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.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.18

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Well, I didn’t read a comic novella to get over my Yonnondio trauma in the end, because my Wodehouse in the TBR was too long, and The Guardian published its list of the 100 Best Novels of All Time which had Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf (1922) on it. I’d put this aside to read sometime this month and so I took the list as a nudge to move it up the pile.

(I’m not sure how much longer my old Granada paperbacks are going to last, they’re very cheap. But I’m sentimental about them because they were the editions my mother – an enormous Woolf fan – had when I was growing up.)

Jacob’s Room portrays Jacob Flanders from childhood at the start of the twentieth century through to young adulthood at the timeof the First World War. It isn’t a character study though, as Jacob is shown obliquely, in impressionistic fragments, mainly through women in his life. Time collapses and viewpoints shift back and forth.

One of the more extensive portraits we have as readers, after a childhood holiday in Cornwall, is from a woman on a train Jacob catches to Cambridge:

“But since, even at her age, she noted his indifference, presumably he was in some way or other—to her at least—nice, handsome, interesting, distinguished, well built, like her own boy? One must do the best one can with her report. Anyhow, this was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done—for instance, when the train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put the lady’s dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: “Let me” very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it.”

This is a recurring theme throughout the novel: women find Jacob attractive, his shy reticence drawing them in. Yet Woolf also shows his youthful callowness. He is an intellectual snob, but with so little meaningful experience to draw upon:

“For the moderns were futile; painting the least respectable of the arts; and why read anything but Marlowe and Shakespeare, Jacob said, and Fielding if you must read novels?”

Jacob is somewhat ambivalent towards women, although he has a sexual relationship with an artists’ model named Florinda. He seems indifferent to the attentions of Clara Durrant, someone more typically of his social circle:

““I like Jacob Flanders,” wrote Clara Durrant in her diary. “He is so unworldly. He gives himself no airs, and one can say what one likes to him, though he’s frightening because …” But Mr. Letts allows little space in his shilling diaries. Clara was not the one to encroach upon Wednesday. Humblest, most candid of women! “No, no, no,” she sighed, standing at the greenhouse door, “don’t break—don’t spoil”—what? Something infinitely wonderful.”

I love that detail, of Clara not wanting the recording of her feelings to spread beyond the confines of the allotted page. I feel like Woolf’s humour isn’t always given enough credit, and this also stood out to me as an example:

“Southampton Row, however, is chiefly remarkable nowadays for the fact that you will always find a man there trying to sell a tortoise to a tailor.”

Woolf’s portrayals of London are always so instantly recognisable, even 100 years on, but I must admit I’ve never noticed tortoises on Southampton Row.

I can imagine the enigma of Jacob at the centre of the novel could make for a frustrating read for some, but I thought it worked beautifully. Writing in 1922, Woolf was living among a generation that had seen countless young men cut down (foreshadowed with Jacob through his surname), and I thought she captured that loss so sensitively, the potential stopped short:

“And for ever the beauty of young men seems to be set in smoke, however lustily they chase footballs, or drive cricket balls, dance, run, or stride along roads. Possibly they are soon to lose it. Possibly they look into the eyes of faraway heroes, and take their station among us half contemptuously, she thought (vibrating like a fiddle-string, to be played on and snapped). Anyhow, they love silence, and speak beautifully, each word falling like a disc new cut, not a hubble-bubble of small smooth coins such as girls use; and they move decidedly, as if they knew how long to stay and when to go—oh, but Mr. Flanders was only gone to get a programme.”

I love how Woolf mixes the high-flown with the prosaic, in that passage where another artist’s model is reflecting on Jacob, and here too:

“But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

For me, reading Woolf means you have to sink into her work – she is immersive, and you have to give yourself over to the experience. This was her third novel and while I thought it not quite as strong as some of her later work, I still loved it.

Jacob’s Room makes brave choices in having the central character remain so enigmatic, but in doing so Woolf captures something of the unknown that endures between people, as well as the devastation of a specific generation of men.  

“But then, this is only a young woman’s language, one, too, who loves, or refrains from loving. She wished the moment to continue for ever precisely as it was that July morning. And moments don’t.”

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.17

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Earlier this year I read Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle for the 1961 Club. I was so impressed I was encouraged to finally get Yonnondio: From the Thirties off the shelf for this month of novellas. Olsen started writing this during the Great Depression when she was only 19, but she put it aside to raise her family and later published it in 1974, although it remains unfinished.

