An end of week recap

“You can love her with everything you have and she still won’t belong to you. She will run wild with you, beside you with every step but let me tell you something about women who run with wolves, their fierce hearts don’t settle between walls and their instinct is stronger than upbringing. Love her wild or leave her there.”
Nikki Rowe

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You may notice a preponderance of purple, white and green in today’s wind up – the colours, as you probably know, of the suffragette movement, representing dignity, purity and hope. These hues were chosen to unify the campaign for women’s voting rights, and they appear here in honour of tomorrow’s International Women’s Day – an opportunity to celebrate women’s achievements and to reflect on the continuing struggle for fairness and respect between the sexes.

Among today’s bookish birthday celebrants are American poet Rebecca Hammond Lard (1772), South African writer Dan Jacobson (1929), French novelist Georges Perec (1936), British novelist and short story writer William Boyd (1952), English author Andrea Levy (1956), Northern Irish writer Anna Burns (1962), American author and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis (1964) and American poet Amanda Gorman (1998). Tomorrow we can blow up the balloons for British writer Kenneth Grahame (1859), Lithuanian romantic author Šatrijos Ragana (1877), Uruguayan poet and writer Juana de Ibarbourou (1892), English writer John Burke (1922), American author John McPhee (1931) and American author Jeffrey Eugenides (1960).

As ever, this is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on the 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 opinions and 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.

* So Many Ways to Read Welshly in Winter *

Karen and Kathryn’s Reading Wales 2026 challenge is now well underway, having kicked off on 1^st March – St David’s Day. My contribution to the event this year is a post on Alex Johnson’s reading guide My Year of Reading Welshly: Discovering Wales in 52 Books, which is fun, informative and perfect for readers exploring Welsh literature in English. >> See My Year of Reading Welshly by Alex Johnson #ReadingWales26 >> 

In my latest wintry post for Three Things, I gather together all manner of things I’ve been reading, thinking about and doing. I hold forth on matters both serious and silly – from a book by Katherine May to a decidedly grouchy start‑of‑year opinion piece. You are warmly invited along for the ride. >> – Three Things + #10: Spring Ahoy! >>

* Blogs from the Basement * 

A couple of women-centred titles from the archives this week: (1) Last April, Vivien Horler, former Books Editor of the Cape Argus in Cape Town, shared her thoughts on the historical novel The Lion Women of Tehran by Iranian-American author Marjan Kamali – a work she describes as “about Iranian women whose plight, [she suspects,] has been overtaken in Western minds, […] by the virtual cancellation of women in Afghanistan.” Published in 2024 (but beginning in the 1950s), the novel “is primarily a wonderful story about the power of women’s friendship”: the two “at the centre of the tale [first meeting] as seven-year-olds” and growing up together, eventually earning “coveted places at Tehran University.” Yet political tensions “are swirling in the background,” and when one of them becomes involved in protest marches, her arrest alters the course of both their lives. To discover more about this “great story,” which “shines a light on the lion women who never stop fighting,” please head over to The Books Page and read How story gives hope and solace to the ghosted women of Iran. (2) Co-founder of Shiny New Books, Victoria Best, reviewed Michèle Roberts’s biography Colette: My Literary Mother last February. In her piece, she explores Roberts’s return to four “well-known works” as a way of tracing the French author and woman of letters’ “relationship both to her own mother, Sido, and to her understanding of what mothers do.” Visit Colette, My Literary Mother by Michèle Roberts to read her full reflections. 

* Lit Crit Blogflash * 

This is where I share my favourite pieces of writing from around the blogosphere. There are a great many talented people producing high-quality book features and reviews, which makes it difficult to pick only this one – posted in the last couple of weeks:

Agatha Christie’s London: A Historical Guide to the Queen of Crime’s Capital (2026) by Tina Hodgkinson – Kate Jackson, our resident crime‑fiction aficionado and author of How to Survive a Classic Crime (among numerous other titles), turns her sleuthing skills to Tina Hodgkinson’s newly published Agatha Christie’s London: A Historical Guide to the Queen of Crime’s Capital. “Divided into three parts”, the “book begins with a very short introduction to Agatha Christie and London in her lifetime”, before moving on to “an overview” of the various narratives set in England’s capital – which are all the more fascinating because “Hodgkinson has an eagle eye for spotting details in Christie’s stories which connect to London.” The third section deals with walking tours around the city with “a brief history of each locale” – described here as a really “handy reference guide.” Overall, Kate found it a “very interesting book, which engages with a variety of secondary material”. Please do read her detailed review to discover why it received a 4.25/5 rating.

