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Here you’ll find an archive of our recent subscription picks alongside the handy notes we include with each delivery and suggestions for further reading.

If your subscription is about to end, you can extend your curious reading experience with a 10% discount using the code SUPERSUB.

Subscription for Curious Readers: May 2024
Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel

Much like all the best “novels about a sport”, Headshot is simultaneously all about boxing and also not about boxing at all. You need no former knowledge or even interest in the sport to enjoy, because the world of the novel is so fully realised that you can only imagine the writer had firsthand experience: a true snapshot into microcosm that most people aren’t usually privy to.

On a plot level, we follow seven head-to-head boxing matches at The Daughters of America Cup in Reno, Nevada, with the novel’s chapters structured by the tournament brackets: starting with eight teen girl boxers and whittling them down knockout-style to a final champion over the course of two days.

But what makes this book go from a “huh, I never knew that about the teen girl boxing world” style experience to truly a transcendent work of fiction is the authorial voice, which hovers over the eight girls in a detached third person, diving into their pasts, their present, their eventual fate, their ticks, their fighting styles, the way they carry themselves, their rich and fraught internal worlds. Through the frame of the boxing match, each girl is thrown into relief against the other leaving their psychologies thoroughly plumbed. In retrospect, the setting is a work of genius. In their mid-to-late teens these girls are at a defining moment in their personalities, and throwing them head-to-head in a high pressure boxing match just adds fuel to that emotional fire.

If you liked Neighbors & Other Stories try…

Previous subscription picks…

April 2024
Neighbors & Other Stories: Diane Oliver

It’s almost impossible to read this emotionally devastating collection of stories divorced from the knowledge that the author passed away at the tragically young age of just 22. Despite that context, or maybe even slightly because of it, the stories themselves shine incredibly brightly still, over half a century after they were written, a totem to Oliver’s potential. Steeped in the dangerous days of the Jim Crow era, and the warmth of the families who navigate them, the stories are by turns impeccably constructed and profoundly moving in their apparent slightness.

Oliver’s range is incredibly impressive: some stories explore the quieter moments of trauma and tension, looking in the most unexpected places for human drama. Others actively seek to torch any sense of calm or contentment, are designed to disrupt – chief among them the gothic-inflected ‘Mint Juleps Not Served Here’, which contains one of the most brilliant swerve-endings we can remember reading in a short story. We hope you’ll be completely captivated by the opening story that gives the collection its name, its delicate yet appropriately troubling grappling with the domestic realities of living in a racist environment.

After such a virtuoso opener, everything else is simply a bonus, and a shocking reminder of how voices like Oliver’s can disappear from the canon in a few short decades. Thanks to this beautiful reissue, we’re hoping for many more conversations about her work.

If you liked Neighbors & Other Stories try…

February 2024

Fifteen Wild Decembers, by Karen Powell

We found ourselves fully drawn into this immersive and absorbing retelling of the story of the Brontë family – and believe us when we say that you need no prior experience of their work to enjoy this marvellous piece. Karen Powell presents the story of the Brontës and Haworth, their home, through the lens of Emily, whose tumultuous and passionate masterpiece Wuthering Heights is perhaps more widely known than the story of Brontë herself. Powell vibrantly conveys the wild and dramatic landscapes of their home in the West Yorkshire Moors, and the turbulent lives of the family coping with isolation, childhood trauma and the premature deaths of multiple family members. 

For Powell’s Brontë siblings, the writing process is an incredibly healing and instinctive activity, as natural as eating and breathing. Through writing, they draw themselves into elaborate fantasy worlds and express their wildest imaginings. Emily Brontë herself, so often portrayed as stubborn and antisocial, is here empowered by her writing, showing an unwavering will to write completely as herself. Steeped ankle-deep in the moorlands, Powell continually brings us back to the harsh, rugged landscapes, the rock and the heather and the wild and stormy weather. At its heart this is a novel about isolation and grief, but also the invigorating and transformative power of nature and words.

