanding feels like the root of the political divides so evident in the US today. Decades later Sigurd sees it himself, lamenting a country split into "the college-anointed versus the roofers and plumbers."

Kingsolver told the AP she wanted to ask "who made these rules, that small-town fiddlers and country music fans don't feel welcome in a symphony hall, and vice versa?" Livia's friend Mickie puts it most simply: "The point of art is to help you like your life better." The novel finds its own quiet answer to that question, which I won't spoil. Not everyone is persuaded by it. Sam Worley in Vulture thinks Kingsolver "asks the biggest questions she can, then resolves them in the smallest ways possible." Whether her answer feels political or like a retreat from politics is something I suspect each reader will settle differently.

Pathétique

Without giving too much away, a large part of the past storyline turns on a crisis in Livia's college years that brings her up against the realities of reproductive health care in autumn 1989, just after the Supreme Court's Webster ruling opened the door to state restrictions. It felt painfully relevant given the state of abortion law in the US now. Greg Londe in the Irish Times puts it best: "Kingsolver dramatises how reproductive rights are artists' rights." Fittingly, this is the one chapter named after a sonata rather than a dance.

This is also where the book piles on hardest. Livia endures a run of catastrophes that Londe calls "a Jude's worth of severe trauma", and one member of my book club asked, "How much bad stuff can happen to one person?!" For me this was one of the places where the novel felt less successful. The tragedies can feel as though they're put upon Livia to make a point, in a way some readers might find artificial.

Cyrus

One of the most poignant parts of the novel for me was the story of Livia's brother, Cyrus, whose backstory is revealed gradually. It's so tragic that he made the decision he did, and like Livia I kept wishing she could have stopped him. The clues are there early if you look. When there was talk of Cy enlisting, Livia remembers thinking, "do they know him? Cy wouldn't even watch war movies on TV." And the children gossip about Mr. Summits at the Western Auto, "called by some people 'a three-dollar bill,' which we thought had to do with the money in his cash register."

Over the course of the novel, Livia gradually learns more about what led Cy to his decision, and those revelations are some of the most gripping and painful moments in the book. I won't spoil them, but painful as they are, they at least end the not knowing, which must have been even worse.

Having gone through my own coming out as a teenager, I understand the pressure from parents to suppress who you are, and I realised that if things had worked out just a little differently, Cy's story could very well have been my own. I can see why he felt he had no options, even as I wish he'd held on to find a life with so many more possibilities. The novel sets beside him Livia's friends from music school, Bassoon and Percussion, who come back from Munich a couple, "with fortissimo marks where everything used to be pianissimo." Theirs is the happiness Cy didn't live to find. I find it so touching that Kingsolver puts gay characters at the heart of her novels. She told NPR that she has lost four people close to her to suicide, and in two cases was the last person to speak to them.

The Woman Without a Name

Livia's mother is never named, and neither is her grandmother. Her husband's will names "Willard Bohusz" but calls her only "his wife". When Livia finds her mother's old recital programmes ("in every one of these handbills she'd saved, my mother was listed as a soloist"), that would have been the natural place to say her name, but Livia withholds it. I think this is intentional, and I wonder whether it's Livia's way of controlling the narrative, denying her mother an identity outside the role she played in Livia's life. It made me think of an early line: "Home was no place I could have named anymore." Just as Livia can't name her origin, she won't name her mother.

As Livia clears the house, she uncovers more about her mother's own thwarted ambitions. Kingsolver told Oprah Daily she has "thought a lot about how it would have felt to be one of those mothers watching your daughter get to do things you never did." I understand that the hoarding was an illness, and that her own disappointments made her want her children to conform. But that didn't stop me feeling furious about the physical and psychological abuse and the loveless household she created, and about some of the choices Livia discovers she made. A member of my book club compared her to the mother in Arundhati Roy's memoir "Mother Mary Comes to Me", a connection I wish I'd made myself. So the almost ceremonial bonfire Livia builds felt poignant to me, a step towards letting go of anger and pain that can't be resolved.

Livia also recognises that she has inherited her mother's hoarding in emotional form. Her husband Charlie asks, "Livia, are you worried you're a keeper like her?" She admits the inside of her head is full of "berry baskets… Full of blame, guilt, things I said or didn't say," and Charlie replies, "No mice, then?" I debated whether this was Kingsolver over-explaining, but I believed it. From someone younger such self-insight might feel forced, but at Livia's stage of life, after a week of clearing the house and bracing for Sigurd, it felt natural.

Sigurd, Charlie and the Recital

Kingsolver told Oprah Daily that love "at 17… feels like breaking the speed limit. Many years later, it feels like a warm bath." That's Sigurd and Charlie in two sentences. Livia admits she'd "mistaken first-rate sex for love", and that even in bed with Charlie "it was Sigurd who pulled me over. Every time." Yet the night after the bonfire, when Charlie says he "grew up old" and calls his second chance at life "a blessing", may be the most intimate scene in the book.

Many readers struggle with Sigurd, and I can see why he's a character a lot of people won't like at all. But I felt more sympathetic towards him. He's young and idealistic, with a theoretical understanding of society that clashes with Livia's lived experience, and that idealism is so much a part of early adulthood. It seems natural that someone like him would fumble and fail to imagine the circumstances she was in. And it shows real growth that, decades later, he deliberately reaches out to make amends, giving her space to choose between talking on the phone and meeting in person.

I won't spoil how their reunion plays out, but when the novel builds up to it, it all seems to make sense, and there's a comic and poignant touch at the very end. Kingsolver describes "Partita" as a little love story, but to me it's much more about Livia coming to terms with herself, with the past, and with the life she has made. Her present circumstances aren't the ones she hoped for when she was younger, but she learns not just to accept her life as it has taken shape, but to love it. It may sound a bit corny, but it reminded me of RuPaul's line that “If you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”

A Few Reservations

Because everything is filtered through music, there are moments when the novel over-explains it. In one passage Livia spends a summer as a line cook: "Tomatoes cut like notes: half, quarter, eighth. Onions falling away from my knife in a glissando of even sixteenths." It read as corny to me, as if Kingsolver were overemphasising that everything Livia does is filtered through music, when chopping vegetables for a living is far more mundane. Malcolm Forbes in the Telegraph objected to the same "contrived musical references", and to Livia's "irksome tendency to explain to Sigurd, and by extension the reader" the workings of great music.

I also had some reservations about how it all played out, and not all of it was completely believable to me. Kingsolver told Inside Appalachia that after "The Overstory", her friend Richard Powers set out to write "a little fable", which became "Bewilderment", and she decided to do the same: "a little love story.… I don't think little is one of my skills." She didn't write a little story, but it isn't a sprawling one either. It sits somewhere in between. She also says that "every sentence in this book was rewritten between two and 40 times."

What the Critics and My Book Club Said

The reviews have been admiring but divided. Kirkus called it "brilliant, affecting work", Leigh Haber in the Boston Globe "sublime and sensual", and Jeff Giles in the New York Times "imperfect but deeply wrenching". Where critics agree is the pacing: the Guardian found it "slower to get going", and the Irish Times said it "drags in the middle". Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal thought the Dickensian catastrophes clash with the subtler psychology, but decided "the mismatch is intentional": like a partita, it's built from clashing parts. Heather Scott Partington in the LA Times read it as "Kingsolver on Kingsolver", even a rewriting of her earlier "Animal Dreams". It's easy to merge Livia with her author, who once won a piano scholarship herself and has spoken to NPR about her inherited Dupuytren's contracture, whose "goal… is to make your hands into fists". But Kingsolver is clear: "fundamentally, I am not Livia."

My book club was split too, and I think that says something interesting about the book itself. Several members loved it, especially the music and its perspective on the wisdom that comes with age, quoting Charlie's "I like being old. It's a blessing." Others felt very mixed, taking issue with the early relationship between Livia and Sigurd and the tragedies piled on top of Livia, while a few didn't connect with it at all. The surprising finding was that loving classical music didn't guarantee loving the novel, and having no musical background didn't stop people enjoying it. One member who used to play the piano described reading it as a homecoming. When I asked which Kingsolver novel was everyone's favourite, most people answered "The Poisonwood Bible", which I agree is fantastic and would like to reread, as I read it quite early in my life.

Verdict

I didn't love "Partita" quite as much as "Demon Copperhead", but I appreciate that Kingsolver deliberately set out to write a different kind of book, as any great writer should, rather than writing the same novel again. The way she has woven music into its structure and its heroine's inner life is inspiring, and many of her most important themes are here too: class, Appalachia, health care that fails working-class people, and gay characters at the heart of the story. It's a smaller and more personal novel, and in its quieter way a very moving one.

The novel opens with an epigraph from Toni Morrison: "Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt." Livia's own answer is in her definition of a partita, where the parts are all different and the artist's work is to make them add up to something that feels whole. I expect "Partita" to be nominated for prizes such as the Women's Prize, though I don't expect it to win. Beyond the story itself, I loved how it sent me back to music, and it might finally get me sitting down at that piano. If you've read it, did you listen along with the Listening List, and did it change your experience of the story? And what's your favourite Kingsolver novel? I'd love to hear.

Alexander: God, King, Man by Edmund Richardson

First Impressions

It feels startling that someone who died just short of his thirty-third birthday could have changed the world so completely, and yet that's the dizzying reality at the heart of Edmund Richardson's "Alexander: God, King, Man". This is such a compellingly told, imaginatively constructed and richly researched account of Alexander the Great, and it's no surprise to me that it has just won this year's Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. It's the first book about ancient history ever to take the £50,000 award, beating a strong shortlist that included Patrick Radden Keefe's "London Falling", and the chair of judges, Kirsty Lang, praised how it "reads like a novel". It's so immersive how Richardson reimagines the bloody moments of war, the dramatic political conflicts and the transformation of Alexander's sense of self as he battles across the world through years of relentless conquest. Early on, he notes that almost 1 per cent of the world's population would die as a direct result of Alexander's campaign, and that sobering fact hangs over everything that follows.

From Penniless Prince to Living God

What I found most amazing is the sheer scale of Alexander's journey. When his father Philip II is assassinated, Alexander inherits a tumbledown kingdom, an empty treasury and millions of drachmas of debt his father had secretly run up. He is twenty years old, and few people have thought much about him at all. Within weeks of his first victory in Asia, he captures the treasury at Sardis and, as Richardson puts it, "the penniless young king was suddenly 'richer than Croesus'". By the end he has plundered the fabulous wealth of Susa and Persepolis, been crowned pharaoh in Egypt, made the gruelling trek across the desert to the oracle at Siwa, and come to be hailed as the son of a god. Richardson charts this not just as a series of conquests but as a psychological journey, and I found it fascinating to follow how the role he plays for others gradually becomes the person he believes he is.

