There’s something about Conn Iggulden’s storytelling that makes history feel less like dates and dust and more like a pulse-pounding political thrilleThere’s something about Conn Iggulden’s storytelling that makes history feel less like dates and dust and more like a pulse-pounding political thriller—with extra daggers. Nero, the first in his new trilogy, is exactly that: a slick, muscular retelling of early imperial Rome that catapults us right into the bloodstained corridors of power. If you’ve got a soft spot for the Roman Empire (as I absolutely do), this is catnip.
That said, I went into this thinking it would be a character study of the Nero—the lyre-playing, empire-burning, famously unhinged emperor—and while he’s here (as Lucius), the spotlight very much belongs to his mother: Agrippina. And let’s be real: she steals every scene anyway. The title may be Nero, but this is Agrippina’s stage, her rise, her survival, her razor-sharp ambition as she navigates a world where misstep means execution. She’s terrifying, magnetic, and completely unforgettable.
“The closer you are to the heart of the empire, the closer you are to power, intrigue, and danger.� That’s not just marketing copy—it’s the soul of this book.
There’s a dizzying cast (Caligula! Tiberius! Claudius! Messalina! Vile, viler, vilest!) and while I enjoyed the cutthroat drama, the sheer number of historical players sometimes dulled the emotional impact. Names are flung around like javelins, and I occasionally had to pause to Google just to remember who was betraying who. Character depth sometimes takes a backseat to the breakneck political manoeuvring. It’s fascinating, but a little emotionally cool. The cost of all the intrigue? A bit of heart.
Still, Iggulden's sense of place is absolutely phenomenal. You can feel the marble underfoot, the sweat of the Senate, the chill of exile. He conjures up Rome not just as a location, but a living, breathing, blood-soaked organism. And when the politics hit, they hit hard. This is history told in a very masculine voice—gritty, urgent, and unrelenting—but even so, I found myself totally hooked.
If you’re here for rich interiority, or characters dripping in nuance and self-reflection, this might not be your arena. But if you want ambition, ruthlessness, and some truly deliciously wild history brought vividly to life (and let’s face it—Roman drama is elite-tier drama), then Nero delivers.
For me, the emotional depth was a little light, but the history? Oh, the history slaps.
I am not okay. I finished Sunrise on the Reaping and immediately stared at my ceiling like it had answers. Suzanne Collins has returned to Panem with I am not okay. I finished Sunrise on the Reaping and immediately stared at my ceiling like it had answers. Suzanne Collins has returned to Panem with a novel that not only delivers everything we ever wanted from Haymitch’s backstory—but devastates us in the process. If The Hunger Games trilogy was fire, this book is the slow, relentless burn of what comes after. The ash. The silence. The grief that never really goes away.
And honestly? I loved every second of it.
We always knew Haymitch was broken. But now we understand the fracture lines. We’ve walked the path with him—step by harrowing step—and Sunrise on the Reaping doesn't just fill in his past, it excavates it. It peels back the layers of sarcasm and self-loathing until we’re left with a boy who never asked to survive, and a man who’s been trying to forget that he did.
“They will not use my tears for their entertainment.�
Collins returns with the same sharp, scalpel-like prose that defined the original trilogy, but there’s something deeper, sadder here. Something richer. The world of Panem is still cruel, yes—but it’s the cruelty of memory, of what stays. The Games are only half the story. What comes after is the real reckoning.
We meet Haymitch on his 16th birthday, right as the 50th Hunger Games—aka the Quarter Quell—is about to pull twice the number of tributes from each district. And from the start, you feel it: this is going to hurt. He’s clever, he’s sharp, he’s in love. He’s trying. He’s still whole.
“I love you like all-fire.� “I love you like all-fire too.�
(Excuse me while I sob quietly in the corner.)
We know what’s coming. And still, it lands like a gut punch.
Haymitch’s Games are brutal—not just in violence, but in psychology. Collins is so, so good at making the horror personal. His alliance with Maysilee Donner (who, yes, wears the iconic mockingjay pin) is tender and tactical and utterly doomed. Their friendship broke me. Their banter reminded me of Katniss and Peeta in Catching Fire, but tinged with something darker: the knowledge that one of them won’t walk out.
And when she dies? Oh, reader. That death changed me.
“Maysilee leaves the world the way she wanted, wounded but not bowed.�
Haymitch wins the Games, but he doesn’t survive them. Not really. The Capitol sees to that. The punishment for his cleverness—his refusal to play the game by their rules—is swift and catastrophic. What they take from him after the arena is so much worse than death. His mother. His brother. Lenore. Everyone who made his world feel worth fighting for.
“I lie on her grave and remain there as night falls, dawn breaks, and blackness descends again. I tell her everything and beg her to return to me, to wait for me, to forgive me for all the ways in which I have failed.�
If you’ve ever wondered why Haymitch drinks, this book answers you with haunting clarity. He isn’t just a man numbing pain—he’s a man who’s outlived his purpose, too stubborn to die and too broken to live. And yet—he stays. He keeps mentoring, keeps resisting in the only ways he can. Quietly. Cleverly. Relentlessly.
And you understand, in your bones, why he is the one who saw something in Katniss. Why he couldn’t save the others, but maybe—just maybe—he could help her burn it all down.
