Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.15

/ madamebibilophile / 13 Comments

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 / 20 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.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.13

/ madamebibilophile / 11 Comments

Last year for this project I read The Shooting Party by Isabel Colegate, and enjoyed it enough to pick up her debut novel, The Blackmailer (1958), this year.

I must admit my expectations were moderate – I liked The Shooting Party but thought it had far too many characters, and I expected a first novel written 22 years earlier to be less skilled. The author’s Foreword says “I look back on The Blackmailer with a certain affection” which to me hints at an unconditional fondness for something you know is flawed. But in fact found it tightly focussed and complex.

It has a distinctly unlikable titular protagonist in Baldwin Reeves. He is a barrister, resentful of those he feels were born with social and financial advantages, and determined to do whatever it takes to be a QC (as it was in the 1950s) and a politician.

“His ‘rivals’ were of course everyone else in the world.”

One of those he resents most severely is Anthony Lane: landed gentry, charming and charmed, war hero, seemingly universally adored. But Baldwin served with Anthony in Korea, and he knows he was dangerously inept, cowardly, and despised by his comrades.

Baldwin needs money, and so he decides to blackmail Anthony’s widow Judith to preserve the dead man’s posthumous reputation. She knows her husband wasn’t the same as the revered memory:

“Later she had come to believe what had at first seemed to her odd and rather degrading, that love was not always based on a similarity of principles, and that it was possible genuinely to love and even at times to admire someone whom one could seldom, if ever, respect.”

The degradation alongside love is important. Although initially Baldwin and Judith see each other as agonists, they quite quickly develop a warped rapport, feeling drawn to one another. For Baldwin, this is wrapped up in his feelings for Anthony:

“As if anything he might have thought about her late husband was a matter of indifference to her. This was not quite what he had expected, but after all there was a sort of familiarity about it: with Anthony too one’s opinions had not mattered because he had been so sure of his own.”

More than once it is mentioned that Baldwin loved Anthony, although it is not stated whether this included sexual attraction. So two people who both despised and were drawn to Anthony find he is bound up in their relationship after his death.

It’s not entirely clear why Judith should care if her dead husband’s name is tarnished, but it is partly due to loyalty towards her spiky, snobbish mother-in-law who adored her flawed son, and also Anthony’s sweet grandfather who saw Anthony as he was.

The story follows Baldwin and Judith’s odd kinship/courtship of sorts, as two somewhat unhappy people struggle against their circumstances in various ways.

‘I completely fail to understand how you can write anything so appalling,’ she said.

‘Yes, it’s nasty isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I shall try to keep my own name out of it if possible, but I may not be able to.’

Those of you who enjoy the writing of Diana Athill may enjoy the scenes of Julia at work in a publishing house. One publisher was utterly convinced that Colegate knew Andre Deutsch, so close was the portrait of Judith’s boss Felix Hanescu to the great man:

“That was what he had wanted to be, a genius: having just missed it, he had become a personality instead.”

The Blackmailer is almost a comedy of manners, but a bit too spiky. It could be very dark, but steps back from being so, such as when Baldwin insists Judith fire her beloved housekeeper (a man of shorter height who is consistently referred to by what is an offensive term now, although not necessarily intended to be so in the book). This piece of attempted psychological warfare is comedically undermined in a scene of absolute farce, rendering Baldwin ridiculous.

Similarly, The Blackmailer is a psychological study of a distorted relationship and the effects of fantasy, jealousy and lies, but it also doesn’t seek to explain the psychology of anyone. Rather it presents the relationships and leaves it to the reader to draw conclusions.

I can imagine this could be a frustrating read for some, but I enjoyed it and the lack of explanations, the wavering between genres. While this kept me at a bit of a distance for much of the novel, Colegate creates two scenes that pack a punch towards the end – one dramatically, one quietly, both devastating in their different ways.

