An end of week recap

“Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.”
– André Maurois (born 26^th July 1885)

Firstly, we will get the bookish birthdates out of the way. Today we doff our virtual hats to Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist, George Bernard Shaw (1856), Spanish poet and prominent figure in the Generation of ’98 movement, Antonio Machado (1875), English writer and philosopher, Aldous Huxley (1894) and Welsh novelist, Bernice Rubens (1923).

Before next Saturday’s WUTW, we can drape the bunting and celebrate with gusto, for it is Paperback Book Day on Wednesday 30^th July, when we are encouraged to curl up with our favourite softbacks and commemorate the release of Penguin Books’ first softcover in 1935. And before you ask, it was Ariel: The Life of Shelley by André Maurois.

If this isn’t enough excitement for one wind up, I can reveal that today in 1887 the first book introducing Esperanto, Unua Libro (First Book) by L. L. Zamenhof, was published. Happy Esperanto Day everybody and donu al mi tiujn odorantajn salojn tuj! I’m hopeful the latter translates as pass me those smelling salts immediately! but I’m not hugely optimistic.

As ever, this is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming publications, see what folk have on their nightstands and keep readers abreast of various book-related happenings.

CHATTERBOOKS >>

If you are planning a reading event, challenge, competition, or anything else likely to be of interest to the book blogging community and its followers, please let me know. I will happily share your news here with the fabulous array of bibliowonks who read this weekly wind up.

* An Austenian Tale from the Shores of Nova Scotia *

Barely a month passes when I don’t hear of at least one of you having your work published (you are such a talented bunch). Today, I am thrilled to announce the forthcoming publication of Sarah Emsley’s debut novel, The Austens, which is now available for pre-order. Described as biographical fiction, her book focuses on a period in the life of English novelist Jane Austen when, unlike her “sister-in-law Fanny [who chose] to marry for love”, she decides to devote her life to “art and the freedom to write fiction instead of marrying for money and thereby selling her body and soul”. In her post, My debut novel, The Austens, Sarah explains that the women’s “disagreements about work and family threaten their friendship in a world that is hostile to art and love, and even the idea of a woman making a choice.” For full details about purchasing a copy (signed, if you hurry), please see Sarah’s My novel The Austens is now available for pre-order!.

* Almost Overlooked * 

At the end of May (so just slipping into overlooked territory), the enigmatic Hungry Reader wrote of Red Dog Farm, Nathaniel Ian Miller’s coming-of-age novel: “Some books don’t need noise to leave an imprint—they just quietly take root in you, like seeds sown in familiar soil.” Set in western Iceland, it tells the tale of a young man returning with uncertainty “to his father’s fading cattle farm after [attending] university” in Reykjavík. Though he has always loved the wild beauty of his homeland, he is now “full of unsaid apologies and heavy silences”, having developed a taste for the outside world. Miller, we are told, “doesn’t just tell us a story; he tills it” by allowing “the landscape [to] breathe through the pages”. The book “beautifully” captures the “burden of land passed down” without romanticising the farmer’s harsh life. It is “also a love story” but “not the loud kind” and is essentially “about going back to where you came from, even when it hurts.” For the full review, please head over to Of Books and Reading to read the eloquently composed Red Dog Farm by Nathaniel Ian Miller. 

* Lit Crit Blogflash * 

I am going to share with you one of my favourite posts from around the blogosphere. There are a great many talented writers producing high-quality book features and reviews, which made it difficult to pick only this one – added in the last few days:

The Secret Book of Flora Lea and The Lost Story – Jeanne Griggs double-booked this week at Necromancy Never Pays with Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story and Patti Callahan Henry’s The Secret Book of Flora Lea – the former a fantasy inspired by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and the latter an historical book-about-books mystery. Both, apparently, “worth reading”. Shaffer’s novel, which is set in West Virginia, “is about fairy tale adventures and a disappearance in the real world that turns out to be a stay in a fictional one”, while Callahan Henry’s story takes place in England during  the Second World War and concerns “a little girl who disappears during [the terrifyingly real] ‘Operation Pied Piper,’ when children from British cities were sent into the countryside” to escape bombing by the German Luftwaffe. Jeanne clearly enjoyed them both – one “grounded in historical reality and the other [mixing] real life with a fantasy world” – and found them “absorbing” but “ultimately a little unsatisfying, perhaps just in the way finishing a really good book always leaves a reader wanting more.” Be sure to read the full review to find all she has to say about these two tempting books.