“Winning isn’t surviving. It’s just a different way to die.�
There are so many brilliant threads here that tie into the original series—Plutarch’s rise, Beetee and Wiress’s quiet brilliance, Snow’s obsession with control. But none of it feels like fan service. It feels like truth. Like the scaffolding we didn’t realize was already there, finally lit up for us to see.
And that epilogue. My god.
“When Lenore Dove comes to me now, she’s not angry or dying... She’s grown older with me... Like she’s been living her life beside me as the years passed, instead of lying in her grave.�
I am not well.
If The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was the Capitol’s origin story, Sunrise on the Reaping is the rebellion’s heartbeat. It’s personal. It’s political. And it’s profoundly, painfully human.
Suzanne Collins didn’t just write a prequel. She wrote a eulogy. She wrote Haymitch Abernathy in full color, in grief and rage and brilliance. And in doing so, she’s given us the final piece of the Panem puzzle.
A must-read. A masterpiece. And—let’s be honest—the book we’ve all been waiting for.
Flesh by David Szalay is one of those books I finished, closed slowly, and then just... sat with. Not because I was emotionally shattered—though thereFlesh by David Szalay is one of those books I finished, closed slowly, and then just... sat with. Not because I was emotionally shattered—though there’s pain here, absolutely—but because I wasn’t quite sure how I felt. Even now, I remain a little conflicted.
Let’s start with this: the first 20%? Rough going. Not just in pacing, but in content. There’s a heavy dose of graphic sex early on, and while I understand the thematic intent—to show us how flesh (and the exploitation of it) shapes a life—it was still a lot, especially for readers who’d rather not marinate in that kind of detail. But once I pushed through the murk of those early chapters, the novel began to unfold, slowly and with real clarity, into something much deeper.
István, our protagonist, is more cipher than hero. He floats through life—acted upon rather than acting, absorbing consequences without really challenging the systems or people inflicting them. At times this is maddening. You want to shake him, scream do something, but you begin to realise that his passivity is the point. This is a story about how trauma, grooming, and dislocation fracture the psyche, strip away agency, and leave you watching your own life from a distance.
There’s brilliance in that idea. And Szalay delivers it with his usual surgical precision—lean prose, understated dread, and a masterful sense of time passing quietly until it explodes. But Flesh isn’t an easy book to warm to. The dialogue, in particular, grated on me at times—so many flat exchanges, so many people answering with "OK" it started to feel like a social experiment. (Was this a stylistic choice? Almost certainly. Was it effective? Debatable.)
Still, once I adjusted to the novel’s emotional minimalism, I started to admire what Szalay was doing. This is a quiet, ruthless examination of masculinity, migration, and the cost of staying numb. It’s about what happens when early violations echo through the decades, shaping a man who never really got the chance to be one.
If you're looking for high drama, big redemptive arcs, or sweeping moral insight, this won’t be your book. But if you’re in the mood for a slow-burn character study, a novel that lingers in its silences and sits with discomfort, Flesh will give you plenty to wrestle with.
3.5/5 � Difficult, distant, but ultimately rewarding. A sharp meditation on how damage calcifies, and how sometimes, the most haunting stories are the quietest ones. ...more
The Book of George is what happens when you take one man’s mediocrity, stretch it over two decades, and let it marinate in unchecked entitlement. And The Book of George is what happens when you take one man’s mediocrity, stretch it over two decades, and let it marinate in unchecked entitlement. And somehow—it works.
Let me say this upfront: George is not a good man. He’s not even a particularly interesting man. But Kate Greathead has written him with such surgical precision, such painfully sharp observational wit, that watching George stumble through life becomes... strangely addictive. We drop in on him at various points in his existence—school, aimless twenties, long-suffering girlfriend Jenny, doting-yet-disappointed mother Ellen—and what emerges is a portrait of a man who is completely incapable of self-awareness, allergic to accountability, and constantly confusing potential with personality.
George doesn’t grow. He doesn’t reflect. He doesn’t learn. He hurts people—not maliciously, but casually, which is somehow worse—and carries on as though his bad decisions are just weather patterns, inevitable and out of his control. He never dreams of trying, period.
And yet... I was entertained. Possibly even moved. Because the brilliance of this novel isn’t in redemption arcs or epiphanies—it’s in the brutal accuracy. The satire hits hard because it’s honest. We all know a George. (Some of us have dated him. Some of us have been him.) And watching his inner monologue—full of grand ideas, tepid ambitions, and half-hearted apologies—feels like watching someone flounder in slow motion while still refusing to admit the water is rising.
The structure—snapshots through time—keeps the pace nimble and gives the illusion of momentum, even as George remains frustratingly static. And I have to hand it to Greathead: she never panders to reader sympathy. George’s charm, when it flickers on, is just enough to keep you from giving up on him entirely. (A literary version of “Oh, that’s just George.�)
So no, this isn’t a feel-good novel. But it is a clever, bitingly funny, and oddly affecting one. A mirror held up to millennial masculinity, complete with smudges, blind spots, and a whole lot of unfinished potential.