“Lately, for the first time, the points system on which he conducted his relations with other people had been beginning to show its failings.“

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.12

/ madamebibilophile / 17 Comments

The British Women Writer’s Series is doing such a wonderful job rediscovering lost gems, and Lady Living Alone by Norah Lofts (1945) is no exception. I really enjoyed this witty, tense novel from a new-to-me writer, and it was in a typically lovely series cover too:

Set in the 1930s, the wonderfully-named Penelope Shadow is three years older than the century and living with her widowed sister-in-law, her nephew and niece. She fails at every job she attempts, until she hits on the idea of writing. Her historical novels featuring bold heroines are moderately successful, until one of them becomes hugely successful.

“Miss Shadow herself was one of those women who is never described without the diminutive: the sweet little thing, a funny little thing, poor little thing, and, of course, after ‘Mexican Flower’, a clever little thing.”

Penelope’s inability to manage day-to-day routines means she is consistently under-estimated. But when her sister-in-law plans to remarry and emigrate, Penelope realises she needs help. I wondered if this wry observation was a piece of self-satire by Lofts:

“For behind Penelope Shadow stretched a long, long line of scribes and daubers, adults in their own peculiar world, but children in this one, vague, feckless, thoughtless creatures always sheltering, consciously or unconsciously, behind some sensible, practical person.”

Penelope has a phobia of being in a house alone after dark, and so she wants a live-in housekeeper. After a series of failures in this regard and following a Gothic interlude in a guesthouse, she leaves with a young, good-looking waiter:

“For Penelope had secured a treasure. There was no other word for it. She had won not only a housekeeper who could cook, and a cook who could housekeep, she had, all in one person, a nurse, a mentor, a chauffeur, a chambermaid, butler and steward.”

But there is an underlying sense that all is not as it seems with Terry Munce. This is compounded when she is visited by her more worldly, pragmatic writer friend, who genuinely sees Penelope as she is, and yet has not taken to Terry at all:

“Miss Fletcher was enchanted, not with the pretty young prodigy whom she had at first taken Penelope to be, but with the odd, contradictory, unpredictable person that she really was.”

As the story progresses, Lofts shifts Lady Living Alone from a domestic comedy of manners with an endearingly eccentric heroine, into a tense domestic noir, with an eccentrically vulnerable heroine.

She also uses Penelope’s situation to make some pointed observations about the legal position of women at this time.

“She knew, even as she settled down to her own job, in her own house, that she was not her own woman in the same way that she had been”

(The supporting material in the BLWW series is always helpful and the timeline; Preface from Alison Bailey as Lead Curator; and Afterword from Simon Thomas, Series Consultant, provide useful context on this issue.)

Such is Lofts skill that the shift in tone and wider political points never jar. I found Lady Living Alone immediately engaging, and then absolutely compulsive as I whizzed through it without any sense of how events might play out. I’m trying to avoid spoilers so that anyone who hasn’t read it might have the same experience, and so I’ll end the post here!

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.11

/ madamebibilophile / 19 Comments

Jhumpa Lahiri was a novelist I used to read as her books came out, then I entirely lost track of her and now have some catching up to do. Interestingly, she wrote Whereabouts (2018) in Italian first, having lived in Italy for a time, before translating it into English herself in 2021.

The novella follows the unnamed narrator over the course of a year, as she considers her past, present and future while she moves within various environments in an unnamed city. The vignettes have titles such as At the Trattoria; In the Pool; On the Couch. Only In My Head recurs, three times. In other words, it is a contemplation of her metaphysical whereabouts from within her physical whereabouts.

The narrator feels a sense of separation: living alone, being single, with no immediate family around. In her mid-forties, her father has died and she has a strained relationship with her mother. There is a vague crush on the partner of her friend, easily relinquished. She works as an academic and writer, and so her career necessitates a degree of isolation.

In the Office: “My colleagues tend to keep to themselves, as do I. Maybe they find me prickly, unpleasant, who knows? We’re forced to inhabit close quarters, we’re told to be accessible, and yet I feel peripheral.”

