An end of week recap

“To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.”
– Will Thomas

Tomorrow is D.E.A.R. Day, observed wherever in the world you choose to ‘Drop Everything and Read’. Then, from Sunday until 18^th April, it is Hate Week – when readers gather en masse in the fictional superstate of Oceania (that is, online) to “celebrate” George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty‑Four. 🐀 

Slim pickings in the bookish birthday department today, I’m afraid. Among the few I can find are the English poet Christopher Smart (1722), Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator Mark Strand (1934) and American writer Dorothy Allison (1949). Sunday isn’t much more action-packed. We have American writer of children’s and YA fiction Beverly Cleary (1916), Polish poet, writer, translator and literary critic Anna Kamienska (1920), American writer of avant-garde short stories and science fiction Carol Emshwiller (1921), American novelist Tom Clancy (1947) and American ‘brat pack’ author Tama Janowitz (1956).

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.

* Lit Crit Blogflash * 

This is where I share my favourite pieces of writing from around the blogosphere. So many talented people are producing high‑quality book features and reviews that it’s always difficult to choose – but on this occasion, these two alternate‑universe pieces, both posted in recent days, stood out.

Book Review: Few and Far Between – Book blogger Jackie Law, host of neverimitate since 2013, turns her discerning eye to Jan Carson’s alternate‑history novel Few and Far Between – a speculative exploration of a community “who were raised in the insular cauldron of twentieth century Northern Ireland.” Set across a remote cluster of islands known as the Ark, the novel centres on an unmarried “middle aged brother and sister, Robert-John and Marion Connolly”, who still inhabit “the home their parents moved to when Marion was eight and Robert-John approaching his teens.” Alongside their neighbours, they have remained on the islands in search of refuge from the Troubles, their lives shaped as much by isolation as by the history they hoped to escape. Their future is now “under threat” and “most of the residents have left” following “the success of the Peace Process”. The siblings “fear for what might happen to them if the government has its way and the Lough is flooded in an attempt to remove damaging algae”. The author, says Jackie, “is skilled at capturing the essential character of the Northern Irish” and “with her signature wit” depicts “a society of misfits […], each serving a novel purpose.” Please take a gander at her thoughtful review of this “wonderfully imaginative and entertaining tale”, with an “understated yet satisfying ending.”

The Isle in the Silver Sea – Paige Schildkamp of Just One More Pa(i)ge describes Tasha Suri’s 2025 Sapphic fantasy novel The Isle in the Silver Sea – in which a female knight and a witch fall in love – as “ethereal and mystical and fantastically full of folklore”. The “titular isle” of this story, a “thinly veiled”, alternate British Isles, becomes the setting for what Paige calls a narrative “take on nationalism and the way that limited thinking/living slowly kills a nation, when new ideas and stories and people are what it actually needs to legitimately survive”. Its protagonists, living “under the unavoidable hammer of something old”, strive to break cycles and traditions, resisting the “pull to follow the original plot”. It is also, we are told, an otherworldly tale about “trading one oppressive ruling party for another”, but one that arrives at a “lovely”, satisfying dénouement.

* 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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The Times (via Archive Today): Margaret Drabble at 86: ‘I could write terrible things about people’ – “The novelist talks to Alice Jones about ageing, regrets[,] the long feud with her Booker-winning sister AS Byatt” and her latest book, The Great Good Places, “a wise, elegiac, slim volume of essays and short stories loosely structured around the places where Drabble felt ‘happy’”. 

The Neglected Books Page: Some Neglected Candidates for the 1961 Club – Brad Bigelow is enormously interested in Karen Langley and Simon Thomas’s 1961 Club, which kicks off in just a couple of days, since it “represents a transition between the relatively conformist culture of the 1950s and the counter-culture just coming around the corner of the 1960s”. He has plenty of helpful suggestions should you be participating, including titles from Terry Taylor, Thomas Savage, Helen Foley, Stephen Martel and others. 

