I’ve had an excessively busy spell over the last week (month, year…!), but it has - and I realise this sounds counterintuitive - been extremely good for reading. Travelling, and the inevitable delayed trains and planes, make for an excellent excuse to consume books. Including these two which are the type of books you are desperate to talk about because they swirl around your brain.

This is not because they are in any way representative of my life. I am not one of those people who needs to filter everything I read through the lens of my own experience. Part of the point of reading is to take you into lives other than your own. But they did make me think about my domestic set-up (and feel grateful for it), and the way we tell stories and construct narratives about ourselves.

I have been pondering the impossibility of doing it all and doing it all well of late; hoping that doing it well enough to get by some of the time is acceptable Much as I love my midlife career renaissance, it is hard to fit in everything on the lists - for I keep multiple lists on my phone, in my head, in various notebooks. Work expands, and domestic and family admin proliferate until every corner is filled. I would not change it, but I cannot pretend it’s not challenging. I have tried various versions (working full-time, part-time, brief spells of being at home with very little paid work - although heaven knows domestic labour is just that. See the brilliant, thought-provoking Femonomics for more) and it’s always tricky. But is our labour always valued? And what would happen if you discovered that it wasn’t: that the person with whom you had a built a life thought their contribution was more significant than yours?

Speaking of busy, I’m doing a Substack live - my first ever! - with the glorious tomorrow, 17th April, at 11.00am (UK time). You can join here and the video will be available on their site thereafter. And this weekend I’ll be chatting to and at the Winchester Books Festival, tickets here.

I read Belle Burden’s memoir, Strangers: A Memoir of a Marriage (Ebury) in a single session, only coming to on occasion to heave my jaw from the floor. It’s like watching a (very well-written) disaster film play out: you cannot look away, despite it being excruciating. It began life as an article in The New York Times’ Modern Love series - one of the sub-one per-cent of submissions which is plucked from the pile. The memoir is is a fleshed-out version of events.

And ye gods, what events they are.

During the first Covid lockdown, Belle, her husband James and two of their three children are at their house in Martha’s Vineyard. One night, after they have eaten, Burden’s phone rings. A stranger is on the end of the line. He sounds young and nervous. As well he might: I’m sorry, he says, but my wife is having an affair with your husband. James begs forgiveness, says he only loves Belle. Burden texts the stranger who has called her, asking how long it has been going on. A month, he thinks, but he cannot text now as his wife has tried to kill herself.

Burden tosses and turns all night, replaying the events of the day. At 6am James walks in - overnight he has become a totally different person. Coldly, he tells her he is leaving, she will be fine, she can have the house, the New York apartment, custody the kids. He wants nothing. He is “done”.

N.B. This is not a spoiler. The opening pages of the book start with this knock-me-down jaw-dropper.

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Sometimes you read a book and want to poke strangers on the train who are looking at their phones and tell them, “Get yourself a copy of this instead of that pernicious little screen which is sucking your soul.” Note that I am also in need of absolution on this front, so it’s very much do as I say not as as I do.

Now, I read a lot. This is one of those ridiculously obvious statements given that I write a newsletter which is predominantly about books, but as there’s a pleasing number of new faces here - hello! Thank you so much for joining me - it is so very lovely and I am, frankly, thrilled to have you here - I feel it worth addressing anew. Because some people might take a year to read one or two books and I can read a book in a day. My holiday packing list last year: two swimsuits, one bikini, three (okay, four) dresses, a sensible number of knickers, twelve books. Even last week, when I spent many, many hours at my desk, I read three books and I have two more on the go.

This is because:

1. Reading quickly is my sole superpower. I have always been able to do it. I cannot explain why but it is so. And when I read I have an uncanny ability to shut down other senses, like listening to my children asking what’s for dinner

2. I don’t do a lot of things e.g. have a wild social life/go to the gym or exercise anywhere near enough/watch the newest and hottest series/do much in the garden other than a spot of primping. I basically work (a lot), look after my family, attend to domestic admin, attempt to be a decent daughter/wife/mother/friend - and I read.

3. I take books everywhere. I carry them around the house with me. When travelling anywhere, for any distance. (I use trains for work so the chances of a delay hover around at least 70% for every journey, so you will often find two books in my bag.) If there is any chance I might have to wait e.g. when picking up a prescription in the chemist. I read in the bath. Heavens, how I adore reading in the bath.

4. I have more than one book on the go. Not literally at the same time - because that would be madness. But different books for, say, commuting and bedtime. Cooking and lunchtime.

5. I love it. It is my joy, relaxation, friend and therapy.

But of course, I don’t love everything I read, but I adhere to the policy of simply not talking about books I haven’t enjoyed. No book is for everyone; someone else will enjoy it; and a person with wrote it - and that’s a huge undertaking. (At least, you very much hope they did.) To trample on their writing feels inherently wrong.

However, when I do read something I love, I want to make a noise about it.

I confess I was drawn to Charleen Hurtubise’s Saiorse due to its Tamara de Lempicka-esque cover. I came for the cover; I stayed for the story and the beauty of the writing.

Saoirse lives in a coastal idyll in a remote corner of Donegal, where “a deep blue sky stretches above the bay, the turquoise waters from the shallow cover roll translucent onto the spit” (the descriptions of the Irish landscape in this novel are breathtaking), with her two young daughters and Daithí.

Let us not dissemble: Daithí is as handsome and emotionally intelligent as he is adept with his hands. Whither the IRL Daithís? When we first meet him, he leaning against the doorframe, waiting for the woman he loves - to tell her she has won a prestigious art prize.

“It is not the first time she has considered painting a series using him as her sole subject, simply title the exhibition Daithí. Add it to the growing canvases of her daughters playing at the sea, climbing the rocks, placing their tiny hands in the crevices of the walls surrounding the house.

Whichever her next series, it will be a happier collection than the one she is due to install in the Raymond Frank Gallery in Dublin next week. A van collected the canvases days ago. She was happy to see it move off down the road, her dark period as she knows it, as though it is all behind her now.”

Saoirse has everything, right?

