Blog - Eyes on the Prize

Switzy (2026)

Eyes On The Prize — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:00:30 +0000

Why this one?

I’m reading some selections from the 2026 Booker Prize longlist and since I was lucky enough to get this as an ARC (thanks to Netgalley and the publishers) I thought I’d jump straight in.

Emma Cline (1989- ; active c. 2013-) was born and raised in Sonoma County, California, as the second of seven children in a winemaking family. After attending Sonoma Academy, she studied art at Middlebury College in Vermont, winning a college fiction prize during her first year. She subsequently earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 2013. While at Columbia, she published the short story "Marion" in The Paris Review, which earned her the magazine's Plimpton Prize in 2014.

Cline’s debut novel, The Girls (2016), based in part on the Charles Manson cult, was a major success. A New York Times bestseller, it also won the Shirley Jackson Award, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize (for best first book). A movie production is in development. Her subsequent works include the short story collection Daddy (2020) and the novel The Guest (2023). Her short fiction and essays have been featured in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Harper's Magazine. Over her career, she has been named a Guggenheim Fellow and in 2017 was one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists. Switzy will be published by Random House in September 2026 and marks her first appearance on the Booker longlist.

Thoughts, etc.

Switzy focuses on the final journey of David, a retired high-flying business executive. Suffering from dementia and dependent on the help of his young assistant Cody, he has made one final decision which will take him to a clinic in Zurich, Switzerland. Along the way, via flights on a borrowed private jet, he will visit his estranged daughter and her nine-year-old son in London, and meet an old friend in France near the Swiss border. His mind deteriorating, he reflects on his life in fragments (repeated phrases from childhood books, films and lessons pepper his present-day thoughts) and distracts his mind with repeated games of solitaire on his phone.

This book achieves something rather wonderful in the way it articulates David’s condition. His command of language, understanding of his immediate predicament and grasp of the larger sweep of long-term memory are all rapidly disintegrating, and yet Cline finds a way to put this across in writing that is both believably reflective of that disintegration and yet still surprisingly coherent, and packed with layers of meaning. The narrative is told from a third-person perspective, albeit one which has deep access to the workings of David’s mind, which initially feels unusual for such a personal story but in reality is an ingenious tool both for reflecting David’s increasing alienation from himself, and also allowing insights that are perhaps slightly beyond what a straightforward rendering of David’s thoughts would give us. Yet it never strays into the territory of explaining, it adds only what it necessary to show us the reality of his condition.

It’s not an easy book to read, as you can probably imagine. While none of what happens to David in the book is especially shocking, most pages contain a degree of heartbreaking pathos as this once-successful man is shown having to depend on others to function even on a basic level. And throughout the book there are instances where David almosts gets to view life from beyond the grave, watching those around him continuing with their lives, seemingly unaffected by his absence. What’s also quite moving about the book is that there’s very little in it that makes you want to question David’s decision to head to the clinic. His life seems hard to bear, so his conclusion feels logical, if coldly so.

What it also does very well is subtly nudge at questions of meaning and purpose more generally. When David digs out fragments from his life, very few of them relate to moments of triumph or success (of which, in the conventional sense, we presume he must have had many throughout his high-flying career). Instead, they’re tiny moments of joy - of being helped, finding beauty in art, or making a breakthrough in communication with a loved one - or in one case, as with his old ‘friend’ Tom, a sense of what he might have missed in life. When he has slight moments of doubt about his choices at the end of the book, again they are about the finality of certain sensory experiences of the world, a brief sense of joys not fully appreciated through the rest of his life, rather than any grander loss.

Ultimately his whole journey acts largely as confirmation of the correctness of his decision to end his suffering, but tinged with regret about opportunities missed previously in life. His last journey has been scheduled around trying to make small amends to these failures, but they’re ultimately futile: his daughter (unaware of the extent of his condition) has more important things going on in her life; his friend Tom - the source of so much instrospection, guilt and meaning in David’s repetitive thoughts - has moved on to such an extent that David’s visit carries virtually no meaning at all to him. In the visit to the daughter, her young son’s carefree movement through the routines of childhood feels like an unspoken further gut-punch, the innocence of a mind that could not potentially comprehend David’s position. It’s all incredibly sad and moving stuff, but brilliantly handled throughout.

Score

9.5

Hugely moving and memorable, with a difficult and potentially hard to articulate subject matter handled with impressive clarity and warmth.

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

I’m giving the new Marlon James a go I think. I may be some time…

Permalink

The Gallows Pole (2017)

Eyes On The Prize — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:01:36 +0000

Why this one?

Every now and then I like to fill in some gaps by Benjamin Myers, and given that this might well be his most well-known book (in the UK, at least) due to its BBC adaptation, I’m long overdue getting to this one.

Benjamin Myers (1976- ; active 2004-) was born in Durham, England. In his teens, he was a member of the local punk band Sour Face, and began writing for the weekly music paper Melody Maker. Alongside his journalism, he also published books on the likes of John Lydon, Green Day and The Clash. He published his first novel, The Book of Fuck, in 2004, but it was his second Richard: A Novel (2010), about missing Manic Street Preachers member Richey Edwards, that brought wider attention.

His third novel, 2012's Pig Iron, won the inaugural Gordon Burn Prize, and this, his fifth, The Gallows Pole (2017) won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. The latter was also the inspiration for a BBC TV series by Shane Meadows (This is England) that aired in 2023. His beautiful 2019 novel The Offing is being adapted as a film by director Jessica Hobbs (Broadchurch, The Crown) starring Helena Bonham Carter. 2023’s Cuddy won the Goldsmith’s Prize and is generally incredible. He followed that book with the much lighter in tone but equally enjoyable Rare Singles (2024) and most recently the brilliantly bonkers Jesus Christ Kinski (2025). Alongside his literary novels he has also published crime fiction, short stories and poetry. He is married to fellow author Adelle Stripe.

Thoughts, etc.

The Gallows Pole is a historical novel set in 18th century Yorkshire. It focuses on the true story of the Cragg Vale Coiners, a ragtag bunch of local men under the leadership of '“King” David Hartley who scrape a living together by “clipping” coins to melt down and produce new forgeries. The book is set on the cusp of industrialisation, in the dying days of an era when a charismatic man could hold effective dominion over a valley, in a relatively closed community maintaining a form of isolation from the rules and laws of the land. The exciseman William Deighton enters as an outsider, vowing to take down Hartley and his hugely successful enterprise. As the web closes in on the Coiners, in the background cotton mills are rising, turnpikes slicing their way through the countryside, and a way of life being lost to history.

