2020s

A new biography of A.A. Milne

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You may well know how much I love A.A. Milne. I wrote all about it back in 2014, and he is such an instrumental part of me establishing my literary taste and discovering what being a bibliophile and book-hunter looked like. And so I was excited to learn that Gyles Brandreth had written a new biography of Milne – and of Winnie-the-Pooh, so goes the subtitle. Called Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear, it is clearly intended to charm an audience more invested in Winnie-the-Pooh than Wurzel-Flummery or Chloe Marr. On whatever front, I was ready to be charmed – and Mum and Dad got me a copy for Christmas.

Brandreth has written a fair few books, but I’d say he is best known in the UK as a sort of cultural curio. He turns up on breakfast TV shows or Celebrity Gogglebox wearing jumpers with teddy bears on them, and says posh, eccentric, kindly things. You can easily imagine that he would love everything connected with the 100-acre wood with the same upper-class simplicity that he probably approaches toast and marmalade, or going to Lords. (He was a Conservative MP for five years, but we won’t hold that against him. It was probably inevitable.)

And so, what sort of book has he written? It is much more focused on Milne than I’d anticipated – it goes through his childhood, his unhappiness at school, his happiness at university, his dizzyingly early achievements as a sketch-writer, comic essayist and playwright. We tread the path through his wartime experience, his sudden and brief success as a detective novelist before the children’s books dominate – and then we wind down on his gradual fading from literary grandeur.

Winnie-the-Pooh et al certainly get plenty of the book, but less than I’d expected – and I was quite grateful about that. Brandreth hasn’t shunted the rest of Milne’s career to the sidelines to give the children’s books unparalleled attention. Rather, he considers them as part of Milne’s long and often-glittering literary reputation. The only exception to this is the way that he intersperses otherwise unrelated sections with quotes from the Pooh books, slightly awkwardly placed in boxes in the middle of the text.

As a Milne aficiando, there wasn’t anything new to me, but I still loved reading it. Brandreth writes with an ease and affection that is infectious. He has clearly read everything he could get his hands on, and it’s evident which works particularly chimed with him – he returns to Chloe Marr quite often, for instance. But… it really is just an affable rehash of Ann Thwaite’s magisterial biography A.A. Milne: His Life. I did wonder if that was why it has no formal referencing – because the source of almost everything he writes is almost certainly Thwaite’s book. It’s a bit of a pity that, 35 years later, there is nothing new to add – but that’s probably because of the sort of writer Brandreth is.

Brandreth is an enthusiast – he is not a researcher. The only new things he brings to the book say more about the world he lives in, because the novel material comes from friendship with Christopher (Robin) Milne. He doesn’t hide this, nor is he needlessly showy about it – he simply shares discussions and perspectives that Christopher Milne shared with him. This largely came when Brandreth was putting together a play, Now We Are Sixty, though it does sound like it flourished into a friendship rather than simply a fleeting professional relationship.

“We were so close,” Christopher told me, “until I left school and beyond, until after the war, really.” Father and son had sport, nature and mathematics in common. Alan delighted in his boy as once he had delighted in his brother.

One presumes that Brandreth is turning to old notes, rather than remembering conversations of many decades earlier.

This is not an insignificant contribution – it takes the book more into the territory of the friend-of-the-family memoir, which is a genre I greatly enjoy, even if Brandreth is certainly on the peripheraries. And it’s a good job that he brings his individual charm to the tone, because otherwise (besides the lack of new material) there are a few things that would otherwise make Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear feel a bit howlery. It seems rather rushed and repetitive – as one example, he is unable to mention Milne’s brother Barry without rehashing that Milne didn’t like Barry but did get on with Barry’s wife. It is probably repeated six or seven times. And then there are unforgivably bad sentences like this:

Boldly, for this feature, in June 1902, for the special May Week issue of The Granta, Alan wrote about the soon-to-be-crowned new king, Edward VII, who had succeeded his mother, Queen Victoria, on her death in January 1901.

How fast do you have to be rushing a book out to let that comma-strewn monstrosity get through? He also has a habit of this sort of chatty, decisive tone, that feels a bit like listening to a self-styled expert in a bar:

When Alan first met the young woman he was destined to marry, he was delighted to discover that she could quote episodes from The Rabbits line by line. Perhaps that’s why he married her. Seriously. He liked that. He liked it very much.

I know I’m singling out suspect sentences, but this isn’t intended as a censure. I only mention them to explain the sort of book this is: it’s a chatty, charming book about an author I love, written by someone who shares that love. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear is not the work of a biography exploring new territory. It’s a bibliophile sharing his enthusiasms. And, you know what, that was exactly what I was in the mood for.

Hope Never Knew Horizon (2024) by Douglas Bruton

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You might have seen by now that Blue Postcards by Douglas Bruton was one of my favourite reads of the past year. Bruton himself happened to stumble across me talking about it, and very kindly sent me a copy of Hope Never Knew Horizon (2024) – and I loved that one too!

There are three threads to the novel, and it took me a long time to work out how they could possibly relate to each other. If you’d like to maintain that mystery, then maybe skip some of this review – and it wouldn’t have been a mystery to me if I’d properly remembered the note that Bruton sent me alongside the book. I hope he won’t mind me quoting from it.

The genesis was this: “I wanted to write something filled up with hope.” And then…

I stumbled across two people messaging back and forth online, discussing a programme they had seen on the TV about the blue whale skeleton in London’s Natural History Museum and how it had been taken down and restored and rehung; and it had been given a name: the blue whale skeleton was not called Hope!

