"Strange Angel" by George Pendle

 This is a biography of American rocket pioneer Jack Parsons, whose actual first name was Marvel.

Inspired by science fiction, Parsons dreamed of constructing a rocket that would travel to the moon. But this was in the 1930s, after his wealthy grandparents had lost their fortune in the Wall Street crash and his privileged upbringing on Orange Grove Avenue ('millionaire's row') in Pasadena had come to an end. And, at the time, when aeroplanes were still in their glamorous infancy, rocketry did not exist outside a handful of amateur eccentrics. 

Not being able to afford a university education, Parsons began working in explosives for mining companies. Then he teamed up with schoolfriend Ed Forman, who was an engineer equally lacking in tertiary qualifications, and maths graduate Frank Molina, to persuade CalTech professor Theodore von Karman (an aerodynamicist who had explained the collpase of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge) to let them use CalTech facilities to test rocket motors, although they still had to fund the experiments themselves. They began working with the military who wanted to add jets to help bombers achieve take-off speeds on shorter runways. But they had problems with the powder fuel: there were always cracks between the clumps of powder grain so burning was uneven. After watching workmen laying molten asphalt on a road, Parsons made his breakthrough and turned the powder into tar which could be poured into the rocket engines. The 'Suicide Squad' founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the company Aerojet which still sends rockets into outer space.

Parsons was increasingly interested in magic and became the leader of the Agape Lodge in LA, a group following the Thelema teachings of occultist Aleister Crowley (whose biography Do What Thou Wilt by Lawrence Smith I read recently). Parsons moved the group to a large house on Orange Grove Avenue which he had bought and began performing sex magick ceremonies. According to this book, L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, moved in and stole Parsons's girlfirend (but Parsons, psychologically dominated by Hubbard, put up with it). In the end it all went wrong and Parsons, having lost most of his money in a failed business venture with Hubbard, went back to making explosives. He blew himself up.

This was a brilliantly written book. I loved the way it clothed its story, by telling us the background: LA in the 1920s, a mix of “evangelists like Aimee Semple McPherson ... performing exorcisms over the new medium of radio ... while the social campaigner and writer Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (the right to freedom of expression) in public." (Prologue). The core rocketeers, a group of young men, working like dogs and risking their lives for their passion, seem just like the young geeks who founded Google and facebook and Microsoft and the other IT start-ups of the internet revolution, or like rock musicians hoping to be big. And the 'also starring' cast has a host of other names such as Suicide Squad members Apollo Smith whose father had given his sisters the names Diana and Athena, his brothers the names Hermes and Orpheus, and the dog was called Cerberus and Tsien who “was descended from the tenth-century emperor Qian Liu Tsien", science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, E E 'Doc' Smith, L Sprague de Camp and L Ron Hubbard, Jack Cornog who first isolated tritium, and  rocket pioneer Robert Goddard who lived in Roswell, New Mexico, 

Selected quotes:

• “John Whiteside Parsons had gone from being a young genius dead before his time to the most overworked, hackneyed, science fiction cliche of them all." (Prologue)
• “The world is drowning - that is exactly why it will clutch at a straw.” (Ch 6, quoting Crowley)
• “Magic, like science, was an attempt to control events by performing technical acts.” (Ch 6)
• “Bob Cornog remembered stumbling into Parsons’ room one morning to find Hubbard and Betty entwined, ‘like a starfish on a clam’.” (Ch 11)
• “The Parsonage, as it had come to be called, had briefly been an adult playground saturated with philosophical hopes and pungent romanticism, fruit brandies and fencing, bohemians and scientists, poetry and rockets.” (Ch 11)

A fascinating story told by a born storyteller.

June 2026; 307 pages
First published in the USA by Harcourt in 2005
My paperback edition was issued in the UK by Weidenfield and Nicholson in 2006

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Ivanhoe" by Walter Scott

This is perhaps the most celebrated novel by an author who was a huge best-seller in his time and respected by Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens among others.

It belongs to the now-outdated 'gadzooks' style of historical fiction with lots of 'thous', 'haths' and 'yes' etc. I suppose that created verisimilitude in those days but it sounds forced and inauthentic to my ears. Modern historical novelists, such as Ken Follett, in The Pillars of the Earth, avoid this. But you can say for Scott, who was one of the pioneers of historical fiction, that he did it better than some of his later imitators, such as Charles Kingsley in Hereward the Wake.

