The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams

First Impressions

This was a weird and difficult one. "The Vivisectors" by Missouri Williams is a novel that has genuinely divided readers, and I've heard from people who have literally thrown it across the room in frustration, partly because its narrator is so deliberately withholding and hard to empathise with, and partly because of its unrelentingly cynical, almost nihilistic tone. Other readers I know have connected with it deeply, both intellectually and emotionally, and found it a fascinating puzzle of a book. As for me, I landed somewhere in between. This was not a pleasant or relaxing read, and I think how you get on with it depends entirely on what you want from a novel and what you're willing to put into the reading experience. There were stretches where I was genuinely engaged and turning over different ways of interpreting the story, and other stretches where I found myself growing quite literally depressed by how existentially detached the whole thing feels from the world. I think that detachment may well be the point: this is a novel that isn't trying to make the reader comfortable, which is a difficult thing to pull off successfully while still keeping people reading.

A Narrator Who Claims to Feel Nothing

The novel has several layers. At its centre is a narrator we don't even learn the name of, Agathe, until well into the book, someone who claims to be so detached from her own existence that she has no real desires beyond tracking and trying to increase her daily step count, even once her feet are sore and bleeding. The novel opens with her mother's suicide attempt, which she insists she doesn't care about, along with the rest of her family's trauma. She's similarly disengaged from her job doing most of the actual work for a professor at the university in the town where she lives, and from the wider conflicts consuming that university.

She describes her inner self at one point as being like a stone, feeling nothing and reacting to nothing beyond surface-level social expectation, and elsewhere compares herself to a house built with no doors, no windows and no staircases, with nothing inside to express. But the novel keeps raising the question of whether we should trust any of this. Early on she muses that if you want to pass judgement on someone, you should write in the first person as though you were them, which opens up a real possibility that Agathe isn't necessarily the one narrating her own story at all. It could just as easily be her father, a respected author of ideas with whom she has a fraught relationship, who claims to have written his own novels as an attempt to understand his daughter, though it's just as plausible that writing about her is really a way of keeping his distance from her. Bizarre, memorable scenes recur between Agathe and her now severely incapacitated mother, including one where she simply sits on her mother's lap in her motorised wheelchair and steers them both around as if they were out for a walk. Between the ambiguity over who's really narrating and how much of Agathe's professed numbness we can believe, the novel becomes a genuine puzzle, and I can understand why plenty of readers find that withholding quality more alienating than intriguing.

Cancel Culture, Academia, and a Muted Love Story

The larger plot concerns a conflict at the university between a student, Adam, and a young professor, Jacob, following a classroom exchange that left both of them feeling wounded, and which the university seems to secretly relish rather than resolve, since the ongoing controversy adds to its own sense of importance. The "vivisectors" of the title are the people who pick apart what others say and do to root out hidden, often unintended offence, less concerned with anyone's actual intentions than with excavating the worst possible reading of them. On its surface, the novel is about the culture wars and the impossibility of resolving a conflict when the conflict itself is the point, generating momentum rather than seeking any real answer. Over time Agathe becomes drawn into Adam's situation as he faces expulsion, and their relationship gradually functions as an extremely muted love story, offering the faint possibility of a genuine, even loving connection, or alternatively pulling her toward finally having to take a side she has spent the whole novel refusing to take.

Deliberately, we're given very little of the actual content of the dispute between Adam and Jacob, just its tone and the sense that they've fundamentally misunderstood each other. I can see this cutting two ways: either the vagueness is essential, because supplying the details would let readers project their own judgement onto it and undercut the point that these conflicts persist precisely because they resist resolution, or the vagueness is itself a failure to properly engage with the very complexities the novel claims to be raising, whether read as an allegory for cancel culture, for the state of academia, for our relationship with a changing environment, or for the nature of love.

A Landscape That Feels Like a State of Mind

The city and university town, both left unnamed, are being steadily overtaken by a creeping vegetation that a team of gardeners has to hack back with machetes every single morning just to hold it off. The setting starts to feel less like an actual place and more like a landscape of the mind. I found myself reading the vegetation as a stand-in for the overwhelming, obscuring flood of information we're drowning in now, except the novel also treats it as something natural, which raises the paradox of whether it might instead represent something essential in us that refuses to be smothered by the trends and beliefs of any given moment.

Scattered through the book are strange, somewhat tedious monologues from unnamed, numbered gardeners and students, each trapped in their own point of view and unable to really exchange ideas with anyone else. They oddly reminded me of Virginia Woolf's "The Waves," my favourite novel of all time, though here the effect felt far more static and much less rewarding. There's also an extended description of a tower built at the centre of the university, meant to represent our cultural values, which comes to seem less like a monument to anything real and more like a sinister, fruitless endeavour, hollow at its core. Much of my own frustration with the novel comes down to how specifically it seems to be an internal argument about universities themselves: I think anyone who's spent a long stretch of their life in academia will recognise its frustrations intimately, but having consciously chosen not to continue my own education because of exactly that kind of insularity, I found it harder to feel much empathy for the argument as it's staged here, even while I recognise that our academic institutions sit close to the heart of how we hold and share knowledge as a culture. The novel's critique of the university is relentless: an institution more interested in hoarding prestige and knowledge for itself than sharing it, and one willing to recruit foreign students mainly for the higher fees they pay, even as those students report feeling badly let down by what they actually receive.

Where I Landed

I feel genuinely conflicted about this novel. There's a moment where the narrator describes people becoming so locked inside their own subjectivity that eventually nothing exists outside the self and its own circular obsessions, and that's close to how it felt to read the book itself: locked inside an uncomfortable, unresolved space with no easy answers on offer. Maybe that's exactly the point, and the reader is meant to be left to grapple with the uncertainty rather than have it resolved for them. But as a reading experience, it's a real challenge, and I can imagine plenty of readers either flocking to it or bouncing off it entirely, much as they did with Williams's cult-following debut, "The Doloriad." Williams herself, a pen name, is a fascinating figure, known for things like staging a production of King Lear cast entirely with sheep, and she's clearly an author intent on unsettling her audience rather than reassuring them. I think you get out of this book roughly what you're willing to put into it, in the same way a novel like Katie Kitamura's "Audition" is a puzzle that could be read either as a genuine emotional excavation or as a purely conceptual exercise, depending on what the reader brings to it. Williams has cited Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" and Plato's "Republic" as influences, and you can feel that lineage of big, abstract ideas floating somewhere above the lived, crumbling world the characters actually inhabit.

Personally, this isn't a favourite recent read. I found it genuinely challenging and strangely intriguing at once, but I lost patience with it in places, and it began to feel repetitive, a narrator who felt like she was going nowhere, whether fast or slow. It took a long time to reach any sense of real change or substance beneath the surface, though it did leave me thinking in a strange, different way about our physical environments and what we build up around ourselves. I'm going to keep turning this one over, and I'd love to hear from other readers where they landed on it, but it isn't an experience I relished, and I'd be hesitant to return to it.

The Disappearers by Marlon James

First Impressions

I've now read Marlon James's new 600-plus-page novel, "The Disappearers", and I'm still reeling from everything it stirred up in me. This is not a light or entertaining read, and it was never meant to be; James himself has acknowledged that his books aren't easy. But it took me on a journey that left me both challenged and changed. The novel has only just been published and has already been canonised by critics, with Dwight Garner in the New York Times calling it a “masterpiece and, quite possibly, the novel of the decade or even the century.” That claim has already sparked a lot of pushback and debate. Ron Charles at the Washington Post stated he was “glad to have read it but equally glad to be done with it. To the extent that it’s a great novel, it’s also an ordeal.” Personally, I wouldn't call it an ordeal. The opening section, structured as a 1988 diary kept by one of the central characters, Eddy, actually charmed me: there's real humanity and humour in these entries, and a kind of innocence in how James eases us into the story through the mind of an eighteen-year-old whose day-to-day thoughts are dominated by music and masturbatory fantasies, the ordinary preoccupations of being young.

The Attack and the Many Meanings of "Disappearers"

Eddy answers an ad to join a small group of gay men planning to stage "Fortune and Men's Eyes," John Herbert's 1967 play about a young man's experience of prison, homosexuality and domination. They're meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1988, in a climate of open homophobia, which makes even their private rehearsals dangerous, let alone the ambition of staging the play publicly. That danger catches up with them: the group is horrifically attacked by a homophobic mob, and not everyone survives. Many who do are left severely damaged, physically and emotionally. It’s striking that the author doesn’t allow the attackers to remain an amorphous group; their individual thoughts and each person’s sense of self-justification for committing such a horrendous act is recorded.

From there the novel’s title starts accumulating multiple meanings. There are the attackers, who set out quite literally to disappear these men from their community. There's the central mystery of two survivors who vanish in the aftermath, and the efforts of the remaining group to find out what happened to them. Because this is the late eighties and this is gay life, the novel also vividly depicts the reality of the AIDS crisis and the many people who disappeared because of it. And there's a more internal, more painful sense of the word too: queer people disappearing on each other under pressure, as when one half of a couple is arrested for his homosexuality and his partner won't risk bailing him out, afraid of what association with him might cost. Beyond that, there's the way people can disappear into themselves, silencing whole parts of who they are just to survive inside a homophobic world. James has spoken about having lived through some of this era himself, and while I wouldn't call the novel autobiographical, since its actual events aren't drawn from his own life, it clearly belongs to the world he grew up in during the 1980s, and it's steeped in the music and television of that period. I loved seeing "The Cosby Show" and "Family Ties" referenced early on, both shows that shaped my own childhood crushes on Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Michael J. Fox, so that sense of period and coming-of-age is vividly, specifically evoked, alongside an honest reckoning with how much of that same media culture was openly homophobic at the time.

A Demanding Structure With a Purpose

Much of the novel arrives secondhand, through diary entries, interviews and letters rather than immediate first-person action, and a number of readers have found that structure genuinely challenging, since it holds you at a remove from events as they happen. I'd argue that distance is doing real work: for people who disappear, all that's left of their perspective are the fragments they wrote down or the secondhand accounts others give afterward, so piecing together the truth becomes part of the reading experience itself, not just a stylistic choice. Combined with a large cast of shifting points of view and sections often written in patois, which may be more demanding for readers outside the Caribbean, I understand why this book reportedly has a higher did-not-finish rate than most. But I think the difficulty is worth taking on for where the novel ultimately takes you.