Then I remembered a poem by Emily Dickinson: ‘Hope is a thing with feathers’ […] And, finally, I recalled a painting I had seen in my early twenties, a painting by G F Watts and it had held me captive for twenty minutes or so when I knew nothing about art, and it was called ‘Hope’.

Three contributions to art or science – three places where the term ‘Hope’ came to the fore. There are no other connections (in reality, at least) between any of the people related to these three creations. But reading them alongside each other forms a curiously moving tapestry of human curiosity, emotion and, yes, hope.

When Ned Wickham is deeper in his cups than any man has a right to be, he tells the story of the Wexford Whale and like I said before he is not ever to be believed. In the weeks and months after, the story grows arms and legs and runs crazy through the streets, hollering with its arms waving above its head. Ned tells how he single-handedly wrestled the whale into submission, up to his knees in the briny, and then took its life with all the heroism fitting of a sabre-wielding cavalryman at the Battle of Waterloo.

Ned is an ordinary, working-class man who knows the sea as well as the land. He does not single-handedly do anything regarding the whale, except he does find it on the shore and is ultimately paid a small amount by the crown for this discovery. It is the first step of many in the whale’s posthumous journey, and it is the only story of the three that is narrated by many different people – starting with a woman who may or may not have a future with Ned.

On we go, through years and years, as the whale skeleton is bought and sold, cleaned and constructed, and hangs high up in the ceiling of the British Museum. Each voice is captured beautifully for however long it is on the page, and Bruton sees so much in the many invisible stages behind a public spectacle.

Next we have perhaps the most famous figure in the novel: Emily Dickinson. Or, rather, we have her servant, Margaret. Her first words are ‘Sure but Miss Emily thinks no one knows’. Dickinson has more than one secret, but the key among them is her deep love for the woman destined to marry her brother. They surreptitiously send letters to one another, and this has a firmer basis in fact than some other elements of Hope Never Knew Horizon, because a volume of letters from Dickinson to Susan Huntington (though not the replies) has been published. It may have been secret from the world, but servants don’t miss anything. What makes Margaret’s perspective so compelling is her investment in the relationship, and in Miss Emily’s happiness, even while she doesn’t fully understand all the implications. She has all the hope that Emily can’t bear.

‘Open me carefully,’ Miss Emily’d written at the bottom of the page. And the letter was to Susan Huntington, ‘Dear and darling Susie,’ she’d wrote. And ‘open me carefully’ and not when anyone is by so that it is a secret just between Miss Emily and Miss Susan, ‘cept now I know and my heart yearns and I look for the postboy now, as much as Miss Emily does, and I wonder where on earth he can be with his dillying and dallying, and I am a little cross when he does turn up and there is nothing for Miss Emily.

Third and final is Ada, an artist’s model known professionally as Dorothy Dene. I will confess that I had not heard of ‘Hope’, the painting by Watts, a detail of which is on the cover. Her introduction shows us the sort of plucky woman she is:

Men’s hearts are so easily won. Just a carefully timed dip of my head, a look that holds his and then lets it go again and a way of shaping the mouth so the lips almost make one half of a kiss, needing only his lips to complete the act.

Ada is another working-class character, making a precarious living in a world of men who are more powerful than she is – yet she holds her own power over them. As with the other characters in the novel, she is on the peripheries of renown and spectacle, though obviously more present than the others by appearing in the painting. But she is very much the subject rather than the artist, despite her self-possession and confidence. Her story becomes one about love and different kinds of love, and what the relationship between artist and subject can be.

Hope Never Knew Horizon would be an interesting novel if it were ‘just’ an unusual slant on three notable moments in British cultural history, told by people (real or invented) whose names are not the sort to be recorded for posterity. But what elevates it above that is Bruton’s extraordinary writing. I do not know how he does it, and I would think it impossible to analyse, but he breathes humanity into his prose with every sentence. That is his special gift: humanity. These are not just characters who are vivid and vital. They are creations whom the author clearly respects, dignifies, and loves.

And, yes, This is somehow a book suffused with hope. There is no heavy-handed moral, or perhaps a moral at all. But I ended it feeling greater hope about the world and the people who populate it. In his note, Bruton wrote “I wanted to write something filled up with hope.” Even after reading two books by him, I can see that that sentiment is quintessentially Bruton. Hope Never Knew Horizon is special and beautiful. If I didn’t have a rule about only including one book by any author on my end of year lists, it would have been a strong candidate for the top 10. I am so looking forward to continuing exploring Bruton’s work, and thankful to have discovered it.

Others who got Stuck into it:

“By the time I started the third story, a mere 22 pages in, I was gripped, transported to that extraordinary utopia of fiction where life is more vivid and meaningful than ordinary reality.” – Victoria

“Douglas Bruton’s haunting writing is the kind that changes you once you’ve read it; this is a truly original and wonderful book and I can’t recommend it enough.” – Karen

“Bruton’s writing is strikingly beautiful, his storytelling captivating and his theme is one close to my heart.” – Susan

8 things I love about Bookish by Lucy Mangan

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Bookish by Lucy Mangan cover

I read a lot of books about books and reading, and I almost invariably enjoy them. But they do quite often feel like palate-cleansers in between other books – treading familiar ground, and not quite capturing the love I had of my first forays into the genre, like Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman and Howards End is on the Landing by Susan Hill.

But then, sometimes, I come across a book about being a reader that reminds me why I love them so much. Bookish (2025) by Lucy Mangan is such a wonderful read. Or, in my case, listen – I listened to the audiobook, but I wasn’t far through it when I knew I’d have to get hold of a paper copy too. It’s always hard to write a proper review from my memories of an audiobook, so instead here are some bullet points of things about loved about Bookish.