It is told in the 3rd person omniscient style, past tense, and framed as a story, allowing scope for the author to interject, for example: “His furred cloak and high cap, seen by the wiry and broken light, would have afforded a study for Rembrandt, had that celebrated painter existed at the period.” (Ch 22) He also bids for verisimilitude by citing his sources. For example, in chapter 24 he mentions both the Anglo-Saxon chronicle and the Wardour manuscript as sources. The latter, however, is fictional, Wardour being a character in The Antiquary, published 4 years before Ivanhoe).

He has clearly done a significant amount of historical research. This is displayed as early as  chapter one, when Wamba points out that Saxons talk of swine and oxen because they farm the animals, while the Normans use the words pork and beef when they eat the meat. Given how early this was written, I was impressed with how accurate Scott seemed to be, although there are some discrepancies and inconsistencies, in particular with dynastic relationships, where, for example, great uncles and prescribed and grandfathers and grandfathers as fathers.

In terms of the plot, it is a cracking yarn, a classic adventure story. It includes a jousting and melee tournament with not one, but two, incognito knights who, naturally, defeat all comers. It includes outlaws waylaying travellers in the forest, an attempt at torture in a castle dungeon, the siege of that castle and an ordeal by combat to save the life of one of the heroines who is threatened with being burned as a witch. Robin Hood, Richard the Lionheart, and bad King John make an appearance.

On the other hand, the characters are very one-dimensional. In the main, heroes are goody-goody superheroes and villains are horrid. There are exceptions. The Templar Brian de Bois-Guilbert is initially no more than a rapist but, impressed by Rebecca's spirit, woos her for a mistress and, in the showdown, when selected as champion for the Templars against Rebecca, asks her to elope with him. Similarly, Maurice de Bracy is in two minds about Rowena. 

Is it anti-Semitic? Isaac the Jew, a moneylender, is a major character and is stereotyped as both cowardly and covetous. However, Scott spends considerable length pointing out how the Jews in this period in England were persecuted and terrorised and in this way condemning anti-Semitism. Rebecca, Isaac's daughter, is the principal heroine; she is strong-minded and virtuous.

Is it sexist? Comments such as, “Women are but the toys which amuse our lighter hours.” (Ch 36) make it seem so, although that is spoken by a villain. Again, Scott is keen to create strong heroines. But there is nevertheless a feeling that he is making stereotypical assumptions. Perhaps the best that can be said is that he was enlightened for his time.

Is it racist? There are very few characters of colour and they are in subordinate positions. There are some unpleasant racial epithets.

So what did Jane Austen see in Scott? (She once said she would read no novels other than those by herself, Maria Edgeworth, who wrote Castle Rackrent, and Walter Scott.) Scott reviewed Emma favourably so the respect was mutual. Fundamentally, they wrote in very different genres. Scott compared Austen's style to that of Dutch interior painting: controlled and utterly realistic. He was writing melodrama and deliberately using exaggeration and extravagance to create drama and to excite the reader: very baroque. 

Selected quotes:

• “It is comfort to think that we leave behind us on earth those who shall be wretched as ourselves.” (Ch 24)
• “This damsel has wept enough to extinguish a beacon light. Never was such wringing of hands and such overflowing of eyes ... A water-fiend hath possessed the fair Saxon." (Ch 25)
• “Glory ... is the rusted mail which hangs as a hatchment over the champion's dim and mouldering tomb.” (Ch 30)
• “Even in our own days, when morals are better understood, an execution, a bruising-march, a riot, or a meeting of radical reformers, collects, at considerable hazard to themselves, immense crowds of spectators.” (Ch 43)

It's an entertaining story but somewhat long-winded for modern tastes (every character must be introduced with a long paragraph of description) which I found wearisome. 

June 2026; 519 pages

First published in 1819 by Archibald Constable

My paperback edition was issued by Penguin Popular Classics in 1994

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

Scott wrote a series of historical novels which were hugely influential at the time. They are known as the Waverley novels after the title of the first (later novels were often published anonymously as 'by the author of Waverley). 

