Guest review by Susan Elkin: DRAYTON AND MACKENZIE by Alexander Starritt

"Intelligent and compelling without ever resorting to shallow literary pretentiousness. I loved it – and wondered why on earth it wasn't on the Booker Prize longlist."

Susan Elkin taught English in secondary schools for 36 years, latterly developing a parallel career as a writer. Since 1990 she has written over 5000 articles for newspapers and magazines, English text books, how-to books for teachers, a book about careers in theatre and latterly four volumes of memoir: Please Miss We’re Boys (2019), The Alzheimer’s Diaries (2022), All Booked Up (2024) and This Writing Business (2025). Her first foray into fiction - Unheard Voices: Tales from the Margins of Literature -  is out now. Susan lives in South London.

It’s unusual to read a book which explores and celebrates male friendship with all its affectionate joshing, trust and respect. We’re so used to reading about male/female liaison in its many forms and/or about gay love that pure, loving friendship between two men is a refreshing change.

Alexander Starritt’s new novel, which is both moving and absorbing, gives us James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie who meet at Oxford and are very different. James is a focused, super-bright, high achiever who doesn’t always relate comfortably to other people. Roland has people skills, enjoys a good time and messes up his degree. So they hardly notice each other. Later they meet again, find a bond and start an innovative energy company – it has potential, perhaps, but of course investment is an issue and there are many setbacks. Some of the stumbling blocks are driven by phases of differing commitment and loyalty as the novel inches, via its dated sections, towards the Covid years. The complementary relationship between the two of them is like a love affair as they bicker, fall out and rediscover each other repeatedly. Rarely have I read a novel with stronger characterisation.

The minor characters are wonderful too. James’s long-suffering parents, with whom he lives most of the time, are a delight. Both are academics. They take in Roland as a quasi family member and Arthur’s therapeutic, culinary hobby saves the day on more than one occasion. Then there’s Eleni, a rich successful Greek they knew at university who can always be relied on for sensible advice. Alice goes out with James for a while but Roland is easier to be with and, somehow, the two men come round to accommodating the change in dynamic. Some of the characters are real too. It must have been fun to write Drayton and Mackenzie’s meeting with Elon Musk.

Is there a future in tidal energy or hydrolisers? I’m no scientist but Starritt, who has clearly researched it all pretty scrupulously, convinces me that there probably is although there are many heart-in-mouth moments at the beginning, not least when the diver descends to attach the first cable. Starritt is very good at tension and brilliant at naturalistic dialogue. He also excels at the agony of loss because, of course, life is messy – in novels as in reality.

The novel’s epilogue pitches us forward twenty years so we do actually find out how successful it eventually all was. And I cried. Drayton and Mackenzie – the book’s title is, of course, the name of the company – got under my skin in a way that no recent novel has done for a while. It’s intelligent and compelling without ever resorting to shallow literary pretentiousness. I loved it – and wondered why on earth it wasn't on the 2025 Booker Prize longlist.

Drayton and Mackenzie is published by Swift Press.

See also our Q&A with Susan about her reading memoir, All Booked Up.

Guest review by David Breakell: PRECIPICE by Robert Harris

 

"Historical fiction is not just a passport to the past. It can also give us a new perspective on our contemporary world: some things don’t really change."

David Breakell, formerly a lawyer in the City of London and now a writer of historical fiction, reviews the latest novel from a titan of the genre, Robert Harris. Earlier this year, David published The Alchemist of Genoa, a novel set in the late 16th century, earlier this year. He is currently working on the sequel. Find out more from his website. 

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” L P Hartley’s famous opening line is about memory, the loss of innocence, moral decline. But it could be seen as an explanation for the allure of historical novels, a brand motto even. One writer with a much-stamped passport to that undiscovered country is Robert Harris. His novels cover the broadest sweep of history, from pre-imperial Rome to the present-day Vatican, from feudal England to fin-de-siècle Paris, all without a hint of jet lag.

This time, Harris takes on the much-visited summer of 1914 and finds something new to say. His microscope focuses on a few square yards of Political London and an odd-couple romance between the married 62-year-old Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and the young, unmarried, Venetia Stanley.