3.5 stars � for the brilliant satire, the laugh-out-loud moments, and the slow, dawning horror that George might be closer to home than you’d like to admit. ...more
I Will Crash? This nook has crawled under my skin and lived there for a while. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t linear. It didn’t hold my hand. But myI Will Crash? This nook has crawled under my skin and lived there for a while. It wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t linear. It didn’t hold my hand. But my god, it got me.
Rosa hasn’t seen her brother in six years. Then one day, he turns up at her door, unannounced. She closes it in his face. Weeks later, he’s dead—car crash. What follows isn’t a grief memoir in any conventional sense, but a fragmented, lyrical excavation of memory, silence, and the psychic bruises families inflict on each other, especially when no one’s willing to name the harm out loud.
Watson’s style is gorgeously disjointed—spare on punctuation, rich in rhythm. It blurs thought, memory, and present action so seamlessly that you feel like you’re inside Rosa’s mind, caught in the tidal pull of emotion and recollection. I’ve read books that try to do this kind of stream-of-consciousness work, but I Will Crash is the rare example where form and feeling are in complete sync. The fragmentation is the story.
Some novels use experimental form like it’s a trick mirror. Here, it’s a necessity. Rosa’s experience—of being gaslit, neglected, of navigating grief when love and trauma are tangled—can’t be told in neat paragraphs. Watson understands that. The repetition, the white space, the staccato rhythm—it mirrors the way trauma insists on replaying itself, unbidden.
As someone who hasn’t spoken to her own brother in years, parts of this hit too close. That ache of unresolved hurt, the sharp edge of what was never said, the way you can love someone and want them far away—it’s all here. And yet the novel never tips into melodrama. It’s measured, intimate, and quietly devastating.
There are scenes here that broke me open—flashes of childhood cruelty, of parents who don’t quite see, of partners who try to understand but can only reach so far. Rosa’s relationship with John, her boyfriend, is one of the most tender, realistic portrayals of modern intimacy I’ve read in a long time. The shared toothbrush moment alone? Gut punch.
Look, I Will Crash won’t be for everyone. It’s not plot-driven. It asks you to sit in discomfort. But for readers who love language that pulses with meaning, for anyone who knows what it means to carry old wounds that don’t scar cleanly—this is something special.
4.5/5 � Unflinching, lyrical, quietly ferocious. A masterclass in voice and form. Read it slowly. Let it bruise. ...more
You know when you read a book and think, this is important, and also, I absolutely did not enjoy this? That was Hunchback for me.
There’s no denying thYou know when you read a book and think, this is important, and also, I absolutely did not enjoy this? That was Hunchback for me.
There’s no denying that Saou Ichikawa is doing something bold here—writing from the inside of a body so rarely given narrative space, never mind sexual agency. As someone living with congenital myopathy, on a ventilator, in an electric wheelchair, Ichikawa does not shy away from the realities of disability. And by realities, I mean both the painful logistics (bodily function, social invisibility) and the raw, complicated desires society refuses to let disabled people have—especially if those desires are messy, sexual, or morally uncomfortable.
Enter Shaka Isawa, our narrator: brilliant, rageful, isolated, and obsessed with performing “normality� through one particular fantasy—getting pregnant and having an abortion. Not to become a mother. Not to nurture a child. But to participate in a rite of womanhood denied to her. "Just like a normal woman," she says. And I’ll be honest: that line left me reeling. Not because I couldn’t understand the grief beneath it, but because I couldn’t move past the shock long enough to sit with the ache.
Which is kind of the problem here.
This is not a gentle book. It doesn’t want your sympathy. It wants your discomfort. And on that front, it succeeds. There’s provocative sexual content packed into its slim frame, and a consistent undertow of resentment—toward able-bodied people, toward the body itself, toward the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable desire. But does provocation make it powerful? Not necessarily.
I found Shaka more abrasive than compelling, and while I deeply respect Ichikawa’s mission to interrogate the sanitization of disabled lives, I’m not convinced that making your protagonist so deliberately unlikeable is the best way to win readers over. And yet� maybe that’s the point? Maybe likability is a trap, too. Still, I couldn’t help but feel detached—emotionally, narratively—and for a book this intimate, that’s a shame.
The writing itself is sharp and unflinching, with bursts of bitter poetry, but structurally, it left me cold. The ending felt abrupt, the plot more like a provocation than a story. And while I appreciate the refusal to wrap things up neatly, I still wanted more—more exploration, more nuance, more than just shock and rage.
Would I recommend it? Cautiously, and only with caveats. This is not for the faint of heart, or for readers looking for comfort or redemption. But for those curious about voices that defy conventions and force us to reckon with uncomfortable truths about desire, disability, and embodiment—it’s a brave, unsettling piece of work.
2/5 � Fiercely written, deeply uncomfortable, and intellectually important� but not, for me, an enjoyable or effective novel. ...more
Okay. Rapture by Emily Maguire? Absolutely divine. And I don’t use that word lightly.
Let me put it this way: if you’d told me a novel about monastic lOkay. Rapture by Emily Maguire? Absolutely divine. And I don’t use that word lightly.
