Blog - Eyes on the Prize

Wild Dark Shore (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 14:28:40 +0000

Why this one?

I’m dipping into a few books from the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, with the eventual goal of reading the full shortlist. This one is my fifth so far, again based on Instagram recommendations.

Charlotte McConaghy (1988- ; active 2005-) was born in Darwin, Australia. She attended the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, in Sydney, from which she received a master's degree in 2012. She has written from a young age, and published several books in a young adult series (The Chronicles of Kaya) as well as writing Science Fiction. Her first ‘literary’ work aimed at adults was 2020’sMigrations,, swiftly followed by Once There Were Wolves (2021). Both deal with environmental issues and the natural world, and both have screen adaptations in the works. Wild Dark Shore was published in 2025, is a New York Times bestseller, and has been shortlisted for numerous awards.

Thoughts, etc.

Wild Dark Shore is set on the fictional Shearwater Island (inspired by the real-world Macquarie Island) between Australia and Antarctica. Its sole inhabitants (aside from thousands of penguins and seals) are Dominic Salt and his three children. Following the departure of a group of research scientists as sea levels rise to dangerous levels, the Salt family are the sole caretakers of the world’s largest remaining seed vault. Their isolation is shattered by the arrival of the battered and barely alive body of Rowan. While the family nurse her back to health, there are evidently secrets on both sides. Rowan is both drawn to Dominic and his children and repelled by a succession of discoveries that raise suspicions.

The novel alternates between the voices of its main protagonists, largely Dominic, Rowan and the Salt children. Dominic is a stoic, hard-working type, still grieving for his wife after many years and ploughing his energy into constant work as a barrier to contemplation. His eldest son Raff (a sensitive type, a musician who has recently suffered grief of his own and who has been taught by his father to punch his way through it with the aid of boxing training) and daughter Fen (who seems to live largely on the island’s beaches with the seals) have helped raise his youngest, the ten-year-old Orly. The latter is obsessed with the seeds, and his stories of seeds, their role in nature and how they are being threatened punctuate the narrative, in segments that are both brimming with Orly’s childish wonder and doom-laden in the face of our awareness of the increasing threats to their survival.

The book is set in the near future, another of many recent reads in which the climate emergency is visiting itself with ever more force and urgency on all parts of the world. Once a respite from its worst effects, Shearwater is succumbing rapidly, and the dramas and tragedies experienced by its last inhabitants are emblematic of the island itself about to go under. Alongside the modern day drama, we hear tales of the islands past in which colonial plunderers battered legions of seals to death and boiled armies of penguins in giant metal buckets, which still stand on the edges of the island, for now at least surrounded by the temporarily happier descendants of those innumerable poor creatures.

Prior to her arrival, Rowan has experienced the crisis first-hand, building a dream house in a forest filled with natural life in Australia before seeing it razed by wildfire, and its wildlife near-obliterated. Having refused the idea of bringing her own children into the world in the midst of this apocalyptic tragedy, she forms bonds with Salt kids, especially Orly, despite casually informing him that they will all soon either burn, starve or drown, along with everyone and everything else.

We learn relatively soon into the book that Rowan was in the vicinity of the island because she was searching for her husband Hank, one of the research scientists who had been due to return home soon, but had been sending her increasingly desperate and frightening communications, apparently fearing for his life. There is mounting evidence that Dominic and Hank have had some kind of run-in, but Rowan takes some time to pin down what has happened. In the meantime, naturally, she begins to fall in love with Dominic.

This is a book with a huge amount going on. It’s on one level a beautiful elegy for a dying world, symbolised by an island which has gone through phases as site of ecological violence, sanctuary for millions of nature’s most threatened creatures, and most recently as one of the last bastions of hope in the midst of climate disaster. It’s a moving story of a family united - and at times ripped apart - by grief and isolation. It’s a multi-layered thriller, in which one surprise follows another. And it’s a romance of sorts, albeit an ultimately doomed one.

At times it’s perhaps almost too much. The thriller plot certainly keeps you turning those pages, but can also feel over-engineered at times (and relies a little too much on suspension of disbelief when it comes to the coincidences and convenient overlooking of the obvious that frequently occur). Aspects of it sometimes edge close to melodrama. But ultimately its positives far outweigh those concerns. Its depiction of the impending climate meltdown is beautifully done, with the mood one of sadness and loss rather than hysteria.

Its characters are memorable, especially the children - who we really come to care for, particularly as they are knocked about throughout by tragedy after tragedy, near misses with violent deaths, all while subject to isolation from society through no choice of their own. We also, as is common in stories like this, see their fates (especially that of Orly, the youngest) as bound up with the fate of the planet - in them there is the beauty of the world and some shred of hope for the future. Whether that hope is ultimately misplaced or that their survival - for however long - is cause enough to keep believing, fighting against what seems to be the inevitable, and pushing on forward, is the question on which the book hangs everything, of course quite rightly neglecting to supply us with an easy conclusion.

Score

9

It’s in many ways a deeply bleak read, but also one that has the slightly moderating quality of a wake-like celebration of a dying civilisation. As it documents an ending, it finds a lot to celebrate in what has been lost, and also in what persists against all odds. Definitely a more-than-worthy shortlist contender.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

(If you click through and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission from Bookshop.org at no additional cost to you, which helps support local independent bookshops. I’ll only share these links for the highest rated titles on the site. )

Next up

The Others

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The Benefactors (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 11:56:51 +0000

Why this one?

I’m dipping into a few books from the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, with the eventual goal of reading the full shortlist. I’d read three prior to the announcement, but this is my first since, and was chosen on the basis of a bunch of recommendations when I asked for them on Instagram.

Wendy Erskine (1968- ; active 2015-) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She studied English Literature at Glasgow University. Following a postgraduate degree, she went into teaching and still teaches English at a school in Belfast. She began writing seriously in 2015, after attending a six month fiction course in Dublin.

Since then she has published two collections of short stories, the first of which, Sweet Home (2018), appeared on numerous prize lists including the Edge Hill Short Story Prize shortlist and the Gordon Burn Prize longlist. 2022’s Dance Move was again shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize, with one of its stories winning the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Award. In 2022 she also edited Well I Just Kind of Like It, a collection of non fiction essays around art and the home. She was appointed a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023 and named by The Observer as one of 2025’s best new novelists. The Benefactors is her first novel.

Thoughts, etc.

The Benefactors is a novel told in a polyphony of voices, centring on the aftermath of a sexual assault that takes place at teenage party. Much of the novel’s focus is on the families of both the victim, Misty, and the three male protagonists. The young men’s mothers, while all very different, are part of a middle-class milieu that is utterly different from that inhabited by Misty, who lives in another part of town and is part of a family used to scraping money together to make ends meet. For her own part, Misty spends some of her time camming on an OnlyFans-style site called Benefactors (or ‘Bennyz’), which is used alongside her social status as ammunition by the mothers to discredit her. The book deals with this social divide, and the way in which the odds are stacked against the likes of Misty and her family, while those with money come together to protect their own, supported by a system that can’t be beaten.

I found this one a really interesting read, both in terms of its page-level interest and in the post-read analysis. It covers such a range of voices that it’s sometimes (arguably deliberately) difficult to know who’s speaking, especially in the vignettes that come between the main sections (which are largely in the - identified - voices of the four main families). But it’s that range of voices that makes it so impressive - showcasing how the voices of crowds can both come together in the deliberate obfuscation of truths that don’t suit, and also - at times - provide a chorus of indifference and distraction against which the novel’s main events can be easily ignored and swiftly moved on from. This wash of voices also contributes a tonal rendering of the shades of grey that run through everything in the book. While there are obvious conclusions to be drawn from its events, Erskine never spells them out, instead forcing us to reckon with those shades of grey and decide whose voices we trust; to separate the signal from the noise.

Misty and her family are the book’s most memorable, and certainly its most likeable, characters. They’re doing what they can to get by. Misty was dumped with her mum’s ex, Boogie, at a relatively young age, with her even younger sister Gen (Boogie’s child with her mother). Boogie is a taxi driver with an admirable stoicism in the face of all his challenges, a kind of ‘get on with it mentality’ that rubs off somewhat on Misty. More impressive is Nan D, the family matriarch, whose outspoken cynicism and vast experience of what it is to be a downtrodden member of the working class acts both as comic fuel and is the necessary match that lights the fire of the plot’s eventual conclusion.

The young men responsible for Misty’s assault are essentially nothing characters. They exist, they do something undeniably bad, but we don’t get to spend too much time considering either their motives or their lives in general. Our eyes are trained instead on their mothers, and the lengths they will go to to protect their boys. None of them spends much time dwelling on Misty’s fate. They jump directly into making excuses for them, and in some cases trying to turn the focus to indicators of Misty’s supposed poor character - a somewhat Victorian endeavour that is sadly still all too recognisable today - especially when it suits those with the power to deploy it.

The mothers are interesting, and given varying degrees of sympathy by the author. The most sympathetic is Miriam, who has recently lost her husband and is simply trying to cling onto her son. She goes along with the eventual scheme to pay off Misty because she seemingly lacks the energy or remaining lifeforce to do much else. And despite her circumstances, she’s also the only mother we really see trying to engage their son about the crime he participated in, a troublingly awkward (and at the same time pathetic) moment that perhaps dissuades her from the desire to engage in further deconstruction in a courtroom. Frankie sits somewhere in the middle. She’s also had a rough upbringing, but married into wealth and keen above all else to cling onto that. Her background should enable her to sympathise more with Misty’s predicament, but instead seems to have hardened her against caring too much, and in any case she can’t bear the thought of having her now-perfect existence disturbed.

The character who comes off worst of all, for me, was Bronagh, who is the public face of a child-focused charity, but offers nothing but hypocrisy in deploying the language of care against the most vulnerable character in the book, and in support of her son. She was something of an enigma - a former music industry manager who has entered a supposedly more caring profession, but really one that’s part of the corporate world and subject to the same tendency towards self-supporting bullshit and double-talk as any other part of that world. She seems to have buried herself so much in this persona and the maintainance of appearances that she will do anything to suppress her better instincts. Inevitably, perhaps, when the drama surrounding her son has been resolved, whatever she’s been holding back explodes, in the book’s most shocking and horrifying moment.

The book’s eventual conclusion is ultimately depressing in its realness. Misty, with Nan D’s help, has extracted what little she can in terms of ‘reparations’ from a system that’s designed for her to lose. She can move on with her life, but will be tainted by some for her choices, and has to live with the knowledge that no justice has been served. The system persists, of course, but at what cost to those that have played it? By the end of the book, while the sons may not have faced criminal charges, they have all been demonstrably lessened by their parents’ decisions to avoid justice. None of them is forced to reckon with their crimes - to justify themselves or to accept punishment for their crimes. As such, they end the book facing varyingly grim fates, protected by the system but not from their own conscience, or the tainting in the eyes of their family or society for what they’ve done.

Score

9

A book that I enjoyed reading but was elevated even more by thinking about its implications afterwards, once the dust had settled and I’d managed to tune out some of the dominant voices in the book and think about what their prioritisation actually meant. A strong contender for this year’s shortlist, surely. And a writer I’ll definitely be going back to.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

Wild Dark Shore

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Bring the House Down (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:12:20 +0000

Why this one?

A belated Netgalley pick that I was surprised to see still available to read - I guess because the paperback is due in April. I was looking for something a little lighter (in style if not necessarily subject matter) after a few recent heavy going reads.

Charlotte Runcie (1989- ; active 2006-) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. She studied English at Cambridge, and while still a student there won the Foyle Young Poet of the Year (2006) and Christopher Tower Poetry Prize (2009). She subsequently became an arts journalist, writing for most of the major UK papers and most recently acting as the Telegraph’s senior arts columnist and radio critic.

In 2019 she published Salt on Your Tongue: Women and the Sea, a non-fiction work which was chosen as a Radio 4 Book of the Week. She currently lives in South Wales, hosts a books and culture podcast, In Haste, and is studying for a PhD in medieval literature at Bristol University. Bring the House Down is her debut novel, released in 2025.

Thoughts, etc.

Bring the House Down takes place during the Edinburgh Festival, and focuses largely on the arts critic Alex Lyons, and the aftermath of a one star review he gives to a show at the festival. He’s clearly something of an amoral womaniser, and seems set to meet his downfall after sleeping with Hayley, the American star of the aforementioned one-star show before the review has been published. The novel is told from the perspective of Alex’s colleague Sophie, whose viewpoint is clouded not only by her proximity to Lyons, but also by grief, and difficulties in her own relationship and family situation, making her an interesting choice to narrate what seems to be an otherwise fairly black and white story.

The first sections of this book are genuinely gripping, particularly the painful hours that take place between the hookup and Hayley finding out about Alex’s review (which of course he didn’t mention). It’s also then intriguing to see where it’s going to go next, as Hayley rips up her original production and builds something new out of the ashes of her mistreatment by Alex. From there on in, it’s a little more hit and miss but never not interesting.

The misses for me were actually around the main through line of the story. Once the first night of Hayley’s show is complete, I don’t know if I feel her character really saw much in the way of development. She’s there as a representative of a version of the ‘MeToo’ movement but we get to know very little about her as a person. Yes, there’s a later moment in which we see her questioning her decisions when Sophie interviews her, but even that revealed precious little. She’s something of a flat cipher, and we see her mostly through the lens of online discussions about her. Maybe that’s the point, I guess, but it did feel like something of a missed opportunity to hear a more rounded take on her story than the mediated one we get.