Girls on the Page: A place apart – “A writer’s workspace is a wilderness,” Emma Leokadia Walkiewicz observes. In her essay, she wanders through the studies, dens and libraries of notable women writers – rooms shaped in an era before the age of curated shelves and self‑conscious interiors – revealing the unruly, intimate landscapes where their work first took root.

Lapham’s Quarterly: William Blake, Remote by the Sea – “Can oceanic visions save us from the machines?” You may find the answer in this piece adapted from Philip Hoare’s untraditional biography‑cum‑poetic odyssey William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, in which he traces the enduring legacy of the visionary poet, painter and printmaker, and seeks to understand how he came to inspire so many artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians.

From My Bookshelf: A Nun-Detective in 19th-Century Russia – Peter C. Meilaender was seeking “a female—and of course Russian—version of Chesterton’s Father Brown.” What he found was Sister Pelagia – a “tribute to Chesterton”, written by Grigory Chkhartishvili (aka Boris Akunin), a Georgian and Russian writer who lives in the UK.

Southwest Review: The Mania of Finding Meaning – Lithium, a “slim volume,” written by Argentine multidisciplinary artist and non‑academic philosopher Malén Denis (originally published in 2020), is described by Cory Oldweiler as “a journal of sorts recording the genuine and often painfully raw emotions of an unnamed 29‑year‑old woman in Buenos Aires.”

The Common Reader: Buddenbrooks, a masterwork of business and real life. A novel to love and live with. – Henry Oliver shares his thoroughly readable notes on delving into Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks while in Austin to give a “talk about literary quests”.

Sandra Orchard: 🍁 Michelle Willms Interview on Northern Girls – “Michelle Willms’s Northern Girls is a courageous collection of true stories about growing up in rural northern Ontario amid instability, silence, and survival.” In a recent interview, the author spoke to Sandra about her childhood, parental addiction and writing this novel.

The Kyiv Independent: From revolutionary to vegan farmer — the wild life of Ukrainian author Volodymyr Vynnychenko – In the latest story for ‘Hidden Canon’ – “a special series celebrating Ukrainian classic literature and aiming to bring it to a wider international audience” – Kate Tsurkan writes: “Like many intellectuals shaped by the turmoil of the early 20^th century, Ukrainian author and statesman Volodymyr Vynnychenko was an idealist [who] dreamed […] of political reform in Ukraine” and “a radical new path for humanity”.

NewScientist: Author of Red Mars calls ‘bullshit’ on emigrating to the planet – Kim Stanley Robinson opens his classic [1992] science fiction novel Red Mars in 2026” (the year in which it is set), as the New Scientist Book Club embarks on reading it this month. Here he looks back on his book’s origins – “and how the idea of moving to Mars holds up today”. 

Two Wildes in one:
People: Oscar Wilde’s Life Gets a New Look in The Weight of Angels – What if, in 1895, Oscar Wilde had ignored the Marquis of Queensbury’s infamous calling card? How might his life have turned out? This is the premise of John Boyne’s forthcoming novel, The Weight of Angels, which “follows [the gifted Irish dramatist, poet and author] into the 1900s, where he meets Houdini, Katharine Hepburn, and Winston Churchill, among others”.
The Invisible Head: Wilde, Beardsley, and the Yellow Book – Alan Horn returns with another fascinating piece about “the intertwined fates of two rivals who defined the 1890s”, this time exploring their involvement with The Yellow Book, the controversial literary periodical published in London from 1894 to 1897. 

Harper’s Magazine (via Archive Today): Brothers and Sisters – Christine Smallwood observes that for the fiction writer, siblings present an especially “rich challenge.” Indeed, as she notes, “multiple siblings create color in a story and a more diffuse sense of entanglement.”

The Saturday Paper (via Archive Today): 🦘 Melissa Manning Frogsong – “Tasmanian writer Melissa Manning’s debut novel, Frogsong, is very much a novel of first love but the arc of its narrative pushes back against many of these conventions”, says reviewer James Bradley.