Let me put it this way: if you’d told me a novel about monastic life in ninth-century Europe would leave me weeping, scribbling quotes, and Googling “Pope Joan real???� at 2 a.m., I might’ve raised an eyebrow. But Maguire didn’t just win me over—she converted me. This book is a revelation. Literally.
Rapture follows Agnes, a wild, brilliant girl with a dangerous amount of intellect and a love of God that burns bright and unladylike. Rather than be married off or shut away in a convent, she disguises herself as a man—Brother John—and begins a journey through the cloisters of Fulda, the radical communes of Athens, and finally, the treacherous politics of Rome. It’s a retelling of the Pope Joan legend, yes, but it's also so much more: a story of faith, ambition, gender, identity, and sacrifice told in prose that positively glows.
The writing? Stunning. Lush but never overwrought, reverent without being sanctimonious, and quietly furious in all the right places. I was especially struck by how Maguire handled Agnes’s relationship to her faith—how her belief is not blind, but full of ache and questioning, how her devotion is both a source of strength and a burden. I’ve read many monastic novels (yes, that is a niche and yes, I proudly live there), and this is one of the best. It’s holy and human, all at once.
The feminist undercurrent here is masterful. Maguire doesn’t scream it—she doesn’t need to. The injustice is baked into every moment, every risk Agnes takes simply by existing as herself. Yet there's no bitterness. Just quiet resistance, resilience, and the power of a woman who dares to think, lead, and love beyond the roles assigned to her.
I finished this book with tears in my eyes and a feeling like I'd just stepped out of a cathedral—hushed, awed, changed. Rapture is exactly that: a rapture of story, soul, and staggering beauty.
Highly recommended for anyone who likes their historical fiction with grit, grace, and the occasional whiff of heresy. Amen....more
Honor Jones’s Sleep is a quiet devastation, a novel that moves like memory: fragmented, looping, occasionally opaque—but pulsing with emotional precisHonor Jones’s Sleep is a quiet devastation, a novel that moves like memory: fragmented, looping, occasionally opaque—but pulsing with emotional precision. It’s about Margaret, a woman trying to raise her daughters while carrying the wreckage of what was done to her in childhood—by her brother, and by her mother’s silence.
From the first pages, I felt myself resisting Margaret. She is prickly, distant, and sometimes even unlikeable—but that resistance faded the deeper I went, and the more I recognized the damage she’s working so hard to manage. “She often wondered: What was the point of her? She was ten years old.� The ache of that sentence stayed with me. Not because it was unfamiliar, but because it wasn’t.
Honor Jones writes with the cool precision of someone who understands that pain doesn’t always speak in screams. Sometimes it’s in the missed calls, the slightly-too-loud laughter, the way a mother “held the moment, made it an occasion,� while her daughter only felt jealousy.
At its heart, Sleep is about how abuse shapes not just the survivor, but the entire emotional architecture of a family. Jones doesn’t sensationalize Margaret’s trauma—if anything, she underplays it, which only sharpens its impact. The summer her brother Neal started coming into her room, “only until she stirred and flinched and felt the blanket around her knees like shallow water”—that image is burned into me. The restrained horror of it, the matter-of-factness, the way she knows that “people hurt children—because they wouldn’t remember, because they wouldn’t tell, because people didn’t think they were quite alive.�
What hit hardest, though, was the silence. The complicity. The not looking. “Too late, Margaret understood what Elizabeth’s expression had meant. She had been asking for help, pleading with Margaret, just this once, for a really big favor. She’d been saying, ‘Please don’t make me look.’� That line broke something in me.
And then, decades later, when Margaret needs her own version of safety, she realizes: “She’d thought a husband would keep her safe. But he hadn’t agreed to that; he didn’t even know that was what she was asking for.� It’s that particular, gendered exhaustion that so many of us will recognize—not just what was taken, but how we have to perform wellness just to keep moving forward.
The writing is spare, elegant, and emotionally intelligent. There are no explosive confrontations, no grand revelations—just the slow, painful unwinding of a life shaped by omission. Even the structure of the novel mirrors memory—scenes drift in and out, time slips, and we’re left trying to stitch the present to the past with nothing but fragments and feeling.
There were moments I wanted more resolution, more catharsis. But maybe the power of this novel lies in that refusal. After all, “every new thing that happened to you changed you; you couldn’t take it back.�
Sleep won’t be for everyone. It’s quiet. It’s uncomfortable. It holds up a mirror to a kind of familial damage we still don’t really know how to talk about. But for those who have lived even a sliver of this—who’ve wrestled with the idea that “maybe I’m the one who made it all worse”—this book sees you.
And as Margaret finally begins to draw boundaries, to say, “Here I end; there you begin,� it feels like more than fiction. It feels like survival. ________________________________________ ...more
Okay, so... egg collecting? Not exactly what I thought I was signing up for when I cracked open The Impossible Thing (yes, pun intended—deal with it).Okay, so... egg collecting? Not exactly what I thought I was signing up for when I cracked open The Impossible Thing (yes, pun intended—deal with it). But here we are: cliffside heists, stolen scarlet guillemot eggs, a dual timeline, and a crime caper that somehow blends ornithology with amateur sleuthing.