The Company He Kept

I appreciated how the book shows that Alexander must have been highly intelligent. As a teenager he was tutored by Aristotle in an idyllic sanctuary in Mieza, learning to question who he was and to look for order behind chaos. Later, he kept a copy of "The Iliad" annotated by Aristotle in a jewelled box taken from Darius's baggage. But Alexander's victories also rested on the expertise of the people around him. There were veteran generals like Parmenio, and above all there was Diades, an engineer from Philip's specialist siege division. When Alexander is humiliated before the island city of Tyre, it's Diades who notices how shallow the seabed is and builds an enormous causeway out to the city, while the Tyrians row out in pleasure-boats to jeer at the soldiers hauling rocks. It emphasises how a smart leader will surround himself with smart people. That makes it all the more tragic to see what happens to those people later on.

"Get Out of My Sun": Diogenes

I was especially interested in how Diogenes figures in the story, because I'd only recently met him, in canine form, in Chloe Aridjis's novel "The Shadow of the Object". There, the family dog that bites Flora at the start of the novel is named Diogenes, a nod to the founder of Cynicism, who was nicknamed "the dog". Richardson's Diogenes is every bit as gloriously rude as his reputation. He lives in a wine jar, calls Plato "a waste of time", and responds to Plato's definition of man as a featherless biped by plucking a chicken and setting it loose in his lecture room. When the newly crowned Alexander comes across him in Corinth and asks what he can do for him, Diogenes snaps, "You can get out of my sun." Rather than being offended, Alexander is delighted by a man who seems to want nothing and care about no one, and he leaves insisting that if he were not Alexander, he would want to be Diogenes. Diogenes's influence also travels with the army. Onesicritus, the philosopher who travelled with the army and later wrote about Alexander, had studied with him, which leaves him poorly prepared for the even greater scorn of the naked holy men he meets in India, and Richardson quotes Diogenes explaining his nickname with "I bite people who deserve it". That's exactly the reading of the dog's bite that opens Aridjis's novel, a bite that strips away illusions. I loved this unexpected echo between the two books. There's something wonderfully pointed about the most powerful young man in the world being told to stop casting a shadow, by a philosopher who, famously, wandered Athens with a lamp in search of an honest man. That's a search Alexander's court of flatterers would have made very difficult indeed.

Myth, Then the Truth Underneath

It's so clever how Richardson presents this history, because he is constantly disentangling the true history from the myths. Sometimes he presents the legend first so that I could feel the full wonder of it, then pulls back to show what can really be known. The Gordian Knot is a perfect example. He builds the scene of Alexander straining with the hidden loops of cord while the crowd grows anxious, until he finally draws his sword and slashes through it. Then Richardson points out that there's no record of the wagon, the knot or the prophecy before Alexander arrived in the city, so the whole legend appears to have been cooked up to inspire his men. He also captures the excitement of archaeological discovery. This ranges from Manolis Andronikos's sensational 1977 excavation of the royal tombs at Aigai, and the doubts that later cracked his neat conclusions, to the remains of Greek mercenaries uncovered near the Granicus battlefield in 2024. He even uses computer code and satellite elevation data to hunt for the lost mountain fortress of Aornos.

A Hero Built from Homer

It's also so engaging how Richardson builds a sense of Alexander's ego and ambition. Alexander modelled himself on Achilles. At Troy, he and Hephaestion run naked around the tombs said to belong to Achilles and Patroclus, and he takes ancient armour from a temple there to carry into battle. By aligning himself with a mythological figure, he went on to build a myth of himself. Through his conquests and the stories that proliferated around him, Alexander became something like one of the world's first superstars, and his story has since been retold by everyone from Roman politicians to Ethiopian monks and Icelandic bards. There's real poignancy in the moment Alexander remembers telling Hephaestion that Achilles was fortunate to have the man he loved at his side and Homer to tell his story, by which point Alexander has lost both his beloved friend and his historian.

The Horror of War

I was also horrified by the terrifying violence Richardson describes. During the siege of Tyre, the Tyrians heat sand in giant bronze cauldrons until it glows, then catapult it onto Alexander's soldiers. It slips beneath their armour and sears their skin while they scream "like men being tortured". The same defenders hurl red-hot lumps of metal into the packed ranks and use giant nets to snatch men off the ground and dash them against the rocks. Alexander's own cruelty can be even worse. After the long siege of Gaza, he has its defiant commander Batis tied to the back of his chariot by the ankles and dragged around the city walls while still alive, in a savage imitation of Achilles dragging Hector's corpse. It's remarkable that Alexander survived as long as he did, given how often he fought at the front: his helmet was split by an axe at the Granicus, he was slashed across the thigh at Issus, and he was left with a wound at Gaza that stubbornly refused to heal.

I also found it compelling how Richardson draws on modern science to better understand Alexander's time. He describes how agent-based models, often used to predict the spread of disease, can recreate the army's march through the Gedrosian desert soldier by soldier and mule by mule. The simulation suggests the army's condition was even worse than the ancient sources let on: once the baggage animals began to die, mass casualties among the soldiers became almost inevitable. On top of that, a flash flood tore through the army's camp one night, sweeping away families, supplies and nearly every remaining animal. Richardson also brings in modern studies of how years of uninterrupted danger change the way soldiers' brains process threat. This makes the soldiers' exhaustion, rage and breakdowns feel painfully real. As he puts it, "at the end of their campaign, the soldiers could find no rest and no peace." One scene stayed with me in particular. Before setting off for India, Alexander gathers the army's hundreds of overloaded wagons and sets fire to his own plunder, then orders his men to burn theirs. Richardson points out that this was partly theatre, staged for visiting envoys, and that the real treasure was safe a thousand miles away in Susa. But the image of soldiers torching the spoils of three years of fighting, simply because they couldn't carry them any further, gave me a melancholy sense of the fruitlessness of war. What was all this for?

The Tyrant

The tyranny of Alexander is also extremely disturbing. After crushing the revolt at Thebes, he has the city razed and every surviving Theban sold to slave-traders. That was tens of thousands of his fellow Greeks, sold in a campaign supposedly fought for Greek freedom, and the proceeds bought him enough money to keep Macedon afloat for a few more weeks. Civilians are slaughtered in Tyre, Gaza and Persepolis. As he becomes paranoid about assassination attempts and coups, he turns on his own circle. Philotas, commander of the Companions, is tortured until he confesses; as Richardson chillingly notes, "Most Greek armies did not travel with torturers, but Alexander's did." Disturbingly, it's Hephaestion, Alexander's dearest friend, who stands over Philotas while the torturers work, and from then on he becomes the king's feared enforcer. Philotas's father Parmenio is then murdered, Alexander runs his old friend Cleitus through with a spear in a drunken rage, and the historian Callisthenes is executed after a conspiracy among the royal pages. It emphasises how power will always corrupt, especially when that power becomes as enormous and all-consuming as what Alexander was able to seize. It also shows how someone so powerful and tyrannical becomes surrounded by people who only agree with him. When the courtier Anaxarchus argues that it's time to acknowledge Alexander as a god, it's Callisthenes, the one man who refuses to play along, who ends up paying with his life. Yet for all this terror, Alexander couldn't keep a grip on the vast empire he'd accumulated. His men mutinied when he tried to push them further into India, and when his treasurer Harpalus heard Alexander had survived the desert, he panicked and fled with thousands of mercenaries and a fortune from Babylon's treasury. Perhaps the most grimly absurd episode comes beside the ruins of Persepolis. After the funeral of the Indian sage Kalyana, Alexander orders a drinking contest in which his soldiers drink undiluted wine through the day and into the night. The winner, Promachus, downs over twenty-three pints, is carried out wearing his golden crown and dies three days later, and forty-one more contestants die in the days that follow. It reminded me uncomfortably of the toxic masculinity contests that still get reported in some workplaces today.

Losing Hephaestion

The death of Hephaestion, and Alexander's mourning, is movingly described. In Ecbatana, Hephaestion falls ill with a fever and is told to rest and eat gruel, but he gets out of bed and devours a whole chicken and an enormous jug of wine. He's dead before Alexander can reach him. Alexander lies on his friend's body all day and all night, then curls up on the floor for days, refusing food. He rouses himself only to have Hephaestion's doctor impaled. He commissions a funeral pyre in Babylon that towers 200 feet high and is laden with gold, and he cuts off his hair and places it in Hephaestion's hand, just as Achilles did for Patroclus. It's striking to see this vulnerable side of a man who otherwise seems so tough, mentally and physically, after all the wounds he's sustained in battle. I couldn't help wondering whether his grief was also partly about facing his own mortality and limits. Richardson seems to hint at this when he sets Alexander's mourning beside Gilgamesh's lament for his beloved Enkidu: "Now, because of him, my brother, / I fear death." Alexander himself would be dead within a year.

Lovers, Sources and a Few Questions

My curiosity was sparked by Alexander's many lovers, both male and female. There's Hephaestion, the friend he loved most and with whom he cast himself as Achilles to Patroclus. There's Barsine, who grew up at Philip's court and later bore Alexander's son Heracles. There's Roxane, the Sogdian aristocrat captured at a mountain fortress, and Bagoas, the young Persian who had been Darius's lover before he was Alexander's. Richardson gives these relationships, and especially the women, a lot more space than they usually get. But I did wonder at points what his sources were for some of his interpretations. He states plainly that Alexander "had a lot of sex with a lot of people, both men and women", and he frequently takes us inside Alexander's head on the eve of battle. How much of this story is built on fact, and how much has been inferred or fictionalised? In his note on sources, Richardson explains that he has followed the ancient sources "as closely as possible, while occasionally adding context". He also acknowledges that every surviving ancient history was written centuries after Alexander's death, and that "there will never be a definitive Alexander". Some critics have argued that he should flag his more speculative leaps more clearly in the text itself. I think this is a fair point, and it's something to bear in mind when the storytelling is this seductive.