I only write about books I recommend, and I do recommend Yonnondio because it brilliantly evokes the grinding poverty of itinerant workers in 1930s America. But good grief, it is bleak. Unrelentingly, grindingly bleak. Which is the whole point, but it did make it a bit of a slog at times, even for such a short book.

It opens with the Holbrook family living in Wyoming. The father Jim works in the mine, where the prospect of mine collapse/explosion looms large over the whole town. His wife Anna is raising their family of four children (more by the end) on no money, not helped by the fact that Jim drinks a lot of his wages.

“Mazie pushed her mind hard against things half known, not known. ‘I am Mazie Holbrook,’ she said softly. I am a-knowen things. I can diaper a baby. I can tell ghost stories. I know words and words. Tipple. Edjication. Bug dust. Supertendent. My poppa can lick any man in this here town. Sometimes the whistle blows and everyone starts a-running. Things come a-blowen my hair and it is soft, like the baby laughing.”

It is a terrifying event with Mazie which stops Jim going to the bars and the family move to South Dakota to work as tenant farmers. Here they achieve the nearest they have to happiness, with Jim working outdoors, the children enjoying school, and Mazie drawing the attention of their elderly neighbour who recognises her intelligence and lends her books.

“After a long while Anna would laugh, a strange mirthless laugh, and rise to go into the house. Then Jim, too, would follow, knocking the ashes out of his pipe onto the vine, giving a last broad look over the night and the earth. Sometimes seeing them sit so in the night, a sharp unhappiness would pierce the golden haze in Mazie’s heart; but the blur of days descending so swiftly would wash it out again.”

However, as they were warned, tenant farmers work themselves ragged to earn practically nothing and usually end up owing money. As this occurs, Mazie’s books are sold and the family move again to Omaha. Now they are in a city, near a slaughterhouse which we are repeatedly told, makes the whole area stink of vomit. The family really seem doomed now – the children hate school and all become ill, Anna has a miscarriage, Jim is drinking again.

Olsen brilliantly portrays the hopelessness of the Holbrook’s situation. All they want is to earn enough money to feed their family and live comfortably – not too much to ask. Anna is desperate for her children to increase their chances through education, but the moving around risks this. The casual domestic violence, illness and stress also incrementally destroys the children, even when they don’t fully understand it:

“Ben saw too – but in the confused, entangled way of a small child whose mind is a prism through which the light shatters into a thousand gleams and shadows that can never come whole. Say rather, a weight, an oppression dragged always in his chest; a darkening shadow hovered over his days in that in moments descended on pierced sharp claws on his heart. Only he did not know why or how – he but knew there was a darkening where there had been light, he but felt there was a weight where there had been a lightness.”

Where the novel finishes actually offers a glimmer of hope, but this wasn’t the intended ending. In Yonnondio, Olsen has written a powerful portrait of the failure of society to allow all its members the potential to thrive. She demonstrates how poverty degrades and brutalises, and how the biggest impact is inevitably felt by the most vulnerable. I’m glad I read it but I’m also hoping I have a comic novella somewhere on the shelves to help me recover, maybe some Wodehouse…

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.16

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Halfway through NADIM 2026! I’m frankly amazed, having only really decided to go ahead on 30 April. I’m still not sure I’ll finish as I’ve home renovations this week and two very busy work weeks coming up, but honestly I’m taking the halfway point as a win in itself!

The Faber Editions series seem to choose their titles impeccably, and Emily Holmes Coleman’s only novel, A Shutter of Snow (1930) is another powerful, haunting choice. (Or good book to take a snooze next to, according to my cat.)

Emily Holmes Coleman drew on her own experience to detail Marthe Gail’s post-partum psychosis, from when she is admitted to a residential mental health unit up until she feels well enough to return home again. It is a disorienting, visceral narrative that places the reader alongside Marthe as she struggles with reality in a setting where avoiding it seems an entirely reasonable thing to do.

Marthe’s admission to the ward is told in a confusion of images, jumbled sentences which jump rapidly between subject and object, baffling yet also evoking perfectly the despair and violence of her arrival.

“The keys jangled from the waists of the nurses. They rattled like silver dish pans and swung chanting high like death songs. They were brittle and ice cold and had faces of stagnant riders from the snow. They were proud, and deliciously ate their indifference.”

At some point in that passage I think the ‘they’ subject changes from the keys to the nurses, but Marthe is so completely displaced it is by no means certain.

