Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.29

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It was Kate’s review right at the end of 2024 which alerted me to Loved and Missed (2021), Susie Boyt’s seventh novel but my first time of reading her.

Loved and Missed is told primarily from the point of view of Ruth, whose daughter Eleanor is addicted to heroin.

“I sometimes thought what I minded most was that all the kindness had gone from her face. The way she had profaned her body.”

Set in a recognisable London, it’s not explicitly stated when the story is set but feels like the early noughties, with Eleanor born in the late 70s/early 80s.

Ruth is sad and self-blaming, but she’s also sparky, funny and resilient. When Eleanor’s baby Lily is born in need of morphine , it is Ruth who tires herself ragged at NICU. Eleanor and her boyfriend Ben are not presented as terrible people, just entirely incapable of taking care of themselves or anyone else.

I’m already making this sound much heavier than it is, so how is this for when Ruth realises she adores her granddaughter compared to other children?

“I sometimes found babies a bit cynical around the edges. Their been-here-before auras often registered as smug.”

Ruth decides to take on the care of Lily. How she engineers this is a move of breathtaking cynicism which Eleanor and Ben entirely live up to. It is presented matter-of-factly while being heartbreaking.

“Eleanor shrugged, which was often how she agreed with me anyway.”

Eleanor is filled with fury, which means Ruth steps on eggshells the whole time, terrified of alienating her further. As a reader I found Eleanor’s behaviour passive-aggressive, and aggressive, to an infuriating level, but Ruth’s deep love for her daughter and grandchild is palpable.

Over time, we see Lily grow into a teenager, repeatedly let down by her mother, unwaveringly loved and supported by Ruth.

“The world was Eleanor’s widow, I sometimes thought.”

Lily is old before her time, unsurprisingly. Meanwhile, her mother sinks further, as Ruth observes:

“She no longer looked at me with defiance and those jets of fury; There was a mild bewilderment to her and hardly any harshness at all. We were in a different phase. Her atmosphere was entirely sad.”

I adored Loved and Missed. It was so believable in presenting the singular focus of addiction without demonising Eleanor in any way, or attempting reductive explanations for why she is as she is. Ruth’s narrative does not let herself off the hook, even when she really could, and at the same time she has to approach life with love and humour to be present for Lily. The two of them laugh a lot.

It’s pacily written with so much wit, there were many sentences I marked – this post could easily have been a series of quotes.

It’s also got a brilliant character in Ruth’s best friend Jean, a pithy, clear-sighted, literature-loving, uncompromising powerhouse.

“’Sometimes in life,’ she said, ‘a really quite good book is what you need more than an excellent one.’ That scared me. It was so un-Jean.”

Loved and Missed is a testament to love, and the messy realities of love – how it is lived in an imperfect world by imperfect people, and how it is entirely fundamental. The novel is wholly devoid of sentiment but made me cry more than once, which given I was on an intercity train was not ideal! Highly recommended, and I’ll definitely be exploring Boyt’s other novels.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.28

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I really enjoyed Gaito Gazdanov’s The Buddha’s Return when I read it a few years ago, so I’m pleased to return to him with The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (1947-8, transl. Bryan Karetnyk 2013) published by Pushkin Press in one of their lovely smaller editions with French flaps.

It opens beguilingly:

“Of all my memories, of all my life’s in innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed.”

This isn’t quite as it initially appears – the killing took place during the Russian Civil War. A man shoots the horse the narrator was riding, and in self-defence he shoots back. He then steals the other soldier’s white horse, later selling it and fleeing to Paris.

He is living in Paris and working as a journalist when he comes across a book of collected stories called I’ll Come Tomorrow by Alexander Wolf. Reading it, he is shaken by one of the stories, The Adventure of the Steppe in which the events above are described almost exactly.

As the book is written in English, when he is in London he visits Wolf’s publisher, who assures him:

“Mr Wolf is an Englishman; I’ve known him for many years and can vouch for that. What’s more, he’s never left England for more than two or three weeks at a time, which he spends mostly in France or Italy. He hasn’t travelled farther; I can say this with certainty.”

However, he is shaken on his return to France when he meets Voznesensky, a drunken acquaintance who has a copy of the book and claims to know the author. Voznesensky is incredulous at the thought of “Sasha Wolf, an Englishman!”

