ETTA LEMON: The Woman who Saved the Birds by Tessa Boase, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

'The RSPB was started by the determined efforts of four women ... but it was Etta's voice that spoke most clearly from the archives."

Photograph by Saira Archer

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her second novel for adults, The One True Thing, was published in 2025 as one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing. Her first adult novel, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (in paperback as Missing Rose) was a Radio 2 Book Club Choice. In addition to her many fiction titles for young readers she has written This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us, a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults. The Hide will be published this autumn. 

As I'm trying not to add to my already overflowing bookshelves, I attended Tessa Boase's event for Rye Arts Festival in September with no intention of buying Etta Lemon. But the talk was so packed, informative and entertaining that I couldn't resist, and bagged a copy before they'd all been snatched from the pile. 

As Tessa Boase points out, birdwatching - especially twitching - is still mainly the preserve of men. But the RSPB was started by the determined efforts of four women: Etta (Margaretta) Lemon, Emily Williamson, Eliza Brightwen and Eliza Phillips, names known to only a small fraction of the million-plus members of what's now one of our largest conservation bodies. Of the four, Boase says, it was always Etta's voice that spoke most clearly from the archives. Yet when she began her research, there was 'not a plaque, not a portrait at headquarters, not a mention in the canon .. It was as if (Etta Lemon) had been completely erased from the conservation narrative.' Part of Boase's achievement has been to right that wrong. Etta now has not only her plaque, and a portrait at RSPB headquarters, but this compelling tribute, too.

The trade in plumage, skins and entire birds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was horrific, not only because it depended on the mass capture and slaughter of birds in many countries, but also because of harsh conditions for the workers involved in dyeing and tweaking feathers for the millinery industry - a labour force that included children. Millinery was certainly big business; in 1891, Boase records, there were 548 milliners in Greater London alone. Hats were adorned with feathers, wings (classed as 'novelties') and even whole birds; an illustration shows a grotesque hat with what appears to be three budgerigars flattened and fastened around it. 

It's widely known that the great crested grebe was driven to the verge of extinction by fashionable greed for its showy plumage. Whereas once ostrich plumes had been de rigeur, the choice widened alarmingly. Describing a plumage sale in London in 1888, Boase writes: "Here were birds by the shipload." The plumes of snowy egrets were much in demand: an undercover reporter noted that 16,000 packages of these were on sale, along with seven or eight thousand parrots, over 12,000 tiny hummingbirds and "several hundred each of Hawks, Owls, Gulls, Terns, Ducks, Ibises, Finches, Orioles ..." Horrible to contemplate, especially with our hindsight knowledge of the drastic decline in bird populations.

Noting the weekly parade of feathers in church each Sunday, Etta, in her late teens, began her campaign by writing individual letters to 'Feather Bedecked Women', soon joining the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk run by Eliza Phillips, a considerably older woman. The Society for the Protection of Birds was founded in Manchester by another campaigner, Emily Williamson, and began as an all-female group in which members signed a pledge not to wear feathers. These two groups - The Fur, Fin and Feather Folk and the SPB - were brought together by the RSPCA which then, as now, saw itself as a moderate pressure group, distancing itself from 'extremists'. The amalgamation of the two, with Etta as Honorary Secretary, attracted attention, allegiance and - crucially - donations. However, support from highly-placed women led to an exemption for feathers from so-called 'game' birds, the aristocracy not wishing to jeopardise its favoured occupation, field shooting. (Hmm, not much change there, then.) In 1904, with royal approval granted, the SPB became the RSPB.

Boase draws parallels between Etta Lemon and her contemporaries Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett, examining the various approaches to campaign strategies. The suffragettes, drawn mainly from well-heeled women, were highly fashion-conscious and publicity aware. To Etta's distress, bird plumage featured prominently on their headgear - just look at the photographs of suffragette marches - and certainly on the hats of Emmeline Pankhurst herself. (In fact this book was first published as Mrs Pankhurst's Purple Feather.) There are other ways, too, in which Etta Lemon's campaign was at odds with the suffrage campaign. It seems barely comprehensible to us now that there could have been an anti-suffrage counter-protest, led by women, yet Etta was one of its members. Ironically, as Boase points out, those women who led this faction were bold, articulate and determined - qualities which would have admirably fitted them for politics. 

Although it's taken so long for Etta's conservation work to be acknowledged, she was a public figure in other ways: she became lady mayoress in 1911 when her husband Frank was appointed mayor of Reigate, and during the First World War she took on the management of the Redhill War Hospital, for which she was awarded MBE. 

If it's hard to imagine nowadays that it could have been acceptable to use the feathers of a bird of paradise for adornment, consider one of the modern equivalents: the high status of reptile-skin bags sold by Hermès and other designers, including the iconic 'Birkin' bag. Apparently the singer and actress Jane Birkin wanted her name removed from the item when she learned that crocodiles and alligators were reared for the purpose in bleak conditions and horribly killed, but the name has stuck. If you should want one (though I hope you don't), be prepared to pay upwards of £450,000 - though the real price, of course, is in animal suffering. On the plus side, London Fashion Week declared itself fur-free from 2024, with a ban on wild animal skins too. A ban on the use of wild bird feathers is yet to come. Fashion has a way to go before it can be called cruelty-free, but fortunately there are plenty of latter-day Etta Lemons pushing for change. (Step forward, PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, among other organisations.)