1. The opening lines

The book starts with ‘I am never happier than when I am in a bookshop’, and you know you’re in safe hands already. Like Lucy Mangan, I consider book hunting to be one of the happiest, most joyful ways to spend time. I’d already really enjoyed her previous bookish book, Bookworm, about childhood reading – and I was even more excited to read her talking about grown up books.

2. Lucy Mangan is a kindred spirit

If that quote doesn’t make it clear, she is One Of Us. Few writers have better captured what it is to live a bookish life – not just somebody who enjoys reading, but somebody who is A Reader. Not in a scholarly, superior way – rather, somebody who lives, breathes, and loves books. There were countless occasions on which I felt seen by her. Which is why I am calling her ‘Lucy Mangan’ in full throughout – because I don’t actually know her, so can’t call her ‘Lucy’, but also now feel too much of a friend to call her ‘Mangan’.

3. She captures stages of life perfectly

There are plenty of life experiences that Lucy Mangan and I do not share – marriage, parenthood, being an incredibly successful journalist. But one thing we do have in common is going to Oxbridge from state schools, and being thrown into seminars and tutorials with students who clearly felt much more comfortable in those environments. The section where she describes that period of her life had me nodding vigorously.

4. She has controversial but correct opinions

I am thinking specifically of her preference for Anne Bronte over Charlotte and Emily. Tell ’em, LM!

5. Our tastes overlap…

To be fair, there aren’t many super-super-obscure books mentioned in Bookish, though there are plenty I haven’t read or are only dimly aware of. But it’s still lovely to read a fellow enthusiast for books like I Capture the Castle and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And, in fact, Lucy Mangan’s love for those books makes me desperate for her to read Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton and O, The Brave Music by Dorothy Evelyn Smith. The four belong together, and it should be impossible to love one without loving them all.

6. …and they also differ

But it was also fun to read Lucy Mangan’s enthusiasm for books I know I wouldn’t like – and that certainly isn’t always the case. She doesn’t like whimsy in books, while I do now and then – and, most decisively different, she adores historical fiction which I usually dislike. And yet reading about her obsession with Norah Lofts was a delight, and I do hope she has read Lofts’ excellent, funny, tense non-historical novel Lady Living Alone.

7. She is wise about owning books

Apparently there are 10,000+ books in her house – and, gosh, I’d love to see her library. The descriptions of culling (limited) and bookshelf arranging (joyful) hit home, and it’s wonderful to read about somebody who sees no problem in overflowing shelves – filled, crucially, with much-loved books and possible-reads, rather than expensive first editions and books bought as investments.

8. It’s funny, warm, and optimistic

Even in the sadder moments, there is a warmth that flows through Bookish. How do you capture it? How do you make a book feel like curling up a sofa for a natter with a dear friend? I suppose by being an excellent writer, and that is a keynote of Bookish. It’s a hoot, it’s self-deprecating and simultaneously celebratory about the reading life. Press it into the hands of any bookish friends and family this Christmas – and put it on your own wishlist. After all, it’ll help justify all the other teetering piles of books.

Literary Gardens by Sandra Lawrence

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I’ve really dialled back the number of review books I say yes to (and, let’s be honest, don’t get offered as many as I did in the blogging heyday) – but I couldn’t resist when I was kindly offered a new title from Frances Lincoln publishers. Literary Gardens: The Imaginary Gardens of Writers and Poets by Sandra Lawrence was a lovely concept – and is executed just as beautifully as you’d hope.

The book looks at the gardens created by different authors in their books – particularly those which have a real bearing on the experience of the characters and the imagination of the reader. When I first heard about the book, I thought it might tread very familiar paths – your usual assembly of Austen, Bronte etc, with an eye on the mass market. And, yes, there are some crowd-pleasers in here (Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald) – but Lawrence is clearly extremely well-read and very thoughtful in her selection.

Some authors I love that are represented – ‘The Garden Party’ by Katherine Mansfield, Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie, Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim. We have nostalgia catered to, with The Secret Garden, The Tale of Beatrix Potter, and The Chronicles of Narnia – and then there are authors I’ve never read and, in some cases, never before heard of (Vivant Denon, Valmiki, Sei Shōnagon).

Each chapter introduces you to the book in question, talks a little about the plot and reception and, of course, the setting. Lawrence has an easy, friendly way with words – balancing her research with the affability of a fellow-reader. Here are a couple of paragraphs on Hallowe’en Party, for instance:

One of Christie’s last whodunits, the novel was not well-received on publication in 1969. Alongside pace-slowing throwbacks to previous ‘greatest hits’, she, perhaps unwisely, tries to keep up with the times. Her tried-and-tested but quaint by the 1960s style is littered with everything from long-haired beatniks to recreational drugs, the merits of abolishing capital punishment to the dropping of the eleven-plus exam, televions to – shock – lesbians, in the process, it would seem, both alienating her core and irritating any prospective audiences. […] Time has been kinder, however, than the critics, and while not her most tightly plotted mystery, the basic story of Hallowe’en Party is solid.

The action is mainly set at the imaginary Woodleigh Common, 30-40 miles from London near the equally fictional Madchester. The village’s houses are mainly named for trees: The Elms, Apple Trees, Pine Crest. The only exception is a large Victorian pile boasting a strange garden: Quarry House. Poirot is unimpressed. To him the idea of a ‘quarry garden’ is ‘ugly’, suggesting blasted rocks, lorries and roadmaking, all alien to this olde-worlde setting. 