* Irresistible Items *

Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last 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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Cronista: 💜🤍💚 Read/Don’t Read (Extra): 8 Books by Women from Around the World… – In homage to International Women’s Day, Juliana suggest eight books “written by women in celebration and remembrance” of 8^th March. The title featured here is Argentinian author Silvina Ocampo’s dark, gothic short story collection, Thus Were Their Faces (translated by Daniel Balderston and with a preface by Jorge Luis Borges).

Nation Cymru: ❤️🤍💚 Book review: Dictionary of the Place-Names of Wales – 2026 edition by Hywel Wyn Owen & Richard Morgan – “The Dictionary of the Place-Names of Wales is an outstanding work of scholarship”, says Desmond Clifford. “This 2026 version is a new edition, compiled by Hywel Wyn Owen and Richard Morgan, and builds on the original version published in 2008.”

Economical with Fiction: Spanish travels, Laurie Lee and Noel Streatfeild – E.J. Barnes examines “two twentieth century writers documenting the ordinary in war-torn times”. 

The Armenian Mirror-Spectator: 💜🤍💚 The World of Zabel Yesayan Comes to Boston – “Writer Zabel Yesayan has been rediscovered in the past couple of decades with the English translation of several of her books”, says Alin K. Gregorian. Her “life coincided with some of the most harrowing chapters in Armenian history, from the Armenian Genocide to the repatriation of many to Soviet Armenia. She was the only woman to be on the list of intellectuals to be rounded up on April 24, 1915 but ultimately met her end somewhere in Siberia, one of many victims of Stalinist purges.”

Volumes: Mood Reading – “Why do some books impress the intellect but fail to stir the soul? And does Sylvia Plath understand how paragraphs work?” Matthew Morgan comes to terms with being a mood reader.

Kismet: 🦘💜🤍💚 Brutal Admissions – “Many of the stories in the collection are succinct and tight in scope” says Camille Jacobson in her review of Helen Garner’s Stories: The Collected Short Fiction, a group of tales centring on “Australian women in domestic settings, going about the business of living.” 

Literary Ladies Guide: 💜🤍💚 The Literary Friendship of Poets Anne Sexton & Maxine Kumin – “Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin were significant twentieth-century poets who provided deep friendship and support for one another as they developed and mastered their craft.” In this guest post by Lynne Weiss, she offers some “fascinating musings and insights” into this “significant literary friendship”.

The New York Times (via Archive Today): The Kremlin Banned These Books. You Can Find Them in a New York Library. – “A professor at [New York’s] Hunter College has built one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world”, finds Sarah Chatta.

The Invisible Head: Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, and Salomé – “The Story of a Troubled Collaboration” – Alan Horn offers a piece on the curious history of Salomé, Oscar Wilde’s play, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, with Wilde famously declaring the artist’s work as “like the naughty scribbles a schoolboy makes on the margins of his copybooks.”

Literary Review of Canada: 🍁💜🤍💚 Published Experience – Stacey May Fowles delves into The Emma LaRocque Reader: On Being Human (edited by Elaine Coburn), tracing “five decades” of the “groundbreaking prose and poetry” produced by this Canadian academic of Cree and Métis descent.

Double serendipity:
The Tearoom: The Homing Instinct of Books – Mariella Hunt writes on “the homing instinct of books” – actually, one book in particular, which she says ‘found’ her at the right time in her life. Oddly enough, I had a similar experience with the same title in 2018. If you wish, you can read my story about Ann Shaffer’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society right here.
From My Bookshelf: On Serendipitous Reading – Peter C. Meilaender discusses the ways in which one book can lead to another – in this instance, books with a Polish theme, including Tadeusz Różewicz’s new poems (pictured here).