Tessa Boase is as engaging a writer as she is a speaker. Her book, an illuminating sweep of social history, illustrates the much-quoted maxim of the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Etta Lemon: the Woman who Saved the Birds is published by Aurum

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

More bird-related reviews:

This Birding Life by Stephen Moss, reviewed by Nick Hodges

12 Birds to Save your Life - Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett, reviewed by Linda Sargent

A Sweet Wild Note: what we hear when the birds sing by Richard Smyth, reviewed by Dawn Finch

Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds - Stories of Extinctions by Barbara Allen, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Nicki Thornton: THE IMPOSSIBLE THING by Belinda Bauer

 

"The Impossible Thing is more than just a perfectly plotted thriller, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling."

Nicki Thornton is a bestselling children’s author who has recently published her first crime novel for adults. Little Bookshop of Murders is about Keera Munroe, who tries to escape her shady past by opening a bookshop in an idyllic village. But when Keera argues with a customer who then dies in mysterious circumstances, she’s forced not only to try to find out what really happened, but to confront the fact that even the loveliest places can be hiding the darkest secrets.

Little Bookshop of Murders is inspired by Nicki's twenty years of working in and with bookshops – perfect places for solving crime!

The Impossible Thing was my favourite read of 2025. Many of my favourite writers are those who use crime fiction to comment on times past and present and Belinda Bauer is one of the best, writing with so much humanity and dealing with big and tricky subjects with a nice line in humour as well as a mystery plot.

A break-in in the present day plunges two unlikely heroes into the historical, unexpectedly murky, obsessive, and very lucrative world of oology, or egg collecting.

I was delighted to see that one of the unlikely heroes is the return of one of my favourites of her previous characters, Patrick. Belinda Bauer won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year with Rubbernecker, another absolute cracker of a story and one I’m always recommending, where a young autistic man, Patrick, signs up for an anatomy class examining a corpse to determine cause of death. Smart but socially inept, Patrick suspects murder. I was thrilled to see Patrick featuring again.

Told in a dual-timeline, The Impossible Thing starts in the 1920s when egg-collecting was both legal and huge. Obsessed and fanatical rival collectors were in desperate competition to have a rare egg to show-off.

The historical timeline doesn’t focus so much on the collectors, but on a group of Yorkshire farmers discovering they have new source of wealth – in all the nests beneath their cliff-top farms. One family is desperate to be part of this new business of egg-collecting, but they have a farm atop a totally inaccessible cliff.

Tiny, brave and always hungry, Celie Sheppard risks her life going over a cliff no one else will dare. She discovers a near mythical red egg, the Impossible Thing. Celie’s bravery changes the fortune of her entire family and everyone connected to her.

A greedy collector knows a red egg is going to be laid every year, and over time will form into an incredible collection, because a nesting guillemot will return to the same cliff nest every year. Each mother lays eggs with distinctive markings so they know which egg is theirs. Of course, if they're collected, none will ever hatch. Every year each chick will be killed. I particularly love that Belinda Bauer weaves the consequences for the birds into her narrative and shows how birds are also innocent victims of greed and ego.

From the wild cliffs to stuffy gentlemen’s clubs in London to council estates, protected woodland nests and the hidden back rooms of a natural history museum, the story loops between the timelines and what happened to those rarest of rare eggs. Patrick and his friend are unwittingly drawn into the now underground, present-day world of egg collecting and all its hidden dangers.

Belinda Bauer triumphantly weaves both timelines together. Crime, mystery, family drama, romance, tragedy, characters you wish you could stay with and the consequences of wildlife trafficking, all is delivered in an enthralling way as the dots are connected as things get increasingly thrilling. I did not want the book to end.

The Impossible Thing is more than just a perfectly plotted thriller, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling. I’m really hoping it will win a lot of awards this year. I encourage everyone to seek out and read it.

The Impossible Thing is published by Bantam.

Nicki Thornton's Little Bookshop of Murders is published by Chimneys Publishing.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: GOD'S SECRETARIES - the Making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicolson

 

"Nicolson relates the arguments dispassionately with perception, in lively writing: deft portraits of characters, strengths, quirks and all."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

*

tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (Lucretius De rerum natura)

‘I have glorified God in Greek and Latin, the consecrated languages spoken by the Lord on Earth’: Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno)

Many of us grew up with the sonorities of the King James Bible attuning our ear to the glories of the English language. Nicolson tells a story not only of the remarkable process of rendering the original Greek and Hebrew in what was, effectively, an entirely new language, he broadens his canvas to create a sharp portrait of the England into which James I of Scotland came as successor to Elizabeth I, under whose aegis the turbulence of religious division and factional rivalry had extended a reign of terror, the vicious excesses of extremism visited on the people of a nation subject to the caprices of a succession of bigoted monarchs dealing with vicissitudes of creed and the challenge of external enemies beholden to a different faith and pretended universal church.