In each chapter, Lawrence widens from the novel or story itself to a broader look at the author – in this one, for example, she looks at Christie’s own home and garden, Greenway. The chapters are short but satisfying. It’s probably more satisfying if you’ve read the book in question, if I’m honest, but I still appreciate Lawrence’s willingness to introduce us to less familiar authors.

This sort of beautifully produced book (not a ‘coffee table book’ in the sense of merely flicking through, but would grace any coffee table) stands or falls on its accompanying visuals – and Lucille Clerc’s illustrations are a wonderful success. They are so sumptuous, inviting you into the imaginary gardens (or, occasionally, appropriately deterring you). She captures the feel of narrative – none of the images feel static, even the ones that don’t have anybody in. Here’s Mr McGregor’s garden from The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, and I defy you not to want to scurry in.

If you google the book, you’ll find a few other examples. I could stare at them for a long time – Clerc resists being fey or whimsical, and even the most fanciful garden illustration has a groundedness to it.

It’s such a good idea for a book, and it is done much better than I could have hoped for. Such a thoughtful selection, and put together wonderfully. I think Literary Gardens would make a lovely present – but I’d equally recommend it for a purchase for yourself.

Autocorrect by Etgar Keret

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A few years ago, one of my favourite reads was Suddenly, A Knock on the Door by Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret – so when I saw that a new collection had been published, I was keen to get a copy. Autocorrect (2024; English translation 2025) was sent as a review copy, and I loved getting back into Keret’s strange mind. The stories in here were published in various places over the past few years, translated from Hebrew by Sondra Silverston and Jessica Cohen. (Only one was written after the 7 October attacks in Israel, and the subsequent extreme violence upon citizens in Gaza, and this story does look at the aftermath of the October attacks in a fairly oblique way. He is not the sort of writer you’d expect to write un-obliquely about it.)

What I love about Keret is his matter-of-fact surreality. The first story ‘A World Without Selfie Sticks’, for instance, opens like this:

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have yelled at Not-Debbie. Debbie herself always said that yelling doesn’t solve anything. But what is a person supposed to do when, a week after saying a tearful goodbye at the airport to his girlfriend, who was flying to Australia to do her doctorate, he bumps into her at an East Village Starbucks?

From here, things just get weirder. We quickly learn that Not-Debbie is from a parallel universe. She is taking part in a gameshow where five contestants are ‘sent to a universe that contains everything they have in their own world, except for one thing’ and their goal is to figure it out. (The last episode was the one with selfie sticks – the solution to this particular iteration is in the final line of the story.)

I don’t think anybody would describe Keret as sci-fi, but there are elements he borrows from that world. Another story, for instance, is about overcorrection when trying to make robot boyfriends have the right level of sensitivity. The title story, ‘Autocorrect’, is about somebody continually restarting their day to make subtle changes, hoping to evade her father’s death. In all of these odd scenarios, what makes Keret so good is how little time he spends on world-building. He gives us a couple of sentences about what’s going on, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, and we are thrust into the plot for a handful of pages that are disorienting in the best possible way.

He’s very good at opening lines. The example above is a good’un. ‘Gravity’ starts “Three days after they moved into their new apartment, the woman who lived upstairs jumped out of her window.” How could you not want to read on? But he is not all stark sentences – ‘Present perfect’ opens rather more philosophically, with rather a striking image:

It’s about time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colours fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artifical orchid smell of fabric softener.

There were some stories I thought less successful than others. Quite a few are extremely short – three pages, say – and that feels too abrupt to try and do something that leans into the unusual as much as Keret does. Others have pay-off with a comment on faith or politics that feels trite and undergraduate-y – can he really think he’s being profound in these moments? For those reasons, I still prefer Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. But it’s also true that our first encounter with a striking, new-to-us authorial voice can be the one that we retain the greatest fondness for, with the glow of discovery.

That voice is sparse and conversational, which makes the strangeness work. I’m glad to reacquaint myself with him, and glad to know there are others I’ve yet to read.

Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay

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It was only towards the end of reading Snow Road Station (2023) by Elizabeth Hay that I realised it was a sequel to an earlier book but, you know what, I don’t think it mattered. I bought it in Oxford’s loveliest independent bookshop, Caper, drawn by the cover, by the fact Elizabeth Hay is Canadian, and by the recommendation from Mary Lawson on the cover. I also have one of her books which I bought in Canada (not the prequel to this) but I think that came a bit lower than those other recommendations.

I was also very drawn by the opening to the blurb:

In the winter of 2008, as snow falls without interruption, an actor in a Beckett play blanks her lines. Fleeing the theatre, she beats a retreat to Snow Road Station – a barely discernible dot on the map of Ontario.

Now, that is good marketing copy! Consider me sold. The actor in question is Lulu. She has had a fairly celebrated career on the stage, but now she is in her sixties – still very attractive and with lots left to give, but with fewer and fewer professional demands, and a life that is looking increasingly lonely.

Beckett’s plays are notoriously difficult for actors, and Happy Days most notorious of all. As you may know, it is one long monologue for a character called Winnie who, as the acts progress, becomes steadily more and more buried in a pile of sand. Beckett demanded total precision in his plays, down to the ums and ahs, and Lulu cracks. She corpses on stage, forgetting her lines. And her confidence is gone. She decides to abandon rehearsals and retreat to visit her friend Nan.

