I read this short 1929 novel—part of Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics series—without knowing much about it, and found myself unexpectedly absorbed. It’s a book about identity, race, belonging and friendship, and introduced me to an element of African-American history I’d previously encountered only in passing, if you’ll forgive the pun. That element is the act of ‘passing’: light-skinned Black Americans presenting themselves as white to escape racial discrimination. Larsen’s novel examines this through the lens of two women—old school friends who meet again in adulthood—and the complex tangle of their re-entwined lives.

One of them, Clare, is married to a white man who is not just unaware of her racial background, but has deeply racist views about black people. I found her frustrating, in a way that I think Larsen intends: charming and careless, drawn like a moth to the flame of the life she left behind. The other woman, Irene, is more cautious and conflicted, and it was her perspective I found easier to connect with. Though Clare’s choices drive the plot, Irene’s perspective provides the emotional and moral centre of the novel—and much of its ambiguity.

There weren’t any specific scenes that hit with particular emotional force, but the whole novel simmers with social commentary. Larsen is writing about race and class and gender, yes—but also about the slow erosion of friendship, and the way that polite social obligation can keep us bound to people long after it does either party much good. That element felt as contemporary as anything I’ve read recently. The writing didn’t feel dated to me at all: crisp, readable, quietly biting.

I read the whole thing in a couple of sittings, and then—somewhat hilariously—left it behind in a Wetherspoons, hence Penguin’s stock photo at the top of this post. A clothbound novel about the fraught tension between outward appearances and private truth, abandoned on a sticky table in a noisy pub. There’s probably a metaphor in there somewhere.

The ending, famously ambiguous, worked for me. I enjoy novels that leave space for the reader to reflect and interpret rather than spelling everything out. And this one leaves plenty of space—moral, emotional, and otherwise. I can see why Passing has become a modern classic. I’m glad to have finally met it.

This 1978 Booker-shortlisted book felt, to me, like an iron fist in a velvet glove. It’s a quiet, precise, wry, gently melancholic novel. Yet by the end it’s delivered a firm and painful blow about human nature and social power. It’s a novel that reminds us that kindness and good intentions don’t always get results. Life isn’t fair. And sometimes, those who seem most benign can be quietly, ruthlessly cruel—particularly if they wield the power of the establishment.

Set in a 1959 Suffolk seaside town, The Bookshop follows Florence Green, a kindly, determined widow who decides to open a bookshop in the damp and dilapidated Old House. Her idea is simple and well-intentioned, and Fitzgerald’s portrait of Florence is deeply sympathetic: she’s someone who wants to help, to contribute, to do something positive for the community. The community does not react with unalloyed gratitude.

What follows is a study in soft conflict. No one screams or throws punches. Instead, there’s a slow unfurling of resistance: polite evasions, petty slights, weaponised rules. It’s a novel about how power is exercised quietly in small towns: not through dramatic showdowns, but through frostiness, formality, and who sits on which board.

The writing is beautiful—precise, readable, laced with dry wit. The tone is so gentle, so lightly tragicomic, that you barely notice the tension building until it’s far too late. The ordinary melancholy of the setting—the creaky building, the indifferent weather, the vague discontent of a sleepy town—becomes the perfect backdrop to a story about how change is resisted and generosity punished.

This was my first Penelope Fitzgerald novel, and I suspect it won’t be my last. She shows how the smallest gestures can carry the weight of whole histories—and how, sometimes, a tiny novel can leave a disproportionately large bruise.

The first chapter of the Sophie Hughes translation of this book refers to

a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and The New Yorker stacked beside a brass candleholder

I read this book, a birthday present from a friend, while sitting beside a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and The New Yorker stacked beside a refillable glass jar candle. I felt seen.

Latronico’s slim novel is a sharp and quietly devastating satire of modern millennial life: the digital nomad, the curated flat white, the performative relocation to Lisbon, and the self-congratulatory minimalism of the internationally mobile. The prose is clean and deliberate, and the tone is coolly distant: we’re watching a couple build their life (or their content?) through the lens of aesthetic choices and geo-tagged escapism.

