The Singer’s Gun by Emily St. John Mandel — Review

When I found out Emily St. John Mandel had a new novel out, I got excited — and then a review of Exit Party mentioned that one of its characters, Ari, first appeared in The Singer’s Gun. Well, I just had to go back and read it then, didn’t I? Not a hardship when it comes to Mandel.

I trust her. There’s an unspoken contract between reader and writer, and with her I’m happy to let a scene sit unexplained, because I know it’ll mean something later. She’s one of my favourite writers, and that trust has been earned over four novels. Station Eleven was the first of hers I read, and I’ve followed her since.

What It’s About?

Anton Waker has spent years building an honest life, away from the forged passports he once sold with his cousin Aria. Then a routine security check at work starts to pull it all apart — will one final job be enough for him to start anew?

It has elements of a crime novel, and early on we meet Detective Broden, who is on the trail of Anton and Aria. Mixed up in this is Elena, Anton’s secretary and one of the beneficiaries of their business.

The first few pages suggest an ending that the book builds slowly towards, and there’s a case that develops and keeps you guessing. But because it’s Mandel, the plot didn’t go the way I thought it might. The ground under your feet is always somewhat unsteady in a Mandel novel.

The Writing

Her writing is stripped of fat, trimmed down to only what matters. Fluid, shiny prose. It’s poised, and the pacing is gradual but never stilted. There’s always something moving in each scene, even if you’re not sure what it is. Like I mentioned earlier, it will reveal itself.

There’s also something theatrical about this book in terms of its settings. It feels like there are three or four “stages” that she is able to flesh out and colour in, in the reader’s mind, each time we visit.

The scenes are so precise — whether they are Russian cafés, Manhattan offices or Italian seaside towns — that as a reader you feel like you enter them from the first few words of the description. There are enough details, but there is a stillness at the heart of them. Conversations are sparse and to the point, but revealing.

‘He was unprepared for the sound. The city was all around him, and he was lost in the noise. There were trucks, horns, sirens from Lexington Avenue and from the cross streets, but behind these individual noises was the sound he stopped to listen to sometimes when he was jogging alone in Central Park at night. A sound formed of traffic and helicopters and distant airplanes, voices, car horns, conversations and music, sirens and shouting and the underground passage of trains, all combined into a susurration as constant and as endless as the sound of ocean waves.’

The Characters

For me, though, it’s about the interactions between the characters — that fluidity. And there is, of course, something running deeper in her books, something harder to describe. But I’ll try.

She makes her characters interesting. They have dilemmas that reveal who they are.. There never seems to be any judgement of the family business on Anton’s part, but he has decided it’s not for him. Does it define him? How much of it sits at the heart of his relationship with his parents?

The plot kept me intrigued, but as with Mandel’s other books, I was more taken by the musings of characters like Elena and Anton.

Anton is an interesting one. How much of his character is set? Can we rebuild ourselves? Can he live in a construct of his own making, invent a past?

Aria is perhaps more unwavering, fatalistic. I always felt that she enjoyed flirting with danger, that she knew everything around her was built like castles in the sand. Her lightly sketched background suggests she knew her world could be upturned at any moment, and she built her life around this.

Elena falls somewhere between the two. She is lost, afraid of being sent back to a place where she no longer belongs, and although she wants to be in New York, she is floundering for a path.

Final Thoughts

Is it my favourite Mandel novel? Not quite. The stakes feel smaller, and it isn’t as wide in scope as her later books — in fairness, one is about a plague and another features people living on the moon. But reading it now, after Station Eleven The Glass hotel and Sea of Tranquility, it’s like finding an early sketch of a painting you love. The questions she keeps coming back to are all here: who we are, whether we can start again, how much of the past we carry.

If you’ve just finished Exit Party and want to know where Aria came from, start here. If you’re new to Mandel, begin with Station Eleven and work your way back.

287 Pages

First Published May 1, 2010 by Unbridled Books

My Tinnitus

I think everyone has their own way of describing their tinnitus. Mine is like the sound you got on one of those old FM radios when you were tuning between stations. Poor sleep makes it worse, but tinnitus causes poor sleep (I’ve written about this in my best books for insomnia list). See the problem there?

It’s hard to put an exact time on when it started, but I’d say five years now. At first it came and went, before I noticed it was there for hours at a time. Now it’s here permanently, in varying degrees of loudness. It’s part of my sound scape now, in the background of everything I hear.

I have a variety of tinnitus triggers: poor sleep, coffee, salt, sugar, alcohol, loud noises, constant background noise… and sometimes it’s bad even when I’ve had a good night’s sleep. I’ve quit caffeine and it made little difference -the others I find hard to avoid, though I’ve cut back at times to lessen the impact.

How I Came to This Book

I was introduced to this book by an audiologist. I wear hearing aids, and although I’m reasonably happy with the set I have, they’re six years old, so I wanted to see what improvements had been made and maybe think about an upgrade.

Tinnitus and hearing loss are interlinked, as the book describes. My hearing loss is quite mild, but the tinnitus makes hearing more difficult. I can’t detect certain frequencies, so that’s where the hearing aids come in. They help making sounds and speech clearer, meaning the brain has to strain less.

(I feel my tinnitus would be a lot worse were it not for my hearing aid. If you’re reading this and feel that your hearing loss is only mild - honestly, at least try one out and see if it makes a difference. I put it off far too long, and I can’t tell you the difference it has made, especially in social situations. I used to blame tinnitus for not being able to hear what people were saying, because it was so loud - in reality, the brain was focusing on it because it couldn’t hear other frequencies.)

My audiologist advised me to buy this book rather than upgrade my hearing set-up, as an upgrade wouldn’t have made much difference. That’s quite a saving: £2,000 for the set I was looking at, against the £10 or so the book cost. He’d been recommended the book himself at an audiology conference, so it comes highly rated.

About the Author

Dr Gladys Sanda is a Clinical Doctor of Audiology based in London. She lives with tinnitus herself (I don’t like the phrase “suffers from”), and it has become her greatest teacher of all. So she’s well placed to write this book.

What’s in the Book

It’s divided into three parts.

Part One is about what tinnitus is: tackling various misconceptions, the different types and the possible causes. I found it particularly interesting to read about how the brain creates tinnitus sounds, which added to my understanding of it. It also delves into the emotional impact of tinnitus, something I haven’t seen written about before.

Part Two is about neuroregulation, meaning practical strategies to calm the nervous system and reduce tinnitus distress. It was good to see self-compassion written about here, as I think it’s incredibly important when it comes to tinnitus. It’s something that can really wear you down, especially when it’s affecting my sleep. I didn’t choose to have it, and it’s not my fault. All I can do is learn how to habituate to it.

Some days I don’t feel like reading because I feel my concentration is poor. Or I choose not to have a noisy night out, because I know the noise and alcohol will make it really hard to live with for a couple of days. a quiet night in, when my auditory system feels overstressed, helps it to settle back down a bit. Periods of calm help me to habituate.

Part Three concerns neuroplasticity: building resilience, CBT and acceptance. I’ve tried CBT for sleep and it didn’t really work for me, but I can see its usefulness. Stress management is something I’m over-familiar with at this stage of my journey.

What I Liked

It’s well written and conversational in tone, and you really get the sense that Dr Sanda really knows what she’s talking about. I also liked the patient stories, which added depth to some of the concepts. I liked how it’s organised, and broken down into sections with a round up of the key takeways in each chapter.

Throughout there are strategies that come with practical tips you can use, and there are plenty of them for learning to deal with the stress around tinnitus. One of them, combining a body scan with a technique such as 4-7-8 breathing, is one that has helped me remain grounded during a time when tinnitus is particularly intense.

I hadn’t thought of using acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) , and I can see how it can help with the emotional impact of tinnitus. It’s easy to withdraw from activities you previously enjoyed, and become more socially isolated. It’s important to focus on your wellbeing, and keep doing what makes you happy. You can’t shape your life around tinnitus.

It’s also a compassionate book, and you feel the author just gets it -there’s a lot of empathy throughout. Struggling with tinnitus can leave you in a lonely place, and it’s good to read a book by someone with a genuine understanding of the condition.

Tinnitus Frustration

If I had an issue with this book, and it’s to do with me, it’s that I was already familiar with a lot of the concepts. I’d come across most of these strategies before, through previous reading, YouTube watched at 5am, podcasts and deep dives on reddit. But that’s my problem.

If I was frustrated, it’s because I’m always looking for that silver bullet: the one method I haven’t tried that can bring relief when my tinnitus has felt unbearable for a stretch of time. That’s just my brain thinking it can “solve” the tinnitus. But it can’t.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve been told there’s no miracle cure for tinnitus, as if you should just lose hope and accept that nothing can be done. This books shows that there are lots of evidence based treatments you can use to filter the sound into the background so that it doesn’t bother you - habituation as it is known.

Who is this book for?

I wish this book had been around five years ago, so if you’re new to tinnitus everything you need is here. It really helps with understanding tinnitus, its causes and how the brain operates, and that knowledge helps. Discovering many of the stategies to deal with the stress around tinnitus would have been a major help to me early on.

If you’re like myself and have had tinnitus for a while, and feel like you’ve heard everything there is to know on the subject, you’ll still find something useful in here. Dr Sando brings plenty of experience to the subject, and there’s just so many perspectives and tools that you can use.

Tinnitus, Insomnia and Non-Duality

A lot of this I’d already met while dealing with insomnia, and in some non-duality and meditation reading. Acceptance is a big one, as is self-compassion with insomnia. Working with beliefs comes from non-duality and the work of Angelo DiLullo. They’re all interlinked.

Learning to live with tinnitus is something I’ve become good at in the five or so years since it developed and worsened. Occasionally it annoys me, but I don’t feel as much frustration or despair anymore. I don’t arrange my life around it.

I use it as a meditation object. If I listen closely, I can notice variations in the tone. If I’m doing natural meditation, it’s there along with whatever other sounds or sensations are occurring. It works in enquiry too: what is it that’s noticing, or hearing, the tinnitus? That’s not always easy when it’s blaring first thing in the morning, but I generally don’t react to it now.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t wearying. I feel like I’m stuck in an infinite loop. The tinnitus is made worse by lack of sleep, and the lack of sleep sometimes feels like it’s caused by my brain being woken by it at 4.30am. I always notice how it’s blasting at that time. Is it the tinnitus that wakes me? Honestly, I’m not sure.

