Recently Read
Goodlord by Ella Frears, Rough Trade Books (2024)
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What follows is an email stream-of-consciousness written to the author’s landlord in which she describes the awfulness of the flat she is renting, the difficulties of finding anywhere half decent to live and her suffering at the hands of men. It’s not all grim and don’t let the email stream-of-consciousness format put you off.
Despite the subject matter, this is an exhilarating rollercoaster of a read from London based poet and artist Ella Frears.
The Party by Tessa Hadley, Jonathan Cape (2024)
This too is grim but in a different way. For a start it’s only 115 pages long, typeset in 11.5pt, and not much longer than an article in the London Review of Books, for which Jonathan Cape are charging £12.99. The jacket cover gently teases the reader
On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, on the cusp of adulthood, go to an art students’ party in a dockside pub; there they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of wordliness and sophistication both intrigues and repels them.
That’s about all that happens. The novella ends the morning after the party of the title with M & E catching a bus home. From the top deck of the bus they see ‘butchers shouldering carcasses across the pavement, greengrocers setting out crates of cabbages and onions and oranges, housewives wrapped up against the cold’. This is where the inevitable and dreadful two-part BBC adaptation will start before flashing back to the night before.
Clear by Carys Davies, Granta (2024)
I picked this up on a recent visit to Abbotsford, the home of Sir Walter Scott. Although as a memento of what was a great day out (really, can’t recommend it enough), I couldn’t quite bring myself to buy any of his novels, the shop had a display of the 2025 longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction of which this is one.
Carys Davies’ novel is set in 1843 against the backdrop of the Highland Clearances and the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland (the Great Disruption). The two main characters, John Ferguson, an impoverished church minister and Ivar, the sole occupant of a remote Scottish island which Ferguson must visit, have no common language. Davies has invented both the island that Ivar inhabits and the language he speaks, the latter based on Norn, once spoken on Orkney and Shetland.
Although the ending perhaps slightly rushed, the difficulties of communication between the two men and the loneliness of the location are conveyed vividly. A story well told.
All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowes, Galley Beggar Press (2024)
My friend K. knows me too well or at least knows what I like to read and occasionally passes me the odd volume which she has finished, most recently this debut novel. The hero / anti-hero Henry Nash shows a disdain for the ghastliness of modern life, in particular banality of work-speak and struggles with regularly being forced to listen to it being blathered into mobile phones in his local café:
We’ve just launched a beta site… Yeah, got a pretty good evaluation… Guess, no guess… thirteen! Thirteen mill. I’ll send you the details when it goes live… our funding success at the moment is about 90-95%... we’re getting very good at, y’know… cutting through the crap. Right, they don’t just provide capital… it’s about introducing digital disruption to councils… yeah it gets people to pitch their ideas. We’re doing a pitch-off, which should be fun… Government are really backing tech right now… yeah, we build a portfolio according to their criteria.
Satisfyingly, Nash describes this as a “voluble effluent of premasticated buzzwords” but I knew the novel was for me long before then when, within the first few sentences, he refers to a previous boss - the owner of a bookshop - as a ‘fuckweasel’.
An excellent recommendation but then my friend also said that when I was finished I was just to return it to the library which makes me wonder if she was just wanting to save herself the bother of going to the library?
As always, if you’re buying any of these books, shop local. My favourites in Edinburgh are Edinburgh Bookshop, Toppings and Portobello Bookshop. For second-hand books, Tills at the east side of the Meadows and also in Portobello is good. All of them need the business more than Amazon. And that last one - and probably the others too - available from Edinburgh Libraries.