Myers’ book brings this lost world to life in vivid and colourful detail. Hartley, as rendered by the narrator and in alternating sections of his own prison writings, is a compelling character, dominating the area through a mixture of his comparitively more advanced intellect, his skills in self-mythologising, and a sense of spirtual forces guiding him that imbue him with a fierce confidence. In the narration (the myth) he is often tough to like - violent, capricious and capable of exacting humiliation on any of his subordinates who fall out of line - but nonetheless evidently a leader for a reason, with most of the supporting Coiners coming across as bumbling clueless oafs by comparison. In his own words, he becomes somewhat more sympathetic (if still entertainingly crude), revealing both some of his vulnerabilities and also highlighting his quasi Robin Hood esque motivations, robbing the rich with the help of his local community to ensure that local community can help itself, and ultimately survive. His capture and therefore failure is acknowledged in a roundabout way by Hartley as a wider failure in society.

While the book’s surface appeal is certainly in its evocation of that lost world in all of its filthy, stinking, wart-laden reality, and bringing to life the complex character of Hartley, as well as in its well-constructed plotting of his downfall (page-turningly compelling despite us knowing its inevitable conclusion, almost regardless of familiarity with the historical source material), there’s far more going on beneath the surface. For me the most impressive aspect of The Gallows Pole is its framing of the historical moment as a pivot-point at the beginning of the journey towards industrialised capitalism. Hartley clearly isn’t a straightforward hero: there’s no doubting that however noble some of his intentions towards his community may be, he’s nonetheless seemingly primarily motivated himself by the accumulation of wealth, the burnishment of his reputation and the betterment of his and his family’s lifestyle as a result. But he’s also representative of the ways in which his community based society at the very least offers its inhabitants to opportunity to sustain themselves, admittedly by criminal methods but in a form of ‘every man for themselves’ structure in which they can at least find ways to better themselves. As the mills rise, Hartley can foresee the alternative: capitalist enslavement, in which the same men will be given legitimate work, but work that will only ever serve to line the pockets of their masters. Hartley himself may have been a kind of feudal tyrant, but his subjects at least had a form of agency.

Ultimately though Hartley’s attempt to sustain this way of life as rebellion against the arrival of outsiders and the looming threat of industrialisation is a doomed one. Like most idealistic movements, it is undone by inevitable corruption and the centre of its project, and in overreaching beyond its sustaining principles ultimately accelerates its own destruction and the rise of its replacement. It’s a book with a great line in moral ambiguity, but also one that recognises the futility of the fight - what’s coming is simply too big to fail, and this emerging moment will not be the last time forces attempting to counter its advance fail due to internal division and the corruption of their leaders. Hartley may be a good man to have fighting one’s fight while the going is good, his unshakeable and quasi-mystical sense of mission elevating everyone in his circle, when a force such as his eventually crashes back down to earth, it takes everything in its path with it.

Score

9

Typical brilliance from Myers. This is the fifth book of his I’ve read now and every one is completely different (aside from the general unifying factor of some form of starring role for Northern England) . I can very much see why this one was such a big deal and won awards. Maybe not my absolute favourite of his, but still supremely memorable.

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

Next up

Time for some selections from this year’s Booker longlist!

Permalink

North Woods (2023)

Eyes On The Prize — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:37:10 +0000

Why this one?

I can’t entirely remember why this was on my TBR list. I think probably a recommendation or two? If you recommended this to me and I forgot, sincere apologies!

Daniel Mason (1976- ; active 2002-) grew up in Palo Alto, California. He studied biology at Harvard University before earning a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. He wrote his debut novel, The Piano Tuner (2002), while still a medical student, drawing on his experiences spending time on the Myanmar-Thailand border. It was later adapted as an opera. He currently balances his writing career with his role as a clinical assistant professor in psychiatry at Stanford University, where his academic interests include the history of medicine and culture.

His subsequent books include the novels A Far Country (2007) andThe Winter Soldier (2018), alongside the short story collection A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020) which saw him nominated for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 2023’s North Woods was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2023, and received a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award in 2024. Earlier this year he published his latest novel, Country People.

Thoughts, etc.

North Woods is the story of a house in New England and its inhabitants over the course of around 400 years, from the 17th century to sometime around the present day. It begins with the establishment of a cabin in the woods by a pair of Puritan lovers, and a tale of an unnamed woman fleeing war who poisons the soldiers chasing her. Perhaps most memorable, though, are the sections that follow next, largely in the 18th century, concerning the Osgood family. Charles, a soldier, moves to the area and renovates the yellow house, as well as establishing an orchard. He becomes a notorious ‘apple man’, famous across the region for his unique Osgood Wonder apples. When he is called up to fight once again, he dies fighting in the Revolutionary War and the house passes to his daughters, Mary and Alice. They live out their lives in an increasingly isolated and codependent fashion, with neither marrying. Their gruesome ending comes to haunt the house through the subsequent centuries.

The books subsequent sections included vignettes focusing on a fleeing slave; an artist who is conducting a clandestine gay relationship with a European author; a Victorian medium hired to help a subsequent inhabitant who is haunted by dreams of the two artists; a mother and her son, a schizophrenic who documents his imagined conversations with the house’s past inhabitants on videotape; and a closing section in which a visiting botanist dies in a car accident, and a depiction of her afterlife in which she communes with the house’s former owners, as in reality the house itself is being re-absorbed by the natural world that surrounds it.

I’ve probably said a few times before that I love a novel with a grand historical sweep, which was almost certainly why a person or persons felt I would enjoy this. They certainly weren’t wrong either. Generally of course these kind of books will focus on a character over time, or perhaps in the more ambitious cases a family, so the focus on a house - its origins, accumulation of layers both in the physical sense and the historical (manifesting as the sense of ‘haunting’ that builds up over the sections), role in the history of the region and the nation in which it sits, and ultimate surrendering back to nature all make for a rather unique and compelling story which finds in the ordinary something that in its totality feels epic, majestic and very powerful.

