The Gordon Burn Prize, 2026

/ Laura / 9 Comments

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I don’t normally follow the Gordon Burn Prize, even though it’s administered by New Writing North and always awarded in Newcastle! This year, however, the longlist caught my eye. The Gordon Burn ‘recognises literature that is forward-thinking and fearless in its ambition and execution, often playing with style, pushing boundaries, crossing genres or challenging readers’ expectations’. It’s open to both fiction and non-fiction. Although I do feel that the judges winnowed down a strong longlist to a weaker shortlist, I was still excited to attend the prize ceremony at Northern Stage.

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I managed to read (mostly by happenstance) six books from the longlist of twelve, and these were my thoughts [links to my full reviews, where they exist]:

Santanu Bhattacharya’s Deviants was one of my highly commended reads of 2025. It’s a nuanced look at three generations of gay men in and around what was once India’s ‘garden city’ and is now its ‘silicon plateau’, Bengaluru, refreshingly tracing uncle-nephew connections rather than father-son and refusing to buy into simple narratives of societal progress.

Colwill Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh was also one of my highly commended reads of 2025. I loved  its full-throttle evocation of early 00s teenage life in Doncaster, and called it ‘a time portal’ (despite not growing up in Donny).

Sarah Hall’s Helm left me rather underwhelmed; I’m a huge Hall fan, but I thought a lot of this millennia-spanning novel was almost deliberately silly and self-indulgent, especially the bits from the point of view of the wind, Helm. On the other hand, there were some powerful characters: from the matriarch of a neolithic tribe to a medieval priest determined to cast out demons to an eighteenth-century wife who wants to stop her husband blowing up the local witch stones to a present-day climatologist.

Elizabeth Lovatt’s Thank You For Calling The Lesbian Line, which I’m reading at the moment, is right up my street; it’s a mix of creative history, as Lovatt reimagines the stories of the women who phoned the London Lesbian Line in the 1990s, and memoir, tracing Lovatt’s own slightly-late coming out at the end of her twenties and her embracing of life as a lesbian. Because I’ve taught and written about modern British queer history, most of the historical material was already familiar to me, although I did appreciate the focus on the 1990s, where historians still rarely venture. My favourite chapter so far considers the material culture of the logbooks: the women’s handwriting, with bubbles dotting the Is; the doodles in the margins; the notes they leave to each other. This is certainly one I’d recommend, especially to newly out lesbians and/or lesbians who don’t know much about lesbian history. Source: paperback purchase from The Accidental Bookshop, Alnwick.

Sarah Perry’s Death of an Ordinary Man is a gentle and sensitive account of the death of Perry’s father-in-law David, who was diagnosed with cancer and died only nine days later. I was especially struck by Perry’s reflections on taking on the role of carer and how it intersected with her feelings about not being a mother. ‘They were mothers. They would have known what to do’, she thinks of two of her friends when David first starts his decline. Later on, though, she finds this attitude changing: ‘in that first moment after David’s incontinence began, I felt a woman’s hand on my shoulder. I’ve rarely thought of myself as a woman, and certainly not a very satisfactory one – I failed to want children as much as I ought to have done, for example… But as I saw David standing there… women claimed me.’ Perry writes that this story is ‘politically indefensible’, presumably because it links into ideas that women are natural nurturers, and yet as someone who also finds it hard to negotiate their own (non-)feelings about gender identity while feeling linked to female legacies, I appreciated her honesty. David, too, is illuminated in the narrative as a genuinely ‘ordinary’ but utterly unique man. This didn’t hit me as hard as I think it has some others, but it deserves its place on the list. Source: hardback purchase from Collected Books, Durham.

Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez is a collection of linked short stories about a Penobscot community in Maine. While this draws attention to important issues faced by Native communities, it didn’t work for me at all as fiction; I found Talty’s prose flat and the book as a whole repetitive and shapeless.

The shortlisted titles, therefore, disappointed me somewhat, as all my favourites were gone, although it was nice to see the Lovatt getting recognised, and satisfying that I had still read exactly half the list:

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All six shortlisted authors spoke about their work at the event – three in person and three on Zoom – so I learnt more about the titles I had not read:

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L to R on Zoom: Maria Reva, Morgan Talty, Omar El Akkad. L to R in person: Anthony Shapland, Elizabeth Lovatt, Sarah Hall.

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a short collection of linked essays that criticises passive liberal responses to the genocide in Gaza. El Akkad spoke beautifully about his book, describing the dissonance of writing about a conflict where he knows his tax dollars are paying for the bombs that are falling. He decried the idea that you can write non-political fiction or non-fiction: ‘the political is coming for you’. I was disappointed by El Akkad’s novel American War because it engaged with hugely promising material about a future civil war in the US but, for me, didn’t quite work as fiction. I can imagine he is a much better non-fiction writer, though.

Anthony Shapland’s A Room Above A Shop is a short novel about two men whom, as he put it, ‘lie, and lie together’. Set in the late 1980s, it explores a gay relationship in south Wales. Shapland spoke interestingly about how there are almost two time zones in the novel: the ‘room above’, where the two men can exist outside their social context, and the ‘shop’, where the reality of the decade they’re living in intrudes through, for example, leaflets about HIV/AIDS.

Maria Reva’s Endling had already been on my radar, but I was uncertain whether I’d be able to deal with its weirdness. It juxtaposes the story of three Ukrainian women working for a bridal agency in Ukraine that seeks to match them with men from overseas with the story of a scientist, Yeva, trying to protect endangered snails by finding them a place to breed. Yeva joins the agency to fund her snail studies; but her plans are shattered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I had a quick flick through this novel at the end and the prose appeals to me a lot more than I thought it would, so I might give it a go.

After a musical interlude from local artist Richard Dawson, Val McDermid, the chair of the judges, appeared to award the prize to…

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ENDLING! I wasn’t especially backing any book, so this was a lovely moment, especially as Reva was visibly delighted to have won. She explained how surreal this was as she was sitting ‘in the room of my sister’ wearing slippers, and thanked her editors for taking a chance on such an experimental novel.

Have you read any of the Gordon Burn Prize longlist this year? Do any interest you?

Reading Diary, January 24th to February 25th, 2026

/ Laura / 12 Comments

Another overlapping Reading Diary, this time entirely due to The Starving Saints taking me So. Long.

V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. One narrative strategy I love in speculative fiction is when the author finds a beautifully simple conceit and simply follows it through to its logical conclusion. This is what Schwab pulls off, mostly, in The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. The novel starts in the early eighteenth century, where Addie is reaching adulthood in a tiny French village, possibly somewhere in the region of Pays de la Loire. As she looks at the kinds of lives her friends are willingly embracing, she’s despite to believe there’s more for her than marriage and children. So, she makes a deal with the devil. (More books should start with somebody making a deal with the devil.) Addie doesn’t quite know what she’s signing up to, but it soon becomes clear: she will live forever, and have all the freedom she wants, but nobody will ever remember her. And yes, it turns out that is quite literal; she only exists while she remains within somebody’s sight, and once she departs, it’s as if they’re meeting her for the first time. It’s a life of one-night stands, meet-cutes and possible friendships that Addie stubbornly lives because the devil can only have her soul when ‘she does not want it any more’. But then, three hundred years later, in a bookshop in New York City, she meets Henry, who at first is not one of her flames: he doesn’t seem particularly special, in fact, apart from one thing. He remembers her.