Alex is more interestingly handled, almost excessively sympathetic in some ways. We get to delve into his past, in which we find excuses for his behaviour (rejection as an actor, nepo baby drama, etc) and even in his worst moments (seducing his best mate’s teenage sister) he’s given the chance to ‘explain’ himself, slightly dulling the impact. I get that this is an attempt to not paint him entirely as a one dimensional character, but it does feel at times like he’s being given anti-hero status when he’s basically just a dick. I dunno.

In a lot of ways this is more Sophie’s book than its central protagonists. While the fireworks between the two aforementioned characters give us the moments that jump off the page and stick in our heads, a lot of the novel’s more heartfelt and thought-provoking moments belong to Sophie. Her relationship with her own partner is more interesting, with a past infidelity on his side regularly mentioned but not detailed, and her own occasionally ambivalent relationship to her relationship with him takes up a lot of space. The most affecting thread for me, as a dad, was the unpicking of the often unspoken motivations that lead to conflict between new parents. Her partner’s depiction of his role as a dad was rather moving, even if a relatively small part of the book.

At times it’s hard to see how Sophie’s own story connects to the headline narrative, however interesting it may be. Thinking about it afterwards, though, one reading is potentially that the Alex/Hayley story is really just fuel for Sophie’s own concerns around her career and in particular the role of the critic in the modern world. It doesn’t entirely work as it becomes so dominant a part of the book that at times Sophie seems inconsequential, but it’s actually her thoughts on criticism that for me were the most engaging part of the book. Is Alex’s reputation being trashed because he’s fundamentally a dick to women (entirely fair) or because people have had enough of honest criticism? The truth is somewhere in between, of course, and we get that nuance from Sophie where the others’ perspectives might have been more black and white either way.

We then dig into Sophie’s own fears around criticism - at the start of the book she’s unable to contemplate the notion of giving a one star review, but as she steps temporarily into Alex’s shoes she finds herself conflicted. First, she entrenches herself further in that position, becoming increasingly convinced of the importance of not crushing the hopes of creators who have put their life and soul (and often significant money) into their productions. But ultimately she finds a production that, regardless of all of this, cannot be justified, and submits her own Alex-style panning. We sense that she’s on her way out of criticism by the book’s end, but not before she’s had a good go of reemphasising its importance.

It’s a book with a lot of memorable moments, a good number of thought-provoking concepts, and at least one well-rounded character in its narrator. It’s an easy and at times gripping read, particularly in its early chapters and (for the visual excitement at least) its closing moments. For me, it didn’t always hang together, occasionally seeming unsure of what it wanted to say and even what kind of book it wanted to be. I’m all for shades of grey in writing, but at times this one did feel like it would have benefitted from a little less fence-sitting.

Score

7

Interesting and at times really powerful, if not entirely coherent.

Next up

Belatedly jumping into one or two from the Women’s Prize longlist…

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Helen of Nowhere (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 14:17:07 +0000

Why this one?

A random pick after seeing some endorsements on Instagram, I think.

Makenna Goodman was born in Colorado, US. She started her career as an editorial assistant for a major publisher in New York. She subsequently worked as a literary agent for a year before apparently being fired. She moved to Vermont to focus on writing, but ended up getting a job as an editor at a radical small press focusing on agriculture and the natural world. She is currently executive editor at Timber Press.

Her first novel, The Shame, was written in secret in the 2010s, and released in 2020. Helen of Nowhere is her second novel, published by Coffee House Press in the US and Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK. Alongside her novels, she has written extensively in the non-fiction field, publishing essays and literary criticism in numerous major titles.

Thoughts, etc.

Helen of Nowhere focuses on an academic, known only as ‘Man’, who has recently lost his job as an English professor and separated from his wife (‘Wife’). He taught on largely transcendentalist themes, which are now being challenged by his (largely female) colleagues and students. His accusation that a student’s work may have been plagiarised was apparently the root of his dismissal, but he believes that he was in the process of being managed out in any case. His wife appears to have tired of him for numerous reasons, and is focused on her own writing career. ‘Man’ is considering a move to the country, and is shown around a large property by ‘Realtor’. The property’s former owner ‘Helen’ is now apparently in care, and has left the task of its sale to the realtor who apparently also lived in the house with her for some time.

After some time at the house, he enters into some sort of séance in which he ‘meets’ Helen, who seems to be suspiciously similar to the realtor. He seems to find the prospect of the encounter with this character, who has been built up as a quasi-mythical ‘earth mother’ figure to be initially arousing, but through their communing he is led to question some of his assumptions about his role in his own downfall. In a final section, we see him return to his wife’s home in a position of submission (acting as a dog or even a baby), seemingly in final acceptance of the true role she has played in nurturing his career, life and ego, and imagining now deferring to her needs instead.

As a reading experience, I found it somewhat disconcerting, which I think is very much deliberate. It begins in a generally realist mode, covering the well-trodden ground of a disgraced professor seemingly seeking some kind of redemption via trying to commune with the nature that has formed the basis of his study for so long. It fairly rapidly becomes clear that he’s an unreliable narrator, myopically committed to his own worldview in spite of the evidence racking up against him that suggests that there may be much more to the story of his downfall than he is revealing.

Once he’s at the property, things get considerably more complex. He approaches the property as a kind of academic coloniser, drawing on his worldview to analyse and idealise the character of ‘Helen’ as loosely presented by the Realtor. The Realtor herself is not a simple character, taking on a role that seems to be first a heightened take on her job (‘selling’ Man an idealised fantasy of the life he could be buying into) and then becoming someone who interrogates Man and forces him to question his firmly held beliefs, first directly (claiming knowledge of his life story that leads us to suspect she may just be a facet of his own character) and then later in the seance section more obliquely (though at this point whether it’s the Realtor or Helen or neither and just the Man’s imagination… who knows)

‘Helen’ herself is deliberately near impossible to pin down. For much of the book it seems she’s invented by the Realtor as a sales gimmick. At times then she seems to be Man’s own invention, a fantasy character through which he can work through his demons. And then we get a section in her voice is which she tells a fairly straightforward and realist tale about allowing some kids to use the lake on her land and her parents then turning on her. Within this tale (probably the most engaging and ‘relatable’ part of the book in some ways) are some more interesting questions about ‘who owns the land’ - beneath the fantasy ‘earth mother’ vibe she is (if she exists, who knows again) actually just another property owner and therefore subject to the normal rules of society, despite the ‘back to nature’ fantasy Man has invested so heavily in.

While this book is well-crafted and intriguing, I did leave it with a sense of befuddlement, as much as anything else. I don’t think that is accidental on the part of Goodman. She’s clearly aiming to give the reader plenty to think about, rather than presenting a straightforward story in which the purpose and ‘moral’ is clear. Hazy ideas of what is real and unreal are used to highlight the instability of any worldview, even as it’s at least generally obvious that the character most in need of having his perspective checked is ‘Man’. In simple terms, the book seems to be a process of unpicking his certainties, taking him on a journey from solid reality through interrogative fantasy and ultimately to a kind of surreal reinvention. But it’s not the sort of book where any ‘simple’ interpretation is likely to be correct in itself. There’s more to it, of course, but what? And do I care?

Score

6.5

An interesting intellectual exercise with moments that elevate it beyond that. But overall just maybe a little too much of a puzzle and not enough of a pleasure for my liking.

Next up

Possibly back to some Netgalley upcomers…

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Glyph (2026)

Eyes On The Prize — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:25:39 +0000

Why this one?

After a bit of a false start (ages ago now) not getting on with Autumn, I read How to be both as part of my Women’s Prize winners project and then jumped back to The Accidental, and loved them both. I was similarly fond of last year’s Gliff, to which this is ‘family’ (but very much not a sequel), in Smith’s words.

Ali Smith (1962- ; active 1986- ), was born in Inverness, Scotland to working-class parents. She studied English Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen and then began a PhD in American and Irish modernism at Cambridge. During this time she began writing plays and so did not complete her doctorate. In the late eighties she regularly had plays performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, before focusing more attention on prose, with her first book of shorts, Free Love and Other Stories, published in 1995.

Her first novel was 1997's Like, which she followed with Hotel World in 2001. The latter was shortlisted for both the 2001 Booker (losing out to Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang) and the same year's Women's Prize (won by the rather lovely The Idea of Perfection.) She repeated the same feat with 2005's The Accidental (this time pipped by John Banville’s surprise winner The Sea and Zadie Smith's On Beauty respectively.) How to Be Both won the Goldsmiths Prize and Costa novel prize in 2014 before finally giving her the Women's Prize in 2015. She has since written four seasonal 'state of the nation' works beginning with 2016's Autumn (also Booker shortlisted) which was written in the immediate aftermath of the UK's 2016 Brexit referendum, plus a fifth in the series, Companion Piece.

Thoughts, etc.

Glyph focuses primarily on two sisters: Petra, the elder, and Patricia (or ‘Patch’). The novel is set in (roughly) the present day, but flashes back to look at the sisters’ childhood in the 1990s. At a family party, an elderly relative tells the story of seeing a man utterly flattened by tanks in France in the Second World War. The sisters create an imaginary friend from the unknown man, and name him ‘Glyph’. This story, and another war tale of a man in the First World War who was executed for desertion (following his unwillingness to put down a blind horse), continue to the haunt the sisters in the present day. Petra is still searching for details of the flattened man, and calls Patricia for help following years of estrangement after she believes she sees the ‘ghost’ of the blind horse in her bedroom, which (by whatever means) has been trashed.

It was always going to be interesting to see what Smith did with the ‘follow up of sorts’ to the near-future dystopia of Gliff. The outcome is typically unexpected - while in some senses a prequel (there are direct references to the pollutant that causes the ecological catastrophe that forms the backdrop for Gliff), it resists this simplistic definition by setting Glyph in a world in which its predecessor exists as a work of fiction. In some senses it seems to be saying that the first book was the ‘fantasy’, the elusive attempt to capture reality via means of imagining its future. This one (named with a word that’s more clear and fixed in its meaning and allusions - a permanent mark; something real and documented) is the grounded reality. As the characters in this book discuss Smith’s last work, taking words out of the mouths of some reviewers and describing it as too ‘on the nose’ and suchlike, we are faced with a book that is even more so. It may be a book with ghost horses and imaginary friends, but both are firmly rooted in true stories, and importantly stories of the horrors of war which are all too clearly connected to the horrors of our present day world.

Reality, since Gliff, has (probably in any sense to Smith’s surprise) advanced somewhat in the direction of the police/surveillance state that she envisaged in that first book. In this one, Patricia’s teenage daughter Bill is arrested for ‘waving a scarf’ bearing the name of a proscribed organisation. The obvious implication is that the road from this direct reflection of events in modern day Britain and the vanishings and state violence depicted in Gliff is minimal. Elsewhere, the genocide in Palestine is a constant presence, both in straightforward discussions between the characters, and in the none-too-subtle subtext of the two historical war stories that thread their way through the book. Here, in the asymmetric warfare that is leading to the ‘flattening’ of an entire people, and in other dehumanising developments (such as the advance of AI which leads to key characters losing their livelihoods) Smith is setting the scene for the imminent dystopia she showed us in Gliff.

If here, as in that other book, there’s much that seems hopeless about the world to come, there are some seeds of hopefulness. As ever, Smith manages to add a lightness to the dark messaging via linguistic playfulness and the warmth of human (again, here, familial and specifically sororal) connections. In amongst these threads are the glimmers of hope: the resurrection of specific characters through the power of imagination, as a counteracting energy to the dehumanising forces at play (‘to imagine is to live’); the importance of paying attention, of not tuning out of the torrent of dismal news our devices expose us to on a daily basis; and the simple escape to be found in close connections (expressed in the sisters’ shared imaginings, fun with wordplay and intuitive understanding).

This is all very thought-provoking and relevant stuff, with a good amount of pleasure to be had in tracing the links between the two books (though that kind of exercise was far better executed by Smith in How to be both) and lots of sentence-level joy in the linguistic play that Smith clearly revels in. Ultimately, taken on its own and in its entirety, though, I found it a far less satisfying read than its sibling Gliff. While I found that book both an entrancing fantasy and a chilling reflection of extant reality, with a haunting quality that hung over me for weeks after reading (and I can still tap back into now), this one intrigued me more than it moved me.

Score

7.5

For me, for all its contemporary relevance and linguistic brilliance, taken on its own merits it feels to me like the lesser twin to Gliff. In some ways (to borrow a phrase from Smith herself) it feels more of a ‘companion piece’ than something that truly stands alone.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

Another book I’d have thought. Which book? We shall see.

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The Given World (2026)

Eyes On The Prize — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:07:49 +0000

Why this one?

Some glowing endorsements on Netgalley from the likes of Sarah Moss and Francis Spufford convinced me to check it out.

Melissa Harrison (1975- ; active 2015- ) was born in Surrey, England. She studied English at Lincoln College, Oxford and after graduating in 1996 worked as a freelance magazine subeditor, as well as writing for the likes of the Guardian and the Times (contributing the ‘Nature Notes’ column for the latter).

She published her debut novel, Clay, in 2013, and was shortlisted for the Costa Prize and longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction for her second, 2015’s At Hawthorn Time. Her third novel, All Among the Barley (2018), won the European Union Prize for Literature. She has written extensively on the subject of nature, both in her fiction and in non-fiction works including Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (2016) and The Stubborn Light of Things (2020), the latter spun off from a podcast she began during the Covid lockdowns. She has also written books for children, including the Moss series, beginning with By Ash, Oak and Thorn (2021). Her books have also been longlisted several times for the nature-focused Wainwright Prizes.