Now, if I’d read His Whole Life, I’d doubtless be totally up to speed with the relationship between Lulu and Nan – as it is, I was piecing it together. Lulu is visiting for the wedding of Nan’s son, Blake, to a woman he doesn’t want to marry. Lulu sees the word through the lens of theatre, and Hay uses this in a way I found effective – not too often, to feel laboured, but giving you an understanding of her vantage on reality when so much of her day-to-day experience is understood through a prism of stage character.

Blake’s limp hair fell into his eyes. It could use a good wash, Lulu thought, but maybe that’s how it looked after a good wash. He was a blend of Nan and her brother Guy, but morose and much more confrontational in his born-again life as an evangelical preacher. She would have cast him as Iago or Angelo, a blend of hot and cold, an agitated man whose blood is very snow-broth, and Nan as some gaunt queen who’s in the dark.

I’m always interested in how writers create Christian characters (usually very badly), but I found Blake quite a successful portrait. He has the stubbornness that comes of a fixed morality, and perhaps the melancholy that can accompany sacrifice, but his happiness or otherwise stems from his beliefs and behaviours much as everyone else’s does. He is not marked out, by Hay, as particularly victim to his worldview – and, frankly, in modern literature that is up there with the better portraits of Christians.

There are a range of other characters – Jim, Blake’s half-brother, who was apparently the central character of the earlier novel; Lulu’s brother Guy, who still lives nearby and with whom she has a rocky relationship; Hugh, a piano tuner and handyman who is perhaps a little idealistically kind and wholesome.

The villain of the piece is Nan’s ex-husband, John. There is a harrowing scene where he gives Lulu a lift and expects them to sleep each other. It seems to be the ‘price’ of this favour. When she resists, he responds with a cruelty that is not physically violent – but so vile, and so precise, that you’ll remember it for a much longer time than most portrayals of abuse.

The novel is set in three ‘acts’ – called Snow, Road, and Station – and there is a lot that feels play-like in its structure. It is firmly set in a particular time and place, and time – 1995 – is significant because the second Quebec independence referendum is taking place, and characters align themselves on either side. But in another way, it is eternal. Snow Road Station is about relationships – between old friends, between parents and children, between somebody’s life and the life they had hoped to live. Hay has extraordinary control over her plot and her characters. Not in the sense that there is a tightly orchestrated set of story points, but in her clear, total understanding of who these people and how they will act – within language that feels loose and thoughtful, but is clearly chosen with absolute exactitude. I can see why Mary Lawson loved it. Hay is an expert storyteller.

Lulu thinks, of the town’s history, “Snow Road Station was an arrival, a departure, a long wait — a place of rest, a stoppage, yet a road.” In the novel, it is all those things. Hay certainly resists any hokey ‘Town good; rural bad’ or ‘Town bad; rural good’ dichotomy – though she recognises that there are certain places that allow and encourage you to develop different facets of yourself. It’s a beautiful, dark, curiously affirming portrait of a group of people who are seldom totally honest with themselves or each other, but whom we end up understanding totally. A triumph – and now I clearly need to read the previous book.

Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel by Mark Hussey

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Following on from my thoughts on Recommended! by Nicola Wilson, here’s another book so up my street that it feels like a personal favour. Foolishly, I have delayed writing my review for months – I finished it at the beginning of March – but hopefully I remember enough to help you understand why I loved it so much. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (2025) came as a review copy, and I read it as soon as it landed.

As the title suggests, this explores Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. I certainly wouldn’t recommend you read Hussey’s book if you haven’t already read Woolf’s, though you don’t need to have a photographic memory for everything in the original to enjoy this. What I do recommend, actually, is listening to Kristin Scott Thomas’s excellent audiobook of Mrs Dalloway alongside Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel. You’ll definitely want to revisit Mrs D one way or another.

The book starts with the background to Mrs Dalloway – starting with a quick overview of the writing and response to her previous novel, Jacob’s Room, which is often seen as a turning point in her development as a writer. For a woman who wrote so much, with almost every scrap of paper being published, it’s surprising how often the same things are used and reused in any book about Woolf. The ‘life is a luminous halo’ quote; the discovery of ‘how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice’. Mrs Dalloway: Biography for a Novel would feel incomplete without them – but they are thankfully only the starting point.

We see how Woolf’s notes and intentions came together in various early drafts of Mrs Dalloway. I was particularly interested in what Hussey notes about the characters Mr and Mrs Dalloway in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out – since I’d always assumed she lifted them from there. As he points out, they are not really the same characters: exploring how she can re-use characters, but also transform them, does take some dealing with – some acceptance of literary slipperiness that doesn’t come easily. But it is definitely worth exploring.

Hussey sets Woolf’s approach in its context – in her own development as a writer, but also in the contemporary literary context. He avoids some of the simplistic received wisdom about James Joyce, and gives a much more nuanced reading:

Woolf and Joyce have often been set up as antagonists, the surface similarities between Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway – both taking place on a single June day in a capital city – offered as evidence of Joyce’s ‘influence’ or even of Woolf’s plagiarism. Such views invariably rely on the casually nasty remarks Woolf made in her diary, that Joyce’s book called to mind ‘a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’, or that it was evidently the production of a ‘self-taught working man’. But Woolf’s discomfort at the ‘indecency’ in Ulysses was not the primness of a late-Victorian woman (who, after all, enjoyed Lytton Strachey’s lewd poems very much). Her objection was baed on the suspicion that it was a ‘dodge’ to convince readers that here was something unprecedented: ‘Must get out of the way of thinking that indecency is more real than anything else’ was another of her reading notes.