If you liked Fifteen Wild Decembers, try…

January 2024

The Delivery, by Margarita Garcia Robayo
translated by Megan McDowell

To begin your reading year in the right way, we’ve opted for one of the most entrancing novels we devoured last year. The Delivery is the kind of book that draws you fully into its world, and holds you there long after you’ve finished it, which we thought was probably a good antidote to any lingering post-Christmas malaise. And ss if to accentuate this rather odd time of year, Colombian novelist Garcia Robayo’s characters and settings are very much in the real world, but the narrative lies just on the edge of the uncanny, constantly urging us to question what is real…

This manifests in several ways: very ordinary moments are woven together with bizarre and unexplained circumstances, not least the delivery of a huge package which is impossible to open. The arrival of the package is shortly followed by the appearance of the narrator’s estranged mother, who brings both comfort and unease: her home-cooked meals make the flat smell of childhood memories, but her presence lingers and takes over the small flat. We found this novel to be the perfect blend of the domestic and the uncanny, the familiar and the unsettling. It’s elegant, smart, and ever-so-slightly unhinged.

If you liked The Delivery, try…

December 2023

Lori & Joe, by Amy Arnold

Lori & Joe is a book that seemingly centres on the mundane: a woman on a morning walk through the Lake Distict’s fells. Yet the novel’s rambling prose hides a stratigraphy of trauma, grief, and melancholy – it’s clear from the very outset that Joe has passed away, and Lori reacts by simply going for her morning walk. As she climbs, her spiralling thoughts reflect on years of marriage, childlessness and isolation. Like the rolling valleys of hills of the landscape around her, the novel’s run-on meandering sentences carry us through the mundane and the shocking, plunging us into something tumultuous and mysterious.

Set over the course of a single day, this petite but powerful novel has a completely captivating style and language all of its own, and appropriately enough for a novel somewhat about emotional inertia you may well read the whole thing with your heart in your mouth. A true experience to read, Amy Arnold takes us on a walk where the threat of danger lurks in the thick fog of the fells, and in the corners of the entrapped female mind.

If you liked Lori & Joe, try…

November 2023

Weasels in the Attic, by Hiroko Oyamada
translated by David Boyd

Do not be fooled by the whimsical (and admittedly delightful) presentation of this gem from Japan: it may only be 70 pages long, but this novel is a gorgeous and tense little package. Two friends meet for dinner three times over a span of several years, and each dinner is characterised by life-changing junctures in the characters’ lives (marriage, fatherhood, the titular weasel infestation etc). There’s little more to the narrative than that, and there really doesn’t need to be – the joy of the book is in the minute interactions between couples and friends, the strange profundity it manages to concoct from the simplest elements.

For all the intentional blankness of the prose, it’s also a surprisingly sensual book, an alternative kind of food novel that doesn’t revel in or over-glorify the mundanity of cooking a meal (something you might find in, say, a Murakami novel), but uses it as a backdrop for something strangely compelling as the low-key drama plays out over steaming prawns, surrounded by fishtanks, stifled by snowdrifts outside. Friendship and masculinity are the perhaps unlikely but innovatively tackled themes that stick out once the book has settled, but there are surprising and various depths to this seemingly slight book.

If you liked Weasels in the Attic, try…

October 2023

The Glutton, by A.K. Blakemore

One of the most pleasing things about this exceptionally beautiful piece of publishing is the number of preconceptions it manages to flatten within its pages. If you happened to read A.K. Blakemore’s award-winning debut novel The Manningtree Witches, you’ll already be familiar with the author’s incredible ability to upset the whole genre of ‘historical fiction’ with a completely modern and un-stuffy approach (and no frilly ruffs or courtly intrigue in sight). With The Glutton, Blakemore concocts an equally addictive experiment – this time a fictional re-telling of the shockingly real tale of Tarare, AKA The Great Tarare, The Glutton of Lyon, The Bottomless Man. 

Tarare is a polyphage, a man with such a huge appetite that he will literally eat anything – there are seemingly no limits to his particular ability. He becomes an object of fascination, a travelling sideshow, and an unlikely political stooge, but also a figure rejected by a society he can barely comprehend. Blakemore fills in the (at times grisly and unsettling) details with her acrobatic prose, delicately and precisely humanising someone we’re told not to humanise. At times painful and thrilling, at others compellingly rich in its depiction of revolutionary France, The Glutton is a wonder in its ability to dazzle the reader without withholding the true horror of what society can do to those deemed unloveable.