But her first instinct is terror that “He knows”.

What does he know? The clues are in the ‘dark period’ and the sketchbooks “locked in a secret place”.

Here begins a plot so propulsive it reads like a thriller. It reminded me a little of Nesting, another Irish novel in which a woman flees abuse and attempts to rebuild her life. Both make you grip the pages and turn them feverishly.

Flashback nine years, and Saoirse is 17-year-old Sarah, fleeing her past using a stolen passport. And her past is grim: we witness in flashbacks her drug-addict mother, who drops her at her grandparents’ home, only to return to whisk her away to live with a new stepfather, a criminal mastermind who drags Sarah and her beloved little sister into the seedy, dangerous underbelly of the drugs world. It is her sister, and her emerging talent for art which saves her. “You are vicious…like the greats” her art teacher tells her, looking at a collage made with dried yams which she cuts with the “razor blade Lou uses to cut his lines of cocaine”. The novel is interspersed with descriptions of her art - and it is through her sketchbooks that the full horror of her past is eventually revealed.

“…she does, in fact, have books full of drawings, graphic depictions, like untold confessions, events that happened just outside the frame.”

Sarah escapes on a plane from Boston to Dublin, where she sits next to Paul Byrne, a rather overly solicitous medical student. When they arrive in Ireland, he scoops her up and delivers her into the bosom of his family. Alas, they are not the Waltons - there are Du Maurier levels of discomfort and menace here and Sarah finds she has inadvertently exchanged one abusive prison for another.

Praise be for art and for Daithí. Between them, Saoirse finds herself rescued and renamed: it is no accident that Saoirse is the Irish word for freedom, or liberty. But how free can you be when your past is a secret even from those you love the most? Saoirse is trapped by the long shadows cast by her childhood, constantly in fight-or flight mode.

This is a story of survival, of seeking restitution - atonement, perhaps. “I am sick of women having to run all the time, and if they’re not running they’re defending themselves,” Saoirse says. At one point she reads Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and wants to fling it “across the room..into the fire”. She is no Tess. The trauma inflicted upon will not define her: she will not sink under its weight. She will rise.

It was entirely accidental that I read two Irish novels in the space of a week (perhaps I ought to go for a hat-trick? Suggestions on a postcard, or a comment below). But I do not regret my literary choices, because the second was gorgeous.

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Good morning and happy Sunday! I stayed up far too late writing this and watching Bridgerton so I imagine you are far more chipper than I. Although we may both have coffee: I always imagine this post in particular as a chat between friends.

I ought to have been in London yesterday to meet up with old friends for lunch and to see the Extra/Ordi…

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In the absence of being able to procure crisp blue skies and sunshine (does anyone else in the UK begin to feel the necessity of chartering an ark? As I type, I am listening to someone on the radio describing the weather as ‘dreich’ which I have always thought an entirely excellent and exceedingly apt word), I offer you instead five books to tempt your literary palate.

I make no apology for the accidental loose theme of infidelity (two are about affairs; one has an infidelity as a peripheral incidental): good books are good books. By the time I realised, I was set on this course. And we can enjoy the irony in the month of February, infamous for its saccharine, overblown declarations of love.

My first hot tip for February is anything but saccharine and overblown.

They - Helle Helle (Akoya)

Akoya is a new independent publishing house, which chooses its titles by literary instinct - and, I think, love. This slender Danish novel is extraordinary: be not fooled by its size; it packs a disproportionate emotional weight.

An unnamed mother and daughter live in a small flat above a hairdresser’s in a small town. They are both at inflection points: the daughter is starting high school; the mother is seriously ill. As they face something extraordinary (the end of their shared world), the narrative follows the ordinary: the bus journey to school, homework, knitted gloves, tomato soup, a duffle coat, tentative teenage encounters with boys, the weather, light shining on cake crumbs. But it reminds that there is beauty to be found in the everyday: “the delight of treetops swaying soundlessly on the other side of a windowpane”, “A man waves from his breakfast”, “lilacs grow at the bottom of the wilderness, she picks many bunches, there aren’t enough vases”, “Coconut loaf cake diminishes endlessly, sticky caramel bake.”

You can’t skip through this of an afternoon - nor would you wish to. Prose this exquisite rewards careful reading. It is set in the now, which sharpens your focus and immerses you in the specific moment and the minds of its characters. Despite its heavyweight subject, there is no agonised wringing of hands - this is the complete antithesis of the overblown emotion of a Hollywood epic, cunningly calculated to clutch at your heartstrings with the literary equivalent of soaring strings. It is stripped back to the minimalism of the unsaid - grief and love are inherent in every moment, the half-caught private joke, the deep currents of silent affection that flow between mother and daughter:

"Today then she's not going to the hospital, her mother doesn't see the need anyway for her to keep coming all that way, she ought rather to think of herself and for example buy a nice big pastry from the bakery.”

Reading this book will make you feel more alive.

The Ten Year Affair - Erin Somers (Canongate)

Cora and Eliot are hip, self-consciously earnest, rather smug New Yorkers who found themselves priced out of the city, even with an unexpected inheritance, and move upstate to a hipster town for space, clean air, and a house where a mushroom grows, inexplicably, between the bathroom tiles. Eliot works, gets high in the evenings and urges Cora to make a friend. Cora is lonely. She spends her days shuttling their daughter to nursery and taking their son to baby groups that smell like “breast milk and cruciferous vegetables” and are populated by people like 'Broccoli Mom’ who talk about episiotomies, orgasming during childbirth, and elimination communication. (You don’t want to know…)

And there Cora meets Sam, who shares her eye-rolling disdain for Broccoli Mom and her acolytes. Because he a “chief storytelling officer” for a mortgage start-up and his wife is “a real person" i.e. a lawyer, Sam on is on parental leave and playgroup duty. Given that Cora’s feelings for her husband have been reduced to something rather “blank, liking-adjacent” and she has fantasies about surviving in the wilderness and a lover who will worship her, it takes no great leap of imagination to fall for Sam, who is “square-jawed and symmetrical with heavy brows”. She longs for a heated sex in hotel rooms.