Amen, Virginia! Hussey takes us, of course, through the content of Mrs Dalloway – the inspirations that could have helped compose Mrs Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, putting them thoughtfully in the context of contemporary conversations about mental health, the long-term impact of war, and the place of women – and different types of women – in the 1920s. Some of this is necessarily based a little on conjecture and on broader themes – but Hussey is brilliant at detail too. There is a satisfyingly in-depth look at slight variants between editions – something perhaps most exciting to the Woolf nerd like me, even while it undermines the idea of literary stability.

The proofs Woolf sent to Harcourt Brace in New York were marked differently by Woolf than those she subsequently sent back to her printer for the Hogarth Press edition. Owing to these difference, together with the American compositor failing to indicate where space breaks fell at the foot of a page, the Harcourt edition appeared with only eight sections. When a second English edition appeared as part of the ‘Uniform Edition’ of Woolf’s works in 1929, a break was missed between sections seven and eight, resulting in a version with eleven sections. Various editors have made decisions over the ensuing years that have resulted in a kind of free-for-all, with some versions of Mrs Dalloway having ten, others eight, others eleven sections, and so on.

The initial reception to Mrs Dalloway – from critics and from the public – feeds my appetite for this sort of literary gossip. Woolf also documented her response to this response, and I found it all fascinating. And it continues! The latter sections look at the continuing legacy of the novel – how critics have assessed it over time, and the works it has influenced. Michael Cunningham’s The Hours gets substantial space, of course, and it’s instructive to see what this did to a revitalising of Woolf’s readership – but there are also enjoyably unexpected legacies. Did you expect this book to mention Miley Cyrus? Or to show Mrs Dalloway with scar, sword, and eye patch?

Hussey is also merciless in his delving into particularly stupid reviews. I was rather shocked by what Philip Hensher wrote in 2003 about Woolf being better known for her life than her novels which were (Hensher wrote) “inept, ugly, fatuous, badly written and revoltingly self-indulgent”. Hussey lets critics like this expose their own ignorance, giving them enough rope to hang themselves with. But it certainly helps explain why I found the only Hensher novel I read to be pretty unsuccessful.

Having said that, though, Hussey doesn’t always keep himself in the background – and I appreciated when his own voice comes through. There were some excellent turns of phrase – Wyndham Lewis is described as ‘One of the arch-enemies of Bloomsbury was that talented precursor of today’s laddish critics’ – and sections that feel more personal than academic. I enjoyed the mix.

Literary criticism might be imagined as a sprawling conversation among professionals about reading. The conversation moves on or lingers, repeats itself or brings to light somethiong new, confuses or clarifies, and at times can be difficult even for insiders to follow. At its heart, though, when all the theories and specialised terminology, the trends and assumptions, are put aside, literary criticism consists of people saying ‘I thought this when I read that’. How we are ‘supposed’ to feel about Clarissa Dalloway, Peter Walsh or Doris Kilman is the wrong quetion. More interesting is to ask how do you feel, and why?

Speaking of Doris Kilman, I think the only section of Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel that felt less successful to me was an extended reading of Doris Kilman – broadly whether she is an empathetic character or not, and what Woolf might be trying to achieve with the character. It was very interesting, but didn’t feel quite like it fit into the structure of the book – more like a discussion from an undergraduate seminar that he wanted to use but couldn’t quite work out where. My only other quibble with the book was the absence of an index, but that might just be in my advance proof copy – I haven’t checked the final published version.

Minute quibbles for a brilliant achievement. You might be surprised, after seeing all that Hussey has included in this book, to learn that it’s only 180 pages, plus notes, references etc. It’s amazing how comprehensive he can be in a relatively short space. Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel does two things marvellously: give a huge amount of relevant, fascinating, detailed information in a distinct and enjoyable way, and remind me why I love Woolf’s novel so much. Now, of course, I am impatient for Hussey to give the same treatment to all the rest of Woolf’s oeuvre.

Recommended! by Nicola Wilson

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Sometimes there comes along a book you never even hoped you’d get to read – something so totally up your street that it feels almost like a personal kindness that the author was willing to write. Such is Recommend! (2025) by Nicola Wilson – subtitled ‘the influencers who influenced how we read’. It is a history of the Book Society, which began in 1929 as one of the UK’s first book-of-the-month clubs, and went on for many more decades.

The idea was simple: notable authors of the day would read advance copies of books and pick a choice for their growing number of subscribers. If they didn’t want that, there would be alternatives they could substitute in. Each book would come with the Book Society News, including reviews and articles. The everyday, normal reader could have what highbrow literary groups had had for generations. They even had a ‘literary club’ in London that any subscribers were welcome to visit and use, though who knows how many did. Forgive a long quote, but I enjoyed this aspirational look at what a dinner between five literary minds could and would turn into:

For as the red wine was served out, followed by whiskey and cigars for the men, cigarettes for the ladies, the writers’ plans began to take shape: month by month, book by book, they’d change how people thought about reading. As judges their tastes would be broad and eclectic, embracing popular genres and literary fiction, as well as history, travel writing, and memoir. They would not take themselves too seriously; books should be enjoyable and for everyone. By supporting new authors and encouraging a habit of book-buying, they’d break the back of the private subscription library market, enabling ordinary, busy people to build their own collections of first editions. They would help those without nearby bookshops to keep up with new writing and ideas, creating a wide Anglophone reading community. Their selections and recommendations will be bestsellers, making publishers, agents, and booksellers take note. They’d shake up the staid book world with their expert advice, allowing wider audiences, with a growing appetite for books, better access to a world from which many felt actively excluded

Along the way, they would gain enemies. Personal attacks and jibes about their integrity would haunt them, threatening to topple their careers. They would be accused of dumbing down, mocked as ‘middlemen’ for ‘conferring authority on a taste for the second-rate’. Not all five would stick it out. But the Book Society they began that night would serve tens of thousands of readers worldwide for the next forty years, steering a course through the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the devastation of World War II. Hundreds of what we now think of as twentieth-century classics would first reach readers wrapped in ‘Book Society Choice’ yellow bands.