Rage, Justice, and the Weight of Real History

There's enormous heart and humanity here, alongside real heartache, pain, violence and rage, and I think that rage is entirely justified. James has described growing up aware of rumours of an attack like this one, and drawing on both his own memory and interviews with queer Jamaicans in shaping the novel, which makes clear this isn't an isolated invention but something many people actually lived through. It's infuriating to read about a situation where the law doesn't just look away from an attack like this but actively participates in it, where going to the police for help might just mean a different, survivable beating rather than none at all. I don't think this belongs safely in the past, either. Living in London today, I'm aware of legal protections gay people have here, but I also remember a report a couple of years ago of a gay couple attacked at a bus stop I go to regularly with my own husband. Seeing the photos of their injuries changed something in me: I still think about it every time I'm at that bus stop, and there are moments when my husband reaches for my hand and I pull away, weighing wanting to be visibly proud of who we are against a very real, very physical fear. That's just a small, present-day echo of the kind of violence this novel is reckoning with on a much larger historical scale.

The novel doesn't offer easy answers to any of this. In large part it's a revenge story, following several characters and survivors down different paths of retaliation, and reading those sections was genuinely horrific on more than one level: the immediate violence of it, but also an uncomfortable flicker of satisfaction at seeing people held to account when the wider structures of society refuse to do so. That response left me with difficult feelings of shame alongside the horror, because I know a cycle of revenge like this can't actually end well, however understandable its origins.

A Complicated, Unflattened Community

I appreciated how honestly the novel portrays the divisions within this group of men even before the attack: different ways of inhabiting queerness, real disagreements among gay men shaped by class, race and relative attractiveness, and the hierarchies those differences create, which raises the harder question of whether "community" is even the right word for what holds them together. One of the most striking sections follows a group known as the Gully Queens, queer individuals pushed to the margins of society who've built a life for themselves literally in the city's gullies. My one small criticism of the novel is that I wish it had spent more time with them; I think it matters enormously that the most marginalised are seen this clearly, even as I understand why James chose to keep his focus centred on this particular group of men. Women are largely peripheral to the story, though it doesn't look away from violence against them either, including a harrowing account of a lesbian couple attacked and a trans woman brutalised and murdered.

The violence throughout is rendered in unflinching, specific detail rather than glossed over the way it often is in film and television, where a gunshot tends to mean an instant, tidy death. James has said he thinks all violence is gratuitous, addressing a common criticism of books like this head-on, but the violence here isn't there to entertain; it's there to testify that real harm like this actually happened, and it continues to do so around the world.

In Conversation With Queer Literature

The novel also meditates on erasure and absence more broadly: one character speculates that if every gay person in Jamaica simply vanished, the society built on their labour and presence would collapse. That immediately brought to mind one of my favourite recent novels, Ibtisam Azem's "The Book of Disappearance," which imagines all Palestinian Arabs vanishing from the state of Israel overnight. It's a reminder of what fiction can do: offering a genuinely different vantage point on the world we already think we know.

Beyond its central themes, I loved how in conversation the novel is with other literature, from an early nod to Mrs. Bennet in "Pride and Prejudice" to a debate between characters over Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens, and further back to queer literary forebears like John Rechy, James Baldwin and Jean Genet, writers who were pioneers not just in depicting gay experience explicitly but in modelling ways of actually inhabiting a gay identity. This novel clearly stands in that lineage, extending it with a portrait of gay life that holds real joy alongside real pettiness; there's plenty of bitchiness among these characters too, which felt honest rather than unkind, and a real sense that disappearing from an impossible situation can be freeing even as it carries its own lasting burden. I was also genuinely delighted by a passing reference to Joyce Carol Oates's short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," since Oates is my favourite author, and while I can see the argument that some of these literary references stretch plausibility for characters caught in such desperate circumstances, many of these men are highly literary people for whom reading is exactly the kind of refuge and touchstone you'd expect them to reach for.

A Culmination of a Career

Having followed Marlon James's work for over a decade, this feels like a novel he's been building toward for a long time. "A Brief History of Seven Killings" shares some structural DNA with it and includes gay characters of its own, and his Dark Star fantasy trilogy, two books in so far, also features queer characters and explicit gay sex. I had the privilege of helping judge the year "A Brief History of Seven Killings" was up for the Green Carnation Prize, an award specifically for queer writers, not long after it had already won the Booker; we debated whether a novel that had already won the Booker really needed another prize, but ultimately felt it deserved recognition specifically for how complex and fully realised its gay characters were. James has clearly been writing toward queer life for a long time, including in a 2015 personal essay, "From Jamaica to Minnesota to Myself," which I'd recommend alongside the novel; you can feel ideas from that essay finding their fullest expression here.

Verdict

I found this novel mesmerising rather than exhausting, gripped by its twists and turns and by James's language, which brings out the full complexity, contradiction and sheer spark of these characters even in the most difficult circumstances. Is it the novel of the decade? I honestly don't know, but it's an extraordinarily impactful book, and I'm very glad to have read it. I raced through it the first time because I was compelled by the plot and character voices. So I'm looking forward to returning to it more slowly at some point to more deeply take in everything it has to offer. I'd recommend it wholeheartedly, but readers should know what they're signing up for: there's real explicit violence and sex in these pages, though never without purpose. If you've read it, I'd love to know where you land: masterpiece, or overhyped?

Black Bag by Luke Kennard

First Impressions

I just read "Black Bag" with my online book club, and it was such a pleasurable experience, both because the novel is genuinely fun and because it kept provoking deeper questions the whole way through, if you want to engage with it on that level. I also had the pleasure of interviewing Luke Kennard and we had a fun lengthy discussion about a wide range of subjects which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIdBHDdJmN8

The novel has a wonderfully straightforward, almost absurd premise: an unnamed, down-on-his-luck actor takes a job in a university classroom for a psychological experiment, wearing a black bag that covers his entire body, unable to speak or interact with anyone. He's just a strange, silent presence in the room, and the experiment is designed to study the effects of that. We get his first-person account of it all, written as though it's unfolding in real time.

The premise is based on an actual experiment. In 1967, Charles Goetzinger at Oregon State University seated a figure in a black bag in his class to demonstrate the "mere-exposure effect," the idea that repeated proximity breeds affection, and watched his students move from hostility to curiosity to friendship over the course of a term. Kennard has said he came across it as a footnote in a social psychology article, and that he was more interested in the actor who took the job than in the finding itself. The real study recorded the students' reactions and left no account of the man inside the bag. Kennard gives us only the inside, updated for the present day and relocated to England.

A Man Who Wants Theatre on His Own Terms

I found the narrator endearing: his passionate love of theatre, his sensitive, arty English foppishness, and his pretensions and wry observations about the state of the current world. I pictured him as a young Hugh Grant. He considers theatre the highest art form and finds it genuinely bewildering that the rest of the world doesn't share his devotion to it, yet he can barely get work as an actor and has to default to dinner theatre and cheap detective-mystery performances just to pay the bills. There's a real contradiction in him that the novel is quietly aware of: he holds theatre up as the highest art and wants everyone to be as enthusiastic about it as he is, but when he does get more serious, socially engaged roles, he's just as critical of those as pretentious. He seems to want theatre to exist only on his own terms, which of course it can't, and that contradiction makes it entirely believable that once he takes on the role of Black Bag, he lets it feed his ego and become something much bigger than the psychological experiment it's meant to be.

So taking the job as Black Bag, with its steady salary, is a real relief for him financially, but it comes to mean far more than that. The day-to-day unfolding of it is consistently amusing: I could vividly picture the farcical sight of a man stumbling around in a black bag and the whole range of ways people react to him. But because we're experiencing it from his perspective inside the bag, I could also feel how physically uncomfortable, gross and restrictive it becomes, and how nerve-wracking it must be to be so conspicuous while being completely unable to respond to anyone. I love his observation that inside the bag it starts to feel as though his face and skin have become his internal organs. And against that discomfort, there's his growing psychological sense of freedom that comes from being completely anonymous.

Visibility, Anonymity, and the Internet Age

There's something pointed in the fact that the experiment anonymises the one figure least accustomed to it: a relatively handsome white Englishman in his mid-to-late thirties, exactly the type usually granted the centre of the room and the benefit of the doubt by default. Stripping that away becomes a kind of test of what happens when his usual privilege is removed, and how that changes both his sense of self and the way society interacts with him.

It also felt more personal to me than that. I'm naturally a fairly quiet person, even though I know I talk a lot in my videos, and I felt that being Black Bag partly reflects the way people project themselves onto someone who doesn't speak, interpreting that silence in a way that says more about their own personality than about the quiet person himself. I've noticed this in my own life, and I found the range of reactions to Black Bag over the course of the novel, from people who seem worried about him to others who are instantly hostile, a genuinely sharp piece of observation about how we treat quiet presences.

The novel also reads as a real counterpoint to our internet age, where anyone with any kind of online presence is expected to be conspicuous, whether that means constantly performing a personal brand or, at the other extreme, hiding behind total anonymity to troll people without consequence. Black Bag's radical anonymity cuts directly against both of those impulses. The counterweight in the story is his closest friend Claudio, an online gamer with millions of followers who is hyper-visible in exactly the way the narrator isn't, and who has to constantly balance the expectations of his audience against staying authentically himself. I related to that pressure in a much humbler way through my own experience of having a BookTube channel, wanting to respond to feedback without simply fashioning myself for an audience. Being authentically yourself risks becoming a target for criticism, but bending to the most popular demands makes a public persona feel soulless, and Black Bag's total refusal to offer any response, opinion or distinguishing feature raises the question of whether that's a different kind of soullessness, or whether it actually preserves something essential about him.