If you liked The Glutton, try…

September 2023

Termush, by Sven Holm
trans. Sylvia Clayton

As we head into the final quarter of the year we’re starting to feel the beginning of that hibernatory instinct, and we’re craving books with an insular nature. Few stories, though, have quite such a distinct feeling of ‘being indoors’ as this fascinating and electrifyingly tense novelette. Originally published in 1967 to only minor notoriety, it has been dusted off from its place in the Faber archives and it’s very easy to see why their archivists may have plucked it from obscurity – it’s a fascinating read specifically for our spectacularly unsettled times.

You’ll know the premise from plenty of other post-apocalyptic novels from across the 20th Century – an unnamed disaster of some kind, much radiation, catastrophes unceasing etc – but few authors have tackled the formula with such grace, darkness and intrigue. Termush is the name of an imaginatively luxe hotel complex for which only the very wealthy have been able to make reservations, specifically to outlast the fallout of the aforementioned unnamed disaster. Inevitably outside forces seek to penetrate the inhabitants’ paid-for safety and, of course, bad stuff ensues, but Holm’s blunt, almost sterile prose drapes the perfect veil over the unfolding terror. Perhaps the strongest compliment we can give this impeccable book is that it will fundamentally make you think twice before stepping outside again…

If you liked Termush, try…

August 2023

Crooked Plow, by Itamar Viera Junior
trans. Johnny Lorenz

Unbelievably, this is the first foray our subscription has made into the literature of Brazil – and we couldn’t have happened upon a more enticing gem of a novel. Exposing the exploitation of tenant farmers and Afro-descendent communities in Brazil’s north-east, Crooked Plow tells the beguiling and beautiful story of Bibiana and Belonisia, two sisters from Seratao, in the country’s underrepresented backlands. Through glittering and poetic prose, Vieira Junior tells the haunting story of a mysterious knife that ties these sisters’ lives (and voices) together. Not only are the sisters’ voices interlaced, but Vieira Junior weaves their stories into the land, the land on which they rely, both for economic necessity, and as a repository for their increasingly disappearing histories.

As the sisters grow apart, and Bibiana leaves the land she grew up on, Belonisia grows intimate with the earth, becoming increasingly alert to the encantados, spirits and saints that dwell within the landscape itself. As the novel’s final section gives voice to the encantado, Viera Junior enlists the polyphonic potential of this spiritual metamorphosis; a transient voice flows across time, across the land, and across the bodies that inhabit it. Combining magical and social realism, Viera Junior plays with voice and voicelessness, asking who has the power to speak.

If you liked Crooked Plow , try…

July 2023

Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened To Carlotta,
by James Hannaham

This firework display of a novel positively attacks the reader with a stunningly realised voice. Rarely have we been more struck and intoxicated by a character than Carlotta, our narrator in this electrifying piece of work. Carlotta is a trans woman fresh out of prison and back in her Brooklyn stomping ground. We join her as she struggles to reclaim any semblance of her former life across one single weekend, reconnecting with the family who knew her as Dustin, navigating the labyrinthine job market, desperately trying to appease her assigned parole officer, pining for the love she left behind bars. 

Accompanying her on this journey of rehabilitation are various good samaritans and ghosts of her past, all of whom force Carlotta to reckon with aspects of her past in unconventional and difficult ways. What truly separates this novel is the writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis – Carlotta herself repeatedly and constantly interrupts the prosaic narration, spewing ornate invective and commentary in flurries of irresistible vernacular. It’s a truly thrilling reading experience, and one that (like Carlotta herself) goes to extraordinary lengths to hide its emotional heart underneath a coarsely, bitterly hilarious exterior – but the heart truly is there, and beautiful when accessed. 

If you liked Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit… , try

June 2023

Elsewhere, by Yan Ge

Long-time Storysmith subscribers might remember back in early 2021 that one of our fiction picks was the unapologetically weird crypto-zoological romp Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge (translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang). We made a mental note to keep our ears to the ground for her next publication (and who knows, maybe we could invite her down to the shop next time? More on that in a minute). 

Yan Ge’s first English language collection makes for such unexpectedly perfect juxtapositions: intimate and observational character stories set in modern day Dublin and Stockholm; sweeping and meticulous political intrigues in medieval China; the sharply realist and the semi-ethereal. This might sound a bit whip-lash inducing, but Elsewhere is a masterfully consistent collection that spins different subjects, times and places into elegant pieces about language, alienation and estrangement that always come back to what it means to be “elsewhere” – and features the only story we’ve ever read that heavily revolves around the practicalities of using a breast pump. (Seriously, it’s excellent). 