Don’t get me wrong—this is classic Belinda Bauer: well-plotted, slyly funny, and with just enough weird to keep things interesting. The two timelines (1920s Yorkshire and present-day Wales) are elegantly woven, with Celie’s tragic, windswept past echoing through Nick and Patrick’s hapless modern-day hunt for a stolen egg. And I will say, the male friendship between Nick and Patrick? Adorably dysfunctional in the best way.
There are some fun twists (some predictable, some not), and the writing is stylish without being showy. But despite all that, I felt a little... underwhelmed. The emotional heft wasn’t quite there. The stakes never fully landed. Maybe it’s just hard to get worked up over Fabergé-adjacent drama when the plot’s been slow-boiling like a soft egg.
Still, props to Bauer for writing a crime novel that’s genuinely unique—and yes, I learned more about egg theft than I ever expected. Would I recommend it? Sure, for a rainy afternoon. Just don’t expect it to blow the shell off your bookshelf. ...more
Okay. Listen. Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is one of those books that made me question my life choices—chief among them being: why did IOkay. Listen. Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica is one of those books that made me question my life choices—chief among them being: why did I keep reading when I absolutely wanted to launch it across the room at least five separate times? And yet... here I am. Scarred, queasy, and low-key impressed.
Let me be clear: I’m a vegetarian. I’ve watched Okja without blinking, I’ve argued with people about the ethics of factory farming over brunch, and still—still—this book made me feel like I was going to crawl out of my skin. Bazterrica doesn’t just hand you a dystopia; she slow-roasts it, bastes it in dread, and serves it rare with a side of horror sauce.
The premise? Animal meat is toxic. Human meat is the new filet mignon. Capitalism says "yum," society says "sure," and suddenly we’re casually running artisanal butcheries for "special meat" (read: people). Our main guy Marcos is numb, grieving, emotionally flatlined—but still complicit as hell. That is, until someone gifts him a live female "specimen," and he starts treating her like, oh I don’t know� an actual person. Things get complicated, fast.
The prose is cold, clinical, detached—which somehow makes everything feel even more grotesque. It’s like a documentary you don’t want to watch but can’t look away from. I actually liked the parts about Marcos� memories of his father and his lost child best—those had a quiet grief that grounded the whole thing. I wish the rest of the book had lingered more in that space.
But oh no, instead we got euphemisms for butchering humans, institutionalized cannibalism, dystopian dating apps, and don’t even get me started on the breeding farms. (Yes. Breeding. Farms.)
I get it—it’s a metaphor. For the meat industry. For how language sanitizes violence. For the way capitalism grinds everything (and everyone) into consumable parts. I get it. But holy hell, Bazterrica, you didn’t have to go that hard.
Would I recommend it? Maybe. If you’ve got the stomach for it and enjoy reading books that feel like a prolonged existential panic attack. It’s horrifying, sharp, and yes, brilliant. But it also made me want to bleach my brain.
In short: Tender Is the Flesh is like a bad trip at a vegan slaughterhouse art exhibit. Thought-provoking? Yes. Disturbing? Absolutely. Regret reading it? Kind of. Glad I did? Also yes. Would I ever read it again? Not unless I’m looking to fully unravel.
3.75/5 � For the sheer audacity, the metaphorical heft, and the fact that I will never look at a meat counter the same way again. ...more
Fable for the End of the World broke me in the best way possible. I closed the book with that aching, hollowed-out feeling—like someone had scooped ouFable for the End of the World broke me in the best way possible. I closed the book with that aching, hollowed-out feeling—like someone had scooped out my insides and replaced them with ash and starlight. And still, I’d do it all again tomorrow. It’s that kind of story. One that devastates, yes, but also dares to suggest that love—real, stubborn, impossible love—might be the only thing left standing after the end of the world.
Set in a drowned, debt-ridden dystopia where the only way out is through a blood-soaked spectacle called the Lamb’s Gauntlet, Fable for the End of the World delivers a world that feels horrifyingly plausible. Caerus—the all-consuming megacorp that runs everything from governance to death—selects "Lambs" from indebted families to be hunted live on screen for public entertainment. It’s The Hunger Games for the post-TikTok generation, but Ava Reid makes it feel like something entirely her own: brutal, gorgeous, and tender.
Our Lamb is Inesa, a soft-spoken taxidermist with no survival training but an abundance of quiet strength and deep-seated rage. She is “a lamb to the slaughter,� sure, but not without teeth. Melinoë, her assigned assassin, is a devastatingly compelling weapon: engineered for beauty, violence, and obedience. She’s been wiped so many times she barely remembers who she is—just what she’s supposed to do. But something shifts when she sees Inesa. Something human wakes up.
And my god, these two girls. Their relationship is the soft centre of a world designed to break them. They shouldn’t work. They should be enemies. But somehow they find a sliver of hope between blood and wreckage. “Maybe I’ve survived this long so I could know how it feels to hold her,� Melinoë thinks. “Maybe all my life has been one long gauntlet, running, fighting, searching for her.� Cue the sound of my soul unspooling.
Reid’s writing is sharp and luminous, as always. I’ve adored A Study in Drowning, but Fable for the End of the World proves she’s just as skilled at crafting intimate apocalypse as she is lyrical folklore. The world-building here is top class—lush, lived-in, and disturbingly relevant. Rising sea levels. Corporate omnipotence. The performative commodification of trauma and femininity. Watching Inesa row through the half-submerged ruins of her town while influencers livestream their commentary on her survival? Too real. And that’s what makes it hit so hard.