Verdict

Overall I was highly entertained by this book. It reads with the momentum of a novel while being stuffed with fascinating details, from Babylonian astronomers watching the stars to the newly translated letters of a Persian governor fretting over rations and boat repairs. It feels startling that Alexander was a man so young who accomplished so much in his short lifetime. And it's sobering to see how much of what he built crumbled so quickly, while the connections he forged between east and west endured. The judges called it a "love letter to the humanities" at a time when those subjects are facing funding cuts, and I think that's exactly right: it's a thrilling reminder of how much ancient history still has to tell us about power, ambition and grief. It's a very deserving winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize. If you've read it, or know of other books about Alexander worth reading I’d be delighted to hear about that.

Switzy by Emma Cline

First Impressions

When I was a teenager my father handed me the telephone and told me to speak to my grandfather. I started talking and realised fairly quickly that my grandfather had no idea who he was speaking to. I kept chatting anyway, describing whatever I could think of about my life at the time, hoping something would catch, and eventually my grandmother took the receiver and told me gently that he was just confused but that he loved me very much. I understood that and didn’t blame anyone involved. But, more than thirty years later, I can still feel exactly how awkward those few minutes were.

I thought about that phone call constantly while reading “Switzy”, because Emma Cline’s third novel does something I’verarely encountered before: it puts us inside the grandfather. Novels about dementia are almost always narrated from beside the illness rather than from within it, by a daughter or a husband or a carer, somebody holding the memory on the sufferer’s behalf. That’s understandable, since those are the people left able to tell us anything. Cline does the considerably harder thing and locks us inside the mind that is going, then keeps us there for the book’s full length without relieving us of it once.

A Final Journey

David Hastings is a retired chief financial officer in his seventies. The word Alzheimer’s never appears in these pages, though we’re left in no doubt about what is happening to him. As the novel opens he’s aboard a borrowed private jet travelling from America to Zurich, where he has arranged to end his life at a clinic before his decline reaches the point at which he could no longer consent to it. He’s accompanied by Cody, his assistant, who has arranged every element of the journey. They stop in London so that David can see his adult daughter Rebecca and his grandson, neither of whom knows why he has come, and they detour into France so that he can see Tom, the boarding school roommate he betrayed sixty years earlier.

The title comes from the word David’s former boss used for the boozy business trips they’d take to Switzerland, and I love that the novel opens inside a memory of one of those trips without telling us where we are. It’s only several pages later that we learn the city is Zurich, and that he has “only ever been there on business”. The work trip and the death trip turn out to be the same errand.

The Shape of a Vanishing Mind

The tragedy of this novel is structural as much as emotional, because the more thoroughly we come to know David the less of himself he retains. We gain him at precisely the rate at which he’s losing himself, and somewhere around the middle those two lines cross.

Cline lays out her method on the very first page. David plays solitaire on his phone and thinks of it as “chaos that resolved itself into order and then back into chaos, in need of order, future order”, which is what he spends the entire book attempting. The prose then enacts it. The novel is built from short blocks of thought divided by white space, so the connective tissue that would ordinarily carry us from one moment to the next has simply been taken out and we’re left to leap the gaps ourselves.

Certain phrases keep surfacing because they’re among the few things he can still produce whole: songs from “The Sound of Music”, a mnemonic for the fates of Henry VIII’s wives, a memory of “Planet of the Apes” which turns out to be a rather perfect metaphor for a man arriving somewhere disorientating that was his home all along. The one that undid me is “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, which recurs through the opening pages and then again much later. It’s a sentence whose only purpose is to contain every letter of the alphabet, surfacing in a mind that is losing them.

Copying, Not Knowing

Alongside this, Cline is quietly interrogating the difference between knowing something and merely remembering it. David recalls being struck at boarding school by how much seeing a boy’s parents could explain about him, as though it unlocked a personality that had previously seemed obscure. Later, at his daughter’s house, he describes the method he once used to learn songs on the piano by putting coloured star stickers on the keys, and Rebecca points out that this isn’t learning at all, it’s copying.

Which is exactly what he now does in conversation. So much of what passes between people turns out to be gesture and rhythm rather than content, and David has worked out that he can copy the reactions without following the exchange. It’s excruciating when his guess fails to match the conversation actually taking place, and it made me wonder how much of anybody’s behaviour is habit rather than anything formed out of what we can genuinely recall. “I no longer desire my desires”, he thinks at one point, as though pleasure has become unreachable for want of any context to put it in.

All of which brings me back to that phone call. There’s a scene where David goes into his grandson’s bedroom wanting a connection he no longer knows how to make, and we can see from the boy’s hesitancy that he has no idea what’s expected of him. I’ve carried my side of that experience around for decades. To be handed the other side of it, from within the grandfather’s consciousness, gave me an entirely different understanding of an afternoon I thought I’d finished thinking about.

The Scene in the Car

The strand that generates the novel’s tension is David’s memory of Tom and the guilt attached to it. The two were close at school, there was an attraction between them that was never fully acted upon, and David stood by while other boys subjected Tom to something cruel. Across sixty years this has grown into the defining shame of his life.

The reunion, when it finally comes, was almost too painful for me to read. The two men sit in a parked car because David isn’t invited into the house, he’s been allotted fifteen minutes, and because we’re so thoroughly inside his perspective we feel how desperately he wants to convey something and how little of it reaches Tom, who seems entirely oblivious to the context. Tom appears to carry no corresponding store of resentment, or at least none we’re permitted to see. It raises the possibility that the guilt we hold about our oldest relationships has accumulated entirely inside us rather than existing anywhere out in the world, which I found genuinely unsettling to sit with.

I went back to what I wrote about “The Girls” ten years ago and found more continuity than the premises would suggest. What I responded to in that debut was Cline’s understanding of how a vulnerable person can be persuaded into discarding their own morality in exchange for being accepted by people they want to be close to, which is precisely what the teenage David does in that dormitory. She has changed the age and the sex of her protagonist and kept the wound.

Cody, and a Reviewer’s Mistake

The relationship I found most compelling is the one with Cody, and it’s also where the novel’s method is most thoroughly demonstrated. As David’s disorientation grows so does his paranoia, and Cody is repeatedly accused of losing things, of making mistakes, even of stealing from him. Rather than contradict any of it, Cody agrees, which is recognised practice in dementia care since correcting somebody in this condition tends only to produce further agitation. The novel gives us what we need to see that the accusations are false — David leaves his phone at his daughter’s house and then blames Cody, who never set foot inside it.

What makes this so painful is that the care is genuine and the cost of providing it is considerable. Cody has to diminish himself continuously, papering over his own needs in order to give David what he requires. I wondered too whether some part of David’s hostility is born of resentment, since Cody is young, professionally capable and openly in a relationship with another man, which is to say that he’s living the life David never permitted himself. We get only fragments of Cody because David is the sole lens available, and I don’t think the book would work if Cline had relaxed that restriction for even a moment.

So completely does she convince us of David’s perspective that it’s possible to finish this novel holding his conclusions as though they were facts. A reviewer in the Boston Globe stated flatly that Cody has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from his employer, which never happens. I don’t point this out to criticise the reviewer, because the error strikes me as the greatest compliment anybody has paid the book. It has to be read in the gaps as well as on the lines, and what can be deduced from those blank spaces is frequently at odds with what David believes.

Cline makes the same demand at the very end, and I had to reread it before I noticed. The close third person we’ve inhabited throughout gives way to the second person and then, in the final sentence, to the first. David claims an “I” the novel has withheld from him for its entire length, and he claims it only at the very end. That last line also reaches back to the encounter with Tom, where the same words appear in the parked car and are either thought or said aloud without ever being received.

Verdict

“Switzy” was longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and I think it ought to have made the shortlist. It’s a difficult book, though not in its sentences, which are precise and often very funny. The difficulty lies in what it asks us to contemplate about memory, mortality and the letting go of everything a life accumulates, which all of us and everyone we love will eventually have to do. It’s a striking and deeply moving novel, and if you’ve read it I’d love to know how it affected you.

What Am I, A Deer? by Polly Barton

First Impressions

Most of us have, at some point, built an entire inner life around someone we barely know. Maybe it was a stranger glimpsed on the same commute every morning, or a person whose few words to us we replayed until they carried enormous weight. These fixations can feel embarrassing to admit, but they say so much about what we're lacking and what we long for. "What Am I, A Deer?" by Polly Barton is a slender novel that takes this very ordinary experience and turns it into something surprisingly moving and extremely thoughtful. I didn't expect a book this short to affect me so much, but it captures beautifully what it feels like to live a modern life: the work of breaking through our own insecurities and awkwardness to reach for some form of authenticity and true connection.

Tram Rides and the Umbrella Man

On the surface, the story is fairly simple. A young woman moves to Frankfurt to translate Japanese for a famous gaming company, despite having little interest in games. She's set on a kind of reinvention, but she finds herself caught in the familiar clutches of tedium and self-loathing on her morning commute. Then a nice-eyed stranger returns the umbrella she left behind on the tram, and she's catapulted into a year-long obsession with him. The novel calls him simply "umbrella man", and elsewhere the term "John King" stands in for any form of idealised man. These names are generic on purpose. What matters is less the man himself than the space he fills in her imagination.

So while this is partly a romance, a longing for an unobtainable crush, it's about much more than the messiness of sex and relationships. The novel ponders how our desires, whether professional, personal or romantic, become inextricably linked with wanting to fill the empty parts of our inner lives. I found this so perceptive. There's a real honesty in how the narrator recognises that what she craves isn't really this particular man, but a feeling of being fully present and alive that he seems to promise.

Karaoke as a Way of Being

I love that the novel begins with a memory of the narrator as a child wanting to become Celine Dion, performing a cappella in front of her classmates. It's such a tender scene because it captures that childhood urge to step fully into a bigger, braver version of yourself, however mortifying it might look to everyone else. (It also sent me down a rabbit hole of listening to Celine Dion songs.) This memory leads into how karaoke comes to represent an expression of her inner being as an adult. In dark, sweaty karaoke booths, her longings merge with the lyrics of emotionally charged songs, from Mis-Teeq's "Scandalous" to Fiona Apple's "I Want You to Love Me".

I really liked the way lyrics are interspersed through the story to round off the main character's feelings. Rather than feeling like a gimmick, this felt true to how many of us actually experience music: a song can articulate an emotion we're unable or unwilling to say aloud ourselves. Karaoke becomes a strangely poignant form of self-expression here, and a kind of solace that's both ecstatic and a little desperate.