So who is Alexander Wolf? Was he the dead soldier? An Englishman who holidays in Italy? A Russian who lives in Paris?

Having set itself up as a possibly metaphysical detective story, the novel then takes a swerve into almost a completely different genre, detailing the narrator’s love affair with Yelena Nikolayevna.  She’s an enigmatic woman with a mysterious past (!) but gradually an intimacy begins to build, despite an “unnatural divide between the inner life and physical life that was so characteristic of her”.

The sudden shift is somewhat disconcerting but Spectre… remains very readable. Essentially the story is less about plot and more a consideration of where we look for meaning. The narrator channels his energy first into Wolf and then into Yelena, but ultimately he has to create his own meanings with his mortality a constant consideration:  

“I thought about how Wolf had become – and not so much Wolf personally as the very thought of him—the involuntary personification of everything dead and sad that existed in my life.”

By the ending, not everything is fully explained, although reader can piece events together. I think by leaving the plot unresolved, Gazdanov keeps Spectre…  as a philosophical consideration foremost, encouraging the reader to make their own meanings as the narrator needs to do.

I also think there is humour in it, I don’t think we’re supposed to take the narrator as seriously as he takes himself:

“Everything that my existence had comprised until now—regrets, dissatisfaction and a sense of the manifest futility of everything I did – began to seem very distant and alien to me, as though I was thinking of something that had taken place long ago.”

I realise I’ve been a bit vague, but Spectre… is an enigmatic and slippery book to both read and describe! It is an eloquent contemplation of its themes, so if you fancy those wrapped up in a few somewhat unresolved narratives then give it a try – I certainly enjoyed it a great deal.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.27

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For the second day running, a novella from when Simon and I went book shopping. Cathy commented on the post that I was in for a treat with Cal by Bernard MacLaverty (1983), and how right she was.

(I’m currently in a budget hotel for a work thing, hence the uplighting available 😀 )

I read Midwinter Break by this author a few months ago, which I really loved. Cal is a very different story but features the same closely observed characterisation and concise yet lyrical  style.

Cal is nineteen years old and lives outside Belfast with his father, after both his mother and older brother have died. His father Shamie works at the local abattoir, but Cal was unable to stomach such work and is unemployed. As the only Catholics in a Protestant area during the Troubles, Cal lives with the constant fear of a beating at best and what he believes more likely, being killed outright by Loyalists.

This fear led Cal’s father to get a gun for protection from Crilly, a bully who Cal grew up with, now part of what seems to be the IRA, although they’re not named in the book. For Cal, this means he owes Crilly, and the organisation he works for, a favour.

“Cal knew that in his father’s mind it was all a bit like the Westerns he so liked to watch on TV—that he had right on his side and it was the baddies who would die. He knew the old man felt safe with his notion and Cal did not want to disillusion him.

He knew that if somebody had marked you out it would all be over in a blinding flash and a bang before you could take your hands out of your pockets, and you would be bleeding into the carpet when you thought you were still standing up.”

Cal spies Marcella working at the local library. Older than him and a single mother, he finds her attractive, but there is a history between them which she seems oblivious to, but which causes Cal a great deal of distress.

He ends up working at her in-laws farm, and the two of them grow closer. Over all this hangs the threat of Crilly, his senior Skeffington, and Cal being pulled towards carrying out the violence he finds abhorrent, or being on the receiving end himself. The constant tension and oppression is palpable.

“Cal for the first time in years felt safe. No one knew he was in this pensioner’s house. He was sure he would sleep. If only he could get away from himself as well.”

Cal behaves in ways that are impossible to condone, but MacLaverty asks the reader to understand the pressures exerted on, and lack of choices available for, a man living in these circumstances who is still a teenager. I don’t want to say much more as Cal is tightly plotted and inevitably I would include spoilers…

Cal shows how political violence can permeate communities and entirely destroy people, both in an instant and by corroding over time. MacLaverty depicts this with a clear-sighted, measured tone, the tragedy in no way lessened for his determinedly non-sensational approach.

To end, a hilariously dreadful trailer for the film adaptation. The film itself may be very good, but what on earth they were thinking with this voiceover and music I cannot begin to guess:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.26

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Today a novella that I picked up when Simon and I went book shopping last month. The Play Room by Olivia Manning (1969) is an unnerving evocation of young womanhood with inherent hurt and dangers, in a brilliantly evoked 1960s small town setting.