Advocating For the Ignorant: Vera Brittain and Honourable Estate – Set between the 1890s and 1930, Vera Brittain’s 1936 novel Honourable Estate “tells the story of two families whose fates will intertwine”. Drawing on her experience as an English writer, feminist and VAD nurse, Brittain shapes a narrative that moves far beyond a simple family chronicle. It becomes, as Sarah Harkness puts it, “a genuinely gripping account of what it was like to be a woman in England in the two decades either side of the catastrophe of World War One, and how rapidly life was changing over that time.”

AnOther: Inside Kelly Bonneville’s Cult Parisian Bookshop Librairie 1909 – “Situated in Dover Street Market Paris and the city’s 11th arrondissement,” Kelly Bonneville talks to Rose Dodd about “founding 1909, books worth reading and venturing into publishing.”

EstLit: Notes on a Thin Black Book – Visiting an Estonian bookshop, Colombian writer Juan Rodríguez’s partner spotted Ten Estonian Novels: Selected Excerpts – a thin black volume published by the Estonian Literature Centre – and immediately bought it for him. That day, Juan “found new voices” he came to “treasure.”

Mostly Books by Marcie Geffner: Book Review: ‘The Book of Fallen Leaves’ by A.S. Tamaki – Marcie Geffner shares her thoughts on A.S. Tamaki’s The Book of Fallen Leaves – “a promising start to a gorgeous Japanese samurai-inspired fantasy series”.

Literary Review of Canada (via Archive Today): 🍁 A Lifetime Preoccupation – Blending investigative journalism with memoir, Hunting History: A Writer’s Odyssey is the “final book” of Canadian historian and author Erna Paris – a “woman whose dogged research and discerning reportage — fuelled by audacious courage and dauntless determination — stripped away the stereotypes of world affairs for tens of thousands of readers”.

Ghost of Giraldus: Tulubaikaporia: A Ritual: A Review – “From first appearances, [Vanechka’s] Tulubaikaporia: a ritual [translated by Vanya Bagaev] is a novel about the rural village (or small town) Tulubaika, located somewhere at the fringes of European Russia […]”: but the village is vanishing and, to save it, you, the reader, must go on a quest.

Daily Maverick: The Light Remains: A South African family saga of love and loss – “In her debut novel, Samantha Keller tells an emotionally resonant story of love, loss and family loyalty, set against the backdrop of 1960s South Africa.” Here is an excerpt from her epic family saga, The Light Remains.

Anthony Burgess News: Spooks at Sea – Newly reissued by Galileo Publishers, Burgess’s 1966 thriller Tremor of Intent has been described as “a parody of James Bond”, featuring a middle‑aged spy “past his best, gluttonous instead of glamorous, and a lustful deviant instead of a sexy lover man.” Yet “the parody evolves into something richer and more unexpected”, becoming “a spy novel that will nourish as well as thrill” and, most surprisingly, one filled with “references to literature, art and music.”

The Conversation: Silence: a brief literary history – “Without silences, we wouldn’t have the exquisite hush of medieval lullabies, the suspenseful secrets of the realist novel, or jagged modernist poetry.” Kate McLoughlin discusses her new book, Silence: A Literary History, which “[sets] out to show that, over 1,200 years, English literature has spoken to us – and spoken to us eloquently – through silences as well as through words.”

Air Mail: Fool’s Gold – In Kutchinsky’s Egg: A Family’s Story of Obsession, Love, and Loss, Serena Kutchinsky tracks down her father’s greatest creation – a multi-million-dollar, Fabergé-inspired jewelled egg that ultimately destroyed his century-old jewellery firm, his marriage and his life.

The Believer: A Review of Ladies Almanack – Newly republished by Dalkey Archive, Djuna Barnes’s parodic yet groundbreaking 1928 exploration of lesbian life Ladies Almanack  – written for and about a circle of Parisian women – can at times feel elusive. To fully “surrender to the book’s colorful language,” Lauren LeBlanc advises that “one should read it slowly, and preferably aloud.”