There is a tension within the narrator. She seems content in some respects yet also dissatisfied, but unable to articulate what it is she yearns after, or if she does so on any significant scale. I’m not a subtle enough reader to know for sure, but possibly the translation by the author from a language to which she was comparatively new, added to the slight sense of dislocation, of spaces between what is felt and what it is possible to put into words.

In My Head: Solitude: it’s become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it’s a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.

But while she grapples with the bigger issues of her life, she remains alert to small moments too. I liked the unspoken comradeship she forms with a philosopher at a much-dreaded three day work conference:  

In the Hotel: Without planning to, we wait for each other every morning and every evening, and for three days our tacit bond puts me obscurely at peace with the world.

Small moments include physical pleasure as well as cerebral reflection:

In the Sun: The simple sandwich I always get amazes me, too. As I eat it, as my body bakes in the sun that pours down on my neighbourhood, each bite, feeling sacred, reminds me that I’m not forsaken.

Throughout the year there is a gentle, almost imperceptible movement towards something better, a potential for more happiness in her life.

Whereabouts is not the book to pick up if you want a pacy, plot-driven read. It is a finely observed study of a person’s interaction with place, while allowing them to remain somewhat unknowable to themselves and the reader. It is about the thoughts, the places and the moments that make up every day lives and the tiny yet significant changes that occur.

Simon has also reviewed Whereabouts this month, for his #BookADayinMay. You can read his review here.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.10

/ madamebibilophile / 21 Comments

I can’t remember where I first heard about the 2022 reissue of Rosemary Tonks’ The Bloater (1968) but I remember thinking it sounded appealing. Just four short years later and here we are!

The narrator is Min, who works at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (apparently Tonks recorded a poem with this forerunner of experimental, electronic music).

“Obviously it’s no good being slightly vulgar; you must be absolutely vulgar. Taste in the arts and theatre should never be confused with good taste, which is static and middle class.”

She is married to George, who barely gets a mention throughout the entire book. The titular Bloater is Carlos, her opera-singer tenant who is trying to seduce her, which Min seems to find in equal measure repulsive and captivating.

“And until the moment he enters it, the bedroom is only a very ordinary room with a bed in it. Then suddenly—snap pool! It’s a boudoir, it’s a dangerous liaison, it’s the fourth floor of a Lisbon brothel, it’s Madame de Pompadour and Louis XV all over again in some unaired voluptuary’s den.”

Meanwhile there is also Claudi, an older male friend caught up in the shenanigans, Fritz the cleaner, Billy her colleague and potential lover, and Jenny her colleague who is thrall to her lover ‘the guitar’. Min is jealous and adversarial towards Jenny, as she is towards so many in her life:

“She’s sitting there as though she’s just laid an egg.”

Apparently this novel took Tonks four weeks to write, with the plan of making ‘a lot of red-hot money’. While I didn’t think it was truly stream-of-consciousness as some reviews describe, I did think the somewhat plotless style wasn’t particularly suited to huge mainstream success.

For the length of a novella, I enjoyed Min’s relentless defensiveness which resulted in witty, barbed comments.  The observations are astute and the use of imagery surprising (Tonks was an experimental poet.)

Had it been longer than 142 pages, I suspect my enjoyment of The Bloater would begin to wane. Min’s immaturity means she takes out her immense fear of reflection and rejection on everyone else, which is hard to stay with over too long a period. The characterisation all-round is thin, no-one really leaps off the page as fully realised person, perhaps reflecting Min’s self-focus and fears. However, I also think if the characters were better drawn, the bitterness of the humour would be harder to take, so perhaps this was an astute comic choice overall.

There’s no doubt Tonks was a highly skilled writer, and she didn’t make The Bloater longer, she kept it short.  So claiming I wouldn’t like a novel she didn’t write really is entirely unfair! I would absolutely read more by her on the basis of this novella.