Laura Fletcher is about to sit her O’Levels (Year 11) and is deeply unhappy at her girls school in the small town of Camperlea near Portsmouth. The other girls don’t like her, which is partly understandable given Laura’s tendency towards boastful lying to cover up how inadequate she feels. The teachers are not sympathetic. When Vicky Logan, an older, beautiful girl lends her a handkerchief, she earns Laura’s utter devotion.  

“Over the years, observant and admiring, Laura had noted her Vicky remained aloof from schoolroom pettiness so she seemed to Laura above human weakness.”

Vicky seems pretty aloof from everything, including her own life, happy to drift along:

“Everyone knew that should she choose to earn her living, she could at once become a film star or a model or something like that.”

I love that “something like that” – so wistful and naïve, so teenage.

Laura is desperate to be friends with Vicky but she is wrapped up in being Best Friends with a girl called Gilda. The reader realises that their friendship may be something more, but Laura remains oblivious.

“She imagined she knew everything but had to admit there was more to life than knowledge. Experience was what she needed.”

Laura’s leverage arrives through an experience she has while on holiday on the Isle of Wight with her brother. This event has dated badly and would not be written now. If you get past it, it serves as a plot point by giving Laura a true story for once and a way into Vicky and Gilda’s world.

Their world is one of motorbikes, dances and men, and Laura is out of her depth and simultaneously desperate to be part of it all. She hates where she lives and can’t wait to leave:

“She blamed her mother for it. She would, she felt, have been a totally different person had she not been born in this dreary town, in this dreary avenue and in a house perpetually fretted by the winds of anxiety.”

Her mother Mrs Fletcher is an intriguing character. She is highly anxious, controlling, self-pitying. She is dismissive to everyone. Yet although unlikable, I wondered about her – one of that generation of women who married immediately post-war, and then saw the world change beyond all recognition with women having choices barely thought of previously.

“Although she controlled everything, although she said ‘I have to take every responsibility,’ it was true that someone had to look after her. She felt too much; lived with too much difficulty; met every situation with nervous dread. Someone had to help her bear her ineptitude for life.”

To me, both she and Laura were united by their anger at their world and its limitations, although neither could see it. One of the rare scenes not from Laura’s point of view is when they shop together for a dress. Mrs Fletcher can see it is ugly, doesn’t suit her daughter, and how young and vulnerable she looks in trying to be older. Yet she knows that because of her way of behaving, nothing she can say will be given any weight by determined Laura. It is one of the most moving scenes in the book.

When Gilda goes to Malta for the summer, Laura sees her chance with Vicky. They start going to dances no longer chaperoned by the local vicar, and events soon spiral out of control. Vicky is drawn to a violent man and Laura is too young to know what to do, or even realise that anything needs to be done.

The Play Room shows how vulnerable young people are when they think they have all the answers but with no idea of what the world could ask of them. A darkness runs through the story; there is no nostalgia for school or young adulthood here. It captures the intensity of feeling in adolescence, but is not entirely without humour:

“Were she asked to die for Vicky she would, she decided, die. At least, she would give the proposition serious thought.”

I found The Play Room highly readable and evocative. I felt the holiday on the Isle of Wight is given too much space within such a short novel, but the bullying, isolated school days and Laura’s worship of an older girl she really doesn’t know at all was well realised. I hoped she would make it to London one day and not be too disappointed…

“Laura, discouraged, dropped down on the rug and shutting her eyes, saw herself walking in night-time Soho through a street a-dazzle with light, where nobody slept. There were discotheques and dance clubs and cafes and coffee bars and young men by the dozen: young men beyond dreams, with lean pliable bodies and hair curling on their shoulders, as beautiful as archangels, in clothes or colours. And she could imagine Vicky walking beside her! Everyone would look at them. Everyone.”

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No. 25

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Daniela Krien is an author I’ve been meaning to try for a while, and today was the day! The Fire (2021, transl. Jamie Bulloch 2023) follows long-term married couple Rahel and Peter over a few weeks as they try to find their way back to one another, or at least identify if that remains something they want at all.

They have planned a break from their Dresden home, to a cabin in Upper Bavaria. Right before they are due to leave, it burns down.