The affair, mostly conducted by letter and occasionally in the back of the PM’s limousine, proceeds decorously as befits the times, but is nevertheless shocking. Not only in terms of Asquith’s cavalier attitude to sharing state and military secrets with his lover, but also his sense of priorities considering what was in his ministerial red box at the time. These are the PM’s actual letters that Harris quotes from the archive – he recreates Venetia’s letters to the PM, because Asquith burnt them after resigning – and there are hundreds of them. Often, Asquith wrote to her three times a day. How on earth did he find the time?

Harris is a seasoned political observer so the context – Asquith scribbling his gushing love notes in Cabinet just as Churchill is explaining the details of the Gallipoli campaign or arguing with Kitchener – is expertly handled.

Equal prominence is given to Venetia’s side of the story. She is the daughter of an aristocratic, landed family but her perspective is thoroughly modern. We can admire her spirit but wonder at her judgment. Eventually, she realises that the affair must end and engineers it by fairly drastic means. If there is a doubt in this reader’s mind about Harris’ version of Venetia, it relates to her keeping the whole thing secret for so long, even from her closest family. Not so much the affair itself, but the state secrets she has become privy to. These feel like an intolerable burden, especially when her brothers and brothers-in-law are called up to serve and Venetia knows more – through Asquith’s indiscretions – about the military campaigns in which they’re participating than almost anyone in the country. Despite that, she shares none of this knowledge, resolutely protecting Asquith’s reputation.

To raise the stakes, Harris writes a parallel story. Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, a Scotland Yard policeman seconded to the embryonic MI5, is on the hunt for German spies. Deemer is a bachelor whose modest background makes him an outsider in the officer-class security service. Half-way through the book, the two stories collide when Deemer starts to suspect that Asquith and Venetia are exchanging more than endearments. Deemer’s pursuit of them - pure detective work – propels the story at pace and, as importantly, gives us a moral character who points up the somewhat naïve antics of the PM. I was occasionally reminded of J B Priestley’s An Inspector Calls with its similar period milieu and its eyebrows raised at the self-indulgence of the privileged classes. But Deemer is no avenging angel like Inspector Goole. He passes no judgment, other than a legal one, on Asquith’s indiscretions and even feels uneasy about steaming open the lovers’ correspondence.

The world we left behind in 1914 is skilfully evoked. London, with its twelve postal services a day, a city where Downing Street is an unguarded backwater and a Prime Minister can walk into a large bookshop and not be recognised. But historical fiction is not just a passport to the past. It can also give us a new perspective on our contemporary world: in a novel where leaders are too powerful to prosecute, where the security services collude with media mag
nates, where politicians are playing footsie under the table – or just golf – while presiding over the fate of the world, it reminds us that some things don’t really change.

Precipice is published by Penguin.

See also David's review of Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson

David's novel The Alchemist of Genoa is published by Dower House Books - look out for a Q&A early next year. 

ALBION by Anna Hope, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Combines typical ingredients of the big house novel and family saga with deep questions about individual responsibility, whether wrongs of the past can be righted, how we adapt to climate change and nature loss, and what kind of future we can shape."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She is a writer, reviewer and active campaigner on animal and environmental issues. Her latest novel, published earlier this year, is The One True Thing. 

The big country house as a fictional setting has enduring appeal. Names come readily to mind: Downton Abbey, Brideshead, Manderley, Mansfield Park, Brandon Hall (see Graeme Fife's recent review of The Go-Between) and countless more, including the recent Saltburn. The house in Anna Hope's latest novel differs from these others in never being named, though it's certainly as grand as any of them - an eighteenth-century Greek Revivalist mansion standing in a thousand acres of Sussex pasture and woodland. The name we focus on isn't that of the house, but of the Albion Project - a ten-year rewilding project that certainly owes much to the influential and nearby Knepp Castle estate, obliquely referred to. As with the Knepp project, the ambition of owner Philip Ignatius Brooke and daughter Frannie is to extend beyond their own boundaries, creating a green corridor that will reach through Sussex and Kent countryside to the sea. 

Now Philip has died, and the novel's action takes place over five days in May during which the family reassembles for his funeral. Of his three children only Frannie, the eldest, still lives there, and is in the process of moving with her young daughter into the main house, while Philip's widow, Grace, will take over their cottage. Philip himself had inherited house and estate at just eighteen when both parents were killed in a car crash; he set up what became known as 'the English Woodstock', a festival known and fondly remembered as The Teddy Bears' Picnic. There he met his future wife, leading to a marriage from which she wishes she'd had the courage to escape. While she remained at home with the children,  he did escape - to New York, where he settled for years with another partner (and possibly another child?) before returning and zealously taking up the rewilding scheme.