• Waverley (1814) set during the 1745 Jacobite rebellion
• Guy Mannering (1815) set in Scotland
• The Antiquary (1816) set in Scotland
• The Black Dwarf (1816) set in Scotland
• Old Mortality (1816) set in Scotland
• Rob Roy (1818) about a Scottish bandit
• The Heart of Midlothian (1818) set in Scotland after which the Edinburgh football team was named
• The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) set in Scotland which inspired the opera Lucia di Lammermoor by Donnizetti
• A Legend of Montrose (1819) set in Scotland
• Ivanhoe (1819) set in mediaeval England, complete with Robin Hood
• The Monastery (1820) set in Scotland
• The Abbot (1820) set in Scotland
• Kenilworth (1821) set in Tudor England
• The Pirate (1822) set in Shetland and Orkney
• The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) set in Jacobean London
• Peveril of the Peak (1822) set in England
• Quentin Durward (1823) set in mediaeval France and Belgium
• St Ronan's Well (1824) set in Scotland
• Redgauntlet (1824) set in Scotland and northern England
• The Betrothed (1825) set in  Wales
• The Talisman (1825) set in Palestine at the time of the Crusades
• Woodstock (1826) set in England and Brussels during the English civil war
• The Fair Maid of Perth (1828) set in Scotland
• Anne of Geierstein set in Switzerland
• Count Robert of Paris (1831) set in Constantinople in 1097
• Castle Dangerous (1831) set in Scotland

"Vigil" by George Saunders

 Saunders returns to the theme of his 2017 Booker winning Lincoln in the Bardo with this novel. Dead Jill returns to earth (as a ghost? an angel?) to comfort a dying man. During his life he was the CEO of one of the biggest oil extraction firms, responsible for a huge amount of climate change and also responsible for denying climate change even while (through his firms secret research) being aware it was happening and taking steps to mitigate the consequences for his company's profits. Even on his deathbed he is justifying himself, often to other ghosts summoned to accuse him by a dead Frenchman responsible for the invention of the 'machine'. Is he responsible or is he a helpless product of his genetic make-up and the circumstances of his upbringing? And can he manage to find peace before he passes over? Furthermore, can Jill, who seems to be doomed to repeat her task of comforting the dying until she too can be 'elevated' to a higher sphere?

If there is any philosophy behind this, it would seem to be the Buddhist idea that we are trapped on this earth, endlessly reincarnating, until we can learn to renounce the self and achieve, on death, nirvana, nothingness. In this book, ghosts, including Jill, are trapped as ghosts, until they can renounce the self and achieve 'elevation': "If your worth depends on your glories, it must also depend on your sins ...forswear the glory, forswear the culpability. The self is the culprit." (p 81)

The glory of this novel is the characters, almost all of them ghosts (again, this is very similar to LitB) and the imaginative whimsy used to create them. But Saunders also has the ability to nail images and ideas in remarkably simple, sometimes shocking, phrases.

Selected quotes:

• "I made for the front door and, not yet walking competently, collapsed to the earth like a just-unstrung puppet" (p4)
• "When you regretted, folks pounced. You were weak with regret, they felt it, they pounced." (p 39)
• "From the wedding came a squeal of shock, as if something unthinkable but delightful had just been revealed to a previously demure matron." (p 67)
• "A bottom-dweller has one bright, shining moment and can't help shit the bed about it." (p 93)
• "Soon will come that special thunk made by: inert load, dropping ... After which, devoid of its former vitality, his sad former-person-bearing meatlump will begin to rot." (p 100)
• "Sheet buttloads of senseless crap" (p 103)
• "My charge had been born him. But he had never chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. Then life had happened to that him, exerting upon it certain deleterious effects ... which had led him to strive, which, in turn, led him to accomplish, and, in accomplishing, he had brought about harm." (p 165)

Part clifi, part meditation of dying and death, this is a fascinating book of ideas.

May 2026; 174 pages
First published by Random House New York in 2026
My edition was the paperback International Edition

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The Persian" by David McCloskey

 Written by an ex-CIA man, you would expect this spy thriller to have the ring of authenticity and it does, in spades, from interrogations (though, thankfully, the book does not go into details of the torture) to the organisation of terrorism to drone attacks to traffic jams in Tehran to guns. What does not always come with an ex-spy is the ability to write a good tale but this was a well-constructed, well-written and entertaining story which had me turning the pages. It reminded me - and I have no higher praise - of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre.

The story is largely narrated through the extracted confessions of Kam, an Iranian dentist of Jewish descent, who has decided to spy for MOSSAD to fund his California retirement dream. We also see things through the perspective of his MOSSAD spymaster Arik Glitzman. Iranian Colonel Ghorbani is sending drones to assassinate members of Glitzman's team and Glitzman has devised an audacious plan to kidnap the Colonel and take him to Israel. This requires Kam to con Roya, an innocent Iranian who happens to work as administrative assistant to Ghorbani's team, into thinking that he is working for Iranian security. But could love complicate the con? (I told you it was like the le Carre book.) 

