Books read in 2026
1. The Great When, Alan Moore (Christmas present from D)
The thing that struck me immediately was Alan Moore's word power. Absolute delight in the construction of many sentences. I quoted one on Bluesky: "This was the whole problem with the past, that it was never really over, when the dreadful bricks of yesterday were what tomorrow would be built from." There were many more I didn't take to social media to share. The upshot of all that is that this takes a long time to read. Page turner it ain't. Laugh out loud funny in some places (the thug who looked like Glen Miller, for example) and with atmosphere and colour everywhere. So, yes, a good book for sure, one that was being promoted heavily in Waterstone's in the run up to Christmas, but now I need a quick read.
2. Final Orbit, Chris Hadfield
And a quick read it turned out to be. 1970s rocketry involved in Cold War skulduggery. Good fun, with plenty of guessing about how much of the story is based on fact and how much Commander Hadfield invented.
3. Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham
I couldn't get past page 50 of the book club choice (The Fall by Louise Jensen). Too predctable with leaden prose. Sorry.
So I moved on to the book I received as a Secret Santa before Christmas. I've seen the TV docu-drama and, obviously, remember it happening. I'm also aware of how the accident was one of the triggers for the fall of the USSR. In this detaled account, Higginbotham sets out exactly what happened and why it happened. The root cause is the Soviet mindset, the corruption, the secrecy, the passing of the buck, the belief that reality can and must be bent to the will of the Party.
No page turner of course, but it kept my interest and attention throughout what was a lengthy tale.
Side bar: none of the book group can remember wrapping this up as a Secret Santa. Truly a most secret Santa.
4. Halcyon Years, Alastair Reynolds
A terrific mix of an almost Maltese Falcon-like detective mystery, mega rich Capulets and Montagues, interesting characters that cannot be who they say they are, and all set within an arkship. Great stuff.
5. Lady Macbethad, Isabelle Schuler
This has been on my shelf for way too long. I met Isabelle Schuler back in 2022 when she appeared at Waterstone's Norwich with Claire North and have a personally signed special edition as a result. It is superb. Absolutely superb. I am aware that I still don't know the full detail of Shakespears's Macbeth, but I know more having read this which is effectively its prequel. We learn of Gruoch's childhood, her grandmother's prophesy of her future rise to the throne, her ruthless ambition and the way she survives. I've enjoyed this so much that I'm immediately moving on to her second novel.
6. The House of Barbary, Isabelle Schuler
Not as immediately arresting as Lady Macbethad but an equally rich and thoroughly-researched story that is therefore entirely plausible. The men around Beatrice Barbary's father, Jakob, sounds like a 17th century Swiss version of the Epstein class. Powerful men all doing unspeakable things and all helping each other to get away with it. Beatrice has an usually restricted upbringing, during which she was lied to by absolutely everyone. As an adult and now mistress of her house, she will have her revenge - whatever the rights, wrongs or costs.
7. Medusa, Rosie Hewlett
As I came to the end of House of Barbary, I wondered whether Isabelle Schuler was attending any events in the region soon. Yes she is. As I write this note, I am less than half an hour from setting out for Cambridge to see her with Rosie Hewlett. I picked up my (special independent bookshop) copy of Medusa from the Victoria Bookshop in Haverfordwest. It's a short novel and so I was able to read it in little over 24 hours. The opening line is terrific: "I was beautiful once. I wouldn't recommend it." It tells the story of how the beautiful and innocent young Medusa was raped by Poseidon. Her punishment for being raped was that Athena cursed her to have snakes for hair and a stare that lithified anyone she looked at. Talk about injustice and being misunderstood. A terrific contribution to the feminist re-telling of misogynistic Greek myths.
8. Lost Girls, Charlotte Philby
As ever, I've enjoyed this one from Charlotte Philby. Farrow and Chang continue to intersect symbiotically although I can't help thinking that Ramona really could do with a bit of good luck soon. Multiple references back to Anna Witherall which again makes me think I really ought to go back and re-read the original tryptich, the details of which, I must confess, I have largely forgotten. The narrative around Ramona's solution to finding justice where Keegan is concerned was particularly well set up and executed.
9. Children of Strife, Adrian Tchaikovsky
Another installment in the Children of Time series where spiders and, in this case, stomatapods have been elevated to intelligence. Avrana Kern wasn't the only terraformer and meddler with genes. There was another, lesser and meaner person who gathetred his misfits and created an evolutionary dystopia all his own.
The story is told from three different stages in the timeline that weave together into a single narrative. Excellent stuff as always.
Adrian Tachikovsky did an author event at Waterstone's in Cambridge that I was delighted to be able to go to. It was a sell out. Only the large scale events put on by Toppings in Ely beat it in terms of numbers. Only when I got there (a little late), did I discover that the interviewer was Cat Webb (Claire North). Good to see her again of course.
As I was late arriving I sat right at the back and couldn't actually hear half of what Adrian was saying. But, by chance, I discovered later that the woman I was sitting next to, who clearly wasn't paying that much attention to the discussion as she clacked her knitting needles, was actually Mrs Tchaikovsky. I was a real treat to get to talk to her and learn that Adrian writes for hours a day. He doesn't drive so he writes on the train and wherever else he happens to be. He has 5 separate publishers, hence the enormous volume of his output.
10. The List of Suspicious Things, Jennie Godfrey (Book Club, Kate)
Miv and Sharon are growing up in an un-named Yorkshire town when Margaret Thatcher has come to power and Peter Sutcliffe is Rippering his way through the county. We see the adult world mostly through Miv's eyes with occasional short chapters that show us others' points of view. The place of a woman being in the kitchen is a given in early 80s Yorkshire. The Pakistani-origin shopkeeper and his son deal with the pervasive racism, the librarian lives under the coercive control of her violent husband and we know that Miv's father is lying about something. An engaging and mostly heart-warming story (most people are actually good folks). A good choice for the book group.
11. The Persian, David McCloskey