For the first two-thirds of Addie La Rue, the turning-points land like depth charges. The midpoint is especially brilliant. It’s so beautifully structured that I forgave a lot of problems with Schwab’s writing, which at its best has the sweet once-upon-a-time feel of Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale or Once Upon A River, and at its worst is very YA (Schwab leans way too much upon repetition). The book veered a little off course for me nearer the end, although I loved how Addie’s resolution mirrored her beginning. In particular, I would have preferred the devil to remain a relatively faceless figure rather than entering the story as a character. But what a satisfying ride. Source: Kindle Unlimited.

Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints. I often see people writing ‘what the fuck did I just read’, and then it turns out to be a book that has a mild speculative twist, or an unexpected serial killer, or something. But this one definitely deserves the WTFDIJR label. Pretty much the entirety of The Starving Saints is set in a simulacrum of a medieval castle running out of food because of an extended siege. We follow three female characters: Phosyne, a former nun turned magic-worker who has already figured out how to purify water and is now trying to transmute food; Ser Voyne, a knight defined by her sense of duty and obligation; and Treila, who once flirted with Voyne but now regards her as her sworn enemy after she executed her father. But while each of these characters have concrete arcs, there’s little complex interiority here. Starling uses them like game pieces navigating an increasingly unsettling landscape. As the siege turns desperate, the castle is invaded by a group of Saints, who look like the icons that everybody worships but have a more sinister purpose. Phosyne, in particular, finds physical barriers dissolving as she begins to move through stone, light ever-burning candles, and boil water with a touch. As the world of the castle becomes ever bloodier, she and the other two women must negotiate an escape.

I almost gave up on reading this several times, because I struggle with fantasy/speculative fiction that doesn’t feel grounded within a kind of reality. But I ended up finishing it for a couple reasons: first, the atmosphere is just SO GOOD; second, and related to that, Starling knows exactly what she’s doing. Everything from her choice of character names to the way that the bizarre happenings in the castle tie back to the manipulation of matter made me realise that she’s thought this all through, and isn’t just riding on the vibes. Funnily enough, though on the surface this was nothing like Starling’s space horror-thriller The Luminous Dead, they are very obviously written by the same author (and not just because they both contain terrifying caving scenes). But Starling isn’t repeating tropes – instead, she seems to be developing a truly distinctive voice. I’d read more by her. Source: Kindle Unlimited.

Lily King, Writers and Lovers. I was intensely wary of this one but was convinced to pick it up by Rebecca and Elle’s glowing reviews. And it’s fair to say it’s definitely a cut above the usual messy millennial novel (Casey, our protagonist, is indeed actually a messy Gen X because the novel is set in 1997). This is basically because King is a very good writer. However, I found myself disappointed by the direction of the plot, despite some great material on Casey’s grief for her Cuban mother and the breakdown of her relationship with her father, who only cared about her as a potential golf prodigy. Writers and Lovers features two of my least favourite literary tropes: the Love Triangle, and the Writer Who Success Is Waiting For If Only They Could Finish Their Book. While I admit that this is slightly more plausible in 1997 than it would be now, I was still intensely annoyed at how easily Casey succeeds after posting off her barely-edited novel to a handful of literary agents. Argh. Would love to see a version of this narrative where it’s recognised that the pain is not in the writing but in the publishing. And, as always with a love triangle, I was rooting for the wrong side (SPOILERS but can’t a fictional woman for ONCE choose the nice safe option rather than the unreliable buzzy one?). A light easy read, but it got on my nerves too much for me to genuinely enjoy it. Source: Kindle 99p deal.

 

A double bind? Our Better Natures by Sophie Ward

/ Laura / 15 Comments

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Warning: academic feminist ranting

Sophie Ward’s Our Better Natures is essentially three separate novellas doled out in pieces. Its central thread follows Phyllis, an ageing woman in Illinois whose son returns from the Vietnam War with a Korean wife, June [Park Choon Hee], and two children. Phyllis tries to welcome her son’s family, but is dogged by what she describes as a ‘stone in her stomach’: she’s frustrated by June’s different approach to housekeeping and cooking, and resentful of the care June receives from her son and from Phyllis’s husband. Two other strands follow two real-life women: radical feminist Andrea Dworkin on the cusp of writing her first book, Woman Hating (1974), and poet Muriel Rukeyser, who is campaigning for the release of Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha, a political prisoner in South Korea. While a couple of fragile links draw these threads together, I struggled to understand what they were doing in the same novel; Ward does little to even explore potentially rich thematic connections, such as (for example), the ways Dworkin’s analysis of women’s lives might connect to Phyllis’s experience. Phyllis’s story is the most fully realised, and I enjoyed some aspects of her arc (Dolly Parton the chicken!) but I still found it a little too simple and sweet for my liking. Muriel’s sections feel as if they have only been added to connect the other two.

Meanwhile, Ward’s treatment of Andrea Dworkin, who is the reason I picked this book up, is the biggest disappointment. Although we see Andrea witness big intellectual moments such as the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky in Eindhoven in 1971, we get almost no sense of what her ideas are or how they develop. Her internal monologue consists of vaguely thinking about the plight of women. This is a bit of a travesty. I understand why Ward would be wary of taking on such a significant and controversial feminist figure, but she chose to put her in this novel, and there are also missteps that made me less confident that this sketchy version of Dworkin was a deliberate choice. Most egregiously, she has Dworkin think in 1972:

Beside her fell the shadows of her other selves. The Jewish child who wouldn’t accept religion. The rebellious adolescent who attended a conservative college. The independent young woman who craved the attention of successful men. The headstrong wife who was desperate to please her husband. She blamed her parents for this constant double bind.

Apart from the fluffiness of this internal monologue, I find ‘double bind’ a really unfortunate choice of words here. It has a specific feminist meaning developed by Marilyn Frye in 1983 that is not the simple idea of contradictory motives that Dworkin expresses in this novel. As Frye explains:

One of the most characteristic and ubiquitous features of the world as experienced by oppressed people is the double bind—situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure or deprivation. 

This is a really important chunk of feminist theory because it explains that patriarchy hurts everyone – but it hurts women in specific ways that men do not experience. Men are able to ‘win’ under patriarchy by living up to patriarchal norms, even if those are not options they particularly like. In contrast, women, caught in the double bind, can’t win whatever they do. As Frye explicitly argues, we need to understand the structure of oppression, as ‘it seems to be the human condition that in one degree or another we all suffer frustration and limitation, all encounter unwelcome barriers, and all are damned and hurt in various ways’, and so simply recognising that we often have to make bad choices is not sufficient to explain the way women’s choices are restricted under patriarchy.*

Therefore, fictional Dworkin is using a term here that would not be popularised and adapted by feminists until the 1980s – although it was first coined by anthropologists studying schizophrenia in the 1950s – and she’s using it in the wrong way. She might have experienced tensions between what she wanted and what she was expected to want, but they’re not double binds. She implies she could have lived up to social expectations by picking the ‘right’ option (e.g. being a good Jewish woman or a good wife). While this may seem nitpicky, it sums up my problems with the lack of engagement with the specifics of the historical development of second-wave feminism in this novel, as well as the wafty way that Dworkin is made to think. I’m sure that Ward knows much more than I do about Dworkin’s early writings and so maybe I am wrong about the word choice here, but ‘double bind’ is such an important and misunderstood term that I’d question its inclusion anyway.

I haven’t read anything else by Ward and I’d heard good things about her earlier novels, so this wasn’t the best introduction to her work or writing for me. If you’ve read Love and Other Thought Experiments or The Schoolhouse, do let me know if they worked better! (Also: she gets props forever for having played one of Mombi’s heads in Return to Oz.) Source: NetGalley

*For more on this, see Sukaina Hirji’s analysis of Frye in ‘Oppressive double binds’, Ethics, 131, 4 (2021), open access.

