Well I'm going to have to read it instantly aren't I: I remember that story so vividly; still waiting for the follow-up

Need houses, Caroline

Doesn’t feel nice. Loved The Essex Serpent and Death of an Ordinary Man. But this is a baffling miss.

Books abandoned in 2025: Enlightenment, Sarah Perry. Could not finish. Lots of good writing, but the dialogue, the characters, the ‘villain’, all are tin-eared and false. Another book with a poorly-realised ghost.

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The dialogue worked beautifully in her period novel, but in a contemporary setting it misses that essential dimension of banality: I might manage one well-turned apercu a decade, and even then, there's no one around to hear it. Most of the time it's silence-filling nonsense or cliche.

And instead of saying 'come again?', her interlocutor will say "ah but if the units of distance were miles and not years, nobody would think it passing strange."

First noticed when I searched for [Stephen) Bush. Though in hindsight, I was asking for trouble.

Was it just that though?

or 'a psychotic Santa of volubility'!

Books drifted through in 2025: Orbital, Samantha Harvey. “The jumbled tumbling of static galactic woodwind rainforest trance of a wild and lilting world.”

It’s Helm by Sarah Hall and it’s not particularly close

Books drained in 2025: Shadowplay, Joseph O'Connor. Loved this lush late-Victorian love triangle between Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Bram Stoker, whose struggles with the larger-than-life Irving give him the idea for a theatrical Wallachian count. Great walk on parts for O. Wilde and J. Ripper.

Now it's just better living through falconry.

Lovely review John, thank you. Though I'm shook with the knowledge Cameron was there the last time we saw them.

Books read in 2025: Death of an Ordinary Man, Sarah Perry. The author's father-in-law dies with shocking rapidity. A report from the front line, stark and unsentimental and immensely affecting.

First CD I ever bought