Despite being opposites professionally, Claudio, the capitalist who has learned to make his online identity profitable, and the narrator, who believes in an art form he can't make profitable, have a fraternal bond I found genuinely moving. Some of the funniest material in the book comes out of their friendship once Claudio starts trying to help monetise Black Bag: the scene where the narrator is paid in actual cash and the two of them are almost bewildered by physical money in an age of tap-to-pay, and his first instinct once he's flush with cash is to buy new curtains, which he then hangs while humming "Master of the House" from Les Misérables. It's such a small, specific, funny detail, and it's typical of how the novel builds character through moments like that.

Justine, and What We Project Onto Each Other

While he's playing Black Bag at the university, the narrator strikes up a relationship with Justine, an older professor there, and it becomes both a sexual and a romantic one, all while he remains inside the bag. It's mutually fulfilling in some ways but was never going to be entirely satisfying, and I became very curious about her motives. Since she doesn't know anything about the actual person behind the bag, what does she really want out of the connection: a genuine exchange, or complete control over someone who must play by her rules? The way their relationship plays out raises real questions about whether we're ever loving the actual person we're with, or simply projecting our own desires onto them, and whether we can ever truly know someone we're in a relationship with.

The Swedish Daydream and the Family He Won't Describe

To survive the lectures he has to sit through as Black Bag, which are themselves reproduced in places in the novel and cover the psychology of our current social atmosphere, the narrator invents an entire alternate life for himself in his head: a simple, humble existence in rural Sweden, complete with a sawmill job, an injury, and a woman named Birgitta who feeds him cake. These daydreams take up more and more space in his emotional life. It's genuinely strange and moving that some of the narrator's most honest emotional moments in the whole book happen inside a fantasy he's constructed and it says something real about how much of our imaginative life can end up carrying more weight than our actual lived experience, which felt like another quiet comment on how we live now, half in reality and half online or in our own heads.

It's a striking contrast to how he treats his own family: when he visits his parents, he refuses to give any real details about them at all, referring to them only as two stone pillars, guarding their privacy even as he's spilling every detail of his invented Swedish village. His imagined exchanges with the family dog, Elliot, who has a very funny personality of his own in these daydreamed conversations, felt like another way of the narrator talking to himself.

Where the Novel Gets Shakier

As the story develops, it edges into something closer to a conspiracy plot, almost a cult story and the narrator’s performance as Black Bag gets tangled up in a vague cryptocurrency scheme. This is where the novel felt slightly shakier to me, striving to do a bit too much. I can see the justification for it, though, since we're only ever inside the narrator's head, and he doesn't fully understand this secret order of people or the financial mechanics behind Claudio’s financial schemes any more than we do; his own information is limited to a slightly ridiculous spying mission. I think these elements of the novel mostly work as a kind of ego-check for him: a way of forcing him to recognise that he isn't special, that he isn't even the original Black Bag, however much he's come to believe otherwise.

His ego does grow across the novel, until he starts to think of himself as the original Black Bag, almost a prophet, which is a real irony given that he has no identity left to speak of. At one point he asks himself, "Isn't it time someone rescued me from the cult of myself for deprogramming?" The ending of the novel presents a real challenge to the narrator’s conception of himself and it leaves open whether affection that arrives purely through exposure is worth having at all.

Form and Style

On a practical level, the novel is built from very short, punchy chapters, rarely more than four or five pages, which keeps the whole thing moving at a brisk, pleasurable pace even when the narrator gets lost in his own ruminations about the death of serious theatre or his romantic failures. It's a world away from the density of something like "The Melancholy of Resistance," which my book club read together earlier this year. Kennard also doesn't use quotation marks for dialogue, and readers in my group responded to that differently, from finding it pretentious to barely noticing it anymore given how common it's become in recent literary fiction. There's even a case to be made that stripping the marks which usually identify speech mirrors what the novel does to its narrator, removing every marker that identifies him, though it didn't add much extra meaning for me personally; I don't think the novel would have lost anything by including them.

I read the book first in print and then went back through the audiobook, which Kennard narrates himself. A number of people in my book club who'd listened to the audio first told me it really adds to the experience, and I found that to be true: his own performance of the material brings out a layered quality in the reading. Rereading it that way, already knowing the plot, let me sit with the larger questions in more detail. This year's Booker chair, Mary Beard, has said her bar for a book is whether it's worth reading more than once, and I think "Black Bag" clears that easily.

Verdict

I found "Black Bag" an extremely enjoyable, genuinely clever read, funny and strange in equal measure, with far more going on beneath its absurd premise than it might first suggest. It raised so many questions for me about visibility and privilege, about how much of ourselves we perform online versus withhold, and about what we're really responding to when we love someone, whether that's another person, an anonymous man in a bag, or a life we've only ever imagined. I'd happily read this one again, and I'm curious now to seek out Kennard's other novels and his poetry.

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

First Impressions

I want to give my thoughts on book III without spoilers, since this continues the journey of Tara as she’s caught in a time loop while the same day in November repeats itself. I’ve followed this story across the two previous volumes of Book I and Book II. I read this while visiting my parents’ home which felt strangely appropriate as I naturally reflected on my childhood and revisited places I knew so well growing up. So much of this book is about the process of memory, the weight of it, and the way our relationships to other people, and to objects, change over time even as our subjective sense of the world tells us things will largely stay the same.

The Plot Moves On

This third instalment does progress the story, and there's a real sense of momentum. Tara is still ageing within the loop even as the wider world resets around her each day, and the book keeps exploring the mechanics of that situation: how objects disappear or persist, what changes and what doesn't. All of that is genuinely interesting, but as with the previous two books, it still feels less about the mechanics of the time loop itself and more about what it reveals about our relationship to time, space, and other people.

Tara and Thomas

The section I found most touching was Tara revisiting her husband, Thomas, who isn't caught in the loop with her. He simply lives the same day over and over as if it had never happened before, unaging, essentially frozen. Tara, meanwhile, has aged considerably and had countless new experiences; she's become a genuinely different person from who she was. I love how the novel uses this to explore the dynamics of long-term relationships and how partners change, sometimes at wildly different rates. It reminded me of how that plays out even in ordinary relationships, where one person starts to shift and grow while another is content and wants things to stay exactly as they are, and how much conflict that mismatch can generate.

There's something almost eerie about how the book renders Thomas: he becomes like a photograph or a video looping on repeat. Tara still feels a strong connection to him, but because she keeps changing and he doesn't, that connection inevitably shifts too. I found this such a poignant way of thinking about how we look back on old photographs or memories and can slightly idealise the person and the relationship we were in at the time, while the passage of time gives us a more objective view than the intensity of the subjective experience allowed for in the moment. Watching Tara try to reconnect with Thomas while she keeps ageing and changing is genuinely moving.

A Different Register

The book also traces how Tara's relationship to the physical world shifts as she notices sounds and details she wouldn't have paid attention to before, the way we're all usually too caught up in our own heads to notice everything around us, except that her circumstances force that attentiveness on her. The novel introduces several new characters here too, each with a strikingly different perspective on what's happening and on where the world is generally headed, some more optimistic, some more pessimistic, and I liked how that underlines how differently people navigate both their own existence and the larger state of things.

This volume was translated by different translators than the first two books, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell, and I'm not entirely sure why the change happened, but it did shift the tone slightly. The prose here felt a bit more clipped and direct than in the earlier books, though still just as readable, engaging, and thought-provoking.

A Series Worth Starting at the Beginning

As with the second book, this is very much not a place to start the series. There's a lot of assumed knowledge here, and honestly I'm glad the book doesn't pause to re-explain everything for new readers, since that kind of throat-clearing can get laborious across a series. But it does mean I'd recommend starting with book one rather than jumping in here. I still find myself wondering whether these need to be published as separate volumes at all, since they're each fairly short and could plausibly have worked as one longer book, though Balle is still writing further instalments in Danish that haven't been translated yet, so there's something nice about following the series as it comes out in something close to real time. It’d be lovely if there will eventually be a big omnibus edition once the whole thing is complete.

Verdict

This was a genuinely moving, meditative reading experience, made all the more resonant by my own circumstances at the time: travelling back to see my family, hearing old stories, revisiting familiar places, and tasting dishes I hadn't had in a long while since living away from America. I'm looking forward to continuing with this series. If you've read this book, or you're following the series as it comes out, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

First Impressions

"Buckeye" is an utterly absorbing family epic, and although it spans multiple generations, it's really centred on two couples living in a small Ohio town, followed from the beginning of the Second World War through to the end of the Vietnam War. I spent that whole long stretch of time getting to know, care about and love all four of these people.

Four Equally Loved Characters

What struck me most is how the narrative moves between all four central characters, both their interior lives and their tangled relationships with each other, and I was equally invested in every single one of them. Usually in a novel that rotates between multiple points of view, I end up with a favourite and find myself impatient to get back to them. Here I loved all four so much that I actually made a t-shirt with their names on it, in the spirit of the famous "A Little Life" shirt with Jude, JP, Willem and Malcolm's names printed on it, even though that novel is really only about Jude and Willem. "Buckeye," by contrast, genuinely belongs to all four of its central characters: Cal, Becky, Margaret and Felix.

Cal and Becky

Cal, who we meet at the very start of the book, was born with one leg significantly shorter than the other, which causes him physical difficulty throughout his life and a lot of self-consciousness, including keeping him out of the military during the war. He also comes from a family where almost everyone has died except his father, leaving the two of them alone together in a dynamic that's claustrophobic and toxic, even though Cal still loves and cares for him. His father is a strange, memorable peripheral figure in the novel, a hoarder who writes complaining letters to American presidents and officials, letters that are reproduced in the text and capture both his personal quirks and a more universal sense of ordinary citizens' powerlessness to be heard. Cal himself is a hugely sympathetic character, a comic-book reader who falls for Becky, whose father owns the local hardware store where Cal goes to work, tying the two families together.

