Books

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” (Jean Cocteau)

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Once again, I completely failed to read I Am a Cat for the fab event Reading the Meow 2026 hosted by Mallika at Literary Potpourri. It’s just such a whopper! Next year I’m going to make a start in March 😊

I decided I’d see if I could find something shorter in the TBR in order to take part, and was hunting about in golden age crime. Mallika had also suggested looking for a short story, and so checking In the Teeth of Evidence by Dorothy L Sayers (1939) came up trumps, because the final story in the collection is The Cyprian Cat. My cheesy 1980s edition even has some Big Cats on the cover:

It’s a very short tale, only 13 pages in my edition. It takes the form of a monologue, with a man in serious trouble for seemingly having shot at a cat (there’s no animal cruelty in the story, despite his horrible plans) and speaking to his K.C as silent interlocutor. It opens:

“It’s extraordinarily decent of you to come along and see me like this, Harringay. Believe me, I do appreciate it. It isn’t every busy K.C. who’d do as much for such a hopeless sort of client. I only wish I could spin you a more workable kind of story, but honestly, I can only tell you exactly what I told Peabody. Of course, I can see he doesn’t believe a word of it, and I don’t blame him. He thinks I ought to be able to make up a more plausible tale than that—and I suppose I could, but where’s the use?”

He and his old schoolfriend Merridew both seemed to be following the bachelor life, until Merridew marries a woman fifteen years younger than him. She has never left the Norfolk village in which she was raised, but about a year after the nuptials, they all arrange to meet in Somerset.

Describing the train journey down, we learn of the narrator’s extreme aversion to cats:

“I found a horrible feeling creeping over me that there was a cat in the compartment somewhere. I’m one of those wretched people who can’t stand cats. I don’t mean just that I prefer dogs—I mean that the presence of a cat in the same room with me makes me feel like nothing on earth. I can’t describe it, but I believe quite a lot of people are affected that way. Something to do with electricity, or so they tell me. I’ve read that very often the dislike is mutual, but it isn’t so with me. The brutes seem to find me abominably fascinating—make a bee-line for my legs every time. It’s a funny sort of complaint, and it doesn’t make me at all popular with dear old ladies.”

He passes the time staring at the attractive young lady opposite him, who of course turns out to be Merridew’s new wife. And so they spend time together as planned, the peaceable atmosphere only spoilt by the titular feline, and others, at night:

“Every night the garden seemed to be haunted by them—the Cyprian cat that I had seen the first night of my stay, and a little ginger one and a horrible stinking black Tom were especially tiresome, and one night there was a terrified white kitten that mewed for an hour on end under my window. I flung boots and books at my visitors till I was heartily weary, but they seemed determined to make the inn garden their rendezvous. The nuisance grew worse from night to night; on one occasion I counted fifteen of them, sitting on their hinder-ends in a circle, while the Cyprian cat danced her shadow-dance among them, working in and out like a weaver’s shuttle.”

Sayers builds an increasingly tense atmosphere of oppressive summer heat and the narrator being driven to distraction by the nighttime caterwauling.

But how did he end up shooting a gun? And why is what happened so implausible? Well, you can read the story online here. Sayers leaves plenty unexplained in this unnerving tale, although I know what I think happened… Lord Peter Wimsey would never believe it!

Review-along: Lady Audley’s Secret

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I really wanted to join in with the review-along for Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862), as it’s a long-standing part of Mount TBR. Novellas a Day in May meant it was beyond me to post on 1 June, but here is my late entry!

The titular woman is introduced to the reader as a penniless but beautiful governess, Lucy Graham:

“Wherever she went she seemed to take joy and brightness with her. In the cottages of the poor her fair face shone like a sunbeam […] and when she tripped away, leaving nothing behind her (for her poor salary gave no scope to her benevolence), the old woman would burst out into senile raptures with her grace, beauty, and her kindliness, such as she never bestowed upon the vicar’s wife, who half fed and clothed her. For you see, Miss Lucy Graham was blessed with that magic power of fascination, by which a woman can charm with a word or intoxicate with a smile. Every one loved, admired, and praised her.”