Anna Hope loses no time in showing us the spiky relationships and resentments of the three grown-up children, Frannie, Isa and Milo. Frannie is named as heir in their father's will, to the disapproval of brother Milo; she in turn is impatient with Isa, who's barely been in contact; Milo, recovering from various kinds of addiction, plans an exclusive rural retreat in the grounds in which, bizarrely, he aims to convert the 1% who can afford it into benevolence that will benefit the whole of society. Frannie, faced with paying millions in inheritance tax, is desperate to find the money somehow, fretting as she tries to write her father's eulogy; Grace, relieved to exchange the house she hates for the cottage, has ambivalent feelings about her late husband and how she'll express them at his funeral. Isa, distancing herself from wealth and privilege, is a teacher in London, scornful of her sister's enterprise: "The shepherd's huts, the yurts, the caravan serving lattes to middle-aged white people while they sit on hay-bales and chatter about their Pilates teachers and their dogs. A theme park for solvent fifty-somethings, all of it about as wild as a fucking printed tea-towel." Meanwhile, seven-year-old Rowan is showing what her class teacher sees as a disturbing fascination with bodily decomposition after death.

Into this potent mix comes a young American PhD student, Clara, with a bombshell to drop. Most readers will see what's coming, but that doesn't lessen the impact when she chooses her moment to reveal the source of the estate's wealth. With mesmerising clarity, calmness and precision she compels the family to listen, making eloquent use of her encounter with Rowan playing with a box of shells.

What next? How will these descendants of Oliver Ignatius Brooke adjust to the knowledge of the vast injustices (more than one) that underpin their privilege?

I first came across this novel when it was dramatised as Radio 4's Book of the Week earlier this year. There, I thought the repercussions of Clara's revelation were disappointing, too glibly and swiftly dealt with, so I wanted to see how Anna Hope handles this in the novel. Even here, though, I'm not sure. There are various reconciliations: too many and still too quickly, because of the constraints of the five-day structure. Frannie is the one whose ending is left most open-ended and uncertain as she confronts difficult questions, both practical and ethical.

That reservation aside, I found Albion utterly compelling: it combines typical ingredients of the big house novel and family saga with deep questions about individual responsibility, whether - and how - wrongs of the past can be righted, how we adapt to climate change and nature loss, what kind of future we can attempt to shape and who will benefit. The pace is leisurely enough to draw us fully into the family's concerns, while never seeming slow; tensions crackle off the page while the depictions of the natural world are vivid and immediate, whether portraying the woodland in May extravagance, the brisk extermination of a pregnant mink or the dawn song of a nightingale. I hadn't read Anna Hope before, so this is a very impressive introduction.

Albion is published by Penguin.

See also Anna Hope's Expectation, reviewed by Claire Grint of Cogito Books, Hexham.

Linda Newbery's The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing.

Guest review by Sarah LeFanu: UNDER THE NET by Iris Murdoch

 

"Her joy in thinking and observing, in the vagaries of the emotions, in the pleasures of friendship, and in the pursuit of love, are all vividly present in her very first, utterly delightful novel."

Photograph: Lindsey Fiddler

Sarah LeFanu is a biographer whose subjects include Rose Macaulay, Samora Machel, Mary Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle. She has published two memoirs that focus on the process of biographical writing: Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal and Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A quintessential Iris Murdoch novel would feature a group of highly intelligent people caught in a chain of unrequited love, struggling to find meaningfulness in the random events of chance, and thinking deeply. They often think about how to be good. For some readers The Sea, The Sea is the classic, for others The Bell, or The Black Prince, or A Severed Head. Murdoch published twenty-six novels, so there are many to choose from. My own current favourite is her very first, Under the Net, published in 1954. It is a high-spirited and frequently hilarious exploration of how to live and how to be good, in the form of an extended caper through the streets and spaces of the narrator’s ‘beloved London’ (with an intermezzo in Paris).

Chronically short of money, reliant on what he gets from translating not-very-good French novels and on the goodwill of others, narrator Jake Donoghue finds, at the opening of the novel, that he and his sidekick Finn have been thrown out of their current nesting-place and must find somewhere else to live.