Becky is smart and sympathetic in her own right, and she's also given what's genuinely one of the more challenging elements of the novel for me: she can communicate with the dead, and the book takes this ability completely seriously. As someone who doesn't believe in anything outside the tangible and provable, I found it a real stretch at times to read a character who wholeheartedly believes in her own psychic gift, and that gap between her conviction and Cal's skepticism becomes a genuine source of tension in their marriage. Becky isn't a fraud or looking to profit from it either; she sees it almost as an obligation to the many grieving people around her. Early in the novel she also writes a letter to her future sixty-year-old self and gives it to Cal to keep sealed until then, a small mystery planted at the start whose contents, once revealed late in the book, feed back into everything the novel has been asking about her ability.

Margaret and Felix

The second couple, Margaret and Felix, are almost a golden couple on the surface, both strikingly good-looking, but each is carrying private secrets they never share with each other, and the novel traces the toll that takes over decades. Margaret was raised an orphan and longs for a wider world even as she finds herself settled in this small town; Felix is handsome, lands a promising job, goes off to fight in the war, and carries deep internal struggles that create real friction between them. The novel is remarkably attuned to the cost of everything we withhold from the people closest to us, and there's a striking line about how a lie carries its own unbearable solitude and that “you're alone when you tell it, alone when you live it, alone when you try to dismantle it.” That sense of isolation runs through both couples as they try to live authentically within the constraints and expectations of their era.

An American Ideal Under Pressure

Patrick Ryan captures something I felt very sympathetic to: that postwar American ideal of the nuclear family, the sense that conformity to a certain mould was supposed to guarantee happiness, and how, as we've since learned across the decades, that was never really true for a lot of people. At one point the novel invokes Norman Rockwell's idealised paintings of American domestic life directly, and shows how thoroughly these two couples fail to live up to that image. It also captures the way wartime creates an emergency that swallows up everything, deferring personal struggles that then take years, sometimes generations, to actually surface and be dealt with, including a thread about repressed sexuality and the quiet, cumulative damage of pushing something essential about yourself down for decades. Even though the novel is set in the past, it felt genuinely timely to me, saying something about our own more divided and anxious present.

The writing is full of vivid period detail, whether it's oddly coloured wartime rations or a genuinely terrifying combat scene that put me right inside the panic and consequences of it. The title itself grows in meaning over the course of the book: a buckeye tree is planted in one of the couples' yards early on, and its slow growth, beautifully echoed on the cover, mirrors how the choices, secrets and ruptures of this generation ripple forward into their children's lives. Ryan is so good at showing that most of these people are simply doing what they think is right in the moment, even as it quietly stores up trouble for the people who come after them, the way every family sets something aside meaning to deal with it later, only for it to compound instead.

Space, Astronauts, and a Personal Connection

There's also a recurring fascination in the book with outer space and the NASA program, which resonated with me personally since one of my own strongest early memories is the Challenger explosion, a kind of rupture in that whole postwar dream of progress. It isn't addressed directly in "Buckeye," but it's a preoccupation Ryan has returned to before, notably in his short story collection "The Dream Life of Astronauts," which includes a story about the Challenger disaster and features some of the same loosely connected characters as his earlier interlinked story collection "Send Me," which came out twenty years ago now. I read "Send Me" as a debut and fell completely for his writing back then, and I actually had the honour of meeting Patrick at Edmund White's apartment not long after, where he signed my copy. We became friends and corresponded a lot over the years, though we haven't been in close touch recently. I want to be clear that none of that affects my reaction to this book; if I hadn't loved it, I'd simply have read it quietly and moved on rather than talked about it here.

Verdict

I'm thrilled to see Ryan get this kind of attention after clearly working on this novel for a long time, and it's entirely earned. As Ann Patchett says on the cover, it's a glorious sweep of a novel, and it completely swept me up too; at around 450 pages, I honestly wished it were longer, since I would have happily stayed with these characters and their children's generation for much longer still. If you've read it, I'd love to know whether you felt the same pull toward all four of these people, or whether one of their stories won out for you over the others.

Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman

First Impressions

Is it a novel? A play? An essay? Does it try to be all three at once and not quite land any of them? “Helen of Nowhere” is a slender novel at just over 150 pages that nonetheless took me a surprisingly long time to get through. Much of it felt like a slog, both because it's so abstract in what it's actually discussing and because I found long stretches of it simply tedious. Even though critics have widely praised its ambition and structure I know plenty of readers have found it gimmicky.

Structure and Premise

The novel is composed like a play in six acts, built from extended monologues delivered by four different individuals, though who exactly is "composing" these monologues is itself an open question the book keeps circling back to. At its centre is a disgraced academic who travels out to the countryside to consider buying a house, where a realtor tells him about the property's former owner, a woman named Helen. Throughout, he's also reflecting on his own marriage. My sense is that this novel is about love, power imbalances, and the tension between urban and rural life, interrogating the whole tradition of "returning to nature," from the transcendentalists onward, as either a search for purity outside the trappings of civilisation or a form of escapism from the complexity and judgment of the wider world that this man has found himself mired in.

A Deeply Flawed Narrator

We spend most of the book inside this man's perspective, and he's a genuinely flawed, often misogynistic figure, even as he insists, defensively, that he loves and admires women. He objectifies his wife even while professing devotion, judging her as having faded with age, even though she was once his student, went on to eclipse his own academic career, and now provokes in him a tangled mix of resentment, desire, and something close to punishment. There's a real possibility, hinted at early on, that the entire structure of the novel is itself the wife's construct, a play written to interrogate her husband from the inside, which adds a genuinely compelling layer if you have the patience to unpick it.

Where It Lost Me

For long stretches, I found myself growing impatient. The book gets genuinely surreal and strange in places, particularly once Helen's spirit is channeled into the narrative to put the husband on trial, before the story turns around and puts Helen herself on trial too. Goodman has spoken in interviews about her background editing agricultural texts, which shows in how fluently the book handles ideas about the natural world alongside academia and shifting intellectual fashions. Helen, now elderly and in care, once tried to build something like a commune on this land, rejecting her own privilege for a simpler life, only to come into direct conflict with local people and face her own legal and moral scrutiny, a genuinely interesting complication of the book's ideas about how ideals curdle once they're actually put into practice.

My frustration mostly came from how much of the book stays at a remove. We only get fragments of the husband's disgrace, of the couple's evolving careers, and of how his wife has advanced professionally while also being held back by both sexism and unacknowledged labor, raising real questions about whether a relationship that began as teacher and student can ever reach true equal footing. The novel also leans hard on constant binary categorisations of people, takers versus doers, golden eggs versus plain eggs, kites versus anchors, even while a line elsewhere in the book seems to undercut the whole exercise, suggesting that any such distinction is really just a construct of the mind. That self-awareness didn't stop the categorising from feeling repetitive to me, especially once the realtor's own lengthy monologue arrives. I found this section in particular largely tedious and only tangentially connected to the story, other than emphasising the realtor’s idolatry of Helen through contradictory accounts. Perhaps this relationship is meant as a counterpoint to the Man and the Wife’s, but this feels like a surface point rather than something which adds any depth to the story.

Does It Work as a Novel, Play, or Essay?

Part of my frustration is that the book seems to be attempting three different forms at once without fully succeeding at any of them. As a novel steeped in psychology, it's mostly telling rather than showing, with fairly slight actual action. As a play, it would likely be static and hard to sit through performed aloud; nor does it especially work as a drama to be read. As an essay interrogating nature versus urban life and academic power struggles, it handles those ideas in a way that felt too slight to come across as fully satisfying either. Perhaps it’s meant to function as a modern counterpoint to “The Odyssey”. But, other than following a man searching for a home that involves a woman named Helen, I didn’t readily discern any interesting parallels to that classic.

Verdict

I can admire aspects of this novel, and I don't mind books that feel like a chore when they're genuinely wrestling with complex ideas in an ambitious way. But “Helen of Nowhere” never quite goes far enough in any of the directions it gestures toward, and I came away unsure what I'd actually gotten out of it and doubtful that a reread would change that. On the whole this was an unsatisfying reading experience for me personally, though I know plenty of other readers share that reaction while others find it genuinely daring and radical as an interrogation of a man lost in his own self-justification, and I can appreciate that reading too, even if it isn't mine. If you've read this one, I'd love to hear where you landed on it, positive, negative, or somewhere in between.

The Delusions by Jenni Fagan

First Impressions

I absolutely loved this novel by accomplished Scottish writer Jenni Fagan. The story follows a woman named Edi who works in the afterlife, processing the recently dead. She holds a kind of admin position, and the queues she has to work through keep growing longer and longer. Her job is to confront each individual about what they actually did in their lives, since she has access to all of their secrets, and to extract from them their own self-delusion about who they believe themselves to be. It's an extremely painful process: extracting someone's delusion is described almost like pulling a thorny vine out from inside them.

A Premise That Earns Its Weight

On its own, this could read as a fairly fanciful construct, a morality tale dressed up in afterlife bureaucracy. But I found it so much more poignant than that, especially because I read Fagan's memoir “Ootlin” last year, which describes her own harrowing experiences growing up in the care system, where her whole existence was effectively reduced to paperwork, to being shuffled from place to place. Knowing that about her background gave this novel's premise a real emotional charge for me. I don't know how much that context matters to a reader coming to this book cold, but personally, it deepened everything.

Edi has held this position for forty-seven years, all the while hoping her son will eventually pass through her queue, since he was still young when she died. Her own death was horrible: she had cancer, went through an experimental treatment, and was essentially treated as a research subject by a doctor who mismanaged her care. That thread of real anger at medical malpractice reminded me of Sinéad Gleeson's excellent memoir “Constellations”, about an Irish woman contending with serious illness and the callousness of some of the doctors she encountered, a book that, like this novel, also finds a strange beauty in describing the cosmos.

The Cosmos and a Sense of Play

I loved the descriptions of the afterlife itself here, genuinely gorgeous passages about the universe and the movement of the cosmos, handled with real playfulness alongside real beauty. Animals pass through the afterlife too, and at one point an enormous wave of cats moves through, which explains the cat silhouette on the cover alongside the constellations. I was so taken with these descriptions that I ended up visiting the Science Museum's "Starstruck" VR exhibit in London, which walks you right through the cosmos. My headset was clamped on a little too tight, so I came out with a red mark on my forehead that lasted for ages, but it was a fun experience, standing at the edge of a virtual black hole and looking down on a volcanic planet. I'm fairly geeky about the science of space in general, so the novel's cosmic imagery really brought the story alive for me.