Three books on Iran:
The Economist (via Archive Today): Six books to read about Iran – “Histories, memoirs and reportage that offer an insight into the Islamic Republic”.
The Daily Star: 6 Books to contextualise the present conflict in the Gulf – “As the pieces continue to shift in the opening moves of what may shape up to be the most consequential war of the 21^st century, it is more important now than ever […] to understand the geopolitical history of present-day Iran, the Middle East and Persian Gulf regions, and the United States and Israel’s role in the present conflict.”
Five Books: Books to Read on Iran – A wide variety of books on Iran: books on Iranian history, Iranian and Persian culture and Iran’s place in the world.

Literary Review: 💜🤍💚 Rare Insight – The trial of Dominique Pelicot shocked the world. For years he drugged his wife, Gisèle, invited dozens of men to rape her and filmed the assaults. Joan Smith considers the transformation of private ordeal into public reckoning in her review of A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides by the incredibly brave Gisèle Pelicot with Judith Perrignon (translated from French by Natasha Lehrer and Ruth Diver). 

Liberties: Klaus Mann, Anti-Fascist Enfant Terrible – Mephisto, the celebrated 1936 novel of German writer, anti-fascist activist and openly gay man, Klaus Mann, pointed a finger at the complicit members of a fascistic society.

Publishers Weekly: 💜🤍💚 Bestselling Women Writers in Japan Defy Cliché – “Mieko Kawakami, Asako Yuzuki, and other novelists offer fewer cats and cafés, more cultural critique”, says Kaja Murawska.

InDaily: 🦘 Book review: This Is What It Feels Like – “A collection of short ‘flash fiction’ pieces created by a group of writers over the course of a year defies easy categorisation.” However, This Is What It Feels Like maps the emotional and “wouldn’t seem out of place rolled up in a fortune cookie”, says Taylor Johnson.

Frontline: Institutions cause the death of languages: Shafi Shauq – Majid Maqbool writes: “Kashmiri poet, linguist, and critic on his formative years reading folk tales and world classics, why institutions suppress the growth of Kashmiri, and the spoken word as the true measure of a language’s life.”

Yle: 💜🤍💚 Saana Nilsson spent 17 years at Finland’s most secret workplace – “In a new book [Suojeluenkeli], a former researcher at the Finnish Security Intelligence Service says that after the start of the war in Ukraine, the fear of Russia completely passed away in Finland.” In an interview at the Rikhardinkatu library in Helsinki, she talks to Jesse Mäntysalo about her book and “criticizes the media for inciting fear”.

Literary Africa: We Hope You Find What You’re Looking For – The latest edition of a monthly newsletter by OtherStories, a culture-led publishing consultancy and studio “on a mission to place African stories at the centre of global culture.”

1000 Libraries Magazine: ❤️🤍💚 The Old Welsh Word That Explains a Feeling Most People Can’t Describe – “Ever felt nostalgia for something you never had?” asks Vincent Phan. “Learn how the Welsh word hiraeth gives that feeling a name.”

The New York Times (via Archive Today): ☘️💜🤍💚 The Intimate, Luminous Poems Found in Iris Murdoch’s Attic – “The formidable [Irish-British] novelist and philosopher, who died in 1999, thought her poetry was mediocre. It’s not”, says Dwight Garner after reading Iris Murdoch’s Poems from an Attic.

NPR: History of mixed-race children orphaned in Germany after WWII inspires new novel by Sadeqa Johnson – “Emily Kwong speaks with Sadeqa Johnson about her new novel The Keeper of Lost Children and [discovers] the story of mixed-race children who were left in German orphanages following World War II.”

The Globe and Mail (via Archive Today): 🍁💜🤍💚 Natural-born storyteller – In an interview with science reporter Ivan Semeniuk, “Margaret Atwood explains why our brains are hard-wired to tell a great yarn”.

The Baffler (via Archive Today): Something Is Missing – “Kafka as he was, rather than as we might like him to be”, is the way Daniel Kipnis describes the 2025 film Franz, produced by Agnieszka Holland.