Playing with Form

It's so sly how the opening section moves from the second person into the third person, which carries the bulk of the narrative. It happens so smoothly that the reader is drawn into the character's perspective before we fully notice the shift, and it subtly plays with the distance between the narrator and herself. As one of the judges of this year's Goldsmiths Prize, Francis Spufford, remarked, sometimes the frontier for innovation in the novel is an interior one. Barton finds a flowing, intricate and almost obsessive language for consciousness that extends the great modernist experiments in charting minds in motion.

The novel's title comes from Isabella Rossellini's series of "Green Porno" and "Seduce Me" videos about sex in the animal kingdom, and I enjoyed how Rossellini's quirky reflections are integrated into the story. The book opens with an epigraph from Catherine Lacey's "Biography of X", a novel I loved, alongside a lyric from Mis-Teeq, which feels like the perfect signal for what follows. There's a playful blend of high culture and academic theory with pop culture throughout, and this mix captures something essential about modern life, where we move between the profound and the throwaway every day and often find meaning in the unlikeliest places.

From Translator to Novelist

You might well have come across Polly Barton's name before, as she's the acclaimed translator of many Japanese novels, including Asako Yuzuki's hugely popular "Butter" and Saou Ichikawa's "Hunchback", which I read and which was listed for the International Booker Prize. She has also published two works of non-fiction, "Fifty Sounds" and "Porn: An Oral History". It's fascinating to see her craft her own fiction, and the novel's protagonist, a translator navigating life in another country and language, feels charged with insights about what it means to move between cultures and selves. "What Am I, A Deer?" is her debut novel, and it has been shortlisted for the 2026 Goldsmiths Prize.

Verdict

This is a thoughtful, sly and funny book about breaking through awkwardness to reach something authentic. It renders the paradoxes of modern life with real complexity while remaining deeply tender towards its heroine and her yearning. Of all the books on this year's Goldsmiths Prize shortlist, it was the one that most surprised me with how moving I found it.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

Anxiety about the Present

Lately I've found myself overcome by a real sense of anxiety about the future, partly, I think, because I've reached a point of relative contentment in my life that makes me newly aware of how precarious everything actually is: how I might lose the people and things I love most, my husband, my family, all of it, and how uncertain the long-term security of my job and housing feels. I also worry about the larger state of the world and the future of the planet, and it all feels like the only real antidote is trying to live in the moment and be grateful for what you have, which is a genuinely hard thing to do.

I'll admit to a slightly ridiculous version of this anxiety too: as a reader, I worry about not having time to read all the books I want to read. Years ago I was on a flight reading Vestal McIntyre's wonderful novel "Lake Overturn" during a stretch of terrifying turbulence, and while everyone around me panicked, the thought running through my head was simply that I wouldn't get to finish the book if the plane went down. I've never actually been afraid of flying, since it feels so entirely out of my control that worrying about it seems pointless, but that moment stuck with me.

The Fourth Volume

All of which is a roundabout way into talking about the book I've just finished here: the fourth instalment of "On the Calculation of Volume", this great, ongoing epic still being published in parts, following Tara as she remains caught in a time loop on the 18th of November. What I find so poignant about this series isn't just the plot or its larger questions about time, but the fact that it's being published incrementally, so that reading it alongside my own life lets me notice how much I've changed since the first volume came out, and how much has stayed exactly the same. That structure makes the book's examination of how we inhabit and move through time feel more resonant, a reminder that worrying so much about the future can mean losing the present entirely, even while watching a character who relives the same day yet still changes in small, incremental ways.

Tara keeps a diary throughout, becoming steadily more aware of her own incremental change, and it made me wonder whether I'd actually be content reliving the same day forever, given how fundamental it is to life that things change, that we make choices we can't take back. She's also acutely conscious of using up the resources around her as she moves through the world, which felt like an apt parallel for the wider, collective anxiety so many of us carry about depleting the planet's resources while still having to go on living our lives.

A Growing Community

This volume shifts more toward a collective perspective. It's a bit of a spoiler for anyone who hasn't read the earlier books, but by this point Tara isn't alone: there's a whole group of people caught in the 18th of November, developing their own routines, their own culture, even their own language for inhabiting this state, setting themselves apart from everyone else living in normal, forward-moving time. Many of them wrestle with the sense that they must have done something to cause their own entrapment, even though nobody understands why any of this is happening and no one has any real control over it. I loved a line from a character named Olga, who says “The world is not a calm sea where all you have to do is refrain from rocking the boat... the world is a rocking boat, a ship in a storm, and when you’re capsized, that’s why. Because the world is a place that throws you overboard.” It struck me as such an honest way of thinking about life: that we can't fully control our own fates, and learning to live with that is the real task.

The novel is full of individual responses to this same situation: one character, dear to my heart, uses the time to finally read all the books she's always wanted to get to; others find unexpected love and want to stay; others are desperate to escape and rejoin the normal flow of time; another has a terminally ill relative and uses the repetition to savor time with them, caught in the impossible tension of never quite being able to let go. Tara finds a kind of contentment within this community while knowing it can't be sustained forever, that tensions will rise and people will come and go.

Identity, Individual and Collective

What I found most fascinating here is how the book treats identity: on our own we feel like distinct individuals, everything we do an expression of our own personality, but as part of a larger group we become something more like an amalgam, without a fully singular identity. It made me think about how much of who we are is actually shaped by the communities and relationships we're embedded in, and how even our own thoughts are often just other people's ideas recombined. It also brought to mind those moments of apparent coincidence, running into someone from an entirely different context, that turn out to have a fairly logical explanation once you consider how people who share interests or circumstances tend to end up in the same places. This volume's exploration of identity as something both individual and collective felt genuinely moving to sit with.

Beyond that, there's plenty of plot movement too, including the community starting to grow plants during their repeating day, and, like every book in this series, it ends on a real cliffhanger that has me eager for the next volume.

A Small Reservation, and a Ranking

I understand readers who find the series a bit gimmicky, both in its structure and in how it's being parceled out over time rather than published as one long book, and I do think there's a commercial logic to that. But I've also found real value in reading it exactly this way, unable to consume it all in one sitting, and in being able to look back at the different points in my own life when each volume came out. Ranking the series so far: book one is still my favorite, with books two and four close behind and extremely strong in their own right; book three I liked but felt it meandered a little more than the others.

Verdict

I loved reading this while I was on holiday in Scotland looking out at a gorgeous landscape. This volume's meditation on how we inhabit the present, how our identities form individually and collectively, and how we move through time landed with real force for me. If you've been reading this series, or are curious to start it, or have had a similar experience following any long-running series across years of your own life, I'd love to hear about it.

Attention-Seeking Behaviour by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo

First Impressions

I sometimes really enjoy reading weird books, for want of a better phrase: novels that use an unconventional structure, mix genres, and find a kind of truth that so-called conventional storytelling can't reach. I often find them exhilarating and fun, if also frustrating, and I won't pretend to understand everything about them. But they revitalise my excitement about literature, which is supposed to do something novel, something that hasn't been done before. I had that feeling with "Attention-Seeking Behaviour" by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo.

A Novel, a Memoir, and an Essay

The book blends novel, memoir and essayistic non-fiction, including accounts of the history of lie detection. For most of the book we follow an unnamed narrator, whose name we only learn near the end. She's a young woman who writes poetry, has run writing workshops, and drifts through various jobs to make a living. She dates quite a few men and enjoys frequent sexual encounters. Over time she has also formed a relationship with a man she calls Normal Ben, a steady influence in her life with whom she shares a dark sense of humour.

But she has confessed things to him that may or may not be true. Early in the book she tells him she came across a body in the city and reported it. That sets up a psychological investigation into how truthful she is in this relationship, and how meaningful the relationship can be if some of what she tells him about her own life isn't true. She seems to have wrestled with this her whole life: she's a compulsive liar and also a compulsive thief. She steals chewing gum from Sainsbury's every day, then pays for expensive ham she likes to snack on. She is also working for a woman she detests and looks down on, and she finds ways to weasel out of any substantial work.

The History of Lie Detection

The narrator goes off on tangents about the people who pioneered so-called scientific methods for reading expressions and judging whether someone is telling the truth. That supposed science has been put into practice by law enforcement and at border controls, where it so easily leads to racial profiling and to misreading people whose personalities simply express themselves differently. She also covers the history of lie detector machines, which are still used in police work even though they've been discredited and tell us very little. All the while she is interrogating herself about how honest she can be about her own experiences.

One of the notes I made while reading concerns an ugly parallel in the book: police interrogators asking women who report being raped whether they are seeking attention. It connects the novel's title to how institutions decide whom to believe, and it ties into a line I marked early on, that facts are often irrelevant when confronted with the force of belief.

Truth, Fiction, and Identity

The book looks at the border between truth and fiction in our personalities. At some point in our lives, we've all told a lie, some big and extreme, others small white lies. We fashion an identity through the information we withhold, relate or manipulate, and I found this fascinating to ponder. The narrator becomes an increasingly compelling character, though obviously not an entirely sympathetic one. I was often critical of her for lying to a man who is, by all accounts, a good partner for her. A long and loving relationship requires some honesty, even when it's uncomfortable, even if we've grown accustomed to strategising how we present ourselves to be accepted or to steer a situation.

I also marked a few moments that stuck with me. Ben wants to defend her but can't fully know her, because she isn't honest with him. He can tell when she's exaggerating or lying, but he overlooks it. At one point he says he sometimes feels she doesn't trust him to understand her, so she exaggerates stories about her life, but he forgives it, thinking she just needs him to listen. In another passage she lists details about her life and ends the paragraph by thinking that not all of these facts were true.

There are also frank descriptions of sex, and these seem to be the only fully honest moments in her life.

The Surreal Edge

I loved the surreal aspect of the story: she increasingly just notes in passing that bodies lie around her as she walks through the city, such as a body hanging from a tree. Is this real to her, or a knowing fabrication from her imagination, or something she has convinced herself of? When we start to tell lies, there can be a dangerous point where we start to believe them, and they become part of our personality. That's testing and scary to confront: how much of the narrative we've built for ourselves is based on the truth, and how much on how we want to present ourselves?

Verdict

The author Luke Kennard is a fan of this book too, and he praises it as a scathing self-critique that left him with an understanding of himself he'd almost rather not have. That feels apt. His novel "Black Bag" also investigates personality and identity from an unusual angle, asking how much of us is authentic and how much is presented to the world, so I liked that connection. For me, "Attention-Seeking Behaviour" is a compelling, unconventional book that gets at truth by refusing to behave like a conventional novel.