The initial group included names still known today. The head of the selection committee was Hugh Walpole; alongside him was J.B. Priestley and Rose Macaulay, though the latter dropped out before the first novel was published. Replacing her was Clemence Dane (pseudonym of Winifred Ashton), and the others on that initial committee are perhaps less remembered – writer and reviewer Sylvia Lynd and academic George Gordon, lending the group some critical respectability. Later judges who get a lot of space in the book include Cecil Day-Lewis and Edmund Blunden.

Wilson takes us through the set up of the group, its advertising and some initial pushback, and how the first books were chosen – which seems not to have been plain sailing. ‘For Hugh, the club’s first choice was a mess’, she writes. His father died in the midst of the decision making, and so he had to leave it to others – who were debating between Helen Beauclerk’s The Love of the Foolish Angel and Joan Lowell’s non-fiction The Cradle of the Deep. The former was chosen – which turned out to be a relief, as Lowell’s book was exposed as a hoax.

The book is structured chronologically, but with different judges taking centre stage at different times. I was a little sceptical about this at first – after all, if we delve into Hugh Walpole’s life (for instance) only for the initial chapter, then how would Wilson deal with significant things happening to him later? How would it work to only learn depths about Sylvia Lynd in chapter four? Well, and not for the last time, I’m very impressed by Wilson’s handling of her material. Somehow, it works. She expertly manages to assess when we really need to learn more about a judge’s personal life – whether that be affairs and divorce, substance abuse, or merely the shifting literary fortunes that gave them more or less time to devote to the Book Society. It works brilliantly, and Recommended! becomes rather a page-turner.

I’m skimming the surface of the details in here (you’ll just have to read it!) but, to be honest, I’d have been captivated if Recommended! were only an account of the mechanics of starting and running a book-of-the-month club. And it’s so much more. Wilson doesn’t tell us about every single choice at length, there are plenty of satisfyingly detailed sections exploring why books were chosen, what that did to their reputation, who squabbled with whom, etc. And the choice of titles is certainly varied. While book-of-the-month clubs now tend towards popular, pacey fiction, the Book Society were unafraid to recommend hefty history books – and, indeed, many of the leading highbrow writers of the day.

I said it on Tea or Books? when mentioning Recommended! and I’ll say it again – I was blown away by Wilson’s research. I wrote about the Book Society for my DPhil and spent quite a lot of time researching it – and I know how extremely difficult it was to find any information. It was a struggle even to find a list of the books they chose, and indeed I failed to find a complete list – but Wilson has found far, far more. The newsletters, the relevant correspondence, the detailed understanding of the judges’ lives throughout the decades – there is so much expert research presented in an engaging way, and it never feels like anything is missing. It is extremely impressive, and I doff my cap to Wilson.

While the Book Society continued until the 1960s, Wilson’s book takes us up to the end of the Second World War, with a postscript and some appendices covering the later years – which is rather a relief, to be honest, as we could stay in the heyday. The only thing missing from this exceptional book is a full list of titles as an appendix – they are listed at the ends of chapters, but that does require quite a lot of flicking about, and I’d have preferred to have a full list to consult.

The Book Society may never have numbered millions of subscribers, but it truly changed the way that society – or a certain section of society, at least – chose and read their books. It could have been a curio of literary history, left to explore in the shadows by students like me. I’m so glad that Wilson has rescued The Book Society from that fate with this captivating, fascinating book that garlands its incredible research with an approachable chattiness. In conclusion: Recommended! is heartily recommended.

Eastwards and Far by Chris Lee-Francis – #ABookADayInMay Day 27

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I think I stumbled across Eastwards and Far (2023) by Chris Lee-Francis on Lee-Francis’s Twitter profile, and was intrigued enough to order a copy pronto. As a memoir of cycling across Canada, it combines something I love reading about (Canada) with something I felt fairly ambivalent reading about (cycling) – but, on balance, I liked the idea of seeing Canada through the eyes of an adventurous traveller enough to give it a go. It’s been 25 years since I got a bicycle and I feel, if anything, less likely to get on one after reading Eastwards and Far, but I loved the experience of reading it.

Lee-Francis got the idea while cycling around Ontario in 2013. He spotted a sign for the Trans Canada Trail, and wondered if it would be possible to cycle all the way from Vancouver to the furthest West point of the enormous country – only later realising that the trail wouldn’t be completed until 2017. That gave time for a plan to formulate – and he and has friend Kristian ended up starting their three-month journey in Vancouver by the middle of 2017 (a third friend wasn’t able to get three months off work, so joined in for the final month). Eastwards and Far developed from the journals that Lee-Francis took during that time – turning into an endurance travelogue, documenting the experiences, the beauty, and the Canadians they met along the way.

For the most part, there are not significant dramas. Along the way, some vital belongings go missing, there is a near encounter with a bear, and misreading of a map leaves them with only six eggs to eat and nowhere to buy food – but this is not a memoir about overcoming great hazards and dangers. Rather, it is a memoir of the wonders that can be encountered by undertaking something like this. The highs and lows of battling all weathers and environments to achieve something momentous. And, above all, the interest and kindness of strangers. There are countless people along the way who may only appear for a few paragraphs or a page, but are indelliby part of the men’s experience – whether offering food, somewhere to camp, or simply company.