It’s the climb: Crux by Gabriel Tallent

/ Laura / 12 Comments

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Dan and Tamma are finishing up high school and bouldering in their spare time, hitching lifts out into the Joshua Tree National Park in California’s Mojave desert to ‘send’ (complete) tricky trad climbing challenges. Both are acutely aware that they are trying to execute a painful, slow U-turn away from their family histories. Dan’s mother, Alexandra, wrote a bestselling 900-page novel as a teenager that briefly made her a literary darling; but after the failure of her follow-up, she’s written nothing since. With no formal education, Alexandra had no cushion when the money ran out, and so she’s desperate for Dan to go to college, even though he’d rather take a camper van into the desert. Tamma’s mother, Kendra, has always been told she is trailer trash and will amount to nothing, and now is maliciously forcing the same narrative onto Tamma, who’s roped into caring for her niblings after her sister’s husband takes off.

The way Gabriel Tallent tells this story is deliberately larger-than-life, unrealistic, messily open. For the first few pages I found myself tripping over my instinctive reaction of nobody would ever talk like that! and then I just went with it. Tallent does not care for the rules of dialogue. He gives ADHD Tamma, in particular, huge paragraphs of worked-up prose, especially when she’s talking to Dan:

The legends of climbing, dude, lived in caves… But now they’ve been replaced by glossy, anorexic, pampered trust-fund bitches with nine-step skincare routines like Paisley Cuthers! That’s not fair… This is climbing. It’s about facing death and pain and darkness and your own demons to do something cool; to climb is to be almost shitting yourself with fear and yet to make the next move anyway, and what does Paisley Cuthers know about any of that? I don’t want to lose to Paisley Fucking Cuthers, Dan! I want to come out of this empty godforsaken litter box and walk out onto those competition mats and wreck her, wreck her and her flawless, beckoning armpits.’

(When Tamma actually meets Paisley in competition, I was truly delighted to see them bonding over the fact that, despite the surface differences, they’re both weird, awkward obsessives).

Tallent, too, is happy to be explicit about the kind of story he’s telling. Not for him ellipsis or allusion. He lets our characters wring out their thoughts on the page. Dan grapples with the fact that Alexandra and Kendra used to be best friends, and yet had a terminal falling-out. He keeps coming back to this problem, feeling he has to figure out the situation so the same thing doesn’t happen to him and Tamma, and reimagines their last, fatal conversation:

Alexandra is back from some tour abroad for her second book… Kendra is a single mom, living in a trailer with three kids… Kendra stands there and says “I could’ve been a writer if I’d had the chance.” And Alexandra gives her this look… there is this moment where Alexandra can admit to her friend that she is afraid, that she herself fears that she is not a writer… Kendra too is full of rage at the smallness of her life… [But she is] not a girl that can be angry, because an angry girl will never have the things Kendra wants, and so it is not that Kendra is angry… It is that Alexandra can not accept her…

And this thing [Kendra] says, “I could’ve been a writer if I’d had the chance”, is a bid for comfort. Tell me I am not nothing, she is saying… Tell me that I am not alone… [But] with this one word, chance, Kendra seems to suggest that Alexandra does not deserve what she has, and because this is exactly what Alexandra fears to be true, she cannot speak… all she can do is stand there… and give her closest friend in all the world this look, a look of total contempt… a look that says, I would rather be totally alone than extend any generosity to you, in this moment, when I myself am so scared and imperilled.

Just as it seems unlikely that Tamma would talk in the way she does, it is unlikely that Dan would think in this way, that he would be able to give this heartbreakingly accurate account of the ending of their mothers’ friendship. Yet, I think Tallent shows that sometimes you have to get things wrong to get them right; that Dan and Tamma are such emotionally real characters because he isn’t obeying certain writerly rules. And this is before we even get to the fantastic descriptions in Crux: from gorgeous desert scenery to technical unpickings of rock climbs to the illumination of the mundane: ‘Behind them lay the low, rowlike buildings of the high school. Before them: charcoal-covered tarmac; hurricane fencing; a scrubby field of crabgrass and cranesbill; a cinder track, partially flooded by sprinklers; and a horizon gauzy with clouds.’

Tallent has something to say with Crux, and he is definitely going to say it. In the end, it’s Alexandra’s story that becomes the key warning for both Dan and Tamma. Alexandra achieved the greatest success she could have expected but still found her life empty. Tamma learns this lesson earlier than Dan, as she starts to realise that she doesn’t scale boulders for their tops but for their cruxes, the point at which you have to truly commit to yourself and the difficult thing you are trying to do (fellow late 00s young persons sing along with me: ‘it’s the CLIMBBBBBB’). I was totally bowled over by this big untidy book, and I can’t wait to read Tallent’s debut. Source: NetGalley.

Reading Diary, January 19th to February 3rd, 2026

/ Laura / 11 Comments

Because I read multiple books at once, there is some overlap between the end of my last Reading Diary and the start of this one.

George Saunders, Vigil. Jill Blaine once inhabited a physical body, but since her untimely death decades ago she has found herself tasked with ferrying other souls towards the afterlife by being present for them in their final moments. Sometimes, she’s pulled back towards memories of her own happy existence with young husband Lloyd, although she’s always slightly detached from the realm of human language: ‘One “Christmas Eve”, when I had “stomach thingy”, he “called in sick”, yelling at “Sergeant Blue” that, yes, “for crapsake”, he knew they were “short-staffed due to the holidays” but what “the hey” did that have to do with the fact that “his wife, man”… could “barely stand the hell up”?’. Jill also encounters other wandering souls stuck on their own stories, like Clyda and William, who can relate each others’ tales of their deaths word for word even though they don’t really care (‘Then night came on, William said. And I thought: I shall never see another sunrise… I couldn’t believe it, honestly, said Clyda. I actually felt my spine crack’.) But Jill’s latest assignment is a difficult one. She’s been sent to comfort the dying oil tycoon KJ Boone, whose booming business and deliberate manipulation of media narratives about climate change through fake science is one big reason for the world burning.

When I read Saunders’ previous novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, which also deals with lingering spirits, I wrote: ‘he is simply brilliant at making impossible things seem internally coherent. His vision of the afterlife is weird, untidy and as solid as a story you feel like you’ve been hearing all your life.’ Certainly, I would never have picked Vigil up if it hadn’t been by Saunders, and his beautifully bizarre writing is the only thing that saves it. Unlike Lincoln in the Bardo, the set-up of Vigil feels cliched and sentimental; I don’t think I found the novel as preachy as some readers have done because I appreciated how seriously Saunders grappled with Boone’s internal world, but it’s definitely a book with A Message. This is novella-length but it took me a stupidly long time to read because I could only cope with it in very short bursts. I truly admire what Saunders does with words but if you’ve not read him before, I’d recommend you start with Lincoln in the Bardo or his short story collection Tenth of December instead. Source: NetGalley.

Juhea Kim, City of Night Birds. I’m a sucker for books about ballet, so I was always going to enjoy following the trajectory of Natalia, who begins her career as a student in St Petersburg and ends up performing for companies across the world as a prima ballerina. One common pitfall in adult novels about ballet is that they go so all out in decrying the problematic aspects of the art form that they leave no space for our characters to also experience joy, pride and love of the craft, often falling into the Ambitious Women Meet Bad Ends trope. Happily, City of Night Birds is not one of those novels. In fact, its biggest strength is its portrayal of Natalia, who is unashamedly ambitious, and also scarred by the absence of her father and a difficult childhood relationship with her mother; she struggles to form close relationships, although her supportive friendship with fellow dancer Nina is a beacon. Kim does a beautiful job of inhabiting Natalia’s lonely psyche, giving us somebody who is deeply relatable even when she is distant. As for the writing, it’s good enough to carry the novel: Kim relies on a few repeating images, such as a swarm of black birds, that resonate but never really become truly transcendent except in a brief sequence when Natalia goes off her meds and feels she is losing her mind. To be honest, the prose is probably a little too tell-y at times, but I believed so completely in Natalia’s emotional world that I was willing to forgive some clunkiness. The blurb and prologue frame City of Night Birds as a story about Natalia’s relationships with two men, but thankfully it goes far beyond this and gives us a much bigger, more nuanced portrait of somebody who puts art at the centre of her life. Source: Paperback purchase from Collected Books, Durham.