"There is a strength in softness," the book seems to whisper. In a world where violence is currency, survival isn’t just about sharpness—it’s about holding onto the parts of yourself that still care. That still love.
Yes, I found A Study in Drowning more narratively satisfying. But Fable for the End of the World moved me differently. It’s quieter, lonelier, more cynical—and then, somehow, more hopeful. The ending shattered me. I mean that. I was a puddle. If you’ve ever needed a reason to believe that care can be revolutionary, read this book.
As Ava writes: “Maybe that’s all it takes—at least at the beginning. Just a few people who care. And that caring matters, even if it can’t cool the earth or lower sea levels or turn back time to before a nuclear blast.�
This is a story about survival, yes. But more than that, it’s a fable about love—messy, radical, defiant love—in the face of a world that wants us numb and obedient. And that’s the kind of story I’ll always come back to.
4/5. A bloody lullaby for the end times. Soft girls, sharp knives, and the courage to hope anyway.
Oh, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams? Let me tell you—this book is the literary equivalent of lighting a match and walking away from a very, verOh, Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams? Let me tell you—this book is the literary equivalent of lighting a match and walking away from a very, very flammable building labeled “Meta.� And yes, Meta is scrambling to put the fire out. Desperately. Which honestly makes it even more satisfying to read.
As someone who’s had a long-standing side-eye fixed on Facebook/Meta and its laundry list of ethical catastrophes, I can’t say I was shocked by most of the revelations here. But what was surprising—and frankly, delicious—was seeing it all laid bare by someone who was on the inside. Wynn-Williams worked in Facebook’s public policy division from 2011 to 2017, and Careless People reads like a front-row seat to a corporate morality play where growth always wins, and conscience is politely shown the door.
She covers it all: Facebook’s role in stoking ethnic violence in Myanmar, the gross mishandling of data around the 2016 U.S. election, and the quietly horrifying strategy of targeting emotionally vulnerable teens with manipulative ads. Oh, and don’t even get me started on the internal misogyny. You get the sense of a workplace where being a woman meant either being ignored or crushed under a tech-bro's TED Talk.
Now, here’s my one big gripe—not with the book, but with timing. Wynn-Williams left before the COVID era, and I so wish we’d gotten her take on Facebook’s censorship games and its eyebrow-raising cosiness with Big Pharma. That would’ve been the final cherry on this dystopian sundae. But even without it, the book is explosive.
And make no mistake—Meta wanted this buried. They’ve tried enforcing NDAs, flexing their legal muscle, anything to keep these stories from hitting the mainstream. Joke’s on them though, because Careless People is now flying off shelves and topping charts. Oops.
Wynn-Williams writes with clarity, intelligence, and just the right dose of understated fury. It’s not all new info if you’ve been paying attention, but hearing it from someone who helped write the internal memos? That hits different. It’s a rare, insider takedown of one of the most powerful—and frankly reckless—companies in the world.
So if you’ve ever felt uneasy about how much control Meta has over what you see, think, and remember—or if you’re just in the mood for a well-written, deeply reported “I told you so”—this is the book for you. Four stars, one middle finger to Silicon Valley....more
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is a slim, glittering meditation on curated lives and performative freedom, tInternational Booker Prize 2025 Longlist
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico is a slim, glittering meditation on curated lives and performative freedom, this novella reads like a postcard from the millennial psyche: filtered, composed, achingly self-aware.
At first glance, Perfection is deceptively simple. Anna and Tom are a digital nomad couple, aesthetically fluent creatives who make their living in the half-glamorous, half-tedious world of remote design. They live in Berlin—in a plant-filled, Nordic-minimalist apartment that doubles as an AirBnB income stream—and move through cities like avatars: Lisbon, Naples, Athens. They work on laptops from cafes with exposed brick and pour-over coffee. They eat well, vote left, post infographics, join protests—until “the refugee crisis� becomes just another phase in a digital timeline. Their politics are all correct; their restlessness, infinite.
If this sounds familiar, that’s the point. Anna and Tom are us. Or at least, they’re the version of us that exists in algorithmic light.
Latronico’s prose, rendered with elegant restraint in Sophie Hughes’s translation, is a perfect match for the novel’s central conceit: beauty as surface, authenticity as performance. Every sentence is crafted with the same meticulous minimalism as Anna and Tom’s lives. “Beauty and pleasure seem as inextricable from daily life as particles suspended in a liquid,� he writes, conjuring not only their lifestyle, but the very texture of the novel itself.
This is Perfection’s brilliance—it performs its critique while embodying the aesthetic it interrogates. The narrative voice is cool, observational, void of dialogue, as if the couple themselves have become case studies in a lifestyle they once chose freely, and now inhabit with a quiet dread. At times, it reads like autofiction, though it maintains a necessary distance: a kind of sociological fiction with literary precision.