It's a great story told with verve. But I was thoroughly depressed by this portrait of fanatics on both sides engaged in a potentially endless game of tit for tat, a war of attrition in which decency and respect for humanity cannot survive.

Selected quotes:

• “He begins to chew on another sugar cube and stares down Kam with the look of a man who despises fornicators because he desperately wants to be one.” (Prologue; The interrogation room)
• “Developed haphazardly, growing in disorganized spurts, Tehran, like most of us, lacks any coherent centre.” (Ch 3)
• “Lean and beautiful with cheek bones high as heaven.” (Ch 3)
• “Amir-Ali's leaking blood counts down like sand rushing fast through an hourglass.” (Ch 4)
• “She now had a phone, cigarettes, and an audience with an Iranian official. Whatever the Mullahs say, Paradise is a fluid concept.” (Ch 30)
• “Rivka laughed - it was the first time I'd heard one from her, and it was more delicate, hesitant, than I'd expected. I suppose she didn't have much practice.” (Ch 38)
• “Believe the breath from my mouth.” (Ch 40)
• “Love comes with a knife, my mother would say.” (Ch 52)
• “Love is the king of all cons.” (Ch 52)
• “The afternoon had brought the smog, and I sucked in a huge breath of Tehran's toxic air: all exhaust, no relief.” (Ch 72)

May 2026; 388 pages

First published in GB by Swift Press in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Something Might Fall" by David Flusfeder

 We are introduced to New York doctor Nicholas and his author wife Emma in a brilliant piece of head-hopping stream of consciousness - it reminded me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf and the 'falling' leitmotif is also appropriate - as they sit in a fashionable restaurant. The first part of the narrative then settles mostly into Emma's perspective as she shepherd's her young son, little Nicky, around town. She has developed writer's block and is worried about something falling on her head. 

The couple are famous for their seasonal parties but an error is dispatching invitations leads to upset and angry words from one of the couples they are friendly with. They decide to forgo a party and the rumour mill sends their reputation into a nosedive. 

In the second part of the narrative, set two years later, little Nicky wanders around New York alone with the money from his birthday.

It is a tiny novella, beautifully written, which explores how life's happiness can pivot on the most trivial of fulcra.

Selected quotes:

• “So this is how people feel, we're making something here, the stuff of popular song and lyric poetry, and it may not be the opera I was expecting, and dreading, but there's something said for the manufactured pop song, its reliability, its form that we know so well, time for the chorus again now, but instead it's still at the bridge, which seems to go on forever.” (pp 17 -18)
• “It's like listening to jazz, but not the freeform stuff in which the listener is the performer’s victim, condemned to applaud wherever whim and virtuosity take them; here the listening is equal, part of the show, a spontaneous interaction, your self, my self, this place, your idea, our breaths, her fancy, her imagination, this sunshine, my ears, her kindness, her generosity, she is embodying something, giving flight to a shared endeavour.” (pp 18 - 19)
• “Children and doormen and barbers mostly have names that end with y, whereas parents never do.” (p 23)
• “Things tremble. She can see the vibrating edges of objects that she had previously assumed to be stable. Lines are liquid, everything shimmers as if just about to dissolve. Planes she had previously thought to be solid are, she discovers, made of light ready to merge. For so long she had assumed things were fixed, but they are not, it is all pure unstable energy on the point of collapse.” (p 35)
• “She is not taken away, she is not mistaken for a mental case, she is not dumped into the poor ward along with all the other lost matrons, the estrogenal detritus of the five boroughs, dried out, used up, nuts, sedated and strapped and self-soiled ...” (p 41)
• “The man talking to him is sprawled at the base of the low wall that separates the sidewalk of Central Park South from the Park itself. It is as if he had been dropped there and hasn't troubled to reorganise his body from the fall. He looks both utterly at ease and terribly uncomfortable.” (p 63)

Beautifully written and poignant

May 2026; 75 pages

First published in 2026 by Salt publishing

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"We Live Here Now" by C D Rose

Winner of The Goldsmiths Prize in 2025, this remarkable novel is made of fourteen sections, each recounting strange occurrences. Many of the characters appear in more than one section, sometimes as principals and at other times as walk-on parts, or even mentioned but not present. Delightfully, the chapter headings across the top are printed so they fade away. The page numbers sometimes appear in different places. The whole thing is remarkably Kafkaesque.