Afrocritik: “BackHomeAbroad and Other Stories” Review: Immigrant Realities Convene in Pede Hollist’s Collection of Stories – “Across his fifteen stories [in BackHomeAbroad],” Azubuike Obi finds that “the Sierra Leonean writer, Pede Hollist, answers what it is [to belong], whether at home or abroad. Traipsing between America, Sierra Leone, and fictional Teneria, Hollist offers an array of perspectives, painting a kaleidoscope of home as both place and feeling.” 

Reactor: The Specific Experience of Being Stuck on a Book – Which was the last book you couldn’t get out of your head? In the latest ‘Mark As Read’, Molly Templeton is snagged on Claire North’s Slow Gods – and the experience of being consumed by a story. 

The Sydney Morning Herald (via Archive Today): 🦘 Cults, political thrills, ADHD and the Murdochs: 10 new books – Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp cast their eyes over new fiction and non-fiction releases “from the Philippines to Scotland […] and from Iran to the Central Kimberley”. 

The New York Review (via Archive Today): ‘To Share Is Our Duty’ – “Two consummate Virginia Woolf scholars have added more than 1,400 letters to the corpus. On show are charm, careful condolence, generosity, candor about her reading and writing, and a belief that ‘communication is health’”, says British biographer Hermione Lee in her review of the enormously expensive The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke. 

Books and Bits: 🍁 We are all just hungry, hungry hippos – Pandora Sykes shares extracts from Canadian writer and academic Kate Bowler’s new book, Joyful, Anyway: Finding Delight in Impossible Times.

Sciencenorway.no: What made books from Norway so appealing in Nazi Germany? – A fascinating article from Bård Amundsen about “a retired professor [who] has investigated a chapter of Norwegian literary history that few have wanted to talk about since.” 

Beck and Call: Where Readers Meet Writers: Who Wrote Jekyll and Hyde? – Christine Beck’s book group chose to read Camille Peri’s A Wilder Shore — “a joint biography of [Scottish writer] Robert Louis Stevenson (often called RLS) and his wife, Fanny Osbourne.” Fanny, “ten years his senior, […] took charge of his health” and became “the first and best reader of [his] work.” Christine shares the group’s experience of reading this absorbing account of their intertwined lives. 

LARB: The Structures That Make Violence Legible – Ian Ellison examines The Threshold and the Ledger, “Tom McCarthy’s critical study of postwar Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann”, which, he says, “shows a deep sensitivity to form.” Born on 25^th June 1926, this is her centenary year.

Open Culture: Discover Gadsby: The 50,000-Word Novel Written Without Using the Letter E (1939) – Ernest Vincent Wright’s self-published Gadsby, arrived on the scene to absolutely “no fanfare”. It is now, however, “acknowledged […] as a literary oddity, far more often cited as a piece of trivia than actually read.”

The Butler Did It: The Penguin Pool Murder by Stuart Palmer – “It’s [Miss Hildegarde Withers’] independence that speaks to readers across decades and makes the spinster a continually popular choice for an amateur detective.” Brooke Holgerson on “spinsters, widows [,] Miss Hildegarde Withers” and The Penguin Pool Murder.

Strange Horizons: From Cosmic Horror to Solarpunk Futures: The Changing Face of Fungal Speculation – From the recent subterranean‑growth special issue, Strange HoRhizomes, comes this eukaryotic essay by Ruthanna Emrys, who argues that “creativity, of all kinds, benefits from breaking down rigid taxonomies.” She further suggests that “decay, whether we fear it or welcome it, provides rich loam for imagining what might come next.” 

The Creative Process: For the Sun After Long Nights: Iranian Women Leading Fight for Freedom – “Professor David Palumbo-Liu speaks with journalist Fatemeh Jamalpour about her book, For the Sun After Long Nights, [an exploration of the 2022 women-led protests in Iran,] which she wrote with fellow journalist Nilo Tabrizy.”

The Cut (via Archive Today): Diary of a Former Wastrel Youth – The Oyster Diaries, cult author Nancy Lemann’s first novel in more than 20 years, “feels very familiar”, says Cat Zhang.