The book’s characters are generally brilliantly drawn, each with their own memorable idiosyncrasies and varied connections to the house. Very early in the book, the house’s story becomes overtaken by violence and chaotic forces, human conflict within and attack from outside by forces of war, the animal kingdom, weather-battering and nature-borne decay. Elements of this turbulent history become bound up in the house’s physical features (and in some cases quite literally buried under its floorboards). There’s a deliberately seasonal aspect to the novel’s structure, one of many tricks that give the books its sense of the encompassing of all our worldly concerns (and then some beyond). The parts I found most captivating were those in the house’s ‘springtime’ of its life, with the Osgoods’ thriving apple business and its subsequent rotting away in the heat of early summer. Throughout there’s the sense of the natural world and its rhythms driving the course of events that impact the house and its memorable inhabitants.

Later in the book, I found the troubled story of Robert, the schizophrenic who is haunted (without being able to articulate to anyone else) by the past history of the house. He feels attacked by imaginary forces which have their roots in the house’s past, and dedicates much of his life to attempts to control these forces through various processes - a meticulous series of walks he takes around the area, in a process he names ‘stitching’ (something of a metaphor for the book’s own attempts to stitch together the complex history of the many forces acting on the house over the centuries), and which we later learn involves the video documenting of his imagined communings with other characters associated with the yellow house’s history. This is one of several form of engagement with the house’s past that come to dominate the book’s later sections, in which we find stories dug up (sometimes, again, literally) by journalists, amateur historians and writers for salacious ‘true crime’ publications. Documents accumulate and eventual start to engage in a metatextual exploration of previous documents, questioning the stories we initially receive as fact and further complicating the house’s already elaborate history.

It’s a book with a real sense of magic and wonder (like the apples….) about it, and one which did keep me very much engaged throughout its varied sections. I had a few minor issues with the book’s structure, which I suppose are inevitable parts of the format of its construction but still made a bit of an impact on my perception. First is that for me the energy and exuberance of many of the book’s early sections is not quite matched by anything in its middle or closing sections. This is partly because I think these sections depict the house in its heyday and everything that follows is the depiction of its decline and eventual journey back to the elements, but it still left me feeling that there was a bit of unevenness about the thing as a whole. And this, for me at least, isn’t helped by the ending, which felt a little too airily ‘spiritual’ for my liking. By this point, the book has rather overdone the ‘ghosts of the past’ metaphor already, so bringing that back in a more apparently ‘real’ sense to round out the book felt a bit unsatisfying to this reader. I guess, though, that like much in this multifaceted and layered novel, we aren’t supposed to take this at face value.

Score

8

Very much up my street in its scope and ambition (for the most part impressively delivered on), with some brilliant sections but a little let down by a slightly uneven structure.

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

Next up

TBC.

Permalink

All That Man Is (2016)

Eyes On The Prize — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 12:57:20 +0000

Why this one?

I really enjoyed Flesh and thought it was a worthy Booker winner in a strong year for the prize. I’ve since heard a lot of people saying that this is actually the better book and I should check it out (despite being shortlisted, it predates my regular reading of the Booker shortlist).

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. 2016’s All That Man Is won the Gordon Burn Prize and was also Booker shortlisted (in the year that Paul Beatty’s The Sellouttook the Prize). His most recent novel, 2025’s Flesh, of course won the Booker.

Thoughts, etc.

All That Man Is comprises eleven short stories, each told from the perspective of a different man. The stories cover men of different ages, loosely in ascending order, beginning with a student and ending with an octogenarian nearing the end of life. Its eligibility for the Booker depended on it being considered a novel, which is something of a stretch. While there is one direct connection made between characters in different stories, and several others implied, the connection between the tales is more thematic than anything else, so in many senses not unusual for a short story collection., Which, let’s be honest, this is. Where Flesh took as its focus the full life of one man, this book instead views that same span of life through the eyes of a range of different men. While there are obvious differences, though, between the men, with some significant variation in social status alongside the obvious variety of ages, there are also many similarities. Is the book ‘all that man is’ in the sense of man in his ‘rich diversity’, or rather, ‘all that man is’ in the sense that, ultimately, there is not much to set us all apart? Is this limited range part of the point: at the heart of it, we’re all driven by the same few things and all destined for the same outcome?

It was those connections that I really found most interesting in this book, trying to figure out what it is that connects these somewhat disparate men. One of the stories ends with a man contemplating suicide, and I did at one point have the somewhat dark thought as to whether that’s a connecting thread - many of these men do appear to be struggling to make sense of their lives and could feasibly be approaching a similar point of no return. On reflection, that’s maybe an overly morbid reading of their circumstances. What seems harder to dispute is that there’s a running theme of shame through most of the stories. Whether it’s the shame of reduced status, the depths one might sink to in the pursuit of short term satisfaction, or (more commonly) a sense of missed opportunity and a kind of shame in the disbelief that emerges when a character assesses their life at a certain point and realises that what they have is all they have - in many cases an inflection point at which we’re left hanging, as to whether the character will see that revelation as a cue to embrace that life, however much smaller it may be than what they had imagined for themselves, or to take a darker conclusion.

Another obvious connection between the characters is their dislocation. There’s a lot of travel in here, mainly around Europe, despite all of the characters having a form of connection to the UK. I don’t know if it was an accident that this came out in the year of the catastrophic Brexit referendum, but if so it certainly feels timely in its depiction of the essential interconnectedness of the continent and its people. Thematically, though, I think what I mainly took from this was the sense of rootlessness of many of these characters, the sense that much of their fate might be determined by their wandering nature, away from (by choice or necessity) any real sense of community. Their relationships tend to be loosely held, with family often absent or far away, and relationships provisional or contingent, often a background to their immediate situations, typically undertaken in solitude or the company only of colleagues or acquaintances of convenience.

It’s that lack that seems to define the book’s characters. They are all, in one way or another, seeking something to fill that void. By and large, that seems to be either sexual fulfilment or through some facet of their career (which all too often has become their main source of identity). Those that deviate from these desires, such as the young student who finds art and culture to be his limited source of solace, or the older man (who we learn is the student’s grandfather) who has perhaps begun to transcend these concerns and find some kind of settled acceptance of his life’s purpose - again however limited - seem to be the odd ones out, and their connection at the end of the book is perhaps a deliberate offering of a point of hope, that there is something to be salvaged from the mess of most of the confused and desperate lives within this book.