Final Thoughts

Habituation is the key buzzword in this book. It’s the process by which the brain learns to filter out the tinnitus sound, so it fades into the background and becomes less intrusive. It really means not letting tinnitus dominate your experience, and I think it’s one of the main takeaways from this book.

It’s the only thing that has worked for me, and there’s plenty of tips in this book to do the same for you.

If someone told me they’d just began to experience tinnitus, this is the book I would give them. It’s written by someone with both knowledge and experience of the condition, and it has the understanding, the coping strategies and emphasis on habituation all in one place.

If you’re feeling despair, this book can bring you hope.

*I’m a book blogger, so if you are struggling with tinnitus, see an audiologist or your GP.

Amazon US‍ ‍Amazon UK

Published November 3, 2025

185 Pages

Beyond the Noise is also available on Audible, narrated by Nicky Griffiths. If you’re weighing up which audiobook service to use, see my audiobook subscription comparison.

Pete Walker

I can’t remember exactly when I purchased this book, but its been on my shelf for a while now, perhaps a couple of years. I know I’ve been interested in shadow work, dealing with emotions that come up during meditation so I must have seen it recommended somewhere and sought it out.

Pete Walker is a California psychotherapist who specialises in childhood trauma, and is perhaps best known for his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, which popularised the idea of emotional flashbacks and expanded the classic fight/flight/freeze responses to include fawn: people-pleasing as a survival strategy. He writes as a therapist, but also as someone who came out of a violent, neglectful childhood himself.

Grieving and Angering

The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame (1995) is his earlier book, and its central premise is that healing isn’t about simply forgiving, or thinking your way out of trauma, but about grieving: actually letting yourself feel what was suppressed. He breaks that grieving down into crying, “angering” (healthy anger at what was done to you, released safely rather than aimed at anyone), verbal ventilation, and simply feeling.

He also talks about how important it is not to forgive too early. Real forgiveness is something you harvest after the blame and grief have been fully felt, not something you force. The Taoist framing is about accepting the whole range of emotion as natural, like weather or seasons, rather than labelling some feelings good and others bad.

Exercises

What I liked about this book is that Walker offers practical tips to help you enhance feeling. Simply described, it’s about putting your feelings into sensations and letting your awareness rest there. Focusing here, you may find that more painful memories arise, and it’s these that you stay with. It sounds easy, but it takes work.

Other exercises include those centered around angering, which is about releasing anger without directing it at anyone. Writing a letter to someone who has hurt is another one, a sort of verbal ventilation. One that I found particularly useful was about blame and forgiveness, simply using your imagination to reimagine a situation. There’s no doubting that it did stir things in me, but that’s where the work is.

Shadow Work

As I said previously, my interest coming into this book was via shadow work. My own understanding of that would be turning towards the feelings and parts of ourselves we learned to hide. From a non-dual point of view, it isn’t about fixing ourselves, but about no longer fighting what arises, and letting even the hardest feelings be fully met.

Walker never uses that phrase, but his grieving is about feelings and loss. It’s letting out the sadness and anger about what happened to you, which were never safe to express at the time. The method is expression: crying, angering, putting it into words.

Blame

I found his thoughts on blame particularly enlightening, and it’s why the subtitle of the book is so important. It’s about putting blame back where it belongs, not holding it as a grudge. It made sense when he said that forgiveness can’t be forced; the anger and the grief have to be worked through. I’d never thought about it like that before.

I think growing up with a religious upbringing, forgiveness feels like a duty. It’s not something you question, but it really made me think about how easy it is to leave the hurt and the self-blame buried.

Spiritual bypassing is something I’ve been thinking about recently. With non-duality and spiritual awakening, there can be a tendency to just repeat “I don’t exist’ or “I am just awareness’, and ignoring those feelings that come up. I can see how it can happen, and I’ve been trying to avoid it.

Summary

It took me a number of months to get through this book. I wouldn’t describe it as heavy, and he writes in a warm and easy manner and doesn’t rely too much on therapy speak. Rather, much of what he said brought up a lot of ‘stuff’ and the associated emotions as I worked with some of his suggestions. Some of his other examples didn’t apply to me, but I found them interesting nonetheless.

This is a really valuable, worthwhile book, and one that I’d happily recommend to anyone interested in shadow work or working with heavy feelings being stirred by deep meditation.

Pete Walker also has a website where you can read many of his articles for free.

Blame

I found his thoughts on blame particularly enlightening, and it’s why the subtitle to the book is so important. It’s about putting blame back where it belongs, not holding it as a grudge. It made sense when he said that forgiveness can’t be forced - the anger and the grief have to be worked through. I’d never thought about it like that before.

I think growing up with a religious upbringing, forgivness feels like a duty. It’s not something you question, but it really made me think about how easy it is to leave the hurt and the self-blame buried.

What Is Land About?

Land takes Maggie O'Farrell back to Ireland, and to her own family. Born in Coleraine, she has based the novel on her great-great-grandfather, who worked for the Ordnance Survey in the years after the famine.

The book opens with a father and son mapping a peninsula in post-famine Ireland in 1865. The peninsula is imaginary, somewhere on the west coast (it felt like Kerry or Clare to me). A lot of the book feels like O'Farrell exploring what life must have been like for her ancestors, and recreating that.

This is a story that spans two generations. It starts off with Tomás and his ten-year-old son, Liam, before we meet an older Liam sometime in the future.

The Famine Years

Some of the most powerful passages for me came early on: Tomás's glimpses back into the famine years, the bodies in ditches, burying relatives. Wrenching scenes as he is transported to the workhouse, and memories that surface later of the conditions there and the coffin ships. A widow recounting the empty cottages, the families decimated. It's a visceral and vital remembering of the past from O'Farrell.

Between 1845 and 1852, more than a million people died of starvation or famine-related disease, and a further million were forced to emigrate, many of whom expired at sea. Tomás lived through it, and that weighs on him; I thought that his survivor's guilt runs right through the book. In fact, I’d say the episode at the tobar triggered something like PTSD.

I think O’Farrell does an excellent job of getting across the devastation of the famine of individuals, on families and their descendants. There’s a really moving section where a widow talks about each house on the peninsula, and the familes that lived there, each one lying empty.

It got me thinking about other books on the famine. Joseph O’Connor’s excellent Star of the sea was one. The Silent people by Walter Macken is another. I’m sure there’s a lot more.

Mapping What Was Lost

Tomás is in the employ of the English soldiers, the redcoats, and he is determined to include the empty houses and famine graveyards, the local landmarks, lest they be forgotten, literally written out of topographical history.

Then the mapping splits in two. Tomás begins a second set of maps using the original Irish place names, while Liam quietly finishes the anglicised versions and hands them over to the redcoats. Irish readers will think of Brian Friel's Translations, set in a Donegal hedge school in 1833 as the same Ordnance Survey renames the places around it. Both are about what's lost when a place loses its name, and in a country the famine had already emptied of its people, a map becomes a kind of memorial.

(One of my favourite books on Irish place names is Manchán Magan’s ‘Thirty two words for field’.)

We still have redcoats in Ireland: it's how we refer to the traffic wardens pestering motorists around the town where I live. They don't generate quite the same fear or animosity, though it's funny how phrases reverberate through the ages.

The Tobar: A Sacred Well at the Heart of the Book

It's on the peninsula that Tomás stumbles across a place, just after Liam makes a quick escape from it: a small copse centred around a pool of water. It's a mystical place that crops up at a number of key moments, and allows O'Farrell to bring an element of Celtic mysticism into the book.

Holy wells like this were sacred springs long before they were 'claimed' by the church. The hill I live on, Ard Mhacha, was a sacred site too, before it was claimed in the same way.

Myth and the Mythic

Mythology plays an important part throughout. The family dog is named Bran, after Fionn mac Cumhaill's own legendary hound. There's also something mythic about the non-verbal son, Eugene, who is connected to the land in a way that's deep and grounded.

Irish myth is full of sacred wells, and the most famous is Tobar Segais, the Well of Wisdom at the source of the Boyne. There the Salmon of Knowledge ate hazelnuts from nine sacred trees and absorbed all the wisdom in the world, until a young Fionn mac Cumhaill burned his thumb cooking it, sucked the burn, and took that wisdom for himself. It's a story about knowledge coming not from striving but from connection with the land itself, which is very much where Land lives.

The History of the Land

One of my favourite sections is an incredible passage in Part Two, where O'Farrell lays out the history of that same piece of land (the copse with the pool and the prayer altar we met in Part One) from pre-Christian times right up to when Tomás and Liam discovered it.

It begins with a family who lived in a nearby fort: a young girl and her wolfhound, with what felt like a nod to the Salmon of Knowledge. Druids, standing stones and sacred altars. Then right through the conflicts: the arrival of monks, Vikings, colonialists from England.

It's such a startling piece of writing: the history of the place intertwined with the land, even hearing from the bodies beneath the soil, full of wonderful imagery that just flows off the page. O'Farrell at her best. The land becomes a living, breathing character, and it reminded me of Daniel Mason's North Woods, which does something similar with a patch of New England woodland.

Characters

I’ve already mentioned Tomás and his son Liam, but there are other characters here, who we return to throughout the book. Phina is the hardworking wife and mother, who holds the family together when Tomás falls apart. She is the pragmatic foil to Tomás’s obsessive mystical pursuits.

The eldest girl is Enda, who is clever, strong and restless. Rose is more stoic and grounded than her sister. Eugene, who, as I’ve already mentioned, is non-verbal, is perhaps more in touch with the land than any of them.

Emigration and the Second Half

Of course, any Irish book set during this time is going to feature emigration, and this is no different. Liam's overseas adventures didn't engage me as much as the others. I do get that Liam is based on O'Farrell's great-grandfather, who joined the Jesuits, and that she wanted to explore that, but I was always eager to return to Enda, a vibrant character, alive with music.

Is the second part, more ambitious and exploring the experiences of Irish emigrants, as focused as the first? I didn't think so. The first half is so strong, and I was so embedded with these characters and the landscape, that it was always going to be jarring to leave them. But I could see why O'Farrell had to move the narrative onto a bigger canvas: the Irish experience, the diaspora, goes beyond these shores.

Storytelling Without Dialogue

I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of writers who write dialogue well, and it was only when I was nearly three-quarters of the way through that I realised conversation between characters was limited throughout (indeed, one of the main characters is actually mute). It's another sign of O'Farrell's skill as a writer that she is able to weave story out of exposition without losing momentum. Not too often you'd find me saying that.

Is Land a Depressing Book?