“Had this happened ten years ago the two of them would have shaken their heads. ‘Who knows, there might be a silver lining…’ Peter would have probably said, giving her a comforting hug. But he’s not so laid back anymore. His subtle sense of humour often veers towards the cynical nowadays, and their lively discussions have given way to a polite amicability. But, worst of all, he’s stopped sleeping with her.”

A recent professional crisis for literature professor Peter has left him and Rahel increasingly distant. Told from Rahel’s point of view, she is desperate to recover their intimacy, but is at a loss as to how to achieve this, despite being a psychologist and used to discussing other people’s relationships.

“In literature he loves impatient, tempestuous souls. Only in books does he get close to them without feeling threatened.”

They end up staying at the remote home of a friend of Rahel’s late mother. Ruth’s husband Viktor has had a stroke so she needs Rahel to watch the house and garden, and care for her considerable menagerie of animals, while she is at the rehab centre. Ruth and Viktor’s home was a constant in Rahel’s tumultuous childhood, and the backdrop to some of the unanswered questions she has from that time.

Over their days there, Rahel will reflect on her past, both her childhood and the thirty years she has shared with Peter. Their somewhat chaotic daughter Selma will arrive with their young grandchildren, they will swim in the lake, care for the animals, eat food and drink wine, and things will change almost imperceptibly but irrevocably.

“It occurs to Rahel that, particularly in a marriage, the sum of what isn’t said for outweighs the sum of what is.”

The Fire builds careful character studies of Rahel and Peter: who they are professionally; as spouses; and as parents as well as individuals. In middle-age they are trying to navigate their place in a changing world. Both are increasingly frustrated at work in different ways. Krien considers generational differences, compounded by Rahel and Peter growing up in the GDR which Selma is scathing about, resentful of her parents’ anti-capitalist leanings which means limited inheritance for her.

The characterisation is subtle. I’m not sure I particularly liked Rahel or Peter, but I didn’t particularly dislike them either. They were believable, flawed people, somewhat unhappy, trying to work out what would make life better for them. This would make a good read for a book club, with plenty to discuss in terms of character and relationship dynamics.

Krien’s writing is pared-back and understated. She trusts the insight of her readers, very much showing and not telling. The ending isn’t tied up neatly, the writing is too sophisticated for anything trite. But it is a satisfyingly realised story, leaving me keen to explore this writer further.

“Nobody else she knows has this connection with literature. Peter doesn’t just read books, he works with them, relates what he’s read to himself, his views, his behaviour and changes them if necessary. For him, literature is like a living counterpart. Sometimes even more alive than what plays out before his eyes. And unlike people, he finds it indispensable.”

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.24

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It’s been years since I read Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World but I remember being impressed by it. Published in translation by the always interesting AndOtherStories, his debut novel Kingdom Cons (2008, transl. Lisa Dillman 2017) is a fable of just over 100 pages.

It is told from the point of view of Lobo, whose parents left him an accordion when they went to ‘the other side’ which I took to mean the USA. He makes his living singing on the streets and in cantinas, until one day he sees The King.

He decides he wants to be part of the Court, and so he goes to the King’s palace:

“The royalty of a king determined these things: the man had settled among simple folk and turned the filth to splendour. Approached from afar, the palace exploded from the edge of the desert in a vast pageantry of gardens, gates and walls. A gleaming city on the fringes of a city in squalor, a city that seemed to reproduce its misfortune on street after street.”

The King takes a shine to him, and so Lobo becomes The Artist, part of the coterie. Frequently referred to as a ‘fool’ or ‘clown’, he is the court jester, a musician placing The King in folk ballads.

“The Artist bowed again and followed the man, fit to burst into tears and blinded by bright lights and his future.”

Also in court are The Heir, The Manager, The Journalist, The Doctor, The Witch and other courtiers. The Artist falls for the daughter of The Witch, but there is much he doesn’t know about her, and how things run at Court, although he starts to piece them together.

Of course, this isn’t a medieval centre of rule, but a modern day drug cartel. We see the politics between cartels, the violence and power struggles at a step removed, but they are there. (The only violence I found difficult was the killing of a bird, which isn’t directly depicted.)

I didn’t find the fairytale/fable framing to be obfuscating or sanitising what was taking place. Instead. I thought it was a clever move by Herrera to show how embedded cartels are in society, how they draw on long-established societal structures, and how there is wider complicity. It is an inventive way of approaching a story so frequently told.