Score

9

I enjoyed this a lot, perhaps not more than Flesh but certainly just as much. There’s obviously been some chatter of late about how Szalay’s ‘recentering of the male experience’ is something that is hardly necessary when we have had so many years of male domination of prizes and suchlike, but I think that’s largely a media invention and not entirely Szalay’s own intent (despite the gradiose title of this older book). I think he’s simply writing from a perspective he knows, not necessary revealing any grand secrets of man but instead brutally highlighting the flaws of many of our kind in the tradition of the likes of Martin Amis and Edward St Aubyn, both writers I’ve seen his work logically compared to.

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

Next up

More random reads since we’re (at least for a bit) out of major prize season.

Permalink

Kingfisher (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 11:01:20 +0000

Why this one?

Reading the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, after reading some from the longlist that mostly didn’t make it. This is my final read from the shortlist, just in time for the winner announcement (due tomorrow, 11th June).

Rozie Kelly (c. 1990- ; active c. 2020-) is from West Yorkshire, England and currently lives in Hebden Bridge. After returning to higher education at age 27, she studied at the University of Manchester and subsequently undertook a Master’s degree in Creative Writing, graduating in 2020. She works for the Arvon Foundation, where she facilitates creative writing retreats and courses.

She was shortlisted for the PFD Queer Fiction Prize 2023 and was one of the eight participants in the inaugural Prototype Development Programme 2024. She won the 2024 NorthBound Book Award for her (then unpublished) debut novel, Kingfisher, which was published by Saraband in 2025.

Thoughts, etc.

Kingfisher tells the story of an unnamed queer man, a writer and university employee whose relationship with his partner Michael (a successful gym entrepreneur) is falling apart at the same time as he becomes obsessed with a female colleague (and far more successful writer) known as ‘the poet’, with whom he begins a complex relationship. His mother, Hetty, treated him badly in childhood in ways that are not fully explained and persists in expressing her homophobia. She is in a nursing home and he occasionally makes grudging visits to her with Michael. As the book develops, he ends his relationship with Michael and spends more and more time with the poet. Hetty becomes critically ill and the narrator decides against seeing her before her death, but as the poet suffers a re-emergence of her prior breast cancer, he effectively becomes a carer to her. Their complex relationship becomes the inspiration for him to restart his writing and leads to him securing a significant book deal.

I had a bit of a hard time with this book. Like Heart the Lover it’s positively riddled with illness and descriptions of suffering and death, which at the present moment I’m not in a brilliant frame of mind for. Ignoring this challenge, though, I found a lot to admire. I thought the central character was very well rendered, certainly not especially likeable but relatably complex. He’s ultimately a fairly masochistic character, something that comes through in his sexual relationships and ultimately in the role of subservience he eventually happily accepts with the older poet, as well as in his occasionally nihilistic exploits and narcotic consumption. He’s probably not the kind of character that everyone will enjoy reading, but I found his inner world pretty compelling.

I also thought the web of relationships around him was nicely put together. Michael is the most straightforward person in his world, someone that perhaps gave him some sense of normality in his life, but ultimately he’s too much of a contrast to the narrator’s artistic complexity and their relationship can’t be sustained in anything other than its sexual form. His friend Jessica is also an interesting addition, another character that adds a degree of ‘real world’ grounding to his life which otherwise seems subsumed in the literary world (both literally and figuratively). She’s an advertising exec, dynamic doer, and general force of nature who stands by the narrator despite all of his flaws and enables him to pull through his challenging circumstances.

The poet is obviously far more complex, a quasi-mythical character who the narrator seems to idolise even as she treats him mainly as someone to help serve her needs. Ultimately she’s a successful inversion of the usual ‘older male’ trope, providing the anchor to the book’s interest in interrogating power dynamics. Ultimately I did feel that some of her complexity rendered her a little abstract and mysterious, less fully-formed than many of the other characters in the book. But perhaps that’s part of the point - she’s an object of desire that the narrator never fully understands, with many of her important truths deliberately withheld. She’s a muse, a symbol, an abstraction to the narrator in some senses, but also one with a very real story and suffering that means we do care about her as she begins to disintegrate.

His relationship with his parents is less foregrounded - his father is long gone, but he seems to experience a persistent sense of loss which comes through in snatches of recollections (or possibly imaginings) of moments with him, as the novel progresses. He can never really forgive his mother’s ongoing cruelty, but her death gives him some degree of closure and even satisfaction. These relationships seem to be the ones that are truly haunting him through the book, and which his existing relationships (with the well-meaning and potentiallly substitute parental figures of Michael and Jessica) have never really helped him untangle. His reckoning with the poet, someone he respects as a person and for her art, and ultimately who enables him to play a role of submissiveness and subservience, seems to enable him to more adequately deal with some of the trauma of his parental relationships, and begin to move forward in a more purposeful way with his art and life.

Score

8.5

A book that is certainly more complicated to unpick than many of the others on the shortlist. There’s little in here that’s black and white, and it sits more squarely in the purely ‘literary’ space, with more use of metaphor and poetic allusion than anything else on this year’s generally more straight-down-the-line list. I found that relative difficulty quite rewarding, though. I wouldn’t say it’s my absolute ‘favourite’ on the list as it’s a challenging read in terms of its subject matter, but I did admire it.

Ultimately I think my ranking is something like:

The Mercy Step (9)
The Correspondent (9)
Kingfisher (8.5)
Flashlight (8.5, though I read it so long ago this could be misplaced)
Heart the Lover (8.5)
Dominion (7.5)

There are a bunch of books on the longlist that I think would have sat at or near the top of this list and I think would have made for a more satisfying shortlist. Notably Audition which is comfortably my favourite from the whole list, but also the likes of The Benefactors, A Guardian and a Thief, Wild Dark Shore and The Others. For me this wasn’t the most enjoyable Women’s Prize year in Shortlist terms. There are certainly a bunch of very good books in there, most of which I wouldn’t mind seeing as the winner, but it definitely feels like a year in which some truly great reads were overlooked.

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

Next up

TBC!

Permalink

The Mercy Step (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 09:32:00 +0000

Why this one?

Reading the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, after reading some from the longlist that mostly didn’t make it. This is my fifth of the six shortlisted books.