Strange Horizons: Why All Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Are Historians – In a piece on the important connection between SFF and history, Ada Palmer says such “authors are the front-line practitioners who put the fruits of history’s craft into daily practice, sharing it in doses the public can consume, combining, treating, administering, customizing, even inoculating against evils like propaganda and despair.”

Kate’s Substack: 💜🤍💚 Why Poetry Reviewing Matters – “Once a week [Kate Clanchy runs] an online poetry workshop with women in Afghanistan.” She discusses here the importance of poetry reviews and the current fracas at Gutter magazine over a critique of “Polly Clark’s new and collected poems” being withdrawn “because a reader objected to her social media posts.”

Defector: Confessions Of A Bookanizer – “Clearly, I do not read like a normal person”, admits Drew Magary. “I cheat on one book with another book, and then I cheat on that book when another book catches my wandering eye. I am a bookanizer.”

Börsenblatt: Dietmar Dath receives Alfred Kerr Prize for Literary Criticism 2026 – “The 2026 Alfred Kerr Prize for Literary Criticism goes to the [German] journalist, writer and translator Dietmar Dath. The jury awarded him this [prize] for his critical texts ‘with extraordinary linguistic design on a wide range of topics’.”

Women Writing the World: 💜🤍💚 Classics: Sex in Louisiana – “In 1899 a novel was published that was so radical it ended the author’s career. The novel is The Awakening and the author was 49-year-old Kate Chopin, a happy widow. Also in 1899, a remarkable short story collection was published by 24-year-old Alice Dunbar-Nelson, then known mainly as the wife of a famous poet who was beating her.” Lilian Nattel looks back at their individual stories. There’s also an excellent piece about Chopin’s feminist classic at A Narrative Of Their Own: Desire and the New Woman at the fin de siècle.

Pittsburgh Review of Books: A Writer Talks to His Translator – “Spanish novelist [author of Centroeuropa,] Vincente Luis Mora talks to his translator Rahul Bery about experimentation, Medieval and Renaissance poetry, and the strange allure of setting a fiction in nineteenth-century Prussia.

Literary Hub: Woodsy Necromancers and Space Moby-Dick: March’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Books – “Stave off winter doldrums” with the latest SFF releases from the likes of Alexis Hall, Jenn Lyons, Adrian Tchaikovsky and others” says Natalie Zutter. The book featured here is Jennifer Mandula’s historical fantasy novel about a Victorian fossil hunter who discovers a baby pterodactyl, The Geomagician.

The Observer: 💜🤍💚 Lucy Apps’s Gloria Don’t Speak is a profound and important debut – Ellen Peirson-Hagger writes: “An Observer debut novelist of the year asks us to see the world through the eyes of a young woman with learning difficulties” in Gloria Don’t Speak.

The New York Review (via Archive Today): 💜🤍💚 The Poet’s Double – “In the early years of the Soviet Union, Konstantin Vaginov wrote fiction and poetry characterized by a sense of doubleness, ambiguity, and perverse humor,” says Sophie Pinkham.

The Asahi Shimbun: Earliest Oe novels, penned as Todai student, unearthed – “Two unpublished novels by [Japanese] Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe (1935–2023), penned before his official debut, have been discovered and are now his oldest known works.”

Irish Examiner: ☘️💜🤍💚 Book review: Exhilarating thriller exposes the harsh reality of stalking – In Your Every Move, Irish mystery author Same Blake (aka Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin) “has clearly done her homework in this impossible-to-put-down read”, says Chloe Barrett.

The Sun: Reimagining the Nigerian literary canon: Power, memory, and struggle for inclusion – “The central question”, writes Damiete Braide, “is no longer whether Nigeria possesses a literary canon. It unquestionably does. The more urgent questions are who controls this canon, who benefits from it, and who continues to be marginalised or erased within it.”

Advocating For the Ignorant: 💜🤍💚 Rosamund, Jane, and their little millstones – Sarah Harkness on The Millstone, The L-Shaped Room and “unmarried motherhood in the 1960s.”

Tablet: Peace Is Written with a Swastika – The Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon – whose novel Tarantula, a taut exploration of violence, conspiracy, and the many complex afterlives of the Holocaust, has just appeared in English in Daniel Hahn’s translation – reflects on “the signs and symbols of Jew-hatred that defined [him]”.