Besides Finn, Jake’s friends and acquaintances include Hugo Belfounder whom he first meets at a cold-cure research establishment (for penniless Jake ‘an incredibly charitable arrangement’), who is a rich inventor, a thinker, and owner of a film studio; Dave Gellman, a lecturer in philosophy whose flat in Goldhawk Road offers a floor if not a bed for Jake and Finn; Lefty Todd, eccentric leader of the New Independent Socialist Party; folk singer Anna Quentin for whom Jake yearns, and her sister, would-be film star Sadie; enigmatic cat-loving Mrs Tinckham who runs a grubby ‘accommodation address’ newsagent off Charlotte Street. And Mister Mars, a canine film star kidnapped (amateurishly) by Jake and Finn, who becomes Jake’s loving accomplice.

Some of these people are met by accident; others are pursued for one reason or another. All form part of an intricate, shifting pattern, pattern rather than plot, for this is a story about chance, luck, misunderstandings, reversals, money that comes unexpectedly and vanishes just as fast. There is unrequited love (Hugo: ‘Jake, you’re a fool. You know anyone can love anyone, or prefer anyone to anyone’), but this is also a novel about friendship.

Under the Net is rich in observed detail. Jake and his friends move through a London that is not yet recovered from the depredations of war, a London of ruined churches and rosebay willowherb. They wander from Shepherd’s Bush to the Holborn Viaduct, from which they look down on Farringdon Street which ‘swept below us like a dried up river’, to City pubs and to the Bounty Belfounder film studio in south London. In the early hours of one morning three of them swim in the Thames when the tide is on the turn and the moon is ‘scattered in pieces’ upon the water.

In between his pondering on inevitability, on fate, on the astonishing fact that the not-very-good French novelist’s latest novel has just won the Prix Goncourt, Jake amiably shares his views and opinions with the reader, and somehow makes us willingly complicit in the most egregious situations. ‘If you have ever tried to sleep on the Victoria Embankment,’ he declares, ‘you will know that the chief difficulty is that the seats are divided in the middle.’ He leads us through a series of wild and comic set pieces (the kidnapping of Mister Mars, the pursuit of Anna through the Tuileries, the clash between Lefty Todd and right-wing agitators at the studio) to an extraordinarily intense climax, which takes place at night on a hospital ward when devastating truth is revealed, but revealed in whispers so as not to arouse the suspicions of the Sister on duty.

Iris Murdoch’s reputation took a trashing, soon after her death in 1999, from an unsavoury memoir published by her husband John Bayley which charted her decline into dementia. I am glad to say that that has been succeeded more recently by biographical and critical accounts that celebrate her wide-ranging interests: her appetite for philosophy, for literature and for love affairs. Her joy in thinking and observing, in the vagaries of the emotions, in the pleasures of friendship, and in the pursuit of love, are all vividly present in her very first, utterly delightful novel Under the Net.

Under the Net is published by Vintage Classics (Murdoch Series)

Dreaming of Rose - a Biographer's Journal by Sarah LeFanu is published by Handheld Classics.

Bookseller feature: Richard Hayden of THE RYE BOOKSHOP chooses CRAFTLAND by James Fox

 

"Craft, it is implied, is for hobbyists at home; instead, this tiny and shrinking minority do work. Hard work ... "

Richard Hayden and Emma McGrath

Launched ten years ago, The Rye Bookshop is one of the smallest in Waterstones’s range of boutique unbranded shops. All the stores in this select portfolio are in small towns and are granted greater autonomy and independence. As one might expect from a rural location, Rye specialises in nature writing but also features a wide selection of local books, the very best in new fiction and non-fiction, and a lovingly curated children’s section. 

Perhaps the first thing to strike you when you start reading James Fox’s Craftland is how few practitioners of the various skills on show actually consider themselves craftsmen or women. Craft, it is implied, is for hobbyists at home; instead, this tiny and shrinking minority do work. Hard work. 

Once, Britain was an entire land of manual workers, designers, builders, tinkerers, engineers, smiths, wrights, coopers, bodgers and Uncle Tom Cobley and all – people skilled with their hands and who profoundly understood their land and (whisper it) their craft. 

Fox sets out to show us that the country still produces the things it has always produced, just in far fewer and, regrettably, ever decreasing numbers, skills stripped away by dynamic changes in the local, national and global economies. 