Marcia Ann Hutchinson MBE (1962- ; active c. 2021- ) was born in Manningham, Bradford, UK, to Windrush-generation Jamaican parents. The seventh of nine children, she grew up in Bradford and attended Belle Vue Girls' Comprehensive School. She became the first pupil from her school to be admitted to Oxford University, attending Brasenose College from 1982 to 1985 to read jurisprudence, and subsequently qualified as a solicitor in 1986 after studying at the College of Law. Her early career was spent working as a lawyer specializing in Town and Country Planning for firms in London and Leeds.

Following the birth of her daughters, Hutchinson moved into educational publishing, founding the multicultural publishing and training company Primary Colours, which operated from 1997 to 2014. Her work in cultural diversity earned her an MBE in 2010. She also entered politics, establishing the Pipeline Project to increase representation for Black politicians and serving briefly as a Labour councillor in Manchester in 2021. nder the pen name 'Lila Cain', she published her first novel, The Blackbirds of St Giles, a work of historical fiction co-authored with Kate Griffin. Its sequel, The Nightingale of Covent Garden, is due to be published in January 2027. The Mercy Step is her debut novel under her own name, apparently rejected more than fifty times before being picked up by the small Cassava Republic Press in July 2025. It was selected as one of The Observer's best debut novels of 2025 and won the Discover Prize at the British Book Awards, before being shortlisted for the Women's Prize.

Thoughts, etc.

The Mercy Step is a coming-of-age novel focusing on Mercy Hanson, the daughter of Windrush generation immigrants, from her premature birth in 1962 in Bradford through to her early teens. The book is narrated from Mercy’s perspective, starting in the womb and then in early months in hospital with ‘New Monya’. From an early age, she’s evidently a gifted and perceptive child and feels disconnected from the rest of her siblings, instead finding solace in chats on her ‘mercy step’ with her Dolly. She nonetheless feels closely tethered to her mother, a bond which is tested throughout the book by her inability to fight back against her abusive and generally unpleasant husband, Mercy’s Daddy, by her blind devotion to her religion, and by the general strains of being a struggling mother of many children. By the end of the book we find out whether she’s able to cut the cord from her mother and make her own way in life.

Overall I really enjoyed this one. While encompassing the specific conditions of Carribean immigrants in the 1960s, the hardships of scraping by in the north of England, and the issues compounded by the intersection of the two, it’s also just a straightforwardly relatable depiction of childhood. While Mercy’s childhood is beset with traumatic incidents, the overriding tone is one of dark humour, with Mercy inured early on to some of the things that might break an average child, often left to fend for herself and therefore developing coping mechanisms that enable her to brush off all but the very worst of her experiences. Her reaction to the second of her childhood acquaintances dying in an unfortunate accident is especially memorable. At times I got an almost Adrian Mole-esque vibe from the tone. Which sounds weird because obviously there are some horrible and genuinely dark experiences recounted here, but I think that tonal contrast is what makes this an especially readable book.

With the relatability of the coming-of-age narrative also come a few cliches of the genre. It’s far from the first book to detail a gifted child feeling alienated from their somewhat blinkered family, finding solace in imaginary friends and then later books and libraries, and then ultimately seeming set to find her way to ‘that London’ accompanied by the help of a cooler older relative. But honestly I didn’t mind that. It’s a structure that has been repeated time and again for a reason, and that’s that it works really well. Of course we could scream emotional manipulation but why complain when you get to cheer the upward trajectory of an unfairly downtrodden child, breaking the shackles of the forces weighing her down (as so often, it’s men and religion) and forging a better path for herself. I also thought the nuance of Mercy’s specific circumstances, her family’s background and the historical moment, made it sufficiently different from others of the genre to still feel fresh.

Score

9

Overall a charming and enjoyable book that despite its potentially heavy themes stands out in this year’s shortlist for its lightness of touch, warmth, and energy. Probably my favourite so far.

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

Next up

Kingfisher

Permalink

Heart the Lover (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 26 May 2026 12:45:57 +0000

Why this one?

Reading the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, after reading some from the longlist that mostly didn’t make it. This is my fourth of the six shortlisted books.

Lily King (1963- ; active c.1999- ) was born in Massachusetts, USA. She studied English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1985 and subsequently undertook an MA in Creative Writing at Syracuse University. She then worked for some time as an English teacher at a bilingual school in Valencia, Spain, where she worked on her debut novel, The Pleasing Hour. Published in 1999, her debut won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and she won a Whiting Writers' Award in 2000.

She has published seven novels and one short story collection. Her notable works include Euphoria (2014), which won the inaugural Kirkus Prize for Fiction and has been optioned for a BBC limited series, and Writers & Lovers (2020), in development as a potential feature film. Over her career, she has taught creative writing at various high schools and universities, and her books have been translated into 28 languages. She currently lives in Maine with her husband and two daughters. Heart the Lover is her seventh novel and was published in autumn 2025.

Thoughts, etc.

Heart the Lover begins in the 1980s, when a female college student meets two witty and intelligent fellow students, Sam and Yash, who come to play a very significant role in her life. Nicknamed ‘Jordan’ by the two men, she initially falls in love with Sam but his religious nature, stuffy family and his own tempestuousness (and generally dickishness if we’re being honest) soon put paid to that. She relatively quickly falls into a seemingly healthier relationship with Yash, but when she moves to Paris to become an au pair, he is distant in more senses than just the physical and seems less willing than Jordan to commit to their future together. When she returns to the US, he fails to meet her at the airport and she decides, heartbroken (and - unknown to Yash- pregnant) that their relationship is over.

In the later sections, we learn that ‘Jordan’ is in fact Casey Peabody, the protagonist of King’s previous novel Writers & Lovers. These sections are set after that book, revealing that she is now a successful author with two children. In a brief middle sectionYash visits Jordan after many years, meeting her children and her new partner Silas. A passing stranger mistakes Yash for the childrens’ father. The more significant section, though, is the final one, set somewhere closer to the present day. In this section, Jordan - already dealing with one of her young boys’ ongoing cancer, for which he has an upcoming surgery - learns that Yash too has cancer, and is dying.

She flies to visit him in hospice, where he is surrounded by a rotating cast of friends and relatives, many of whom bring back memories from their earlier life together. One of those is Sam, with whom Yash has maintained a deep friendship over the years (including during, and likely to the detriment of, his relationship with Jordan). While Silas looks after her children at an incredibly difficult time, she stays by Yash’s side, reconciling to some extent and wrestling with whether to reveal the secret, never told, of her pregnancy with Yash’s child. Yash is, at least outwardly, positive about his circumstances, and before he passes away discusses theories of time and purpose with Casey.