1. In the first, written as a review article for an art magazine, the career of a performance artist who has gone missing is assessed; those who worked with her seem to be cursed. There are ambiguities and gaps in the record, the main source for the story may be an unreliable narrator. The work is described thus: "You can walk in, and it seems as if there are fewer of you, as if the person you are with isn't really there." (We live where now?)
2. In the second, Kasha, an art agent, loses a piece of art before tracing it to a shipping container.
3. In the third, Rachel Noyes, who records sound, is on her own in a flat in a strange town waiting to be interviewed for a job.
4. In the fourth a ship carrying a cargo of shipping containers experiences strange happenings aboard; the captain is the brother to a collaborator with the performance artist in the first section and the Dynamic Positioning Officer comes from South Uist.
5. Death #47, the fifth section, is about a man who has, so far, died 46 times, although he has always survived. So far. "His whole life had been a dérive" (I am fascinated by the concept of the dérive as promulgated by Guy Debord and the Letterist International.)
6. In Commission, Ryan, a photographer, is commissioned to create a portrait of a multimillionaire whose company makes cables and owns container ships.
7. Thomas Vyre, whose father once worked on South Uist, has had his identity stolen. Five times. So there are six of him, one of whom knocks at his door. 
8. Sweeney is perpetually on a train, all the subway systems in the world, which somehow interconnect.
9. Ton, a composer, has become obsessed with a video of some Russian teenagers climbing an immensely high building; this section links with the one about Rachel Noyes.
10. Joe, an actor, is making an experimental film (Rachel is the sound technician) on South Uist where there is a container is a military base. 
11. Jen works on the night desk for apartments reserved for guests.
12. Silas, friend of Kasha, attempting to launder money he has earned by selling drugs, buys and sells artworks ... and makes even more money that he can't bank. 
13. In the penultimate section many of the characters assemble for a talk by Lukas Lemnis, art philosopher extraordinary. 
14. The books ends with a comeback show entitled Klein Bottle, which might be significant, reported again by Che Horst-Prosier, who wrote the first section.

Having written all that, I realise that I have given almost no idea of what this book is about. I have almost no idea of what this book is about and trying even to describe the sections (without spoilers) is impossible. That seems to fit. This is a book which needs rereading again and again, to properly understand the interconnections. It is highly experimental and immensely interesting. It reminded me of M John Harrison's The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, another worthy winner of the Goldsmiths Prize. I must read more of this author's work.

Selected quotes:

• “Kasha knew her job was to blow the smoke and polish the mirrors.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “That was what she did. She got away with things.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “‘This is just impostor syndrome’, she told her brain, but then realized it couldn't really be Impostor syndrome because that was when one falsely believed one wasn't actually up to the task, and Kasha knew full well that she wasn't up to the task. She couldn't have the syndrome if she actually was an impostor.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “Kasha remembered the time Silas had told her to read Kafka, ‘because, actually, it's fucking hilarious’. She hadn't found it hilarious. She thought it was realistic.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “Kasha walked out and dug around in her bag to find a Lavender Kalm. They made her burps taste like an old lady's bathroom but it was the best she was going to be able to get right now.” (It is what it isn't, we are where we aren’t)
• “No echo, only that short sucking noise, as if the sound was trying to hide itself before it even registered.” (Every echo is a leak)
• “The tangerine sky of the early dawn.” (Manifest)
• “As soon as Oreste Lauro had stepped out of that pub he knew he was about to die, again.” (Death #47)
• “Thomas knew that every Echo was a leak, a clue, a map of space.” (Six versions of Thomas Vyre)
• “When he tried to remember the past, which he sometimes did, Sweeney believed only that he had been there forever, and would forever be there.” (Ich Verstehe Nur Bahnhof)
• “Sweeney knew that history emerged from geography.” (Ich Verstehe Nur Bahnhof)
• “Sweeney knew that the spaces between the signs, the gaps and the lapses, were as important as the signs themselves.” (Ich Verstehe Nur Bahnhof)
• “Echo and drone, drone and echo.” (Crazy Russian Kids Climb Old Soviet Tower.)
• “The sound of their youth crackling with potential. Their mortality was as nothing to them. It flew distantly above them, giddy, drunken. Death was just another one of their mates, the slightly crazed one who none of them would trust that much, the one with a bit of a cracked look in their eye, the one they all knew was having trouble at home.” (Crazy Russian Kids Climb Old Soviet Tower.)
• “She realized she'd imagined a den of louche and opulent decadence, a secret boudoir rich with bosky perfumes and the potential for debauchery. Instead she found the executive suite of a mid-range ring-road hotel.” (Contract)
• “Everyone was doing the art look. No one was looking at each other. They were looking for someone who might be more interesting.” (Chicago Typewriter)
• “We were very much against physical space but then we realized we had to rethink space, territory, consider what it could be, project it into a future - I mean, it's like space, isn't it? And you can't give up on that? On the body. We all have bodies, don't we?” (Chicago Typewriter)
• “Che Horst-Prosier was telling Kasha Hocket-Baily why a container ship was the perfect exemplar of a Foucauldian heterotopia.” (Chicago Typewriter)
• “To us, a Klein bottle looks like a fancy vase in which it would be impossible to put any flowers, or a trick wine glass from which you are tantalisingly unable to drink, or a Murano version of a twisted doughnut, or a Möbius strip, or the universe itself, crafted by a particularly talented glass blower.” (Klein Bottle: the Comeback)