The James Bible was not the first vernacular edition of the sacred text and many former translators had suffered vicious intolerance for their desire to make the Bible available to all God’s children, releasing it from the stranglehold of Latin. James, his childhood blighted by neglect and the persecution visited on his mother, was an awkward, socially inept man but a man of books, quick in temper but studious in manner. Under his immediate supervision, a gathering of groups of scholars set about rendering the Bible in a language which would make scripture available to be read in church and intelligible to every listener. Nicolson’s account of how this highly complex operation evolved and succeeded is riveting. He explores not only the process of translation per se, but the interaction of scholars in all their egocentricities, vanities, personal likes and dislikes. How to coordinate the work of teams of Translators – the approving capital was added at the time – to produce an integral work? It was a fiendishly difficult task and I quote one example only of many to illustrate how beautifully they succeeded in evincing a melodious and accurate translation based on ‘heard rhythm’ the majesty of a new English matching the majesty of the sentiment enshrined in scripture itself, but also a plain simplicity and directness, which delivered to the people as a whole a call to and retaining their attention. ‘Behold: I tell you a mystery…’

James came to a country riven with faction and disagreement, himself very shortly the target of a group of Catholic fanatics who wished to restore their faith to the land and its people: the gunpowder conspirators. The new King sought peace and consensus, to be, as it were, the sun that shone on all as against the effect of other faiths which kept people in ‘ignorance and darkness’.

Studied reference was made to those versions which had preceded this new rendition and I don’t quote the Tyndale here, let Nicolson make his own assessment, but the new reading delivers what he calls ‘a pace of deliberate and magisterial slowness … as solemn and orderly as the beginning of a steady and majestic march’. These are word written to be heard, remember, for their simplicity of effect and for their emotional power: ‘and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’

Now, in the Hebrew the word means ‘surface’ but at the time in English that meant ‘the superficies or upper part’ and thereby drains any sense of the deep force of the creative power deployed by the Demiurge and ‘face’ has, as Nicolson nicely stresses ‘a rich plain Englishness to it’. That is, above all, the beauty of this Bible, the move away from the denser, often tangled diction of the contemporary dramatists to the language which would, later, inform so much of the homespun diction of the American founding fathers and on to the work of a novelist like Melville, a glorious, heartfelt simplicity which gives, for example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address such emotional strength, even its melodious sway. Moreover, punctuation used as a sort of musical notation, rests and pauses to increase the dramatic effect in recital.

There are anecdotes aplenty and I particularly enjoyed the tale of one of the Translators, Miles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester – and most were, as well as eminent scholars and linguists, in holy orders - being so bored by a sermon that he walked out and made for the ale-house. Some were insufferable bores and pedants themselves but, in sum, they produced an astonishingly fine work which no other version rivals. T S Eliot said of the New English Bible (yawn) that it ‘astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic’. It’s flat and entirely lacks the sensitive concentration on words that any true translation absolutely requires; it also lacks soul and musicality, both of which inform the James Bible. As a clarion for peace in a quarrelsome, fissile realm, what better?

There were objectors – this was religion - and Nicolson relates the arguments dispassionately with perception, in lively writing: deft portraits of characters, strengths, quirks and all. As for James, a man of books himself – he once said that he would be glad to be held captive along with the other chained prisoners in a library of protected books – his inspiration and authority unleashed a work of English in what some regard to be its apogee of style.

God's Secretaries is published by Harper Perennial

More of Graeme's choices:

The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters, also by Adam Nicolson

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Go-Between by L P Hartley

Special feature by Paul Dowswell: THRILL POWER - in praise of 2000 AD

 

"Despite the plainly terrifying nature of some of the stories and characters, there was something  essentially benign about 2000 AD ..."

Paul Dowswell's journey from foolish youth to mithered old codger is near to its end. In between these two points he has written some books and hopes to write some more. His website can be found here. 

A 2000 AD cover from 1983. Here, the unfortunate Bizmo Klutz, who is already 80% bionic parts, falls into a radiation pit. His human remains dissolve, leaving his malfunctioning bionic frame to set out on a quest for human parts …

I have never liked the Superheroes of the Marvel or DC Comic world – Superman, Spiderman, the X-Men et al. I heartily agree with comic author Alan Moore who described this genre as ‘revenge fantasies of the impotent’, although I don’t think the phrase is his own. I can’t be doing with the endless Superhero movies either, although their huge popularity does suggest I’m in a minority. I always had a soft spot for the Beano, though. And graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

I’ve been in ‘Swedish Death Cleaning’ mode these past few months – clearing out our overstuffed attic, and I was fascinated to find two boxes of a moth-eaten sci-fi comic I’d squirrelled away decades ago called 2000 AD. First published in the misty 1970s, by 1980 the comic had really hit its stride and was popular with secondary school kids. I was introduced to it in the early 1980s by my younger brother Alan and liked it so much I bought it every week for the next three or four years, despite being well into my 20s.

2000 AD is mostly famous for its flagship character Judge Dredd, a near-future Judge/Jury/Executioner tasked with keeping law and order in Mega-City-One, a huge and chaotic conurbation making up most of the east coast of the United States. Post nuclear war, and outside of a handful of other vast cities, the North American continent is now a howling hellscape known as The Cursed Earth. The vastly overcrowded cities aren’t much better and ‘The Judges’ are tasked with bringing judgement to law breakers. The comic strip has spawned two films you may be familiar with. The first, a 1995 effort with Sylvester Stalone in the title role, is breathtakingly dreadful. I’d rather be boiled alive than watch it again. Another go, in 2012, is much better, and Karl Urban plays Dredd in a manner more in keeping with the spirit of the comic book. Both films regularly pop up on Netflix and other platforms. If you can bear the graphic violence, the Karl Urban one – Dredd – is very watchable. In truth, both films were hobbled by the fact that the original character is so obviously based on Dirty Harry era Clint Eastwood, and by the time Dredd was popular enough to be made into a film, Eastwood was way too old to play him.