Except Sam refuses. For ten years, whilst Cora angsts and longs, and performs mental gymnastics of passionate infidelity. Reality is bound to be disappointing - and of course it is, because you can’t escape yourself - especially if you’re as painfully serious and self-conscious as Cora. Her post - and sometimes coital - thoughts wonder to spaghetti, Uno, and the children’s bath-times. Sam snores “the like 40-year-old husband he was” and sends her erotic photos, the description of which made me snort with laughter. (Move the crocs out the picture, Sam! Don’t grip your manhood like “a walkie-talkie”.)

Somers unpicks a midlife affair with withering brilliance. She is constantly alert to the comic potential of everyday married life - and, come to that, the humour inherent in a middle-aged, married mother engaged in an affair, but also has a constant ticker tape to-do list running through her mind.

“She and Sam showered together, which became sex, and Eliot wondered aloud if he should resubscribe to The New York Times or let it lapse because it had become a little expensive, hadn’t it?”

It’s a droll, clever, relentlessly, often wince-inducing, rapier sharp portrait of both marriage and affair.

More thoughts on excellent books below. Subscribe now to get access to all the goods. As ever, I am hugely grateful to all subscribers - thank you for reading. And to paid subscribersL your generosity allows me to spend the time writing this newsletter. When I say I couldn’t do it without you, this is not a a word of a lie!

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The happiest of new years to you. I like the cut of 2026’s jib. Yes, the world might be topsy-turvy, but there is goodness to be found in many places if you know where to look. There are also more good books than you can possibly read in a lifetime (see above for just some of the proofs I am working my way through), which always comforts me for some reason.

I am somewhat overwhelmed by posts about making resolutions. Or not making them. Or making a resolution not to make resolutions. Whilst here I am still idly eating chocolates (Heroes, this week) and reading whilst admiring the lights of the Christmas tree. (I received this by the wonderful , and it is quietly lovely - both thoughtful and thought-provoking. Recommended.) I am delightfully steeped in the lull for one more day.

But I have pondered the simple things which improved my life last year. I’m not so much a person of grand, sweeping changes, but small tweaks, those I can make.

1. Spending more time in museums and galleries - and going alone is perfectly permissible. I recently rejoined the V&A and have already taken my daughter to see Marie Antoinette (dazzling) and will be taking my mother to Schiaparelli. Just before Christmas, when a meeting was cancelled and the rain fell in torrents, I gifted myself a trip to the Cecil Beaton exhibition at the NPG, which is a delight. Packed with portraits of debutantes and duchesses in fabulous gowns, costumes from My Fair Lady, and the sense of a talented, but conflicted man.

2. My cooking life has genuinely been changed for the better by the acquisition of some very good knives, which we keep on the wall by the cooker on a cheaper-than-chips wall-mounted magnetic strip (like this). It makes me feel competent, like a woman who knows her way around the kitchen.

3. I swapped my socks. I realise this sounds ridiculous, but you cannot underestimate the joy of warm feet when you are an inherently chilly mortal. I wear Le Bon Shoppe which I buy locally and they really are the king of socks. Although Uniqlo does a fine line in cable knit socks and I picked up some very long, very warm wool socks in navy and cream for a song in Primark.

4. M&S Apothecary body wash. It has the fragrance of something which cost three times as much, and makes getting up and into the shower marginally less painful. I am addicted to the Restore but there are options for all showering types.

5. Watching films. At the cinema! And terrestrial television - my daughter and I are very into The Traitors and what an old fashioned pleasure it is to be compelled to wait between episodes, so you have time to speculate and discuss and form ridiculous theories.

And five things I intend to do more of this year…

1. See more of the people who bring me joy; nurturing and deepening the bonds between us. Endeavour to meet with others who I think might be life enhancers. Several of whom are on Substack.

2. Write - for myself.

3. Date my husband. (I think we perhaps managed two dates in 2025...)

4. Wield better control over my time.

5. The perennial classic: read more, scroll less.

With this last in mind, I give you a partial and not-remotely-exhaustive list of books I am excited about reading (have read/am currently reading)…

Land - Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press)

A new Maggie O’Farrell is an occasion to be celebrated. Her latest is a sweeping and ambitious story of survival, set on a windswept Irish peninsula in 1865. Tomás makes maps for the Ordnance Survey - he is intent it will be a record of the Great Hunger. He is thrown off-course by an encounter in woodland - which will ricochet through the generations.

The Infamous Gilberts - Angela Tomaski (Fig Tree)

A darker I Capture the Castle meets Shirley Hazzard. The eccentric Gilberts are a once-grand family in decline, clinging to the past in their crumbling gothic edifice. An eccentric, exquisite, utterly unpredictable and wholly unexpected tragicomedy.

Laws of Love and Logic - Debra Curtis (Bloomsbury)

One woman. One life. Two great loves. Endless complications. A searing tale of grief, marriage, family, love, terrible mistakes, the moments on which lives turn - told with compassion and profound understanding.

Mrs Dickens - Emily Howes (Phoenix)

I have always been fascinated by Dickens’ relationships with women. Howes (who delved into the past so skilfully in The Painter’s Daughters) lifts the veil on Catherine - Kate - Hogarth’s relationship with Dickens (from which, incidentally, he does not emerge well). I cannot wait to see what Howes does with such fertile material.

All In - Claire Powell (Vintage)

Claire Powell writes with such elegance and elan about the knotty business of family, love and marriage - set during the course of a summer holiday. Glorious, vivid - full of humour and insight and heart.

The rest of the list is for my beloved paid subscribers: 30 more books to add to your 2026 reading list.

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A quick placeholder newsletter because work is bananas* but there are always good books to talk about. Regardless of the season, but especially as the nights lengthen.

*So much so, I spent much of Sunday sitting on the floor, surrounded by a forest of paper that might have appeared to be utterly random but was in fact an interview transcript arranged in …

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Please note: this is not intended to be a holiday reading list. It’s a list of jolly good books which I happened to read on holiday, but would be just as satisfying when read at bedtime or on the bus home from work on a rainy Tuesday. (At one point in my twenties, I took the number 9 bus to work from my corner of London. It trundled down Ken High Street, past Hyde Park and along Piccadilly: I suspect this journey would today require me to set off at 6am to arrive on schedule, but at the time it was a delightful way to travel. Top deck, book open - done.)