Is it me or is there some sly humour there? This woman elbowing her way into the cottages of the poor, assuming that to bask in her presence is payment enough? I don’t think Braddon takes a humorous approach generally to this sensation story, but maybe there’s a bit happening…

Lucy catches the eye of Sir Michael Audley, windowed and stinking rich, so of course they are married. But here Lucy’s charms find their limit, with spiky step-daughter Alicia who is only a few years younger:

“She is a vain, frivolous, heartless little coquette,” said Alicia, addressing herself to her Newfoundland dog Caesar, who was the sole recipient of the young lady’s confidences; “she is a practiced and consummate flirt, Caesar; and not contented with setting her yellow ringlets and her silly giggle at half the men in Essex, she must needs make that stupid cousin of mine dance attendance upon her. I haven’t common patience with her.”

The stupid cousin is feckless Robert Audley:

“Sometimes, when the weather was very hot, and he had exhausted himself with the exertion of smoking his German pipe, and reading French novels, he would stroll into the Temple Gardens, and lying in some shady spot, pale and cool, with his shirt collar turned down and a blue silk handkerchief tied loosely about his neck, would tell grave benchers that he had knocked himself up with over work.”

However, when Robert’s friend George Talboys disappears on a visit to Audley Court, Robert can’t shake off his feeling that something is deeply amiss, and begins to investigate.

“The lazy bent of his mind, which prevented him from thinking of half a dozen things at a time, and not thinking thoroughly of any one of them, as is the manner of your more energetic people, made him remarkably clear-sighted upon any point to which he ever gave his serious attention.”

This pulls him into a convoluted tale, whereby George had abandoned his wife and baby to seek his fortune in Australia, fully expecting her to be patiently waiting after three and a half years in which he didn’t contact her once. On his return, George found his wife had died and his son was being raised by his father-in-law, a man who spends all his money on alcohol.

Robert soon realises that the new Lady Audley may be involved with George Talboys’ disappearance…shocker! The secret is quickly worked out by the reader and we watch as Robert tries to unravel her history and prove what has happened to his friend.

His investigation will see him uncover murder, arson, thefts, lies, manipulations, impersonations, conspiracies… well, it is a sensation novel after all!

The exploration of women’s roles in Lady Audley’s Secret is interesting. Lucy is constantly referred to as beautiful, doll-like, with a halo of golden curls. She revels in material wealth, but like a child.

“Her fragile figure, which she loved to dress in heavy velvets, and stiff, rustling silks, till she looked like a child tricked out for a masquerade, was as girlish as if she had just left the nursery. All her amusements were childish. She hated reading, or study of any kind, and loved society. Rather than be alone, she would admit Phoebe Marks into her confidence, and loll on one of the sofas in her luxurious dressing-room, discussing a new costume for some coming dinner-party; or sit chattering to the girl with her jewel-box beside her, upon the satin cushions, and Sir Michael’s presents spread out in her lap, while she counted and admired her treasures.”

But what is also made clear is that this love of money has grown from a background of poverty. Lucy knows what it is to be poor, and she never wants to be that way again. The way to ensure this, is to use her looks and marry for money. In Victorian society that is the best use of her resources.

Meanwhile Alicia enjoys being sporty and active, and is rubbish at running a household. She seems to spend a lot of time being furious, which seems borne of frustration that she doesn’t have a lot of options as to what to do with her sharp mind and talents, as well as Robert’s failure to realise she is in love with him.

There’s some anti-women rhetoric in the novel too, mainly from Robert, but this seemed a source of humour and I felt Braddon was more on the side of questioning the limited choices for women at the time. I also found among the sensation, a nudge towards compassion and moderation, particularly in the character of George’s father, the wonderfully named Harcourt Talboys:

“There were no shady nooks in his character into which one could creep for shelter from his hard daylight. He was all daylight. He looked at everything in the same broad glare of intellectual sunlight, and would see no softening shadows that might alter the sharp outlines of cruel facts, subduing them to beauty. I do not know if I express what I mean, when I say that there were no curves in his character—that his mind ran in straight lines, never diverging to the right or the left to round off their pitiless angles. With him right was right, and wrong was wrong. He had never in his merciless, conscientious life admitted the idea that circumstances might mitigate the blackness of wrong or weaken the force of right. He had cast off his only son because his only son had disobeyed him, and he was ready to cast off his only daughter at five minutes’ notice for the same reason.”