ML Rio, If We Were Villains. These days we’re flooded with dark academia, but I remember when there were far fewer such novels, and they were almost all carbon copies of The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s influence is evident in If We Were Villains, but it’s also one of the most successful examples of this sub-genre that I’ve ever read. Oliver is a final-year theatre student at an exclusive arts college in rural Illinois, immersing himself in Shakespeare alongside a tight group of six other peers. Like Tartt’s classicists, this group have buried themselves so deeply in a different way of thinking that it’s started to affect the way they interact with the world. Most obviously, they throw Shakespeare quotations into their conversations at every opportunity (something that seemed eminently plausible to me, given how long they’ve spent studying these texts); but their relationships with each other are also twisted and heightened because they have to operate at the highest pitches of human emotion during a relentless series of full-fledged performances, improvised scenes and readings.

Tartt’s depiction of her individual characters is unparalleled, but I actually found myself more convinced by the way in which Rio’s group interact with each other. (Perhaps this makes sense, given the contrast between Greek tragedy and early modern theatre?) There’s a buried relationship at the core of this novel that isn’t a twist, exactly, because it’s spottable from the start, but as Oliver gradually realises what is going on, I felt his conflicted emotions and ultimately, his grief and shock. Similarly, Rio doesn’t play games with the reader to hide the identity of the ‘villain’ in this novel – the thematic pattern of the narrative makes it quite clear whodunnit – but how much more satisfying it is to get to experience that journey with the characters rather than being deliberately wrong-footed. Finally, a particular highlight is the way Rio writes the staging of the various plays the characters perform in, from Macbeth to Julius Caesar to Romeo and Juliet to King Lear: she clearly knows her stuff, and I felt as if I was watching by a lake or near a stage spangled with mirrored stars as well. Totally immersive. Source: Kindle Unlimited.

Reading Diary, January 10th to 21st, 2026

/ Laura / 17 Comments

Caroline Palmer, Workhorse. When I was in my very early twenties, commuting from Cambridge to London, working in publishing, and having various bad relationships, one of the comfort books I’d read over and over was Lauren Weisberger’s The Devil Wears Prada. My life had little in common with Andy’s – my job couldn’t have been more laid-back, or my co-workers less fashionable – but something about the totally foreign stresses of her days was intensely soothing. So, having pretty much memorised that novel, I was READY for Workhorse. We’re back in the New York of the early noughties, following another low-ranking editorial assistant who wants more. But while Andy settled for a lot of passive-aggressive complaining and painfully-acquired competence, Clodagh, our alcoholic narrator, is much more determined. She learns the ways of the magazine industry with unnerving focus, and although she can never quite shed a certain awkwardness, she’s a ruthless social climber.

One of the things I most enjoyed about Workhorse is how Clodagh’s narration slowly turns dark and unreliable. She tries to win our sympathy with a narrative about not coming from inherited wealth – being a ‘Workhorse’ rather than a ‘Showhorse’ – but it’s increasingly difficult to buy it, especially as the supposed privilege of her rivals is peeled away. A number of pivotal incidents in the novel are observed by Clodagh with the appropriate emotions, but I found myself wondering whether she’s more involved in making things go her way than she ever tells us. We also gradually sense the looming financial crisis out of the corner of her eye, because she never focuses outside herself for long enough to see what’s coming. It’s a shame, therefore, that Workhorse is easily twice as long as it needs to be, as this blunts the impact of what are some genuinely brilliant set-pieces (the art theft! the power cut! the babysitting debacle!). The book seems to settle down softly into its landing rather than slice towards it because each of these incidents is cushioned by so much filler. And while I can read about early-noughties fashion magazine drama forever (as I say, clocked up approx 1000 re-reads of The Devil Wears Prada), Workhorse really did feel weirdly bloated. I wish it’d had better editing, because it could have been savage. Source: NetGalley.

Emma Donoghue, The Paris Express. I’d seen only lukewarm reviews of this novel set aboard a train travelling from Granville to Paris in 1895, but I’m a Donoghue completist, so I picked it up anyway. And I was pleasantly surprised! Perhaps it helped to be warned in advance about the large cast of characters and the focus on switching from vignette to vignette, but I managed to sort out the key players in my head pretty quickly, and I loved the way Donoghue used this structural choice to give us a cross-section of Parisians at the time. There is, I think, a tension between her cherry-picked cast – she mostly gives us figures who’ve left important traces in the historical record rather than passengers whom we know were actually on this train – and the intentions of the novel. We find out at the beginning that one of the passengers, Mado, is a budding anarchist carrying a bomb in her lunch bucket who’s planning to blow up as much of the train as she can to draw attention to the corrupt governance of France and its empire.

For some of the novel, then, I wondered if Donoghue was going for a kind of Light Perpetual conceit – telling the stories of ordinary people to demonstrate how much would be lost if Mado does upturn that bucket. But, because she stacks the decks with notable figures from a female pioneer of moving pictures to a woman who modelled for Gauguin to a little boy who grows up to be a hero of the French Resistance, this can’t land. To be fair, I think her intention was more to use the confined interior of the train as a way of giving us a slice of Paris in 1895, which is fair enough. And while other reviewers have complained that her research is showing, I still think that Donoghue is so good at finding telling, fascinating historical details that I don’t mind her throwing a few too many of them in, although I agree that she’s written novels where the setting/time period is better integrated (e.g. The Pull of the Stars). I relished finding out about how a fin de siècle steam train takes on water en route, why Montparnasse is called Montparnasse, and how people would actually sell hot coffee from tanks on their backs. Yes, the small bits from the point of view of the train don’t work (why are so many writers letting inanimate objects narrate over the past few years?), but this was an engrossing ride. Source: Jesmond Library #LoveYourLibrary

Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves. I complete my re-read of the unfinished Gentleman Bastards series with a novel that I also remembered less than fondly, although I preferred it to Red Seas Under Red Skies when I first read it. My only memories of this novel were: 1. We finally meet Sabetha, Locke’s long-lost love who’s been teased throughout the first two books; 2. In one thread, set when the gang are teenagers, we have to suffer through a lot of cod-fantasy-Shakespeare as they perform in a play as part of a con; 3. In the present-day thread, Locke and Jean have to manipulate the results of an ongoing election, which could have been a great plot but falls a bit flat; 4. We find out something really disturbing about Locke’s true nature, though obviously nothing disturbing enough that I could remember what it was.

Like Red Seas Under Red Skies, I enjoyed this book more on a re-read, although I think it’s more obviously flawed than either of the first two. Sabetha is a big narrative problem. She arrives trailing so much weight that Lynch struggles to do anything interesting with her, even though he’s clearly realised (possibly after writing book one) that it isn’t great to have your only central female character be defined solely by how mysterious and heartbreaking she is, and he needs to give her more to do. And although he tries hard, it’s not really a problem he can solve given the existing architecture of the series; we might have got some fantastic female pirates in Red Seas but we needed more women in these books from the start (perhaps replacing Calo and Galdo, whom annoy me more whenever they appear on the page). The writing also becomes oddly stilted whenever Locke and Sabetha interact; their dialogue is so convoluted, even though both characters can speak perfectly naturally in other contexts. Plot-wise, the play is boring and the election under-used, but luckily both take up much less space than I’d remembered. And The Republic of Thieves is bookended by two amazingly creepy sequences that make it worthwhile, the first when Locke is being cured of poisoning by some terrifying alchemists, and the second… I’ll avoid spoiling it. I now think that I will read the next in this series if Lynch ever publishes it, which is something I wasn’t sure about when I’d only re-read The Lies of Locke Lamora. Source: already-owned Kindle copy.