Telling the story from Marthe’s point of view but in the third person – occasionally first person –  brilliantly conveys her rapidly shifting perspectives and slight detachment from what is happening. Trying to keep up with her means the reader struggles to keep track and maintain a viewpoint, just as Marthe does.

Here she is anticipating a visit from her seemingly supportive husband, but he does insist on her being silent/passive, which perhaps explains Marthe’s seeming ambivalence here:

“He was coming today. It would be some time before the red lights. He would come stalking in the door with his gentle hands and would smile at everything she said. He would look up from under his eyebrows and demand to know what she meant. He would have purple sandals and a crown of laurel. He would bring her a casket of roses and she would crush them on the floor. And there would be under his coat to the little snow-haired baby with clenched hands.”

That quick shift to violence consistently – yet unpredictably – occurs with Marthe. She will be calm and seemingly content, before suddenly spiralling and lashing out.

But she is subject to violence too, including state endorsed violence. There are numerous episodes of her being restrained, bound repeatedly in strips of cloth and blankets, attacked by other patients, and also forcibly medicated. The Shutter of Snow is a very difficult read, both structurally and in terms of subject matter.

But there is humour in the novel too, particularly in interactions with the medical professionals:

“Dr Brainerd said Marthe earnestly, just because I’ve got a toxic exhaustive psychosis is that any reason why I have to be treated like a dog?

Who told you you had a toxic exhaustive psychosis? said Dr Brainerd. You think I have anyway said Marthe, and someday you’ll be rather astonished when you find out what it’s all about. I don’t think I’ll lend your husband anymore books said Dr Brainerd.”

The lack of punctuation and speech marks there is indicative of the whole book, contributing to sense of an askew narrative without becoming entirely incomprehensible. The novel steadily becomes more coherent, reflecting Marthe’s gradual recovery.

The Shutter of Snow is a fully immersive read, where you sink into Marthe’s world of institutionalised reality, delusion, dream, fantasy. It is extraordinary in how it brings Marthe’s experience to the reader. Emily Holmes Coleman is a stunning writer and on the strength of this I wish she’d written more.

“The only thing to do is to put hammers in the porridge and when there are enough hammers we shall break down the windows and all of us shall dance in the snow.” 

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.15

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I had an interesting experience reading The Gulls Fly Inland by Sylvia Thompson (1941). The blurb on the back made it sound like a thwarted-lovers type story. This wouldn’t really pique my interest but the war setting and reliability of Handheld Press’ choices meant I decided to give it a go.

Around page 70, I wondered why I was enjoying it, when the characterisation of the love interest, Vernon, was practically non-existent. I knew basically nothing about him. Yet I was enjoying the novel because in fact, it was more to my taste than I’d expected, portraying families and changing interwar society with an elegiac tone. I returned to the novella, and a few pages on there was this:

“I have been reading what I have written since I began. So far I think I have made better portraits of people I have loved less. […] Whatever I have written of Vernon seems true, but like a conventional photograph; not evocative. […] Perhaps I have only added up little characteristics, but failed to explain him.”

Well, that acknowledgement won me over entirely!

The Gulls Fly Inland takes the form of a diary written by Blanche Lancret, a young French woman exiled to England by the Second World War. She begins on 3 October 1939, and writes not only of her current circumstances but of her past, her friends and family, and her romance with Vernon, brother of her American schoolfriend Annabelle.

Throughout the diary, as she pines for Vernon, she also pines for France, Europe, and a time she knows is lost forever:

“For, as my father gave me one Paris, and my schooldays another, Vernon gave me still another; and the roots of the third Paris are those we followed together […] in this Paris, which is the one I have still in my heart, there are corners made significant by our moments of brilliant feeling as by sudden effects of floodlight.”

Blanche’s life is one of reasonably wealthy privilege. At the start of the novel she has Annabelle’s baby, her goddaughter, Camilla Blanche, living with her, while the rest of the Annabelle’s children recover from chickenpox. But of course she doesn’t have to care for a baby, the nanny has come too. She and Annabelle met at boarding school, and Blanche spends her holidays on the French Riviera with my favourite character, her mother’s half-sister Tante Julie.

“For I knew, by now, that my aunt, though never actually demi-mondaine, did not take part in any reputable social life; and did not desire to. I did not understand then her greatest distinction, which is that she lives according to her own values; and of all the artificial values respects only money and fashion.”