“Ah, parking! The graveyard of so many good evenings.”

To end, not the Tonks recording but a poem performance with the BBC radiophonic Workshop from around the same time:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.9

/ madamebibilophile / 16 Comments

I love The Thin Man films. Starring William Powell and Myrna Loy as married detective duo Nick and Nora Charles – not forgetting loyal Schnauzer Asta – they are an absolute wisecracking joy.

So I don’t really know why it has taken me so long to read Dashiell Hammet’s final novel, published in 1934 (the first of the films was released the same year), but I’m very glad to have finally got to it.

Nick Charles is a former New York private eye, now married to wealthy Nora and living in California, running his father-in-law’s business interests. He is back on the East Coast for Christmas when he runs into Dorothy in a bar (Nick is constantly drinking alcohol despite the story taking place in 1932, before the end of Prohibition) whom he knew as a child, and she now needs his help to find her missing scientist father.

Nick is reluctant, but his wife Nora is more open-minded:

“There’s nothing I can do to help her.”

“She thinks you can.”

“And so do you, which shows that no matter what you think, you can always get somebody else to go along with you.”

Nora sighed. “I wish you were sober enough to talk to.” She leaned over to take a sip of my drink. “I’ll give you your Christmas present now if you’ll give me mine.”

I shook my head. “At breakfast.”

“But it’s Christmas now.”

“Breakfast.”

“Whatever you’re giving me,” she said, “I hope I don’t like it.”

“You’ll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the aquarium said he positively wouldn’t take them back. He said they’d already bitten the tails off the -“

“It wouldn’t hurt you any to find out if you can help her, would it? She’s got so much confidence in you, Nicky.”

This captures so much of the comedic tone of the novel. Nick and Nora’s constantly teasing, fond relationship underpinned by respect, and the fact they do truly listen to one another is what gives the story heart. (Admittedly it also captures how their relationship is underpinned by relentless alcohol consumption!)

Despite Nick’s reluctance, it isn’t long before he’s drawn into the mystery and the various machinations of Dorothy’s family, which results in a murder of the scientist’s assistant/mistress, and gangsters with guns rapidly appearing:

“So far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing – the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing – but when we stopped at Reuben’s for coffee on our way home at four the next morning, Nora opened a newspaper and found a line in one of the gossip columns: “Nick Charles, former Trans-American Detective Agency ace, on from Coast to sift the Julia Wolf murder mystery”; and when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed some six hours later Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.”

What follows is good fun, with speakeasys, red herrings, a genuinely terrifying mother, comedic turns from villains, and world-weary wisecracks from Nick.

The novel is over ninety years old and so attitudes have dated, not least towards women (the phrase “feminine brainstorms” was a particular favourite of mine) and towards mental illness; Nora makes several baffling references to Nick’s Greek heritage; and there is one use of a racial slur. But none of these instances are the focus of the story, or attempted to be validated.

Generally with these types of novels I’ve been conditioned by Raymond Chandler to forget the plot and enjoy the ride, but actually, The Thin Man does hold together, albeit reliant on a lot of exposition by Nick in the final few pages. If you fancy a hardboiled read but on the comedic rather than noirish side of things, with a witty heroine and a very appealing Schanuzer, then this is one for you.

Although… I must admit this is a rare instance where I think the film is better! The dialogue is snappier, the plot leaner and the chemistry and charisma of the two main stars (plus Asta) is just phenomenal. So even if you don’t fancy the book, I would urge you to see the film 😊

“She laughed. “All right, all right. Still want to leave for San Francisco tomorrow?”

“Not unless you’re in a hurry. Let’s stick around awhile. This excitement has put us behind in our drinking.””

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.8

/ madamebibilophile / 15 Comments

I rarely read historical fiction, or modern crime, but having enjoyed Louise Welsh’s first two Rilke thrillers (I haven’t read the third published this year) I decided to give her 2005 historical novella Tamburlaine Must Die a try. I also have a fondness for Early Modern theatre and so a story about Christopher ‘Kit’ Marlowe’s last days was tempting.