Laura Rereading: Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch

/ Laura / 7 Comments

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Mild spoilers for The Lies of Locke Lamora.

Before re-reading: I first read Red Seas Under Red Skies in January 2015, when I was 29. I remembered very little about this sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora other than it starts with main duo Locke and Jean trying to pull off an amazing con in a fantasy version of Las Vegas, but veered far too quickly for my liking into a very different plot where they get entangled with pirates. My impression was that it was a slow and unevenly paced read after the impeccably structured first book. I actually rated it even lower than the third book in the Gentleman Bastards series, The Republic of Thieves, which I really struggled with. I didn’t review any of the series at the time.

After re-reading: Honestly, this has put the wind up me; I feel like all my reading intuitions have been called into question. Red Seas Under Red Skies is actually GREAT. Indeed, I feel confident in saying that it’s better than The Lies of Locke Lamora. When I re-read that one, one of the things I struggled with was the lack of interiority. Obviously, the Gentleman Bastards series doesn’t deal in sophisticated psychological realism, but I was frustrated by the near-omniscient narrator and the amount of head-hopping. Red Seas Under Red Skies, in contrast, focuses on the two central characters, Locke and Jean, and it’s much the better for it, especially as their extended gang in Locke Lamora always felt like placeholders for obvious reasons. The pair’s platonic partnership is also interrogated in a way it wasn’t in the first novel; their bond is challenged from the start as Jean has to deal with Locke’s intense depression after what happened in Camorr, and continues to come under fire.

And while the wider cast here is not complex, they land more satisfyingly on the page than they did in Locke Lamora, especially the pirates. I enjoyed our pirate captain, Zamira, who is also a thirty-nine-year-old black mother of two (Lynch has explicitly said that he wanted to write a wish-fulfilment character for an audience that’s not served as well as nerdy white men), and her first mate, Ezri, who bonds with Jean over both literature and hand-to-hand combat strategies. Tonally, too, Red Seas Under Red Skies worked better for me than its predecessor, which felt a little callous at times. Partly, it’s because this book deals less in gruesome tortures than the last, and partly, it’s because we see more genuine emotion from our quippy heroes, so the violence is less jarring.

I wonder if this re-read is a lesson in managing reader expectations. When I first read Red Seas Under Red Skies, I loved the opening sequence in the Sinspire, an elite gambling tower, so much that I resented being dragged away from it, even though this con takes up a lot more page-space in the book than I’d remembered. Because I knew what was coming this time, I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of Sinspire we got and ready to appreciate the pirate sections for what they were. And while the book does take an about-turn when Locke and Jean are blackmailed into setting out on the high seas, it’s still as beautifully paced as its predecessor. I might hate side-quests in fantasy novels, but this is a truly satisfying one, with some especially hilarious moments as our landlubber heroes try to learn nautical jargon and practice the roles of sea captains:

“Imaginary sailors! Tacks and sheets!” Jean waved his arms and hollered his instructions to the invisible deck hands. “Smartly now, you slothful dogs!”

“Master de Ferra,” called Locke, “that imaginary sailor is not minding his duty!”

Red Seas Under Red Skies starts with a rather cheap and unnecessary trick: a prologue that foregrounds a dramatic incident from late in the novel that ends up amounting to nothing much at all. It might have been better, instead, to give us a scene that signalled the nautical plot, so we knew what was coming. But this 600+ page novel was an absolute, immersive, old-fashioned delight; while I may not have read it in December, it delivered everything I want from a doorstopper. I’ve got to re-read the third one now, haven’t I?

Source: my original paperback copy, which has clearly had a bit of a time of it; I must have dropped it in the bath at some point.

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Rating January 2015: ***1/2

Rating January 2025: ****1/2

Have you ever completely changed your mind about a book after rereading – for better or worse?

2026 Reading Plans

/ Laura / 38 Comments

In this (slightly belated) post, I’ve picked twelve 2026 releases that I am particularly looking forward to, then, as always, added a further eighteen books that I want to read in 2026, whether they are new this year or not.

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George Saunders, Vigil (January 2026). ‘A playful, wise, electric novel taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO, in the twilight hours of his life, as he is ferried from this world into the next.’ I wouldn’t read this if it was written by anybody but Saunders, but I loved Tenth of December and Lincoln in the Bardo, so bring it on.

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Deepa Anappara, The Last of Earth (January 2026). ‘A stunning historical novel set in nineteenth-century Tibet that follows two outsiders—an Indian schoolteacher spying for the British Empire and an English “lady” explorer—as they venture into a forbidden kingdom.’ I found Anappara’s debut, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, uneven but moving, and this blurb is irresistible. I’m impressed that she’s doing something so different, as well.

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Gabriel Tallent, Crux (February 2026). ‘Dan and Tamma are two Californian teenagers growing up dirt poor in the shadows of the Joshua Tree National Park, one of the world’s great rock climbing meccas… Climbing at sun-up, on cliff faces that test their bodies to the limit, is where their friendship is forged. It’s also the one thing that gives them hope. But as their final year of high school unfolds and their climbs become ever more dangerous, and their home lives ever more extreme, it’s inevitable that something is going to snap’. I’ve not read Tallent before but I’m already obsessed by this setting and the focus on friendship and rock-climbing – fingers crossed.

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Senaa Ahmad, The Age of Calamities (February 2026). ‘An electrifying debut collection of alternate and speculative histories, inflected with horror, humour and the fantastic… Henry VIII wants Anne Boleyn dead, but there’s just one small problem – she’s alive again by morning, sipping tea at the breakfast table. In the gilded hush of the Winter Palace, the Romanov sisters slip through time and waltz aboard a star-bound spaceship. A woman on the run strikes a sinister bargain with the ghost of Joan of Arc, but can she reclaim her body in time for sunrise?’ I love all these mini-blurbs and hope these short stories live up to their premise. Also, great cover.

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Asako Yuzuki trans. Polly Barton, Hooked (March 2026). ‘Eriko’s life appears perfect – devoted parents, spotless apartment and a job in the seafood division of one of Japan’s largest trading companies. Her latest project, to reintroduce the controversial Nile perch fish into the Japanese market, is characteristically ambitious. But beneath her flawless surface she is wracked by loneliness. Eriko becomes fascinated with a popular blog written by a housewife, Shoko… But as Eriko’s obsession with Shoko deepens, her increasingly possessive behaviour starts to raise suspicion.’ I found Butter unexpectedly engrossing, so I need to try Yuzuki’s latest.

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Eliana Ramage, To The Moon and Back (March 2026). ‘Steph will let nothing interfere with her dream to become an astronaut, and ultimately, to go to the moon… [But] in her certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with the three women who know and love her most dearly: her younger sister Kayla, an artist whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; her college girlfriend Della, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her family as a young girl through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and her mother Hannah, who has held up her family’s history as a beacon of inspiration to her kids, all the while keeping the truth about her own past a secret.’ This has been on my Kindle for SO LONG because the UK ARCs were released so early, and I know it’s already had rave reviews from others. I’m hoping it will make up for the disappointing Atmosphere (Taylor Jenkins Reid).