I read a lot on holiday. I packed ten books for just shy of two weeks and read nine. How? I went nowhere without a book in my basket - you never know when you might find a shady spot for coffee or when other people will require a sit-down ice cream stop. And now my children are older and can both occupy themselves and swim without requiring constant eagle-eyed supervision, I am afforded the luxury of reclining on a sun lounger and losing myself in a book in between dips in the pool. (Even people who don’t read very often, read on holiday. This is backed up by actual research, I’m not making wild pronouncements: for one in four British adults, a holiday is the only time they open a book. Yes, this blows my mind, too.)

I re-read Lucy Steeds’ The Artist, but I wrote about this at length in this post, so I won’t repeat myself here but to say that I can highly recommend reading it in Provence should you get the chance. And I started The Sisters on the plane home, but it’s such a hefty tome, didn’t finish it until my tan started to fade (although it did so almost immediately because This Is England), so I cannot cheat and include it: on this occasion, I am not going to be the bender of rules, even my own.

O Caledonia - Elspeth Barker

Adolescence is not, as we know, the easiest of times, but at least yours wasn’t abruptly curtailed by your murder, leaving you mourned by none but your pet jackdaw. Not a spoiler: this is how we meet Janet in Barker’s deliciously dark gothic tale. It is littered with brilliant gems that gleam and wink at you from every page.

Having discovered Janet as a murdered corpse dressed in her mother’s black lace evening dress, we get to know her. She is the archetypal misfit: misunderstood, ill-fitting, unable to connect with her family or other girls (she lacks “some essential quality of girlishness” and cares more for subjunctives than sports). She rattles around the decaying, freezing family home (a prep school for boys), understood by no one and disdainful of most, barely tolerated by her distant parents and compared unfavourably to her irksomely perfect siblings. She is wild, courageous, angry - and doomed. It’s a gothic, brilliant, coming-of-age story that’s also about fiercely being yourself when the world tries to bend you to its will. It is tremendous.

It borrows from Barker’s own life - more on which here - but do read her book of essays, Notes from the Henhouse, because everyone should. There should be a law on the matter.

Heart the Lover - Lily King

I have mentioned before (checks notes: umpteen times) that I love this book. I really do. I think it is a masterpiece. You could underline sentences on every page and you marvel at Lily’s ability to create such depth of character (how soon you come to care) in just a few lines.

It opens with this line, so good it gives me chills: “You knew I’d write about you some day.”

The voice is that of the unnamed narrator, now a successful writer and mother of two sons, looking back on the love story on which her adult life turned. As a young, bright and ambitious student, she was ushered into the gilded intellectual fold of star students, Sam and Yash. They rename her - Daisy and Jordan after The Great Gatsby - and assimilate her into their lives and the professor’s home they are housesitting. Complications are inevitable.

Two further episodes in the narrator’s life make up the slim (250 page) epic. I hesitate to say more as part of the joy is watching it unfold, so please just read it. It’s not just a love story, but a mediation on the choices we make and they way they ricochet throughout our lives, with their unfinished stories, the regret of middle age, the ‘what ifs’ of Frost’s road not taken (‘that has made all the difference’). It is honest and true and startlingly beautiful.

Do note that if you choose to finish this in a public place, say, a train making its leisurely way along the coast Cote d’Azur, you should be prepared. I recommend sunglasses to hide the tears that will course, unchecked, down your face, because you cannot tear yourself away from the beauty of the prose, even as your heart is quietly breaking.

Katabasis - RF Kuang

What a dizzying, freewheeling, mind-bending read this is. It’s a take on the campus novel (Kuang was obsessed with the 1980s British campus novel at the time of writing - and it shows) meets fantasy, with a hellish twist and a will-they-won’t-they romance.

For the rest of my holiday reading list - and the books I turned to upon my return, inspired by my travels because it is always good to have more books on the go, become a paid subscriber (if you can!) And a small housekeeping note: this is a long post, so you may have to click through to read it in its entirety on the app or on the site.

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What have you been reading lately? Anything I should add to my list? And how did you decide what to pick up. I ask because I’ve been reading in a very piecemeal fashion over the last couple of weeks. There’s been no system to what I’ve picked up - not even a whim has dictated. I’ve simply reached mindlessly for the next book on the towering piles that surround my desk and bedside table. I think when you have a lot going on, you tend not to want to make yet another decision, so the path of least literary resistance it is. (In between gorging fiction, I’m also still reading this, and I am about to start this about which I hear tremendous things.) This explains why I read three romance-centric novels in a row, which I wouldn’t usually do - I prefer to mix it up.

Happily, I realised they are nearly all published this month, which allows me to pretend there was a system and recommend them without being that annoying person who insists you simply must read X because it is quite the best book they have read in forever, only for you to discover X isn’t published until August or October or some other distant date, by which time you will have forgotten all about it. (Shades of Lady Boxe in The Diary of a Provincial Lady.)

More-than-a-romantic-comedy: Great Big Beautiful Life - Emily Henry

Frequently imitated, rarely bettered, I think this may be my favourite Henry yet.

Relentlessly upbeat entertainment journalist Alice Scott is convinced she’s found her big break: writing a biography of the infamous, reclusive Margaret Ives, descendant of American media royalty. But when she arrives Little Crescent Island (one of those small coastal towns which crop up in Henry’s novels and have you googling ‘is this a real place?’ with a view to visiting), she finds she’s not the only one vying for the job. Pulitzer-winning writer and “human thundercloud” (but admittedly very hot) Hayden Anderson is also in contention. Margaret throws down a gauntlet: they each have a month to interview her - separately - and then pitch their proposals. Except…it’s a small town and they will keep bumping into each other, and whilst they try not to compare notes, when they do, something doesn’t quite add up. As they unravel the secrets of Margaret’s past, their burgeoning romance is a counterpoint to the raw emotion of her story, which gives the novel depth. Poignant, witty, charming, heartfelt. It’s an emphatic yes from me.