As the stories continued I realised our bikes had let us skip several layers of social interaction usually required to be sitting in someone’s kitchen talking as friends. A few hours ago we’d not yet met. Now, after nothing more than asking where we could safely violate several byelaws to spend a night sleeping rough without getting caught, we’d been invited over the threshold into their home.

There are definitely amusing moments in Eastwards and Far, but it isn’t played for laughs. This is no attempt to create a Three Men in a Boat style narrative. I’d, instead, describe the tone as warm. Chris Lee-Francis comes across as a thoroughly decent guy – and I suspect a lot of the kindness he and Kristian receive from strangers is because of that decency, and a capacity and willingness to embrace positives encountered every day. What else would possess someone to cycle for thousands of miles?

Of course, hearing about the challenge probably raises lots of logistical questions in your mind – and I enjoyed learning about the answers, particularly the Very Canadian ones. How, for instance, do you deter bears?

At the end of each day in bear country, when you’re nice and relaxed, tent ready and waiting, with a meal and maybe a beer inside you, comes the time to hang your food bags from a nearby tree.

The collective recommendations of friends, park rangers, information pamphlets, and numerous other knowledgeable sources was to suspect all food and cooking gear at least four metres off the ground, a safe distance from camp. Sounds easy, but this part of the day had often become more of a rigmarole than I felt it should’ve been.

The first step was to establish how far away to hang the bags. Received wisdom says at least a hundred metres, which we measured early in the trip to estimating Kristian’s running speed, calculating how long it would take him to run that far, and me timing him while he sprinted off into the distance. Bags would be suspended from a suitable tree somewhere beyond the perimeter.

“That was twelve seconds!” I called to Kristian the first night we did this. “Probably not a hundred metres?”

He looked wounded. “It could be!” he called back.

“Isn’t the world record just under ten?!”

“True! I guess the ground is quite uneven!” He ran a bit further and stopped again.

“That looks good! Probably fourteen seconds total?!” We used this time on subsequent nights.

One aspect that intrigued me, and wasn’t covered in any detail, was what it was like to spend three months constantly with a friend – and high-endurance three months, too. There are very few people I could spend that much time with, without going mad or severing the friendship. The two men seem to still be firm friends by the end, so it was obviously a success – and perhaps scarcely a cross word was spoken between them on the trip. Or perhaps Lee-Francis drew a veil over it.

He keeps the pace up well through the narrative. Something that could have become quite repetitive is somehow compulsive to read – even though he resists any urge to introduce sustained jeopardy. There is never really any doubt that the cyclists will complete their challenge, and do so in one piece. By avoiding any false tension, we can instead enjoy the journey as an adventure into curiosity. I’m still unlikely to ever get back on a bike, let alone undertake any significant challenges, but I really enjoyed reading about it from the comfort of my sofa.

As a sidenote, Eastwards and Far is by some distance the best-quality self-published book I’ve ever come across – French flaps and all! I would have appreciated the font being a little larger, as it is quite tiny, but it was certainly readable. If you’d like to read it yourself, you can get hold of it from Chris Lee-Francis’s website.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams – #ABookADayInMay Day 22

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Careless People

Today I finished the audiobook of Careless People (2025), the recent memoir-exposé by Sarah Wynn-Williams about her time at Facebook. After a chapter about surviving a shark attack as a child, seemingly only included because how could you not mention something like that, we whizz forward to her petitioning Facebook for a role in policy and politics. The only problem is that neither the role nor the department exists. And yet, eventually, they are worn down – or at least see why the role should exist.

And what follows is a terrifying look at how Facebook runs. I’m only writing a short post today, because it’s late and I just got back home after going to Bristol to watch The Room, but a quick mention of some of its contents is chilling enough. Sexual harassment goes unchallenged (and, indeed, Wynn-Williams seems to have been fired partly for raising it); Cheryl Sandberg insists on assistants sharing a bed with her; Chinese Government’s human rights violations are accepted as a pesky necessity; Facebook lies under oath to Congress; Mark Zuckerberg barely cares when his employees are imprisoned for following his advice; a convulsing and bleeding employee is ignored by her manager and others around them because they are ‘too busy’.

None of us will have believed that Facebook was a force for good – it’s been clear since The Social Network and before that Mark Zuckerberg et al are ruthless, immoral, and selfish. But what Careless People exposes so well is exactly what the title (quoting The Great Gatsby) says: they are careless. They simply do not care about the terrible impact they are having – whether on their subordinates at work, teenage girls being deliberately served ads for weight loss products when they delete selfies, or human rights activists whose data will be given to people who will violently quash them. They are careless. It’s a new example of the banality of evil.

Sarah Wynn-Williams comes out of the book extremely well – so well that you have to conclude she is editorialising. I don’t doubt that the people around her were awful (she is even chastised for not responding quickly to work emails – while on maternity leave and in a coma) but I suspect she is not quite the tireless ambassador for morality that she suggests. It’s never quite clear why she takes so long to leave after she is disillusioned about the company – she mentions health insurance, but other companies have health insurance. Facebook/Meta are, of course, trying to tar her and say the book is all lies. I expect it is all truth, where they’re concerned. And this is just from one woman’s access to information – who knows what else they are hiding.

It’s a page-turner (or whatever the audiobook equivalent is) of a book, well-paced and unsparing. If you can cope with the info, since we all know that immoral powerful people are seldom likely to be held to account, then I recommend it.