The Given World is her fourth novel and is due via Random House / Cornerstone in May 2026. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thoughts, etc.

The Given World is set in a rural community in the fictional village of Lower Eodham, in the Welm Valley in southern England. It’s set in a modern-feeling world, albeit one in which an unnamed (but very Climate Crisis-y) threat is more imminently looming. Its chapters take turns in offering the perspective of a range of characters who make up the village, each dealing with their own personal issues, from tragedies to minor conflicts, alongside Harrison’s documenting of the unravelling of the social and environmental constructs that held the village and its community together.

It’s a book that sets its stall out fairly quickly in terms of its roots in the natural world, with some richly descriptive early passages before we start to get into the human stories which make up its individual chapters. We’re soon introduced though to Clare Grey, a long-time resident and pillar of the community, living in a converted priory which has been in her family for generations. With her acquisitive father now dead, and her sister long since relocated to London, she’s now the steward of the property. Through the book, Clare learns of some less savoury parts to her family’s history and its impact on the land and community, and it’s also revealed that she is terminally ill. In both senses, she seems more widely emblematic of the sense of decay and impending doom that hangs over the valley. There’s an elegiac quality to her story and that of the community as a whole, a sense of innocence lost and corrupted by man’s competitive urges in the modern era.

While Clare’s story anchors the book, each chapter takes us into the inner world of a different character. We find the tragic aging figure of Alan Jope, the last of an even longer history of landowners in the area, now reduced to a fairly pitiful existence in a version of the valley that he barely following land-grabbing injustices and the death of his brother. Elsewhere, an elderly female resident narrowly escapes death after a fall, a builder suffers from vertigo while going about his work on a roof, ‘incoming’ rich residents struggle to integrate, and various younger residents grapple with the eternal dilemmas of coming of age in the middle of nowhere: to leave for a life of promise elsewhere, or stay and commit to a relatively risk-free but likely very dull existence, following in the footsteps of ancestors in a diminished version of the world in which they thrived.

Throughout, the modern world’s intrusions are contrasted with folkloric images from the region’s distant past and the simple decency of the older residents (who are, in one way or another, fading in influence) is set against the capitalistic drivers of incomers (not all of them that recent) who prioritise short-term profit over any attempt at sustaining harmonic balance within nature, community or family. Petty disputes continue in the foreground while in the background all of the residents have a sense of dread (generally haunting their dreams) of something not quite right with the world. Next to a sign bearing the village’s name sits a dead badger’s corpse - recently demised at the book’s start, merely a semi-buried collection of teeth and bones by its end.

It’s a book that presents a compelling and unsettling vision of a familiar world rendered increasingly unfamiliar. Ultimately its message - presented with impressive subtlety but clear nonetheless - is one of the urgency of coming together to combat the many forms of decay being inflicted on our world (‘given’ to us, and therefore by inference easily taken away), all ultimately rooted in the competitive individualism and consequent societal fragmentation that characterise late capitalism and particularly its present technology-dominated manifestation. The novel is far from conclusively optimistic about the possibility of such a solution, but in its characters’ banding together in moments of tragedy, and its final pages’ nods towards a collective voice over the individual, it hints that hope has not been entirely extinguished.

Score

9

A beautiful and sad book that I’d love to see cropping up on some of the major prize lists this year.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

Looking forward to reading Glyph by Ali Smith, the sister novel to her recent Gliff.

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We Live Here Now (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:15:02 +0000

Why this one?

It won the Goldsmiths Prize last year, which I don’t follow quite as religiously as some of the other major prizes, but sometimes think I should. This year’s shortlist also included a couple of my favourite recent debuts in We Pretty Pieces of Flesh and Nova Scotia House and past winners have included excellent books that I’ve covered on the blog by Benjamin Myers., Ali Smith and Eimear McBride, among many others that I really should also get around to reading.

C. D. Rose (“late 1960s”-; active c.2013-) was born in Manchester, England. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from Edge Hill University. He has worked internationally as a teacher and trainer, including a decade-long tenure with the British Council in Italy and shorter periods in Lebanon, Morocco, Russia, and the United States. He currently lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Birmingham.

Rose’s previous novels form a "parafictional" trilogy (exploring themes of lost books and forgotten authors): The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure (2014), Who's Who When Everyone Is Someone Else (2018), and The Blind Accordionist (2021). His short story collection Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea (2024) was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, and has edited the anthologies Cities: Birmingham (2018) and Love Bites: Fiction Inspired by Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks (2019)..

Thoughts, etc.

We Live Here Now is a set of fourteen short stories set in various corners of the modern world, connected (thematically and often more directly) by their positioning within the broad landscape of modern art and its intersection with commerce and capitalism. It begins with a fictional article by the critic Che Horst-Prosier about the equally fictional artist Sigi Conrad, who has disappeared following her most recent exhibition, which has become notorious for the apparent ‘disappearance’ of a number of its attendees. We are then introduced to twelve characters, seemingly all in some way connected to or impacted by Conrad, across the book’s stories, before most of the cast are reunited (for unclear reasons) in attendance at a mysterious talk, before we return to another article by Horst-Prosier on Conrad’s return, for an exhibition purportedly taking the form of a ‘Klein bottle’ (a device in which inside and outside are the same) and things get even weirder.

I do say this sort of thing a lot, but it really is very difficult to know where to start with this one! I raced through it, really loving some of the stories and enjoying most, and then ended it feeling surprisingly underwhelmed, and perhaps with a bit of a sense that I wasn’t quite smart enough to have ‘joined the dots’ in what is ultimately a highly confounding book. For the most part, though, it’s easy to be carried along by its many qualities. The writing is punchy, concise and never needlessly difficult (on a sentence level) even when covering very complex subject matter. There’s a huge amount of humour in here too - some of it rather dark and obtuse, but some just straightforwardly funny (like the invented naming convention for the succession of slick black SUVs that crop up throughout the book - Lexus Punishers and suchlike). Many of its characters feel rounded and human, and hugely memorable, despite their relatively brief amount of page time. And perhaps most impressive is the overall mood throughout, in which reality is constantly subtly ‘off’, not quite right, a general uneasiness that occasionally tips over into memorably rendered reality-obliterating weirdness or nightmarish horror. It’s all hugely cinematic and immersive.

Some of the sections I liked most were those that felt most clearly purposeful in their connection to the central figure of Conrad and her work. Early in the book we meet Kasha, a dealer who sells a work by Conrad which then goes off on a global journey via sea containers for insurance / tax dodge purposes. When its mystery buyers appear to demand a viewing, they are greeted with an empty container. Kasha tries to spin this as ‘the point’, and for all we know it might be. Elsewhere we find those containers described as works of art in themselves, in another great section called ‘Manifest’ in which we go deep into the world of sea containers on a global voyage in which this time Conrad herself appears to be an unusual passenger. In this section, we learn a lot about sea container disasters, especially fires. I also liked the story in which one of Kasha’s acquaintances (boyfriend?) Silas becomes caught up in art collecting, and ends up with his own Conrad, which contains more than he bargained for. And that of Ryan, a Richter-esque artist whose usual mode is to create paintings that erase their subject matter, who becomes the unlikely choice to create a new portrait of the CEO of Laerp, an industrial conglomerate focused on undersea cables (and, yes, also apparently something to do with shipping containers). The section on Rachel Noyes (no/yes indeed), a sound artist who is sent to Berlin to apply for a job she knows nothing about, is seemingly unable to leave her slick apartment and in any case realises the interview is actually via video call, is brilliantly Kafka-esque and maybe a contender for my favourite in the book.

There are some other sections which feel less fully formed and more tangential to the main through line of the book. ‘Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof’, despite its excellent title, kind of drifted over me in its depiction of a man who constantly rides around on underground trains. There’s another story about another guy who makes sound recordings. Elsewhere there are several stories that have engaging Black Mirror style concepts, but don’t really seem to go anywhere (a man keeps having near-death experiences; a scientist has his identity stolen by multiple people; a woman has a job in an upmarket private members’ club in which there’s a secret room she’s not allowed to enter; etc.) All of these are actually still incredible pieces of writing, excelling in that ability to build a mood of unease and dislocation. Like the rest of the book, they recall works by some of my favourite authors (Auster, DeLillo, David Mitchell; others have repeatedly referenced Borges and Calvino). But I was never quite sure what to make of them, either in isolation or as a whole.

I think it’s that last point that slightly dented my enjoyment of a book that I really loved the experience of reading. As I’ve said a few times on this blog, I’m not the sort of reader who gets annoyed at an open or inconclusive ending. In fact I’m quite fond of being left with a bit of work for the imagination, or fuel for discussion. The difference in this one I think is that it doesn’t seem to be pointing towards a ‘make of this what you will’ type conclusion, but rather suggesting that there is a kind of code to be unlocked, and if you haven’t cracked that code, you’ve missed the point. That sort of (vaguely modernist I guess?) approach I find harder to deal with, probably because it makes me feel a bit stupid. I could be wrong here, it may be that the seemingly intricate web of connections and references that litter the book are just there in the spirit of playfulness, rather than to be pieced together to form a solution to a cryptic crossword clue.

Perhaps it’s better to turn to Rose’s own well-chosen words, in a New Statesman interview talking about the Goldsmiths Prize and ‘innovation’ in writing:

”“Innovative” approaches ask more of the reader, and often offer no easy rewards. You may be asked to read more carefully, more slowly, or to re-read. Your time will be needed. You might not find closure, or resolution, or revelation. A book with an innovative approach will not be a love letter to anything. It will not tell you about “what it means to be human.” It will deliver no message. It cannot be easily summarised. It will demand your close attention, and might leave you bereft and adrift. But, Lord, you will have experienced something.”

However much you enjoy the various facets of ‘innovative’ works he’s describing here (I like some aspects and find others a source of frustration) it’s impossible, when considering We Live Here Now, to argue with that last sentence. You certainly will have experienced something. Quite what, is less clear, and I certainly did leave that experience feeling somewhat ‘bereft’ and very much ‘adrift’. But it was, as they say, a hell of a ride.

Score

9

Ultimately I think this does exactly what a Goldsmiths winner should: it leaves you with more questions than answers, upends your notion of what a book should or shouldn’t be, and kind of messes with your head a bit. With all that, there will be inevitable frustrations, but I think on balance they’re more than worth tolerating given the quality of that overall ‘experience’.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

I have a few lighter non-fiction reads/ audiobooks on the go, which probably won’t make it to the blog, but other than that I might get back into a few upcoming Netgalley releases.

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The North Road (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:24:24 +0000

Why this one?

I think I initially noticed this one by means of a recommendation from Benjamin Myers, which always feels like a safe place to start. The subject was also appealing: I’m fond of maps, psychogeography and explorations of my home country. I grew up not too far from the titular road (my hometown’s name crops up a couple of times in passing) and spent many years subsequently in North London, at least vaguely near its origin. It also has a beautiful cover, doesn’t it? No shortage of reasons, then, to check this one out.

Rob Cowen (1976- ; active 2011- ) was born in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. After graduating from the University of Leeds, and playing in various bands, he worked as a journalist, writing on nature and travel. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Guardian and the Independent and written radio programmes for the BBC. His first book, Skimming Stones (2012), received the Roger Deakin Award from the Society of Authors. He is also the author of Common Ground (2015), an examination of a square mile of land in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. This work was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize, the Portico Prize, and the Richard Jefferies Society Award, and was voted one of the nation’s favourite nature books of all time in a BBC poll. A version of it produced in combination with several folk musicians also hit the stage in 2016. He has also published a volume of poetry, The Heeling (2021).

Thoughts, etc.

The North Road is one of those books that’s very difficult to categorise. Superficially, it’s fairly straightforward: a non-fiction book about Britain’s ‘Great North Road’, a 400 mile stretch that has existed in some form or other since Roman times, now known (for the most part) as the A1(M) motorway. Yet from its earliest pages, it’s clear that it’s a little more complex than that. We begin by encountering Cowen in something of a career rut, having recently become a father for the second time. He’s encouraged by his own father to get out a bit, and this leads him, under the precept of a journalistic story of some sort, to join an archaelogical dig somewhere in the vicinity of the A1 near Catterick, where he soon ends up unearthing long-forgotten remains and beginning to combine several threads into the idea for the book that we end up holding in our hands.

It’s rightly been described as kalaedoscopic in scope, but there seem to be at least three linked threads that spin off from this originating incident. First, the proximity to the road itself unlocks the idea of that ‘Great’ thoroughfare as a structuring vehicle for an examination of the history of the country it straddles. The unearthing of human remains sparks several of the book’s other major themes - mortality, and a deeper quest for purpose and meaning that this journey might help its author explore. And finally the connection to family that inspired the visit to the dig is far from insignificant - overlaid across all of those themes is Cowen’s own family - from the meaning and joy found in his own two children, to a look back at his teenage abandonment by his own father, explorations of his great-grandfather’s own travels up and down the North Road, and the ups and downs of his life (from tragedy to schmoozing with Burton and Taylor in his London years), and eventually a grander sweep back in time to the discovery of another long-lost buried soul who turns out to be an ancestor.

It’s interesting, beyond this, to think about the book’s many different modes and how successful it is at effortlessly switching and sliding between them. As it gets into its stride, it’s dominant mode seems to be a travelogue, albeit an interesting one as Cowen walks a large part of the Road’s early miles from London to the home counties, accompanied by his seemingly less contemplative soldier friend known only as A. In these sections, there’s an enjoyable but not entirely unexpected blend of history of the Road’s origins, various tales of famous highwaymen and suchlike, and reportage of the pair’s interactions as they navigate the often uninspiring concreted suburbia that characterises this stretch of road. Still here there are highlights, both weird (the archaic May-day celebrations they come across towards this section’s end) and touching (Cowen’s recollections of a personal connection to the Hatfield rail disaster, as they pass its location).