The Japan Times: ‘Alone in Japan’ travels towns in decline and talks to the people left – “While Japan’s depopulation is a much-discussed issue, […] Tom Feiling’s book Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future tackles the topic face to face” as he travels to remote parts of Japan. 

Largehearted Boy: Patricia Henley’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Apple & Palm – The author’s playlist on this occasion is by Patricia Henley, whose short story collection Apple & Palm – a provocative examination of aging, memory and desire set in and around the town of Whistle Pig in Western Maryland – has just been released. Among the songs are Etta James’s ‘At Last’, K.D. Lang’s ‘Big-Boned Gal’ and Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’.

Noted: Mason Currey’s “Inefficient and Glorious Research Process” – Mason Currey, author of Making Art and Making a Living, explains how he “skims, scans, and scribbles his way into the lives of writers and artists”. 

4Columns: Black in Blues – In the non-fiction book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People – “an exploration [of] the color blue as it appears in concert and contrast with black (black people, black history, the color black)” – Imani Perry’s writing is at its strongest when she “commits to the reshaping of the familiar”, says Hanif Abdurraqib.

The Montréal Review: Séances on the Moscow River – Thomas More And Niccolò Machiavelli – “Michael Jackson looks at the strange ways the Soviet regime used the past to justify its power, starting with the enshrinement of Thomas More as a socialist hero on a Kremlin monument. While More’s vision of a property-free society was used to build a revolutionary myth, the regime later turned the reputation of Niccolò Machiavelli into a symbol of treachery to destroy its own founders. The essay shows how these Renaissance ghosts were summoned during the Great Purge, specifically when Lev Kamenev’s scholarly work on Machiavelli was used by prosecutors as a death warrant.”

Prospect (via Archive Today): Infidelity in 2026 – In this piece on Sophie Mackintosh’s fourth novel, Permanence, Ellen Peirson-Hagger admits she is “facing up to the new wave of literary novels, mostly written by women, on the theme of cheating couples”.

Compact: Substack Has Revived the Serial Novel – “If we want people to read novels in the era of shortened attention spans, […] then we need a revival of the serial novel”, argues A. A. Kostas. Fortunately, “that is just what we are seeing.”

China Book Reviews: A Chinese Intellectual in Oxford – “In the 1930s Chiang Yee, a Chinese writer and artist, moved to England. His work, and that of his wartime circle of Chinese literati, deserve to be remembered”, says Paul French.

Los Angeles Times: Why rich women pay me to tell them what to read – Amy Silverberg writes, “When I tell people I have a job facilitating book clubs, the first response is almost always, ‘That’s a job?’”. Here, she shares a few secrets of the trade.

BBC News Culture: Best-selling The Housemaid author Freida McFadden reveals true identity – “One of the biggest mysteries in publishing has been solved, after the best-selling US author known to millions of readers as Freida McFadden revealed her true identity.”

The Wrap (via Yahoo! Entertainment): How ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Screenwriter Larry McMurtry Convinced Annie Proulx to Let Him Adapt Her Short Story | Exclusive – “Biographer David Streitfeld writes in this excerpt from Western Star that when McMurtry read Proulx’s 1997 piece [Brokeback Mountain], he knew it was a masterpiece – and a movie”.

The New York Times (via Archive Today): To Topple the Patriarchy, These Women Have Sex With Vegetables – According to Sadie Stein, “The Polish best seller Hexes of the Deadwood Forest is like a post-porn fever dream of Eastern European magic realism crossed with a plant-based Joy of Sex.”

Culture Café: What Jane Austen can teach us about Trump – “While Donald Trump was blowing up the world, I was on a sun bed reading Jane Austen.” Christina Patterson shares her thoughts from a sun lounger, somewhere in Egypt, while reading Persuasion.

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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 term, 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: Alternate Universe, Alternative History, Anthony Burgess, Brat Pack, Camille Peri, D.E.A.R. Day, Fanny Osbourne, George Orwell, Hate Week, Imani Perry, Jan Carson, John Boyne, Margaret Drabble, Robert Louis Stevenson, Will Thomas