You have to read it to appreciate it. It isn't difficult to read, each section is enjoyable and entertaining. But what it means ...

Just read it.

May 2026; 309 pages
First published by Melville House in 2025

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Tainted Love" by Anna Chilvers

 I adored the first third of this original novel set in a village in rural Yorkshire ("Gran said they call Yorkshire 'God's Own Country', but I'm not sure that he liked this bit of it"; Ch 21). It is told in short chapters in the past tense from a multi-first-person PoV. Hairy, hoofed and horned teenage Peter (Pan?) lives with his dad in a cave on the moors, mostly naked, and is a promising Physics student at the local sixth-form college where he gets teased because of his unusual appearance. His girlfriend Lauren, who lives with her dad and leonine Mr Lion, a DJ, hears plants having conversations. But even as Peter and Lauren start having wonderful sex, their relationship is threatened by Richard, an apparently young man with cold skin, wearing a long coat and dark glasses, who has just moved in to a remote farmhouse with his glamorous Porsche-driving mother Meg. Their plumber, Jimmy, is a fire-eater, he and his tightrope-walking girlfriend perform with an internationally-touring Circus in the summer. Meanwhile homeless Ali, on the run from drug-dealers, is hiding out in the village.

Wow! What a brilliant mixture of magic and modernity. Mythology positively crackles from the pages. The beastly Mr Lion has a dog called Beauty, trees intertwine like lovers. 

Spoiler alert. Meg and Richard are vampires. I lost interest almost as soon as this was revealed. It appears as if almost everyone in the village knows this, including Peter's dad and Lauren's dad, but for some mysterious reason nobody is prepared to tell the young people the necessary information to keep them safe. There are complicated rules as to the number and spacing of bites on your victim that will turn them into a vampire. The Ali drug angle becomes a side issue that adds a touch of thriller to the last quarter of the book.

Such a promising start. Such a disappointing end.

Selected quotes:

• “The air danced with coins of sunlight” (Ch 1)
• “Jimmy liked girls in the same way there's a child like sweets, they tasted good and made him feel happy.” (Ch 4)
• “I liked to listen to the plants in my garden. The roses whispered, wishing the others would all be quiet. The vegetables sang songs of soup and frittatas. The onions told dirty jokes which made the cauliflowers laugh. The roses blushed and the runner beans tutted and turned away.” (Ch 14)
• “I knew her features so well from the photograph. Now they moved and changed and it was as though a character had stepped out of a fairytale and become real.” (Ch 22)
• “He said, ‘ You're behaving like a child.’ That's how you're supposed to behave with your parents.” (Ch 34)

May 2026; 333 pages

Published in 2016 by Bluemoose Books

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"At the End of the Sidewalks" by Baptiste Thery-Guilbert

This is a tender and tragic short novella, set in the south of France, chronicling the terrible pressures placed upon gay teenagers by the expectations of heteronormative society, the transgressive joys of casual sex, but also the beauty of a loving relationship between young friends. 

It starts at the end: “Clément died. A suicide by many hands.” (Age 17; p 10). It then returns to the narrator's passionate affair with Clément, his best friend and fellow school pupil. The narrator also has sex with Blue, an older man who likes the idea of underage boys. There are other gay characters as well, such as Louis, a complex character who dislikes gay men but can't get an erection with a girl and who enjoys being buggered by Djamil, an Arab catholic who can't speak to his mum but goes to confession where he speaks freely about his love-life.