As such, Craftland begins as a journey around the UK, looking for the pre- and post-industrial trades that have for varying reasons begun to fade away. It asks can they be saved? Should they be saved? The answer to both, of course, is yes, but Fox takes the questions further and looks at how it could (or, indeed, can) be done. 

During his search, Fox can often appear wide-eyed, almost naive, in his initial comprehension, but he is never mawkish nor sentimental. In fact, as he learns the details of the work and challenges, so the hardness of the lives lived by many of the practitioners is accented in his writing. These are often difficult lives. Hard but fulfilling. There are no wistful lingering looks back at a supposed long-lost comfortable bucolic existence.

 Instead, he explores the extent of the problems and then considers solutions: some theoretical, others already being put into practice. The significant issue faced by most of the British crafts featured is that as the economies around them changed so, too, did the nature of demand. For instance, Fox charts how hedges and fences replaced the dry-stone walls of farms in Northern England and Scotland simply because they were cheaper and easier to maintain. 

But, as Fox shows, many crafts can be repurposed to suit a modern market, saving the skillset from extinction – such as those dry-stone wall builders who now renovate property boundaries of private homes rather than miles of sheep farm. Or the woman who rescued river reed harvesting and turned it into an international export industry. Crucially, these efforts are not driven by charitable funding or heritage grants but by pure business sense. 

Craftland succeeds wildly in delivering upon its thematic promise. It is also a literary study in quality, written as it is in wonderfully accessible language and with a structure that explores its ideas clearly and with colour. Each chapter ends on a philosophically inclined portrait of the craft in action – renovated church bells ringing out for the first time in decades was an especially emotive sequence. 

In addition to the history and the interviews, Craftland is also full of amazing details about unique human elements of our home country, such as the fact that there are 5,000 change-ringing bell towers in England but only 300 in the rest of the world. Or that Scottish thatchers don’t use wheat straw or water reed, as their English counterparts do, but the much more recalcitrant local bracken, heather, marram grass or a whole host of other tough plants. 

Ultimately, Craftland is a history of the past but also of the present. Or, as Fox himself says: ‘The book is nostalgic... for the skills and traditions we think are gone but are actually all around us.’ There is also sadness within its pages as it charts Britain’s passage from the world’s workshop to the more service-based economy that is has become, showing the decline in manufacture, skill-based crafting, and the supply chain-led communities that once thrived here. 

While it admits that Britain is not necessarily materially poorer for that progress, it is perhaps socially and spiritually worse off. Or, at least, deeply changed in a way that has left many bereft. Craftland hopes to highlight the occasional hopeful streams of light that point to the benefits of human manufacturing: as much a history of a potential future as one of a recent past.

Craftland is published by Bodley Head.

Guest review by Catherine Butler: THE TALE OF GENJI by Murasaki Shikibu, translated by Kencho Suematsu

 

"Gradually you are training yourself to see and think your way into a radically different world. And that is a rich reward."

Catherine Butler is Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University. Her academic books include Four British Fantasists (2006), Reading History in Children’s Books (with Hallie O’Donovan, 2012), Literary Studies Deconstructed (2018), and British Children’s Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking-Glasses (2023), as well as several edited collections, the latest of which (on Watership Down) will appear in 2026. She has also published six novels for children and teenagers. Catherine is Editor-in-Chief of Children’s Literature in Education.

My interest in Japanese culture came late. I only turned to the subject seriously when I was about fifty. Watching anime with my daughter spurred me to start learning the language (I had found anime subtitles highly implausible), and from there history, food and modern literature soon followed. Eventually I began visiting the country, making Japanese friends, and even wrote a book about the influence of British children’s literature on Japan.

Older literature, however, was still a closed book. Yes, I’d dipped into Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, and enjoyed its observations of nature and of manners, its wistful appreciation of fleeting beauty, and all those qualities that I had learned to think of as ‘quintessentially Japanese’. But for a long time I neglected that other great work of the Heian court, by Sei Shōnagon’s contemporary and rival, Murasaki Shikibu: The Tale of Genji. (It’s an intriguing fact that the two most famous writers of Heian Japan were women.)

When I did get around to The Tale of Genji, I expected it to be a tale of warriors, fighting monsters or each other and dying nobly. I knew that it had been written at around the same time as “The Battle of Maldon”, and for some reason assumed that everyone at the turn of the millennium must have been writing the same kind of story.