I read it in a single sitting and found it enormously enjoyable. It felt very much grounded in the present, a 2020s blend of irony, yearning, and careful lighting. Latronico skewers the way social media distorts not just the image we present, but the choices we make: what we eat, where we live, how we frame our success. The characters are less people than case studies, which feels exactly right. The distance allows room for commentary.

I particularly enjoyed this observation:

Differences of opinion that, online, were expressed in sarcastic retorts and subtweets would feel far less extreme in person. Somehow, value systems that seemed completely incompatible on social feeds could find a middle ground around a table at a café.

This is a novel about what we trade away in the pursuit of beauty and belonging. The aesthetic lives described here are not soothing; they’re brittle, polished to the point of falseness. Reading Perfection made me think of We Had to Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets. Her book is very different in tone and setting, but is another short novel that explores the corrosive influence of online life on human connection.

If you’ve ever gasped as someone carefully crops a selfie to make their life look a little more like an ideal—only to see the flat sadness return the moment the camera’s away—this one’s for you.

The third instalment of John Boyne’s Elements quartet, Fire, brings us the story of Freya, a character who played a minor role in Earth, now centre stage in a short novel that feels both more dramatic and more heightened than the previous two entries in the series—Water and Earth—both great. This isn’t a book grounded in gritty realism so much as one that leans into the operatic tone that Boyne often favours. And that’s not a complaint.

Freya is a plastic surgeon who treats burns victims. She also has a traumatic childhood and some very dark secrets in her adult life—though perhaps ‘secrets’ is too gentle a word for what unfolds. I didn’t find her especially believable as a character: she seemed more like a caricature of a cold-hearted young female surgeon than a person I could imagine meeting in the real world. If she was meant to be morally ambiguous, then that nuance didn’t land for me.

That might sound like a deal-breaker, but oddly, it wasn’t. Boyne’s writing is so propulsive and absorbing that I found myself tearing through the book regardless. It fits so neatly into the world established in Water and Earth that I didn’t mind the unreality of it.

The other two books felt like realistic explorations of the long-term effects of abuse; Fire felt like an exploration of that same topic, albeit filtered—at times—through Hollywood rather than reality.

I particularly enjoyed that characters from both earlier books turn up, which gives the whole project a pleasingly cohesive feel. It really feels like one novel in four parts, rather than four loosely connected short stories.

One character who stood out to me was Aaron, a medical student undertaking a three-month elective under Freya’s supervision. Unlike Freya, Aaron felt like a believable and relatable character. Despite Freya’s coldness and occasional cruelty, Aaron remains diligent and focused on his patients. His resilience and empathy provided a grounding presence in the narrative, and I ended up more invested in his journey than Freya’s. Interestingly, Aaron is set to be the protagonist of Air, the final book in the series, which has only heightened my anticipation.

Freya’s medical work, especially her treatment of burns patients, takes a backseat to the drama. It didn’t add much psychological depth, nor did it feel especially explored, though this may simply be a limitation of the novel’s short form. I found myself wondering whether readers outside of medicine might see more virtue in her profession and read that as a redeeming aspect of her character, which might have made this feel more real and less Hollywood: a bit of moral ambiguity goes a long way to creating a sense of reality.

I enjoyed Fire every bit as much as the earlier books, if not more, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how Air brings everything together.

Boyne’s quartet is turning out to be a rather interesting experiment. He’s always been a writer more interested in character than plausibility, and the emotional through-lines of these books—abuse, identity, the gap between surface and reality—feel increasingly well-woven. I’ll be fascinated to see where it all lands.

This is a short, sharp little book, often taught in schools in Germany, but which I read in Jamie Bulloch’s English translation.