Typically pithy dialogue from the Judge Dredd story ‘The Apocalypse War’ where America goes to war with the 22^nd Century version of the Soviet Union.  

Read again, forty years later, the Dredd stories remain the most engaging in the comic, not least the extraordinarily creepy tale of Judge Death and his three companions: Fire, Fear and Mortis – a parallel-world quartet of unnerving Judges whose mission in life is to wipe out all living things. One story ends with Judge Death captured inside of the mind of the Psychic Judge, Anderson (also featured in the illustration above), and both are then encased in a single plastic cocoon to prevent Death escaping – something to give any child nightmares.

2000 AD’s most terrifying baddies, the four Dark Judges.

But Dredd could also be funny and topical. Here below are a few frames from ‘High Society’, a story where low-life slum dwellers are relocated by Mega City One’s municipal housing department to a posh orbiting satellite for the ultra-wealthy. Another story pits two huge social housing blocks against each other in an all-out war. The buildings are named Carole Munro Block and Vince St Clair Block – the aliases Coronation Street’s Jack and Vera Duckworth adopt when they both surreptitiously sign up to a video dating agency in 1983. And I loved the story about Carl Heinz Pilchards-In-Tomato-Sauce Clayderman – a name inspired by the avant-garde composer Stockhausen and the French easy-listening pianist. At a classical music concert in Mega-City One, the composer turns on his audience and starts murdering them in a variety of ludicrous ways which coincide with his music. Judge Dredd, of course, is in attendance and intervenes…

One Judge Dredd episode from 1984 sees a high society orbital suburb occupied by rehoused slum dwellers from Mega-City One. 

Like its 1980s contemporary the music magazine Smash Hits, the comic was cleverly designed to make the reader feel like they were part of a secret society with its own insider slang. The editor was an alien from Betelgeuse called Tharg (of course he was) forever reassuring his readers their stories were charged with ‘thrill-power’. 2000 AD even invented its own pretend swearwords ‘Grud’, ‘Drokk’ and ‘Stomm’, like ‘Frak’ in Battle Star Galactica and ‘Pigging’ in Jack Rosenthal’s The Dustbinmen.

Reading again from a distance of 40 years it’s easy to see how many of the strips were borrowed from other sci-fi films and books. ‘Rogue Trooper’ for example, owes a debt to Blade Runner, as does ‘Robo-Hunter’, which also comes with a large dose of Sam Spade. ‘Mean Arena’ was clearly inspired by Rollerball. Inspiration also came from history. In ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ a strangely horse-like alien defends his fellow extra-terrestrials from Spanish Inquisition style human space explorers intent on genocide. The stories, illustrated in a detailed steam-punk style, also have more than an echo of the Nazi racial state, with its evil baddies banging on about ‘keeping pure’.

Plagiarism, or maybe it’s ‘homage’, also abounds in Alan Moore’s ‘DR and Quinch’ a cheeky lift from National Lampoon’s OC and Stiggs, itself a deplorable but amusing tale of two repellent high school students from the Eisenhower era who create Olympic standard mischief. Moore’s version is set in the far future and features two bizarre aliens getting up to malevolent high-jinx on their home planet.

Waldo ‘DR’ Dobbs and Quinch fall foul of Judge Thorkwung in the episode ‘DR and Quinch Go Straight’.

But my favourite story of all takes inspiration from E.T. and, incongruously, Boys from the Blackstuff. Running in 1983, ‘Skizz’ is another invention of Alan Moore and reading this again I still found it engaging and moving. Here an alien interpreter from some far-off planet’s diplomatic corps crash-lands in the West Midlands and is taken in by two kindly and unemployed Brummies, Roxy and Loz. They help him learn to speak English and adjust to life on Earth while also keeping him out of the clutches of a brutal South African policeman who bears a passing resemblance to PW Botha, who is working in league with the British military.

Stranded Interpreter Zhcchz (Skizz) is taken in by kindly Brummies Roxy and Loz. Uneasily adjusting to Earth food and atmosphere he vomits frequently, an event he thinks the Earthlings call ‘Flippi-Neck’. 

The copies I have were produced during the high tide of Thatcherism and fortunately 2000 AD was not on the radar of the Daily Mail. The insult ‘Woke’ was, of course, decades away from coinage, but they would have gone into orbit at the comic’s anti-establishment stance. Almost all the characters are either brutal representatives of a repressive state or men and women who have been done wrong by authority.

Like Viz, the quality of the artwork and stories was variable and sometimes you had to sift through a lot of dross to get to the gold. The weekly schedule put tremendous demands on the artists who often produced highly detailed work, so they were rotated to keep to the deadlines. But despite the plainly terrifying nature of some of the stories and characters, there was something essentially benign about 2000 AD. Occasionally a strip would feature editor Tharg and his office ‘droids’ – robot caricatures of the staff and freelancers – and in one story the office is infested by mice. The staff buy mousetraps in an effort to exterminate them but Tharg is having none of it. He opens a space portal, gets out his magic flute, and leads them across space to a planet entirely made of cheese. The snowflake!