Kit Marlowe was stabbed in a pub in Deptford in 1593, after an argument over the bill. He was 29 years old, already a successful playwright, probably a genius, more than likely a spy for Elizabeth I’s government, outspoken atheist (whether he believed it or not), and unapologetic about his sexual encounters with men and women. The last three in that list all put him at considerable risk in the society of the time, meaning that from the start questions have been raised as to the motivations behind his murder.

Tamburlaine Must Die takes the form of a letter written by Marlowe the day before his death, neatly side-stepping attempts to answer who was truly behind his murder and why. Instead we follow Marlowe as he knows his days are likely numbered.

“I like best what lies beyond my reach, and admit to using friendship, State and Church to my own ends. I acknowledge breaking God’s laws and man’s with few regrets.”

Someone using the name of Marlowe’s famous anti-hero Tamburlaine is distributing heretical tracts around London. Marlowe is summoned before the Privy Council, and resolutely denies it is him. Unfortunately, his friend and former roommate, playwright Thomas Kyd, has confessed under torture that Marlowe made him copy such texts:

“They made him sing until he hit the high notes, then they chorused your name and he picked up the refrain.”

Generally I would have liked more characterisation of Marlowe throughout the novella, but his deep sense of betrayal by Kyd was truly affecting.

Marlowe travels around London trying to find out who Tamburlaine is, feeling this is his main chance of survival. Welsh evokes Elizabethan London viscerally and naturally, never weighed down by her research. She also avoids too much foresight which is usually tedious, although I did like this observation by Marlowe:

“Suddenly I felt sure this place could not survive. There was so much energy, so little space. One day the City must surely combust.”

Marlowe encounters the great and not-so-good of society in his quest:

“The room swam and I was at one with the tavern dwellers, the prostitutes and sinners. I was with my own kind and this low place suited me better than all of Walsingham’s luxury and Ralegh’s philosophising.”

This includes a memorable encounter with necromancer Dr Dee and a consideration of a deal with Sir Walter Raleigh:

“Raleigh is the most calculating of men, and reckless with it. Raleigh is a fine pirate and a bad spy. He’s adept at fiction and poor at deceit. He can weigh smoke.”

Ultimately though, a sense of defeat hangs over everything and even without knowing the history, the reader realises young Marlowe is up against far greater forces than he can combat or outrun.

“‘Are you Tamburlaine?’ I asked, half dazed.

And he laughed. ‘Put that impostor from your mind. Whoever he might be, his threats are nothing compared to ours.’

‘Death is the same whoever brings it.’

He gave me a last look and asked ‘Do you really think so?’”

Looking at the Wiki page for this book, apparently it had mixed reviews, some really positive but one that described it as ‘buccaneering tosh’. As someone who loved Errol Flynn films as a child, such an assessment would raise my expectations rather than lower them, but regretfully I have to disagree with the reviewer. Tamburlaine Must Die thankfully takes a low-key approach to what is a potentially highly dramatic story. Swords are drawn but Marlowe doesn’t crash wildly through his final days, unlike many of his preceding ones.

Tamburlaine Must Die is evocatively written, descriptive without losing sight of the story. I personally would have liked more of a sense of desperation and the sadness at such a young life cut short, but it is still an immersive read.  

To end, an entertaining turn by Rupert Everett as Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love:

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.7

/ madamebibilophile / 19 Comments

Last year for this project I read Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball, which made me keen to read more. Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953) was her debut novel and already demonstrates what an accomplished stylist and storyteller she was.

Professor Clement Darrelhyde is at London Zoo watching two Hackenfeller’s apes, Percy and Edwina. The apes are thought to be the closest to humans, and Brophy draws her parallels with a light comic touch.