Whistler by Ann Patchett

The world has felt quite heavy lately, and I've come to treasure the kind of novel I can turn to for solace in such times. Not a slight or simplistic book, but a quiet one: contemplative and reflective, where nothing too dramatic or tragic occurs, yet which looks at identity, memory and relationships in a genuinely engaging way. Ann Patchett's tenth novel "Whistler" is a perfect example of this, and I read it recently as a great comfort. It's written in a way that feels so straightforward and relatable — the language and structure never overly complex — that I connected with it immediately. I also discussed it at length with my book club recently, where it divided readers more than I'd anticipated, and those conversations only deepened my appreciation of what Patchett is doing here.

The story follows Daphne Fuller, a teacher of fifty-three who is recognised at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, whom she hasn't seen in nearly forty-five years. Eddie was married to Daphne's mother Abigail for little more than a year, and the marriage ended abruptly after a car accident on a snowy road when Daphne was nine. What struck me, and what I think is the beating heart of the book, is the wonderful instant rapport the two of them rediscover — a connection that lets Patchett explore familial relationships and the question of what actually makes a parent in a really interesting way. Daphne has had three fathers across her life, and the novel is quietly insistent that the man who was present for barely a year might be the one whose heart was, as she puts it, forever stitched to hers.

Much of the pleasure lies in watching Daphne negotiate the tender and sometimes tricky relationships around her. She has a lovely, easy rapport with her sister Leda, a clinical psychologist who draws the buried story out of her, while her bond with her mother is more complex. I found Abigail especially well drawn: steely on the surface, unlucky in love across three very different marriages, yet someone I came to feel real sympathy for once I saw what she'd done in raising four children through difficult circumstances. As a counterpoint there's Daphne's marriage to Jonathan, an easy-going and mutually supportive partnership that still has its own small points of tension. The way Patchett handles all these evolving histories — who knew what, who's only learning it now — felt so recognisable and was, to my mind, beautifully done.

Structurally, the novel keeps circling back to that night in the overturned car, and we only gradually get the complete picture of how Eddie and Daphne survived. I loved the gentle tension this created; I kept wondering how they physically came through it. The crisis itself arises from Eddie's folly in switching off the headlights so the two of them could better see the stars, and I completely understood the impulse — one of the most transcendent experiences of my own life was being in a desert in the middle of the night beneath a canopy of sky so piercingly beautiful it hardly seemed real. It's there in the freezing car that Eddie tells Daphne the story of a woman named Mary Carter and her horse, Whistler, to distract her from their peril. The tale is sentimental, and I did wonder about the plausibility of it being something Eddie would later be so keen to see published, yet it carries real symbolic weight, threading survival, mortality and human connection through the whole book. The image of the horse recurs beautifully, too — in the granite carving at the Met, where Daphne sees "one horse and its ghost", and later in a toy horse Jonathan gives her.

That emphasis on stories told aloud is, for me, what elevates "Whistler" above mere comfort. A counterpoint to Mary's story comes when Daphne, sitting with Eddie through his treatment, tells him about the death of her biological father Buddy Zabriskie — a heartbreaking account, but also a beautiful way of honouring a largely absent parent in his final days and granting him a lifelong wish. (It's Buddy, after all, whose box of emergency provisions kept the two of them alive in the car all those years before.) I found it genuinely moving how these oral tales demonstrate the solace and reflection that storytelling can offer, especially in moments of crisis and heartache. And as a reader I confess to a geeky delight in how much the novel revels in a love of books: the woman at the party who prides herself on having read everything while Daphne tries to name novels she might have missed; the house full of unread Philip Roth that Daphne keeps meaning to begin; Eddie's small apartment lovingly crammed with books. It's an unabashed pleasure to spend time with characters who love reading as much as I do.

(Some spoilers follow in this paragraph.) What I found most quietly affecting was the gradual unfolding of Eddie's homosexuality and the complicated dynamics of his relationships. It felt entirely believable that he and Abigail would enter into a marriage naively trusting it would be enough, only to realise it wasn't — no malice in it, just varying degrees of self-deception, and a love that remained real even though it was never romantic. That it's all reflected upon in retrospect by both of them, while coming as new information to Daphne and Leda, makes it the more poignant (and I loved the touch of Leda's son clocking Eddie's sexuality long before the sisters did). Harder to parse is Eddie's lasting devotion to Skip, who, when we meet him in old age, seems rather distasteful. But I think the Eddie/Skip/Polly arrangement is finally unknowable to us, because we haven't lived everything these people have. This is a very different book from something like Patrick Ryan's "Buckeye", which shows us the formation of a marriage between a gay man and a straight woman from the inside; here the context and compromise sit mostly off the page. Patchett seems to be arguing for a degree of grace when we look at other people's lives — their relationships evidently work well enough for them, in their different ways, and it's all too easy to judge in hindsight.

As with "Tom Lake", I can see exactly why some readers grow impatient with a tale of relatively comfortable, you might say privileged, lives where little appears to be at stake — that was certainly the fault line in my book club, and it echoes the sharper critics who've found the book too neat or too nice. But I don't think the low stakes mean there's no drama. The drama is simply internal and interpersonal: the tensions playing out between characters, and Daphne's private reckoning with her past. For me that's precisely the territory I love in a quiet novel, and I'd place "Whistler" in the company of books like Anne Tyler's "Ladder of Years", Colm Tóibín's "Nora Webster" and Rónán Hession's "Leonard and Hungry Paul" — stories that cherish the aspects of life fiction too rarely values.

So much of this novel is tender, funny and hopeful, full of moments of true connection that I found simply beautiful. I'm glad Patchett has carved out this space in literature for calm, reflective, big-hearted fiction rather than reaching for high drama. "The Dutch House" remains my favourite of her books, but I'll gladly read anything she publishes, and I'll go on enjoying those video recommendations she shares from Parnassus Books. If you've read "Whistler", I'd love to know where you landed on it — did you buy wholeheartedly into Daphne and Eddie's connection, and did its quiet, low-plot structure feel confident or slack to you?

In One Brief Moment All Eternity by Elif Shafak

I need to begin with a caution I don’t usually give: Elif Shafak’s engrossing new novel spoils the ending of “Madame Bovary” in its opening pages. Many readers have asked whether they should read Flaubert’s classic first, and if you want its ending kept intact, the answer is yes. That said, I don’t think it’s essential. Shafak has said she wanted readers unfamiliar with Flaubert or the 19th century to connect with the story, and I saw one Goodreads reader who had never read “Madame Bovary” name this among her favourite books of the year. Having read Flaubert’s novel twice myself, I found it heightened my appreciation. The book opens with Emma Bovary speaking back to her creator and puts him on trial for the way he portrayed her. Much of what follows plays on that porous boundary between the creator and the created, and on where imagination lies in between.

The novel spans the whole of Flaubert’s life, from a childhood in a Rouen household that was part home, part hospital, part morgue, to his death at Croisset in 1880. He became a writer in defiance of parents who wanted him to be a doctor, then a lawyer, and he was branded the “family idiot” even though he went on to become one of France’s greatest novelists. His life is told in close third person across five life stages, each chapter named after a colour and an object. Interspersed with it are thirty sections in the voices of women, some human, some not, some living, some dead. They include Eleanor Marx, the first to translate “Madame Bovary” into English, George Sand, an Egyptian belly dancer whom biographies treat as a footnote, and, in typical Shafak fashion, the city of Istanbul, syphilis and even a camel. These voices question Gustave’s judgement and memories while forming a web of surprising connections. All of them are caught up in an age of political upheaval and face the social pressures of the time differently. The bird on the gorgeous cover of this novel is the Simurgh of Attar’s “The Conference of the Birds”, the poem that gives the novel its title. It’s also the vision Gustave sees during his epileptic fits, and it holds a secret that only becomes clear at the end.

What moved me most was the portrayal of Gustave himself, especially as a lonely, bookish child. Shafak has described this as a book about loneliness and otherness, and she has spoken of being a lonely child who found companions in books. It’s funny how young Gustave feels so connected to his father’s library that he literally starts consuming the books. The tender bond with his nursemaid Julie, whose fabulous tales spark his imagination, is a reminder of how much children need to be told stories. Shafak depicts him as a synaesthete who can taste words. Some critics have speculated about this, though it has never been proven. It recalls Arthur in “There Are Rivers in the Sky”, and it ties in with the colours that frame the novel. His perceptions are also shaped by his epilepsy and later by syphilis, and Shafak notes the period’s misconceptions that blamed epilepsy on the mother or on too much masturbation. Gustave’s fantastical sensibility, mirrored in his early reading of “Don Quixote”, blends imagination with reality. I loved the description of him wanting to be a literary lizard, warming himself all day in the sun of inspiration, which sits nicely beside his painfully slow way of writing. Above all, he is an empathetic, romantic spirit who stops to ask downtrodden people about their lives, and their stories gradually feed into the creation of Emma Bovary. As Shafak writes, “Nothing human can ever be alien to literature.”

Shafak also explores the blurred lines of gender, a recurring theme in her work and no doubt one reason Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” is among her inspirations. A tutor presents as a man in order to move through the world and achieve professional success. In a wonderful childhood scene, Gustave and his sister swap clothes to feel what it’s like to inhabit another gender, something he later carries into slipping into the skin of Emma Bovary. There are terrifying sections too, set during revolution and mass starvation, which show how turmoil can drive mobs to act out their fears on outsiders and scapegoats. Gustave witnesses the execution of a woman wrongly convicted of murder. “Is there anything more dangerous than certainty born of ignorance?” Shafak asks, which recalls the “Malady of Certainty” in her “Three Daughters of Eve”. The novel also considers how writers take revenge: “not with punches or swords but with words.” That idea runs from Emma’s opening tirade to Shafak’s own experience of being put on trial in Turkey for words her fictional characters spoke.

Where the novel falters for me is in some of the narrative voices. I understand that giving a voice to a city or a disease extends empathy beyond the confines of human consciousness, much as the fig tree did in “The Island of Missing Trees”. But some of these sections felt too laden with research, as if a writer had gathered a mass of details and packed them into a narrative, and they took me out of the story. Some critics have noted that the voices sound too similar. (Spoilers follow.) The ending offers one answer to this: Emma returns to reveal that Gustave himself wrote all thirty voices, and in Persian si-murgh means “thirty birds”. It’s a clever and artful turn that answers Emma’s opening complaint that writers betray their characters, since Gustave became each of them and turned imagination into an act of empathy. You could also see it as a fault. A novel whose premise is to decentre the male genius ends by recentring him as the author of it all, though of course Shafak wrote everything. For me, the reveal didn’t change my sense that some voices felt manufactured rather than convincing.