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar this week. I generally make a point of tweeting/x-ing (not to mention tooting and bsky-ing) a few favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, here are a selection of interesting snippets: 

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Popular Science: When wily sea lions and determined wildlife officials sparred in Seattle – In an excerpt from A Year with the Seals: Unlocking the Secrets of the Sea’s Most Charismatic and Controversial Creatures, science writer Alix Morris writes: “These animals are smart. It’s all about the reward they’re seeking.”

The New York Times (via DNYUZ): The Meaning Hidden in Wordsworth’s Teacup and Mary Shelley’s Hair – In Mathelinda Nabugodi’s revelatory history, The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, “artifacts from the archive of British Romanticism [are examined and] a scholar finds evidence of intimate, if often overlooked, connections to slavery.”

University of Cambridge: The Song of Wade – “A medieval literary puzzle which has stumped scholars including M.R. James for 130 years has finally been solved.” Tom Almeroth-Williams on “decoding a lost English legend, solving a Chaucerian mystery, and revealing a medieval preacher’s meme”.

Read the Classics: Round-up – Island Novels – Henry Eliot with a splendid “selection of novels set on islands.”

TIME: Jane Austen’s ‘Persuasion’ Can Teach You How to Grow Up – “Author Brandon Taylor argues that Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion illustrates how funny – and sad – adulthood can be.”

Himal Southasian: The present and deep past of anti-caste speculative fiction – “The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF demonstrates the power of speculative and science fiction as instruments of the anti-caste struggle in Southasia, and these genres’ connections to the wide traditions of Dalit and Adivasi literature”, writes Sreyartha Krishna.”

Orion: After We Burn It All Down – Tajja Isen has a conversation with American essayist and critic Maris Kreizman “about critique, action, […] hope” and her debut essay collection, I Want to Burn This Place Down.

Nippon.com: Shaped by Conflict: Japanese Literature After World War II – “Whether directly or indirectly, Japanese literature in the aftermath of World War II showed the influence of the devastating conflict”, says Takino Yūsaku.

The Observer: Jennifer Dawson’s lost chronicle of a crack-up – “The Ha-Ha, a newly reissued 1961 novel about a young woman’s time in a mental hospital, is startlingly contemporary”, finds Anna Leszkiewicz. 

On Yorkshire Magazine: Goodbye to Russia by Sarah Rainsford – Barney Bardsley reviews Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War, Sarah Rainsford’s “complex and emotional memoir,” which “gives a much-needed voice to many of those who have been unjustly silenced” in this “strange, challenging, and increasingly beleaguered country.”

The Bookseller: Up close and personal – “Why”, asks Caroline O’Donoghue, “are female authors asked to bare their souls to promote their books?”

Defector: Calvin And Hobbes’s Gruesome Snowmen Were A World All Their Own – Bill Watterson, the American cartoonist and creator of comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, “knew, or at least captured better than anyone, the private derangement of the average 6-year-old boy”, says Barry Petchesky.

The Common: What We’re Reading: July 2025 – Elizabeth Metzger, Nina Semczuk and Seán Carlson “bring you ruminations on what it feels like to return—to home, to memory, to oneself. As they make sense of their own lives through a poetry collection, novel, and essay collection, their recommendations invite us to contemplate what it means to exist within both change and stillness, and how time itself can wander and fragment.”

The Metropolitan Review: Better to Be a Ghost – Elroy Rosenberg on Hebdomeros, the artist Giorgio de Chirico’s seminal 1929 surrealist novel, now reissued with an introduction by the scholar Fabio Benzi.

Electric Literature: These Carson McCullers Stories Are Haunted By Mothers Who Can’t Be Their Authentic Selves – In her essay on Southern Gothic author Carson McCullers’ stories, Acree Graham Macam writes: “Women, men, and children alike are confined and defined by the artifice of the ‘tradwife’.”

Hamilton Review of Books: Telling Our Own Stories: Working-Class Representation in the Arts – Janet Pollock Millar reviews Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour, Canadian comics artist Kate Beaton’s essay collection exploring connections between class, literature and art from Cape Breton Island.