A Bureaucracy With No Comfort

There were stretches in the novel where the pacing dragged a little, since Edi spends a lot of time simply complaining about her job, and even given the extraordinary nature of that job, after a while it can start to feel like anyone grumbling about tedious work. But it builds to a powerful and dramatic ending, as changes on the planet start affecting the afterlife's operations, and Edi herself remains part of a system she doesn't fully understand, unsure exactly where the people she processes actually go. It's less a comforting afterlife than another layer of faceless, controlling administration, with no more say for the dead than they had in life. There's a line late in the book that struck me hard: “We have so much more to give and receive than the structures of humanity even vaguely allow.” That feels true of far more than just this story.

Verdict

I found this a really excellent, beautiful, and poignant novel, and it was interesting to read alongside George Saunders's recent novel “Vigil”, which also follows someone guiding the recently dead through a reckoning with what they actually did in life. I think “The Delusions” handles that shared premise in a more dynamic and creative way, though I'd say both novels have their own strengths. In Fagan’s story the people who have committed horrific crimes must face true justice in the afterlife by truly owning what they have done, but also the virtuous must wrestle with untangling the fiction they’ve created regarding their own lives. I appreciated the artful and complex way this novel meditated on these deeply personal issues.

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan

First Impressions

“The Renovation” is a brilliant debut novel whose profundity develops gradually over the course of the story. On the surface it has a fairly straightforward, symbolic premise: a woman has her bathroom renovated, and instead of a bathroom, the workers leave behind a prison cell. Some readers quite rightly will label this as surreal, or Kafkaesque, but for me it carried such real-world emotional weight that I connected with it on multiple levels at once.

Premise

We follow Dilara, who moved to Italy from her native Turkey about a decade ago with her husband and her father. He has now moved in with them as he’s developing Alzheimer's. The renovation happens to make more room for him, but when the construction finishes, Dilara finds a Turkish prison cell where her bathroom should be, eventually revealed to be modelled on Turkey's real Silivri Prison. On one level, this obviously mirrors how caring for her father has come to feel like its own kind of imprisonment, and how living in exile from a country she and her family had to flee for their safety carries its own confinement. But the novel builds far more nuance than that reading alone would suggest, as Dilara finds herself drawn back into this cell again and again, encountering guards and more and more prisoners, even as she keeps stepping back out into her ordinary life caring for her father in Italy.

Caregiving and the Loss of Memory

There are so many harrowing, heart-rending scenes of her father's decline, and the novel occasionally slides into second person when addressing the larger experience of caregiving directly, as though reaching out to any reader who has lived through something similar: the emotional toll of watching someone you love become a husk of who they were, and the way that tragedy doesn't erase the ordinary, complicated tensions that were already present in a family. There's a lovely, devastating image of family love as a kind of orbit, everyone circling each other in connection and familiarity without ever fully touching, and the novel asks what happens to that orbit once the shared memories holding it together start to disappear. Dilara herself starts losing her grip on her own memories under the sheer exhaustion and stress of caregiving; there's a striking moment where she vividly recalls a family gathering, certain that photographs exist of it, only to find the actual photos show something quite different from what she remembers.

The story doesn't shy away from the practical wreckage either: dwindling money, her husband eventually leaving after the Turkish cell triggers real fear that their old government has somehow found them, and Dilara left alone, unable to find work despite once having been a practicing child psychologist. Her sense of her own identity grows slippery too, especially once her father begins mistaking her for her own mother, who died suddenly years earlier, a contrast that throws the slow, grinding nature of his decline into sharp relief.

Exile, Language, and Nationhood

There's a poignant nostalgia woven through the sections set in the cell, particular tastes and objects such as coffee and marzipan that briefly transport Dilara back to Turkey before slipping away again, a past she can never fully recover. That resonated with me personally, as someone who has lived outside my own native country for my entire adult life; a certain sensation can transport me back there in my mind but whenever I return to the United States now it's a genuinely different place from the one I left. For Dilara, that displacement is sharpened by real political danger back home, and the novel captures how ordinary people get swept into extraordinary circumstances almost without realising it, including one darkly funny aside about a relative bringing unpaid parking tickets to a protest just to find a policeman to sort them out. Language becomes another marker of that drift: Dilara and her husband mostly speak Italian together, and she finds herself forgetting Turkish words, only reconnecting with the language inside the cell itself, talking with guards and prisoners. Her father, meanwhile, keeps repeating one phrase throughout the book, insisting that what he's experiencing "is not correct," a line that works on the level of his own disorientation but also as a much larger judgment on the state of his home country and his family.

Verdict

I connected with this novel on some simpler levels too, like Dilara's friends back in Istanbul teasing her for only ever reading depressing literary fiction, which is very much my own reading diet. But beyond that, what struck me most is how the book extends the idea of imprisonment well past its literal setting: when someone is caught in circumstances entirely outside their control, they can become a kind of prison cell themselves. There’s a tension throughout about whether Dilara might literally be in a Turkish prison cell and her life in Italy is purely an escapist fantasy. I found real echoes in this novel of Kafka and Beckett, but most powerfully of Georgi Gospodinov's “Time Shelter”, in how both novels braid together the experience of dementia with a country's oppressive political history. For anyone who has cared for a family member, partner, or friend through Alzheimer's, I'd also strongly recommend Sam Mills's memoir “The Fragments of My Father”, which captures the physical, emotional, and financial toll of that experience in unflinching detail.

I was genuinely so impressed by the nuance and complexity with which this novel handles memory and identity, and by how strongly it resonated with me. Orhan previously published a short story collection, and I understand this novel actually grew out of one of those stories, which makes me want to go back and read that prior book. If you've read this one, or have other recommendations of literature that grapples honestly with Alzheimer's and caregiving, I'd love to hear about it.

Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli

First Impressions

“Beginning Middle End” follows a mother and daughter in Sicily. The mother has recently published a book and gone on a European book tour, and she's also recently divorced. She and her daughter are staying in an apartment belonging to the mother's new lover, a musician currently away on tour, while the mother works on a new book whose shape she hasn't yet figured out, and the two of them read from classical literature together. They also carry with them a mosaic depicting theGreek god Proteus who is associated with knowledge of the future and the past. The mother's own grandmother found this artefact on an archaeological dig and kept for herself.

Where We Stand in Time

This novel is really about trying to locate ourselves in relation to time: where we've been, where we're going, and what it means to be in the middle of your life, uncertain whether you're heading toward a new beginning or already locked onto a path toward the end. It’s poignant how she feels a “nostalgia for the present” which can “warp time strangely”. All of that gets folded into the mother's own writing process and her thinking about narrative structure. There's a section where she considers Aristotle's rules of plot, the basic beginning-middle-end shape, and reconsiders what "the middle" actually means and “perhaps a defence of the middle is needed, a revindication of being in the middle, because eventually we have no choice but to be in the middle, caught in the middle, no longer able to swim back to shore, but realising the other shore is also still very far away: and where do we go from here?” I know a novel about the process of writing a novel can feel like a cliché, but I found Luiselli's handling of it genuinely poignant.

The book also looks across generations of women: the grandmother, the mother, and the daughter, plus the mother's own mother back in North America, who may be in the early stages of dementia. It asks what actually gets passed down between generations, and whether it's the accuracy of what's remembered that matters, or the feeling carried by the person doing the remembering. I liked how the mother and daughter stay unnamed throughout, which gives the whole thing a sense of continuity, as though the grandmother was once the mother, the mother was once the daughter, and the daughter might become a mother in turn. This is much more a contemplative novel than a plot-driven one, though there's a genuinely gripping moment at its centre when the mother has to make a dramatic decision shaped by their circumstances, all while the volcano Etna simmers in the background, its activity triggering wildfires that add real pressure to the story.

A Continuation, Not a Sequel

I hadn't realised this going in, but the book is clearly a continuation of Luiselli's earlier novel “Lost Children Archive”, a road trip story following a couple and their respective children as their relationship comes apart. Here we see the aftermath: the mother has left that man, taking her biological daughter with her, while his biological son stayed behind with him. Luiselli has said in a short interview that she doesn't consider this a sequel and within the novel itself she resists the idea that mother’s writing is autobiographical or auto fiction. It’s true that “Beginning Middle End” isn't a continuation in terms of plot so much as a return to the same people in an entirely new moment, grappling with different concerns. It does gesture back to the earlier book though, where the daughter in “Lost Children Archive” had a harrowing near-drowning moment, and the daughter here references that scene as though it happened to her, even though it didn't, since reading about it created a kind of false memory. That's very much what Luiselli is interested in here: what becomes "true" once a story or myth takes hold in our minds, and what the consequences of that are.

A Shift Late in the Book

There's a significant shift in form toward the end of this story that I know some readers have disliked. The novel becomes something closer to a collaborative project between mother and daughter, echoing how “Lost Children Archive” incorporated photographs alongside text. Part of me thinks the book might have worked just as well if the mother had simply kept writing the story herself, but I understand the larger point Luiselli is making with that formal turn. I'd be curious whether it landed for other readers or not. There's a line I found genuinely powerful, “I’m afraid of not knowing where to begin and how to end. Beginnings and endings are confusing: they are written as if in a foreign alphabet.” This gives a sense that we are in some senses lost in a perpetual sense of the middle of life, equally disorientated by a lack of true understanding about the past or a potential future. Luiselli’s story meaningfully contemplates how to inhabit the present of one’s life. I thought this was a beautifully intelligent and reflective book.

May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry

First Impressions

May We Feed the King is a really intriguing new kind of historical novel that quite surprised me. Going in, I'd seen a reader response saying it was difficult to follow, but I don't actually think that's true. I wonder if what that reader meant is that the novel deliberately withholds specificity and refuses to offer definitive answers, which can feel unsettling in its own way, but it serves a definite artistic and theoretical purpose in this novel. That was exactly what made it so enchanting, and I found myself completely intrigued by the details we are given.