“In captivity it moved on all fours; but in the jungle, as Hackenfeller had noted, it ran erect with its hands holding onto branches overhead. Children sometimes used a similar method when they learn to walk, but in the adult man it was forgotten until he had to relearn it in crowded buses and trains.”

Both the Professor and Edwina hope for a mating to occur, but Percy is not obliging, despite the Professor’s ritual of singing Mozart to them.

“Here was an animal discontent with his monkeydom, already exercising the first characteristic of Man, which Man had never satisfactorily explained, self-restraint.”

Very quickly we learn that the Professor is under time pressure. An arrogant young researcher named Kendrick wants to send Percy to space in a rocket. The Professor is outraged, disparagingly drawing parallels in his mind between Kendrick and Rossini! He has only a few days to try and rescue Percy (although, keeping him in a cage is an odd kind of rescue).

“He looked like a scholastic grasshopper, crossing Regent’s Park and shattering its pastoral calm.”

The Professor undertakes interviews of comic misunderstanding with a journalist, and the inappropriately named Colonel Hunter at the League for the Prevention of Unkind Practises to Animals. Brophy has great fun satirising the press bias and well-meaning inactivity of organisations.

Eventually the Professor is aided by Gloria, a young pickpocket and burglar who, having been in prison, is up for setting Percy free.

But what does Percy want? Brophy takes us inside his mind in a way that works perfectly. It never seems clunky or whimsical, and she never sentimentalises Percy. I particularly enjoyed this reflection of his:

“Physically, he was exhausted. The Professor had not let him have his sleep out; and that at first seemed typical of the Professor’s nattering officiousness.”

The Professor and Gloria seemed doomed to failure and I couldn’t work out how Brophy would end this tale, but it is surprising and sensational, and she carries it off with aplomb.

I should warn readers there are some upsetting moments with the animals, but these are sentences not scenes. Brophy was a leading campaigner for animal rights and she knows how to make her points without didacticism or horror.

This really is an astonishing novel, finely balancing serious issues with comedy, philosophy with outright silliness.

Hackenfeller’s Ape has been reissued by Faber as one of their wonderful Editions series. More than 70 years after it was written, I’m sure it will resonate with a new generation of readers.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.6

/ madamebibilophile / 14 Comments

Hollow Inside is the debut novel of Asako Otani (2023, transl. Ginny Tapley Takemori 2026), published by the ever-wonderful Pushkin Press. At only 108 pages it is an accomplished portrayal of a woman trying to find peace within and without.

The narrator is Hirai, self-described as:

“A plain woman just shy of forty in a grey skirt. I had the feeling that by blurring my focus I could be completely assimilated into the jostle of strangers around me on the swaying train. I crossed my eyes slightly and concentrated on erasing my existence.”

We join her when she has been living for four months with Suganuma, slightly older at the age of forty-two. They met at work bonding over their love of the same boyband from their youth.

It is Suganuma who suggests they live together, fed up with the cramped flats and loneliness of living alone.

“As far as I was concerned, my decision to move in with Suganuma meant that I’d given up. A future in which I was married and had children was looking impossible.”

Suganuma is more sanguine, seemingly content in her life choices, and overjoyed at living together as Hirai wryly observes:

“It happened so fast I couldn’t help thinking that if she only handled her work in the same way she’d be able to live in a larger flat of her own.”

Suganuma works mainly from home, 3D printing pets for bereaved owners. The title comes from the figurines and from Hirai’s identification with them.

Hirai also has no sexual attraction to men and ambivalence towards being a mother, both of which she wishes were different. She feels she doesn’t fit, and limits social contact with colleagues and with her family.

“Every single one of my childhood and college friends now had their own family, and for years now the only contact I had with them was liking each other’s social media posts.”

In a very short space, Otani establishes a sympathetic but not sentimental character study of Hirai, showing her pain and confusion as she struggles to find a place for herself. By the end of the novel, she will made some significant decisions, but the author avoids trite conclusions or neat resolution.

To end, regular readers will know I never shy away from an entirely obvious choice: