That it touched on the lives of esteemed and therefore crotchety poetry types was a bonus. I sniggered at what I recognised and was moved by the emotional resonance as characters were revealed. Absolutely everyone is marvellously, morally grey in this book. I texted a friend halfway, ‘it’s maddening – he writes with such lucidity and nuance, I can’t imagine [one of his contemporaries] writing about AI and geopolitical disaster with this sort of alacrity.’  

One of its themes are the prisons we create for ourselves – whether built or assumed. The way this is relayed in the second part of the book should be studied. 

I think of it as a sister-read of  «Atonement» in how it explores revisionist history, curative narratives, the sleight of hand that is memory. There is irony and caricaturing so subtle it’s practically cheeky, but intentional as is always with McEwan – there is no loop left unclosed. He practices prose with the deliberateness of poetry. 

There’s even some mild futuristic sci-fi and a touch of virtue-extolling, some geopolitical doomsdaying. Its sharp but also snaps back into the delicacy and ease of an English cottage garden. It’s also inexplicably only 300 pages long. 

I don’t want to tell you anything about the plot. Go read it, and let’s chat over voicenotes or with takeaway coffee with our heels disturbing autumnal mulch. A perfect late-year read. 

Reading this book oddly seems to attract  sand in your eyes. My teenagers were mortified. Friendship, grief and belonging is captured in a way that slows time and turns pages.

There was one part that snagged at me, in an otherwise straightforward novel. One of our protagonists is an artist who paints from pain and compulsion, or boredom or catharsis or any other reason than the accolades and fame which he goes on to achieve. The plot opens with him encountering someone who is wired the same way.

As a poet that writes to encapsulate and occasionally platform a thought or a moment, my motivation (flagged, faded and life-worn) tends to be the process itself.  But still, there are moments. When folk connect to one of my pieces, or see the wiring for what it is, or light up at the same things. (Not often, not regularly – it IS still poetry for goodness sake.) It has made me feel like the luckiest, most useful person on the planet. It’s only a  moment, it’s fleeting, but it’s everything. This feeling was glittered across this novel. It made me ache, it made me smile. It made me want to write again. 

There’s so much love in all its forms it’s actually a little rude to be made to work so hard and feel so much just to try and read a book on holiday. 

I would not recommend this book to everyone, but I would to people I truly love. For anyone who feels like one of us. 

Anyway, at this point I would read Fredrik Backman’s discarded grocery lists. Perhaps after I’m done with German I will try and tackle Swedish.

In 1947 a little girl is pushed into a swimming pool with an early prototype of an aqualung – taking her first breaths towards becoming a marine biology legend. Two teenagers in Chicago’s fierce love and competition with each other heralds their undoing. Deep-learning algorithms transform social networking and change the way humans relate and play and an island in French Polynesia must decide their fate.

This book is an urgent, contemporary, gasp-out-loud read. Themes:  adolescence, friendship, found-family. Features  marine life so gorgeously recounted it reads like magical realism.

Manages to be cautionary without being preachy and lends itself to broad interpretation.

Leaves you with hope.

• Backdrop Fictional rural Connecticut
• Themes unlikely friendship, grief, poverty, drug abuse, immigration, mental illness
• You might like this if you liked ‘Demon Copperhead’, found family, quirky characters, visceral, poetic prose
• You might NOT like this if ambiguous endings, drug abuse, and stories of abandonment are not to your taste
• Verdict I loved it. Vuong’s writing cradles these characters in their hope and humour, gritty desperate love in all forms. They will stay with you.

• Destructive, formative love
• a timeline that traces artists, art, freedom and betrayal
• from fug and grime of the 90s to sanitised inequality of pandemic 2020
• is ironic, somehow lightly comedic with a stinging pathos

Already ridden with papercuts for being a little different in the ricepaper veil between childhood and adolescence – the loss of her brother, the diminishing presence of her mother, and the small-town stigma sets salt into what already hurts.

Luna befriends Zot, a transplant from Chernobyl and the two children pull you into lands of make believe, clear-eyed child logic and light scheming. There are a cast of complementary characters, flawed, hilarious, despicable and kind. I picked this book up in Rome in the Spring, and ear-marked it as a summer read. Some reviews criticise the pacing, it’s slow to pick up all the oddballs on the way but this is precisely what makes it such a great sprawling summer read. It was touching, witty and delicately relayed. I can only imagine how good it reads in the original Italian. 

There are difficult, inked-in scenes of domestic violence in this book handled with a frankness that still leaves room for empathy. It is  somehow still gentle, a vignette of humanity, as delicate and complex as the butterfly wings that sets these stories in motion.

Gordon, Julian, Bear.

Three names for the same boy whose identity, relationships and destiny flex around the circumstances of his name. This book had me racing, savouring, and thinking about amongst other things – ‘what’s in a name?’ Definitely one of the best of the year so far. 

• 11%  intriguing, a painter uses stream of consciousness as the medium to subsume art forms. Innovative and hazy water colour trails of thought with occasional beams of clarity. I’m curious.  
• 14%  I am no longer curious, yet stubbornly hopeful for  ‘stream of consciousness’ to represent something transcendent, but I can never seem to get on this train. Not for ‘Walden’ or ‘No One is Talking About This’  or ‘Checkout-19.’ My own thoughts sound preachy, I’d rather not drown in anyone else’s puddle.
• 16% maybe I’m just an experimental format snob. How disappointing for a freeverse millennial poet. 
• 18%  Would I like this more if it were an actual poem? 
• 21%  No.
• 22% Despite certain luminous turns of phrases, and multiple highlighted passages, it now feels more appropriative of poetry, than poetic 
• 42% It’s a very bad sign that Ulysses just popped into my mind
• 46% ‘All living beings, except man, are a scandal of astonishment’ its like squid-fishing at night for writing prompts. There, now I’m doing it too.
• 48%  ‘I notice I’m writing as if I were between sleep and wakefulness’ – literally, just NOW? 
• 61% ooh, I like this bit about flowers
• Rest of the book – I’m going to finish this in one sitting. Like being on day three of a holiday and realising, OK, this place isn’t for me but let’s make the best of it. 

The next time I put a ‘stream-of-consciousness’ read on my ‘to read’ list please check in on me. 

Given the premise – a queer, mixed-race man spanning Thatcher‘s Britain to 2020, there should have been an interesting perspective, but the writing was so busy othering the protagonist that the reader easily misses most of the story.

The time jumps are disorientating and any hoped-for identity-affirming plot is distorted by a rather horrifying Paddington-bear-esque ‘fist-out-of-water’ dialogue.

The theatre references were suffocating.

Although the pacing of the first part of the novel gently affixes a lavender haze of adolescence and becoming, it unravelled in a sprawling, exhausting way that makes the reader forget to hate the rather forgettable antagonist. Had hoped this would be Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan coded. I tried very hard to like it.

The memoir format possibly had this on the backfoot from the start – would it have felt as jarring if it were a podcast or a work of fiction? It had a messy SATC undertone that prods in the direction of columnist gone rogue. The satirical emails, tongue-in cheek lists and recipes added to the noise – it was all over the place, and maybe this was a storytelling device but it somehow diluted the writer as she diligently and distractedly opened bag after bag of tricks. An anecdote here, some self-deprication there. The final straw that murdered the camel were the timeline inconsistencies and eye-smarting negative exceptionalism. 2.5 stars.