OkayAfrica: In Her Debut Novel, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo Expands the Nigerian Immigrant Experience – “The Tiny Things Are Heavier is a stirring and masterfully delivered bildungsroman that follows a young Nigerian woman as she tries to make sense of her new life and what exactly she wants from it”, says Nelson C.J.

Novara Media: The Britain You Know Was Created by European Immigrants – “In the 1930s, as fascism engulfed Europe, a wave of artists, writers, filmmakers, architects, photographers, designers and publishers […] came to the United Kingdom to seek safety”, writes Juliet Jacques. Owen Hatherley’s book, The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century, “is a collective biography of them”, which aims “to shed light on just how much of what we might consider quintessentially British […] was created by immigrants.”

Handheld Diaries: Charmian Clift, Mermaid Singing, and Peel Me A Lotus – Kate Macdonald shares her thoughts on Charmian Clift’s “two fabulous accounts of Bohemian living on a Greek island in 1950s,” Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus.

BookTrib.: Tasty Shapes and Noisy Colors: Books about Synesthesia – Diane Parrish with five books about synesthetes, including “biographies […] and a neurologist’s research on the condition, written in terms a layman can easily understand.”

Literary Review: Man of Glass – Translated from Italian by Emlyn Eisenach, Boccaccio: A Biography, Marco Santagata’s biography of the celebrated author of medieval masterpiece The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio, “offers a wonderfully clear and vivid window onto the life of a pivotal figure in the history of Italian literature”, says Alexander Lee.

The Guardian: A new Irish writer is getting rave reviews – but nobody knows who they are. That gives me hope – Pen names have a long history. Now Liadan Ní Chuinn [author of the short story collection, Every One Still Here] is shunning publicity in an industry that demands ever more exposure”, says Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett.

India West Journal: Megha Majumdar’s ‘A Guardian And A Thief’ Explores Family, Fear, Climate Collapse – Megha Majumdar’s speculative new novel, A Guardian and a Thief, tells the story of a family facing climate catastrophe and food scarcity in a near-future Kolkata.

GlobalVoices: The magic of travel: Three Ukrainian women writers of the 1930s – As “part of a series of essays written by Ukrainian artists entitled Regained Culture: Ukrainian voices curate Ukrainian culture, Julia Stakhivska looks at the ways in which “travelogues […] shaped women’s emancipation”.

Independent: Norwegian author Ingvar Ambjørnsen dies at age 69 – “Ingvar Ambjørnsen, a Norwegian author who mixed a sharp, even dark tone with humour and empathy in works that depicted the lives of the oppressed and vulnerable, has died.”

WLRN: Ivonne Lamazares’ ‘The Tilting House’ explores memory, migration and justice – “In The Tilting House, Cuban‑American author Ivonne Lamazares tells the story of Yuri, a teenage girl growing up in 1990s Havana”. Helen Acevedo chats to Lamazares ahead of the book’s release.

The Invisible Head: Ernest Dowson: Poet of the 1890s – “Little Enough I Found” – Alan Horn looks at the life and works of the tragic English poet, novelist and short-story writer (often associated with the Decadent movement), Ernest Dowson.

The New York Times: Veronica Roth’s Favorite Dystopian Novels – “The author of the Divergent series recommends books that explore human nature and disintegrating reality.”

Faber: Essay: A History of the Sprayed Edge – “Kate McCaffrey explores the history of decorated books and what they can tell us about their owners, from Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours to the present day.” An interesting counterview to Selah Jordan’s piece in Paste, Sprayed Edges Are Everywhere and I Hate Them, which was featured in WUTW #430.

Compulsive Reader: A review of The Brittle Age by Donatella Di Pietrantonio – Translated by Ann Goldstein, The Brittle Age is the story of an “Italian village wounded by a brutal crime in the 1990s”, which “investigates cultural dissonance and our innate need to place blame on ourselves or the other,” says Catherine Parnell.

Wesleyan University: The Book Lover’s Book Editor: Pamela Dorman ’79 – “In this Q&A with Wesleyan University Magazine [publishing industry veteran, Pamela Dorman] reflects on her long career in publishing, what she looks for in the books she acquires, and the passion and stubborn ‘doggedness’ that fuels her success.”