A King With No Name

The novel follows a reluctant king from history who is never named. We get no character names, no dates, no country, though the setting is presumably medieval. What we do learn is that he came to the throne only because his two older brothers, both kings before him, died prematurely, making him the default heir. There's something almost absurd built into the very phrase used when a monarch dies, "the king is dead, long live the king," and the playwright Eugène Ionesco played on exactly that absurdity in one of his own plays. What it actually means, of course, is that the moment one monarch dies, the next person in line simply becomes king, as though kingship were an interchangeable role handed down a line, almost like selecting one apple from an anonymous barrel.

We're given plenty about this king's actions, his refusal to follow his council's advice, his reluctance to order executions or lead the country into war, his constant friction with a hated chief advisor who has likewise simply inherited his own role, but almost nothing about his interior life. We know he's deeply unhappy, doesn’t mind that his wife the queen is having an affair, that he barely eats and that he's essentially trapped. There's even a story of a previous king who abdicated outright, fled the palace, and was eventually caught throwing apples at the men sent to drag him back, earning him the nickname "the apple king." Our king is acutely aware that there's no real way out of his own situation, only this legend of a failed escape.

History, Curated

Alongside the king's story, the novel is bookended by a contemporary curator tasked with dressing the rooms of this same palace for a special event. She takes the job far more seriously than anyone around her expects, working with an archivist to dig into the palace's history and becoming completely engrossed in the king's story. Like the king, she's never named, but she has a real, almost fetishistic precision about which objects she selects and how she arranges them, wax apples included, believing that the right arrangement can let a visitor sense the history embedded in a room rather than just being told a flat set of facts.

I think it's very clever how Rebecca Perry builds such a strong sense of this king's identity without ever giving us direct access to his thoughts or feelings. Instead we get him only through side glances: what servants and councillors observe of him, the stories people tell about him, some possibly fabricated, possibly gossip, possibly politically motivated. That mirrors exactly how we receive history in general: we have to ask who's telling us a given story and what their motivations might be, because that shapes how we understand the facts we're given.

Judgment, Then and Now

There's a real, quiet tragedy at the center of this book: a man thrust into a role he never wanted, with no way out. And yet, he's just a king and privileged individual, exactly the sort history tends to remember over the ordinary people who lived decently and acted in small, unrecorded ways. But I think the novel's point extends well beyond monarchy. All of us are scrutinized, judged, and assumptions are made about us in ways we can't fully control, especially once we become any kind of public figure, and our own narratives can be told by others without our consent. Oddly, this made me think of Patrick Radden Keefe's recent book “London Falling” and the mystery surrounding the death of Zac, the nineteen-year-old at the center of that book, and how sympathetically Keefe reconstructs a story his grieving family still doesn't have full answers to. It also brought to mind Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell trilogy, beginning with “Wolf Hall”, and the way she imaginatively fills in the interior lives of Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Cromwell himself, offering a new slant on history while still leaving room for readers to draw their own conclusions. Maggie O'Farrell's “The Marriage Portrait” does something similar with another real historical figure, Lucrezia de’ Medici, refusing to let the known facts limit the possibilities of her inner life. Rebecca Perry seems to be doing exactly that here, deliberately withholding names and dates so that history feels like an open field rather than a fixed timeline of accomplishments and failures.

A Puzzle Worth Solving

I found real pleasure in trying to piece together what was actually happening, in a way that felt almost like solving a puzzle where some interpretations land better than others. In the contemporary strand, there's a quietly building romance between the curator and the archivist, a growing attraction handled with real subtlety in the background. The novel also plays with different kinds of looking: tourists passing through the palace rooms today, courtiers and servants once watching the king, and, in one lovely touch, the king himself becoming a kind of tourist in his own home, wandering into the kitchens, asking how cinnamon cakes are made, and picking up an egg in its shell for what is the first time in his life, utterly struck by it. That layering of who's observing whom, and how the reader becomes another observer entering into all of it, kept the ambiguity alive without ever making the book feel murky or hard to follow.

There's a nice tension, too, in how the curator resists pressure from the palace's overseers, who just want the rooms dressed quickly and generically. She insists on arranging them as though a specific person from history had passed through only moments before, which raises exactly the questions the novel is interested in: what we can actually know about the past, what we can never know, and how much room there is to hold multiple honest possibilities about the same set of facts.

Verdict

I'm glad I got past my initial hesitation, which turned out to be based on nothing more than one secondhand reader reaction. This novel has been greatly well received this year: Rebecca Perry was named one of the year's best debut novelists, despite coming from a background in poetry rather than fiction, and while the prose itself isn't conspicuously lyrical, I think it could fairly be read as an extended prose poem. It won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize this year and has since been longlisted for the Booker, and I wouldn't be surprised if it goes further still. I found it a real pleasure, full of tantalizing details I'm still turning over. If you've read it, I'd love to know whether you agree with my read on it, or if there's more you'd want to raise about it.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken)

First Impressions

“The Wax Child” is extremely odd (in a good way) and it’s genuinely a wild ride. The overall story is easy enough to grasp, but a lot of its details are so curious and strange that I had to really focus to understand what was going on and what it all ultimately meant. And the impact of the story builds to something much bigger than just an individual tale from the past.

This book is a novel, but it also feels like a piece of poetry, not just in its language but in how certain phrases repeat and build a real lyricism, especially in sections structured like incantations or based on real historical superstitious practices woven throughout the text. It also feels a bit like a play, since Ravn apparently began working on this as a dramatic piece before it evolved into prose. It's a historical story, but I found it carries a surprising amount of modern relevance and urgency, and it functions, too, as a kind of horror story: genuinely horrific things happen in it, and its larger meaning and impact are quite terrifying in their own right.

Premise and Perspective

The novel begins in the late 1500s in Denmark, though most of it takes place around 1620–1621. It follows a woman named Christenze, but not from her own point of view. Instead, the story is narrated from the unique perspective of a wax child, an object Christenze creates out of beeswax mixed with human hair and nail clippings. It's such a different way of building a narrative about the past: most historical novels are either objectively or omnisciently narrated, or told from a particular character's subjective viewpoint, but here the narrator is an object with a strange kind of objectivity, formed from both natural and human elements, able to see into the minds and motivations of the people around it as well as into the natural world, without making value judgments. It has emotions, but no real point of view to impose on what it observes; it simply records.

Christenze, whom the wax child considers its mistress, is of noble birth but not wealthy, living a fairly humble life with a well-off woman desperate for children, who has lost fifteen of them to miscarriage or early infant death. After all this loss, that woman goes looking for a scapegoat and settles on Christenze, accusing her of witchcraft. That accusation forces Christenze to flee, and she ends up connecting with other women living on the margins of society, women quite different from the mainstream, and forms a real bond with them. The first half of the novel follows the connection that grows between these women as they live and work together, preparing fish, singing, sharing stories and superstitions. Every character in this book is based on a real historical figure.

The Witch Trials

Because of the patriarchy and misogyny of the era, alongside larger societal shifts, these women become targets and scapegoats in the witch hunts, something the book signals early on and that isn't really a spoiler given the imagery on the cover itself. The novel follows them into suspicion, persecution, and torture, rendered in small, carefully chosen details rather than extended, graphic description, which somehow makes it more horrifying: a red-hot pincer, a leg screw tightened further, a woman returning to her cell with a broken hand. Confessions are extracted this way, and women are made to give up the names of other women in turn.

What struck me most is how this persecution wasn't just superstition or mass hysteria, as it's sometimes framed, but part of a deliberate expansion of power. Christian IV of Denmark instituted laws and actively pursued these witch hunts as part of centralizing his authority, creating convenient scapegoats to position himself as protector of the righteous against supposed agents of the devil, while simultaneously imposing standardized behavior and belief that would knit the population into a unified, obedient nationhood. England and Ireland's King James I pursued similar witch trials around the same time, part of a broader pattern in how modern nation-states and power structures were forming, built in part on enforcing gender norms and conformity, with women who didn't conform serving as convenient targets. It's not hard to draw a line from this to how authority figures today still identify "bad people" to demonize, rallying segments of a population under a leader by scapegoating marginalized groups, transgender people among them, generating a kind of protective paranoia in the process.

Hypocrisy and Autonomy

I loved a section that exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of this authority: a woman convicted of witchcraft and awaiting execution is brought to the pregnant wife of the king, who asks for advice on ensuring a quick, healthy birth. The condemned woman recites a series of common superstitions, and the wife responds that she already knew all of that, it's common knowledge, only to be met with the unspoken irony that this same "common knowledge" is what got the woman condemned as a witch in the first place. Later in the novel, when Christenze is made to defend her own life in an unjust trial, she declares, "I love life. It belongs to me," a powerful assertion of the one thing she still has any claim to, at the same time as it's being taken from her. Ravn doesn't flatten these women into simple victims, either: Christenze at one point tries to set herself apart from the other accused women by invoking her noble birth, hoping it might spare her, and while she is treated somewhat differently in her execution, she ultimately meets the same fate. The novel is also honest about how some of this persecution came from other women, part of how patriarchy actually functions, including a heartbreaking moment where a young girl testifies at trial without really understanding that her words are helping convict the accused.

Ravn's Method

There's so much in this book that's enticingly strange while also being clearly built on real historical research. I loved hearing, in an interview, how Ravn described reading original documents from this period and being unable to make sense of one particular text until she realized it was actually a set of dance instructions, at which point she got up in the middle of a library reading room and started performing the movements herself to understand what was being conveyed. It's a funny image, and also a good encapsulation of her creativity as a writer: this book resists being pinned to a single genre, weaving together enough different elements to give a real, distinct understanding of this period of history and, in turn, our own present moment.

Verdict

Beyond the sheer immediate weirdness and pleasure of this unique story, which is satisfying in its own right, thinking through its larger implications made this feel moving and impactful to me. I think Ravn is a hugely talented writer; I also loved her earlier novel “The Employees”, which seems entirely different on its surface, a story set in outer space narrated by both humans and robots or beings somewhere between the two, but which shares this same technique of narrating from the perspective of objects or non-human entities, offering such a distinct outside view of the human condition. I'd love to know if you've read “The Wax Child” and what you made of it.