I read it in a couple of days, though I think it would have been better approached in a single sitting. It’s a single, breathless, unbroken monologue delivered by the daughter of a family, whose mother is preparing a mussel dinner to welcome home their father. It’s a claustrophobic and propulsive read. I just wanted to keep going, partly to escape the suffocating domestic atmosphere and partly to find out where on earth it’s all heading. It’s a quietly brilliant piece of narrative control.

Originally published in 1990, the novella has often been described as a veiled allegory of political tyranny, with the father figure as a stand-in for the East German state, or authoritarianism more broadly. But for me, with a less-than-perfect grasp of German history and reading it in the present cultural moment, I was struck more by how contemporary it feels as a portrait of toxic masculinity within a domestic setting. Less regime, more patriarchy.

The father dominates the entire book through sheer force of absence. And yet it’s the daughter’s voice, childlike and unreliable, that gives the story its emotional weight. There’s a touch of humour throughout, with little turns of phrase, slightly skewed logic, a child’s earnest interpretation of adult dynamics. It lightens what is, in essence, quite a dark and disturbing tale — yet that levity makes the darkness more acute. Is this all as grim as it seems, or is it the impression of a child with a flair for drama?

I felt a good deal of sympathy for the narrator. Her unreliability made her more relatable. I wanted to protect her, seeing what she can’t. That dynamic gives the novella an oddly tender quality, even as the plot edges ever closer to its strangely satisfying conclusion.

It’s not a book I expect to return to, but I’m glad I read it. I’d recommend it as a short palate cleanser, something to read in an afternoon that will stick in the mind longer than you expect. A neat little curiosity, with much more going on under the surface than first appears.

There’s a particular part of my brain that only ever lights up when I read Calvino. I don’t know quite how he does it. The stories are often absurd, abstract and utterly unmoored from reality—and yet they always end up saying something simple and profound about what it means to be human. I suppose that’s the trick, isn’t it?

I stumbled across Cosmicomics more or less by accident: I hadn’t even realised there was a Calvino I hadn’t read. Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics edition caught my eye, and I ended up reading it across a smattering of cafes, Metro journeys, and odd pockets of time. It’s a collection of short stories, each inspired by a scientific theory—most of which have since been disproven. But the facts are irrelevant. The stories are timeless.

In one, the moon is so close to Earth that people climb up to it on ladders and gather moon milk. In another, a generational culture clash is played out between an amphibian and his fishy uncle. In yet another, dinosaurs become mythical creatures whose presence haunts the collective imagination long after their actual threat has vanished. There’s even a story about a message that travels between planets over millions of years—a surprisingly prescient allegory for social media and the gnawing anxiety of being seen but not understood.

The stories sound bonkers. And they are. But they are also beautiful. There’s a real emotional clarity running through them—a sort of quiet, reflective core that anchors the whimsy. Calvino plays everything straight, and that’s part of what makes it work. If anyone else tried to write a story about a shy dinosaur feeling displaced in a post-dinosaur world, I’d probably scoff. But in Calvino’s hands, it becomes a meditation on trauma, resilience, and the shifting nature of memory. It reminded me of the way intense fears can linger long after the actual danger has passed. Over time, those feelings mellow and morph. Some traumas fade into something almost mythical: half-remembered, oddly unreal, occasionally even a little funny. Calvino captures that process perfectly.

The story Light Years, about delayed communication across space, struck a similar chord. It starts with a message—‘I saw you’—and unfolds into a deeply resonant exploration of guilt, miscommunication, and the irrelevance of context once enough time has passed. That gap between action and response, intention and perception, felt painfully familiar. It’s extraordinary how a story written in the 1960s can feel so bang on about our digital present.

If Calvino’s better-known work feels like fairy tales for grown-ups, Cosmicomics is something slightly different: more cosmological, more playfully abstract. And yet, it’s still unmistakably him. The whimsy. The philosophical undertow. The gentle humour and unshowy wisdom. It’s all there, just seen through the lens of space and time rather than gardens and cities.