None of this detracted from my enjoyment, or from the novel’s insistence that without stories we’d each be much lonelier, and that solitude, as distinct from loneliness, can be a source of strength. As Shafak put it in an interview with Prospect, “I never believe fiction is a luxury—I believe it’s existential,” and in a time of so much conflict that feels especially true. Perhaps this novel isn’t as great as “There Are Rivers in the Sky”, and how much you connect with it may depend on your tolerance for her whimsy. But it’s a wonderful meditation on artistic creation and the lives of outsiders. It also does what all great literature should and sent me looking for more. I’m keen to read Eleanor Marx’s translation of “Madame Bovary” and Lydia Davis’s from 2010, having only read Alan Russell’s, as well as “Salammbô”, which Mircea Cărtărescu cited as a major influence when I interviewed him. I’d be delighted to hear what you think of Shafak’s most recent novel and whether you read “Madame Bovary” before starting it.

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

First Impressions

This is an immersive epic which I grew increasingly emotionally and intellectually involved with as it went on. When I finally closed the book I looked up and realised I'd been so lost in it that I'd lost track of everything around me. I also realised it was an incredibly rainy day in London, with rain streaming down the window, which tied in perfectly with the novel's central theme as water is at the heart of it.

Tributaries Becoming a River

What I find extraordinary about this novel is how Shafak takes characters who seem quite different from one another, living in very different places and periods, and gradually brings their stories together in a deeply touching way. They begin to fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle or, more fittingly given the theme, like tributaries and bodies of water that slowly join to form one flowing river. I won't give away any spoilers, but I can sketch out the main threads.

The novel opens in Mesopotamia in the seventh century BC with Ashurbanipal, a despotic leader and military commander who was also an intellectual. He amassed a great library of clay tablets, many taken from other cultures and countries, and it's from tablets in that library that we know the "Epic of Gilgamesh." That ancient tale runs through the whole novel, and it feels miraculous that it survived at all, given how many transformations it went through along the way.

In Victorian London we meet Arthur, born into extreme poverty to a mother who scavenged valuables from the city's wastewater, and nicknamed "King Arthur" by the other scavengers. He feels like a Dickensian character, rising from humble beginnings to an intellectual career thanks to an extraordinary memory that lets him recall the distant past in precise, picture-perfect detail. He's also a synaesthete, experiencing tastes and smells when he sees words. These gifts are a double-edged sword: they open doors for him, but they also make him an outsider and an object of curiosity. It's fitting that Charles Dickens himself makes a brief appearance in a couple of scenes, while looking for a new publisher, which is a fun touch.

The next thread follows Narin, a Yazidi girl who is about to be baptised on the banks of the Tigris in 2014, while her family and culture face growing pressure and real danger from military and political forces and the prejudice against them. And in 2018 in London we follow Zaleekhah, a hydrologist who has left her husband after marital difficulties and is moving onto a houseboat on the Thames at Chelsea. She comes from a very privileged, wealthy family. As the novel moves between these very different characters, their stories gradually link up.

Outsiders Who See Clearly

What connects them is that each experiences a great deal of loneliness and isolation, and each has a special ability or intelligence. They are slight outsiders, and I think that's why they see more clearly what's happening around them and begin to question the larger society, in which people are exploited and displaced. The final main character is a drop of water itself. We follow it through the centuries, with a consciousness and a memory, in a book premised on the idea that water holds memory as it passes through its many transformations. Water is so essential to life yet so misunderstood.

Whimsy and Wonder

This is where readers may divide. Shafak walks a fine line between whimsy and absurdity, especially in her recent novels. "The Island of Missing Trees" is partly narrated by a fig tree and by an insect, and some readers feel that tips too far into absurdity. For me, and for others, it's whimsical and a wonderful way of thinking outside the boxes of identity and consciousness we normally work within. That's what I find so moving about Shafak's writing: a heartfelt humanity runs through all her books, along with real sympathy for outsiders and people who don't conform to standard ideas of how a person should live or identify.

I read her whimsy as a way of saying we don't have to be stuck inside a narrowly human consciousness. We can become so accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a human race that dominates and controls the planet, when there are many workings and mysteries we don't understand, outside the mainstream narrative, that steer our lives in unexpected and fantastic ways. The novel has a great sense of wonder, playfulness and humour. One example is the lamassu, the Mesopotamian sculptures with a human head and a lion's body, which also have five legs. Several of them, along with many of the tablets from this famed lost library, now sit in the British Library. I want to read more about that, and about how the "Epic of Gilgamesh" has been passed down across centuries, both orally and in writing.

Hidden Rivers and Serious Themes

Zaleekhah's storyline describes the hidden rivers beneath London and every major city. We think of London and the mighty Thames, but there were many other rivers, which have been built or paved over or repurposed, and it was fascinating to see a map of them. For all its whimsy and humour, the novel also takes on serious themes through water. There's a lot on climate change and pollution, and on how we imagine we control rivers when we don't. Humanitarian crises are so often about a lack of water, with people in disadvantaged areas dying of thirst, and as climate change continues, water will become a major issue for many nations.

The Yazidi genocide is also depicted in the story, which I found heart-wrenching and which made me want to learn more. The theft of cultural artefacts features too, both in the ancient Mesopotamian library and in the contemporary British Museum, whose holdings were taken from so many cultures and remain a hotly debated subject. And there's organ farming, in which very wealthy people who need a transplant bypass the medical system and buy organs from impoverished or displaced people.

I think Shafak mostly strikes a good balance, handling these subjects while keeping the reader involved in the characters' lives. I felt so close to them that what they gradually saw around them, I was seeing too as a reader: the larger things at stake for many people, and the ways we are implicated in systems that should be questioned more. We become complacent because we're born or work our way into certain circumstances, or inherit a cultural outlook that makes us assume this is simply how the world is, and only gradually do we realise how it disadvantages others and what more sinister things we are part of without noticing.

The Reading Experience

The novel contains multitudes of stories and holds them all in one big epic tale. If you find the drop of water's consciousness, or the multiple storylines, a bit disparate at first, trust me that they all come together, and I found it incredibly moving how they form a whole.

Coincidentally while reading the novel I went to the Yoko Ono retrospective at Tate Modern, which sits right on the Thames. Looking out at the rain falling on the river, I thought of the river in this novel. Ono is such a singular conceptual artist, and some of her pieces appear as written prompts on the wall for viewers to carry out or simply imagine. One I read asks you to imagine a drop of water falling on a stone and watch until it eventually drills a hole through it, which of course would take many, many years. It connects so beautifully with this book, as another way of thinking about consciousness and narrative. Imagine being a drop of water, passing through solid and gas, rising into the sky and falling back to earth, perhaps swallowed and ingested along the way. That expands your mind beyond the limits of a single human life.

Verdict

That approach will work for some readers and not for others, and I know people who take issue with Shafak's work in this way, which is entirely fair. For me it was very moving and a wonderful form of storytelling, and I loved how the novel drew me through so many tales, periods and places to form one whole narrative. If you've read it, or want to now, I'd love to hear what you think.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

First Impressions

This is a book that radically altered my perspective, and I think it's genuinely going to change how I inhabit the world going forward. I don't say that lightly. I read a lot of books, and this doesn't happen to me very often, but there is greatwisdom in this memoir. Even though it's a very specific, individual story, it carries such a real universal application that I'd recommend it to pretty much everyone. This is a memoir about this celebrated author's life and her very difficult relationship with her mother, Mary, over the decades. But it's also about so much more than that.

A Different Way of Reckoning with the Past

I think we often reach a certain point in life where we start looking back, both on the households we were raised in and the country we were raised in, and we interpret the limitations of those things as having permanently inhibited our ability to fully inhabit the world, as having damaged our emotional well-being to the point that we feel defeated by having originated under circumstances that involved neglect, abuse, discrimination, or corruption, whether within a family or within larger institutions. It's a very seductive frame of mind to take, essentially deciding that's why we can't fully live and be as happy as we want to be. But that isn't the perspective Arundhati Roy takes in this book, and I don't think it's one she arrived at easily or lightly over the course of her life.

The way she describes growing up with her mother, whom she mostly refers to formally as Mrs. Roy, there's a real distance in that naming itself. Her mother severely emotionally abused her throughout her childhood and was constantly putting her down. Roy recounts many of the things her mother said to her, including that she'd wanted an abortion when she was pregnant with her, that she actively hadn't wanted her. For so many people, hearing something like that from a parent would confirm a deep sense of being unwanted in the world, and it would understandably lower their self-esteem and their ability to participate in and enjoy life. But Roy has such a different way of holding it. She writes that her mother was both her shelter and her storm, and that these two ways of seeing her mother can coexist: appreciating her mother and the difficult circumstances she came from, while not denying or glossing over the fact that her mother treated her, and many people around her, abysmally, and still admiring her mother's genuine accomplishments.

Mrs. Roy's Extraordinary, Contradictory Life

What her mother did was, in its own way, extraordinary. She left her husband, who'd become an alcoholic, to raise her children alone, and she campaigned to overturn a prejudiced law in India that prevented daughters from inheriting their father's property, taking her own case all the way to a higher court. She also built a genuinely progressive school from nothing. So she achieved so much in her life, while also not being a traditionally nurturing parent, often antagonistic toward her children, making them feel like nothing. Roy understood this was simply who her mother was, and still loved her and remained an active part of her life, though there was also a long period of estrangement between them, no contact at all for a stretch of time. So many people have had to sever ties, either with a parent or with their own country, because of how they were treated by one or the other, and I think that parallel is really at the heart of this memoir.

From Family to Nation

The book moves in two halves. The first focuses on Roy's childhood and her relationship with her parents, up through the point where she writes her first novel, “The God of Small Things,” which became an international bestseller and won the Booker Prize, turning her into a globally recognized figure. From there, the second half follows her engagement with Indian politics and society: calling out corruption, campaigning against prejudice, and helping to bring about positive change in India. She feels a love for her country even though she is clear-eyed about its imperfections. Interestingly, she doesn't favour being called an activist, doesn't really see a clean distinction between that label and being a writer, even though everything she does: contributing money, contributing her intellectual work, writing articles, raising awareness, protesting, engaging with different groups, reads to me as activism in every meaningful sense.