The Booker Prize 2026 Longlist

The 2026 Booker season is officially here, and after making my predictions I'm relieved to say the book I was surest about made it: "John of John" by Douglas Stuart — a heart-wrenching, atmospheric novel I'd been convinced there'd be near-rioting over if it were left off. I'm equally glad to see M. John Harrison's "The End of Everything," a strange, quietly political dystopia whose mood I connected with deeply, and Elizabeth Strout's "The Things We Never Say," a more overtly political turn for her that I loved.

There are, as ever, surprises — three debut novels among them, including Rebecca Perry's "May We Feed the King," fresh from the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. Marlon James returns with "The Disappearers", giving us two former winners on the list alongside Strout as a previously-listed author. Two titles — James's and Emma Cline's "Switzy" — aren't even out in the UK until September. The novel I’m most hesitant about is “The Palm House” since I loathed Gwendoline Riley’s previous novel “First Love” but I’m willing to honestly give it a try.

I've read only three of the thirteen so far, a lower hit-rate than usual, but I'm thrilled to get stuck in. My disappointments? "Transcription"'s absence stings most, and I'd hoped to see Maggie O'Farrell's "Land," Kae Tempest’s “Having Spent Life Seeking,” Tahmima Anam’s "Uprising," and Valeria Luiselli's "Beginning Middle End" too.

My online book club votes next on which we read first through August — the shortlist lands 22 September, the winner on 9 November. Take your time with these; they're worth savouring.

What do you think of the list? Any early favourites? Any books you’re disappointed not to see listed? And what are you most excited to read next?

Floodlines by Saleem Haddad

First Impressions

I love an engaging family epic that gets into all the messiness and drama of family life, and there's certainly a lot of that in “Floodlines” by Saleem Haddad, which follows three generations of one family, primarily three adult sisters who've mostly been estranged from one another. Living in different places, they're pulled back together partly because their aging mother, Bridget, is facing increasing mental and physical difficulties, raising immediate questions about her care, but also because of a much bigger question: what happens to their father's legacy. Their father was a very famous artist in Iraq, and the rediscovery of his paintings raises the question of who gets to be their caretaker, whether they should be sold, or displayed as a representative example of Iraqi art. We follow the sisters as they come together to argue this out, with their mother Bridget drawn into the discussion too.

Family, History, and Art

In working through all this the novel explores facets of Iraqi history I wasn't aware of before alongside a real sense of how each individual's perspective on a nation and its history depends entirely on their own experience of it. Each of the sisters grew up in Iraq alongside their parents but left at different points in their lives, which has given each of them a genuinely different point of view on the country's history, all of which feeds into their disagreements over their father's legacy. All three women are also practicing artists in their own right, each working in a different form that feels tied to their individual personalities and how they see the world. This novel engages with the complex question about what it means to create art, how art can express an individual point of view while also representing something much larger about a community or a nation's history, and how art can be manipulated for political ends, something their father discovered firsthand while creating a major commissioned piece in Iraq, shaped by the shifting governments around him.

Structure and Characters

The novel moves between the sisters' perspectives, though we actually enter the story through another character, Nizar, the son of one of the sisters. At the novel's start, Nizar is deeply disillusioned with his career as a war journalist, having traveled through the Middle East reporting on various conflicts, left physically scarred and mentally traumatized by moving through those war zones. He's drawn into his mother and aunts' conflict over his grandfather's art, and the novel moves between his perspective, the three sisters', and Bridget's. I often find myself favoring one perspective over the others in multi-POV novels like this, but here I found every account equally engaging. Most of the action takes place across the middle of 2014, though the characters frequently loop back into memory, and there are buried family secrets and old dramas that surface and reshape the present as the novel goes on, full of intriguing surprises and plot twists. Getting to know each character's backstory only pulled me in closer.

Zainab, Nizar's mother, had a very difficult early life, including the loss of her first husband, raising her child while moving between countries and struggling to get by, before eventually marrying a wealthy man and arriving at real financial comfort. She wants to establish her father's legacy and celebrate his art in the country where it was made, a position her sisters don't fully share. Her older sister, Ishtar, is strong-willed and opinionated, one of my favorite characters in the book, someone I loved reading about even though I'd never want to actually meet her, given how intimidating she is. She lives on a houseboat on the Thames in London, is a lesbian, and has this grand conceptual art project: recreating an ark to sail down the Tigris, an attempt to reconnect the region with the ancient art and tradition of Mesopotamia. We follow her on that journey, sailing through countries including active war zones, and it generates high tension throughout the book, as this family's present increasingly entangles with both world events in 2014 and the nation's history across previous decades. There's one very dramatic scene involving a dance with a historic figure at a public function that reminded me a little of Alan Hollinghurst's “The Line of Beauty”, a completely jaw-dropping moment.

Verdict

What struck me most is how tenderly the novel explores each character's backstory and their difficult, halting effort to come together as a family, moving the story from tense family arguments toward something like hope, hard-won and incomplete, but genuine. Nizar spends much of the novel in a place of deep despair, reflecting on a broken relationship with a man named Alfie, a good and supportive relationship undermined by fundamental differences in perspective between them. There's an especially moving section at the novel's center focused on Bridget, the mother, at a point in her life where past and present have started to blend together, and the memories that surface for her are rendered with heart-wrenching beauty.

I think this is a genuinely inspiring, informative book, one that offers such a different vantage point on displacement and on understanding your own relationship to nationhood from a position of remove from the country of your birth. But beyond all that, it's simply a wonderful family story with so many compelling characters that I wanted to keep reading about, and there's so much in it, too, about the richness and power of art itself. I think it's a wonderful, finely written, and very accomplished novel. This is an impressive follow-up from Haddad’s debut novel “Guapa”.

Interviewing the Author

I had the pleasure of interviewing Saleem Haddad at a live event at Hatchards bookshop in London, and it was fascinating hearing his perspective on writing this book, which took him many years given how complex and layered the story is. I think it's impressive how he draws in so many characters and layers of history while keeping everything clear; I was never confused about what was happening, even moving between all these different perspectives.

Before our live conversation, I filmed a short segment with Haddad in the bookshop discussing books that influenced him while writing “Floodlines” which I’ve included at the end of my video review. His final recommendation was Virginia Woolf's “The Waves”, which happens to be my own favorite novel of all time, something I found genuinely touching, especially given that he discussed it at Hatchards, the historic bookshop that's actually referenced in Woolf's “Mrs. Dalloway”. Haddad said he thinks of it, in many ways, as a book about life itself. While writing the ending of his own novel, he wanted a dreamy atmosphere built around a kind of collective, polyphonic voice, and someone recommended “The Waves” to him as a model; he read it and fell in love with it, describing it as ultimately about the human experience.

If you've read “Floodlines”, I'd love to know what you thought of it.

Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

First Impressions

Dominion is so skilfully written and creative that it was a genuine pleasure to read. This is fiction that feels new, exciting, and full of real vigour. It's also a genuinely thrilling story, with a lot of dramatic events packed into a relatively short book that’s just under 200 pages. This debut novel is set in the year 2000 in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi.

Premise

The novel centers on a teenage boy named Manny who is often referred to as "Wonder Boy." He’s the golden child of one of the community's most prominent families. His father is a widely respected reverend and the family is well-off. Manny excels at sports and academics, extremely popular in the community. But there's a great deal about this young man that most people don't know or understand, and crucially, for most of the novel, we never actually get his own perspective directly. Instead, we see him filtered through the two women closest to him. First there's Priscilla, his mother and the reverend's wife: beautiful, no-nonsense, and someone who's known for a long time that her outwardly pious husband is, underneath it all, quite the hypocrite; she also carries a longstanding hip injury from an accident in her youth. Then there's Diamond, Manny's seventeen-year-old girlfriend, deeply in love with him. The novel moves back and forth between these two first-person perspectives, giving us a rounded, layered picture of this young man and the crisis he's moving through: trying to live up to everything expected of him while wrestling with unruly desires and a viscious strain of selfishness, the sense that his own wants are the only ones that matter.

Crucially, the novel never simply paints him as a monster, even though he does some genuinely monstrous things over the course of the story. He's a complicated young man, but the book is really about these two women, their own complicated paths, and what it means to live inside a largely patriarchal, deeply religious community full of social expectation and rumor, where maintaining a good public standing matters enormously.

Language and Craft

Something I admire about this novel is its unique, precise metaphorical language, which gives such a strong sense of these women's sensibility and worldview. There are so many lines where the prose genuinely crackles: the reverend is described as"4:30 hot," the hour when the day's heat peaks; a room's interior is "hot as armpits"; church hats become "helmets of salvation"; a woman's tired back is "ready to retire." These images are so precise that I understood exactly what was being conveyed, while also being filtered through a very specific sensibility that let me feel the texture of these characters' lives and the culture they come from.

Structurally, alongside the alternating first-person sections from Priscilla and Diamond, the novel includes printed sections of sermons, seemingly notes or outlines belonging to the reverend, possibly even typed up by Priscilla herself, which do real work establishing the community's values and the questions its members are wrestling with. There are also short, cryptic sections headed only by strange numbers, presented in Manny's own first-person voice. I genuinely struggled to work out what these were at first, wondering if they referred to some kind of file or case number, until I came across a Goodreads reader's theory that they're dates counting backward, meaning these are likely diary entries from Manny across the years leading up to 2000. That reading feels right to me, and these fragments eventually reveal something much bigger about who Manny really is and the secrets he's carrying.