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Kelly Yang, The Take (April 2026). ‘Maggie Wang, a broke young Asian American writer, needs a lifeline. Ingrid Parker, a veteran white Hollywood producer with her career on the edge, offers an irresistible deal: $3 million for ten experimental medical sessions to reverse aging, using Maggie as a transfusion partner.’ There are a lot of Asian American takes on the anti-ageing industry out at the moment (to take just one example: Taiwanese-American Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty) but this premise sounds a bit more out there, and so interests me.

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Caro Claire Burke, Yesteryear (April 2026). ‘Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle – and has the social media accounts to prove it. Her charming farmhouse on her working ranch is artfully cluttered, her husband is a handsome cowboy, her homemade sourdough boules are each more beautiful than the last. Then, one morning, Natalie wakes up in a strange, horrible version of reality. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off.’ This has got a LOT of hype and so I’m suspicious, but I’m intrigued by this take on the tradwife trend.

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Portia Elan, Homebound (May 2026). ‘It’s 1983 and Becks can’t wait to get the hell out of Cincinnati. In the meantime, she has work to do: her uncle, the only person who understood her, has left her a half-finished game to complete. What Becks is coding will outlast her by centuries and shape the lives of a scientist, an astronaut and a desperate sea captain in ways she cannot imagine.’ Love everything about this blurb, hope this debut lives up to it.

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Ann Patchett, Whistler (June 2026). ‘When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives.’ After being disappointed by a couple of Patchett’s more recent novels, I unexpectedly adored Tom Lake and now I’m back on the train.

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Jacqueline Crooks, Sky City (August 2026). ‘Sky City – an estate in North London, 1992. After years in a hostel for young homeless women, Jaycee finally has a room of her own, high up in the sky. But the past is not so easily forgotten and her childhood continues to haunt her. When an old classmate, Sol, reappears, he seems to offer her a lifeline. Sol was her first love, and the only person who looked out for Jaycee when they were kids. Can she trust him now?’ I loved Fire Rush, especially the vibrant voice, and I’m excited to read Crooks’s next. No cover yet.

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Emily St. John Mandel, Exit Party (September 2026). ‘2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some good news. The Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party. Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong…’ I felt that Sea of Tranquility was a bit lacklustre, but I’m still a big St John Mandel fan, and I like this premise.

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Sophie Ward, Our Better Natures (February 2026). Adding to the pitifully small amount of fiction that deals with second-wave feminism, Ward’s latest follows three women in 1970s America – one of whom is Andrea Dworkin.

Avery Curran, Spoiled Milk (March 2026). Not gonna lie, it was the Julia Armfield blurb that sold this one to me – she thinks it’s ‘A dirty little jewel of a novel’. Curran’s debut sees a deadly infection sweeping a girls’ boarding school in 1928.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife (March 2026). The latest in the sprawling SF series that began with Children of Time.  I’ve had mixed feelings about all these novels, which shift between being compellingly scary and too cerebral for my tastes, but I’m invested enough to keep going.

Fran Fabriczki, Porcupines  (April 2026). This sounds like a fun one, and I wanted something lighter. In 1989, Sonia moves from Budapest to settle in the States. In 2001, her ten-year-old daughter concocts a scheme to reunite Sonia and the man she believes to be her father.

Ken Liu ed/trans., Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation. I loved Liu’s second anthology Broken Stars and I’m keen to dive into some more short Chinese SF.

Annabel Lyon, The Best Thing For You. I was enormously impressed by Lyon’s writing in her Women’s-Prize longlisted Consent, but I’ve still not read anything else by her. I’m intrigued by this collection of three novellas.

Sayaka Murata trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori, Earthlings. The only Murata in translation that I’ve not yet read, I’ve also been warned that this one is by far the weirdest. I love her writing enough that I’m willing to give it a go.

Grace Perry, The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture. I’m interested in both queer-coding and historicising the 1990s and 2000s, so this sounds up my street.

James Frankie Thomas, Idlewild. Speaking of queer-coding, Thomas’s essays in the Paris Review on ‘YA of Yore’ are one of my absolute touchstones. His debut novel is set in a Manhattan prep school and follows two queer and trans outcasts.

Balli Kaur Jaswal, Now You See Us. This novel focuses on three Filipina domestic workers in Singapore after a fellow maid is murdered and they determine to find out what really happened. I always like an upstairs/downstairs plot.

Peggy O’Donnell Heffington, Without Children: The Long History of Not Being A Mother. I have a load of books about childlessness on my Goodreads TBR but I picked this one for its historical perspective and what sounds like a focus on both childlessness and the choice not to have children – it’s the messy middle ground between the two where my interest really lies.

Keshava Guha, Accidental Magic. I was massively impressed by Guha’s second novel, The Tiger’s Share, and I couldn’t resist the blurb of this one, which focuses on four people whose lives are brought together by Harry Potter. I’m forever fascinated by fandoms.

Isabel Cañas, The Hacienda. I had a lot of fun with Vampires of El Norte and Cañas’s debut sounds like more of the same: set in the aftermath of the Mexican War of Independence, it follows a woman living in a remote house who allies with a priest when she begins to believe it’s haunted.

Elaine Hsieh Chou, Where Are You Really From. Chou’s debut Disorientation remains one of the best things I’ve ever read on cultural appropriation, and I’m keen to read this new collection of short stories.

Alex Gonzalez, rekt. This follows a young man’s descent into the dark web after the death of his girlfriend in a car accident; sounds gory and disturbing. I’m hoping it might be a bit like Matt Wixey’s Basilisk crossed with Black Mirror.

Dayo Forster, Reading the Ceiling. One of the many books I find on my Goodreads TBR and have no idea how it got there in the first place… but it sounds good! Starting off in Gambia, it stars Ayodele, who’s decided to lose her virginity and has three options. But these three different men will lead her on three very different paths. Love a Sliding Doors narrative.

Malka Ann Older, … And Other Disasters. Older’s novel Infomocracy was ambitious but a bit dry for me; however, I love her short fiction and want to read more of it. This collection looks promising.

Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints. While I had issues with Starling’s space horror novel The Luminous Dead, I loved its originality and atmosphere. This one sounds very different but GREAT: it’s a medieval horror novel set in a besieged castle.

Do any of these sound good to you? Have you read any of them? And what books are you most looking forward to in 2026?

Don’t Bury Your Girls: Heteronormativity and Stranger Things

/ Laura / 11 Comments

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El in the finale of Stranger Things.

This post will contain major spoilers for Season 5 of Stranger Things.

In an otherwise predictable and uninspired final episode, the writers of Stranger Things make one brave decision. El, the traumatised teenage girl with psychokinetic powers who has always been one of the central characters of this show, chooses to sacrifice herself to end the cycle of horror perpetuated by the villains. Although some fans have read this as misogynistic and/or as lacking respect for victims of abuse, who need stories beyond those written for them by powerful men, I felt that this ending worked for El. Through a series of conversations with her father-figure Hopper, we understand that this is her way of finally seizing control of her own fate after a lifetime of being controlled by others. I liked, also, that through a narrative device, the writers give us a what-could-have-been future for El, where she escapes somewhere else to heal and rebuild. My interpretation of the ending is that El is 100% dead, but this alternative future shows us the life she might have had and the life she deserved. On a more thematic level, I agree with the showrunners that El entered the narrative in season 1 as something from another world, a cross between ET and a powerful mage, and so she was always going to have to leave our characters behind after the supernatural threat receded.

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El in her ‘possible world’ ending.

