I’ve walked past this premise in Bangor many times over the past twenty years or so, and always wondered about it. The combination of ‘self-service marketing’—which seems an odd thing in itself—and ‘hosiery factors’—whatever they are—fries my brain.

Some dedicated sleuthing hasn’t revealed an awful lot, though in an advert in the Mid-Ulster Mail from 1 March 1990, they declare themselves to be:

But this just provides more bafflement: surely the suppliers of the finest hosiery in all the land would be able to spell the name of the thing they sell?

This summer has been full of angry, broad-brush commentary about asylum and immigration in the UK media, and it feels like this will only ramp up as autumn comes round. It felt refreshing to read a novel that set those debates aside and instead turned its gaze to the lived experiences of individuals whose lives take them between different countries.

Naudé’s book follows Jaco, a middle-aged gay man, as he oscillates between Europe and South Africa, reckoning with his father’s approaching death and his own unsettled existence. Around him, he encounters a range of other ‘fugitives’: migrants, artists, lovers, all navigating the dislocation of living between cultures. Of course, Naudé presents these people as textured, complicated individuals rather than as the faceless homogenous ‘migrant masses’ so often conjured by political rhetoric.

I sometimes warmed to Jaco and sometimes felt distanced from him. At moments he felt like a character to root for, while at others he’s more of a lens than a companion. Perhaps that’s intentional: Naudé isn’t writing a simple psychological portrait, but a book about movement and fracture, including within families. I hadn’t previously given much thought to how ties can splinter when relatives live under different societal cultures and expectations; this book made me think harder about that.

The strand that will linger with me is the subplot of a sick child taken from South Africa to New York for experimental treatment. The hope, the weight of expectations, and the inevitability of disappointment echoed other parts of the book, and left me reflecting on how we load our own dreams onto others, sometimes unfairly. It was a moving and troubling seam in a novel already rich with them.

The prose style didn’t particularly draw attention to itself. In many ways that felt right: it’s the characters and their displacement, rather than the language itself, that stay with me.

Overall, I found Fathers and Fugitives absorbing, timely, and quietly thought-provoking. In a season when immigration is a political football, it was refreshing to spend time with a book that insists on the messiness and individuality of people’s lives.

Andrew Sean Greer is perhaps best known for Less, his Pulitzer-winning comedy about an ageing writer blundering around the globe. I enjoyed Less when I read it back in 2018, but for my money, The Story of a Marriage is the better novel. It’s quieter, more restrained, far more emotionally resonant, and I felt like I gained more insight from it.

Set in 1950s San Francisco, it tells the story of Pearlie Cook, her husband Holland, and the stranger who arrives at their door to unravel the carefully ordered lives they have built together. What begins as a portrait of an unassuming family becomes, revelation by revelation, a study of the secrets, compromises, and half-truths that hold relationships together.

I was swept along by both Greer’s elegant prose and the steady drip of revelations. Each turn added new emotional weight, not just to the plot but to my sense of the characters and the bargains they struck with themselves in order to survive. Pearlie’s voice drew me in: warm and candid at first, but increasingly distant as the novel unfolded. It felt as though the more we understood about the context of her life, the less she resembled a contemporary confidante, and the more she stood as a figure shaped and limited by the societal expectations with which she lived.

Reading this shortly after Nella Larsen’s Passing, I found myself struck by the parallels. Just as Larsen illuminated the personal costs of racial and social conformity in 1920s America, Greer here makes vivid the stifling pressures of the 1950s. In our era of self-expression, we often dwell on the anxieties of exposure; this novel is a reminder of the equally corrosive anxieties of enforced silence.

The Story of a Marriage may not have the wit and sparkle of Less, but its restraint feels exactly right. It’s a novel of quiet devastations, one that lingers not for its cleverness but for its insight into how private lives are warped by public expectations. I finished it with a sense of melancholy admiration — and a conviction that it deserves more recognition than it gets.

Jessica Stanley’s Consider Yourself Kissed opens with what could be a rom-com cliché: Coralie Bower, a young Australian in London, rescues a child from a pond in Victoria Park and promptly meets the girl’s charming father, Adam. Except this isn’t really a rom-com at all. Over the following decade, Stanley dissects the relationship between Coralie and Adam with scalpel-like precision, revealing how the gloss of a “meet-cute” corrodes—or maybe just grows more layered and complex, and perhaps takes more work—when it collides with ambition, in-laws, and the everyday grind.