I'm not trying to draw an exact equation between someone's experience with their parents and their experience as a citizen of a nation; they're not the same thing. But there are real parallels here, because in all of this work, Roy has faced persecution from corrupt police and governmental forces, including a short imprisonment, simply for trying to stand up for what's right. For many people, facing that kind of opposition might lead them to disengage, to stop trying to enact change, or to simply leave and live somewhere else, which Roy could certainly have done. She's chosen not to. There are so many specific instances in the book, decisions she's made, mistakes she freely admits to, that add up to something like a lesson in how to inhabit one's life positively without being defeated by circumstances that, in so many cases, would make it entirely understandable to become apathetic and cynical.

A Specific, Absorbing Life

Beyond the larger message, I found this an absorbing memoir simply for the specificity of her story. She writes about the real struggles, joy, and defeat of leaving home, of a number of different relationships, of the prejudice she's faced as a woman. There's an extraordinary section where she describes how, riding public transport, it's simply accepted as the norm that men will treat attractive women as available for the taking, to grope, to make salacious comments toward, and how that's just the daily reality for so many women. There's also her time in the film industry, her development as a writer, and the overwhelming experience of “The God of Small Things” earning so much attention and love. I read that novel many years ago and really ought to reread it.

She also writes about her second novel, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness,” which came many years later, and the circumstances and inspirations behind finishing it. I found all of that fascinating, and it made me think back to when the novel was first published, when I was lucky enough to attend an event where she signed my copy. Thinking back now, knowing everything she was going through while writing it, has given me more appreciation for that novel which I felt quite mixed about at the time. I'd like to reread both at some point.

Her Father, and the Deaths That Prompted the Book

Alongside her mother, there's also her father, whom she didn't know for much of her life. There’s an extraordinary scene describing their eventual reunion. The book follows the emotional journey through to both of her parents' deaths, and I understand the initial impulse to write it came from her mother's death and the intense, complicated grief that followed, complicated precisely because Mrs. Roy was such a difficult figure. I felt genuinely devastated toward the end. There are some extraordinary coincidences she recounts around her parents' deaths that, if she'd invented them for a novel, would seem unbelievable, but they actually happened, and it's hard not to feel there's some larger meaning in them, one she's clearly sat with and meditated on, both for herself and for how she moves through the world.

Verdict

This book offers such a powerful example of how to process and emotionally reckon with the circumstances we're born into, while recognizing that we remain independent beings who can determine our own course and choose how much the past is allowed to shape what we do next. That message goes far beyond the specific details of Roy's story, even though that story is, on its own terms, enthralling: a genuinely fascinating life that left me with enormous respect for her and eager to read and reread more of her work, fiction and nonfiction alike. We live in difficult, worrying times, and I think recognizing that our influence is limited but real, that we do have agency to stand up for what we believe in and to live a fulfilling life despite the circumstances we face, is exactly the kind of message I needed right now. I was genuinely blown away by this memoir. If you've read it, or read any of Roy's other work, or have your own book that completely changed how you inhabit the world, I'd love to hear about it.

Cathedrals by Claudia Piñeiro (translated by Frances Riddle)

First Impressions

I spent an entire weekend completely engrossed in this book! It's the kind of novel I kept returning to in every spare moment and staying up late until I'd finished it. At its centre is a genuinely gripping mystery: the body of a teenage girl is found not only dead but dismembered and severely burned. But what makes the novel so compelling is how much larger meaning it builds around that central crime. I won't give away any specifics of how things unfold, since I think that's best left for readers to discover for themselves, but I do want to talk about how cleverly and thoughtfully the novel is constructed, along with a handful of things about it that genuinely bothered me. None of that stopped me from being thoroughly absorbed in it, and I'd still highly recommend it.

Piñeiro is a prolific Argentinian author, and her novel "Elena Knows" was one of my favourite books the year I read it; I've also really enjoyed her novel "A Little Luck". In "Cathedrals," the narrative rotates between a series of different first-person perspectives, never repeating the same one twice, all circling the death of a teenage girl, Ana, killed thirty years earlier. We meet her family at a point when that loss has long since blown them apart. Ana had two older sisters: Carmen, the eldest, devoutly and strictly Catholic, and Leah, the middle sister, who was especially close to Ana. In the aftermath of Ana's death, Leah broke entirely from her family and from the Catholic faith she was raised in, moved from Argentina to Spain, and opened a bookshop there. She's stayed in contact with her father, Alfredo, over the years, but only on the condition that they never discuss anything happening within the family, so their relationship has narrowed down to conversations about books and literature. None of this is a spoiler; we're told all of it right at the start. The novel opens with Leah's point of view in Spain, where she's built an entirely separate life for herself, until an encounter with family members drags the past, and Ana's case, back into the present. What unfolds isn't suspenseful in the traditional whodunit sense so much as in the question of why, and how the actual events played out.

A Searing Critique of the Church

This reminded me of what I admired so much in "Elena Knows," where Piñeiro also builds an overarching mystery around a death while using it to explore much larger questions about religion and women's place in society. Here, the novel offers a genuinely searing critique of the church, less of religious faith itself than of how certain organised religions are actually run, and the traditional structures built up around them that can badly warp some people's capacity for empathy, pushing them toward judgment rather than openness, with real and sometimes extreme consequences for how they treat the people around them. It made me think of another novel I read recently, "A Private Man," which examines the Catholic Church through the lens of priestly celibacy; both books dig into the history and rules that shape religious life in ways I found genuinely illuminating.

Piñeiro is also excellent on the private architecture of families: the way people behave with each other inside the family unit versus how they're perceived from the outside. One sister here is publicly affable, someone everyone instantly likes and admires, while within the family she's seen as far more calculating, her warmth read as a kind of performance. I found the resulting friction between family members, and the real venom that surfaces between them, genuinely moving, and I got quite emotionally caught up in watching that side of the family reveal itself over the course of the book.

Where the Novel Strains

I did have a few real issues with the book. It leans a bit too heavily on coincidence in places, and the fact that this case is only being properly investigated thirty years later felt somewhat engineered to me; I kept wondering why certain conversations or investigations hadn't happened much earlier. Piñeiro does supply in-story justifications for these gaps, including a plot thread involving memory loss that edges close to soap-opera territory, but even with those explanations in place, it occasionally felt like the story had been built backward from the ending it wanted to deliver, rather than the reverse. That said, the drama it generates is genuinely effective. I was fully invested in wanting to know what had happened and why, and the ending landed for me in a way that felt truly rewarding.

The Cathedral as Metaphor

The novel's title carries real weight by the end. Leah lives in a Spanish city famous for its cathedral, and another family member travels through Europe visiting several famous cathedrals before eventually reuniting with her there. Piñeiro is careful to specify that this isn't a religious pilgrimage or an act of mysticism; it's closer to holding onto one's own sanity amid a kind of surrounding collective delirium. The cathedrals take on real emotional and symbolic weight for the family. In one striking detail, the cathedral in Leah's city turns out to be undergoing major renovation and is entirely covered, so visitors who've travelled specifically to see it can only experience it secondhand, through postcards and photographs.

The title also nods directly to Raymond Carver's short story ‘Cathedral,’ which Piñeiro references explicitly in the novel. Leah and her father Alfredo bond over literature, he mostly reads nonfiction but she's introduced him to fiction as well, and Carver's story comes to hold real personal significance for him. In Carver's story, a sighted man and his wife host a blind visitor for an evening; after they've smoked some marijuana while watching a television program about cathedrals, the sighted man struggles to describe what a cathedral looks like, so the blind man suggests they draw one together, his hand resting on top of the other man's as it moves across the page, a shared act that opens up an entirely new way of seeing for the man who could see all along. Piñeiro recreates a version of that same exercise between a grandfather and grandson in her own novel, carrying forward Carver's underlying idea about what we allow ourselves to truly see in other people, and what our own belief systems keep us from seeing, sometimes with devastating consequences for the people we're supposed to be closest to.

Verdict

"Cathedrals" tackles far bigger questions than its central case alone, even though that case is compelling in its own right. If you want a genuinely gripping story that also carries real weight and meaning, I'd recommend it highly, alongside "Elena Knows." Piñeiro is such a talented, thoughtful writer that I want to read even more of her work. I didn't love "Cathedrals" quite as much as "Elena Knows," but it's a strong, rewarding novel, and I'm glad I read it.

Anne Carson Wins the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature

I was so delighted to see Anne Carson named this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I watched the announcement live, cheekily typing "JCO for the win" into the comments as always. But Carson had been one of my top predictions, so when Ingrid Carlberg, in her first year as the Academy's Permanent Secretary, read out her name, I was thrilled. The Academy honoured her "for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature." It was charming to hear that when they reached her by phone she was in Iceland "listening to the wind." I love picturing her running jubilantly across a glacier or, more likely, quietly sipping tea and staring out the window. She's the first Canadian to win since Alice Munro in 2013, the first poet since Louise Glück in 2020, and only the 19th woman to receive the prize. It's also one of those rare years when the betting got it right. The British bookies barely rated her, but the wider prediction markets had her as the favourite.

The only book of Carson's I've read is “Autobiography of Red”, and I found it incredibly inventive. It retells the myth of the red-winged monster Geryon as a gay coming-of-age story. She builds a modern, novel-like narrative out of the surviving fragments of the ancient poet Stesichorus. Although it's written in verse, I found it accessible and deeply moving. I connected with how she captures Geryon's alienation, his desire and his synaesthesia, and lines like "There is no person without a world" have stayed with me. My copy is even more special now because Carson signed it for me in 2019 when I saw her speak in London. It's striking how she mixes poetry, essay, translation, drama and visual art into new forms. Her elegy for her brother, “Nox”, is published as a folded facsimile in a box. She was reworking Greek myth with wit and intelligence long before myth retellings became a popular genre of their own.

This win has given me the push I needed to read much more of her work. Next I'd like to try “Nox” or “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy”. I also want to finally pick up “Glass and God”, which has been sitting on my shelf for far too long. If you've not read Carson before, I'd recommend starting with “Autobiography of Red”. Her UK publisher is Jonathan Cape, and I expect we'll see plenty of reprints in the coming weeks. Have you read Anne Carson? I'd love to hear how you feel about her winning, and which of her books you'd recommend I read next.