And yet, the writers of Stranger Things refused to let El end her life alone, as they should have done. Instead, they kept her shackled to her ‘love story’ with long-term boyfriend Mike, a relationship that has consistently undermined her agency and sense of self. Mike kisses El at the end of Season 1 of this show: while they are both children at the time, El, because of her upbringing in a lab, is significantly socially stunted. By her own admission in Season 5, she did not ‘know how to be a person’ until at least a year later, and it will take her two years to understand that she can choose her likes and dislikes for herself. Mike and El are separated for most of Season 2, but when she returns, she’s scripted straight back into Mike’s heteronormative fantasy as they dance together at a middle school Christmas party.

As El and Mike enter adolescence and actually get to know each other, their relationship worsens. Most worryingly, El is obsessed with, and dependent upon, Mike. In season 3, they spend every day together, mostly making out rather than talking (Mike doesn’t seem to have told El much useful information about the outside world, and her language development remains rudimentary). One day, Mike doesn’t turn up at the assigned time, and only ten minutes later, El is visibly frantic. Because she’s in hiding, Mike is her only social connection, so her panic is understandable but clearly unhealthy. Forced out into the open, El connects with new best friend Max in a montage that marks her most joyful moment in the series, as Max tells her ‘There’s more to life than stupid boys’ and encourages her to dump Mike after he lies to her. Nevertheless, El’s neediness continues as she spies on Mike using her powers – a violation of privacy that he rightly calls out.

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‘There’s more to life than stupid boys!’ El and Max celebrate her dumping Mike.

El returns to her relationship with Mike at the end of season 3, seemingly unable to imagine life without him, and tempted by a crumb of true affection – when the group were discussing sending her into danger, he burst out ‘I love her and I can’t lose her again!’, not knowing she was listening. It’s a confession that he will only repeat once more in the series, and under duress. But for El, this is enough. She patches up their relationship by telling Mike that she loves him too and kissing him, which he receives with more bafflement than happiness. It’s clear that he thought their relationship had run its course before El’s unexpected change of heart.

In season 4, El moves to California and becomes ever more reliant on her memories of Mike as she experiences relentless bullying at school. She builds a shrine to him in her room, and writes him letter after letter which she always signs ‘Love, El’, even though he can’t return the sentiment. When he comes to visit, she jumps into role as the perfect girlfriend, planning a day of romantic activities for them that don’t seem to include things either of them really enjoy. El clearly feels that if she is honest with Mike, she will lose him, so she pretends to have a thriving social life. Once again, she’s acting out what she thinks a teenage girl in a relationship should be like, rather than taking the opportunity to confide in her boyfriend about her unhappiness. In his turn, Mike is oblivious to El’s pain.

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El’s shrine to Mike in Stranger Things 4.

When El finally, courageously, confronts Mike about his inability to say ‘I love you’, he dodges the question, and they break up for a second time, but this one feels different. ‘[It was] the kind [of argument] you can’t come back from’, Mike confides to best friend Will. Even though Mike knows exactly what El needs from him, he won’t tell her to her face that he loves her until Will monologues to him about how much El needs him and encourages him – during the actual moment of truth – to finally spit the words out. And yet Will is not telling Mike about El’s feelings, but his own, pretending that a painting he made for him was commissioned by her. Indeed, many of the things he says in his monologue – ‘You make her feel like she’s not a mistake. Like it’s better to be different’ – are directly contradicted by Mike’s behaviour earlier in the season, when he turned away from El in her moment of greatest need.

Going into season 5, therefore, this relationship felt deeply problematic. And for the entire season, the writers do nothing to mend it. Indeed, all of El’s and Mike’s interactions before the final episode could be read as platonic, and I let myself entertain the hope that they might have broken up, quietly, offscreen. But then, in the finale, El returns to her dependence on Mike with a vengeance. He is the last person she contacts before she goes to her death, and in an emotional speech, she claims that he is the only person who has ‘always understood her’, a claim contradicted by not only his behaviour in the previous four seasons but in season 5 itself, where Mike continually refuses to engage with El’s real worries and fears about the future, feeding her his fantasies about running away together to a place with ‘three waterfalls’ where they can be safe forever.

This is, accidentally but laughably, reflected in a supposedly romantic Mike/El montage during this conversation. While ‘Purple Rain’ plays, we are shown these images of the couple. One depicts El in season 1 dressed up by Mike in his sister’s dress and a blonde wig: the image of forced conformity to femininity, Mike’s idea of what she should look like rather than how she she actually wants to look.  But it gets worse: the images of Mike and El together in this montage also ALL FEATURE WILL, because there are basically no images of them from season 4 when he’s not there unless they’re arguing (romantic!!!).

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The beautiful montage. Credit: thewisewill80sbyers.

After this impressively shameless and unsuccessful retcon, El is the one who reaches out to Mike, who kisses him, who says ‘I love you’. But he still can’t say it back without somebody else cheering him on – even though she is dying. Mike’s reasoning in season 4 for his reticence was that he does love El, but he felt that saying it out loud would make it hurt more if he lost her. There’s a veneer of romance here, and the writers clearly intend for us to sympathise with Mike, who has, after all, lost El once already, in seasons 1 and 2. But when you think about it, and in the wider context of the Mike/El relationship, what Mike is really saying to his girlfriend is: ‘I’ll only say I love you if you promise to stay’.

So El dies, still trapped in the narrative that Mike wrote for them before she learnt how to be a person, before she knew what a boyfriend was, before she experienced any other kind of love. And I am absolutely furious on her behalf, because she deserved to go out on her own terms. It’s a hellish mix of the Born Sexy Yesterday and Fridged tropes, as Mike’s grief over El frames the ending of his own plot – in which he is inexplicably depicted, at least visually, as turning into his miserable, conformist father.

Mike [L] is styled very differently in the finale than he was throughout the series. His messy, curly hair is confined in a more ‘normal’ hairstyle and he wears glasses for the first time, mirroring the presentation of his father Ted [R].

I wrote in my previous post ‘Don’t bury your gays: queer-coding and Stranger Things’ that a love story between Mike and his canonically gay best friend Will, while unlikely to actually happen in season 5, would be a brilliant solution to the narrative problem created by the black hole of Mike. El would have been released from her heteronormative prison, understanding that she can live without Mike, and that his lack of romantic love for her was not her fault. Mike would no longer be a selfish, misogynistic, homophobic prick, but a complex, closeted character struggling with his own emotions. Will wouldn’t have been consigned to being the only central character who never gets to experience reciprocated attraction during the course of the series (seriously, this is a kid who says in season 3 that he’s ‘never going to fall in love’, and the show basically says to him, yep, spot on!). But Stranger Things could have fixed the problems with El’s arc without having to take the even braver step of foregrounding a love story between two boys. Let El and Mike break up long before she dies. Her loss would be no less tragic if they were just very close friends.

It was this shot of Mike and El in the end credits which finally drove me over the edge (Hilariously, they had to cut Will out of this image because, as I’ve said, he literally haunts the heteronormative narrative in season 4):

The end credits sketch vs the actual scene. Credit: crown-prince-zuko

This is a scene in which El was desperately unhappy. Mike, although also trying to act cool, was at least contented to be reunited with his beard girlfriend. But El had sighted her bullies at the roller rink and was dreading a confrontation. She knew the way the night was going, and we see her fixing on a smile. Mike didn’t spot her fears, and he could not help her when they came true. And now we, the audience, are supposed to believe that this is true love lost? That it’s a tragedy that these two can’t be together?