2000 AD was formerly published by IPC Magazines Fleetway Publications and currently by Rebellion Developments

SPECIAL FEATURE Q&A: David Breakell talks to John Case about THE ALCHEMIST OF GENOA

 

"Writing as a lawyer, employing clarity and precision, is very different from writing a thriller, where what you don’t say is just as important. It took me a long time to unlearn the way a lawyer drafts a document …"

David Breakell was born and grew up in Sussex. After his schooldays, he read law at Worcester College, Oxford. Despite spending too much time on student journalism, filmmaking and fencing for the university, he somehow managed to get his degree. After hitchhiking around the US for a summer, he tried various other jobs before deciding to qualify as a solicitor. His legal career culminated in nearly 20 years as a banking partner in a global law firm. David is married with grown-up children and lives close to the sea at Pett Level, East Sussex. His first novel, The Alchemist of Genoa, was published in 2025 and he's currently working on the second in the series - find out more on his website.

Training initially as an actor, John Case spent his early 20s working in theatre in the UK, before moving into the Arts and Heritage Sector, working as a senior manager with Surrey County Council’s Cultural Service Department, covering Performing Arts, Libraries and Heritage. For four years John was Festival Director of the Rye Arts Festival, one of the South-East’s largest multi-arts festival, held every September since 1971. 

This interview was first published in Rye News in October 2025.

John Case: Your book has been recently published, to great reviews. Tell us a little bit about it. 

David Breakell: The setting of my debut novel is the city of Genoa in 1587, in other words, one year before the launch of the Spanish Armada. The threat of war is in the background, but it’s not the subject of the story. My focus is on the lives of the men and women in one particular Genovese family: the events of this turbulent year are mostly seen through their eyes. They are a banking family and through them we also see how money itself was a secret weapon in that historic conflict. But it’s not just about financial machinations: the human dimension – love, honesty, religious faith, or their opposites – also drives the action

JC: Where did you get the idea for the story?

DB: I remember that it was not long after the banking crisis in 2008 – the Lehman Brothers crash, in which I was involved professionally – that I read an old history book which hinted that some sort of credit crunch (they didn’t call it that, but I recognised the symptoms) had happened around the time of the Armada. It was the proverbial light bulb moment as far as the idea of the book was concerned.

JC: Why a wealthy banker as your principal character? It’s not an obvious hero choice.

DB: That was the attraction – and the challenge. Nico Castello emerges from the story as an honourable man, unafraid of sticking to his principles despite the cost, but he was not the most obvious choice perhaps, save for the fact that I understood his business world. And as the novel evolved, I found him the most interesting character to write about.

JC: How much of the story is based on fact?

DB: Well, I couldn’t put a percentage on it, but certainly all the background events, like the manner of Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution, the Vatican’s loan to Philip of Spain and the delays in launching the Armada, are factual. The city of Genoa plays a key part and if you visit its historic centre, you’ll still see many of the locations I describe. And of course, many of the characters are historical persons, for example, Walsingham, Archbishop Sauli of Genoa and King Philip and his Foreign Minister, Idiaquez.

JC: Was your previous career as a lawyer an advantage or a disadvantage?

DB: Both! I spent my professional life, 35-plus years, crafting words on paper of course, but at the same time, writing as a lawyer, employing clarity and precision, is very different from writing a thriller, where what you don’t say is just as important. It took me a long time to unlearn the way a lawyer drafts a document…

JC: When did you take up creative writing?

DB: In my 50s – I guess it’s never too late to start! I began the novel several years ago, but it evolved into something very different over time.

JC: Who are your own favourite writers, in historical fiction or generally?

DB: I read historical fiction, naturally – but also spy fiction and some crime fiction. John Le Carré’s writing is the absolute pinnacle as far as I’m concerned, but there are several other writers who excel at the spy genre. In crime, it’s got to be Kate Atkinson, whose writing never fails to impress. The first chapter of When Will There Be Good News? is my all-time jaw-dropping opening. In historic fiction, someone who recently read my book compared it to Robert Harris and C J Sansom, which I found very flattering.

JC: What are you reading currently?

DB: Robert Harris’ latest novel, Precipice. Harris can take a well-known character or period and show it to us through a very different lens. I hope that readers will feel my own novel has done something similar.

JC: Is there a sequel in the pipeline? Is it set in Genoa?

DB: Yes. And partly. You’ll have to wait and see for the rest!

JC: Where can people buy a copy of your book? 

DB: The paperback is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or a copy can be ordered via any bookstore. Or you can order directly through my website. An e-book is also available from Amazon and, if you’re a subscriber, through KindleUnlimited.

The Alchemist of Genoa is published by Dower House Books.

See David's review of Robert Harris' Precipice

and of Kate Atkinson's Death At the Sign of the Rook.

BOOKS OF THE YEAR Part 3: chosen by our contributors

Here's the final part of our roundup and our chance to thank our reviewers for their generous contributions throughout the year. We couldn't do this without you! Thanks too to all our followers. We hope everyone's found something here - or maybe several titles - to add to your reading pile for 2026.

John Newman chooses something old and something new: My reconnection with the work of Rosemary Sutcliff continued this year and I was really thrilled to find a second hand hardback edition of Knight’s Fee complete with Charles Keeping illustrations. I f could not recall reading of how Randal, an abandoned kennel boy overcomes adversity to become a knight. Sutcliff brilliantly uses his rise to explore how the Saxon and Norman population find a common enemy in the French and those attempting to usurp the throne at the end of the eleventh century.