Is there any other writer who can jump from their native language (and genres, times, places) and retain their authorial voice? And how has she managed it? Well, Yan Ge is genuinely coming to the shop on the 22nd of June for an evening with Polly Barton – so you can ask her yourself!

If you liked Elsewhere, try…

May 2023

When I Sing, Mountains Dance, by Irene Solà
trans. Mara Faye Lethem

This stunning, visionary book is one of our absolute favourites from the last few months, and we’ve been so excited to share it with readers in the beautiful new paperback edition.

In masterful, lyrical prose translated from the original Catalan text, this novel tells the stories and histories of a Pyrenean mountain community through its voices: not only voices of the families that live there, but also the roe deer, the chanterelles, the raindrops, the witches and the ghosts that hover over the landscape. Through stories and observations we piece together the love and loss and sufferings of one family, and their connections with the wild natural landscape that surrounds them.

Solà tells a profound and moving story, but her use of language and form is playful and entirely innovative. It’s perhaps no surprise to learn that the author is a visual arts graduate, such is the luminosity of her descriptions, and as such we can safely say that we’ve never read a story partly narrated by mushrooms before. Amidst all these delightfully esoteric flights of fancy, we were fully captivated and can’t wait to see where Solà takes us next.

If you liked, When I Sing, Mountains Dance, try…

April 2023

Kick the Latch, by Kathryn Scanlon

Sometimes in our reading journey the most valuable thing you can do is step into the life of someone you never even considered. That’s exactly what we thought when we approached this unusual but deeply profound new novel from Kathryn Scanlan – meticulously and seamlessly woven together and reassembled from a series of conversations between the author and horse trainer named Sonia, who becomes our trusted guide in the arcane and physical world of her work. Hoof care, training regimes, equine health: it’s all in there, it all sounds prosaic, but it will become in your mind as sacred as it is to our narrator.

We are with Sonia right at the side of the racetrack in beautifully concise chapters that form a portrait of a life lived in service to something larger. Lines that seem slapdash and spat out contain sometimes unbearable, barely-disguised heartache. Reading those lines twice is often irresistible. Effortless to devour and gently enveloping with its dawn groomings, the bleak landscapes and travelling circus of the horseracing circuit makes for surprisingly propulsive storytelling, and though there are moments of bleakness, the ultimate effect is to be transported into that elusive other life.

If you liked Kick the Latch, try… 

March 2023
Seven Steeples, Sara Baume

In Sara Baume’s lyrical third novel, a young couple and their dogs move from the city to the sea, and steadily withdraw from the lives they used to know. This spare and quiet story can be read in a wealth of ways, but to us it’s at least partly about isolation, the passage of time, mundanity, sociality, and Covid. The last of these might deter some, but we implore anyone wary of reliving a global pandemic in their escapist reading time to make an exception – if anyone can deal with this weighty recent event without falling into cliché and triteness, it is Sara Baume. And like all the best books, it’s really about where we, as readers, meet and shape it with our own interpretations. 

The interior lives of our main characters, Bell and Sigh, are deliciously evoked, while the surrounding landscape of the south-west of Ireland, with its standing stones and the steeples of the title, is drawn with rich and brittle imagery. We are immersed mercilessly into the tensions and careworn familiarity of this relationship and everything it entails, the domestic minutiae and unuttered regrets. Part of the joy of all those dangling threads is that Baume allows you to settle on your own impression of this elliptical and chimeric little masterpiece – and perhaps this is the most enduring satisfaction of the whole book.

If you liked Seven Steeples, try… 

February 2023

Chilean Poet, Alejandro Zambra
trans. Meghan McDowell

You’ve heard of the Great American Novel, sure. But what about the Great Chilean Novel? This is undoubtedly it. We’ve long been Zambra fans in the shop, but if you’ve been to Storysmith in the last year it will have been difficult to avoid us yabbering on about his latest novel. I defy anyone to read the first few pages of this book and not be instantly hooked. Alejandro Zambra’s intimate father-son novel is both an acute portrait of an unconventional family, and a profound meditation on what it means to be Chilean. 