Given the time it's set in, the post-famine years, with Ireland still under a brutal colonial power trying to wipe out its culture and language, it's going to be sombre. There are some really emotional moments in the book, just like Hamnet. O'Farrell has that power to take you into the heart of an emotion, no bad thing for me in a book. Is it relentlessly bleak and without hope? Absolutely not.

Land and Hamnet

I found myself completely immersed in this at times, swept along by both the narrative and the prose. I remember feeling the same way about Hamnet, which I read during lockdown. O'Farrell really is a writer at the peak of her powers.

For anyone still with 'that' scene from Hamnet in their mind, there is one scene, maybe with a nod to that book, where two siblings swap identities, though unbeknownst to one of them, and not with the same devastating emotional heft, mind.

When I borrowed this book, the librarian said that she’d heard it wasn’t as good as Hamnet. I get that the comparisons are inevitable, but honestly they’re quite different -Hamnet was set in a house in Stratford, centred around one devastating moment. Land is set across a much bigger canvas, with an emotional weight spread across characters and decades.

Hamnet went on to become an Oscar-winning film, and Land has already been optioned for the screen by the same producer, Liza Marshall.

Final Thoughts

No one ever really owns land, do they? Countless beings come and go, occupying a space for a short time. It made me think of that phrase: the body keeps the score. The land does too.

The land still holds a lot of stories, and Maggie O'Farrell is one of Ireland's finest writers. I really enjoyed the sweep and depth of her storytelling here, and she has a wonderful ability to tap into the rich seam of the past. She weaves the mystical with post-famine Ireland, across multiple characters and timelines, with vivid and haunting descriptions of the landscape.

This book was my introduction to Murakami over twenty years ago, and though I remembered the ‘gist’ of the book, I’d forgotten a lot of the details. I’ve read a lot of the Japanese author since then, so before I started my re-read I wondered - isn’t this the one with the cat and the well? And what of this ‘wind up bird’?

I know I must have enjoyed it, as I’ve been a devoted reader of his novels ever since. What was it about the wind up bird chronicle (henceforth known as TWUBC) that got me hooked, and would I enjoy it as much on a second visit?

Story

Here’s a rough outline of TWUBC.

Toru Okada is an unemployed thirty-something drifting through his days in suburban Tokyo when his wife asks him to find their cat — and then, not long after, disappears herself. What starts as a domestic mystery slowly widens into something much stranger.

Toru finds himself pulled toward a dry well in his neighbourhood, drawn into the lives of a series of strangers, and confronted with buried fragments of Japan's wartime past that seem to have no business surfacing in his ordinary life.

That Scene

When I got to the part of the book set in Manchuria, some uneasy feelings started to surface. I knew there was something coming up that had definitely affected me on my first reading.

Murakami has this habit of dropping a visceral, strange, violent scene in his book that you never see coming. I found myself just as affected by this passage as I was first time around, and I took myself off for a good walk afterwards.

There aren’t many authors that have that sort of impact on me, even when I know what’s coming. I must say that I think Lieutenant Mamiya’s scenes were the most vivid and engaging of the book for me.

Toru

I get that some people might see the ‘protagonist’ Toru as quite a frustrating and passive character but I think he’s deliberately written like that. When we meet him he’s unemployed, drifting through his days, waiting for a phone to ring. As things start to escalate around him - Kumiko’s disappearance, strange women and old soldiers appearing to talk to him - he waits, and listens.

He waits at the bottom of the well. He listens to these strange stories from people. It feels like he’s absorbing what’s going on around him, that he retreats into stillness to receive answers. It’s not about what he does, but what surfaces through him.

Kumiko and Noboru Wataya

Kumiko is Toru’s missing wife, who we meet at the beginning of the novel and I’ll tread carefully here so as to avoid spoilers. I would say that before her disappearance that she is the practical one in the marriage compared to the listless Toru, and their life is described as mundane but that’s how they like it.

She has a bigger part more as an absence in the book, and it’s this that pulls Toru to the well in the first place. How much did Toru really know her? Can we truly ever know another person?

Looming over much of the book, mostly from a distance, is Noboru Wataya — Kumiko's brother, and Toru's opposite in almost every way. Where Toru drifts, listens, and waits, Noboru is ambitious, publicly successful, and increasingly visible as a rising political figure — smooth, media-savvy, and persuasive to everyone but Toru.

He's rarely on the page directly, and yet his presence shapes the novel's undercurrent of dread; there's a sense throughout that he represents something Toru has to reckon with, even if it's never entirely clear what that confrontation will look like or what it means.

What makes Noboru so effective as a foil is that he's never a cartoon villain — Murakami gives him charisma and public credibility, which makes Toru's private unease about him feel harder to justify. Their opposition runs through the book, surfacing fully only when it has to.

Unconscious

One of the aspects of Murakami's work that makes him stand out so much for me is the unconscious - the darker parts of us that we’d rather not visit. The unconscious here isn’t as much a theme, as a place where most of the novel is set in. For a start, Toru makes the decision to spend time at the bottom of a well - in terms of the journey inwards, it doesn’t get much more obvious than that. Dreams and the waking life bleed into each other; Toru's encounter with the woman in the hotel room feel real.

There’s also intergenerational trauma, a national conscciousness arising from Japan’s involvement in WW2, found here in the Manchuria scenes with Lieutenant Mamiya. What society tries to bury comes back through people who weren’t even there.

The unconscious in Murakami's world is shared space that character can navigate, where identity, history, violence, all blend into each other. It’s hard to think of an author who does it so well.

I also have to mention the mark on Toru’s face. Not long after one of his stretches at the bottom of the well, a strange mark appears on Toru's cheek — a bruise-like discolouration that no doctor can explain and that simply wasn't there before. It's never treated as an injury in any ordinary sense. It reads instead as a kind of residue, as though whatever happened to him in the dark left a trace that surfaced on the outside.

What I find so compelling about the mark is how it collapses the very boundary the rest of the novel keeps testing — between what happens inwardly, in dream and descent, and what's visible to everyone else. Other characters notice it, and something in how they respond suggests they sense a shift in him beyond the physical.

It also seems to coincide with moments later in the book where Toru acts with a decisiveness, even a capacity for violence, that feels entirely unlike the passive, waiting man we met at the start — as if the well didn't just change what he understood, but what he was capable of. Murakami never explains the mark outright, and I don't think he needs to; it's proof enough that whatever Toru goes down to find, he doesn't come back from it unchanged.

Non-Duality and Shadow Work

So often my interpretation of events in this book coincided with my interest in shadow work and non-duality. Reading this now, years into my own sitting practice and no small amount of shadow work, I found myself seeing Toru's stillness differently than I did twenty years ago.

Back then it just read as passivity — a man waiting for life to happen to him. This time it looked more like practice. He doesn't go down into that well to escape or to fix anything; he goes to be with what's there, without pushing it away or needing an answer straight off. That's close to what non-duality teachers mean by allowing — staying present with the uncomfortable material rather than bypassing it.

So - what is a wind up bird?

“nearly all within range of the wind-up bird’s cry were ruined, lost.”

The wind-up bird is a recurring, unseen bird whose creaking cry — like a spring being wound — echoes through the neighbourhood at key moments, usually right before something significant is about to shift in Toru's life or the wider story, like an omen I suppose.

I don’t really have an answer, just more questions. Does it mean a pattern from the past is being repeated? Are we witnessing fate in action? Is it when the conscious/unconscious worlds are overlapping? This being Murakami, it’s never fully explained, nor should it be. It's evocative and eerie rather than symbolically tidy.

First time reader

I love the succinctness of Murakami's writing, how he layers his ideas. Even though his books are translated from Japanese, there’s a wonderful clarity to his imagery and storytelling.

What I would say is that this is a long book - 600 pages. And compared to some of his other books, it’s more ambiguous, and if you’re not used to Murakami, it might seem impenetrable and just…..strange.

But this is where I started over twenty years ago, and I immediately fell for his storytelling. It might not be for you - Kafka on the shore is another good option (I’m currently compiling a list post on Murakami’s books)

Summary

There's so much to admire about this book, and with that much depth, of course I lapped it up a second time around. I took far more time with it on my second reading, appreciating how carefully Murakami layers things. And he's just so damned readable, for a book that asks this much patience.

I've gone on at length about my own reading of it — shadow work, non-duality, the way the conscious world seeps into the unconscious. I don't pretend to understand all of this book, even after two readings twenty years apart, and that's true of all Murakami's work for me — there's an undefinable, wondrous quality you just feel rather than explain.

Like I’ve said, if you're new to Murakami, though, I probably wouldn’t start here. Save TWUBC for once you've read a book or two of his and already trust where he's taking you — the patience it asks for pays off far more once you know that's simply how he works. Kafka on the Shore or Norwegian Wood is where I'd point a first-timer; this is the one you come back to once you're already hooked.

First published January 1, 1997 by Knopf - Translated to English by Jay Rubin

607 pages

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When I visited Japan last year, one of the things I couldn't help but notice was the number of older people still working. In the konbinis, especially late at night, it wasn't unusual to be served by someone well into their seventies. Older people could also be found in areas of Kyoto directing traffic around the main tourist sites.

It was a personal observation, but it intrigued me. I was fascinated by the culture and history of the country, but I started to become curious about what life was actually like there for people — so I did a bit of research and began to learn more about Japan's losing battle with demographics. When I came across Alone in Japan by Tom Feiling, I was eager to learn more.

Statistics

There are a lot of statistics in this book. But the author also conducts a lot of interviews, and goes on his own journey into Japan's hinterlands to see exactly what is happening on the ground, so it never feels too dry or academic. There were times when the stats piled up, but I generally felt they furnished the main points rather than overwhelmed them.

I'm not going to repeat many of them here, but one stood out above all others: Japan is shrinking. By 2060, the population is expected to have declined by around 40 million — roughly a third of what it is today.

Take Akita prefecture, located in a mountainous region in Honshu, Japan's main island, which has the lowest birth rate and highest death rate in the country. For every child born, three people die — essentially two people disappearing every hour. The population is expected to have fallen by 41% by 2045. Some observers suggest it may have totally died out within a hundred years.

Audiobook

I went for the audiobook version, read by the author. The subject matter can be dry, weighted as it is with statistics, but Feiling does a good job of putting some personality into it. He previously lived in Japan in the nineties, which puts him in a good position to offer opinions on what has changed. His own recollections give the book breathing space from the data.

I'm sure there are books written by Japanese authors that go into even more depth on demographic change, but I was happy to listen to an outsider's perspective — particularly one who had actually lived there. Some subjects benefit from the writer having a degree of distance from the material.