The edition itself is a treat—a pocket-sized hardback in Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics range, with the original William Weaver translation. It felt like an indulgent thing to hold and read, which added to the pleasure.

I’ve read too much Calvino to have any sensible opinion about whether this is a good place to start. But for me, it was a joy—amusing, moving, intellectually playful, and oddly comforting. Like all the best Calvino, it made me feel more human. And a little more okay with the fact that none of us really know what we’re doing.

I’ve read a few books from The School of Life recently, and when I spotted this one described as “a therapeutic novel”, I was curious. It’s not a phrase I’d come across before, and I wondered what exactly they meant. A novel that soothes? One with a diagnosis and a treatment plan? As it turns out, A Voice of One’s Own is a fictional story with an overtly therapeutic aim: it sets out to explore the emotional legacy of growing up without space to speak freely or feel heard.

The story centres on one woman’s life, and through her, the book explores some universal themes—particularly the long shadow cast by early parenting, and the difficulty of expressing oneself when that hasn’t been modelled or encouraged. The plot is relatable, though the tone of the omniscient narrator is more didactic than literary. It’s gentle and readable, but a little heavy-handed in parts, and I found that its simplification of messy, complex human experiences occasionally jarred. There’s insight here, but it often feels pre-digested.

Structurally, it’s an unusual book: each of the short chapters is accompanied by an illustrative photograph. These didn’t add much for me. They weren’t especially beautiful or evocative, nor did they feel meaningfully connected to the narrative. They were very literal and representative. If anything, they disrupted the flow. I found myself wishing the book would just get on with telling its story.

That said, there were moments that gave me pause. The book gently illustrated how lacking confidence in one’s own voice can manifest in small, ordinary moments—reluctance to correct a mistake, silence in a meeting, deferring to others without even realising it. These aren’t revolutionary insights, but they prompted a little personal reflection. I just think the same ground has been covered elsewhere with more subtlety and spark.

In the end, this didn’t land as strongly for me as other titles from The School of Life. It’s a short and well-intentioned read, and I suppose if someone wanted a very soft, undemanding introduction to this sort of emotional territory, it might be a good starting point. But for most readers, I think there are better, deeper options out there.

I finished A Luminous Republic with a slight sense of unease—not because the novel had let me down, but because I wasn’t entirely sure what I had just read. That’s part of its brilliance. Andrés Barba’s short novel is one of the most unsettling and enigmatic books I’ve encountered for quite some time. I read the English edition translated by Lisa Dillman, whose crisp, controlled prose perfectly matched the unsettling restraint of Barba’s story.

Narrated by a civil servant with the sort of cool detachment that would be admirable in the minutes of a council meeting but feels almost surreal when describing mass hysteria, societal collapse, and the mysterious deaths of children, the novel recounts the extraordinary events that unfolded when thirty-two feral children appeared seemingly from nowhere in the fictional South American city of San Cristóbal. No one knew where they came from; no one knew how to handle them. The city, naturally, fell apart trying.

The dry, documentary style of narration is inspired. It doesn’t just describe the events — it actively withholds emotional clarity. The more inexplicable things become, the more the narrator recedes into procedural memory, reports, newspaper clippings, and bureaucratic euphemism. It’s a little like reading the minutes of the apocalypse.

What the novel is about is harder to pin down, and therein lies much of its power. Is it an allegory for how societies treat ‘outsiders’—a reflection on racism, xenophobia, classism, homophobia? Is it a parable about the viral spread of dangerous ideas, about how fear and misinformation can sweep through an ostensibly civilised population? Is it something else entirely? The novel doesn’t deign to offer answers. Different interpretations seem to fit neatly at different moments, and this slipperiness made the book linger in my mind long after I closed it. That one of the characters (the mayor of San Cristóbal) is named Victor Corbán surely must be an echo of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán— perhaps it is coincidence, but I could help thinking that it must be a clue to the sorts of unpleasant ideas Barba was targeting.