Kingdom Cons is a quick read, almost a short story. The characters are deliberately lightly sketched, presenting as long-established archetypes to emphasise how the running of the cartel is nothing new. It is powerful in its demonstration of how mythology endures, questions who should be mythologised, and the use that is made of myths.

“It’s as if there is no right to beauty, he thought, and he thought that the city ought to be set alight from its foundations, because in each and every place where life sprouted up through the cracks, it was immediately abused.”

Novella(s) a Day in May 2026  – No. 22 & 23

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Well, I knew it would happen eventually and possibly not for the last time this month – work demands and home renovation chaos meant I didn’t post my NADIM yesterday. I did manage to read a novella and finished it around 10pm but I was soooooo tired and also achy from hoicking furniture around in a manner that would have health and safety professionals fainting clean away, that I decided my bed was calling.

The novella was Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (2021, transl. Daniel Bowles 2024). This is the first by Kracht I’ve read but apparently it forms a sort-of sequel to his 1995 novel Faserland, presenting as auto-fiction about a writer called Christian who wrote that novel (and in a running joke, is consistently mistaken for Daniel Kehlmann.)

The novella follows Christian and his mother, whom he finds “thoroughly objectionable”, taking a road trip across Switzerland. She has recently been discharged from residential mental health care, and has asked him to visit her in her apartment where she self-medicates on a heady mix of cheap wine, vodka and phenobarbital.

“Perhaps today, rather than just pretending, I would succeed in accepting her as she was, and then, for once, not vanished down the bottomless rabbit hole of memory, but be amenable to the moment, to her delusions, to which I could simply open myself. What on earth did she want?”

Christian is deeply angry about his family history, which includes his grandfather being Nazi and a father who worked for a right-wing media mogul. He’s also furious about Zurich, about trappings of wealth, about seemingly everything. Wherever he turns he finds things morally abhorrent, and he doesn’t seem mistaken in this.

“It had been put into my mind that the circumstances of my childhood and youth were in some way special or extraordinary, where in reality they were steeped not only in bourgeois mediocrity—for that I’d have been able to accept—but also in profound menace.”

His mother adds to this when she decides to cash in her stocks and shares for a trip to Africa, and it seems she is quite wealthy from investing the arms trade. She and Christian travel around Switzerland with 600k in a shopping bag, driven by an accommodating taxi driver, encountering various immoral people from where they have to make their escapes. They also keep trying and failing to give the money away.

As the novella continues, it becomes more metafictional, with Christian describing a scene he wasn’t privy to:

“It was as if I had floated out of my brain and taken a walk, as ether, had flowed out of the plot I had been part of, even, and as if it had thereby become possible for me to be omnipresent, which, in the end, I was anyway, in my story.”

And then his mother summarising Eurotrash thusly:

“Your mother. Takes her along to some saccharine melodrama, tragedy, comedy, whatever, starring yours truly. Promises her who knows what, seeing that she’s got to drink herself to oblivion constantly and choke down pills for her unendurable pain. And then he blames everything on Switzerland, the Nazis, and the Second World War.”

I probably wasn’t in quite the right mood for Eurotrash, being really very tired, and I remained ambivalent about it for most of the book. A lot of the blurbs pitch it as a dark comedy, but aside from a few moments I didn’t find it particularly funny, due to how bitterly cynical and disillusioned Christian is.

However, I kept reading because Kracht’s style is so readable, and ultimately at the end it genuinely surprised me by being quite tender and moving, despite my reservations (personal, not literary) about the set-up for the final scene. So all in all I’m glad I persevered!

And then today I read Clear by Carys Davies (2024). I think I was the only person in the bookish blogosphere who didn’t get on with Davies’ debut novel West, but on the strength of this I might give it another try because I absolutely loved Clear.

Set in 1843, it takes the clearances as its starting point. Landowner Lowrie is going to evict Ivar from the island somewhere between Scotland and Norway where he is the sole remaining inhabitant, and where he has lived his whole life.

“Walking along the bank between the two low waters and the lightly moving wind, he thought about that, the pleasure of it—sitting with Pegi and quietly knitting; Pegi very still, his hands barely moving as they worked the needles; the only other motion a cobweb quivering in the atmosphere near the ground.”