Population Decline

He does a good job on the many factors behind Japan's population decline: the erosion of traditional family structures, rural decline, changing attitudes to having children, the importance of careers for women, and people opting for single lives, among many others. And as for what Japan can do — the country has a famously low immigration rate, but that may continue to change. More emphasis is also being placed on encouraging couples to have children, with increased family allowances and more daycare places. Japan's economy, too, is apparently emerging from a prolonged period of stagnation, which may help.

I found it an endlessly fascinating country even in its difficulties. I particularly enjoyed the tangents — the importance people place on pets (including funeral rites), the rise of robots to combat loneliness and assist with domestic care for the elderly, and the deeply sad stories of people who die alone and villages that are quietly disappearing.

It's obviously about Japan, but population decline is a very real threat facing many western countries too, so the situation there, and how it is handled, is being watched carefully. A canary in the coalmine, so to speak.

Summary

This is very much Feiling's interpretation of demographic change in Japan, and for me it worked best when he brought it down to an individual's perspective. At times it felt doom-laden, and occasionally too heavy on statistics, but I found it a genuinely interesting read. It's not a travel memoir like Chris Broad's sparky, humorous book — it was never meant to be. It's more a social and cultural analysis, which is exactly what I was after.

I've never really seen much of Japan outside the main cities. I hope to visit the rural towns of the country on my next trip — which I'm sure will still be there.

First published February 26, 2026 - 368 pages 12 Hours 58 Minutes

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Looking back at my Goodreads, I can see I first read this book back in 2009, seventeen years ago. I have memories of being impressed by it, but can't remember much more than that. Claire Keegan has soared in popularity since — Small Things Like These, Foster, The Quiet Girl film that was based on— so I thought it time for a revisit.

My memory was jogged by a trip to Laragh in Co. Wicklow a few months ago. Unable to get food beyond crisps and sandwiches at the local hotel due to filming taking place, I approached the security lad and asked what they were filming. Walk the Blue Fields, he said. Ah said I, Claire Keegan. He wouldn't tell me who was in it, but I was able to find out later it was Andrew Scott, Emily Blunt and Ciarán Hinds, amongst others. There were cameras about, but I don't think they'll be using footage of the exhausted hiker with a pint of Guinness and bags of Tayto strewn in front of him.

Short Stories

It’s difficult to pick one story over another, such is the strength of the collection, but I’ll go with the ones that had the most emotional resonance with me. It’s a short collection, but it took me a while to get through as one story tended to stay with me a couple of days before I was ready to move onto the next one.

The second shook me — The Parting Gift, about a young girl on the morning she emigrates from Ireland. So much packed into such a short story: trauma, grief, and by the end some sort of release. I just had to check again — twelve pages.

The title story came back to me as soon as I started it, and I knew why they were using the pub in Laragh — it begins with a wedding reception, and features a priest. I can't wait to see what they make of it and will be keeping an eye on Netflix.

It's impossible to pick a standout. There's a wildness and dark humour to some of the longer stories, such as the final Night of the Quicken Trees, about a woman who moves into a cottage next door to Stack, a farmer who shares his household with a sleek brown goat called Josephine. There's something folklore-rich and chaotic to this, but like the rest there's an emotional resonance to it that pierced my heart.

I'm a fan of the great John McGahern, so I took particular delight in Surrender, based on his father, who was a constable in rural Cavan. There's also the emotional distance between people, exemplified by The Forester's Daughter, with Deegan and Martha trapped in a loveless marriage, a stifling home life that neither can escape.

Keegan has such a beautiful ear for dialogue. There's not a word out of place, everything pared down. I love how powerfully brief her sentences are — she gets to the point, painting scenes with the barest of strokes, slivers of details.

If there's a thread running through the collection, it's the emphasis on moral dilemmas in rural Irish life — (maybe with the exception of Close to the Water's Edge, which seems oddly out of place) — and people doing their best to deal with whatever hand life deals them. But ultimately, it's about how much joy there is to be found in the human experience.

She's a master of the short story. One word, then a sentence, a paragraph. Building, slowly, until something emerges. Just a beautiful collection.

First published January 1, 2007 - 168 pages

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Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy centres on a father and his three children, caretakers of a small island called Shearwater, north of Antarctica, home to the world's largest depository of seeds. They are the only human inhabitants — the previous researchers have left — and as sea levels rise, they know they will have to leave too. Before that happens, during a storm, a woman named Rowan washes up on the shore. But is she telling the truth about why she is there?

Migrations

I previously read and enjoyed Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy, so I was eager to pick this up. That book was set in the not-too-distant future, in a world where many species of animals have become extinct. It tapped into the all-too-real fear of climate change, with a relatable, emotionally damaged lead character. It was a pretty devastating read.

There are lots of parallels with Wild Dark Shore. The threat of climate change is to the fore, and all of the characters we hear from have been emotionally damaged in some way. I felt the character of Rowan was similar to that of Franny from the previous book — driven, haunted, and searching for something she can't quite name.

Characters

I really liked Rowan. We see her character grow, and she reacts genuinely to the events around her and I really wanted her to find happiness. The father, Dom, is also flawed and struggling with grief, though I found it hard to warm to him.

Each of the three children has their own distinct relationship with the natural world around them — one that feels entirely believable given the island setting. It deepens the book's central themes, and makes the inevitability of leaving all the more painful. I

It's a stunning setting, and one of my favourite scenes was the one with the whales — so vivid and almost awe-inspiring that I felt I was in the boat with them. It is, of course, a bleak setting too, and the isolation really comes across.

In terms of genre, it's not easy to pigeonhole, but I was fine with that. Climate fiction, literary thriller — definitely atmospheric, and the mystery element definitely pulled me along, and the alternating characters points of view worked well.

Climate Crisis

It feels like it's set in the not-too-distant future, which gives it an added urgency, as we can see the signs of climate crisis on a daily basis. It’s close enough that it doesn’t feel like science fiction. We can see a lot of this happening around us already.

The island of Shearwater is already disappearing — the family knows they are living on borrowed time, and the seed depository itself is a kind of admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that the natural world as we know it needs to be archived before it's lost. This is similar to ‘Migrations’ - in that book it was a species that was disappearing - in ‘Wild Dark Shore’ it feels like it’s the world itself that’s going.

I'll say straight out that some of the later developments didn't work that well for me. It didn't spoil my overall enjoyment and I enjoyed the character development and the setting is very immersive. McConaghy is such a vivid writer, and does a fine job building tension.

Summary

Wild Dark Shore is a book that lingers. Flawed in places, yes — one of the subplots just didn’t work for me, just a minor flaw really — but McConaghy's ability to conjure place, and to make you care deeply about characters in an almost impossible situation, more than compensates. Recommended, especially if you loved Migrations.

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The Sharaf family are an immigrant success story. Escaping war-torn Afghanistan, through grit and hard work they find themselves wealthy, respected, living in an exclusive neighbourhood in Northern Virginia. Zorah, the eldest daughter, seems destined for great things — the apple of her father's eye, attending a prestigious school, the embodiment of everything the family worked so hard to achieve.

But tragedy befalls them, and suddenly the Sharafs find themselves at the mercy of the court of public opinion, caught in the eye of a media storm. Cultures collide. The American dream turns into a nightmare.

Race Riots

I was reading this book in the midst of the now annual race riots in the North of Ireland. The timing felt apt. Pogroms are not a new thing in this part of the world, and there was something pertinent about sitting with a novel about an Afghan family navigating prejudice, suspicion, and the gap between how a community sees itself and how it treats outsiders — while the same ugly currents were running through the streets a few miles up the road. It gave the book an added edge that I hadn't anticipated.

Format

What I loved most about this book is the format. It's told entirely in interview style — short chapters, multiple voices — through the eyes of people outside the Sharaf family. Neighbours, friends, classmates, lawyers, journalists, people who encountered them on the night the tragic events took place.

We never once hear directly from the family themselves. It's a format that makes everything feel disturbingly real, and there are real-life cases you'll find yourself drawing parallels with. I'm doing my best in this review not to give anything away.

You know from the opening pages that something terrible has happened. But the tragedy itself isn't revealed until halfway through. The first half is devoted entirely to building a portrait of the family through other people's eyes — and I'll be honest, there were moments when I wanted it to move faster. I was eager to get to the heart of it. But looking back, I can see exactly what Sabit is doing. She is quietly, carefully shaping your assumptions. By the time the tragedy is revealed, you have already formed opinions — and those opinions will colour everything you read in the second half.

I flew through the second half, and I changed my mind more than once.

Mystery

It's a mystery in the sense that you want to know what happened. But it isn't a thriller in the conventional sense, as the outcome almost isn't the point. What matters is how you arrived at your conclusion — and what that says about you. How much of a role does race and tradition play in how we assign guilt? What about wealth? The way someone dresses, speaks, behaves?

Running through all of it is the question of assimilation — the pull of old traditions, the pressure of family and community, the desire to hold onto where you came from, set against the freedoms and temptations of a new country. It’s especially difficult for the second generation , those born into this new land of opportunity. The clash of those two worlds is where real tension lives.

Good People

Who and what are the ‘good people’? Is it the people I referred to in the early part of this review, who see themselves as ‘defenders’ of their community, ‘protecting’ their way of living?

Is it the parents who want to bring their children up in a certain way that upholds their traditions and values, in an increasingly immoral world?

And in the book you have all those who give their opinion on the family - they are all decent, upstanding ‘good’ people, and it’s their opinions we should listen to.

Summary

My own opinions changed more than once while reading, and what struck me most was that I could almost feel them shifting — could almost catch myself in the act. What exactly was I basing my judgements on? What had I assumed, without realising I was assuming it, about this family, their faith, their traditions? Was I quick to condemn on flimsy evidence? And if so — why? More than once I had to put the book down and think about how was reacting to what I was reading.

This is a wonderful debut. Assured, intelligent, deeply readable, and the kind of book that you really want to get talking to someone about. It would make a tremendous book club read.

400 pages, Hardcover

Published February 3, 2026 by Crown

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It’s the middle of the night on Catalina Island and Detective Sergeant Stilwell and two of his deputies are acting on a tip-off. A plane is coming in to land on a remote mountain airstrip, and a pickup truck arrives to meet it. Things take a bad turn.

Back at the substation afterwards, an internal inquiry leaves Stilwell kicking his heels. Cleaning out a storage room one day, he finds an expensive-looking backpack that was never claimed from lost and found. He traces it to a hiker who went missing nearly four years ago. Why had it only just been handed in?