All in all I enjoyed Lady Audley’s Secret, but it was repetitive and overlong. This is a bit of an unfair criticism; like many Victorian ‘baggy monsters’ it was serialised and the repetition was to get readers up to speed/remind them of what had gone before. But reading it as a 376 page novel with teeny-tiny type meant I felt it could have easily stood to lose 100 pages.

However, it was also a ripping yarn, an interesting portrait of various aspects of Victorian society written in a readable style, had some lovely descriptions (if repeated too often) and some complex characterisation in Lady Audley. I’m so pleased the read-along meant I finally got to this one.

Here is Fiction Fan’s Review which also has the links to other bloggers who were much more organised than I am and posted on time!

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.31

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I made it! I’m genuinely amazed! May has been a really busy, slightly chaotic month and I can’t believe I managed to sustain my daily novella reading and posting. I’ve enjoyed it so much, and a massive thank you to everyone who has liked and commented, and ignored grammatical errors and general waffle, as some of these posts were written when I was very tired 😊

Many of you will know Simon has also been doing his #BookaDayinMay project, so it feels very apt to be finishing with a book he reviewed this month which had me scurrying off to spend my bookshop.org vouchers. The Driveway Has Two Sides by Sara Marchant (2018), is published by the lovely Fairlight Moderns and it arrived just in time!  

The Driveway Has Two Sides follows the arrival of Delilah on an East Coast island. “The matriarchs” of the island are sceptical of this self-contained young woman.

“They were taciturn by nature, and the environment on the island required tact, discretion, and independence.”

They watch her clean out her house and start to reorganise her garden. Some of their questions are answered when Delilah changes out of her overalls into a dress, in order to greet a man the matriarchs judge as “too old for his long hair and overly blue denim jeans.”

This is Alan, Delilah’s married lover who is paying for everything. He’s entirely self-focussed and just likes Delilah as a pretty young thing to feed his ego, the same as his sports car:

“Delilah’s silence was one of Alan’s favourite things.”

Delilah doesn’t seem too bothered by this, as she views her relationships with older men as transactional. With Alan the material gains are obvious. With Ted, the sweet, kind, widowed Sherriff of the town, she wants his gardening know-how:

“She saw his gardening instinct win out over lust. She hugged her arms around her waist. She loved older men.”

There is a lot about gardening in this novella, which is a big win for me, I loved all the descriptions of garden plans and planting. But if you’re not into gardening don’t let that put you off, it’s not overwhelming!

“The shades and variations of green, highlighted by the specimen plants that were not green, looked more than natural. They looked supernatural. It was an Impressionist painting come to life. It was a masterpiece. Ted was an artist.”

We follow Delilah as she gets her physical house in order, while trying to work out how she is going to live. (Teeny criticism: there is talk of her ‘completing’ her garden. Any gardener knows you never complete your garden!)

“Later, during his trips by her house, Ted watched as she developed her kitchen garden in the front. He understood her reasoning; there was more room, more sun, a fence to use as garden bones. He still found it scandalous, yet also intriguing, he had to admit.”

The titular driveway is shared with her mysterious neighbour, someone even more contained than Delilah. He is attracted to her, as is seemingly every man in the book. Their relationship builds, and so in a sense the plot is who of three men Delilah will choose.

But that’s not a plot that particularly interests me, yet I enjoyed Driveway. I enjoyed it for its depiction of small-town life, its gentle humour and its humanity.

Unusually for me, I finished the short novel for once wishing it had been longer – I would have liked to have met Maisie Thompson, Delilah’s  “friend and sparring partner” who we only hear about (unless I’ve forgotten a brief portrait near the start) and I would have loved to have had more of Mrs Oakapple and her fellow matriarchs.  I also really wanted to know by the end what one of the characters did next.