Starting as a coming-of-age story for the aspiring (and quite bad) poet, Gonzalo, it ventures into even more comings-of-age as the novel progresses: Gonzalo has a coming-of-dad when he reunites with his high school girlfriend and becomes a sort of step-dad to her son, Vicente, who himself has his own boy-to-(failed)poet-to-man arc; and a host of other characters, and other poets, journalists and writers, all on their disparate, internal quests.

Sweeping in scale, but closely observed in Zambra’s trademark ironic-profound style, this is the perfect balance of literary virtuosity and juicy narrative fiction.

If you liked Gentleman Overboard, try… 

January 2023

Gentleman Overboard, by Herbert Clyde Lewis

Unusually, the story behind this novel is almost as good as the novel itself. Herbert Clyde Lewis was a less-than-prominent screenwriter with the occasional hit to his name, but spent most of his professional life skipping through bankruptcy, bad tempers and bad luck – the pinnacle of which was that this beautifully concise and melancholic novel from 1937 was only fully appreciated after his death in 1950. Gentleman Overboard sees our main character, a dissatisfied banker named Henry Preston Standish, escaping his domestic life and abandoning his family by taking a long and languorous trip on a steamer to Panama, only to slip and fall into the sea and be left bobbing, waiting for a rescue that may or may not be on its way.

We are then left only with the thoughts of this newly-lonely man, his speculations and ruminations on where it all went right or wrong for him, what might be happening on the boat in his absence, what his family will be thinking. It’s a perfect comedy of embarrassment and ineptitude, but one that asks hard questions of its main character and his actions in leaving his family, making it a true anomaly: a dinky masterpiece bobbing alone in obscurity until it was miraculously reissued last year. As the hours of his new existence slip by and the night threatens, we come to understand the situation Standish finds himself in, in every sense.

If you liked Gentleman Overboard, try… 

December 2022

The Seaplane on Final Approach, by Rebecca Rukeyser

There are so many elements to this novel working in perfect concert. The stunning cover, drawn with an aesthetic of enticing melodrama. Then the premise itself: adolescent unrest, geographical isolation, increasingly wild weather events and – crucially – the constant threat of bears. Mira is 18 and completely captivated by the owners of the Alaskan lodge where she is working for the season. She makes cookies, chats to the international guests to put them at their ease, and takes the trash out to the shoreline every day at low tide. The churn of guests arrive by the titular seaplane, the one glimmering sign that things in the outside world are continuing without her. More importantly, though, Mira is also obsessed with the nature of sleaze, with the strange relationship of lodge owners Stu and Maureen, and with the sullen and unpredictable chef who lives in a tent on-site

We were absolutely taken in by this seemingly effortless debut novel. It’s so beautifully executed and expertly paced that you don’t even realise the tension is building and that things may not be so idyllic as the average holiday guest might like to think. Rukeyser captures that preciously horrible time in late adolescence when warring emotions can’t help but show themselves, no matter how strong the characters think they are. Written with the ideal amount of grumpy humour and a cast of delightfully dysfunctional supporting characters, this book does a perfect job of creating an irresistible world you’d never want to be stuck in. Mischievous perfection.

If you liked Seaplane on Final Approach, try… 

November 2022
Diary of a Void, by Emi Yagi

translated by David Boyd and Lucy North

Ms Shibata has had enough. Tired of working long hours in a male-dominated office where she is expected to make coffees and clear away the cups after meetings, she decides on impulse to lie to her colleagues and tell them she is pregnant. As opening gambits go, it’s hard to deny this one is immediately compelling. Ms Shibata starts to track this fictitious pregnancy and adapt her lifestyle accordingly, sinking deeper and deeper into the lie until we’re left wondering how far she can take it – it’s an exquisite trajectory.

You can read this novel as part of a wider and, for us, deeply satisfying seam of modern Japanese literature that interrogates the role of women in wider society (see below for a few more examples of this pleasing trend), but on a purely narrative level the delights are ample: turns of phrase recur and redefine themselves as the book progresses, male behaviour becomes increasingly ungainly and pathetic as the faux-pregnancy becomes more obvious.