This is a novel grounded the novel felt in the modern world. The background hum of Brexit, covid, and the endless parade of prime ministers keeps the book firmly tied to its time. For me, working in medicine, where careers tend to advance by steady increments rather than sudden leaps, it was a reminder of how different the pathway can be for other people. As a journalist, Adam’s professional success relies on pouncing at exactly the right moment, usually to the detriment of everything else. Stanley makes painfully clear how disruptive that opportunism can be, not just for him but for the people who happen to love him… and all with no guarantee of the leap being worthwhile in the end.

Coralie’s slow erosion into invisibility is convincingly drawn. Adam’s career needs always seem to trump her own ambitions, and while she reflects wryly on it, Stanley never lets the humour disguise the sting. The family entanglements are especially well done: the in-laws provide some of the sharpest comedy in the book, even while reminding us that ‘family’ is rarely a neutral force in relationships.

The writing itself is witty, sharp, and attentive to the little things — the contents of a child’s backpack, the oddities of a Hackney terrace house, the coded silences of a dinner with relatives. Stanley has a very good eye for often unnoticed domestic details.

This isn’t glossy escapism, nor is it political satire. It’s a novel about the messy way people actually live: the compromises, the small betrayals, the laugh-out-loud absurdities of family life, all set against the backdrop of a country lurching from one crisis to the next. I thought it was excellent: truthful without being joyless, and funny without being frivolous.

I’d recommend it.

This is Hartlepool’s sculpture of a hart, the male red deer after which the town is named, located in the town’s Marina car park. I’m afraid I’ve no-eyed deer who the sculptor might have been: they’re effectively fawnonymous.

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.

On Friday, the third reading of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill was passed in the House of Commons.

Assisted dying should, obviously, be legal. Ending one’s own life is not illegal, so it is bizarre that assisted dying is. This isn’t a restriction on death—it’s a restriction on autonomy. It prevents people who require assistance from doing something they are legally entitled to do. That is, to me, quite obviously wrong.

In a civilised society, we ought to strive to make legal activities accessible to all. We ought not to prevent disabled people from doing things the rest of us can.

Of course there need to be safeguards by the bucketload to prevent abuse—just as in myriad other areas where vulnerable people need assistance. But our starting point should always have been that we support those who, through disability or infirmity, are unable to carry out legal activities the rest of us can access.

It is morally reprehensible to hold people to a different legal standard on the basis of physical capacity.

The bill now moves to the House of Lords, where the Lords Spiritual will have their say: the 24 bishops appointed to our legislature by the Church of England. It is absurd that we have an upper house with more church-appointed clerics than doctors. It is unjustifiable that there are more bishops of a minority religion in the Lords than people under the age of 45.

In a secular, multicultural society, it is ethically indefensible to distort the debate by handing structural power over scrutiny of this legislation to a narrow theological bloc. Ethics and theology are not the same thing—especially in a society as plural as ours. We ought not pretend that a group which only began admitting women in the last decade has any kind of ethical authority relevant to the modern world.

Look: we’re handing 24 unelected bishops an automatic vote on how we die. Tell me your legislature’s a basket case without telling me your legislature’s a basket case.

And yet: bishops having a say makes more sense than assisted dying being framed as a medical issue. It’s not, it never should have been, and no one benefits from pretending otherwise.

Death is a spiritual, familial, social and, for some, religious event. It’s only the bizarre and persistent myth that death is a kind of medical failure that has pushed it out of sight and, all too often, into hospitals. Decisions about death ought not to be based on clinical prognostications—they are moral and existential choices.

Of course, doctors have a role. But that doesn’t make death a medical issue any more than it makes flying a plane a medical issue. A medical opinion may inform whether someone is fit to be in the cockpit, but a million other factors decide when and where the plane is headed.

Death is natural and expected. It comes to us all and concerns us all. It is one of the few unavoidable truths that touches and unites every human being on the planet. The idea that doctors are uniquely significant gatekeepers to end-of-life decisions is misguided and offensive—and I say that as a doctor.

Of course assisted dying should be legal. But I’m not nearly smart enough to know how it should work, or how to implement sufficient safeguards to prevent abuse. I do know I wouldn’t ask bishops or doctors—just as I wouldn’t ask them to design systems to safeguard against abuse in financial transactions, legal dealings, or any other domain where care and access must be balanced. I would look to other countries who seem to have made more sound progress with these issues.

Of course assisted dying should be legal. And I hope there are people smarter than me who can make it work.

The image at the top was created with GPT-4o.