The characters� millennial ennui is rendered with exquisite clarity. “They did for money now what they used to do out of passion,� Latronico notes, capturing in a single line the soft disillusionment of turning art into content. “The internet came of age with them,� he writes elsewhere, “like their own entrance into adulthood, it didn’t happen overnight, but gradually, in a way that only seemed inevitable after the fact.� It’s one of the best encapsulations I’ve read of the subtle psychic erosion of growing up online—of how social media didn’t just shape perception, but rewrote the very architecture of desire.
Though political awareness hums throughout—gentrification, economic displacement, climate grief—the novel avoids the trap of polemic. Instead, it allows contradiction to speak for itself. Anna and Tom protest rising rents while sipping natural wine in a gentrified district. They bemoan the erasure of community while curating their own lives for consumption. “They spent all their time in plant-filled apartments and cafés with excellent wifi,� Latronico observes. “In the long run it was inevitable they would convince themselves that nothing else existed.� That line gutted me.
Still, Perfection is not cynical. If anything, it’s tender in its understanding that the desire for meaning, for beauty, for freedom—is not in itself a crime. It’s the hollowness of our options, the way systems reward aesthetics over substance, that’s quietly tragic. Even their discontent becomes another brand of luxury: the privilege of dissatisfaction.
The novella’s structure is neat: three sections titled Past, Imperfect, and Future, as if time itself can be parsed like grammar. But memory is slippery, and time—like their curated timelines—is non-linear. One of the most devastating passages arrives late, when Anna and Tom revisit old photos and no longer feel shame, only detachment: “Now those images just seemed like a con.� The question lingers: were they lying then, or now?
This is not a dramatic novel—there are no climaxes, no breakdowns, and no betrayals. And that’s what makes it radical. Perfection dares to be quiet. It doesn’t shout its themes—it lets them shimmer, like the polished floor of a co-working space reflecting afternoon light.
Some readers may find its emotional distance off-putting, its character development too cool, too curated. But that, too, is part of the story. “They and all their friends belonged to an imprecise political left,� Latronico writes. “They identified as feminists and spoke out against social injustices,� even as they participated in the very systems they critiqued. It’s not judgmental. It’s just true.
In the end, Perfection is not about the pursuit of flawlessness, but the yearning to feel real in a world that rewards surfaces. A quiet, devastating reminder that wherever we go—Lisbon, Berlin, Tulum, the next city trending on TikTok—we carry ourselves with us.
It’s just like it is in the pictures. And that’s the problem.
4.5/5
Read it with an oat flat white and a hint of self-reckoning.
� 5/5 | genre-bending brilliance, with maths, memory, and melancholia �
I’ll admit it: I picked up The Expert of Subtle Revisions because of its cover.� 5/5 | genre-bending brilliance, with maths, memory, and melancholia �
I’ll admit it: I picked up The Expert of Subtle Revisions because of its cover. I was fully prepared for quirky. What I got was something astonishingly tender, dazzlingly clever, and quietly profound.
This book is, in a word, a vibe. Think Cloud Atlas by way of Sea of Tranquility, with a whisper of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida if it were written by someone who solves equations in verse. It’s about time travel, sort of. But it’s also about memory, grief, the tyranny of history, and the precise moments when a life bends into a different shape.
There’s a woman in 2016 named Hase who edits Wikipedia pages and lives in the shadows, waiting for her father to arrive by sailboat. There’s a group of mathematicians in 1930s Vienna arguing over theories of time while fascism closes in like fog on the Danube. And somewhere in between, there’s a music box that might alter the shape of a life. Or a century.
Each narrative thread is exquisitely rendered. Menger-Anderson does something rare: she gives her characters intellect and interiority in equal measure. Hase isn’t quirky for the sake of it—she’s strange in the way that grief makes us all strange. Josef is abhorrent, but never cartoonish. Anton broke my heart in three well-timed intervals.
Time travel, in fiction, is often about spectacle. This isn’t that. Here, it’s quieter. Less about machines and more about possibility. Less about paradox and more about personal recursion—how we loop through our regrets, how history repeats itself in small, cruel ways, and how art (and mathematics, and queerness, and stubbornness) might be our only rebellion.
And the writing? Gorgeous. Crisp. Oddly elegant. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t perform. But every line is calibrated, like the balance on an old scale—delicate, deliberate, and slightly dangerous. There’s queerness here, but not as subplot. It’s stitched into the logic of the book, like a hidden proof. There’s philosophy, but not the kind that makes your eyes glaze. And there's a finale that isn’t a twist, exactly—it’s more like finding the edge of the map and realizing it was drawn by someone who loved you.
It’s rare to find a book that feels like it’s thinking with you, like you’re solving something together. Rarer still to finish it and feel like something has subtly shifted—just one degree, but enough to change your trajectory.
The Expert of Subtle Revisions is brilliant in every sense of the word. Give it your attention. Let it bewilder you a little. ...more
You know that rare reading experience when a book unfurls in your hands like a blood-red rose—beautiful, dangerous, and laye⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (and then some)
You know that rare reading experience when a book unfurls in your hands like a blood-red rose—beautiful, dangerous, and layered with quiet menace? That’s The Book of Guilt. It doesn’t announce itself loudly. It slips into your consciousness, petal by petal, and before you know it, you’re gripped, unnerved, and whispering what the hell is going on to an empty room.