I found this an interesting one to unpick. It’s certainly a book of two halves. The first part offers an appropriately melodramatic depiction of a love triangle amongst three people barely out of their teens, all bright young minds bursting with ideas and a lot of energy to throw into what seem from the start like doomed young romances. This section breezes past, super enjoyable and - if not totally original - a really believable depiction of college life, the naivete, idealism, and ambition of youth, and love of various kinds (even from this stage, it’s clear that bonds of friendship and in come cases family seem likely to trump this youthful version of romantic love). The conclusion to this section is incredibly powerful and sets a high bar for the rest of the novel.

The resolution certainly has a lot going for it too. I have to admit that I came across this dual-cancer narrative at a very inopportune time, which made it hard to read, but at the same time illuminating and incredibly emotional. It contains the fruits of those earlier seeds - Casey’s family life, for all its hardships, is beautifully depicted. As also is the ongoing friendship between Yash and Sam (and more broadly the community of friends and family that surround Yash on his deathbed). It is heartbreaking, and incredibly poignant in places, and I think the central juxtaposition works very well - contrasting in the pages of a short novel these harrowing moments at the end of life with the preceding hopeful, emotionally vibrant, idealistic images from the characters’ younger lives. Even as someone who hasn’t read Writers & Lovers and so has no prior connection to any of the characters in the book, they’re all believable and compelling and feel like real people we care deeply about.

While reading, I had maybe one major issue with it, which was just quite how central a role these men from her youth play in Casey’s life. We do of course find out that there are some good reasons for this - both the fact that their early literary sparring shaped her career and to a large extent her life, and the obvious fact of the secret relating to Yash that she has been burdened with for decades. But ultimately she has forged a successful career, found a caring and devoted husband and had two children she cares very deeply about (one of whom is seriously ill). So it did initially feel slightly odd at this point in her life that her focus is on a couple of guys who behaving abysmally towards her when she was a student, especially with her sick child waiting for pivotal surgery back at home.

There’s something very interesing, though, in the philosophical debate she enjoys with Yash on his deathbed around Eternalism and Presentism. As a mother, and a mother of a seriously ill child, she is forced to live almost all of her life entirely in the present, so it makes sense that she takes this side of the argument (‘the present is all there is, nothing exists meaningfully outside of it’). But presumably there’s something alluring to her also in Yash’s optimistic embrace of Eternalism (‘everything that has happened or will happen is happening at the same time’). It’s a philosophy that offers various comforts, and for Casey an escapism of sorts back into the simpler concerns of their youth (back to her ‘Jordan’ role and out of her present one of ‘mother’), with her perpetually delayed flight back to her family somewhat symbolic of her desire to make the most of this brief excursion from reality and into those same comforts that are sustaining her old friend in his dying moments.

Score

8.5

Ultimately despite a few nagging concerns I thought on reflection this was generally brilliantly done, with some seriously weighty themes lurking beneath its seemingly everyday concerns. I’m very keen to try to read Writers & Lovers now, to effectively fill in the gaps in Casey’s life!

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

Next up

The Mercy Step

Permalink

Dominion (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 19 May 2026 09:00:25 +0000

Why this one?

Reading the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, after reading some from the longlist that mostly didn’t make it. This is the third of the six shortlist books for me.

Addie E. Citchens (1980- ; active c. 2020- ) was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and currently resides in New Orleans, Louisiana. She earned her undergraduate degree from Jackson State University and subsequently completed the Florida State University Creative Writing Programme and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Prior to publishing Dominion, her debut novel, Citchens focused on short fiction and non-fiction, including much relating to music history. Her non-fiction research on the history of the blues has been featured in Mississippi Folklife and broadcast on The Mississippi Arts Hour via Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Her short stories and essays have appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the Oxford American. She was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Writer’s Fellowship, and her short story “That Girl” won the O. Henry Prize.

Thoughts, etc.

Dominion is set in the fictional small town of Dominion, Mississippi in the year 2000. The novel focuses on the Winfrey family, with the family’s patriarch Sabre Winfrey Jr. the reverend of the Seven Seals Baptist Church, as well as a locally successful entrepreneur. The Winfreys outwardly represent the pinnacle of Southern Black success and religious devotion. Behind this facade, though, is a more unflattering reality, with Sabre’s relationship with his wife Priscilla somewhat broken by his relentless infidelities and hypocrisy.

Adding another layer to the tension between public appearances and private drama is the central story of their youngest son Emanuel, nicknamed "Wonderboy." Emanuel is a talented musician and singer and a star high school football player who has inherited some of his father’s less godly tendencies. Priscilla witnesses a sexual encounter between Emanuel and Diamond, a vulnerable local teenager who has fallen blindly in love with him, which disturbs her and raises her suspicions around the realities of his character. Emanuel is later accused of sexual violence to several young women, but even before that the depths of his darkness are revealed as he responds to a sexual incident with an anonymous by murdering the local character who witnesses it and attempts to blackmail him.

The book is mainly told from the perspectives of Priscilla and Diamond, framing it clearly as the story of the women in the community and how they are impacted by the actions of the men. The latter present publicly as paragons of virtue, the father a celebrated preacher and pillar of the local community, and the son the embodiment of teenage masculinity, with flawless academics alongside sporting heroics. Their success draws vulnerable women into their orbit, often with disastrous consequences for the women, and allows them to do pretty much whatever they want with total impunity. (At various points, the suggestion of criminal investigations into any of the men in the community are mocked; their friends run the local police force, of course, meaning that any attempt to bring them to justice is something the women have to take into their own hands, as the book’s conclusion proves).

The only punctuations of the women’s perspective are the notes from Sabre’s religious journals / plans for his sermons, which offer a window into the extent of his somewhat manic religious fervour on paper, which mainly represents an exercise in attempting to convince even himself of his spiritual worthiness, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. This sort of works as it shows us enough about what’s going on in Sabre’s head without granting him too much narrative space with which to justify his deeds.

Less satisfying for me was the lack of voice given to Emanuel in the book. To be fair, much of the story does revolve around him and there’s clearly a purposeful decision in giving voice to the women affected by him (not just a feminist justice, but also a narrative purpose - the two women are two who begin the book naturally disposed to believing in Emanuel’s perfection - a mother and an obsessed teen lover - who must come to their own conclusions about the men’s shady behaviour in order to begin to free themselves from it). But in the central incident that causes the young prodigy to unleash murderous rage and sow the seeds of his eventual undoing, there’s too much for me that goes unanswered.