Into his solitary, quiet existence comes John Ferguson, a minister who has left the Scottish Church to join the Free Church, and as a consequence has no money. This puts him in a vulnerable position and he ends up being employed by Lowrie to tell Ivar he will have to leave. Lowrie assures John that Ivar will not be disadvantaged by the move, something John’s feisty wife Mary sincerely doubts:

“Thinking of reports she’d read in the newspapers over the years of people in Sutherland and Wester Ross and the Hebrides who had not, in fact, done well for themselves; who had wanted very much to stay where they were and farm, instead of seeing their houses burned or reduced to rubble and the land they’d worked for generations laid under sheep.”

Things become further complicated when John is seriously injured on his first day and his belongings destroyed by the sea, including the few words he had written down to try and speak with Ivar in Norn. As Ivar cares for him, the two men start to build a fragile bond despite having no common spoken language.

“It was so long since anyone […] had looked at him properly, and if he’d been asked to describe his feelings he might have reached for that word in his language that described what happened when a rock is covered and uncovered by the sea – when, briefly, the water rises up and submerges it completely before it falls away again and reveals it.”

Clear is beautifully written, poetic and precise. It builds a carefully tender portrait of an emerging relationship between two people whose lives are so entirely different. And ultimately it surprised me by becoming a real page-turner! An absolute stunner.

Image from here

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.21

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Day 3 of home renovations and a very full work week means this will likely be a short and waffly post – apologies in advance for a higher than usual level of incoherence!

I’ve really gone off-piste with this choice. I never read horror; the nearest I get is domestic Gothic with Shirley Jackson. But I picked up Bodies of Water by VH Leslie (2016) because it was published by the always interesting Salt Publishing, and because from the blurb on the back I didn’t actually realise it was a supernatural horror story 😀

The setting is Wakewater House, a huge Victorian pile on the banks of the Thames, but outside of the city. In the present day, Kirsten has bought one of the converted apartments off-plan:

“It was hard to believe that this same water ran all the way to the centre of the city, to those dense, overcrowded pockets where life swarmed. It was a relief being at a distance from it all though her commute would be longer, here, the river was entirely hers.”

And in 1871 Evelyn has been admitted as a patient for the water cure “hydropathy”. It’s a clinic for privileged middle class women:

“‘Doctor Porter likes to think of those he helps us guests, not patients.’

‘In case he doesn’t cure us?’”

And they know they are being patronised at best, victimised at worst by medical misogyny, having been admitted for a variety of ‘women’s problems’ including the ever-popular hysteria:

“Mrs Goddard gave her a knowing glance. ‘Of course we’re mad, dear, we’re women.’

The chapters alternate between Kirsten and Evelyn, united across time by their place of residence and the fact that they both see a soaked and bedraggled woman with long black hair, sometimes in the river.

Kirsten’s only neighbour Manon is undertaking some sort of research around historical female suicides by drowning:

“Among the bracken she was hardly noticeable, a diminutive figure hunched over at the water’s edge like one of the many bunches of wild flowers that dipped their heads towards the surface. In her hand was a large stick, which she seemed to be using to prod the water, and Kirsten was reminded of a witch stirring a cauldron.”

Evelyn also knows of women in the river, but more folkloric:

“‘Of course, there are rusalkas and nixies, sirens, undines.’

‘No men?’

‘Oh no, the water is a female domain.’”

Moving back and forth across time, Wakewater House becomes increasingly eerie, potentially haunted by women who were abused and neglected. The repeated motif of water, its sudden appearance, power and destructive potential is used to build an insidiously unstable environment for Evelyn and Kirsten.

Bodies of Water is not gory; had it been, I would have quickly tossed it aside. Instead it is creepily Gothic, supernatural while grounding the tale in its strong feminist themes.

I love being in and near water, but I might think twice about river swimming now…

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.20

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It’s been years since I read Han Kang but I did like The Vegetarian and Human Acts, so I was looking forward to reading the novella which came between those two, Greek Lessons (2011, transl. Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won, 2023).

In mainly alternating chapters, it tells the story of a teacher of Ancient Greek who is losing his sight due to a long-standing condition, and his pupil who has spontaneously stopped speaking for the second time in her life. His chapters are mainly first-person, hers are third-person.