The second part jumps forward two years to the narrator aged 19; he and Clément have broken up. There is a sense of maturity and regret.

What lifts this little novel above most gay fiction is the way the author structures the prose - which is as lean and spare as a waif-like rent-boy - into poetry. Consider this paragraph (Age 17, p 17):

"Djamil knows now

he will never have his fill of pleasure reaped from the bodies

of such giving men."

The writing is never ornate or melodramatic. Even complex human emotions are stripped to their naked essentials:

"When  Djamil gets angry around his mum he tells her to shut her mouth. She wants to listen. 

No matter. What Djamil wants to say no one understands." 

(Age 17, p 18)

The anonymous narrator tells his story mostly in the first person present tense, which creates intense empathy between narrator and reader. However, at times, he slips into the second person, describing himself as 'you', which both doubles down on the empathy and also creates a dissociative feeling of identity, as if the writer can separate his personalities, as we all can to some extent, putting on masks to disguise himself. This technique works well as a metaphor for the need for gay teenagers - before they are 'out', and frequently after - to hide their sexuality in the face of a frequently, sometimes murderously, censorious society. But it also suggests a degree of neurodivergence on the part of the narrator, underlined by the fact that he takes lithium, which is generally prescribed in the UK for bipolar disorder.

This delightful novel has echoes of, for example, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. It also reminded me of the oeuvre of Jean Genet, and some of the books of Andre Gide, such as The Immoralist. The works of William Burroughs (eg The Wild Boys) and John Rechy (eg City of Night) clearly deal with the same subject matter. But what makes this novella unique is its style.

I am blown away by the simple brilliance of this little book. Is there an English translation of Thery-Guilbert's first novel, Pas dire, or his 'distorted mirror sequel' to Sidewalks, Lésions. If so, I want to read them. If not, please may there soon be. 

Selected quotes:

• "In Marseille you deviate from the norm you die. In Marseille domination is a blood sport played in the street with a passing word or look.” (Age 17; p 10)
• “Desire never dies merely clots.” (Age 17; p 14)
• “It's better to be who you are than to play at who you should be.” (Age 17; p 52)
• “On the concrete still hot from the freshly finished day where men come greedy for hope and hungry for a body.” (Age 19; p 76)

May 2026; 97 pages

Originally published by Editions blast in French in 2022

This translation, by Trask Roberts, was published in paperback by Renard Press in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Lazarus Man" by Richard Price

 Days after a five-storey tenement in Harlem collapses, Anthony is dragged from the ruins. His miraculous survival is used to inspire young New Yorkers on the periphery of gangs. Meanwhile Felix, a young photographer who lived opposite the disaster, is seeking paid employment, Royal, a funeral director, is seeking bodies, and Mary, a detective, is seeking a missing person who might or might not have been in the building.

I was spell-bound by the first part of this take of ordinary New Yorkers struggling to survive and make sense of their lives. The characters of Felix and Mary had me hooked, Royal providing a lighter touch. But the book started to become less engrossing from the moment that Anthony, like Lazarus, rose from the dead. I persisted to find out what happened to Mary and Felix, and to solve the mystery that is being woven around the survival of Anthony, but somehow the moment stalled. 

But I loved the gritty authenticity and I hope to read more from this author. 

The author has a particular skill in creating original descriptions, such as "straw-sipping", "weed-poked", and "sitting slump-shouldered". 

There are some super lines such as:

• “When the doors opened at the next stop he bailed like a bailiff.” (Boom)
• “Bobby Hazari, her partner du jour.” (Boom)
• “A lover who was nothing more than a clap-on clap-off dick.” (Boom)

Selected quotes:

• “Maybe-this-time is the drug, you-never-know is a drug.” (Angels)
• “Straw-sipping something peachcoloured.” (Angels)
• “Both left him feeling like a spy in the world; a double agent inside a double agent.” (Angels)
• “The big man in the dark sunglasses sitting slump-shouldered.” (Boom)
• “The street itself, a glittering quilt of daggered glass topped here and there with scatters of mail and magazines.” (Boom)
• “The buckling weed-poked macadam.” (Boom)
• “The sneaker skitter of the small kids randomly running in and out.” (Boom)
• “Nodding like an over excited oil rig.” (Boom)
• “Maybe something could be salvaged if the film editor used a machete instead of a splicer.” (Boom)
• “So oblivious to their surroundings that whenever one of them tried to cross to the other side of Fifth Avenue all the cars had to go into slalom mode.” (Boom)
• “The police would make their periodic sweeps, but it was like pushing a broom without a dustpan.” (Boom)
• “A young lady such as yourself should never have to pay for her own banana.” (Boom)
• “She could hear his heart beating in his throat, sounding to her like one of those plush toy animals you'd put in the crib of a newborn that imitated the swashing sound of a womb.” (Boom)
• “The sexual equivalent of a square meal - hearty and filling.” (Boom)
• “The elevator was a crawler, Royal able to clock its ascent with a calendar.” (Risen)
• “The street can be a brutal sculptor.” (Risen)
• “Doubling his fee, otherwise known as two times zero.” (Risen)
• “If it weren't for genitals, she thought, people could live for hundreds of years.” (Risen)

May 2026; 337 pages

First published in the USA by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2024

My UK paperback edition was issued by Corgi in 2026

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"The House of Spirits" by Isabel Allende

 A family saga doubling as the history of a country. The author Allende was second cousin to Salvador Allende, who, having been elected Marxist president of Chile, was killed during a military coup. The book's last quarter is a description of a military coup and the terror unleashed by the subsequent dictatorship. Until that point, it seems to be a slightly meandering account of three generations of the family of Esteban, a violent man, a right-winger who subsequently becomes a Senator and his clairvoyant wife, Clara. This element introduces significant elements of magic: salt-cellars are moved by psychokinesis, dreamed predictions come true etc. This aspect of the book, together with its intent to tell the history of a nation, make it comparable with Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children which had been published the year before.

It is written in the past tense and mostly in the third person omnipresent, although occasionally a first-person section (narrated by Esteban) intrudes. The Epilogue is another first-person narrative written by the person whom we then discover to have been the narrator of the rest of the book. The chapters are long, averaging over thirty pages, and the paragraphs tend to be long, not infrequently more than a page in length. This can make it heavy going. Nevertheless I finished it in five days.

It was narrative heavy, with a great deal of exposition, which enabled the author to get through a great deal of material. Perhaps this was necessary: the canvas of this book is large. After all, as the author suggests in the Epilogue: “Memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.” (Epilogue) So there is a lot of stuff to write about. Nor does the narrative skim the surface: this tapestry is richly embroidered. Nevertheless, for all that, it seemed a little heavy on the tell rather than the show, and there were times when I wanted less exposition.

There are, occasionally, moments when the narrator breaks through to hint at what is to come, such as: “This story could not have been written if she hadn't intervened to rescue us and, in the process, our memories.” (Ch 4)

Selected quotes:

• “The only one whose appearance was enhanced by mourning was the church's patron saint, Sebastian, for during holy week the faithful were spared the sight of that body twisted in the most indecent posture, pierced by arrows, and dripping with blood and tears like a suffering homosexual, whose wounds, kept miraculously fresh by Father Restrepo’s brush, made Clara tremble with disgust.” (Ch 1)
• “She had buried him once before, which explained why she had room for doubt with her this time his death was real.” (Ch 1)
• “It seemed that no sooner did he roll in the pasture with the girl than she became pregnant.” (Ch 2)
• “The weed-choked garden where the statues of the Olympian gods stood naked and covered with pigeon droppings.” (Ch 7)
• “She attempted to establish a system of communication with Blanca that would allow them to circumvent the terrible delays of the postal system, but telepathy did not always work and she was never sure how the message would be received.” (Ch 7)
• “Pedro Tercero Garcia holding her in his arms, stroking and kissing her, and eliciting from her the same profound harmony he drew from his guitar.” (Ch 8)
• “That lost gaze often observed in those who eat only vegetables.” (Ch 9)
• “The military's scrupulous honesty for the unimportant.” (Epilogue)

This is the first novel of Allende's I have read and it hasn't awakened in me a longing to read more of her oeuvre. I think I prefer the less  mainstream South American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (A Universal History of Infamy) or Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Chronicle of a Death Foretold). 

May 2026; 491 pages

Allende's debut novel

First published in Spanish as La Casas de los espiritus in 1981

The first English translation was published by Knopf in 1985

My paperback version (translated by Magda Bogin) was issued by Vintage in 2011

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God