Sometimes picking up a proof copy can lead to a major reading experience. Such is the case with Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. The story of how an antiquarian book dealer awakes continuously on the 18th November and how she attempts to adapt is told a day at a time. I'm now up to Volume 3 of a planned septology and I can’t stop recommending them.

John Newman is an independent booksellers at Newham Books. 

Penny Dolan chooses A Voice in the Night by Simon Mason, the fourth in his excellent ‘DI Wilkins’ crime series: Two murders, set in a rather unlovely Oxford: the stabbing of a security guard and a mysterious death-by-drowning of a retired academic.

DCS Wainwright, the ruthless new Superintendent at Thames Valley Police, wants both murders solved. She also wants one of two officers out of the service. Will it be handsome, black, college-educated DI Raymond Wilkins? Or his ‘past partner’: trailer-trash, trackie-bottomed, single-parent DI Ryan Wilkins, who must have ‘no responsibility’, yet somehow fixes on essential facts?

Though each Wilkins goes their own way in sorting out the mystery, they also face painful responsibilities in their own lives. A Voice in the Night, with its compelling heart, makes my Book of the Year 2025, though I must add that the three earlier DI Wilkins novels are worth reading first.

Mary Hoffman: My fiction-reading has involved a lot of re-reads. I discovered Elly Griffiths’ wonderful Ruth Galloway series of detective novels in June and have read all fifteen and am now re-reading them. The first is The Crossing Places and I heartily recommend them. The heroine is middle-aged, not slim and fashionable, but is a forensic archaeologist. Yet Ruth Galloway is not short of male admirers.

I’ve also been re-reading my way through my extensive Anne Tyler collection and am six books in so far. I got the latest Jackson Brodie novel by Kate Atkinson at Christmas last year – Murder at the Sign of the Rook (Doubleday), so of course I then had to re-read all the others. And I belong to a book group which also sometimes supplies titles I know already, including my own choice, The Leopard (Collins and Harvill Press) by Giuseppe Tommasi di Lampedusa, partly inspired by the recent Netflix series, which played fast and loose with the plot but was beautifully cast and filmed. It was first published in Italy in 1958 and the English translation two years later, both after the author’s death. I must have first read it in sixth form; anyway, I seem always to have known it and it remains one of my favourite books. 

Other favourite re-reads of the years have been Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, which I enjoyed much more second time round and Irène Nemirovsky’s Suite Française, which ditto. Our last book club title of the Year is Pip Williams’ The Dictionary of Lost Words and it is a corker.  It may be hard to write a page-turner about a (fictional) girl helping to compile the OED, but Williams has done it. Happy reading!

Mark Davies has also chosen The Dictionary of Lost Words: Set largely in Oxford, the novel is structured to track the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the life of the first-person character, Esme. As the daughter of one of the editors, Esme's awareness of the significance of words begins as a small child. As a adult, she is employed at the Dictionary, and determines to try to include 'lost' words of a more feminine derivation, having realised that the Dictionary was a male-dominated domain: the editors and compilers were men, the majority of cited sources were written by men, and most of the researchers were men. By retrieving otherwise ignored or mislaid words, and by talking to working class women, Esme collects the basis of her own small alternative 'Lost Words' dictionary. This feminist theme is interwoven with the simultaneous activities of the suffragette movement and the nursing of soldiers injured in the First World War, making the book both engaging, thought-provoking, and educational.

Mark Davies is an Oxford local historian, public speaker and guide. His latest publications are A Jericho Scrapbook: Inside an Oxford Community Saved from Destruction and Jericho - a Celebration.

Jane Dalton: My pick is The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel. Ostensibly a warning of the devastation wreaked by ponzi schemes, this strange and haunting novel carries an undercurrent of a world in which women pay the price for men’s crimes and selfishness.

Chief among them is Vincent, who at school was straight-As pupil but whose talents go unrecognised. Without a career, she becomes a fake trophy wife to the "super-rich" Jonathan Alkaitis, while her half-brother Paul plagiarises her video work. He squanders his college education funded by his mother, whereas Vincent is haunted by the loss of her own beloved mother.

The many different shifts in time, perspective and tenses - present and past, including Paul justifying his actions to a therapist in later years - make for a read that’s as unsettling as offensive messages written on a hotel window - a key plot point.At the end, I had to return to the start to better relish the nuances and detail of the rich narrative in context.

Jane Dalton is a journalist for the Independent. Her first novel is currently out on submission to publishers. 

Leslie Wilson's choice is When I Was, by Miranda Miller. What struck me about this novel was the vulnerability of people trying to be adults, and somehow never managing it; the deeply insecure parents are imprisoned by their class and difficult background, trying to negotiate the world without enough tools to do so, at least not enough to fool other adults that they know what they're doing, and aren't we all like that at times? The four children are also struggling through their lives, particularly the youngest, an observant, sometimes truculent little girl who loves her parents in spite of their failings. The family relationships ring absolutely true.

There are passages of wonderful comedy, particularly the abortive excursion to Brighton in a hire car, which turns out a disaster, particularly for the car. There's  also deep and devastating sadness. Engaging, perceptive and compassionate, this is a novel that’s hard to put down.

Leslie Wilson’s latest novel is The War’s Not Over Yet.