Set in a chillingly plausible alternative Britain, Catherine Chidgey’s novel operates with all the precision of a scalpel and the emotional weight of a confession. From the opening lines, there’s a sense of something not quite right—Vincent, Lawrence and William are triplets living under the gentle tyranny of three ‘Mothers� in a government-run home where sins are recorded, dreams are documented, and the ultimate aspiration is to be chosen for Margate. (Yes, that Margate. But not as you know it.)
The writing hums with dread. It’s subtle and sophisticated—no fireworks, no gore, just that creeping sense that the world you're in has slipped a degree off its axis. Chidgey’s slow-reveal mastery is on full display here: the truth arrives like mist off the sea, and by the time you realise the extent of the horror, you're already in too deep to turn back.
The speculative premise—copies, created in labs, grown into children, monitored, medicated, and eventually disposed of if they show “deviance”—is a staggering metaphor, and a gut-punch critique of systems that dehumanise in the name of progress. These are children who “weren’t the same,� who drank their tea differently, wore colour-coded shirts, and were punished for things they never chose. And yet—they dreamed. They loved. They suffered.
I was floored by moments like this:
“We didn’t know the name of our sickness, and its symptoms varied from month to month and boy to boy: we just called it the Bug…�
Or this:
“We knew the basic set-up, but we put it out of our minds, the same way we ignore the origins of our pork sausages.�
You see what she’s doing, right? Chidgey doesn’t preach—she implicates. She turns the reader into a complicit observer. The “copies� become a mirror, and the reflection is uncomfortably human.
Vincent’s narration is beautifully controlled—fragile, intelligent, full of small griefs that bloom into larger ones. Nancy, living an eerily domestic life that slowly intersects with the boys', becomes a second axis of emotional weight. And as for William—cruel, chaotic William—the relationship between him and Vincent wrecked me. It’s about the kind of love that hurts and binds at once.
“And yet, I loved William better. I still can’t explain that, but perhaps you can understand—perhaps you have loved in that way too.�
Yes. I have. That line alone earns this book its stars.
There’s no clean resolution. No sermon. Just this quiet devastation that stays with you. You think you’ve reached the end, and then Chidgey throws in one last quiet horror:
“We were ever so relieved when we found out it wasn’t an actual boy.�
Reader, I stopped breathing.
Fans of Never Let Me Go, The Handmaid’s Tale, or We Are Not Ourselves will find a familiar ache here—but The Book of Guilt is entirely its own creation. And I mean that in every sense.
It’s smart, unsettling, achingly tender in places, and deeply, deeply political. But most of all, it’s necessary. Chidgey is writing at the top of her form. And this book? This book is a classic in the making.
Thank you to John Murray and NetGalley for the ARC—I will be thinking about this one for a long, long time.
If you’d told me a Dust Bowl-era novel featuring a memory-hoarding witch, a clairvoyant camera, and a sentient scarecrow would leave me breathless andIf you’d told me a Dust Bowl-era novel featuring a memory-hoarding witch, a clairvoyant camera, and a sentient scarecrow would leave me breathless and a bit emotional about the American experiment, I’d have raised a sceptical eyebrow. But Karen Russell’s The Antidote is no ordinary historical novel—it’s a kaleidoscopic masterpiece that peers through the cracked lens of national myth and memory and dares to ask what we choose to forget, and at what cost.
I devoured this book like a thunderstorm rolling over a parched prairie. It’s spellbinding. Gorgeously weird. A grown-up fairy tale with the grit of soil beneath its nails. Any book that includes a cat as a fully-fledged character has my vote (obviously), but The Antidote earns its place among my all-time favourites through sheer brilliance alone.
The Wizard of Oz allusions are delicious and deliberate. There’s a lion (well, a cat), a scarecrow, a town called Uz, a literal tornado, and a witch—though in this case, the Prairie Witch, or “Vault,� is no green-faced caricature but a walking archive of collective grief. People line up to deposit their worst memories in her, creating a spellbound population of smiling amnesiacs. Honestly, it's the most chilling metaphor for American historical erasure I’ve ever read—and it hits hard.
And that’s before we even get to the magical camera, which reveals the past in unflinching detail and the future in flashes of warning. Or the brutal Home for Unwed Mothers. Or the shameful, buried story of Indigenous genocide. Or the basketball-playing niece who becomes the soul of the novel without even knowing it.
Russell builds a haunted museum of forgotten truths and invites you to walk through it barefoot. Her prose is like barbed wire wrapped in velvet: every sentence beautiful, but with a sting that draws blood. You can feel her fury at the lies we’ve told ourselves as a human collective, at the stories edited for comfort, and the memories too inconvenient to keep.
And yet—somehow—it’s also hopeful. It whispers that memory is medicine. That to remember is to reclaim. That the antidote to the poison of history isn’t forgetting, but facing it fully, together. I’m not exaggerating when I say The Antidote might be the novel of the year. It’s uncanny, elegiac, and ferociously original. It’s Russell at her wildest and wisest. And it’s going to stay with me like dust in the lungs and a song in the bones.
5/5. Order it. Highlight the hell out of it. Give it to someone you love. This one’s a landmark. ...more
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