Not least is the fact that the rage is induced by the potential for a crack in his idea of perfect masculinity to be exposed. I wanted to know more about this hint at sexual complexity in this important character, rather than just have a that moment used as the spark for violence. Perhaps that’s my privilege showing though - reacting to the possible eruption of unconventional sexuality in a religious community in the American South, suppressing it via violence it may be a very logical choice (and one that’s been learned first hand from his father).

Score

7.5

Overall there was a lot to take in here: I did find the characters compelling and the sense of place really well rendered. It’s atmospheric and has a real sense of tension and foreboding throughout. Its central themes of distrust of all forms of conferred authority (religious, patriarchal) resonated and raised some interesting questions. I just wished that it had had a bit more space to unpick some of the other intriguing threads that it raised but didn’t really resolve.

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

Next up

Dominion

Permalink

The Correspondent (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Sun, 10 May 2026 07:51:22 +0000

Why this one?

After the announcement of the 2026 Women’s Prize shortlist I had 5/6 still left to read. Moving on from all the great books from the longlist that didn’t make it, this was the first of the remaining contenders that I picked up.

Virginia Evans (1986- ; active 2019-) was brough up in Severna Park, Maryland, USA. She studied English Literature at James Madison University in Virginia, before later moving to Ireland to pursue a Master’s in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin, where she studied under a range of notable authors including Claire Keegan.

Prior to the publication of The Correspondent in 2025, she had been writing since the age of 19, completing seven ‘unsuccessful’ novels in the intervening years (including one that she self-published in 2015). She worked various jobs over those years, including (notably for this book) a brief stint as a bankruptcy lawyer. She now lives back in the United States in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her husband and two children. The Correspondent has been a runaway commercial success, topping the NYT bestseller list, and also recently won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.

Thoughts, etc.

The Correspondent is an epistolary novel told via the letters from and to the 73-year-old retired lawyer Sybil Van Antwerp, mostly covering a span of her later life in the 2010s. Living in Annapolis, Maryland, she is generally an ‘ordinary woman’ who is notable primarily for her commitment to the art of letter-writing (though she does also dabble in emails where absolutely necessary). The book covers her letters to friends and relatives, and the authors of books that she loves (including a notable correspondence with Joan Didion), as well as a few more interesting interchanges that form the basis of significant plot developments.

One of these is with an Syrian immigrant employee of a DNA heritage testing kit, through which she uncovers a connection to her birth family (she was adopted as an infant). Elsewhere, there’s a regular communication with a highly intelligent but troubled teenager called Harry Landy, to whom she begins to act as a kind of surrogate mother. Troubling missives from an angry character signed only as ‘DM’ relate back to an incident from many years ago in her legal career. There are romantic overtones from two very different elder gentlemen - a Texan with a penchant for booze and guns, and a humble but rather charming German neighbour, Theodore Lubeck, who has his own hidden history to come to terms with.

Most notable of all though, are a series of unsent letters to an unnamed recipient, through which she documents both her responses to all of the above, as well as revealing some of her deeper issues that she doesn’t tend to talk about in her sent letters. In these letters she reveals more about her desire to know more about her adoption and therefore her identity, but also about the grief she experienced following the loss of one of her own children in an accident at the age of 8, the impact of this incident on her relationship with her ex-husband Daan (now dying of cancer) and on her ongoing relationship with her surviving children, notably her distant daughter Fiona.

There is a huge amount going on in this relative short book. It’s structurally very well done, with the range of letters allowing the concurrent development of these many threads in the seemingly ‘ordinary’ later life of its central protagonist, and the ‘unsent letter’ thread hinting at - and ultimately revealing - the book’s deeper emotional heart, rooted in the incomparable trauma of the grief for the loss of a child (and the associated guilt - justified or not - that Sybil feels for her role in that loss).

Sybil is initially presented as a somewhat abrasive character, a little self-righteous, occasionally pompous, and rather withering in her assessment of anyone who doesn’t meet her very high standards. But even in these early pages, there’s plenty to love about her characterisation, which initially comes across as very Olive Kitteridge. She’s certainly a character who knows her own mind, but her putdowns are hilarious, her occasionally ‘senior mis-steps’ equally funny and while she can occasionally come across as petty, we eventually understand that most of her foibles have roots in very deep and relatable issues. (A letter to a newspaper early in the book, in which Sybil responds with unconstrained rage to an article highlighting a parent’s role in their child’s accidental death, is an early hint of where things will ultimately go.)

It’s a book that plays well to its intended audience, with Sybil’s self-professed status as a ‘literary snob’ providing some easy laughs and empathy for a crowd of reader (like this blogger) who get some (if not all) of her references. She tends towards the classics, but it’s her engagement with recent authors (often explored in her correspondence with her lifelong friend Rosalie) that is most interesting. She’s amusingly (and predictably) dismissive of the likes of Dan Brown and Stieg Larsson but seems intrigued by Kazuo Ishiguro (whose Never Let Me Go is discussed at some length). The latter I found intriguing, along with several references to John Williams’ Stoner, which feels like an obvious influence in terms of its examination of the quiet dignity of an ordinary life, and interest in later-life reflection (notably, Sybil also expresses admiration for Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day in her letter to him, another book with similar concerns).

While its format makes it a little less stylistically coherent than either of those books, it’s in that focus on reflective self-examination that it’s most effective, at times devastatingly so. While there are certainly moments of joy and humour peppered throughout this book, it hits hardest when it zooms in on those moments at which small decisions in a life can have huge, long-resonating consequences, both on those involved and their families and other relationships. In its ending we see Sybil engaging in person, in some form, with things that she has previously kept at a distance via her writing. This is in some senses forced - we know that throughout the book she has been losing her sight at rapid pace and coming to terms with a life in which she cannot have quite the same focus on reading and writing. But it also allows her some closure around issues that perhaps through writing alone she could never quite resolve.

Score

9

One of those books that contains multitudes. Easy to see why it has found popular resonance, with its treatment of universal issues like aging and grief, and crowd-pleasing humour and popular literary references. But also with a quietly reflective depth that makes it an ultimately very satisfying read and more than worthy entry on the shortlist.