Jane Rogers chooses Juice by Tim Winton: I love Winton’s work but I’d read enough utterly depressing cli-fi dystopias to feel reluctant about starting this. Juice is set in a lawless, scorched, barren Australia 200 years in the future – how could it not be grim? But Winton is a compelling writer. His narrator spins his tale to save his own life, at the hands of a lone killer who holds him, and the child he is trying to protect, captive. There are layers and layers of suspense, not just about the narrator but about his mother, wife, and child, and about the violent climate justice organisation both he and his captor have worked for (the chief targets are heirs to Big Oil). Winton is brilliant at raising complex moral issues; blame, revenge, honesty, and love. The astonishing humanity of the story makes it much much more than the recital of bleakness I was fearing. And his introduction of honourable AI in the final third of the novel raises questions which continue to haunt me.

Jane Rogers' latest publication is a short story collection, Fire-Ready.

Becky Jones: The book I loved most this year was The Wedding People by Alison Espach. It was the first book for a long time that hooked me on the very first page. Phoebe, a divorced academic, arrives at the Cornwall Inn to find she is the only guest who is not there for the elaborate week-long wedding of Lila and Gary. When the bride realises, she is furious – this depressed stranger could ruin her meticulously planned celebrations. As things pan out, however, Phoebe becomes important to her in ways neither of them could have imagined.

What I loved about this book was the writing – sometimes I find myself aware of the craft of writing which can sometimes detract from the enjoyment as a reader. But with this book, I could admire the writing whilst laughing and crying and being fully absorbed in the story. The premise was perfect – a week-long wedding in a hotel. It was a stage set for drama, full of surprises with wonderful, fully formed characters and sparkling, funny dialogue. But what I loved most was the way themes of loneliness, depression, grief and being different were treated with such humour. An uplifting read.

Becky Jones' first novel, Searching for Amy, was published this year.

David Breakell has chosen The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Hugh Aplin: Written in the era of Stalin's show trials, this political satire cum fantasy horror was finally published only when the author - and Stalin himself - were both long dead. In a surreal Moscow where most of the humane, moral characters are to be found in a mental institution, Bulgakov skewers Soviet society with prose which is, at turns, darkly comic and terrifying. For me, its most compelling aspect is the 'novel within a novel': the eponymous Master is struggling to complete his manuscript, a historical novel which reimagines a single day - the day of Christ's crucifixion - from the point of view of Pontius Pilate. In the hours after Christ's death, Pilate tries, unsuccessfully, to alleviate his sense of guilt. Sprinkled through the text of the main narrative, these chapters provide a brilliant counterpoint to its satirical message. But also perhaps hope for the Master and Margarita.

David Breakell's first novel is The Alchemist of Genoa - read a Q&A with David next Monday.

The choice of Alison Layland is Audrey Magee's The Colony: There’s something about islands, and I realised recently that I've visited quite a few in my reading this year, all of them as exciting and intriguing an experience as a real-life trip across the sea currents.

In The Colony, the inhabitants of a small island off the coast of Ireland are visited by an English artist and a French linguist, who battle one another for the soul of the island’s people and their language, to the bewilderment of the islanders themselves. In a microcosm of colonialism, their desires and actions have profound consequences. This is a beautifully written, engaging read with brilliant characterisation and dialogue, and so much between the lines.

Other excellent island-based novels I’ve read this year are: Little Great Island by Kate Woodworth; Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy; Muckle Flugga  by Michael Pedersen; Island by Jane Rogers. Maybe I’ve been drawn to island-set novels recently as my novel, After the Clearances, is largely set on the fictional island of Ynys Hudol, inspired by Bardsey off the north-west coast of Wales.

Alison Layland's latest publication is After the Clearances.

Nick Manns recommends Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes: In Rome, one Sunday in November 1950, Valeria Cossati walks into a tobacconist’s and asks the shopkeeper for cigarettes and a child’s exercise book. The shopkeeper says it’s forbidden to sell non-tobacco products on a Sunday. With sudden urgency (‘I need it’), Cossati persuades him to break the law, and with the notebook hidden beneath her coat, walks into the street, past a watching policeman.

‘I need it’ marks the point when de Céspedes’ character steps beyond the role of compliant housewife and selfless mother and speaks for herself. The ‘forbidden notebook’ – her diary of domestic events – becomes a document of resistance: reports from a strange country.

Written five years after the fall of Italian fascism; 18 months after the publication of The Second Sex, Valeria Cossati walks towards our own time. She says, ‘This is what I saw; this is what I worked out.’

Nick Manns has written four novels for young adults and is the founder-director of Dyslexia Lifeline.  

Paul Dowswell couldn't decide on just one, so chose three! Firstly, A Village in the Third Reich. Julia Boyd, who also wrote the fascinating Travellers in the Third Reich about tourism in Hitler’s Germany, excels in this captivating account of the Nazi-era lives of the people of Oberstdorf in the Bavarian Alps. Not a good bedtime read for anyone worried about the state of the world; It gave me nightmares.

Secondly, Long Island by Colm Toibin. I loved Brooklyn, both film and book, so was keen to catch up with Eilis Lacey, Tony Fiorello and Jim Farrell. We’re now in the 1970s and all is not well. Toibin writes so well about the longings and disappointments of his characters and leaves us on a cliff edge. I eagerly await the third instalment.