Such was not the case. The Tale of Genji is difficult to pin down in Western genre terms. We might call it a Bildungsroman, a story of manners, a tragi-comic romance, an essay in aesthetics, occasionally even a romp. The setting is the imperial Heian court, where Genji – handsome, charming and both sexually and romantically promiscuous – is the son of the Emperor by one of his lowlier concubines. As an imperial prince, with access to wealth and deference but with little in the way of political power, Genji devotes much of his time to romance. (Later chapters see political intrigues become more dominant, but the heart of the story – at least in the abridged form in which it is normally published in the West – lies in Genji’s youth.)

Heian court ladies were hidden from male view, and for a would-be lover to gain access demanded considerable ingenuity, not least in the writing of poetry, skill in which was one of the main means by which they could prove themselves worth the risk a lady ran by giving him admittance. That risk was considerable, but intrigue may have been one of the few ways to relieve what must (or so it seems to modern eyes) have been a life of sustained tedium. Some of Genji’s affairs are mutually pleasurable, some fizzle out or end in rejection or even tragedy. At times Genji seems sincere, at others shallow and careless. His character develops page by page and year by year. The challenge of understanding his feelings or those of his lovers at the distance of a thousand years and several thousand miles is considerable; but for me, the partial illegibility of the world of the story is what makes The Tale of Genji so fascinating. It’s like visiting a country where you are uncertain of the customs and assumptions. The chances of misunderstanding or making a faux pas are high, but gradually you are training yourself to see and think your way into a radically different world. And that is a rich reward.

The Tale of Genji is published by Tuttle Publishing.

Guest review by Cindy Jefferies: THE HUMMINGBIRD by Sandro Veronesi, translated by Elena Pala

 

"Funny, serious, clever, controlled, sometimes a little demanding but always rewarding."

First published in 2001 for children, Cindy Jefferies found success with her Fame School series with Usborne Books, obtaining 22 foreign rights deals. Latterly writing fiction for adults as Cynthia Jefferies, her first title The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan was published in 2018, followed a year later by The Honourable Life of Thomas Chayne, set during the English Civil Wars, followed in 2019. Both titles are now available in paperback.

 
Sandro Veronesi is an Italian writer who is the only person who has won the Premio Strega prize twice. His is a formidable talent, but he wears his skill lightly. His work is funny, serious, clever, controlled, sometimes a little demanding but always rewarding. He has every right to demand our attention, because what he writes, and how he writes it is often unexpected and usually brilliant.

His hero in this novel, Marco Carrera, is a man whose life seems to stand still. A series of misfortunes happen and he has to deal with them. He doesn’t always want to, they affect him deeply, but he invariably does what he can to help. His life is both ordinary and extraordinary, as many human lives are. Veronesi relates the entire life of this man, bringing in along the way many fascinating thoughts and facts, which, because they interest the writer, also interested this reader.

Did you realise that not many languages in Europe have a word to describe what you become if your child dies? Widow, widower, orphan, that’s it. We have to look to Sanskrit, many of the African diaspora languages, Hebrew, Arabic or ancient and modern Greek to find a word to describe it. Who knew? In case you worry that Veronesi is irredeemably gloomy he also quotes Lady Bracknell.

Did you know that the BBC, along with several countries, banned the 1933 song Gloomy Sunday, because it had inspired people to kill themselves? It was only unbanned in 2002. There are many versions of it around now, from Bjork to Billie Holliday.

There are some fascinating thoughts about seeing. Marco is an Ophthalmologist.

Marco loves Luisa all his life.

His father collected sci-fi novels.

Oddly, I can’t remember much about Marco’s mother except that she called him The Hummingbird because he stopped growing. Medical intervention eventually helped, after she had objected strenuously to her husband insisting on taking their son for treatment.

There is something about the direct way Veronesi tells us Marco’s story that is very touching, and the nearer we get to the end, the more touching it is.

The only other thing I can say, except to urge you to read this novel, is that the first paragraph said something conversationally, to me as a writer, that I so agreed with I had to put the book down and walk around for a few minutes before going on. That doesn’t often happen, but when it does it is curiously electrifying.

Thank you Sandro Veronesi, for the whole book: the plot, the characters, the musings and facts, even the occasional lists. And last, but by no means least, thank you for your fascinating and useful acknowledgements. I’m sure I shall have cause to refer to them again.

The Hummingbird is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.