This page links to all the Talk about books posts for 2025. Earlier posts can be found on the archive pages for 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2020/1. The most recent posts (about a year’s worth) are on the main archive page.

Against self-slaughter: Three short novels by Muriel Spark
30-Nov-2025
A discussion of The Driver’s Seat, Loitering with Intent and A Far Cry from Kensington.

Some other time: Ian McEwan, The Child in Time and Atonement
15-Nov-2025
Time, childhood and irreversibility in two novels by Ian McEwan

War games: Stefan Zweig, Chess; Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Watched Trains
01-Nov-2025
Two translated novellas from the recent Penguin Archive series, set at the beginning and end respectively of the Second World War.

The anti-intentionalist fallacy and the usefulness of paraphrase
18-Oct-2025
A rather outdated, and probably redundant, argument that, in literary criticism, intentionalism is not a fallacy nor is paraphrase a heresy.

Her story to tell?: Laura Lippman, Dream Girl; Rebecca F Kuang, Yellowface
04-Oct-2025
Two novels that deal with allegations of plagiarism, with authors suspected of telling the stories that should more properly be told by others

Fantastic and grotesque: Sarah Hall, Sudden Traveller
20-Sep-2025
The short stories in Sarah Hall’s collection, Sudden Traveller (2019) at first seem vaguely disturbing. On closer examination, several of them turn out to be very disturbing indeed.

“Lady you deserve this state”: Second person singular pronouns in Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”
06-Sep-2025
A look at Andrew Marvell’s use of second person singular pronouns in “To His Coy Mistress” (and a few paragraphs about “The Gallery”)

Care and maintenance: Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives
16-Aug-2025
Caoilinn Hughes’s third novel is about four sisters who go to varying lengths to avoid each other’s solicitude, even when they might need it.

Making herself understood: Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times
02-Aug-2025
Naoise Dolan’s first novel is among much else an exploration of language as both a medium of communication and a vast and complex human artefact. Her Substack reflects similar interests.

Not from any other place: Mavis Gallant, Home Truths
19-Jul-2025
A discussion of seven of the stories in Mavis Gallant’s collection Home Truths (1985), including the Linnet Muir sequence.

A period of transition: Kate Atkinson, Not the End of the World
05-Jul-2025
The stories in Kate Atkinson’s 2002 collection, Not the End of the World, are linked or interconnected, but unusually closely.

Honour and policy, a Martian perspective: William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
22-Jun-2025
Following from my previous post on Shakespeare’s Roman plays, in which I discussed Julius Cæsar and Antony and Cleopatra, here’s what I have to say about Coriolanus.

“I think it’s only fair”: Chris Power, Mothers
07-Jun-2025
A look at Chris Power’s short story collection from 2018, Mothers.

Random thoughts about determinism: Brian Klaas, Fluke
24-May-2025
Brian Klaas’s nonfiction book, Fluke, revived my dormant interest in determinism, free will, chaos theory and more, and integrated them into a stimulating argument.

“Detective-fever”: Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
10-May-2025
The Moonstone, we are told, is “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.” But perhaps that’s not where its main interest lies.

Noblesse désoblige: Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat
27-Apr-2025
Daphne du Maurier’s novel, The Scapegoat, is set roughly contemporaneously with its publication (1957) in the aftermath of the Second World War. When two doppelgängers, a French aristocrat and an English lecturer in French history, swap identities, neither gets quite what he was expecting.

“Some colour at least of justice”: Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
13-Apr-2025
Henry Fielding’s 1749 novel is centrally concerned with justice (particularly natural justice) and the difficulty of knowing the truth. And more besides (it’s a long novel), but I focus on these two themes.

More about Browning’s music poetry: “Abt Vogler” and “With Charles Avison”
23-Mar-2025
A continuation of a previous post in which I discussed two of Robert Browning’s poems about music (“A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”). In this one, I’m writing about “Abt Vogler” and “With Charles Avison”.

The law of war: Scott Turow, Ordinary Heroes and Testimony
09-Mar-2025
In wartime and its aftermath, the pursuit of some approximation of justice is represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the military who do the actual fighting and the lawyers, some of whom attempt to ensure that legality is maintained. These are their stories.

Strange and cruel: Liz Nugent, Our Little Cruelties and Strange Sally Diamond
22-Feb-2025
Liz Nugent’s two most recent novels have several things in common — terrible parents and alternating first-person narratives, for starters — but they offer very different reading experiences, partly because of the more interesting characters in the second book.

Gay best friends: Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident, and Belinda McKeon, Tender
09-Feb-2025
Two novels by Irish women writers, published in the last 10 years but each set 13 to 18 years earlier, feature intense friendships between a straight young woman — a college student or recent graduate — and a slightly older gay man.

Against community: Wendy Erskine, Sweet Home
27-Jan-2025
Wendy Erskine, whose first novel will be appearing soon, is perhaps the most remarkable short story writer working in or to have emerged from Northern Ireland. In this post, I take a look at her first collection, Sweet Home.

Content warning: Sexual violence in Kate Atkinson’s One Good Turn
11-Jan-2025
An essay in the LRB about the Pelicot rape trial unexpectedly sent me back to the second book (of six) in Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series.