Welcome back to Catalina

Ironwood is the second book in what is becoming known as the Catalina series, following Stilwell's introduction in the excellent Nightshade. That book established the island as a deceptively idyllic setting, so arriving here feels like returning somewhere familiar — the rhythms of the place, the geography, the cast of locals already half-known to us. As we discovered last time, being separated from the mainland by twenty-two miles and drawing in tourists by the boatload does not make for a quiet posting.

It's a setting I've grown genuinely fond of. Everyone on the island knows everyone else and everything is connected. That cuts both ways — it might make cases easier to crack, but it also means toes are very easy to tread on. Some of these families carry serious influence, and Stilwell has to navigate that carefully.

Only two books in and a vandalism case already has threads running back to Nightshade. This is one of the quiet pleasures of reading Connelly in order — the universe rewards patience, and the connections accumulate in ways that feel earned rather than contrived.

Old friends and one very welcome cameo

I do love it when Connelly's universe overlaps. Renée Ballard turns up here, and she and Stilwell work a case together. There's an immediate connection between them — a mutual recognition of how each approaches the job — and I can definitely see more collaborations ahead for this pair.

There's also a fleeting appearance from Maddie Bosch. And then — well. Look who it is. The mighty Harry Bosch himself, described as an old man but still very much above ground, though just about as we meet him in a graveyard. which may or may not be Connelly doing a spot of foreshadowing. I won't spoil the encounter, except to say that Ballard shares one of her mentor's methods with Stilwell — a technique that has served her well before — and the scene has a warmth and a weight to it that only years of accumulated storytelling can produce.

On which note: more Harry is coming. The Hollow is out on October 27th and it's already a preorder in this house. From what the blurb suggests, it goes back to when Harry's mother died and he was a ward of the state at MacLaren Children's Center — a fellow resident's death was covered up, and Harry is looking for justice all these years later. Sounds like the old dog has plenty of life left in him yet.

Stilwell

I'm liking him more with each book. There's something old-fashioned and decent about Stilwell — that same quiet commitment to proper police work and genuine justice that runs through the best of Connelly's characters. He fits the lineage without feeling like a copy of anyone who came before. We even get his first name in this one, though nobody ever uses it. Pay attention or you'll miss it entirely.

Negatives?

A few minor ones. Tash doesn't get a great deal to do here, though I suspect we'll see more of her as the series develops. One of the case resolutions feels slightly less tight than we've come to expect — though it's possible it's laying groundwork for the next instalment rather than tying everything off cleanly. And the book felt short. Though maybe that's mostly because I wanted more of it, which is not really a complaint at all.

The pace never relents. I had it finished in a couple of days. Few writers are this addictive.

The standard-bearer

Tightly plotted, cases detailed and nuanced, the prose pared back to the absolute minimum. I'd love to know how much editing goes into a Connelly novel, but I can't imagine there's much wastage. He is a completely controlled writer — always in command of his material — and his ability to reveal character through dialogue alone remains one of the best in the business.

The Catalina series is a welcome addition to the Connelly universe. Only two books in and I'm already happily settled on the island with Stilwell. Already looking forward to my next visit.

(Welcome news that we are going to get an adaptation of ‘Nightshade’ entitled ‘Welcome to Catalina’. It’s currently underdevelopment at HBO Max, with David E. Kelly at the helm, who also adapated The Lincoln Lawyer for Netflix).

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth is a book whose subtitle tells you exactly what you are getting into — and still manages to surprise you at every turn. This is Patrick Radden Keefe at his most ambitious: a portrait of a glittering, corrupt city, a labyrinthine mystery, and at its quiet centre, a mother and father trying to make sense of the unthinkable.

It begins in the early hours of November 29th, 2019, when surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6 captured footage of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the south bank of the Thames. At 2:24 AM, he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighbourhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her he was staying with a friend, but he didn't come home. Days later, a police car pulled up outside and two officers delivered the news no parent should ever have to hear.

That's all you're getting from me on the story. Anything more would take away from discovering it in real time, just as I did.

Compelling

I've written about Patrick Radden Keefe on this blog before. My introduction was Say Nothing — totally absorbing, impossible to put down — after which I quickly launched myself into Rogues, then Empire of Pain, then Snakehead. These are works of non-fiction so meticulously researched and so compulsively readable that they put most fiction to shame.

So I came to London Falling with high hopes, and Radden Keefe delivers again. He had me from the first page and I cleared the reading decks until it was finished. I tried to ration myself to a chapter an evening, but he ends so many of them on jaw-dropping moments that stopping was simply not possible. If I hadn't had to work, sleep, eat, or attend to the other tedious business of being alive, I could have consumed this in a single sitting.

I'm convinced that Radden Keefe could take Bulgarian folk music in the 1800s or the evolution of vacuum cleaners and turn either into a page-turner. His talent lies in meticulous research combined with a genuine understanding of narrative structure — he knows which threads to pull at and when, and he has a journalist's instinct for the story that exists underneath the official story.

Glitter and shadow

Much of the book is spent in the murky territory where London's super-wealthy and its criminal underworld overlap, and it makes for a grimly compelling portrait of a city that has become a playground and a laundromat for some of the world's most questionable money. It is a world of cultivated images, of walking the walk and talking the talk — where the distance between respectability and ruin can be a single phone call.

What elevates this beyond thriller-adjacent true crime are the unexpected tangents Radden Keefe takes you down. The Ugandan Asian diaspora — of which I knew nothing — was utterly fascinating. Hugo Gryn's story was deeply moving. The backstories of the other key figures are so fully realised that you forget, at times, that these are real people rather than invented characters.

The city itself is as much a subject as anyone in it. His account of the development of the Docklands — from its Dickensian squalor to the gleaming towers of today — is wonderfully detailed. And he writes with real tenderness about small, tight-knit communities: here it is the survivors of the Holocaust who made their lives in London, still a close knit community.

Emotional Heart

My heart broke for the Brettlers. They carried themselves with extraordinary dignity throughout — grief-stricken, yes, but determined — navigating the loss of their son while slowly uncovering the world he had become entangled in, often having to push against a disengaged Metropolitan Police just to be heard.

Of all his books, this is Radden Keefe's most intimate, and that is because the Brettlers are its emotional core. His research draws on police transcripts, security camera footage, emails, letters and hours of conversation with the family, and that closeness and care shows on every page.

There were many times reading this that I forgot I was reading non-fiction. Dark secrets, naked ambition, unimaginable wealth, the careful performance of respectability — and at the heart of all of it, quietly devastating, the loss of a son and a brother.

361 pages, Hardcover

Published April 7, 2026 by Doubleday

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In early October 2023, Plestia Alaqad was a twenty-one-year-old journalism graduate with typical ambitions — a career, a future, a life taking shape. Within weeks, she would be filming the destruction of her home city and sharing it with the world, her posts reaching millions of people who had never heard her name before. By the end of November, she was known simply as the Eyes of Gaza.

The book is written as a diary, which suits the material perfectly. It places you inside the experience rather than at a safe journalistic distance, and what you find there is not only horror — though the horror is unsparing — but also the texture of ordinary life persisting underneath it. Alaqad writes about the people around her with enormous tenderness, capturing small acts of courage and unexpected moments of vulnerability amid the bombardment.

It is worth noting that Israel has banned international journalists from Gaza, which means we are reliant on brave Palestinian journalists to inform us. Many of them have been killed by the IDF - the international federation of journalists estimate that 235 journalists and media workers have been killed since October 23.

Audiobook

I listened to this as an audiobook, and Plestia reads it herself. That gives it a real immediacy — you are not listening to a narrator interpreting events but to the person who lived them. It reinforces the sense that you are inside someone's diary and it is raw and it is intimate, her voice carrying a weight that no actor could replicate. There’s a real poetry to her words.

Genocide

I will be honest: I took breaks with this book. I was listening to a couple of chapters a day, and that felt like the right pace. This is not a book to rush through, and it did affect me.

And then I would catch myself on, as we say here — aware of the privilege of being able to take a break, to close the app, to step away. Plestia could not step away. The people she writes about cannot step away. That discomfort is part of reading this book honestly, and it sits with you.

I feel a deep frustration too — at the useless response of much of the world's powers, at the indifference of governments that could act and choose not to. The questions Alaqad raises are not rhetorical.

What kind of world allows a genocide to take place?

And why do we study history when nobody ever seems to learn from it?

Resilence

This is not just a harrowing account. It is full of resilience, and you get a vivid sense of Palestinian community — of people looking out for one another under impossible circumstances. Plestia is not writing for pity. She wants a homeland. She wants her people to have freedom, to live with dignity in the way the rest of us take for granted.

There are statistics about this genocide, but Alaqad turns figures into faces. She sits in shelters with displaced families, visits children with horrific wounds in hospitals, and refuses to let the numbers remain abstract. She also pushes back against the way Palestinians are so often reduced to victims — these are people with the same hopes and dreams that any of us have.

Homeland

How can the world be so vast, yet when it comes to us Palestinians, there isn’t enough space for us

This is not just a young journalist's account of reporting on the destruction of her own people. It is also a love letter to her homeland. The latter part of the book is also about displacement - Plestia gets an emergency humanitarian visa for herself and her family for Australia.

You can hear the yearning in her voice as she recalls the places and people of her childhood — not just lost as memories, but physically erased, reduced to rubble, wiped from the earth. Her and her family are safe, but she’s watching this from afar.

What stays with you is that this is not, at its heart, a book about war. It is a book about a place — about streets and neighbours and a way of life that was being destroyed even as she wrote. That it refuses to become a lamentation is itself a kind of defiance, and it is what makes it so hard to put down and so hard to forget.

A ceasefire is not an ending

This ceasefire is not an end. It is a pause. Wars do not end when the bombs stop falling — they linger in the minds of those who survive and in the void left by those who do not. For Palestinians, the war is never over. A ceasefire is merely the space between tragedies. And in that space, we are left carrying memories that cannot be undone.

Read this book. Or listen to it. Just don't look away.

Free Palestine.

Silence of the Heart is a collection of dialogues with Robert Adams, an American spiritual teacher who studied under Ramana Maharshi — the great Indian sage whose teachings on self-inquiry have influenced practically every non-dual teacher since.

Adams spent years at Ramana's ashram in India before returning to the West, where he taught quietly for decades, relatively unknown during his lifetime. This book is the closest thing we have to sitting in a room with him — direct, unhurried, and surprisingly funny for something aimed at pointing you toward the end of the self.