I suspect it’s a book that reveals more with each re-reading—and I’m looking forward to testing that theory.

Despite its potentially science fiction premise—feral children spontaneously appearing, a society crumbling in response—the book feels grounded and painfully plausible. There’s no sense of magic or fantasy here. Just human frailty, fear, and the haunting realisation that sometimes, there are no satisfying explanations.

I don’t often seek out science fiction, and I wouldn’t ordinarily be attracted to a novel that sounds this peculiar. Yet A Luminous Republic captured me completely. It didn’t change the way I view the world, but it certainly furnished me with some new metaphors for thinking about it. For a short book, it is luminous indeed.

This was a book Wendy and I read together over the course of a month—just a few short essays before bed each night. That context probably matters: I suspect that reading it slowly, letting the ideas settle, and chatting together about them gave it a resonance that I might have missed had I powered through it on my own.

The book is a series of short, thematic essays intended, as the title suggests, to inspire a little hope. Each reflection begins with a story, often drawn from art, literature or history, and builds into a modest argument or observation about what might make life feel a little less bleak. That structure—anecdote, idea, note of optimism—could easily have become formulaic, but I found it surprisingly satisfying. The source material is varied, and the tone strikes a compelling blend of melancholy and grace.

The first section, ‘reasons of darkness,’ is the one that stuck with me most. It’s unusual to find a self-described book of hope that begins in the mud: suffering is inevitable; people lust for vengeance; we are all profoundly flawed. But instead of glossing over these, the book leans in. These darker reflections feel honest rather than heavy, and it’s from this honesty that their hopefulness arises. I found that strangely comforting.

If you’ve read much from The School of Life, you’ll know the tone: measured, thoughtful, gently philosophical. But this volume stood out to me for its coherence: while none of the ideas felt new to me, seeing them collected and loosely stitched together under the banner of hope lent them fresh significance. It was less about new insights and more about the quiet joy of recognition, of seeing well-worn thoughts in new light.

Compared to On Confidence, which I read in one go, Reasons to be Hopeful felt more textured and rewarding. That may be less about the content and more about the way I read it: this is a book that benefits from being slowly savoured. Read too quickly and you might miss the point entirely.

I’m not sure it radically changed anything for me, but it did recalibrate the tone of my internal monologue a little. And that’s no small thing. At the end of a long day, it reminded Wendy and me of the good in the world, and helped us both frame those pre-sleep ruminations with a little more tenderness and a little less despair.

It turns out that hope, when served in measured doses, can be rather potent after all.

I’ve long admired Annie Ernaux’s writing for its relentless honesty—her refusal to flinch from the rawest corners of human experience. That fearless openness drew me to The Use of Photography, co-authored with journalist Marc Marie and translated by Alison L. Strayer. It’s a brief, piercing book, documenting an unlikely intersection in the early 2000s of two intense experiences: Ernaux’s chemotherapy for breast cancer and a passionate affair with Marie.

The book’s central device is strikingly intimate: photographs depicting the aftermath of their encounters, typically showing clothes discarded around their apartment or other settings. Each photograph is paired with independent reflections from both authors, exploring the memories and emotions these snapshots evoke.

Ernaux and Marie beautifully intertwine two contrasting experiences: the deeply challenging reality of cancer treatment, usually viewed as purely negative, and the exhilaration of their affair, typically seen as positive. The intermingling of these experiences felt profoundly true to life—highlighting the complexity of our emotional landscape, where joy and sorrow coexist in constant interplay.

As ever, Ernaux’s writing is exceptional. Her prose remains reflective, vivid, and emotionally honest, making the book not just insightful but deeply moving. The narrative flows effortlessly—I found myself eagerly turning the pages, absorbed by the nuanced interplay of reflection and vulnerability.

I found this both compelling and poignant—an exceptional exploration of intimacy, memory, and life’s contradictory beauty.