Publishers Weekly: Oxbelly Retreat Toasts to a Decade of Storytelling – Ten years on, “the Oxbelly writers’ retreat in southern Greece has evolved into a star-studded mingling point for the worlds of film and literature.”

Engelsberg Ideas: A summer of reading – “Contributors to Engelsberg Ideas share the books they’ve enjoyed in the summers of their lives.”

Pens and Poison: George Orwell’s Box – In this essay, Liza Libes argues that “Orwell’s defence of writing [Why I Write] led to its undoing”.

The Asahi Shimbun: INTERVIEW/ Kaoru Hasuike: In his new book, abductee comes clean on life in North Korea – Kaoru Hasuike “is one of the five Japanese citizens that North Korea released after abducting them in 1978.” Here he speaks about his latest book and his reasons for “finally fully opening up about his long ordeal”.

Notes From Poland: Historical estate where Nobel laureate Sienkiewicz lived and wrote sold for €278 – “A 19th-century manor house in Belarus where renowned Polish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz once lived has been sold at auction for the equivalent of €278 (1,180 zloty)”.

Scroll.in: Living without the magnifying glass: A reflection on Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel, ‘Zorba the Greek’ – “Zorba’s effort is not directed at any objective; the goal of his life is simply living itself – living fully, immersively, moment by moment”, writes R Sivakumar of Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1946 classic, Zorba the Greek.

Washington Independent Review of Books: Beyond The Book: 7 Books that Get the Classical-Music World Right – Martha Anne Toll, author of Duet for One, which she describes here as “a love story, a journey through grief, and a tour of the classical-music world, based in my hometown of Philadelphia”, has “paid close attention to books about classical music.” Here she shares seven titles that immerse “readers in an unfamiliar world” and raise “questions that go far beyond the notes played.”

The Paris Review: The Guts of the Russian Brontosaurus-Cow: A Conversation with Vladimir Sorokin – In a conversation adapted from the introduction to Vladimir Sorokin’s forthcoming story collection, The Sugar Kremlin, novelist Joshua Cohen asks him about his work and what it means to be a Russian writer today.

Open Book: More Tips on Writing Book Reviews – Pakistani-Canadian writer Manahil Bandukwala expands on book reviewing tips she shared in an earlier article.

Caught by the River: The Lost Elms – “Mandy Haggith’s The Lost Elms, published earlier this month by Wildfire, defies us not to fall in love with elm trees, writes Kirsteen Bell.”

AP: Hungary’s oldest library is fighting to save 100,000 books from a beetle infestation – Justin Spike reports: “Tens of thousands of centuries-old books are being pulled from the shelves of a medieval abbey in Hungary in an effort to save them from a beetle infestation that could wipe out centuries of history.”

BBC Culture: ‘There were days where I felt I could never leave’: Intimate images of ‘the real Hotel California’ – “The legendary Record Plant Studios was where the most iconic rock stars of the 1970s gathered, immersing themselves in the decadent atmosphere. Now a new book [Buzz Me In by Martin Porter and David Goggin] offers a glimpse inside – and argues that The Eagles’ time there inspired the US band’s most famous song.”

Aeon: The grammar of a god-ocean – “To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness”, says novelist Eli K P William.

Laura Thompson’s Substack: Demanding the Undemanding – Laura Thompson with an amusing piece on people “taking books personally”.

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FINALLY >>

If there is something you would particularly like to see in Winding Up the Week or if you have any suggestions, questions or comments for Book Jotter in general, please drop me a line or comment below. I would be delighted to hear from you.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I wish you a week bountiful in books and rich in reading.

NB In this feature, ‘winding up’ refers to the act of concluding something and should not be confused with the British expression: ‘wind-up’ – an age-old pastime of ‘winding-up’ friends and family by teasing or playing pranks on them. If you would like to know more about this expression, there is an excellent description on Urban Dictionary.

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: Alix Morris, André Maurois, Charmian Clift, Esperanto Day, Jane Austen, Meg Shaffer, Megan Giddings, Nathaniel Ian Miller, Nikos Kazantzakis, Paperback Book Day, Penguin Books, Sarah Emsley, Sarah Rainsford