How I found him

I have the YouTube algorithm to thank for discovering Robert Adams. About a year ago his satsangs kept appearing in my recommendations, so I decided to give him a listen. These things can be hit or miss. This was immediately, unmistakably, a hit. There was something in his phrasing, his voice, and above all his words that stopped me in my tracks.

The channel is SoulSpiritSelf — a mixture of talks from the later period of his life, with some created using an AI replication of his voice. There are many to choose from, but below is one of the early ones I loved.

As much as I love video, I'm also drawn to the written word. And while it's difficult to read this book without Adams' voice already in your head, it didn't bother me. When the message is this resonant, I'll take it in whatever form it arrives.

Who am I?

The book is divided into chapters — among them Self-Enquiry, Maya and Spiritual Practices — and Adams discusses each topic in his clear, direct style, laced with humour and anecdote.

These are transcribed dialogues: Adams speaking to small groups, answering questions, gently redirecting people who are overcomplicating things. It gives the book a quality that most spiritual writing lacks -there's a real warmth to it.

Adams teaches in the Advaita Vedanta tradition — the non-dual philosophy that holds there is only one consciousness, and that the sense of being a separate self is the root of all suffering. But where some teachers in this tradition can feel abstract or remote, Adams talks the way a wise friend might — unhurried, quietly humorous, never making you feel like you're failing to grasp something you should have understood by now.

His central instruction is simple: turn your attention inward. Not to analyse what you find there, but to ask who is doing the looking. This is the self-inquiry practice he inherited from Ramana Maharshi — the question "who am I?" not as a philosophical puzzle but as a lived investigation. Adams returns to it again and again throughout the book, from different angles, in different conversations.

It took me a few months to read this — one short section at a time, letting each chapter settle before moving on. I think that's probably the right way. No matter where you are on your spiritual journey, you'll find something here that meets you where you are.

If you have an interest in this topic, you may another title that resonates on my list of best books about spiritual awakening and non-duality.

Everything that you can ever imagine, that you want to be, you already are.

You are the imperishable self that has always been, that you will ever be.

Beyond birth, beyond death, beyond experiences, beyond doubts, beyond opinions.

Beyond whatever it is your body is going through, whatever thoughts your mind thinks.

You are beyond that.

You are the silence.

The silence of the heart.

Robert Adams

Eriko has everything on paper. Prestigious job in a Tokyo trading firm, devoted parents and a spotless apartment. What she doesn't have is a single real friend. When she engineers a meeting with Shoko, a likeable housewife blogger she's been following obsessively, she believes she's finally found her person.

What follows is a slow, unsettling unravelling. Admiration tips into fixation, fixation into something darker. Asako Yuzuki is forensic about loneliness and what it can make people do.

Butter

Butter was my introduction to Asako Yuzuki (also deftly translated by Polly Barton) and it was one of those reads that lingered with me (as well as giving me hunger pangs). So when Hooked landed I was happy to give this a go.

Whereas butter was more of a slow burning literary thriller, I’d say this is more of a character study of two women, Eriko and Shoko, who both want to be recognised for where they are in their lives and are ultimately seeking connection and acceptance in their own ways.

Eriko and Shoko

The book moves between the two women in a twin narrative, and you get deep into the architecture of their inner lives — the overthinking, the jealousy, the insecurity that sits just beneath the surface of everything. Eriko's obsession with Shoko darkens gradually, her behaviour tipping from awkward to something more unsettling. There's an inevitability to how it all unravels.

Shoko begins as Eriko's opposite — easygoing, unambitious, apparently unbothered. But her growing online following starts to pull her into territory she wasn't prepared for. Others' perceptions begin to shape her, and slowly she becomes the product. It's a quiet transformation but a telling one.

There were moments I found genuinely uncomfortable — one scene between Eriko and her manager had me reading faster just to get through it. Eriko isn't easy to like. At her worst she seems completely unhinged, so deep in her own head that she's lost the plot entirely. But by the end I'd found some sympathy for her, which I hadn't expected.

There's also a neat thread running through the novel around Eriko's work — she's trying to push through a deal to reintroduce the Nile perch, a carnivorous fish, back into the Japanese market. Yuzuki doesn't labour the metaphor but it's there if you want it.

Themes

As a bloke it was an interesting read for me about the societal expectations placed on Japanese women, and about loneliness in adulthood. It reinforced the idea that Japan is a patriarchal society, and many of the themes of women not having children, population decline and rural depopulation are popping up in a non-fiction book I’m reading about the same subject.

I’ve read other books about loneliness and I thought this was a modern take about the ache that we have for connection, though in the book a lot of it is a total desperation to be liked.

So much of our online lives seem to be a constant search for validation. Here we see Shoko not really caring to begin with - and that becomes the reason for her online popularity. Soon she is sucked into the whole vortex of needing to be liked, of obsessively reading comments and ultimately publicity.

My blog has never been popular, so this wasn’t something I could in any way relate to. I’m happy to remain permanently under the radar, even if means my hopes of reading books and blogging about them from a cottage overlooking the Atlantic ocean on the west coast of Ireland seem to be rapidly diminishing.

Summary

I liked this well enough, but it didn’t have the same drive for me as ‘Butter’. It’s not a thriller, though there is a uneasiness to some of the scenes in the book, and I was generally happy enough to keep reading, as curious as I was about where Eriko and Shoko's paths would take them.

I seemed to read the earlier sections a bit more quickly, and I felt it fizzled out a bit towards the end, but I think it was a suitable ending for both characters.

400 pages, Paperback

First published March 30, 2015 -

Translated by Polly Barton - republished March 12, 2026 by Fourth Estate

I no longer include Amazon links in my reviews. Please support your local library and bookshops. Libby is also great.

If you do wish to purchase online, feel free to support independent bookshops and contribute to the hosting of this website by purchasing via  Bookshop.org 

Many of you do, and it contributes to the upkeep of the site and allows me to buy the occasional book (via bookshop.org, of course).

Asako Yuzuki’s ‘Butter’ featured on my list of Books to read before you visit Japan

When the postman delivered the ‘Last One Out’ by Jane Harper, I knew it was time to clear the reading decks. This is her sixth book, (I’ve compiled a list if you want to read the others) and I know my precious reading time is going to consumed by her latest release. To begin with, I keep it to a chapter a day, let the story and the setting sink in, thinking about the characters and their motivations.

My last day finishing this I woke an hour before the alarm and it was the first thing I reached for.

What’s the setting in ‘Last One Out’?

When I start a new Jane Harper novel I’m as eager to discover the setting as much as the plot and characters. This time it’s the town of Carrolan in New South Wales, which is being slowly eaten up by a mining operation, a black mass on the horizon that emits an ominous industrial hum and covers everything in grimy dust.

Harper zooms in, and our attention is on three abandoned buildings on the side of a hill just outside the town, connected by three paths that converge into a dusty track. There’s a pretty ivy covered cottage, a weatherboard farmhouse and and a squat sandstone bungalow, now boarded up.

What’s the story?

The prologue takes place five years to the modern day, where Sam Crowley stands on the dusty track, looking up at the three buildings. It’s his 21st birthday, and he’s due back at the family home for a party. He never makes it.

We join his mum Ro, dad Griff and sister Della five years later, as they gather at the family home for a memorial to the son and brother who just disappeared.

Carrolan and Characters

As previously mentioned, this is a town on its last legs. At the single crossroads the only building in operation is the pub, and that’s only open a couple of hours a week. From the start you feel it won’t be long until the last person has left.

There’s still some lingering resentment between the last of the towns inhabitants. Originally united in their determination to resist the mine, cracks in the alliance appeared when first one sold, then others followed. The few who remain know they’ll only get a fraction of the original offers, whilst others have come back out of guilt, whilst some are tied for family reasons. But most have left, or are making plans to do so.

The events have taken a toll on Ro and Griff’s marriage, each alone in their grief. Gathering for the memorial, they start to look through some boxes of Sam’s things. Will a further visit to the three abandoned homes on the hillside reveal any secrets?

Summary

This was a slow burner for me. As is usual in her books the setting is an integral part of the story, and she excels in creating a dusty, abandoned backdrop. It took a wee while for the atmosphere and tension to build, though I was intrigued with the mystery from the start.

As usual her characterisation was spot on, all believable with their own motivations and burdens. I read slowly, my suspicions fluctuating around the characters.

I really felt for Griff and Ro, their grief felt all too real and it gave the story an emotional heart that you don’t always find in thrillers. There was also something sad to watch as the town slowly disintegrated, soon to be swallowed up.

I found this to be atmospheric and melancholic, beautifully written as usual and I didn’t mind the slower pace. It was very much character driven, tightly layered with a mystery that comes to the boil nicely in the final third.

Already looking forward to the next one.

326 pages Macmillan

April 14, 2026

I no longer include Amazon links in my reviews. Please support your local library and bookshops. Libby is also great.

If you do wish to purchase online, feel free to support independent bookshops and contribute to the hosting of this website by purchasing via Bookshop.org 

If you liked this, you might also like ‘The Survivors’ or ‘Exiles’by Jane Harper, whilst another thriller you might enjoy is ‘God of the Woods’ by Liz Moore.

Nineties

I loved the passion I had for books back when I was younger. I remember this book having a big impact on me back in the day - it was so effortlessly cool, concerned with matters of the teenage heart, and of course death. I’d also been obsessed with The Beatles since I’d been a child, and that particular song held a deep affection for me.

Parts of it seemed to inhabit almost an inbetween world, though this didn’t really surprise me - ‘The Wind Up Bird Chronicles’ had been my first Murakami, so I was happy to go along with whatever was happening, even if was strange.

This is more straightforward - essentially the story of a man looking back on his youth - specifically his relationships with two women. His memory is triggered when he hears the title song on a plane, about 17 years later,

‘The melody never failed to send a shudder through me, but this time it hit me harder than ever.’

What is it about the song? For me it has this wistfulness, this sense of something just slipping away. The music just has the folksy warmth, Harrisons sitar adding something indefinable yet traditional to a song that sounds fresh, even now. I had to put it on whilst writing this. Still beguiling.

(Lennon wrote it under the influence of Bob Dylan — who even wrote a response song, Fourth Time Around, feeling Lennon had borrowed too closely from his style. You can hear it in the oblique, image-led lyrics).

It has this slight sense of dislocation, of being between worlds. It's the perfect sonic equivalent of what Murakami does with Japan in the novel — real but dreamlike, familiar but just out of reach.