This is a deliciously smart and crafty story of deception, but one that wears its worldlier themes lightly. Hidden beneath the snippy facade there are salient ruminations on the societal pressure placed on women’s bodies, and almost melancholy musings on the futility of opposing the patriarchy. Whichever way you read it, we hope you’ll find the peculiar atmosphere will linger like it did for us after finishing this excruciatingly well-crafted book.

If you liked Diary of a Void, try… 

October 2022:
Lolly Willowes, by Sylvia Townesend Warner

If you’ve visisted us in the shop and asked us for a recommendation you may already know that we tend towards the spooky wherever we can. We were very excited, then, to discover that a new clothbound edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s daring novellette Lolly Willowes is to be released in time for October. It’s a relatively new favourite of ours, and we’re not ashamed to admit we weren’t hip to its charms despite it being first published in 1926. With a prescience that feels somewhat unearthly, Warner uses her titular character to undermine and comment upon the patriarchal structures of between-war Britain by having unmarried Lolly abandon her comfortable life for a life of solitary witchcraft in the countryside.

Even now, in these more enlightened times, Lolly’s move feels gleefully transgressive. The excitement, of course, cannot last and the way Warner ekes out the finer details of exactly what is wrong with Lolly’s new home village is irresistible. Without giving anything away, the finale to this book is stunning and inventive, but like so many other elements in this book it’s hidden beautifully. Delivering the chills and, in a gentle but very real way, the thrills – Lolly Willowes does everything we’d want a book to do this spooky season.

If you liked Lolly Willowes, try… 

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September 2022:

Afterparties, by Anthony Veasna So

We’re huge fans of a well-crafted short story collection at Storysmith, and we loved this warm-hearted, bold collection of interconnecting stories about Cambodian-American lives. The stories express the joy and messiness and pain and love of real lives, families striving to make ends meet, to feel fulfilled, and to hang on to some semblance of Cambodian cultural heritage whilst trying to achieve the American dream. The stories take us to the heart of ordinary existence, sometimes with an absurd twist; a mechanic whose business is failing because he wants to offer jobs to his whole community, a high school teacher who can’t move on from his dream of being a badminton star, cousins trying to psyche themselves up to attend a relative’s reincarnation party.

Veasna So’s playful tone makes for entertaining reading, but the effects of the Cambodian genocide hover in the background of all of the stories, the younger generations are grappling with the complexities of their culture and identity, feeling the inherited grief of their parents and grandparents and dealing with the gaps in their family trees. The stories depict the incredibly human capacity to carry on in the face of so much adversity, to work, fight, party, date and eat a huge amount of Cambodian donuts.

Anthony Veasna So’s writing is so full of heart, he navigates the nuanced topics of immigration, race and sexuality with a sharp wit and tender understanding. Afterparties is sadly the only published collection from this talented writer whose career was just about to start when he passed away in 2020.

If you liked Afterparties, try… 

August 2022:

The Twilight Zone, by Nona Fernández

(translated by Natasha Wimmer)

This unconventional historical novel is crammed with details that bring its subject alive with incredible energy, a blazing journey through the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile during the ‘70s and ‘80s. Told from the perspective of a journalist and documentarian (in a distinctly auto-fictional manner) uncovering the details of a man known only as ‘the man who tortured people’, The Twilight Zone is a propulsive and unrelenting excavation of ordinary life under oppression. In researching her unconventional subject, the narrator reveals the psychological damage not just on the individual, but the whole nation.

While the subject matter is unavoidably heavy, it’s delivered as a counterpoint to the mundanity of real life, of pop culture and family life. The classic sci-fi TV show that shares its name with the book is used as a neat way of framing the surreality of the situation, and as we discover more about the man who tortures people we begin to see a complex, uneasy humanising effect. Books like this reinforce the cliche that a good novel teaches the reader more than just the mechanics of the story, and with The Twilight Zone we were bowled over by how much insight, atmosphere and history you can glean from such clever prose (brilliantly translated, we should add).

If you liked The Twilight Zone, try… 

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July 2022:

Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks

We’ve been quietly devouring some of the choice morsels from Faber’s ‘Faber Editions’ series. These lovingly-produced and rediscovered classics which have included such Storysmith favourites as Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls and They by Kay Dick, and now the absolute crème-de-la-crème: Maud Martha, the only novel by Pulitzer Prize winning American poet Gwendolyn Brooks. First appearing in 1953, this carefully executed novel of Chicago life was never published in the UK, and didn’t exactly make waves back in the US either, but now its reputation can be rightly reconsidered. 