To be honest, if I heard this premise described without knowing the author I would think it sounded clunky, and I’m a bit tired of unnamed narrators too. But that just shows how little I know because Greek Lessons was a tenderly realised exploration of human connection and the role of language.

The woman is recently bereaved and has also lost custody of her son. She lives alone and is entirely isolated:

“She knows that no single specific experience led to her loss of language. Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens. Language warm ragged over the course of her life, by her own tongue and pen.”

The teacher reminisces about a love he had when young. She was deaf and used sign language. He was worried that when he lost his sight they wouldn’t be able to communicate:

“I know now that, had we in fact lived together, I wouldn’t have needed your voice after I went blind. For even as the visible world would gradually have receded like an ebb tide, at the same time, the silence we shared would have gradually become replete.”

In this way Greek Lessons looks closely at language: its limitations, the silences between what is said, what it opens up and what it closes off.

“Despite what her psychiatrist and mother had hoped, the stimulus of social interaction couldn’t fracture her silence. Instead a brighter and more concentrated stillness filled the dark clay jar of her body. In the crowded streets on the way home, she walked weightless, as though moving encased in a huge soap bubble. Inside this gleaming quiet, which was like gazing up at the surface under water, cars roared thunderously by and pedestrians elbows jabbed her in the shoulders and arms, then vanished.”

As these two people move towards one another, Kang questions how much true intimacy is derived from a shared language, and how much language enables avoidance of intimacy:

“She would have still had language then, so the emotions would have been clearer, stronger.”

Greek Lessons is very densely written, so although it’s short it isn’t a fast read. It is a detailed exploration of loss in many guises: the senses, people, love, roles, choices. There isn’t really a plot and there isn’t resolution, so definitely not the read for when you’re looking for those. But as a fractured, elliptical exploration of her themes through the lives of two lost people, it is engrossing.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.19

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The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner (1984) was apparently hailed as one of four perfect short novels in the English language. If I was Helen Garner I would sigh with frustration at such accolades being on the jacket – how is any novel going to live up to that?  But it is excellently written, and in a nice W&N Essentials edition too.

The story revolves around Dexter and Athena, a happily married couple with two children, Arthur and Billy.

“They were friends. They lived in a sparsely furnished house near the Merri Creek: its walls were cracking, its floor sloped and its doors hung loosely in their frames.”

Dexter meets an old friend Elizabeth, who has caring responsibilities she wishes she didn’t: her much younger, chaotic sister Vicki. Dexter is pleased to see her, although its unclear if it is Elizabeth herself he’s pleased to see, or what she represents:

“Dexter was mad about the past. He believed in it, it sustained him, he used it to knit meaning into the mess of everything.”

Elizabeth is living a very different life with her sort-of boyfriend Philip. It is the steadiness of what Dexter and Athena represent in contrast that draws Vicki from her sister and Philip, towards those with a more conventional set-up:

“She loved the notes they left for each other, the drawings and silly rhymes, the embarrassing singing, the vegetable garden, the fluster under which lay a generous order, the rushes of activity followed by periods of sunny calm: Vicki was in love with the house, with the family, with the whole establishment of it.”

But Athena and Dexter aren’t too good to be true. There are pressure points in any relationship and without malice, Vicki, Elizabeth and Philip start to force these open.

We follow Dexter and Athena into a more unstable world where the structures they have surrounded themselves with begin crumble. What I thought was a masterstroke was that Garner doesn’t portray this in a linear fashion. We jump forwards, there are gaps, not everything is spelled out. It stops what is in some ways a very ordinary story from becoming pedestrian, and it reflects the way the characters continue along their lives until something jolts them out of routine.

The characters are well realised without being cliches too. Athena is a loving homemaker, but she isn’t self-sacrificing. I found shocking this casual admission about her son Billy, who has an unspecified disability:

“I’m just hanging on till we can get rid of him.”

And Elizabeth, more freewheeling and self-focussed, surprises herself when Vicki moves out:

“She went home on the tram and was surprised to find a small lack in herself, a blankness where the unwelcome responsibility had been.”

Garner isn’t interested in what is easy. She is so skilled at presenting complex human beings while not seeming to take a view on them: they are as they are. I think I preferred The Spare Room of the two Garner’s I’ve read, but that is more to do with themes that I’m interested in rather than the novella itself. Either way, I’m keen to read more of the fiction and non-fiction by this skilled, clear-sighted writer.