Toru Watanabe

The story takes place in sixties Japan, with Toru living in Japan against a backdrop of student protests. He’s mostly immune to the unrest, still grieving the loss of his friend Kizuki, and generally feeling disconnected. He reads a lot, in particular F Scott Fitzgerald and Western Literature, and likes his music (of course I appreciate now that he sticks on a Bill Evans record, who I didn’t know back then).

He remains an intriguing character. He’s quite passive at times, sometimes frustratingly so, but there’s also the sense that he’s learned to exist by being at a remove from everything. There’s a stillness to him , a trustworthiness, and that’s appealing - in fact, it’s what attracts Midori and his friend Nagasawa to him.

Nagasawa is an interesting one - he’s a foil to Toru. Charismatic, driven and ruthless, whilst Toru is quiet and inward. He’s not just a villian though - he just knows what he wants, and there’s an honesty to him.

Toru is completely devoted to Naoko. But at the same time, Midori appeals because she’s different, vivacious and present. Toru is not quite there, and it’s that opaqueness, an ambiguity, that makes him so appealing as a narrator.

Naoko and Midori

The two women in this love triangle are Naoko and Midori. Naoko is the tragic figure, haunted by grief and fragile, sort of operating in a grey area between life and death. There’s something beautiful but unreachable about her. She was Kizuki’s girlfriend, so she and Toru share a deep grief. They bond by walking through the streets of Tokyo, and later in a sanatorium, a community as closed off as she is. Toru loves her, and feels he is the only one who can reach her.

Midori is almost a polar opposite. She’s completely present, funny, daring and full of energy. She too has pain in her life, but she processes it in a completely different way.

That’s where the tension in the novel lies - which way does Toru want to go? He does love them both, but for different reasons. It comes down loyalty and loss versus possibility.

Japan

There’s a melancholic, beautiful (especially the countryside around the Sanatorium), slightly mysterious feel to the setting. The sanatorium where Naoko retreats sits deep in the mountains, far from Tokyo and far from ordinary life. Murakami describes it with real tenderness — cool air, dense forest, a community that exists almost outside of time. When Toru visits her there, the landscape feels like a physical expression of Naoko herself — beautiful, isolated, and quietly heartbreaking. It's one of the most evocative settings in the novel, and one that stays with you long after the story ends.

I have to also mention Reiko, Naoko’s friend (and later Toru’s) who has had a breakdown of her own. But there’s something grounded and warm about her, and some of the most warm and intimate scenes are when she’s playing guitar for them. There’s also a sense that Reiko is ok - she has scars, but she knows who she is, and is resilient.

Should you read Norwegian Wood?

Did it have the same impact on me? Well, in the same way that you can't stand in the same river twice — because you're not the same person and it's not the same river — the effect was a bit more muted this time. I'd forgotten most of the details, though I always knew the outcome. But the mood of the book was still the same.

There's no doubting it remains a haunting read, one that has lingered with me for many years. It's difficult to describe, but there's a particular quality in Murakami where you feel the absence of something you can't quite name. An ache, a wistfulness. Writing this Haruki Murakami Norwegian Wood review has made me realise how much I enjoy spending time in his worlds.

I don't burn with the same desire for art, for life, that I had back then. That's just a fact of mellowing with age. But there was a quiet pleasure in falling under Murakami's spell again. I'm a bit more lived in now, so it just hit differently — and that's ok.

If you've never read Murakami, this is the place to start. It's his most accessible novel — no magical realism, no talking cats or girls stuck down wells, just a deeply human story about grief, love and the people we lose along the way. If it gets under your skin, and it will, then The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is waiting for you.

296 pages, Paperback - Translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin

First published September 4, 1987

I no longer include Amazon links in my reviews. Please support your local library and bookshops. Libby is also great.

If you do wish to purchase online, feel free to support independent bookshops and contribute to the hosting of this website by purchasing via Bookshop.org 

If you liked this, you might also like ‘The City and it’s uncertain Walls’ or ‘After Dark’ by the same author.

In 1958, a Stormont politician proposed draining Lough Neagh — the largest lake in Ireland — to create a seventh county for Northern Ireland. It never happened, but in ‘Few and Far Between’ Jan Carson has looked at that forgotten piece of political madness and asked: but what if it had?

Terence O’Neill

As barmy as this sounds, it was said to have been an idea conceived by Terence O’Neill, who became prime minister of the North in 1963. The idea was to drain the Lough, turning the area into a seventh county of Ulster, boosting employment in the area. Ultimately and not surprisingly, the idea came to nothing.

But maybe it’s not as far fetched as it sounds. When you consider the ingenuity of the Dutch with dykes and polders, land reclamation projects from the Chinese, Ancient Egyptians and Aztecs, perhaps he was onto something. A quick google even reveals that draining Lough Neagh was tried four times between 1846 and 1959 to prevent flooding - which sometimes revealed small submerged islands.

Lough Neagh

I’ll come back to those small submerged islands shortly. But first Lough Neagh - never out of the news here in the North of Ireland. 5 miles wide and 18 miles long, it’s been supplying over 40% of the North’s drinking water and supporting Europe's largest commercial eel fishery. Part of its shoreline lies in County Armagh, just a few miles up the road from where I am. It’s been central to life for generations of families here.

In the summer of 2023, massive blooms of blue-green algae appeared, so severe they were visible from space. Despite a national outcry, the algae returned in 2024, then again in 2025, and is now back once more in 2026. It’s an incredibly depressing story, but what caused it?

Well, it seems to be a combination of factors. For decades, excess nutrients from agricultural fertiliser, poor wastewater treatment and septic tanks have polluted the water. Climate change and the presence of an invasive species, the zebra mussel, have encouraged the growth of the poisonous blue-green algae.

To further complicate matters, the bed and soil of Lough Neagh is privately owned by the Earl of Shaftesbury, an English Aristocrat which has made more difficult efforts to establish community ownership and proper governance. Enviroment minister Andrew Muir has tried but repeatedly comes up against vested interests.

Like I said, never out of the news and the headline is a simple one: The Lough is dying.

Islands

So back to those Islands I mentioned earlier. What Jan Carson has done is imagine what would have happened if O’Neill’s plan had come to fruition - and what would life have been like on the islands for those inhabitants?

Well, this is a Jan Carson novel, and if you've been here before, you'll know I rate her highly. Books such as ‘The Raptures’ about a mysterious illness which affects a group of school children. And the dark and quirky short story collection ‘Quickly, while they still have horses’.

So life on the islands as imagined by Carson is done in her own distinctive style, and is centered around Marion and Robert John, siblings who grew up on the Ark - the name given to the collection of small islands on the ‘Archipelago’.

The Ark

Marion and Robert John were the children of renowned anthropologist RJ Connolly and Ursula, who moved the family to the Ark in the 60s. The group of islands was viewed as a sanctuary from the troubles which were to break out at the end of that decade.

The people who moved to the islands were generally those whom mainland society judged and condemned. On the Ark, they were accepted. Fuelled by heady optimism, the people who settled on Big Flat were not just getting along — they were actively integrating, mixing and mingling, cohabiting without a thought for the traditional sectarian divide devastating the North. As RJ mentions early on, the Ark is "both victim of the ongoing conflict and an act of embodied protest" against it. But the novel makes clear the utopia was never as clean as the idea of it.

In the modern day, the authorities have decided that the Lough should be flooded, hopefully dealing with the algae problem. The Connolly children are terrified of this taking place, as it would mean they were being flooded out of their home, and forced to face truths they’d prefer not to confront.

Marion and Robert John

Marion and Robert John are the main characters in the book. A lot of Robert John’s story revolves around his relationship with his father, and how that has shaped him as a man. I’ve read some excellent books on toxic masculinity, such as Michael Magee’s ‘Close to Home’ but this is interesting in that Robert John is a lot older (late fifties/early sixties).

Marion has been a caretaker to this island, and there is a feeling that life is passing her by. She has a secret addiction to social media, and wonders what her role, if any, would be in the outside world.

The Ark is their prison as much as their home. They can't leave because of what they'd have to face, and they can't stay because the flood is coming whether they like it or not.

There are other characters. Alex is a young anthropologist who arrives on the island, keen to meet the offspring of the esteemed RJ Connolly, who the siblings hope can help them stop the flooding, whilst they are also wary of in case she discovers some secrets about the past.

There are few residents left now, but there is Sandra, an older Trans woman who doesn’t think she can face life on the mainland. There other inhabitants of the island, who aren’t as easily explained.

The Stranger Islands

There's always a point in a Jan Carson book when I'm reminded why I enjoy her work so much, and it's when the magic realism first reveals itself. It works so well because it gets at something straight realism can't — that the trauma of the conflict didn't end when the conflict did. It seeped into everything: families, mental health, how men behave, how women are treated. Carson doesn't lecture you about any of this. She just builds you an island and lets you figure it out.

This is where the magic realism takes hold - the ark is grounded enough to seem real, but also very strange. There’s the sleepers - women who won’t wake up and are nursed around the clock. The almost deads, souls in limbo, clinging on. (These folk made me think of ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ by George Saunders). There's also one for suicides, and another that swallows anything placed on its surface.. Handy in the North for those who wanted to get rid of a range of incriminating materials, but these things have a habit of reappearing.

Summary

This review took a lot longer than expected as I got drawn into quite a few internet rabbit holes as I read about the history of the Lough. It also got me thinking a lot about the themes in the book and what Jan Carson has to say about the North, about trauma, about memory, and the things we as a society here would prefer not to face.

Maybe I’m being too simple in my understanding (but hey, it’s my blog so I can interpret it any which way I want) but the novel is not just the inability to confront the past — it's that the past won't let you go either. The ark is that place where we thought we could quarantine our trauma, only to discover that water always finds a way back in.

Like I said earlier, the Lough is dying. Years of mismanagement, of agricultural runoff that nobody dealt with - burying the problems rather than dealing with them - has resulted in this.

Really enjoyed the book, (I should say it’s very funny in parts too) and the Lough Neagh crisis gives the novel an almost unbearable real-world weight. You can probably tell by now that she’s one of my favourite storytellers.

Few and Far Between is about what happens when a society tries to solve its problems by putting them on an island and hoping they stay there. They don't. They never do.

Pub Date Apr 09 2026 | Random House UK, Transworld Publishers 

Thanks to Random House UK for the ARC via Netgalley

Available via Bookshop.org and there’s a special edition via No Alibis bookshop

In 2023, a Chinese man called Hu Anyan posted an essay online about working the night shift in a sweltering logistics warehouse — and it went viral across a country of a billion and a half people. He had worked nineteen jobs in roughly as many years, drifting between cities with little more than his copies of Chekhov and Carver for company.