The cool kid: Deep Cuts - Holly Brickley

There were moments during this when I had the unsettling feeling that I might not be cool enough to read it. I have never been one of those intense muso types who makes knowing quips about esoteric lyrics in songs by little-known indie bands, in between reading The Guardian and suffering Rooneyesque angst. But then I thought, I love David Nicholls and this is basically One Day meets Nick Hornby doing a too-cool-for-school Noughties soundtrack. I predict it will be huge - not least because it’s being made into a film with Saiorse Ronan and Aidan Butler, so there we very much go.

Percy and Joe meet in a bar. She’s an English student with an encyclopaedic knowledge of pop music, very many opinions, but no musical talent. He’s a tortured artist (grim home life) and an aspiring singer-songwriter with serious talent - and a girlfriend. What ensues is years of them being inexorably drawn towards each other without actually doing so because, you know, girlfriends and friendship and a collaborative relationship that is too important to risk. As Joe’s star rises, Percy has to stand on the sidelines and watch as everyone else falls for the man she secretly loves but can’t admit she does.Pages upon pages of frustration, envy and the sweet agony of denial and longing - so much longing. It’s smart, poignant and very moreish indeed. Thee literary equivalent of a musical earworm.

Soaring historical mystery: The Midnight Carousel - Fiza Saaed McLynn

What a bewitching, evocative debut this is. A dark, swirling, magical story of obsession, revenge, grief and love - as hypnotic as the titular carousel.

In 1900s Paris, a man wracked with grief at the loss of his wife and son makes a beautiful carousel. But it seems to be cursed, as riders keep vanishing into thin air, but Detective Laurent Bisset thinks he has his man. Meanwhile, on Canvey Island, Essex, plucky, determined, parentless Maisie Marlowe escapes a cruel foster home when her Aunt Mabel appears and whisks her off to the household of Sir Malcolm Randolph, where Mabel has been appointed housekeeper. But when scarlet fever sweeps through the household, Sir Malcolm and Maisie are bereft - and emigrate to Chicago, grief hot on their heels. On a whim, Sir Malcom buys a carousel, and resourceful, capable Maisie sets up a genteel fun fair with the carousel as a glittering centrepiece to restore their depleted coffers. But history starts to repeat itself. Enter Bisset - charming, sympathetic, haunted by sending an innocent man to death, dissatisfied with his life, determined not to fail a second time, and curiously drawn to Maisie.

It’s terrific - and I adored Laurent and Maisie. It’s rare to meet two such engaging characters. I could read a whole book about Laurent, and Maisie is remarkable: an outsider who straddles worlds, and strikes out as independent woman at a time when women’s lives were heavily restricted and curtailed.

Pondering the messiness of modern life: Table for One - Emma Gannon

Ah, the new novel from , Substack Queen…

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Exhausted? Overwhelmed? Too tired for anything bar mindlessly flopping on the sofa in front of something vacuously soothing or so familiar you don’t need to pay attention at all? (Re-runs of Friends, perhaps, or a nice Agatha Christie.) Too tired to watch the news, especially before bed, lest you be haunted by nightmares of the world ending a blaze of …

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Do you keep a list of every book you read? Have a magic number to hit every month/year? Always have a reading challenge on the go?

I have never done a single one of these things. (I bet Anna Ancher’s 1905 serene woman reading - above - didn’t either. She doesn’t look the type. )

I remember my daughter’s primary school setting a reading challenge which was intended to run over the course of the school year. One boy - of the terribly bright and insanely competitive ilk - proceeded to smash said challenge in about two weeks. Leaving aside my doubts as to how he could have read that many books in so short a space of time (including - or so he claimed - the dictionary), it meant that hardly any other children bothered with the challenge because it had already been ‘won’. This neatly illustrates my point that reading to numbers/a challenge is problematic because it becomes too much about the end result. Whereas the joy of reading is in the act; the journey; the relationship between you and a book.

I am a selfish reader. I read primarily for my own pleasure - unless I am reviewing a book for work. I’m not about GoodReads rankings, ratings, or reading as a kind of social media currency - despite being guilty as charged of liking a pretty picture as much as the next bookstagrammer, but what’s written underneath it matters more. I want to know why you love a book - or not; why you connect with the words on the page; what moved you; the emotional response. I don’t care if you have 50 or 50k or 250k followers: I want to know how a book made you feel. What and how we read are a highly personal matter - which is why the best book recommendations come from the heart.

(I’m frequently asked how many books I read, to which the boring but truthful answer is: it varies. Last week was been busy with work, so I read three, with a fourth on the go into this week. On holiday I often read a book a day. Do note that my primary skill in life is reading quickly.)

I am, however, in favour of personal reading goals - although I don’t think of these as ‘goals’ but more prosaically ‘books I want to read’ or horizons I wish to expand. For me this year is about diversifying and reading outside my literary comfort zone; for you it might be re-reading the complete works of Barbara Trapido or Douglas Adams or L.M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy (we’ll come back to this one day: I’ve never been wholly comfortable with manipulative, older Dean Priest), or tackling the Russian Greats which have thus far eluded you. I don’t wish to be prescriptive.

Having just written that, I am about to be prescriptive. So by all means do as I do and not as I say, but as 2025 is shaping up to be a tremendous year for debuts, please do consider adding these books to your reading list/request them from your local library - because libraries are the closest thing some of us get to religion in this secular age - and because I promise you that they are worth your time. Treat them as suggestions rather than instructions if you wish, but know this: they are books which made me FEEL.

The Eights - Joanna Miller (27th March, Penguin)

Sometimes, a book is peopled by characters so wonderful that you don’t want to say goodbye. I want to be one of the Eights - Otto, Beatrice, Dora, and Marianne - who live on corridor eight at St Hugh’s College, Oxford in Joanna Miller’s quite frankly GLORIOUS debut.