A Pivotal, Ambiguous Scene

Partway through, there's a scene where Manny, out running alone, is kissed by another young man. I won't give away what follows, but it leads to a great deal more drama, and the moment itself is genuinely ambiguous, open to interpretation depending on how you read his reaction. On the surface, it could suggest repressed desire, but I think it's more about aspects of his character he can't fully allow himself to acknowledge, given the constrictions of the world he's grown up in and the expectations placed on him: even entertaining the possibility of being gay or bisexual would carry consequences he can't countenance, and we see some of those consequences play out almost immediately. There's also a clear biblical undertone here, an echo of Judas's kiss of betrayal, and the novel elsewhere raises the question of whether Judas can really be blamed for playing a role he was, in some sense, preordained to play. That same moral ambiguity runs through Manny: is he ultimately a saint or a sinner? The novel suggests he's genuinely both, and uses that tension to probe a bigger question: what do we actually owe, or know, about our own children?

Strangers We Thought We Knew

As the story unfolds and more comes to light, Priscilla and her husband, the reverend, have to reckon with who their son actually is, and how much they're willing to keep hidden versus expose, both for the sake of their own reputation and, they'd like to believe, for his soul. At one point the novel notes it would be far easier to sweep his transgressions under the rug than to risk their own being exposed in turn. It made me think of a line from Andrew Solomon's nonfiction book “Far From the Tree”, which I read years ago and admired greatly, and which I coincidentally saw quoted again recently in Patrick Radden Keefe's “London Falling”, a completely different kind of book that nonetheless centers on a son who turns out to be a stranger to his own parents: "Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity." That's exactly the terrifying question “Dominion”confronts: what do we do when the person we thought we knew and loved turns out to be, in crucial ways, a stranger to us?

Diamond

Diamond is a fascinating character in her own right: beautiful, but shaped by real hardship, having been abandoned as a child by her mother and her mother's partner, left to fend for herself and her siblings. She's someone longing for love and family in a way she's never really had. I loved one small moment where she reflects on watching The Cosby Show as a child and finding its version of family completely false, in contrast to Bob Ross, whom she considers genuinely real, a funny, telling detail about her character.

Where It Could Have Gone Further

I can see why some readers might be critical of this book, and I felt a bit of that myself: events move quickly, and the novel flips through a lot of material fairly abruptly. I could easily have read another hundred and fifty pages of this, with room for fuller character development. At the same time, I admire the sheer compression here, which is part of where the book gets its power. My other small reservation is with a shift in Priscilla's character, and particularly her relationship to Diamond, toward the end, which felt a little too swift and neatly resolved for me, though I understand the case for it, given how much Priscilla has endured and how her long-held position in the community, she's literally referred to by some as "the first lady", might understandably shift once she decides she's had enough. I did really appreciate how her private, repressed erotic longings are handled in the book, in real contrast to her husband's own indulgences, and I found myself hoping the story might eventually let her explore those desires in reality rather than leaving them confined to her imagination.

Verdict

I appreciated so much about this novel: its complexity, and the sheer richness of Citchens's language bringing it all to life. It was a great delight to read. It’s a genuinely accomplished piece of literature and, given the prize recognition it's already picked up, I expect it will keep earning more. If you've read this debut, I'd love to hear what you thought of it.

Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest

First Impressions

“Having Spent Life Seeking” is an incredibly powerful and beautifully written novel. I felt like I genuinely lived alongside these characters and went on a journey with them, which is exactly the experience I want from fiction. This is a story about the difficulty of self-acceptance set against the pull of social acceptance, a tension I think so many of us feel, especially in childhood and our teenage years, rendered here with great impact. It's also a novel about the importance of persisting through seemingly insurmountable challenges, because there will still be beauty, joy, love, and even tranquility to be found in life, even when the world feels like it's completely falling apart.

Premise

The novel follows Rothko, who at the very start has just been released from prison after twenty years. Rothko is slowly rebuilding a life in their hometown of Edgecliff, a fictional, slightly shabby English seaside town of the kind with plenty of lifelong locals alongside weekend holidaymakers. Rothko is trying to live and work independently, but the world has changed enormously in their absence. One of the most impressive things about this novel is how little interiority or direct self-reflection we actually get from these characters; we mostly get description of experience and dialogue rather than explicit inner monologue. Normally that kind of withholding frustrates me in fiction, because I want access to what a character is really feeling. But even without much of that here, I felt like I deeply understood these characters and could connect with what they were going through, which I think is a real feat of craft: conveying all this emotion without spelling it out on the page. It reminded me a little of David Szalay's “Flesh”, where a similarly withheld interior life still lets you feel exactly what a character is going through, though the styles of these two books are quite different otherwise.

Rothko's Story

Rothko has a difficult relationship with their mother, Meg, who struggles with her own addiction and the trauma of past abuse. We get Rothko's backstory gradually, and for a long stretch we don't actually learn why they were in prison for so long, which serves a couple of purposes: real narrative tension, but also a way of resisting the instinct to judge someone based purely on incarceration, when what actually matters is understanding the circumstances that led there. So much of this novel is about connection and disconnection, especially with strangers, capturing both beautiful, unexpected moments of human recognition between people who owe each other nothing, and moments where people judge and mistreat one another on entirely superficial grounds. Rothko doesn't judge others this way, even though they are far from a straightforwardly virtuous character and has made real mistakes; when they meet someone destitute, angry, or unpredictable, they tend to meet them on a purely human level, and those moments landed with real emotional force for me.

Rothko's nickname comes from childhood: they blush deeply pink or red when embarrassed or ashamed, and as a child this was described as their face "going like a Rothko painting." It's such a strong, simple visual image that stayed with me throughout, a way of physically rendering shame without ever spelling out the internal experience behind it. There's a similarly striking scene, a memory of riding in a car with a driver who's become so emotionally unstable that it feels like the car could crash at any moment, that hit me hard, since I've had a similar experience myself of being trapped in a car with someone who seemed to have lost touch with reality, desperate just to get out even on a dangerous highway.

Family, Gender, and Identity

I also appreciated how Tempest handles Rothko's relationship with their sister. I found the line “they might have come from the same people but they had never really been coming from the same place” to be especially poignant. Though there’s a shared origin there is also a fundamental, if imperfect, mutual understanding. Part of that distance is on Rothko, for not fully opening up to their sister about who they are, something tied to their lifelong struggle with gender identity and discomfort inhabiting a body which, for much of their life, read to others as more conventionally masculine, generating real confusion, suspicion, and hostility from people around them. There's a beautiful early friendship with a teenage boy, and later a love affair with a girl named Dionne. This novel is, in part, a genuine love story, but one that follows two people developing as individuals alongside their relationship, rather than staying fixed while navigating differences between two already-formed selves, which felt like a genuinely different, truer way of depicting a long-term relationship than most fiction manages.

Throughout the book, Rothko frequently refers to other people as "normal" and expresses how they feel alienated from the general population. Much of the novel traces Rothko’s path toward a real sense of self-acceptance, toward feeling that everything about them is simply right rather than something to keep measuring against other people. There's a genuinely important, difficult scene where Rothko, just wanting a quiet pint after work, has to decide which gendered toilet to use, aware that either choice risks a reaction from other people in the pub, and the fear and humiliation bound up in a situation that should be entirely mundane. There's an echo of this too when a group of teenagers openly discuss and speculate about Rothko's gender, dialogue that felt so vivid I could practically hear it. Given everything happening around trans rights and legislation in Britain right now, I think really feeling what that experience is like from the inside matters.

Language and Structure

Tempest is also a poet and musician, and that shows in the writing: mostly grounded and realistic, but with moments of real philosophical density where a single line opens out to convey an entire lived experience. There's a striking stretch, covering a long period of Rothko's life during a low point with addiction, that shifts into an almost musical, rhyming register, compressing a huge amount of time and despair into very little space. For instance, one line that stuck with me was "Using is its own universe." The novel conveys, through both Rothko’s mother Meg and Rothko themself, just how consuming addiction becomes, and how it can override every other relationship and responsibility in a person's life.

A Small Reservation

If I have one criticism, it's that the compressed, musical section covering Rothko's addiction and much of their prison sentence skips over a lot: twenty years is an enormous span of time, and the actual lived experience of prison doesn't get fully rendered, even though it shaped so much of Rothko’s life. The novel doesn't shy away from stating that prison was a genuinely horrible experience, even while acknowledging some of what Rothko gained there, skills, one significant connection with another person, but the difficulty of reintegration afterward, in a world that's simply moved on without them (self-checkout lines being one small, disorienting example), is handled really well.

A Personal Resonance

This novel feels genuinely personal for Tempest, who has undergone his own journey with gender in recent years, now identifying as a trans man and using he/him pronouns. Rothko is referred to as they/them for most of the novel, until a single moment where he's able to say plainly, "I am a man," to another character, after which the pronouns shift to he/him. It's a tender, powerful moment, and one I felt I'd really traveled toward alongside him: something so simple for so many people to say, and so hard-won here.

I got my copy of this book from the queer library that the shop Aesop runs every Pride month in London, turning their usual fragrance shop into a stock of free queer books for anyone to take. Tempest has spoken in interviews about being given a copy of “Stone Butch Blues” by a stranger early in life, and how transformative that was, and I think that same spirit runs through this novel and through initiatives like Aesop's library. This year I also marched in a Pride parade myself for the first time, with the small Rīga Pride contingent in London, drawing on my own Latvian heritage, and witnessed one of my fellow marchers run to embrace his mother on the sidelines in tears, a moment that felt like it echoed exactly what this novel is reaching for: real joy and connection persisting alongside real struggle.

Verdict

It’d be negligent of me not to mention that there's also a wonderful thread to this story involving Rothko's dog, Donovan. So much of the book is about how fleeting, even coincidental connections with other people can matter enormously to our own journey of understanding and accepting ourselves. The novel also raises poignant larger questions about the sheer strangeness of being alive; for example, one line that struck me was "“How could a thing as weightless as life be so fucking heavy so much of the time?” Life passes through us lightly, in the moment, and yet we carry so much weight: memory, disappointment, love, heartbreak, and the world's judgment. What matters, the novel suggests, is how we feel about ourselves and how much we allow those feelings to affect the way we actually live in the world.

I thought this was an absolutely incredible book and I loved reading it. I'd highly recommend it, and I'd love to hear from anyone else who's read it, or who wants to point me toward more of Kae Tempest's work, since I've read some of his poetry but haven't yet properly explored the music.