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

Next up

Dominion

Permalink

The Others (2025)

Eyes On The Prize — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:45:57 +0000

Why this one?

This was my final selection from the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist, prior to the announcement of the shortlist. This one didn’t make the shortlist (of which more later) and nor did most of the ones I’d read so far. The exception was Flashlight, which I enjoyed back when it appeared on the Booker list but by the time this one rolled around I’d actually forgotten that I’d read it. So there’s that. I was especially disappointed that Audition (just brilliant) and The Benefactors (a great book to think and talk about) didn’t make it. Anyhow here we are.

Sheena Kalayil (1970- ; active 2015-) was born in Zambia to parents from Kerala, India. Her upbringing was nomadic, spanning Zambia, Zimbabwe, and India before she moved to the United Kingdom aged 18. She studied engineering in Budapest, Hungary, where she lived during the collapse of the Soviet Union. She currently lives in Manchester where she works as a lecturer in Intercultural Communication at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on multilingualism and heritage languages among South Asians in Britain.

Kalayil’s career as a published novelist began in her late forties, following years spent teaching in countries such as Nepal, Mozambique, and Venezuela. Her debut novel, The Bureau of Second Chances (2017), won the Writers' Guild Award for Best First Novel and was shortlisted for an Edward Stanford Prize. This was followed by The Inheritance (2018) andThe Wild Wind (2019). The Others is her fourth novel, published in 2025, and the first to appear on the Women’s Prize longlist.

Thoughts, etc.

The Others is based in a ‘small coastal city’ (modelled on Rostock) in the north of East Germany, and begins early in 1989, prior to the seismic geopolitical changes that took place over the course of that year. It focuses on a love triangle between three very different characters: at the heart of it is Lolita, a medical student from India; with Armando (a factory worker on a labour exchange from Mozambique) and Theo (an East German mechanic and aspiring writer) vying for her attention. At the start of the novel, Armando and Lolita are on an early date, accompanied by Armando’s daughter Clara (with ex-lover Petra, an East German journalist), when they come across the body of a drowned man, who apparently lost his life while attempting an escape to Denmark. Their involvement in his discovery attracts the attention of the Stasi, leading to increased tensions over their already precarious position as ‘others’ in the tightly controlled regime.

While there is evidently high chemistry between Armando and Lolita, their relationship is made challenging by various aspects of their circumstances and personalities. In a cooling-off period, Lolita meets Theo who attempts to seduce her, with some degree of success. While he grabs her attention with his poetry and way with words, his physical manner is somewhat more clunky and there’s no similarly obvious chemistry between the two. In the course of this clumsy seduction Lolita is introduced to Theo’s grandfather Rainer, a charming survivor of wartime France who has secrets of his own. During this meeting, Lolita reveals details of her and Armando’s discovery of the drowned man, which later make Armando’s position even more vulnerable (Lolita herself is protected by her connection to a compatriot who seems to have connections in the right places; Armando has no such safety net).

Soon, those seismic changes intervene and seem to render these challenges at least superficially less menacing. The Wall falls, and our main characters have all made their way to see it. While Lolita begins the events with Theo, she ends up with Armando, as Theo gets to experience his long dreamed-of passage into the West under an unwelcome cloud of rejection. The novel’s climactic events (in the book’s main time period, at least) see the three protagonists experiencing the collapse of the Soviet Bloc from wildly differing perspectives. Theo, while temporarily subdued, has a new world of opportunities open to him. Armando and Lolita’s seemingly promisingly revived relationship, however, seems obviously doomed - they are not permitted the same freedom of passage as Theo. They must return to the collapsing East and figure out how best to negotiate their futures in a way that focuses more on the bare necessities of survival and familial duty rather than the extravagance of the artist calling Theo is able to pursue. A brutal conclusion for Petra, the mother of Armando’s beloved child, effectively collateral damage in the chaos of the collapsing country they inhabit, seals the lovers’ fate.

In some ways, that’s maybe where the story should have ended. Instead we get a coda set in the present day in which a comfortably successful Theo tries to piece together what happened to his erstwhile rival and love interest, involving an encounter with a grown-up Clara. It is in some senses -necessary: the light it sheds on the plight of those like Armando who came to Germany with the promise of a financially secure future only to have it cruelly withdrawn from them on an effective technicality is important to highlight, and a story I personally was not familiar with. However I did get left with a sense that this ending was a little too tacked-on and an overly tidy way of wrapping up what had up to that point been a very subtly and engagingly developed novel.

I actually spent much of the book’s first half wondering if it was quite going to do it for me. I’d picked it up on the promise of a story set at the heart of a critical event in postwar European history, and for much of the early part of The Others that history is very much in the background. Of course we are firmly situated in that reality by the discovery of the body, but after that for a while the history takes a back seat to an admittedly quite compelling love triangle narrative (not normally my thing, if I’m honest, but well done here). Eventually it does become apparent that this was scene-setting, establishing the characters in the ‘real’ world of their day-to-day problems in which by the late period of the Soviet era what seems remarkable to us from the vantage point of history had become normal, and therefore generally unworthy of detailed discussion even by directly-impacted characters.

In any case, the book’s second half does a great job of thrusting us firmly back into the brilliantly-rendered reality of those historical events, for better (the celebratory mood in Berlin) and worse (the threats faced by Armando before those events, and their unforeseen consequences for Petra). Its characters are extremely compelling, particularly Lolita and Armando (Theo has a role to play, but he never feels like he’s as much of an interest for the author, making his central role in the coda at once disappointing and maybe understandable - he’s in a sense an outsider in a different way, the documenter and observer of a story more interesting than his own). It’s a great concept that is for the most part beautifully executed, and its roots in moments of Kalayil’s own personal history shine through (she was present in Budapest at the time of the fall of the Wall in Germany, experiencing the celebrations from an adjacent perspective; and later worked in Mozambique where she witnessed the ongoing protests by the workers who were never compensated for their labour in East Germany).

Score

8.5

A very satisfying read that I would have been very happy to see on the shortlist.

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

Next up

The Correspondent

Permalink

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.

Next up

The Others

Permalink

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

Permalink

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…

Permalink

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…

Permalink

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.

Permalink

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.

Permalink

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.

Permalink

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.

Permalink

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.

Permalink

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.

Permalink