For more on this book and four more fabulous books to read this year, plus access to the full archive and Notes, why not upgrade to a paid subscription? Still only £5 a month, still enormously appreciated as it is only thanks to paid subscribers that I can devote the time to this newsletters. (Love reading as I do, it does not pay the tax bill. Shudder.)

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Happy, happy New Year, my friends. I hope 2025 will thrill to the tune of dreams fulfilled, health, happiness, and many, many good books. Could this be the year when my yearning for a library ladder comes to pass? (This image was taken in the ‘secret library’ in the Rijksmuseum. Please note I don’t require a spiral staircase: a ladder on a rail would ve…

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I hope your Christmas was what you hoped for (or rather better if you were dreading it) and you are settled into these lazy, in-between-neither-here-nor-there days. We are very much a decorations up until Epiphany household - which also means I can eat panettone with impunity.

As promised, herewith my favourite reads of 2024. It was no easy task (why put…

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Well, that was a week. There I was, confidently pronouncing you’d have a books Christmas gift guide today, but then work came upon me and an unwelcome visitor in the form of minor but irksome virus, and delay was as inevitable as a train run by South Western.

I err towards not minding overly re the trains, providing I have factored the delay into my plans, as delay repay is topping up my coffee-buying fund nicely. My husband and I verging on the point of competing to see who has the biggest pay out this week. [For those who live in a country where trains do such madcap things as run to schedule as per the timetable, ‘delay repay’ is the scheme by which you apply for refunds if your train is over 15 minutes late. Which has been the case for every train I caught to and from London in November. What larks!]

This is my very roundabout way of saying neither week nor post went as planned, but I am still resolutely cheerful. We had a smattering of snow this week: it did not lay but scattered in the air - hopeful and magical. I bought this striped grosgrain ribbon for Christmas purposes. I had a very good day of meetings in London and made plans and walked back over Waterloo Bridge which always enchants me with its view over the Thames. I read with my son at bedtime. I curled up with my daughter by the fire, and today the two of us go for lunch to celebrate her. And here are five more cheerful things. Free subscribers get two dollops of cheer, paid subs get the full five, which includes thoughts on books.

More Cazalet Chronicles!

Good news alert! Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles are to be continued by her niece the novelist Louisa Young. This fills me with delight. The Golden Hours is a suitably Cazalet-ish (Cazalettish?) title - although we do have to wait until next September.

Young is an excellent writer - the My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You trilogy is worth anyone’s time - and she promises to pick up the saga in Christmas 1962. (Cazalet-devotees will recall that All Change finishes in 1958.) “Like many others, I want more”, Young rightly observes. “Jane looked at the huge effects of the war through the microcosm of her people’s everyday lives. In these books I will observe the immense social change of the 60s and 70s through the lives of individuals. How will they cope as modern England shifts and forms around them?”

Whilst you wait, this is the prettiest set of the existing Chronicles I can find (and at the best price), and an excellent Christmas present for the uninitiated. And Howard’s excellent memoir, Slipstream, is an enthralling candid - if at times infuriating - read. Howard had “a great hunger to be loved” but fell for a series of unsuitable men - and was pursued by many more, not least publisher Jonathan Cape, who chased her around a table. She was clearly an irresistible combination of personality, wit and dizzying beauty, but constantly puts herself down. To modern eyes, Kingsley Amis is very much a selfish cad, and the difference in treatment meted out to him versus Howard by the establishment is enough to induce the gnashing of teeth.

Bedtime reading dates

I have taken to having bedtime reading dates with my 10-year-old. When I am around at bedtime (not always the case these days if I have a work event), we both climb into his bed and read our respective books in companionable silence. This week, he has been reading The Chronicles of Whetherwhy: The Age of Enchantment and I have mostly been re-reading Rivals. “That looks interesting,” he remarked, peering over my shoulder, as Rupert assured Cameron he is a member of cli-Tory party, and I briskly angled the page away from enquiring eyes.

He (my son, not Rupert Campbell Black, who has an enviable library but rarely reads a book) is a fluent reader, but he does not - unlike his older sister - read for pleasure. He enjoys us reading together, or reading to me - but he would not pick up a book if at a loose end. This - regrettably - fits with the National Literacy Trust’s latest findings: only one in three (that’s just over 34%) of eight to eighteen-year-olds read for pleasure, the lowest level recorded by the NLT since it started tracking children’s reading habits 19 years ago. Enjoyment has fallen acrosss all age groups, particularl boys and children/teens in secondary school. Sigh.

I’ve written about this in my day job (Content Director at BookBrunch), which is less hand-wringing and more ‘what can be done?’ with bracing, reassuring and encouraging words from experts. I won’t repeat myself, but you can read the article here. (And do I urge every parent to read it - not for my sake, but because the expert advice really is terrific - and achievable.)

What struck me was that even if a child has every advantage - engaged parents; ready access to books - the education system in the UK seems hell-bent on crushing any love of reading just as children become fluent readers. (Every single teacher - including a couple of heads - who messaged or spoke to me said a version of this.) Sats make reading about process, not passion or imagination. My son is doing his SATS next year and let me tell you: there is little joy to be found in fronted adverbials, modal verbs, or subordinate clauses.

The Party - Tessa Hadley

If you have only the smallest of windows in which to read, this elegantly whippet-slim novella for you. I read the first chapter as a standalone short story in The New Yorker, so needed little persuasion to invest. It would be a gorgeous Christmas present - just look at it!

Join in the paid subscriber fun, for full access, full-length reviews of my recent reads, to - err - join me in the bath (if you see what I mean), and to bend your beauteous eyes upon my festive reading round-up. It’s coming: I promise!

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I write this on the hoof as it has been a week. As a result, you will find no overt theme or order here. Merely a disparate scattering of thoughts and reads.

I have been at Frankfurt Book Fair, which is - in new job terms - the equivalent of learning to dive and starting with the 20m board and attempting a reverse 4½ somersault in the pike position.

My new job is not unrelated to my previous career iteration. In a world where everything is content - as Nora Ephron would doubtless say, were she around today, I am content director for BookBrunch, a website that serves the publishing industry. However, I have been accustomed to coming in in the final furlong: holding a proof or near-enough finished novel in my hand. The reviewing and interviewing, talking-about-the-book, exhorting others to read it stage. Not the business end. And Frankfurt Book Fair is very much the business end. If you’re thinking author talks and signings- rewind. It’s the rights and deals. Ideas and developments. The future of books in the making.

Frankfurt is held in a sprawling (but terribly well-organised and signposted - this is Germany) conference centre, called the Messe. It is made up of six halls, each containing more than one floor - hence when planning a meeting, instructions read along the lines of ‘6.1, 345’ which is brain-boggling, at first. The place is vast.

I received the advice to ‘wear flat shoes’ approximately 22 times before departing - this was wise. There is a lot of dashing. There is also a lot to catch and distract the eye. There’s Elif Shafak on stage! A tree of knowledge in the middle of India! An edifice to Sarah Jane Maas! (Romantasy is still very much a thing.) The big five publishers have shiny stands, with backlit images of their bestsellers, and copies of putative bestsellers lined up on the shelves. They are set up like very chic cafes, every table occupied by two people engaged in what looks like intense debate - which they probably are, as this is the trading floor of the publishing world. Think Wolf of Wall Street, minus the nudity.

The other raison d'être of Frankfurt is networking. Publishing is madly social. Publishing also loves a drink. Come 5pm, the stand parties begin and a party atmosphere descends upon the Messe. Some are really rather fancy, with champagne and proper canapes. Others are all about cheap fizz and crisps. (I am very partial to a cheap crisp.) But what it is mostly about is meeting, greeting and attempting to charm people. Let me tell you something about publishing (yes, Natasha, do tell us): the people are great. They are warm, generous with their knowledge, experience and contacts - and there is very little by way of gatekeeping.

Frankfurt airport, incidentally is the precise opposite. It is all about gatekeeping. EU passport holders were probably at their final destination by the time I reached the front of the ‘All other passports’ queue. (Do they chortle every day ‘this’ll learn them for Brexit’?) By way of compensation, fate dealt me a great hand on the flight: I chatted to a really bright, sparky, interesting woman, and then I discovered the great beauty of flying into London City airport: from plane to tube in five minutes flat. The satisfactory bliss of it.

I was meant to be hightailing it to Cookham yesterday to interview the clever, funny and decidedly stylish Bella Mackie, but she - poor woman - has been struck down by tonsillitis. I am very sorry for Bella, the lovely bookshop, and the disappointed bookworms/fans (nothing wrenches the heart like a disappointed bookworm), but a. it will be rescheduled and b. This gave me the excuse to curl up with some really good stuff…

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People. She’s back. And so is Lucy Barton. And William. And gentle, good-and-pure-as-an-apple Bob Burgess. And Olive Kitteridge.

Yes, Strout has brought them together in the Stroutaverse.

If your mind isn’t boggling with delight, then you might wish to stop reading. There have been critics who complain that this is too whimsical. Too much Strout. Or too Strout-ish - with her characteristic “oh’s”. To which I say: is there such a thing as too much Strout? Give me excess of her. The phrase ‘deceptively simple’ was made for her - her apparently artless sentences contain multitudes. Strout makes me sit back and marvel. She thinks that “all ordinary people are extraordinary”. In the words of Lucy: “People are mysteries, We are all such mysteries.”

I loved this book so much, I wanted to keep it to myself for a little while - just me and it. I held it in my hand and marvelled. I carried my thoughts around with me, let them swirl gently like flotsam in my mind, looking at strangers in a new way and pondering how there are “all these unrecorded lives” and how “people just live them”.

Lucy - you may recall - decamped to small-town coastal Maine during the pandemic, moving in with her ex-husband, William. Lucy and Bob take regular walks. “Tell me everything. Tell me every single thing,” she tells him, giving both the novel its title and Bob something irresistible: a friend who listens and understands like no other.

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Hello, and welcome to a new week, my friends and fellow book-devourers. Today, I give you three women teetering on the brink. Which, to be frank, could be any one of us, if you catch us at the wrong moment.

Before we settle in, I must mention (for I am very excited about it) that I will be in conversation with Bella Mackie on Saturday 19th October at The Little Bookshop’s Crime & Wine evening. We’ll be talking about her new novel, What a Way To Go, which is a caustically witty, twisty mystery. Anthony Wistern, the patriarch of a wealthy, dysfunctional, disgracefully behaved family has been summarily murdered. The fallout is gleefully awful - as are the characters. Tickets available here.

Right. As we were.

There I was, pottering along, still trying to make sense of it all in my mid-forties, worrying that time is slipping past, will I find The Thing, write The Novel, raise The Children whilst having The Career. Should I flex and step back in again? But I am more or less just getting on with things in between the rise and fall of emotions, life and my youthful elasticity. Mostly falling in the case of the latter.

And then I read All Fours, Miranda July’s new work of autofiction and a whole new take on what I shall call - with a broad stroke brush - the menopause novel. And suddenly, I felt that my midlife crisis is either seriously inadequate or very, very low-key.

July’s cool multimedia artist narrator (perhaps she is July herself - they share sufficient biographical details) is restless. She feels estranged from both reality and her husband - they were last united by “ecstatic” pain when their (non-binary) child Sam was born and hovered on edge of life and death for two months. Since then, the distance yawns. July’s narrator dissembles to everyone, including herself, obsesses about sex - grilling her friends for the details (and I mean details) of their sex lives. She is, you see, desperate for sex - only not with Harris (poor Harris! I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him by the end) who she sees as “a co-worker in a staff kitchen”. Could it be, perhaps, the perimenopause, that “dangerous time, right before the window closes”?

To celebrate her 45th birthday, July’s narrator decides to take a solo road trip from LA to New York. She gets no further than a petrol station just outside LA, where she locks eyes with Davey - a gauche but gorgeous attendant who washes her car. Bafflingly (or maybe this is just me?) she then checks into a nondescript, dingy motel, pays Davey’s interior designer wife thousands of dollars to redesign a room - and there she spends the next three weeks eating, drinking, masturbating and having an (unconsummated) passionate affair with Davey via the medium of dance.

Not a single word of this is an exaggeration.

At this point, I put down the book, my eyes popping. “My mid-life crisis looks nothing like this,” I messaged my friends and literary kindred spirits and Grazia book editor, Helen Whitaker - both of whom had, I knew, read All Fours. Cheer up, Helen messaged (or words to that effect). There’s still time to have an affair with a hot, young garage attendant. Or become a lesbian, she added, helpfully.

Well, that’s a relief.

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Despite not having been on holiday (prime beach and reading time), I have spent some very English time on very English beaches: pebbles, bracing swims followed by flasks of coffee and apple turnovers. And I have also been powering through books.

It is perfectly possible that the reading is a direct result of not having been away and instead doing the universally-recognised-amongst-parents school holiday juggle, in which you attempt to do several things at once and end up doing them all but to a sub-par level. Or at least, I do. Such is life as - I think - Mma Ramotswe of Alexander McCall Smith’s Ladies’ Detective Agency would say. See also: procrastination. Because I might not be able to achieve peak parenting/write 3000 words in a day/hone and pitch five perfect, commissionable feature ideas, but I can definitely read another book.

Out of idle curiosity - and stay with me, this all ties up neatly in the end, I promise - I have just looked up how the No 1 Most Prolific Author accounts for his prodigious output. Alexander McCall Smith says his secret is getting up early - 4am early - and writing before everyone else is up, and travelling extensively, so he can work on planes, trains and in doubtless very nice hotel rooms. I also suspect the man has a laser focus. Whereas my brain has slipped into August mode: somnambulant, slow, prone to procrastination. I have just re-read this post by with a handy anti-procrastination toolkit.

But as a result of all the displacement activity reading, l can offer you several titles to add to your August reading list, and four to earmark for September. Obviously, there are more than four (we neeed to talk about Miranda July’s All Fours and the new Charlotte Mendelson, Wife, just for starters - but the 4x4 title appealed to me. We will come to the rest in due course.

The absolute delight: Death at the Sign of the Rook - Kate Atkinson

I would read Kate Atkinson’s shopping list - for she is SUCH a brilliant writer. But this is even better: a delicious, inventive, sardonic homage to the golden age of detective novels and the sixth to feature Atkinson’s rather grumpy (but secretly avuncular) veteran sleuth Jackson Brodie. HANG OUT THE BUNTING.

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There are times when I crave the simple life of a cheerful book. One that will make me feel better about the world. Or one in which I have a blissfully uncomplicated relationship with the lead characters i.e. I just….like them.

And, my goodness, these books are bliss. Fancy a remote paradise island or a dream jaunt to Paris? A rip-roaring adventure or the most exquisite will-they-won’t-they love story? Eccentric casts of characters and heroines to tuck into your hearts? The best take on Austen I’ve read in many a moon? All here.

P.S. Any of these would also make for a brilliant addition to your summer holiday reading. Line ‘em up.

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Sometimes you read a book which blows your socks off. It is a little like falling in love: as though the book seeps into your soul as it preoccupies your mind. You think of it whilst cooking, parenting, or dawdling home from work. You even dream about it. ‘What about that part? I wonder what so-and-so was feeling then? And what happened next? It can’t stop there!’ Have you noticed that the best books often leave you wondering this, because you are so invested in they characters? They feel so real they live on in your head.

Of course you know this. Witness the popularity of the Pride and Prejudice sequel - a literary juggernaut because so many people long to know what became of Elizabeth and Darcy. Does Elizabeth call him Fitzwilliam, or Fitz for short? (Personally, I can’t see it, but your Elizabeth might not be my Elizabeth.) If they had a daughter, is she fiery like her parents, or docile like Aunt Jane? What did they talk about when Lady C de B came for tea, once Elizabeth had cajoled Darcy into extending an entente cordiale? Was it all horribly awkward amongst the polluted shades? Many, many questions.

But my point is not to hold forth on P&P. My point is that love can strike at any point. When it happens, I want to put out the bunting, press these books into the hands of strangers, ring the bells because I wholeheartedly believe these these are books which should be READ. They demand it.

Now, I’ve had this experience several times of late. I know! Check me and my fickle nature. And I promise I will come to onto those. But today it’s all about Ordinary Time by Cathy Rentzenbrink (Published 11th July - pre-order on Amazon or from Bookshop.org.)

Rentzenbrink has always been a terrific writer. She is warm, generous and wise. Her memoirs are excellent, The Last Act of Love deserves a place on any bookshelf, and I thoroughly enjoyed her novel, Everyone is Still Alive (in part because it is set in the very London streets in which I lived). But her new novel Ordinary Time is so good it left me breathless. I kept putting it down - partly in fear it would be over all too soon; partly because I was agog at its sheer brilliance. If you love Anne Tyler, Barbara Trapido or Carol Shields - novelists who illuminate the universal truths to be found in even the most ordinary lives - then this book is for you.

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I take a break from compiling my summer reading guide - which is now running out of control - to make mention of Sandwich, the new book by Catherine Newman which is published today so let there be rejoicing in the lands. You may recall that she broke our hearts into approximately one million pieces, whilst also making us hoot inelegantly with laughter with We All Want Impossible Things. (If you’ve not read it, I implore you to stop reading this IMMEDIATELY and go in search of it. Stock up on handkerchieves first, because you will need them.)

writes with such openness, generosity and warmth: it feels to me that she shares something of herself. (I am half in love with her, to be frank. If you don’t already subscribe, her Substack Crone Sandwich is a delight.) You feel the heartbeat on every page. She sees inside the human condition; turns it inside out and gives it a good shake; she sees the truth. She writes with the eyes of a realist and the pen of a poet who knows that the ordinary is really the extraordinary. Days can “contain multitudes”, and happiness and heartbreak can share the same moment without us even realising it at the time.

Sandwich is a slim novel, but it is a slim slice of perfection. My copy is littered with underlinings and folded corners and the odd tear blot. It ought to be distributed as a kind of survival handbook for midlife.

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