I also found Tante Julie’s love interest, Otto Behrens, more fully realised than Vernon:

“I was charmed by his brown bird-lidded eyes which shone clear with his natural goodness of heart, for unlike many worldly people he loves his world.”

Blanche’s father is loving but incapacitated by grief for his wife who died of pneumonia. He lives in Venice, physically and somewhat emotionally distant. And so the impact of the war will be felt across the continent in a very personal way for Blanche.

As time goes on, we see a maturing of Blanche, from schoolgirl to young woman who is increasingly aware of the world, politically and socially.

“Suddenly seduced, as happens to me from time to time, by England, or at any rate by the England which I have been able to enjoy—that is, which ignores a dozen Englands which I either do not know or do not wish to experience; industrial England, political England, England expressed in Midland towns, in dockyards, in suburbs, in slums.”

The Gulls Fly Inland is a very subtle novel. The sadness of what it portrays crept up on me, as Blanche’s friends and family gradually accept that their lives are changing forever, by forces beyond their control. There is love in many guises here: romantic, familial, between friends, for place and for time. It is truly moving, and of course, at the time of writing, Sylvia Thompson did not know what the outcome of the conflict would be.

Although sad, the resilience and strength of the characters means it is not depressing. There are sparks of humour too, as Blanche can be a witty and slightly spiky narrator:

“What Annabelle says is often self-evident, but she gives the sentence to you like a present, prettily tied up with a ribbon of your favourite colour.”

So The Gulls Fly Inland wasn’t at all the book I expected, and so much the better for it – but for those of you without wizened hearts like mine, rest assured there are some romantic moments too!

To end, a wartime classic apt for Blanche and Vernon, and I chose a version sung by an American group in honour of Vernon:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.14

/ madamebibilophile / 24 Comments

Rose Tremain is one of those authors whose name is completely familiar to me without much idea of her writing at all. Positive reviews in the blogosphere encouraged me to give her a try, and I thought her novella Absolutely & Forever (2023) would be a good place to start.

Narrated by Marianne Clifford, A&F details her abiding love for handsome and clever Simon Hurst. It is the late 1950s and Marianne is fifteen, awkward and unsure in everything except her feelings for Simon.

Tremain brilliantly captures the naivete and arrogance of youth.

“Well, we’ve arrived here, but my days as a girl in this house are numbered, because soon enough I’m going to marry Simon and travel the world with him and eat dates in Arabia and snorkel among exotic fish along the Great Barrier Reef.”

Marianne never pauses long enough to think about what she is going to do outside of her relationship with Simon, or whether he feels the same way. When Simon flunks his Oxford entrance exams and decides to move to Paris, his vanity and insecurity are so comical and heart-breaking:

“But I probably won’t see it through. I’ll just hang out in jazz clubs or try and meet Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and get drunk on existential nihilism.”

Bless.

Tremain treats this adolescent affair with humour and seriousness, demonstrating the ridiculousness of behaviour but never laughing at the feelings or the pain involved. I particularly liked this scene of Marianne impatiently returning from a family holiday knowing a letter from Simon will be waiting:

“As we drove across Salisbury plain, my vision of the letter somehow eclipsed my view of the standing monoliths of Stonehenge that waited patiently for me to see them for four thousand years (or perhaps longer, for all I knew about them then). From this, I have to conclude that love makes people indifferent to even the noblest feats of primitive engineering, but that they feel no real remorse about this.”

Poor Marianne feels she lets everyone down: her brittle mother; her stiff veteran father; her frustrated teachers; her bitchy friends. She and her true friend Petronella move to Swinging Sixties London:

“It seemed to me that everybody in that place had undergone a metamorphosis which made them appear entirely beautiful in a deranged kind of way.”

Where Marianne continues to flounder, unable to pass her secretarial exams or achieve her fantasy:

“I walked with the confidence of a girl who has formed a coherent idea of who she is and how her life will unfold. But this was really all my plan consisted of: a kind of hologram of me, heading towards some consoling destination of the mind, which, in actual fact, I was unable to name.”

Absolutely and Forever is a compassionate novel which had me wincing at scenes, feeling both frustrated by and sorry for young Marianne. Although she pines for Simon, she also seems to pine for a sense of self, or purpose, forever out of reach.

The novella conveys deep sadness with a deceptively light touch, demonstrating how people carry on while in the midst of heartbreak. There were scenes with Marianne’s elderly parents to towards the end which were devastating, yet not unusual. There is nothing in Absolutely and Forever which was extraordinary, which I think is exactly the point.