We weren’t hugely familiar with Brooks’ poetry on reading this slim and powerful volume, but now that we have we know this: Maud Martha is a miniature masterpiece. Told as a series of vignettes that capture Maud Martha’s childhood, her teenage years, her early marriage and her journey into motherhood, we see snapshots of a life condensed. This is a book of ordinary people doing everyday things – a trip to the movies, putting up a Christmas tree, furnishing the kitchenette – but in-between these moments of domesticity there’s laughter, pain, passion and heartbreak, the sheer grind of existence. It’s very easy to love Maud Martha herself: she’s poised, quietly defiant, and the real genius of the novel is in how Brooks makes her life accessible to us, shows the reader its gentle strength without veering into sentimentality. 

If you liked Maud Martha, try… 

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June 2022:

The Godmother, by Hannelore Cayre

There are few things we like more than an unexpected crime novel. Perhaps it’s something about the conventions of the genre, the classic rhythms of a whodunnit or a police procedural, but when an author tries and succeeds to reinvent a classic formula, it’s a source of great joy for us. When we first came across this French translation a few years ago, we got that exact feeling – that The Godmother really was something a bit special. Don’t be fooled by its brevity, and don’t expect any easy answers: one of the delights of this stylishly-told curio is the way in which it continually subverts your expectations.

Our heroine, Patience, has earned an honest living for 25 years as a translator for the police, feeding vital wiretap information from African drug gangs. But when her financial security suddenly comes under threat due to bureaucratic injustices, she decides upon a most unexpected career-change, a total reinvention of herself. The Godmother is going to use all her experience of the criminal underworld gleaned from decades hidden in plain sight. She’s just not going to use it in the way you’d expect…

If you liked The Godmother, try…

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May 2022:

Ruth & Pen, by Emilie Pine

Emilie Pine has already made a name for herself in the literary world with her essay collection Notes to Self, which we absolutely loved in the shop (and probably recommended to you at some point if you happened to pop in). Now she seems set to take it by storm again, with her debut novel Ruth & Pen, and we’re so pleased to be able to bring this special story to you hot off the press in its publication week.

In some ways, Ruth & Pen feels like a contemporary (and more accessible) rendition of James Joyce’s Ulysses – a kind of evolution of the Irish novel, if you will. Taking place in a single day in Dublin, the novel follows the two titular women, unknown to each other but plagued by similar concerns, on the verge of falling in and out of love. On this day, Ruth is contemplating her marriage to Aiden, and whether the wounds that they have inflicted on each other can be repaired. Meanwhile Pen is preparing to speak her truth, and tell her best friend Alice exactly what she means to her. It’s a tender consideration of love, miscommunication, friendship, neurodivergence, fertility, the climate crisis, therapy and grief. It broke and simultaneously warmed our hearts and we hope you enjoy your ‘trip’ to Dublin as much as we did.

If you liked Ruth & Pen, try…

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April 2022:

Love in the Big City, by Sang Young Park

(translated by Anton Hur)

Love in the Big City begins with an unlikely pairing: the narrator Young and his college best friend and roommate Jaehee, a situation considered unacceptable by almost everyone except themselves due to her being unmarried. Nonetheless, they form a mutually beneficial cohabitation-of-convenience as they ricochet between classes, terrible boyfriends and freezer-cold cigarettes, setting the tone for the novel as a whole. It’s a portrait of contemporary Korean queer culture that is both celebratory and mournful, ironic and melancholy in equal measure, rendered in a narrative style that brims with personality.

From these humble coming-of-age beginnings, the novel bounces between Young’s escapades in love and loss over the course of his 20s and 30s, with Seoul, South Korea as the titular big city. But while the topic is indeed love, it’s unconventional and not always romantic. Sometimes it’s an obsessive, addictive, all-consuming love; sometimes it’s an accidentally unshakeable friendship and the awful void it can leave. It’s also the joyous sexual freedom of the big city and the punishingly lonely and isolatingly conservative moral climate of Korea at large – the complexities and contradictions of gay life in modern Korea are laid bare in a thousand well-realised moments.

Love in the Big City is a celebration of this multitude: idyllic and devastating, and surely destined to become a queer cult classic.

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