Literary Sensation

What began as an essay has become a literary sensation in China, and when translated worldwide it made many ‘best of’ lists at the end of 2025. So what is it about a man describing 19 jobs in 19 years that has made this such a success?

Hu Anyan was born in Guangzhou in 1979, and as a young worker in a burgeoning economy he found himself working in a variety of positions across the country. During the covid lockdowns he began posting online of his experiences in a logistics warehouse where the nights were so hot, he could drink three litres of water - without being able to take a toilet break.

These online posts became popular, and though he had no intention of writing a book, in the short amount of time he had available he began to do so.

Beijing

One of the main sections of the book is Hu’s job delivering parcels in Beijing. He arrived there one morning in Spring 2018, uploaded his CV to a job site, and had a phone call before lunch. He was recruited through a headhunting service and went for an interview that same afternoon in Yizhuang. It begins almost comically fast —one day in Beijing, already working.

The conditions were relentless: twelve-hour shifts, unpaid trial periods, extreme heat, constant surveillance, and the economic pressure to complete a delivery every four minutes to remain profitable.

Riding an electric trike in summer, the metal was often scalding to the touch within moments of parking. He describes waiting over half an hour outside residential complexes for customers who kept saying "soon, soon" — then calling back an hour later to ask where he was.

Under constant pressure, it takes its toll and eventually the job comes to an end. Knowing this seems to give him renewed energy - there’s kindness and humanity in the way he no longer rushes his route, taking the time to talk to customers, going out of his way to help them when delivering.

Other Jobs

Selling bicycles, running a women's clothing store, working in a bakery, making 3D architectural renderings, doing night shifts at a logistics warehouse - there’s not much he doesn’t do, with a variety of bosses along the way.

What’s striking is that there’s no upward trajectory to these positions - he’s mostly moving between horizontal rungs, the workload and pay staying the same. Convenience store clerk, security guard, he just moves between them with little complaint.

China

Hu has called himself an ‘honest recorder’ rather than a critic of low paid labour. He is just one of the millions who has left rural China for the cities, many of whom are undocumented with no access to social services, subsidised housing, public schools or healthcare. I found it interesting to read about ‘the hukou system’ — which ties social entitlements to your place of birth registration — and means you can live and work in Beijing for years while remaining effectively invisible to the state.

China inhabits late-stage capitalism through its unique blend of market economy and state-owned business — there is no Amazon but instead the vast Alibaba ecosystem, WeChat instead of Facebook. The logistics network is incredibly efficient, with next day delivery within the same province — but this progress, as Hu says himself, comes at the expense of workers at the lower end of the industry.

You can understand why the book has resonated in his homeland.

Hu Anyan

I found myself admiring Hu Anyan because he doesn’t constantly complain about these jobs. There’s something very zen about the way he goes about his work. He doesn’t seem to have much in the way of need -it’s not that he’s supressed them, it’s just he had reduced them so he doesn’t need a lot to get by.

There’s no cynicism or bitterness in his writing - in fact, he comes across as humble. As a writer he’s blessed with a keen, sharp eye, and is an unflinching observer of the world he’s in.

But of course it does affect him. One bit that stood out for me was when he talked about how the delivery work was eroding him - he writes that there is a reason deep-sea fish are blind and animals in the desert tolerant of thirst — a big part of who he is is determined by his environment and not his nature.

There’s no drama or pity to his observations, and it often felt like an act of contemplation.

Audiobook

This is one of those occasions when I’m not going to recommend listening to the audiobook. It took me an absolute age to listen to this because I kept drifting off and constantly found myself having to rewind because I’d missed whole chapters. If you’re having sleep issues, like I am, perhaps it’s the book for you, but I wanted to pay attention to the book and found I couldn’t.

At times it’s just hypnotically boring - apt given the work being described. Winson Ting does an admirable job, but I found myself fighting a losing battle if I listened to this when I was tired.

Summary

What was most interesting to me was Hu’s role as observer. Even though he’s performing these roles whilst being trapped in an algorithm that governs his deliveries, the unpaid trial shifts, the wages that evaporate - he's simply watching. Watching the system, watching his colleagues, watching what the work does to him, watching himself react.

He finds freedom in his ability to remain aware of himself within his circumstances rather than being entirely consumed by them. He is present as the awareness watching it all. Non dual, I know.

Deliver Parcels in Beijing is not really a memoir, and it's not really social commentary either — though it contains both. It ends up being an act of sustained, honest attention to ordinary life, written by a man who had nothing to prove and no agenda beyond telling the truth of what he saw.

He wrote it all down without bitterness, without self-pity, and with a dry humour that keeps the darkness from becoming unbearable. Reading it, I kept thinking about presence — about what it means to remain yourself inside conditions designed to erase you. Hu never frames it in those terms. But the question is there on every page, quiet and insistent, whether he intended it or not.

Penguin Audio 2025

Translated by Jack Hargreaves

Read by Winson Ting - 10hrs 19 mins

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi arrived in San Francisco in 1959, a quiet Japanese Zen priest who ended up changing the spiritual landscape of the Western world. His new book — the first collection of his talks in over two decades — is called ‘Becoming Yourself,’ and it carries the same unhurried clarity that made ‘Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind’ a classic.

The point is to learn how to be yourself, how to be a person in the way that a stone is completely a stone.

Shunryū Suzuki

This is the second mention of Shunryū Suzuki in this blog. A few years ago I wrote a post about on my favourite books on Meditation and Mindfulness and ‘Zen Mind, Beginners Mind’ got a mention. There was something in the stripped back, simple style that for me made it such a wonderful introduction to Zen Buddhism.

Like that book, ‘Becoming Yourself’ is based on talks given by the famous Japanese Zen priest. As mentioned above, he is credited as being one of the most important figures in bringing Zen Buddhism to the West, and ‘Zen Mind..’ is considered a classic of it’s kind.

This first collection in over two decades was put together by Abbot Jiryu Rutschman-Byler and the late Sojun Mel Weitsman, who spent years working through recordings and rough transcripts.

‘Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm.’

Three Movements

‘Becoming Yourself’ is divided into three parts - The first is on sitting and being yourself, the second on bringing that spirit into your daily life, whilst the third is centered on the Buddhist precepts - guidelines for living with integrity.

I liked how this was structured - each part fed into the next one. Practice is nothing if you can’t bring it into your daily living. What’s the point otherwise? I found the last section on ethics interesting, and something I’d like to read more on, whilst the first two ‘movements’ will be revisted quite a few times.

Teacher

He was obviously an extraordinary teacher, and I honestly feel that his quiet wisdom really comes across in these pages. What he’s saying, what comes from Zen Buddhism, is ultimately is that there is another way to be. Not to stop and think, or stop and figure yourself out, but just to stop. To sit.

What surprised me reading this was how radical that actually feels — how much resistance arises, how much the mind wants to turn even stillness into a project. But underneath all that, Suzuki seems to be pointing at something that was never missing. The sitting isn't a technique for getting somewhere; it's more like coming home to a place you never really left.

It just happened that during my time of sitting with this book that I was also ‘practising’ natural meditation, or do nothing meditation as it’s sometimes called. It’s been interesting for me to notice how much grasping the mind engages in, looking for a technique in something as simple as meditation. To just sit, with no method, has been so liberating.

"Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don't serve them tea."

Summary

Whether you’re just exploring Zen Buddhism or a seasoned practitioner, I think you’ll find something that resonates in this volume. I’m not sure it has the immediacy of ‘Zen Mind, Beginners Mind’ but not many books do. It’s a quiet, generous book, that yo read slowly and return to. (I returned to the first page when I reached the end.)

For a teacher who died in 1971, he feels remarkably present on every page.

The best pointings are simple, true and straight:

Stop trying to get somewhere and notice what’s already here.

The 2025 Booker Prize Winner ‘Flesh’ by David Szalay is the story of István, a Hungarian who we follow over the course of his life both at home and abroad. It’s written in a sparse, unsentimental manner that can be unsettling but always compelling.

Unsettling

I’ve been struggling to read much in the way of fiction but I always try and make time for the Booker prize winner. As usual, I went in cold and haven’t read any Szalay’s other books. Anyone who has - are they along the same lines as this? Let me know below.

I found myself gripped by this from the start, though it’s unsettling from early on. There’s a sparseness about the prose, and there are long stretches where it’s just short clipped sentences between two characters. I had an uneasy feeling as I was reading it, but found I wanted to continue.

There’s an uncomfortable encounter between István and an older neighbour early on that sets the tone for the rest of the book. Szalay describes this incident without judgement, and it put me in mind of the films of Micheal Haneke. The unblinking gaze, cool and controlled.

Transactional

István leaves Hungary, and we find him first in Iraq and later London. I won’t spoil the storyline, not that there’s much in the way of plot. But the sense continues throughout the book that relationships and life are transactional in nature. I don’t think his physical attributes are ever described, but he proves himself useful in Iraq, and then later as a bodyguard in London. When he does rise up the social mobility ladder, I always got the feeling that he was just trading his physical ‘skills’ to do so.

There’s not much in the way of romance or intimacy. There’s often an imbalance of power in many of the relationships and a sense of people being used, but often the characters are complicit in it.

István

I wondered throughout the book about free will. István reacts, he drifts, and he often makes the most of his circumstances. You don’t get the sense that he has the words to describe his interior life, though he hurts like everyone else does but finds it hard to express it. It’s definitely a book with something to say about many modern men such as István who has been very much shaped by his experiences in this world, and his is a life unexamined. Not that I ever judged him or felt it was his fault, which I think is down to the skill of the author.

Of course he wants more from life, and he makes the most of his opportunity to advance through the social classes. Though at times I wondered how much he had to do with it - did he ever belong in a world that was never really his?

The book is called ‘Flesh’ so of course this is something central to the book. István trades his body as an asset, whether with older women, as a soldier, as a bodyguard. He is valued physically, though not emotionally.

Summary

Hard to say I enjoyed this, not that it matters. I found a lot if it unsettling and clinical (much like the Haneke films I mentioned) but always compelling. It made me think about exploitation, about the transactional nature of relationships, about mobility and the modern male. I liked the writing style, and there’s a sense as you read it of tension tightening, and at times I wanted to look away but couldn’t. I finished it with a mixture of admiration and unease, which I think is exactly what Szalay was aiming for.