The Driveway Has Two Sides is a gentle, quick read, especially recommended for those who like Katherine Heiny or Anne Tyler. I’m hoping Sara Marchant is going to be one of those authors who return to the same setting in further novels, so I can hear much more about the town and its sparky, kind residents.

Novella a Day in May 2026 – No.30

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I enjoy satire but I think it can be hard to sustain, becoming bitter and distancing. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico (2022, transl. Sophie Hughes 2025) judged this just right – at only 115 pages it is quick and incisive.

Anna and Tom have emigrated from an unnamed southern European country to Berlin, drawn by its cool reputation and cheap housing (at that time). The novella opens with an interiors magazine style description of their home, all verdant plants, string lights, mason jars, marble pastry table, and on and on and on… an overwhelming piling up of what they own and how they’ve styled it.

The next chapter gives the reality of living in that space: the clutter, the cleaning, the dust, the constantly accumulating mugs and tissues:

“It wasn’t order they so desperately craved, but something deeper and more essential. […]

In itself, chaos could be joyful, creative; But in that context, it only seemed to signal impermanence.”

Therein lies the problem. Anna and Tom are millennials who have grown up with the internet from its early iterations, they are constantly online looking at images, and feel very insecure when they can’t curate their reality like an Instagram post.

“Anna and Tom spent much of their first year in Berlin carefully constructing this mythology. And it wasn’t personal to them; its value lay precisely in its universality…. it was the topic of countless lifestyle articles and documentaries, and circulated on the Facebook timelines and Instagram feeds of an entire generation.”

They remain entirely ignorant of Berlin beyond cool places to socialise, and Germany itself. Their work is carried out online, their friends are just like them. They don’t learn German, they use Google translate.

“It never occurred to them, for example, that the distinction between Alt- and Neu- buildings in property listings had been drawn by the Allied bombings.”

Telling the story in the third person is entirely right: Anna and Tom have no innate sense of self, no inner life. They don’t know who they are if they are not viewed externally. While Latronico relates this very much to a specific online generation:

“They lived a double life. There was the tangible reality around them, and there were the images, also all around them.”

I also felt it was long-established folly to believe that what you own is who you are. Apparently Perfection was inspired by Things: A Story of the Sixties by Georges Perec, which shows how this conflict between image and reality, consumerism in a search for meaning did not arrive with the internet!

Advertising, which is both implicit and explicit in Anna and Tom’s world, is constantly promoting the idea that worth as a human is determined by money spent. You are your sofa/kitchen/car… But then, advertising also encourages consumers to constantly find themselves wanting, because there is always more money to be made by selling more stuff:

“The collective upheaval of the 20th century was over and the vestiges had been translated into the language of individualism—that is, of consumerism. Freedom had turned into abundance.”

Of course Tom and Anna aren’t happy. Their reality will always be messy at the edges, unlike a cropped image. They are also entirely incapable of working out why they aren’t happy. Content, well-adjusted people won’t spend as much money chasing illusion, so these answers won’t be sold online.

In an attempt to find meaning, they are clicktivists. I felt this was where Latronico was most scathing, whereby they and everyone in their bubble tells themselves they are socially engaged and responsible, just so long as it doesn’t mean any real action needs to be taken in their own lives, which could inconvenience them in any way:

“They identified as feminists and spoke out against social injustices, which in practise meant they were willing to express outrage at instances of racism or sexism that took place in New York. […] in practise, their social commitment amounted to using Uber only if it was snowing and always leaving tips in cash. They didn’t eat tuna.”

But for the most part I didn’t think Latronico despised Anna and Tom, I thought he felt for them as they struggled against what is essentially existential despair, without any tools to manage this. They were baffled that where they lived, what they owned, where they ate, and the holidays they took weren’t working. How could this be, when all those things looked great in online posts?

Perfection is short and snappy. It manages to be pinpoint specific and universal. Another fascinating read from Fitzcarraldo Editions!

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

/ madamebibilophile / 22 Comments

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

/ madamebibilophile / 16 Comments

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.”