This latter point is one of many early deviations into something more closely approximating memoir or family history. A sort of psychogeographic take on ‘Who Do You Think You Are’. These are clearly the book’s heart, and cover a huge amount of ground both in terms of Cowen’s own ups and downs and those of his relatives. In every case there’s a connection to the Road, never forced, even where the extent to which his family’s history seems magnetically attracted to the Road to a point that stretches even Cowen’s own sense of coincidence. Perhaps most moving is the juxtaposition between the moments of pure tragedy (the death of a young employee of his great-grandfather; a horrific mining collapse that also impacts young workers) with the hope and inspiration Cowen finds in the present day with his own young family, which is always a joy to return to.

On top of all of this, there are sections that jump straight into fictionalised recreations of historic events. Some of these bring to life relatively well-known characters, but mostly they focus on events either centred on or relevant to the ordinary folk that have lived alongside the road over its many centuries. These are generally wonderfully done, lending the book an immersive feel that a mere recounting of the same events would not have done. Admittedly, some of them are somewhat hard to penetrate, generally appearing as they do somewhat unannounced and only then being explained in retrospect. This works for the most part, and hits exceptional heights where the fictional narrative is presented as a contrast to the more studiously historical take with which it is followed up, such as in the recounting of the racist takes on a locally famous boxing match, and that of a murder of a supposed drunken man along the Road’s route. There are a couple of these sections that maybe drag a little, but they do draw you in and offer a sense of time-travelling wonder that a more straightforwardly factual telling would have missed.

Something else that I enjoyed finding threaded through the whole book (yes, there’s still more!) was a layer of contemporary commentary on the years over which the book was written. From genesis to completion seems to have taken Cowen at least a decade, yet the ‘present day’ seems to retain its tense throughout, which makes for an interesting reading experience, as experiences of Brexit’s separation and isolationism sit alongside historic tales of building connection; Covid intervenes to prevent Cowen’s movement along the road, and is juxtaposed with fictionalised accounts of previous plagues; and the collapse of the climate raises its ugly head, itself a manifestation of the recurrent theme of all roads having to have an end.

Just sketching down these somewhat random thoughts about the extensive and multifaceted contents of this excellent book doesn’t really do it justice. It suggests something messy (it is, but only in the sense that life is) and complex (similarly so, but almost always a joy to read in the moment). If you come to this book expecting a simple history or travelogue, you’ll definitely be surprised by how much more than that it contains. It certainly works on this level: you still come to its end feeling like you’ve been on that journey with its author, traversing Britain’s length as well as its history and picking up what makes each stretch of that road unique. But it’s the universal themes (mortality, the importance of family, that elusive idea of ‘Britishness’ and what - if anything - it means) that are expressed through Cowen’s own exploration of his life and family history, that elevate this into something truly magnificent.

Score

9

Highly recommended reading. Like the road, it covers a huge amount of ground, winds its way through diverse landscapes, has no clear beginning or end, and often deviates away from its main path. But all of that, of course, is its beauty.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

TBC.

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Vigil (2026)

Eyes On The Prize — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 17:52:39 +0000

Why this one?

It’s the new novel (and only the second) by the author of my favourite Booker winner!

George Saunders (1958- ; active 1986- ) was born in Amarillo, Texas, USA. He grew up in Oak Forest, Illinois, near Chicago. His first degree was, unusually, a BS in geophysical engineering from Colorado School of Mines, though he took an MA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University in 1988, where he met his wife Paula Redick.

He began writing short stories, with his first published in 1986. His first collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline wasn't published until 1996. In between his MA and this first book, he worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer, while continuing to publish short stories. He has subsequently published three further collections of short stories, edited an anthology called Fakes, and written extensively for the likes of The New Yorker, The Guardian, Harper's and GQ. Having previously said he wouldn't write a novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017’s aforementioned Booker winner) was his first venture into the longer form. Prior to this, his most recent book was 2022’s story collection Liberation Day, which I also rather enjoyed.

He has taught an MFA class at Syracuse for over twenty years, and in 2021 published A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a "literary master class" based on his classes on the art of the short story form, focusing on four Russian masters.

Vigil will be published by Bloomsbury in January 2026. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thoughts, etc.

Vigil takes us back to what many have dubbed the ‘Bardoverse’, that being a kind of purgatorial netherworld inhabited by the dead that formed the primary focus of Lincoln in the Bardo. Here, though, the setting is the present day (or thereabouts) and instead of a graveyard we largely find ourselves at the bedside of a dying man, the powerful oil executive K. J. Boone. We are introduced to him through the eyes of Jill “Doll” Blaine, a young woman who died (in a rather unfortunate case of mistaken identity) in the 1970s, and has been sent to ‘comfort’ Boone through his dying moments. While she has been through this process more than 300 times in her afterlife, Boone represents an entirely new experience for her. He is an unrepentant architect of climate change, and even aside from that, a man with precious few redeeming qualities.

For better and worse, it’s by no means a straightforward retread of Bardo’s setup. In the latter, the deceased spirits that we encounter are the recently dead, confined to a graveyard where they refuse to accept their fate. In this limbo-state, they are crammed in with dozens of others of their ilk (to borrow a phrase from Jill) in a chaotic environment in which their bodies are grotesquely distorted in various (often comical) ways. Jill, by contrast, occupies a more established and ‘professional’ role in her afterlife, as do pretty much all of the other deceased characters we encounter in Vigil. Especially given the repeated use of the term ‘elevation’, it could be the case that the role Jill takes on is one in which she has transcended the status of those Bardo ghouls, and that the ultimate ‘reward’ is being given this purposeful role of comforting/guiding others in their moment of darkness. Or it could be the case that it’s just a totally different concept that happens to also deal with the afterlife (but that would be less fun!)

On the positive side, this difference in focus gives us a fresh perspective and not just a crowd-pleasing revisit. It also gives us more time with a single ‘dead’ character, in Jill Blaine, who is definitely an entertaining voice through which to view this world. In this story, she experiences significant character development, arriving to repeat a task she has performed successfully many times before, from a position of relative innocence and purity (having died young, she approaches the world from this relatively untainted perspective and begins the book with a touch of endearing naivete). Through her disgust at what she experiences in the mind of Boone, however, she is spurred into something of a reckoning with her own past, in which she discovers that those around her (mainly men) have not been quite so innocent - her murderer has lived a life free of consequences, and absolved himself of blame; the true love of her life moved on relatively quickly after her death. The combination of the encounter with Boone and her enhanced understanding of these elements of her own past leads her from the ‘angel’ like figure we first encounter to a far more assertive (and human) character who ultimately reveals herself capable of violence in pursuit of a kind of ‘justice’.

Elsewhere, I enjoyed the book’s more fantastical moments. There’s nothing quite on the level of pure chaotic surrealism that Bardo had, but there are still plenty of vividly rendered images of a fantastical world in which spirits both human and animal can appear, often in large quantities, reconfigure themselves and generally paint wildly entertaining pictures in our mind. Saunders’ deployment of these kind of fantastical elements in the service of hugely serious themes is clearly one of the many manifestations of his genius as a writer. Even in their more constrained format in this book, they still represent brilliant irruptions of joy and humour in an otherwise dark world.

There are, however, some aspects of this novel that make it harder to enjoy than his previous (in my view, near-perfect) novel. The first is that it is such a darker and less hopeful book than its predecessor. This is perhaps inevitable given the weight of the subject matter it’s contending with. Bardo was set safely in the past; Vigil is set in our doomed modern world. While the traveller from the near-future, Mr. Bhuti, gives us a glimpse of a ruined world, destroyed by changes to the climate wrought by the likes of Boone, his dispatches don’t come as much of a surprise. In fact, that’s partly the point: even faced with incontrovertible evidence, Boone is unable to be swayed into a deathbed moment of acceptance of his role in this scenario. It ultimately makes for a fairly gloomy read, if one that’s depressingly apt for our times. Those most at fault for our tragic fate are incapable of change; and the horror of this recognition spurs even the innocent ‘angel’ like Jill to become tainted (one might argue into a necessary violent activism, but again there is little joy in this outcome).

Arguably more significant, though, for me, was the relative lack of emotional weight. Because of all of the above, it lacks the heart of Bardo in which amidst the chaos and hilarity we also experience the raw grief of a man for his child, and the broad range of emotions associated with that scenario. In Vigil, there’s no real emotional anchor, and an overriding sense of emptiness as a result. It’s a book that deals with the grandest of tragedies, but one in which the weight of that subject tramples everything beneath it, leaving us with a book that’s easier to respect than to love.

Score

8

Despite this, it’s still evidently a joy to read at sentence-level. I also suspect it might benefit from a re-read, which I would consider if it makes any of the major prize shortlists. It’s also in a sense timely, but like Boone’s post-death pleas for forgiveness, perhaps also ‘too late’. Maybe that’s also part of the point.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

TBC.

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The Palm House (2026)

Eyes On The Prize — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 16:22:06 +0000

Why this one?

Just one that caught my eye on Netgalley, for no specific reason. This is my first book by Riley.

Gwendoline Riley (1979- ; active 2002- ) was born in London and grew up on the Wirral, with her grandparents following her parents’ divorce. She has said in interviews that she considers herself estranged from her parents. She attended Manchester Metropolitan University, where she studied English Literature. She lived in Manchester and Glasgow for several years before relocating to London in 2011.

Her writing career began in 2002 with the publication of her first novel, Cold Water, written while still at university, which received a Betty Trask Award. She followed this with Sick Notes in 2004 and Joshua Spassky in 2007, which won a Somerset Maugham Award. Her subsequent novels include Opposed Positions (2012), First Love (2017), and My Phantoms (2021). 2017’s First Love was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize (losing out to Naomi Alderman’s The Power), the Goldsmiths Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

The Palm House will be published by Picador in April 2026. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thoughts, etc.

The Palm House focuses on the friendship between Laura Miller (the narrator) and Edmund Putnam (known mainly as ‘Putnam’) two characters working in the London media landscape, set close to the present day. Over the course of a long weekend, they meet several times for drinks and crisps, and discuss the state of their lives, and share stories from their past. Putnam is coming to the terms with the death of his father and dealing with the arrival of a terrible new boss at Sequence, the cultural publication he has spent decades working for, and Laura is still somewhat in the shadow of her performative and over-the-top mother, and is somewhat listless in her current life and looking for ways to improve her circumstance.

It’s a brilliantly observed book, albeit one in which nothing especially dramatic actually happens. It’s more of a character study, about the small solace of friendship when one’s life is otherwise not going to plan, as well as something of a wistful elegy for a passing generation, one that feels especially particular to the changing nature of life in London in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Its characters observe a changing London from the one that they have lived in for much of their lives (for Putnam, one that gave him meaning and purpose for decades; for the younger Laura, one that promised much but delivered little of substance beyond a lot of ‘bad parties’) - a world that perhaps peaked in the nineties and saw its decline with the 2008 financial crash. Some of the changes they observe are relatively superficial, amusing grumblings of the middle-aged and relatively privileged (kids these days don’t know how to have fun, and suchlike) and others are heavier in their implications (the inability of a younger generation to experience the kind of London lives that they did, with stratospheric increases in relative cost of living pushing new entrants out of the capital entirely).

Its primary pleasures are in its character-driven vignettes. In the present day, the arrival of the obnoxious and vacuous Simon ‘call me Shove’ Halfpenny at Sequence is relatably cringeworthy, as a man utterly devoid of substance blunders his way through an attempted rebrand of the magazine. In Laura’s past, there are more rich pickings in terms of the weird and occasionally despicable men she has encountered on her way from escaping the shadow of her mother to landing in her present world, from the relatively light descriptions of various media toffs she drunkenly encounters through to the genuine horror in the retelling of the result of her teenage infatuation with a comedy ‘icon’.

These characters and their stories make for compelling and often entertaining reading, and I enjoyed the evocation of a London I know well, and especially the contrast between its alternately grimy and glamorous appeal in former glory years, contrasted with the hollow bluster of its modern-day inhabitants. Not everything worked for me, though. While it’s been an interesting one to chew on afterwards, I didn’t immediately grasp with any clarity what it was trying to say. In some sense that’s a strength, as it’s the sort of book that doesn’t offer easy conclusions, preferring a more observational take on its subjects. But at times it did feel a little frustratingly ‘bitty’ and lacking in focus. It’s also somewhat narrow in its focus, and not necessarily in an especially fresh space - the London media bubble is certainly one that has been well-covered over the years by literary fiction.

Score

7.5

Overall, though, an enjoyable and obviously well-crafted short novel, and one that makes me keen to go back to check out some of Riley’s earlier work.

Next up

TBC.

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Dark is the Morning (2026)

Eyes On The Prize — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:55:51 +0000

Why this one?

I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by Thomson to date, with particular highlights being the dystopian Divided Kingdom (2005) and the more recent (and wildly different) Never Anyone But You. I also reviewed his most recent novel, How to Make a Bomb, last year.

Rupert Thomson (1955- ; active c. 1976- ) was born in Eastbourne, in southern England. He lost his mother at a young age and subsequently attended Christ's Hospital, a charitable boarding school. While there, he developed an interest in poetry and began writing himself. He later studied Medieval History and Political Philosophy at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he had poems published in several magazines.

Following university, he traveled extensively in North America, and spent time living in Athens, before taking a role as an advertising copywriter in London. After four years he gave this up to devote himself to creative writing, initially living in Italy before moving around through the 80s, with spells in West Berlin, New York and Tokyo. In this period he wrote his debut novel Dreams of Leaving, which was eventually published by Bloomsbury in 1987.

His subsequent works have included The Insult (1996), which was listed by David Bowie as one of his top 100 reads, and the unsettling The Book of Revelation (1999), which as well as being my own introduction to Thomson's work, was adapted as a film in 2006 by Ana Kokkinos. 2009's Death of a Murderer centres on Moors murderer Myra Hindley and was shortlisted for the Costa prize. In 2010 he published the memoir This Party's Got to Stop, and in 2020 published a novel (NVK) under the pseudonym Temple Drake. He has continued to regularly put out acclaimed novels, including Katherine Carlyle (2015), Never Anyone But You (2018) and Barcelona Dreaming (2021). Despite consistent critical acclaim, he has yet to win any literary prize for his fiction.

Dark is the Morning will be published by Head of Zeus in May 2026. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thoughts, etc.

Dark is the Morning takes place in Abruzzo, Italy, predominantly in the early 2000s. At its centre is a relationship between Gino, who after a mis-spent youth is trying to get his life back on track, and Franca, who told him when they were children that they would one day marry. The novel is set up as a romance, in which two outsiders look set to make amends for their failure to get it together during some initial adventures as teenagers. However, we know from the start that things are unlikely to be as simple as that, via means of words that conclude its introductory chapter, narrated by the Englishman Harry who (from the present day) refers ominously to ‘those events’ that took place in the early 2000s.

Initially, things do run almost too smoothly for the young lovers, who marry, inherit a dilapidated and isolated farmhouse, and soon after become parents. A combination of factors conspire to undermine this seemingly perfect scenario. We’re aware from early on that Gino has somewhat auto-destructive tendencies, and a past that includes both substance abuse and violent events. And despite marrying the woman who professed here loyalty to him from a young age, and subsequently offered him ‘all of myself’, he also demonstrates a propensity for jealousy, showing signs of suspicion over her post work drinks. He also learns early in their relationship of a previous affair she had with a married rich local businessman, Enzo Pierozzi. Never entirely comfortable with being made privy to this secret relationship, he is unable to file it away and is instead determined to confront Enzo, and when he does so he is taken aback by his beauty, which sits in contrast to his own negative self-image.

When Gino and Franca’s son is born, the story takes on a slightly different tone, with the reaction of everyone around them to the child’s beauty having a kind of quasi-mythical element to it. People stop them in the street, travel from far afield to visit their remote house, and generally treat the baby as some kind of miracle. While the book is set in rural Italy, and subsequently populated with characters who may be inclined towards religious fervour, it nonetheless seems to take the story outside of a purely realist mode and into the realms of the fantastical, heightened further as the child ‘speaks’ to Gino. His words are a manifestation of what Gino has already been building to, a fierce paranoia built around the idea that the child is not his - that his impossible beauty could not have come from two outsiders, and must therefore be the result of a further infidelity, which takes him in only one direction, ultimately with disastrous consequences for him and everyone around him.

It’s a typically brilliantly crafted piece of storytelling from Thomson, which draws on techniques from myths and fables to explore ideas of fate and destiny. We’re drawn in early on by the compelling characters and beautiful scenery, with our enjoyment of the developing love story undercut by warnings seeded from the start. And then something intervenes to send things spiralling out of control, and the rest of the book is read with a growing sense of horror as Gino seems increasingly doomed to destroy the life he has clawed back for himself. While its central themes are those of jealousy and paranoia, there’s something deeper in its character study of Gino. Despite encouragement from surrogate father-figure Harry that his son’s beauty is not evidence of infidelity but of a beauty within himself that he cannot see, Gino is ultimately unable to believe that narrative, seeing himself as fundamentally and irredeemably flawed, a belief that ultimately leads him to his disastrous end.

The framing of the book by Harry is an interesting choice on Thomson’s part. I did have a few questions as to why he gives this character such a prominent voice in what’s clearly the story of Gino and Franca. But on reflection I do think there is a logic to it. Given its fabular qualities, it’s a book that almost demands a ‘storyteller’ framing. Harry makes sense as an outsider in most senses, not from the culture that generates the relationship and also produces some of the instigating oddness that catalyses Gino’s undoing. Yet at the same time he’s developed a lifelong (albeit mostly arms-length) connection with Gino and is therefore able to offer fatherly interventions and a commentary drawn from his own experiences of a relationship that has seen its troubles but is managed in some way. He’s also intrinsically connected to their story, despite his distance. He doesn’t just frame the book, but also their relationship - present at an incident that defined their failed teenage attempts to connect, and also involved (as a kind of doomed quasi-Shakespearean ‘messenger’) in their final unravelling.

Score

9

This is up there with the best of Thomson’s work, a modern-day tragic fairytale with a haunting quality that I suspect will linger long after reading.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

TBC.

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Belgrave Road (2026)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 13:53:31 +0000

Why this one?

Another upcoming release that caught my attention while browsing Netgalley.

Manish Chauhan was born in Leicester, England. He works as a finance lawyer and currently lives in East London. His short story ‘Pieces’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2024 and he has won several other awards for his short fiction. This is his debut novel, and is due to be followed by a short story collection (Leicester) in 2027.

Belgrave Road will be published by Faber in early 2026. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thoughts, etc.

Belgrave Road is ostensibly a love story, between two immigrants to the UK who meet in the Midlands city of Leicester. Mira has arrived in Leicester, like many others, from India, following an arranged marriage to the British-raised Rajiv. She is at once far away from home, and amongst many of her compatriots in a long-established Indian community in the city. She meets Tahliil, a recent arrival from Somalia, who endured a traumatic journey with his sister to escape war and find sanctuary in the UK.

The novel switches perspectives between the two characters, highlighting both the differences in their experiences (Tahliil is with his family but has no surrounding community; Mira almost the opposite) and the similarities. It is centrally focused on the connection that the two form, finding solace in another person as a substitute for ‘home’, in both cases fighting against challenging circumstances for the right to be together. The romance is admittedly well-told, giving me occasionally thoughts of a David Nicholls or a Sally Rooney in its ability to maintain lightness while being far from superficial. Behind that, though, I think, are two more interesting stories.

Mira’s, of arranged marriage, has certainly been covered plenty of times before by Indian and British-Indian writers, but I do think Chauhan takes a reasonably fresh angle on it with Mira’s character. The criticism of the institution is not always explicit, but it is obvious, particularly as we take Mira’s perspective in numerous scenes of unwanted intimacy with a man who plainly wants to be with someone else. Despite this, her character’s responses is far from one-dimensional. While she’s bold in the sense of taking clear steps to break with tradition and make a better life for herself, she’s also (at least for the majority of the novel) a realist who isn’t inclined to risk breaking the harsh rules set for immigrants by marriage such as herself. Her support to Rajiv’s mother, who has unquestioningly endured the (literal) brutality of an arranged marriage in a way that she never would, is obvious in some ways but also subtly and tenderly portrayed.

Tahliil is perhaps less well-rounded as a whole than Mira. Aspects of his backstory read more like cliche, and I found his dialogue to be a little patronisingly written at times (we get that his English is not so good, but I think sometimes that’s better expressed through an initial explanation than repeated “I not know that, boss” type utterances). Having said all that, he does bring a heart and soul to the novel that for me negated these minor criticisms. There have been better renderings of the Kafkaesque nightmare of immigration bureaucracy (which takes up a fair chunk of his story) but several of his sections were much more powerful. First and foremost of these is the depiction of the trauma of his journey through Europe to get to the UK. It’s a thoroughly horrible, yet transparently typical, telling of a very topical and important story. My one big hope whenever I read something like this is that the book gets into the hands of at least some people who demonise immigrants and particularly refugees, as I cannot fathom how one could read a story like this and still maintain such views. (I actually think Belgrave Road is suitably accessible that this hope may actually become a reality - particularly if as feels inevitable a film or TV adaptation follows). Outside of this, his care for the elderly Mr Stevens, and subsequent appalling mistreatment by his estranged son, elicit further sympathy and (once again) righteous anger.

Elsewhere, there are some interesting decisions. Oddly for a book with such a specific place name in the title, it feels much more a novel of interiors (cramped houses and stifled minds) than one that really screams ‘place’. Sure, there are plenty of street names and parks that might work nicely for those familiar with the area, but they don’t serve as much more than backdrop for the essential interiority of the novel. I didn’t mind this, but did find it a slightly surprising thing to reflect on afterwards.

More of an issue (although still not a fatal one) for me was the ending. As I’ve often said, I like open endings. I’m not fond of overly tidy conclusions where everything is neatly and conveniently wrapped up. I’m also down with abrupt, unexpected endings, where they serve a purpose. Here, though, I was left overwhelmingly with a sense of a book leaving itself open to a potential sequel, rather than one in which the lack of resolution served a deliberate purpose. I’ve thought about it a little since and I think there is one take that might redeem it - which is that potentially what Chauhan is doing is showing (not telling) us that the fantasy of escape that both characters experience is ultimately nothing more than that. It’s a pessimistic, yet unfortunately likely true to life, reading of the book’s conclusion. We can’t seriously be expected to believe that there is any way out (especially for Tahliil) following his unjust fate, can we? I guess time, and the demands that may follow what seems to be an expected commercial success for this book, will tell…

Score

8

An engaging read, that covers heavy and timely topics with a light touch.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

TBC.

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I Could Be Famous (2026)

Eyes On The Prize — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

Why this one?

Essentially because I was browsing Netgalley and saw an endorsement from George Saunders (his name is so big on the - possibly provisional - cover above that it almost looks like he’s the author!) so thought it was worth a look.

Sydney Rende was born in Baltimore, MD, and later lived in New York City, where she worked as a personal assistant to an actor. She received her MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University. A self-described reality TV enthusiast, she is on the record stating that she "will challenge anyone who dares to argue that reality TV isn't high art." She currently lives in Southern California.

Her short stories have appeared in Joyland and Carve magazine, and she has written about fashion and travel for publications like Who What Wear and T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Her first book, the short story collection I Could Be Famous, is informed by her interest in celebrity culture, and will be published by Bloomsbury in January 2026. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thoughts, etc.

I Could Be Famous is a book of semi-connected short stories set in California and largely around the LA/Hollywood celebrity ecosystem. Ten of the stories have young women as their focus, mostly in some way connected to or on the periphery of this celebrity culture (from aspirational actors to minor reality TV stars). One more story (Trick) focuses on the established actor Arlo Banks, who has recently found his career somewhat derailed by allegations of cannibalism. He also crops up again in several of the other stories, and it is implied that he is somehow a connecting thread between all of the women in the book.

A recurring theme throughout is a desire for proximity to celebrity, whether simply by getting closer to it (attending cooler parties, messaging celebrities on social media, or in one story stealing random things from their houses), actively pursuing it, or struggling to live a ‘normal’ life outside of it (as in the story where the lead character is already a reality ‘star’). Connected to this is a recurring sense of the demands asked of (whether directly, or by assumption based on established norms) on the women in search of stardom. Its first story sees a young woman enraptured by the perceived glamour of an influencer who begins taking her to parties, before realising the latter funds her lifestyle with decidedly less glamourous activities (for which she has seemingly been grooming her). Another sees an aspiring actress ‘going method’ with her not especially appealing day job boss in order to prepare for a role. Even the less directly fame-adjacent stories feature women exploring their (usually sexual) perceived obligations to men.

Dotted amongst these stories is the intriguing (and somewhat ludicrous) character of Arlo Banks, an actor who rose to fame as the perfect boy next door but now seems to spend the majority of his waking life seeking out endless sexual encounters with vulnerable young women (of the kind that populate the book), mostly ensnaring them via his gross (though undeniably impressive if you’re into that sort of thing) ‘trick’. His already preposterous character is added to by the allegations of cannibalism, which initially seem like fabrications but our doubts build throughout his subsequent appearances. He seems to exist in the book more as an emblem of the fame that the women in the book are chasing, a deliberate caricature of the gaping void at the heart of the lifestyle being sought. He is, to at least some degree, celebrity itself. Desirable, superficial, luring in ‘fresh meat’ to serve its neverending rapacious appetite, and… I guess, if you come too close, it bites?

The stories wear their heavier thematic interests lightly, though. They’re pacey, attention-grabbing and always crafted to leave us wanting more. Their characters are quickly-sketched but always feel real and worthy of our interest. Threaded through all of them is a biting sense of humour. It’s dark humour, for sure, but also often somewhat silly with it. There are quite a few laugh out loud moments, and it’s hard not to at least smile at most of these characters and the ridiculous situations they find themselves in. Overall, the book pulls off an impressive balancing act - highlighting the absurdity of celebrity culture while also able to communicate its attraction. And however misguided some of the pathways taken by its aspirant participants may be, their foibles are of minor significance when compared to celebrity’s vapid, yet monstrous, patriarchal heart.

Score

8

An enjoyably zippy read with memorable characters, laughs and a good balance between serious subject matter and light execution.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

TBC.

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Flashlight (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 13:37:14 +0000

Why this one?

A last minute conclusion to my (slower than usual) reading of this year’s Booker Prize shortlist.

Susan Choi (1969– ; active 1998–) was born in South Bend, Indiana, to a Korean father and an American Jewish mother. Following her parents' divorce when she was nine, she moved with her mother to Houston, Texas. She studied Literature at Yale and later earned an MFA from Cornell. Early in her career, she worked as a fact-checker for The New Yorker in New York City. Her debut novel, The Foreign Student, published in 1998, drew on her father's experiences in the Korean War and won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction.

Choi’s subsequent works have achieved significant recognition. Her second novel, American Woman (2003), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and A Person of Interest (2008) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is perhaps best known for her 2019 novel, Trust Exercise, which won the National Book Award for Fiction. Choi has taught creative writing at institutions including NYU and, currently, Johns Hopkins Flashlight, her latest novel, began as a short story that won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.

Thoughts, etc.

Flashlight begins with the disappearance of Serk, a Korean émigré and academic, during a walk on along the coast in a small Japanese town with his young daughter, Louisa. While Serk is presumed drowned, Louisa washes ashore hours later, traumatized and unable to recall what has happened. The books subsequently spans decades and continents, as Louisa and her American mother, Anne, struggle to cope with their grief and the mystery of his vanishing. This sits against the complex geopolitical backdrop of the late 20th century, particularly focusing on the lives of Korean immigrants in Japan and the unsettling history of North Korea.

We learn more about Serk’s childhood in Japan, out of place as a Korean after his family moved there by necessity during the second world war. Most of his family later make the move back to Korea, where they find themselves caught under the repressive regime of the DPRK. Serk and his sister are the only ones to stay behind, but gradually lose touch and Serk is unwilling to talk about his family to Anne and Louisa, with whom he eventually moves to the US as an academic. They move back to Japan for a teaching secondment, living in unappealing conditions, with Louisa struggling to adapt and Anne’s health deteriorating. They move to the coast in an attempt to improve things, but they are only there for a few weeks before Serk’s disappearance.

[Significant SPOILERS follow this point!]

Subsequent chapters cover a lot of ground: we are introduced to Tobias, Anne’s son from a previous marriage who after a difficult childhood has become a benevolent but somewhat naive Japanophile, living the life of a kind of iterant monk and occasionally touching base with Louisa and ‘Our Mother’ (as Louisa refers to Anne); we see Louisa’s life developing through college and motherhood (albeit often in rather unsatisfying flashes); Anne finds a kind of love with a less complex, more all-American man, even as her health continues to fade. Most shockingly, after a large section of the book in which he is only an absence in others’ lives, we meet Serk again, not dead but his circumstances changed beyond recognition.

This is a book which packs a lot in to its 450 pages. It begins in gripping fashion with the mystery of Serk’s disappearance, ends what seems like (and in many ways is) lifetimes later in truly heartbreaking fashion,. and in its peak chapters set behind the veil of secrecy in North Korea, it captivates with its shocking brutality and the sheer desperation in which we find our central protagonist, seemingly lost but actually living - an outcome which at first gives us some hope but transpires to be a genuine case of a ‘fate worse than death’. Its characters are suitably well-drawn and believably human, so much so that to see the suffering they endure makes this at times a very tough read.

Thematically it’s also very broad in its coverage, at times a coming-of-age novel for Louisa, a fairly sad domestic tragedy for Anne, and a mystery/thriller/horror story for Serk. Alongside its broader themes it also has a central focus on a very specific thread of geopolitical history, namely the abductions of Japanese citizens by the DPRK in the late 70s and early 80s. The book covers the full history of these events and addresses the subsequent only limited acknowledgement of them by both country’s governments. The issue remains an area of diplomatic uncertainty between the two countries, with unsolved cases of disappearances still ongoing. One of the book’s central concerns is clearly to bring to life the scale of the loss experienced by families of those who were lost, as well as the horrors experienced by the missing. The latter is covered (as mentioned) in horrific detail, but the former is really addressed through the novel in its entirety.

It’s made particularly interesting by the decision to focus on a case in which those left behind had no idea of the dark fate of their missing person, rather than say those who spent years knowing (or at least believing) that this was their fate and campaigning publicly for their return. We meet some of these characters later, and while their own tragedies are painfully rendered (particularly the couple who have lost a child) the book feels more impactful as a whole for its angle that focuses its attention on Louisa, who is really subject a tragedy twice over, first in the grief attending the presumed death of her father, and later in the understanding not just the grimness of Serk’s true fate, but the sheer crushing weight (only hinted at, never spelled out) of the decades of potential connection unnecessarily lost, and the unspeakable cruelty of their final reunion, meaningful but in many senses simply too late.

It’s a rich, powerful, illuminating and moving book, which at its peak is genuinely remarkable. In comparison to some of the other great books on this year’s shortlist, it lost out somewhat by nature of its structure, which at times felt uneven. The weight of time spent on Anne and Louisa’s lives back in America is necessary to give its conclusion the impact it merits, but for me these sections felt both slightly padded out in terms of how interesting their contents are, and somehow at the same time not quite long enough to truly build the depth of connection we should have with these characters. Louisa, who really ends up as the book’s heart., has brilliant sections at the start and end of the book but I feel like we lose her somewhat along the way, living a life that’s perhaps deliberately ‘ordinary’ but read at times as simply unmemorable. Elsewhere the book picks up threads that aren’t really full resolved (perhaps like life, but in this case occasionally annoying) - for example the character of Tobias begins interestingly enough but ends up being little more than a conveniently located node, there to serve the plot rather than being given a conclusion of his own.

Score

8.5

Its best moments are maybe the best things I read in a generally strong year for the Booker shortlist, but it loses a few points for what I thought was slightly uneven pacing (long sections devoted to less interesting things, and then a conclusion that felt slightly rushed towards). It wouldn’t be my ultimate pick for the win, but I wouldn’t be entirely unhappy with it either.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

My final ranking on the shortlist looks something like this. Really all of the top five were, for me, extremely worthy books for a Booker shortlist and I think I enjoyed this year’s more than the last couple overall. If you’d subbed out The Rest of Our Lives for Seascraper (which would have been my overall favourite) I think you’d have had a very near perfect list.

1. Audition (9.5)
2. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (9.5)
3. The Land in Winter (9)
4. Flesh (9)
5. Flashlight (8.5)
6. The Rest of Our Lives (6)

Next up

Who knows! With an excellent Booker shortlist now completed, I’m free to choose for the first time in a while. Exciting!

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A Guardian and a Thief (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:24:25 +0000

Why this one?

I requested this on NetGalley a little while back on the basis of an interesting plot description and some heavyweight recommendations. It then popped up on this year’s National Book Award shortlist, which prompted me to push it up my reading order. I’m glad I did!

Megha Majumdar (1988- ; active 2020-) was born and raised in Kolkata, India. She moved to the United States for university, studying social anthropology at Harvard and subsequently completing graduate work at Johns Hopkins University. Before focusing on her writing career, she worked in publishing, holding editorial roles at Catapult in New York City, where she continues to live.

Her first novel, A Burning (2020), achieved significant success, becoming a New York Times bestseller. The book received widespread critical recognition, including a National Book Award for Fiction longlisting. She won a Whiting Award in 2022, and has received fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri and Hawthornden foundations.

A Guardian and a Thief is out now in the US and will be published by Scribner in the UK in early 2026. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.

Thoughts, etc.

A Guardian and a Thief introduces us to two families in a near-future version of Kolkata. This is a world ravaged by the effects of the climate crisis, with unbearable heat and extreme food shortages a daily (and worsening) fact of life, with Kolkata clearly very much at the frontline of a global crisis. We first meet Ma, her toddler daughter Mishti and elderly father Dadu. The three are a week away from a move to Michigan in the US, where they will join Ma’s husband where he has a job as a scientist. Early in the novel, however, their house is broken into and (amongst more trivial items) their passports and travel documents are stolen. The remainder of the novel is structured around the next seven days, in which they frantically attempt to ensure that they are able to proceed with their planned journey.

We also get to know the character initially presented as the ‘thief’. A young man who is living in the shelter where Ma volunteers, we learn that Boomba has come to the city from rural poverty, in an attempt to provide for his own family and especially his owner toddler brother Robi, to whom he is a kind of father figure but has recently let down. His burglary of Ma’s household is not malicious, but presented as part of an inevitable attempt at survival and his own desire to be a ‘guardian’ to Robi (much as Ma is to her daughter) - he discards the travel documents without a thought as they are ‘not food or money’ - the only conceivable priorities in this collapsing society.

While the book is ostensibly a dystopia, it’s one that feels alarmingly close to home. The desperate scenario in which the Kolkata families find themselves is clearly not remotely fantastical, but rather representative of a reality that already exists for many around the world - that of the devastating destruction wrought by our rapidly changing climate and the subsequent nightmare of bureaucracy and borders that is presented to anyone trying to escape these horrors. Putting a key character in the US is a particularly clever move on the part of the book - here too, things are clearly rapidly deteriorating, but not yet as far advanced as the events in India, and comprehension of what is actually going on in the countries more immediately and severely impacted by the crisis is minimal (even for a family member).

In the midst of this disturbingly believable setup we find a couple of relatively ordinary families - one relatively comfortable and able to contemplate ‘escape’, and one more used to poverty and merely adapting already-existing strategies of survival to a reality that is worsening (but has always been somewhat miserable). Making things more heartbreakingly real are the young children in the story, notably Mishti (whose desperate pleas for her beloved cauliflower - ‘flowerflower’ in her toddlerspeak - in a world increasingly bereft of fresh produce of any kind - are especially crushing). Elsewhere the children in the book are universally well-drawn to the point of being ‘too real’ for this particular toddler dad. While his parents are being told that Boomba’s plan for them to move to a safer house in the city have fallen through, Robi is in the background cheerfully parroting that he will bring ‘one toy for me, one for Dada’; elsewhere - a five year old child has a precious orange stolen while his mother left him alone to go to the loo. Painful stuff!

In stark contrast to our main characters’ everyday struggle for survival, there’s also a supposedly benevolent billionaire leader who isolates herself on a remote complex (the ‘hexagon’) and offers crumbs of comfort to her rapidly starving population. We don’t see too much of her, I guess deliberately, pointing to the fact that she is purposefully cut off from the reality, and the suggestion that she is able to use to media to manipulate an entirely different story from the one we are reading. By the end of the book, we’re reminded very clearly of the reality faced by many over the world who find themselves between a rock and a hard place in a world of ludicrously increasing wealth disparity - their leaders, and those abroad, continue to enrich and protect themselves while providing nothing in the way of hope for those at the bottom.

It’s an incredibly tough read, throughout, but never in the sense of being ‘dark’ or ‘depressing’. I mean, it is objectively both of those things, but it’s also oddly beautiful in its presentation of hope and of the lengths people will go to protect their loved ones. It’s difficulty is more in recognising the truth of its characters in the midst of the horrors - from the everyday realistic mannerisms of the children to the desperate actions of the adult characters. And it’s also in the other methods Majumbar uses to raise and then crush the reader’s sense of optimism throughout the novel. Some of its effects are also purposefully delayed - the father in the US is repeatedly sheltered from the bleakest truths of Ma and his family’s situation, and we know that at the end of the book he has a massive payload of grim news to catch up with. Similarly, we are left pondering how the surviving characters in India will cope, not just with the worsening environmental crisis, but with the reality of what they’ve each been through.

I feel like I’ve already overused words like ‘crushing’, ‘devastating’ and ‘heartbreaking’ in this short summary, and it’s hard to use any other terminology to describe the impact this book will likely have on its readers. It’s written, though, with the pace of a thriller, with incredible heart and with the urgency of bringing this imminent (and indeed, for many, present) reality to life in a way that is both compelling and incredibly moving.

Score

9

Overall, a prescient and necessary read that manages to captivate and enthral at the same time as it utterly destroys you.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

One more Booker shortlister to read, in the shape of Flashlight.

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Audition (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 12:45:26 +0000

Why this one?

Continuing with this year’s Booker Prize shortlist. I’d held off on this one for a while, but I’ll come onto that later.

Katie Kitamura (1979– ; active 2005–) was born in Sacramento, California, and spent her childhood in the United States before her family relocated to Mexico when she was seven. Her family later returned to the U.S. when she was a teenager. She completed her undergraduate degree at Princeton and later earned a PhD in American literature from London Consortium. She is the daughter of a Japanese parents who immigrated to the US, her father as a professor of engineering. She lived in London for several years, where she met her husband, writer Hari Kunzru, and is now based in New York City where she teaches in the creative writing programme at NYU.

Kitamura’s first novel, The Longshot, was published in 2009 (though her first book, Japanese for Travellers: A Journey, a non-fiction work, was published in 2006). Her fourth novel, A Separation (2017), was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Premio Gregor von Rezzori. Her 2021 novel, Intimacies, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Thoughts, etc.

Audition is very much a novel of two halves. A cliche, and one which has come up more than once in my recent reading, but never more true than here. In its first part, we are introduced to an unnamed female narrator, preparing for a role in an upcoming play, in which she is notably struggling to nail a key scene. A young man, Xavier, meets her for lunch in an upmarket restaurant, having previously explained that he believes she may be his mother (a seeming impossibility as the narrator has never given birth). They are observed briefly by her husband, Tomas, an art critic, who seems somewhat weary of her affairs and is behaving a little shiftily himself.

(At this point it’s worth noting that knowing anything more about this book will almost certainly spoil your enjoyment of it, so throwing in a big SPOILER WARNING before I move on!)

Just as we learn that the narrator may be on the verge of resolving her professional issues, we jump to the book’s second part, seemingly a few months down the line in which the play has been a success. However, it’s not long before we realise that this is no mere leap forward in time. Facts established in the book’s first half have shifted: both subtly (the title of the play she was preparing for) and more significantly: in this section, Xavier appears to now be the narrator’s son, on the verge of moving back in to the parental home, and with allusions to a shared history of memories that could not have been possibly in the book’s initial setting. This second section takes things in a very different direction: while the narrator here is ostensibly happier, a parent who has not apparently suffered the traumas of abortion and miscarriage detailed in the first half, and riding the wave of creative success, her life is taking a turn for the weirder - particularly with the arrival of Xavier’s apparent girlfriend Hana.

By the book’s end, we are left unsure as to what is real or invented, and whether or not it matters. Amongst several possible thought-lines the conclusion raises: Xavier has written a play about a character like the narrator - is ‘reality’ the second part and his play the first part (in which he reduces himself to a suiter for the filial affections of his mother and invents reasons for her distance from him)?; is ‘reality’ in fact the first part, and the second is one in which the narrator attempts to construct an idealised ‘better life’ to correct for troubles and traumas in her real life, a facade that comes crashing down as the section progresses?’; is the whole thing a thought exercise by the narrator, helping her come through her difficulties in comprehending what the author of the play in which she was acting has written in her troublesome ‘bridging scene’ in which a women moves seemingly inexplicably from grief to success? Or are all of these partly true? Or none of them?

Jumping back a little to my introduction, I mentioned that I’d been wary of reading this one. My rationale was that it seemed to be getting a lot of love from the same quarters as Universality, a 2025 longlisted book which I really didn’t get on with, garnering some direct comparisons here and there. I sort of get why this might have been: both are somewhat experimental, and feature a switch in which the reality we’re initially presented with is questioned. I think the reason why this one worked for me, and Universality didn’t, is that the latter felt like an unsatisfying parlour trick - you endured something fairly dull before - ha! - you’re given a one-dimensional lecture on why you were wrong (and have to put up with some dreadful characters along the way). Here, there’s no apparent right or wrong reading of the book. It’s in dialogue with itself in a way that only invites questions. That, for me, is an altogether more satisfying outcome. Though I appreciate it may not be for everyone!

That’s not at all to say that the book is some kind of postmodern plaything in which purpose is irrelevant. It’s perhaps better to leave the explanation to Kitamura herself, who puts it brilliantly in her explanation on the Booker website (again though, I’m VERY glad not to have read this before reading the book and sitting with my own thoughts for a while):

“The starting point for Audition was a desire to write about the long process through which children must necessarily grow up to become strangers to their own parents. I wanted to write about how certain universal experiences – of love, of motherhood – can sometimes feel like two mutually exclusive things at the same time. But rather than writing about that contradiction, I wanted to write it directly – to embed it in the structure of the novel. Reading the book requires holding two separate versions of events in your head at the same time. It’s either/or, and also and. As a culture, we’re becoming quite bad at holding a contradiction in our heads. And yet we live in a time of profound and increasing cognitive dissonance.”

Elsewhere in her discussion she also mentions wanting to achieve something like the effect of a David Lynch movie, in doing this. Which struck me as really interesting, in that while I’m overwhelmingly more of a fan of the written word than of cinema, I do sometimes think that (non-mainstream) movies tend to be more open to presenting multiple realities that can coexist despite apparent contradictions, where fiction, even of the literary kind, often seems more inclined to demand answers. This is obviously hugely reductive but it was something I was thinking of throughout my own reading of Audition - so clearly concerned with acting and performance and therefore inviting this kind of comparison. It also felt, on a more basic level, hugely visual and ‘cinematic’ as a piece of writing.

Overall, cementing that Lynchian comparison, it’s a hugely unsettling and disturbing read, without (mostly) straying into the realms of the straightforwardly ‘weird’, it manages to deliver a sense of ‘wrongness’ throughout. So much so, in fact, that I was slightly thrown by its opening sentence, which doesn’t make any apparent sense. Over the next few pages, it becomes clearer that this is a first example of a deliberate manifestation of the uncertainty we’re going to have to get to grips with as we go through this short but powerful novel: a sentence not ending quite how we expect it to will turn out to be the least of our troubles.

Score

9.5

Another favourite from this year’s excellent shortlist. I’m now beginning to realise why it was such a difficult year for the judges and why some brilliant books were left out!

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

One more to go on the Booker shortlist, possibly via a brief diversion first though…

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The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 08:55:00 +0000

Why this one?

Continuing with this year’s Booker Prize shortlist, which has so far proved to be relatively enjoyable. I’d been waiting for this one to come out since the longlist was released - it would have been top of my list having previously enjoyed Desai’s 2006 Booker winner The Inheritance of Loss.

Kiran Desai (1971- ; active 2006- ), was born in Delhi, and is the daughter of three-time Booker shortlisted novelist Anita Desai. Both left India when Kiran was 14, spending a year in England before moving to the US. She studied creative writing at Columbia University.

Her first novel, Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard, was published in 1998 and won the Betty Trask Award for young Commonwealth authors. The Inheritance of Loss was her second novel, and its Booker win made her the youngest female winner to date, aged 35. It also won the National Book Critics Circle Fiction award.

The Inheritance of Sonia and Sunny comes some 19 years after its predecessor, with Desai saying she has focused on virtually nothing else in the intervening years, a fact that shows in the richness of this 688-page doorstopper.

Thoughts, etc.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an epic family saga centring on the lives of Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, two young people from India whose paths intertwine. The story is initiated by a clumsy and half-hearted failed attempt to engineer an arranged marriage between the two by their neighbouring families in India. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who has been studying in Vermont, returns home to India after a deeply troubling relationship in New York with a memorably deranged and controlling older artist named Ilan de Toorjen Foss. She is haunted by this encounter, believing he may have cast a "dark spell" on her (which manifests - seemingly physically - as a ‘ghost hound’ later in the novel). Sunny, a struggling journalist, is working for the Associated Press in New York City, living in Brooklyn with his American girlfriend Ulla. He too returns to his home country, initially to help his friend Satya in his own attempts to secure an arranged marriage.

The main plot begins with Sonia and Sunny’s chance meeting on an overnight train in India, which ignites an on-off romance between them. While this relationship blossoms for a time, it’s seemingly thwarted by the complexities both of the young characters face in their families, personal histories and roles as immigrants of a new generation, trying to make it in non-traditional ‘immigrant careers’ while maintaining some sort of connection to their cultural identity. Sonia grapples with the expectations of her family, particularly her father, as she navigates the complexities of her writing career and the ongoing trauma of her abusive relationship. Sunny’s life, while less trauma-ridden and ostensibly moving in a more positive direction, remains complicated by his overbearing mother, Babita, who is embroiled in a larger-than-life crime plot back in India, involving her late husband's brothers.

Overall this was an absolute joy to read. One thing that immediately stands out about Desai’s writing is its density of thought. It’s never overly knotty, and is in most senses a really easy breezy read, but at the same time each page is crammed with ideas. Nothing is passed by without a fresh, finely crafted observation accompanying it. With this richness, the book is able to marry its very specific concerns (India’s changing role in a globalised world, most obviously) with more universal ideas and commentary on human nature, love, family and (obviously) loneliness. At times it’s easy to get carried away with the overall readability and the momentum of the central plot (if you strip it down, the main through-line is a relatively traditional will-they-won’t-they love story) but there’s a huge amount of pleasure to be gained in dwelling on this one at a sentence-by-sentence level.

That brings me to the subject of its length. At times I did find myself thinking that, given this page and sentence level density, a book of half the length would have been just as rewarding, and somewhat tighter in terms of focus. I’m ultimately in two minds about this - it’s definitely the case that its central (and most straightforwardly compelling) story could have been told in fewer pages, but it’s also true that there’s pleasure to be found on most pages (so why curtail it?) and also that in many ways its length, globe-spanning scale and extensive list of well-formed characters is essential to its depiction of its central idea - the disconnection between it characters and their loneliness in an ever-more globalised world.

Its concerns feel somewhat different to those of the migrant characters in Desai’s previous novel - where in particular movement to the US was motivated by economic necessity and other concerns (while present) were somewhat lesser. The migrants in that book were comparatively invisible, working literally underground in basement restaurants and dealing only with their immediate surroundings. In this book, times have changed and the migrants we meet are part of a globalised ‘academic’ class, no longer struggling to survive but more to establish identity and connection in a world in which they are now much more integrated (mixing in artistic and literary milieux) but still somehow ‘other’, belonging neither to their home, family and tradition, nor to the new circumstances in which they find themselves (and where their ‘dreams’ - at least ostensibly- lie). This makes for an appropriately Booker-ish development of the story of India in its winning novels, which was a hugely significant and evolving theme over my read-through of previous winners (from immediately post-colonial stories told by the former colonisers, via Rushie’s carnivalesque reclaiming of the narrative, to the winners (including Desai herself) earlier this century that moved the story closer to the present world.

In this book, Desai notably doesn’t bring us especially close to the present day. It’s still a retrospective analysis, albeit one that feels very deliberately chosen as a moment at which many of the conditions for our modern world were being established and an old order further upended. Set primarily between 1996 and 2002, it captures a period at which the conditions for this globalised movement of intelligent young people was established (India moving more outward and capitalist; the ‘West’ for a time at least opening its doors to those who wanted to enter; etc) yet one that is prior to our present age of digital (dis)connectedness in which the loneliness depicted would take an altogether different form. It also notably captures many of its characters’ reactions to 9/11 - mostly from a distance but with a keen eye to how their status as ‘others’ in the west (particularly the US) will immediately change - its main players are suddenly dramatically more visible and in this we get a sense that the moment captured in this book is one which is soon to change, again, in numerous and significant ways.

These big themes about India, the US, the world in general and its inhabitants are what lend the book its likely status as a favourite to win this year’s Prize, fitting neatly as they do into a constant dominant through-line of Booker history. But it’s really the character studies in this book that take it to another level. Its titular characters are obviously central to everything, and sufficiently interesting to make the main romantic plot worth investing, but in many ways it’s their reaction to those around them that is what brings the book to life. If there’s a gravitional pull that exists dragging Sonia and Sunny together through the book, there’s also an oppositional force acting by which they are both trying to escape more toxic relationships in their past. For Sunny, they are mainly familial, with his dramatic mother Babita acting as a regular impediment to his progress in life, until he begins to cut ties and find his purpose later in the book. For Sonia, it is escaping the more clear and present danger of relationships with toxic men, most notably Ilan. The latter character is by far the most memorable here, in his wild egocentricity, pathetic neediness and relentless gaslighting and controlling behaviour, to the point at which his influence follows Sonia around in the form of a rabid ‘ghost hound’.

If these very real concerns are the most gripping and emotionally impactful elements of the book, its drift into the realms of the more fantastical felt somewhat less successful and complete, to me at least. I’m rarely a fan of these kinds of devices when thrown in on such a limited basis (dreams, hallucinations, metaphors for mental issues rather than genuinely weird fantasy stuff), and this felt like the case here to some extent. These sections do serve a purpose in the novel, most notably as vivid shorthand for the trauma following its characters (especially Sonia) around, but also as a kind of metafictional device. Sonia, an aspirational writer, is told by Ilan that she should avoid supposed cliches (‘orientalist nonsense!’) of her country’s writing like ‘magical realism’ (as well as other handy hints like not writing about arranged marriages). Desai, of course, playfully breaks all of these rules, finding more truth in placing these tropes (somewhat subverted) alongside a range of other themes which are less ‘expected’. Sonia, towards the end of the book, is also learning to break those rules, offering a more optimistic vision of her future career, maybe one rooted in honesty of expression rather than the tortured hysteria advocated by Ilan and his ilk.

Score

9.5

You can pick holes in certain aspects of this (inevitable I think in a book this big and rich) but ultimately it’s a joy of a read, one to savour and get lost in. It feels suitably momentous, more than justifying the many years that went into its creation, and it’s hard to describe it as anything other than a favourite to win.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

Finally getting around to Audition.

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The Rest of Our Lives (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:23:14 +0000

Why this one?

The 2025 Booker shortlist was announced last week. I was pleased to see The Land in Winter and Flesh on there, very pleased to see Universality NOT on there and (like many) somewhat distraught at the omission of the magnificent Seascraper. As I’d only read just under half of the longlist, I’m generally happy that there are a few more for me to check out before I move on for another year. Four to be precise. Here’s the first of those…

Benjamin Markovits (1973- ; active 2004-) was born in Palo Alto, California and spent his youth in a variety of locations including Texas, London, and Berlin. He studied literature at Yale and went on to complete an MPhil at the University of Oxford. Following his studies, he pursued a career as a professional basketball player in Landshut, Germany, a period that later informed his 2010 novel, Playing Days. He currently lives in London, has two children, and teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Markovits' first novel, The Syme Papers, was published in 2004. He is particularly noted for his trilogy of novels about the life of Lord Byron: Imposture (2007), A Quiet Adjustment (2008), and Childish Loves (2011). In 2013, he was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists (he has dual British-American citizenship). His novel You Don't Have to Live Like This won the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2016. The Rest of Our Lives is his twelfth novel and first to make the Booker shortlist. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Thoughts, etc.

The Rest of Our Lives focuses on the 50-something law professor Tom Layward, based in New York with his wife Amy and about to see their youngest child Miri off to college in Pittsburgh. We learn early on in the novel that Amy had cheated on Tom over a decade ago, at which point he had privately vowed to leave her after their children had both left home. As they prepare for Miri’s departure, both experience some degree of ‘empty nester’ anxiety and Amy decides to stay home rather than face the emotional trauma first-hand.

After dropping her off, instead of heading home Tom decides to drive West, beginning an unplanned road trip across the US. On top of dealing with his long-held commitment to leave Amy, we also learn that Tom has recently put on enforced leave from his job due various controversies, and also that he is dealing with health issues, initially dismissed by doctors as untreatable manifestations of ‘long Covid’, which has put him off from further visits. On the road, Tom visits a succession of characters from his past, including a former colleague, an old college friend, an ex, and his son Michael in LA.

As well as these characters from his past, a former interest in basketball looms large over the trip, with Tom frequently stopping off to play pick-up games on neighbourhood courts, taking photographs with the vague intention of writing a book about the culture around pick-up basketball. Another connection to the sport is through a recent engagement providing legal counsel to NBA team-owner accused of racism and sexism. Via his stop-off with an old colleague, he is unwilling led to a meeting with another protagonist in this dispute, who rants at him about the perceived barriers to success for white players of the game in the US.

I have to admit that this one perplexed me somewhat. I’d already passed it over both as an ARC and when sampling from the longlist as it sounded pretty uninspiring in terms of plot, and longlist reviews were pretty mixed to say the least. And for much of the book I felt like this reservation was justified. I really had a strong sense of deja vu throughout, feeling like I’d read this story before. A middle aged man on a road trip; having a mid-life crisis; relationship and family discontent; some kind of American sport fixation. You get the idea, right? For the most part this is all you get from The Rest of Our Lives. Very little feels fresh or like it’s offering a new perspective.

There are a few exceptions that lift it slightly. It’s very firmly situated in the present day, in the shadow of Covid and (more importantly) in a divided America in which we meet some (white, male) characters who are aggrieved by their perceived diminishment in society in the modern era. While Tom doesn’t actively participate in this line of argument, he is clearly at the very least comfortable to professionally defend similar characters (putting his career at risk in the process) and his reaction to the direct confrontation with the basketball dude moaning about his sporty take on replacement theory is little better than a shrug of the shoulders. While raising these kind of important contemporary issues made the book marginally more interesting, it might have had a little more impact if it was presented as more than background noise to Tom and he participated more actively in the debate.

The other thing that lifts the book is the retrospective view of it presented by the conclusion. It’s revealed fairly late on that Tom’s symptoms are serious (likely cancer; potentially terminal) rather than the minor inconveniences he presents them as. There is a clear hint that Tom is at the very least aware of the possibility of these symptoms being more serious, and has therefore in some sense been on the run from a final diagnosis, both in terms of having to face up to it himself and the impact it would have on his wife and children. The road trip takes on a slightly different context in this light, inviting a second reading in which some of Tom’s decisions (to withhold information, to ignore worsening symptoms, and even to disengage with the ‘noise’ of some of the debates going on in society) can be read differently.

The question, I think, in assessing how successful this book is in how much you are willing to forgive a largely uninspiring and occasionally frustrating first read on the basis that its ‘twist’ reveals some more interesting layers to think about. It’s one of those cases where the Booker jury’s need to read a contending book at least three times places them in a somewhat different position to the average reader, and perhaps explains its shortlisting over more immediately rewarding titles on the longlist. I’m personally not entirely convinced by this line of argument. I’m not really a re-reading type, and I don’t think the context provided by the conclusion in this case is sufficiently game-changing to change my mind here.

Score

6

It’s a perfectly adequate book, with moments of insight and some tricks up its sleeve that lift it above mediocrity, but to my mind not one that merits its place on a major 2025 fiction shortlist. Some have compared it to a ‘male All Fours’ which I found laughable - there’s nothing like the transgression, excitement and weirdness that you get from July’s book. And while it’s important that male stories continue to be told in major fiction, I don’t think (unlike, say, Flesh) this has anything genuinely new to say on the subject of masculinity.

Next up

I’m excited to finally embark on Kiran Desai’s epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

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The South (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 15:32:17 +0000

Why this one?

Continuing with a few selections from the Booker longlist.

Tash Aw (1971- ; active 2005-) was born in Taipei, Taiwan to Malaysian parents of Chinese descent. He was raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, before moving to England. He studied law at Jesus College, Cambridge and the University of Warwick, and later earned a Master's degree in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He is now based in Paris.

His first novel, The Harmony Silk Factory, was published in 2005 and won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. His 2013 book, Five Star Billionaire, was longlisted for the Booker in the year that Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries won. Outside of fiction, he has written nonfiction essays dealing with the changing face of Asian society, migration, and “outsider” identity. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

Thoughts, etc.

The South is the first book in a planned quartet that centres on a family navigating a period of significant change both in Malaysia and in their own lives. The main events of the novel are set around 1997 and the Asian financial crisis, following the Lim family as they travel from their home in Kuala Lumpur to a dilapidated farm they have inherited in Johor, southern Malaysia. The central plot of the novel revolves around 16-year-old Jay's coming-of-age and sexual awakening. On the farm, he meets Chuan, the son of the farm's manager, and a transformative relationship develops between them over the course of the summer.

Their relationship is set against the backdrop of the family's larger tensions and the external pressures of a changing world, including the economic anxieties of the time. Alongside Jay’s story is that of his unhappily married parents Sui Ching and Jack, and Jack’s illegitimate half-brother Fong (Chuan’s father). The fact that Fong has managed the farm diligently for years and yet the previously absent Lims are the ones set to inherit the farm is another primary source of tension in the novel.

It’s a beautifully written piece, overall, which is never anything other than a pleasure to read. I’ve seen a few reviews describing Aw’s work here as ‘masterly’, and I can certainly see why. There’s clearly a lot going on - symbolic layers upon layers, with tensions of many kinds (cultural, social, familial, sexual) all deftly intersected in a way that never feels heavy-handed. It’s evidently the work of a great craftsman, and a writer of real weightiness. At times, I did find its heft and austerity in danger of feeling somewhat suffocating: for all its depth and stylistic qualities, there are at times fairly long sections in which there’s very little fun to be had.

Its standout moments are very definitely those involved Jay and Chuan. They feel much more vibrant and exciting, colourful and contemporary, than the farm-set passages and those involving the older generation. While there’s (as with everything here) a deliberateness to that choice - alongside all the other oppositions in the book there’s also a clear intergenerational divide. The sections involving Jay and his sisters, Chuan and his friends, and various permutations of the more youthful characters feel much freer, more energetic and ultimately enjoyable, placed next to the relative tedium of the inheritance drama and broken relationship that takes over the farm-set sections with the older relatives. Deliberate it may be, but at times I felt these sections felt a little like Jack’s watercolours - blurry, repetitive, and unlikely to give much pleasure to the viewer.

Overall, I’m inclined to agree with the various reviews that have criticised this book in the context of it being the first of a series. I’m not someone that necessarily looks for easy ‘resolution’ in every novel, so I’m not especially concerned by that aspect of it - I thought it was reasonably self-contained, and not one of those books that feels incomplete without its sequels. However, nor was I sufficiently grabbed by it to want to dive immediately into a follow-up (luckily I suppose, as there isn’t one yet). It’s a slow-moving book, lacking in major moments of inciting drama, and its stakes are not especially high.

And while the fact that some of it is narrated from the future is effective within the context of this book, it at least seems to give a little too much away about any of the questions that might intrigue us about the future of these characters. I guess the sequels could surprise us, but it seems like there’s little doubt as to the general direction of travel, which makes it slightly hard to get engaged with what might happen next. On top of this, beyond Jay and Chuan (and possibly Fong) the characters felt a little loosely drawn so again not so demanding of attention.

Score

7

Generally a pleasure to read, with moments of excitement, and some weighty and important themes. I found some of it lacking in engagement though and it drifted over me at times, so I’m unlikely to be tempted to pick up its sequels.

Next up

The shortlist! Coming soon.,..

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Flesh (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 12:07:27 +0000

Why this one?

Continuing with a few selections from the Booker longlist.

David Szalay (1974- ; active 2008-) was born in Montreal, Canada to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father. He grew up there before moving to England where he studied English at Oxford University. After his studies, he worked in various sales jobs before starting to write. He now lives in Budapest with his wife and two children.

His first collection of short stories, London and the South-East, was published in 2008 and won the Betty Trask Award. He was included in the 2013 edition of Granta’s once-a-decade Best of Young British Novelists list. His 2016 book, All That Man Is, a collection of interlinked stories, won the Gordon Burn Prize and was also Booker shortlisted (in the year that Paul Beatty’s The Sellout took the Prize).

Thoughts, etc.

Flesh is set over most of the life of one man, István, with its main action taking place in his home country of Hungary, and London. We first meet István as a fifteen-year-old, living with his single mother in a new town. In an unsettling first chapter, István is (initially reluctantly) drawn into a sexual relationship by a much older woman, a friend of his mother’s. This relationship ends in tragedy, with István implicated in the death of her husband and subsequently serving time in a juvenile prison. The rest of the novel jumps forward in time for each chapter, often skipping significant moments in his life and focusing instead on their impact on him. Following a stint in the army during the 2003 war in Iraq, he moves to London where several chance developments lead him to a life of luxury. Up to a point, the novel seems like a classic ‘Rags to Riches’ narrative, but in its later chapters, we see István’s life gradually collapsing around him, and his eventual return to a relatively humble life in Hungary.

The book’s first chapter is one of the most uncomfortable reads I’ve come across in a while., kicking things off with essentially a very vivid description of István’s grooming by a much older woman. It sets up several key elements of the novel: its emphasis on physicality, and István’s passivity as a character, but does so in a particularly shocking manner, with little left to the imagination. We learn early on that he is not really one for communication, so his experiences at this formative and likely traumatic phase of his life remain known only to him (as far as we are aware, this remains the case throughout his life). This section of his life ends with him attempting to wrest some sort of control over the scenario (once the older woman decides she has had enough of him), a move that rapidly leads to the death of a man and subsequently to István’s detention in a juvenile prison. From this point on, and perhaps unsurprisingly, István tends to avoid taking big decisions, and instead is carried along by the hands of fate.

Subsequent snippets of his life see him drifting along in an ordinary sort of life in Hungary following his spell in prison: taking a job his mother pushes him towards, getting rejected by a girl he fancies, and ultimately - seemingly for want of anything better to do - joining the army, and requiring relatively little persuasion to do so. We learn that his war experiences have piled on further trauma - in the shape of the death of close comrade for which he partly blames himself - and while he submits to therapy and it seems to help somewhat, we don’t get much sense that he is becoming especially introspective. He eventually finds himself following the flow of many of his compatriots in the 2000s to London, living in overstuffed shared accommodation and working the door at a Soho strip joint. Another random event sees him save a rich man from a mugging late at night, and this man - Mervyn - becomes determined to reward him for his help - setting him up in the world of private security for celebrities and the super-rich.

He ends up working as a driver for one of the latter rich folks, and during one of his many trips away on business is seduced (again, despite his initial lack of interest) by his employer’s wife, Helen. Their relationship deepens, and continues even while her husband is being treated for ultimately terminal cancer in a German clinic. Her son, Thomas, takes an obvious and open dislike to István, describing him as an example of ‘primitive masculinity’, and not worthy of his elevated status. Eventually István and Helen marry and have a son together, Jacob. Years of luxury living follow, alongside some relatively normal issues (we see István developing as a father - notably something he lacked himself - as he deals with Jacob’s unhappiness at school). Just as it seems that things are getting relatively settled (despite the ever-bubbling undercurrent of the feud with Thomas - who we know will eventually inherit all of his father’s fortune), a further shocking twist begins a dramatic downward spiral for István. By this point, his passivity has developed into a kind of stoicism and, despite evident trauma (once more), he is able to take his rapid fall somewhat in its stride, and settle back into a version of his earlier ordinary life in Hungary, moving back in with his mother, drinking in bars and having short-lived relationships.

It’s an interesting read, and one that marries explosively shocking and emotional (for the reader) moments with longer sections in which events are recounted in a sparse, detached manner, mirroring István’s own sense of drifiting through time and place, going where the winds take him. It’s general structure, of a life told through snippets over a long period of time and set against the backdrop of a changing world, is one that I always tend to enjoy, so I did find this inherently very readable. I also enjoyed the way it subverted many of the tropes of this kind of novel. Its protagonist doesn’t really learn much, doesn’t reflect introspectively on the various traumas he experiences, and does not go on a predictable ‘linear’ journey, instead more of a ‘circular’ one, ending in much the same place we imagine he might have done without any of the same major events in his life having taken place. All of this combines to give a kind of nihilistic view of life: ultimately, what has it all been for? The physicality implied by the title and referenced throughout reinforces this - István is less of the complex ‘thinking man’ popularised (/invented?) by modern literature, and more a physical object, acted upon but rarely acting. There’s a counter-take I guess which is that there’s a kind of nobility in the stoicism he displays, and that he represents a kind of pure (rather than as Thomas says ‘primitive’) humanity, not tarnished by venal ambition or overthought. He’s far from a dislikeable character and, unlike many other reviews I read, I actually found his uncomplicated approach to life and those around him to be rather refreshing and charming. ‘Okay’?

Score

9

Another really strong read on this year’s longlist, for me. Uncomfortable at times, for sure, but packed with things to think about. It loses a half point or so for falling into what felt like a more conventional narrative in some of its middle section, but both its introductory and closing sections will remain imprinted on my brain (for better or worse) for some time.

Like the sound of this one? Buy it at bookshop.org.

Next up

One or two more from the longlist I think.

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