The Booker Prize 2026 Shortlist

I was away in Italy when the 2026 Booker shortlist was revealed last week but I did my own little reveal video beside the Mediterranean and I'm absolutely thrilled with the six the judges have chosen. Having read the whole longlist and made both a wish list and a predictions list, I'm delighted that four of the six books from my wish list made the actual shortlist. I'd braced myself to see Gwendoline Riley's "The Palm House" and "Helen of Nowhere" make the cut, so I'm quietly delighted neither did. It's a strong, satisfying group: two former winners in Marlon James and Douglas Stuart, a returning Elizabeth Strout, and three writers shortlisted for the first time.

"The Disappearers" by Marlon James left me reeling, and I'm still not done thinking about it. It's a monumental, emotionally striking novel about a group of gay men in 1980s Kingston who come together to stage a play, and the murderous homophobic attack and cycle of revenge that engulf them; James even takes us inside the attackers' minds, and the effect is devastating. Douglas Stuart's "John of John" is a beloved, heart-wrenching, atmospheric book about three generations on a remote Scottish island reckoning with buried secrets, sexuality and community — I'd joked there would be rioting if it weren't listed, so I'm hugely relieved it's here, and I'd love to see it win Stuart a second trophy. Elizabeth Strout's "The Things We Never Say" follows Artie Dam, an ageing teacher wrestling with mortality and a long-held marital secret; it's the most overtly political book she's ever written, and I've loved it enough to buy multiple copies as gifts.

Luke Kennard's "Black Bag" delighted and surprised me more than anything else on the list — a genuinely funny, cleverly built campus novel about an out-of-work actor paid to quietly sit through lectures zipped inside a bag — and comedy this sharp is rare on a Booker shortlist; I was also lucky enough to record an extensive interview with Kennard about the novel, which I'd urge you to watch, and in which we discuss the possibility of his wearing a black bag to the Booker ceremony. Rebecca Perry's debut "May We Feed the King" enchanted me, moving between the present and a medieval court as a curator builds an exhibit around an almost-forgotten, reluctant king; it's an inventive new approach to historical fiction and a thoroughly deserving Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize winner. And M. John Harrison's "The End of Everything" was the genuine surprise of the six — a strange, singular dystopia that isn't quite sci-fi and refuses to explain itself — but its mood, of us quietly surrendering our agency to the technology we've built, is one I connected with completely.

Not everything I loved survived: I'm genuinely disappointed that Kenan Orhan's "The Renovation" and Emma Cline's "Switzy," two of my very favourites from the longlist, didn't get through. But this is a rich and varied shortlist, and the storylines ahead are irresistible — if Harrison wins at 81 he'd be the oldest winner in the prize's history, if Perry wins she'd be the first debut winner since Stuart in 2020, and either James or Stuart could become only the fifth author to take the prize twice. The winner is announced on November 9th, and I honestly can't call it from this group — which is exactly what I'll be debating in future videos. I may not have time to reread all six books before then but I’d be glad to re-experience all these books.

What do you think of the shortlist? Will you read all six? Who do you want to win?

The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley

First Impressions

Gwendoline Riley is a well-regarded author who's received considerable award attention over the years, and plenty of readers and critics genuinely love her fiction. I am not one of them. I'd previously read her earlier novel "First Love," which I didn't just dislike but actively loathed, and that's a reaction I don't often have to a book. Going into "The Palm House," I really wanted to give it a fair chance; enough time had passed that I wondered whether my own tastes had shifted, or whether her writing had developed. I read it with as open a mind as I could manage, and found myself bored and frustrated, and at points genuinely agitated by it.

What Actually Agitates Me About Her Writing

I've spent a lot of time trying to work out exactly what it is about Riley's prose that provokes such a strong reaction in me, because normally if a book bores or frustrates me, I just put it down and move on without much further thought. I think it comes down to the cool, cynical, detached quality of her writing, the way we get so little of her characters' inner emotional lives or reflection, so that everything stays observational, looking outward rather than in. This novel is a bit different from "First Love" in that we do get a good amount of the protagonist Laura's backstory, which suggests some kind of development in Riley's approach, or maybe it's just this particular story. Even so, so much about the book frustrated me.

The best comparison I can make is to something that used to agitate me when I first moved to England from America. I struggled for a long time to get used to pub culture, which was so far removed from anything I was used to as a fairly introverted person who'd rather be home reading. My partner and flatmates would encourage me out for a few drinks, and I'd go, have an hour or two of polite conversation with relative strangers, their workmates, people I quite often just didn't have all that much in common with. But once you're at the pub, there's this unspoken expectation that you stay at the pub: someone buys you a drink, so you have to finish it, then it's your round, so you buy drinks for others, and on it goes for hours, long after the conversation has worn down to something completely banal, until you're just drinking for the sake of it. I once tried to leave early and a flatmate told me she'd be genuinely insulted if I did. That experience of being stuck making small talk with people I had little real connection to, listening to stories about people I didn't know and didn't especially care about, is exactly what reading this novel felt like to me.

That's not an abstract comparison, either; it's more or less what physically happens throughout much of the book. People are at the pub, having drinks, opening packets of crisps. There's a small, oddly specific detail I kept noticing, how the novel describes people tearing open crisp packets at the seams rather than just opening them, something I've genuinely observed as a very English habit, and it bookends the novel at the beginning and end. So much of the story unfolds through these conversations, rendered with a kind of sharp, realistic ear for the way people actually talk, repeating themselves, dwelling on details about their own lives that aren't especially interesting to anyone else or, at least, to me. Laura, the narrator, seems to have real patience for all of this. Much of the novel follows her long friendship with Putnam, a man who's just resigned from his position as deputy editor at a longstanding arts and culture magazine, interwoven with episodic glimpses of Laura's own life: her mother, and several of the men she's been involved with over the years.

A Question of Compassion

I don't object in principle to fiction that withholds a character's inner reflections rather than spelling out how the events of their life add up to some larger meaning. David Szalay's "Flesh" does something similar, portraying how people really interact with each other while still conveying a real sense of inner life and humanity underneath it. Riley's writing, by contrast, feels muted, glum and pessimistic to me, and even though Laura never explicitly judges anyone she encounters, that flat, cold observational quality starts to feel like its own kind of judgment: an implication that everyone, and society generally, is simply mediocre, and that this is just something we have to put up with. There's a real lack of compassion in it that I think is at the heart of what agitates me so much, a refusal to find anything in people worth redeeming despite their contradictions, absurdity and ego.

There's one scene that struck me as a rare exception: Laura talking with a friend's young child, who explains her own peculiar theory of how life began on Earth, and Laura simply takes it in, almost visibly absorbing the charm and wit of someone else's point of view. It's a small, genuine moment of warmth that stands out precisely because it's so rare elsewhere in the book. Laura's mother comes across as largely self-absorbed, as do many of the people Laura interacts with. As a teenager, Laura has a relationship with a comedian twice her age who uses her in a cold, clinical way; she never names it as abuse, simply relates what happened without visible judgment. There's a genuinely chilling moment later when her mother's own awareness of that relationship becomes clear, one of several lines in the book that land with real, sudden force.

Where the Novel Does Work

I did find myself engaged by some of the novel's later material, particularly around Laura's independence. When she's about to buy her first apartment, she has an interim period where she stays with a man who's offered her a place, seemingly out of generosity. Nothing untoward happens between them, but there's a genuinely uncomfortable scene where he seems to be quietly judging her, and it becomes clear that even a generous offer like his carries its own unspoken expectations, so that Laura only really finds freedom once she has, in effect, a room of her own. It's harder for me to square that thread of progression with the long-running Putnam storyline, which is driven partly by his own ego and partly by a changing media landscape: a new editor at his magazine wants to overhaul it entirely, leaving Putnam feeling like a relic, and though he resigns, the novel ends with him essentially going back. That's not much of a spoiler, since this isn't really a plot-driven novel so much as an attempt to trace a mood and present a grudging record of the ways we're obliged to be sociable with each other, even as Laura readily keeps showing up at the pub anyway. Putnam observes at one point that pub culture is changing, that people under forty are going out far less than they used to, which does track with a real shift in England, especially since the pandemic, even though the novel itself is set in late 2017.

The novel is carefully anchored in time and place: London's sky is described with the strange yellow hue it actually took on in 2017 from Saharan dust drifting into the atmosphere, and the story opens near the meeting of two bridges in Southwark, the same spot where Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend" begins, situating the novel within a lineage of London writing. As a Londoner myself I could appreciate nods to certain locations I’m familiar with such as The Tate and Gordon’s Wine Bar. But for all that grounding, the version of society it offers felt stripped-down and thin to me, without much real insight on offer, even as I've tried to think harder about what its themes actually amount to.

The Title and Its Symbolism

The title refers to the enormous Victorian conservatory at Kew Gardens, and I saw one mention in the Literary Review that suggests it as a metaphor for English arts and culture as something that has to be sealed off from the wider world in order to produce anything of beauty. Hands recur as a motif too: Putnam has eczema on his hands early in the novel, while Laura recalls a childhood holiday with her mother and grandmother during which she visited a palm reader who somehow caused the warts on her fingers to fall away, a small image of being made new. Inside the Palm House itself is one of the world's oldest potted plants, and a character notes that indoor plants like it need to be largely left alone in order to thrive, not entirely neglected, but close to it. That feels like an apt description of Laura's own life: left mostly to her own devices, including during that relationship with the comedian, which she entered as a fifteen-year-old fully aware of what was happening, even as you can't help wondering where any adult oversight was.

Verdict

There were individual moments and lines in "The Palm House" that genuinely landed for me, sudden and chilling in their effect. But so much of the novel is built from conversations and anecdotes about peripheral people I knew almost nothing about and had little reason to care for, which mostly just underlined a sense of mediocrity, hollowness and self-centredness in the people it depicts. That may well be my own interpretation more than Riley's intention, but it's the effect the book had on me. I don't need fiction to be full of profound exchanges, and I'm equally wary of novels that go too far the other way, the way André Aciman's characters sometimes fall into deep philosophical conversation on a casual night out, which never feels quite real either. But I want more than trivial exchanges about barely-there figures with little bearing on the larger story. I read this one start to finish and genuinely tried to meet it on its own terms, but for me it left an impression of cynicism and detachment I don't actually want more of in my life. Riley clearly isn't a writer for me, though I know plenty of readers feel very differently. I'd love to hear whether you've read her, whether I'm missing something in her work, or whether "The Palm House" might be worth your own time even if it wasn't worth mine.