The showrunners have implied that, to an extent, the viewers can choose what they believe about El’s fate in Stranger Things. Well, I can officially announce that I have MADE MY CHOICE. I believe that if El did survive against all odds, she hasn’t reconnected with Mike not only because it’s too dangerous for her but because she doesn’t want to. She’s finally figured out just how badly he treated her: how he never let go of the idea that she was a superhero rather than a human being, how his confident reliance on her powers led to her fake-out death in season 1 and could have led indirectly to her real death in season 5. And I believe she is thrilled that he got just what he deserved: a miserable life where he never faces up to his own homosexuality, watched over forever by the painting that represents the love he could have had, sitting alone in the basement that Will would have happily shared with him for the rest of his life. I believe. I believe!

Have you ever felt that a series you originally loved – book, TV, film or elsewise – took a serious misstep near the end?

My Top Ten Books of 2025

/ Laura / 21 Comments

It’s time for another top ten books of the year list! (You can find my 2024 post here, my 2023 post here, my 2022 post here, my 2021 post here, my 2020 post here, my 2019 post here, my 2018 post here, my 2017 post here, my 2016 post here, my 2015 post here, and my 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 posts on my old blog.) For clarity, these are my ten favourite books I have read this year, regardless of when they were published.

In no particular order…

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1. Old Soul: Susan Barker. This slam-dunk literary horror novel moves from urban legend to Ring/u-style curse to Faustian pact to cosmic terror as it follows an ancient woman who leaves a trail of death and destruction in her wake as she targets her victims. I reviewed it here.

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2. We Do Not Part: Han Kang  [trans. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris]. Intensely real and unreal at the same time, this novel follows writer Kyungha, who had planned to work together with her carpenter friend Inseon on an art installation to commemorate those who died in the massacre on the South Korean island of Jeju in 1948. When Inseon injures herself in a carpentry accident, she asks Kyungha to travel through a blizzard to her isolated cabin on Jeju to save the life of her pet bird, who has been left there alone. Truly, beautifully hypnotic. I reviewed it here.

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3. The Other Valley: Scott Alexander Howard. Many novels are compared to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: this is the first where I’ve felt the comparison was warranted. It depicts life in a valley its inhabitants can never leave, because the valley to the west (or Ouest; this appears to be a French-speaking community) is twenty years in the past, and the valley to the east is twenty years in the future. Captivating and ultimately heartbreaking. I reviewed it here.

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4. The Bombshell: Darrow Farr. The perfect beach read for the anarchist at heart. When Séverine is kidnapped in 1993 by a radical splinter group fighting for Corsican independence from the French mainland, Soffiu di Libertà, the three men who took her soon realise they’ve bitten off more than they can chew. After reading Franz Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth] and a biography of Jane Fonda, she decides she should become the face of the revolution. Both very funny and very serious, The Bombshell has been haunting me ever since I read it. I reviewed it here.

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5. Basilisk: Matt Wixey. My reading experience of the year, if not the decade, this follows an ethical hacker, Alex, who starts working through an online series of puzzles set by the mysterious figure of The Helmsman; it’s claimed that if you solve them all, you will be presented with his basilisk, a cognitive weapon that consists of just four words. If you read these words, they will shatter your perception of reality and may drive the unprepared mad. Indeed, most of the people who have seen the basilisk are now dead. Basilisk is a chilling horror and gripping techno-thriller, but it also has a lot to say about how deeply we crave knowledge at all costs. I reviewed it here.

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6. The Echo Maker: Richard Powers. Mark wakes up in hospital after a terrible truck accident that should have killed him. He’s experienced a traumatic brain injury, but appears to be on the road to recovery – except that he no longer recognises his own sister, Karin. A twisty, beautiful novel of ideas, but also a book about the ways in which we can never really know another person, and hence how valuable the connections we can make are; both Mark and Karin remain permanent mysteries to each other, despite the closeness of their sibling bond. I reviewed it here.

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7. The Raven Scholar: Antonia Hodgson. Ah, I can’t remember this epic fantasy novel without a smile. It was just such pure fun. In the walled capital city of Orrun, seven contenders arrive to compete to be the next emperor. Court scholar Neema is unexpectedly drawn into the trials after one of the hopefuls is murdered. I loved Hodgson’s lightness of touch, the court politics, and the genuinely convincing romantic sub-plot. I reviewed it here.

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8. Sky Daddy: Kate Folk. Yes, I didn’t think a novel about a woman who is sexually attracted to aeroplanes would make it into my top ten, either. I loved our hilarious and sympathetic narrator, Linda, and the way in which her obsession throws the weirdness and futility of all our life aspirations into relief. I reviewed it here.

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9. Woman At The Edge Of Time: Marge Piercy. This feminist utopian SF classic was right up my street – thanks to all those who recommended it to me. Our narrator, Connie, spends the novel incarcerated in an abusive mental institution in New York State, her suffering only interrupted by a visitor from the future, who is able to transport her into their society and show her how the world could be built differently. I loved its Ursula Le Guin esque vision of an alternative way of living in community; I’ve rarely read a utopia that feels so realistic and yet so enviable. I reviewed it here.

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10. Into Thin Air: Jon Krakauer. I read this non-fiction first-person account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster near the end of the year when I had little energy for blogging, and so I didn’t review it. But it’s an absolute masterclass in how to tell a true story. Krakauer expertly interweaves necessary background information and evocative context with the horrifying facts of the deaths on the mountain, and refuses to default to moral absolutes; as he says, if we position this as a ‘lesson to be learnt’, people will simply believe that they won’t make the same mistakes as the protagonists of this tragedy, and so stray into more danger. Since 1996, almost 200 people have died climbing Everest,  significantly more than died before 1996, which reflects the commercialisation of the climb and the idea that it ought to be a ‘bucket list’ goal.

Commendations

I don’t have the bandwidth this year to do a separate post, so I’ll briefly mention a few other books I think deserve a shout-out, with links to my reviews where they exist. Colwill Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh was, interestingly, one of the four books I gave five stars to this year but the only one of the four not to make it into my top ten. Thinking back on the novel, although I still loved its full-throttle evocation of early 00s teenage life, I guess I felt it was less than the sum of its parts. Indeed, the novel that came closest to making my top ten and just missed out was not Brown’s but Christine Murphy’s Notes on Surviving the Fire, a smart, moving novel about a working-class PhD student dealing with her own sexual trauma as she writes a thesis on Buddhist justifications for violence and tries to survive in a world that is literally and metaphorically burning. Only the tacked-on ending let it down. Because I didn’t review it at the time, I also want to praise Kayla Rae Whitaker’s The Animators, a delightfully knotty and messy novel about two women who become a dynamic team in the world of animated film while bounding over their stigmatised ‘white trash’ upbringings in central Florida and rural Kentucky. Finally, Santanu Bhattacharya’s Deviants is a nuanced look at three generations of gay men in and around what was once India’s ‘garden city’ and is now its ‘silicon plateau’, Bengaluru, refreshingly tracing uncle-nephew connections rather than father-son and refusing to buy into simple narratives of societal progress.

Reading Stats

I read 139 books in 2025, which meant I didn’t meet my target of 150 and read less than I have since 2017. This was entirely due to December being a washout rather than being a trend through the entire year, so I’m not especially bothered. In 2026, I’ll again set a target of 150. Of the 139 books I read, only 3 were rereads, which meant I actually reread less this year for the second year running, despite wanting to reread more.

I read 106 books by women (including 2 trans women) and 33 books by men. The usual showing for men this year at 23% of my total reading, but they punch above their weight by taking 4 out of 10 of the spots in my top ten. As ever, I tend to be more discerning when picking books by men.

I read 47 books by writers of colour and 94 books by white writers, meeting my target of making sure roughly a third of books I read are by writers of colour (34% this year).

Finally, here’s what Goodreads thinks was My Year In Books: 

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