Realnoe Vremya: 💜🤍💚 “Comrades in the lyre”: Agnia Barto – Following “the 125th anniversary of the poetess’s birth” last month, this article looks at “how and what [the Russian Soviet poet and children’s writer] Agnia Barto learned from Mayakovsky, Chukovsky, and Marshak”.

Rail Advent: Vintage treasure uncovered during renewal work on the Tyne and Wear Metro – “Vintage recordings of JRR Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Hobbit have been unexpectedly uncovered on a Tyne and Wear Metro line in Newcastle upon Tyne”, reports Katherine Tweedy. Found “buried at the base of an overhead line mast,” the tapes contain an adaptation of the book that was broadcast on Radio 4 in 1968”.

Biographers Conversation:🦘💜🤍💚 Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970 – “In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Jacqueline Kent chats with Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970.”

Words Without Borders: “Where Dust and Sunshine Ran Riot”: Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water – “In its verisimilitude, City Like Water reads more like a series of parabolic anecdotes than a sustained historical allegory,” writes critic Michelle Chan Schmidt of Dorothy Tse’s dystopian novella set in a city very much like (and could be) Hong Kong.

Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society: 💜🤍💚 A Cambridge letter for a Spring morning – Ann Kennedy Smith shares some exciting news about a forthcoming book to which she has contributed a chapter: From Darwin to Cornford: The Evolution of the Poet Frances Cornford, edited by Jane Firman and due for publication later this year.

Escape With Dollycas into a Good Book: ❤️🤍💚 The Curious Case of the Poisoned Professor (A Welsh Village Mystery) by Lucy Connelly – “A new job can be killer in this series debut mystery set in Wales, perfect for fans of Sheila Connolly and Paige Shelton”, says Dollycas of cozy crime novel The Curious Case of the Poisoned Professor.

The New York Times (via Archive Today): Hungry for Affirmation, Vulnerable to Scams: As a Writer, I Know the Feeling – “From George Saunders to the National Book Foundation, the literary world has been besieged by fake requests. Just like me”, reveals Dan Barry.

Open Culture: An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published – Italian artist Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus is “essentially an encyclopaedia about an alien world that clearly reflects our own, each chapter [appearing] to deal with key facets of this surreal place, including flora, fauna, science, machines, games and architecture.” Josh Jones attempts to describe a book that “shares many similarities with The Voynich Manuscript, save its relatively recent vintage and living author.”

The Korean Times: 1 year, 1 publisher, 9,000 books: AI-generated titles flood Korean shelves – Kim Se-jeong says the Korean “publishing industry [is warning] of [a] crisis of reader trust” over the recent flood of AI-generated books.

The Melt by Jason Diamond: It’s Always Twin Peaks Day – “We’re stuck in the Black Lodge”! Jason Diamond on Scott Meslow’s A Place Both Wonderful and Strange: The Extraordinary Untold History of Twin Peaks and the landmark cult series that changed the course of television.

KCUR: 💜🤍💚 Kansas City illustrator turns library checkout cards into tiny works of art. She only gets ‘one shot’ – “Heidi Pitre’s series merges literature, nostalgia, and history, featuring pen-and-ink drawings on about 160 vintage library checkout cards. Interest in the pieces has expanded, but her supply of old-school, ephemeral cards is dwindling.”

McSweeny’s: Is It a Red Flag? Wuthering Heights Edition – In this amusing feature on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Amy Greenlee seeks but struggles to spot red flags in Heathcliff’s behaviour.

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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.

>> See my monthly digest at the Book Jotter Journal on Substack. >>

Categories: Winding Up the Week

Tags: #IWD2026, Agatha Christie, Alex Johnson, Colette, Dewithon 2026, Gabriella Kelly-Davies, International Women's Day, Iranian Literature, Iris Murdoch, Jacqueline Kent, Jennifer Mandula, Marjan Kamali, Michèle Roberts, Nikki Rowe, Persian Literature, Reading Wales Month 2026, Silvina Ocampo, Tadeusz Różewicz, Three Things, Tina Hodgkinson, Tove Jansson