Lastly, Abbey Road. David Hepworth is a music journalist with a keen eye for the sort of ‘fancy that’ information my fellow music trainspotters love. He's also a successful publisher with a keen understanding of the £££ that oils the wheels of art. This book is a highly readable history of the famous London studio and, simultaneously, the history of recorded sound.

Paul Dowswell's latest title is Aliens: the Chequered History of Britain's Wartime Refugees

From our own Adèle Geras: Andrew Michael Hurley’s Saltwash is a book that lingers in your mind long after you finish reading it. It’s not as frightening as some of his others (try Starveacre for the most terrifying last paragraph I’ve read in years) but it does have what Hurley has always excelled at: an atmosphere that settles around you as you read like drizzle in an out of season seaside town. This is exactly what Saltwash is. I’m very partial to such settings. A man goes to meet a friend in the oddest seaside hotel you’ve ever visited. The friend isn’t there at first but turns up later. There’s a big party on that night, as it happens, and many strange guests are ready to attend. I shan’t say another word! Merry Christmas to all WR readers.

Adele Geras' latest novel, under the pseudonym Hope Adams, is Dangerous Women.

Linda Sargent's choice is What you are looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama, translated by Alison Watts: a Japanese bestseller and it’s easy to see why. The story unfolds as we follow the interlinking lives of five characters from a range of ages and backgrounds, but all are at some kind of turning point in their life. They arrive at a community centre/library and are directed to the librarian Sayuri Komachi, who has an uncanny, almost magical, gift for deep empathy and she directs them to seemingly unlikely books that turn out to be exactly what they need. All the while she makes tiny felt gifts and all five of the characters in this story are given one, which is also significant in their progress too. I especially liked Masao’s crab which ends up on his daughter’s bag and is a pathway to their greater connection too. It is a book about community, connection, listening and kindness. Perfect for these somewhat overwhelming times in the world and emphasising the necessary treasure provided by libraries and librarians. I loved it.

Linda Sargent's most recent publication is Tosh's Island.

Jon Appleton chooses The Light of Day by Christopher Stephens and Louise Radnofsky, a compelling addition to the canon of queer British history.

Roger Butler was the first British man to publicly admit his homosexuality, lighting a touchpaper at a time (1960) when society condemned ‘inversion’, before sexual acts between consenting men were legalised. Christopher Stephens was a young Oxford student who became the older man’s friend and was gifted, upon Roger’s death, an episodic letter which revealed not only the unrequited longing Roger had for him (about which he knew) but the man’s extraordinary life as a private citizen turned activist during the early years of gay liberation. Extracts are interspersed with Christopher’s reflections on the friendship, on his own story, on the tricky matter of offering the right levels of affection and admiration to those we revere – not just in their lifetime but after they’ve died. It’s a compelling mix and part of the reason it’s my book of the year is that just a few streets away from where Christopher visited Roger in East Oxford, I made visits to my own friend and hero, writer Jan Mark, and since her death I have grappled with many of the questions Christopher confronts.

Jon Appleton is editor of the gab, which celebrates 20th century children’s literature: lettersfromrobin.com/the-gab

And finally ... a great note to finish on, with good advice for all of us! Venkatesh Swamy recommends Slow Down and Be Here Now, by Laura Brand, illustrated by Freya Hartas. These are times where the normal is rush, rush, rush. One keeps lurching from crisis to crisis and leaps from opportunity to perceived opportunity. For many, life has become one merry-go-round with no stop button. There have been days when I feel that I have been shot out of a cannon. Here’s a book for those moments. 

Slow Down and Be Here Now is a book that immediately needs to be introduced into children’s lives (maybe adults too). As are other titles in the Slow Down series. Written by Laura Brand and illustrated by Freya Hartas, it starts off with a simple tip - Be Here Now! 

Each of the short 46 chapters is fascinating and some of my favourites are: Watch a Duck Coat its Feathers, See a Grasshopper Jump, Watch a Family of Hermit Crabs Move House. And if I get the time, I will do just that. 

The book’s premise? When it is almost impossible to find joy, feel peace or follow curiosity, there are ways you can look after yourself, calm your body and mind, and being immersed in nature is just one of them. All you need do to see them is slow down.

Venkatesh Swami is the proprietor, with Swati Roy, of Eureka! Bookstore in New Delhi.

We'll be back to normal next week. Follow us for a great reading recommendation every Monday!

BOOKS OF THE YEAR part 2 - chosen by our contributors

Here's our second batch of lovely recommendations. Thank you to our reviewers, all authors and booksellers, for your support - we couldn't do this without you - and also to all our followers. Come back next week for the final selection of great suggestions to kick off your reading for 2026!

Jaffé and Neale Bookshop: Patrick Neale's Book of the Year is The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek: A literary gem describing Russia's invasion of Finland in 1939. It's a thriller about the world's greatest sniper, capturing a forgotten piece of history that resonates strongly today. Rachel White's choice is Ian McEwan's What we can Know: McEwan is back on form with this time-spanning quest that expertly threads a literary mystery of a lost poem through a post-catastrophe future. Can hope be rescued from looming gloom? It's his best work since Atonement and Enduring Love. 

Jaffé and Neale is an independent bookshop in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire.

Lissa Evans: I loved Ghosts of the Farm, by Nicola Chester.  This is a non-fiction book, but it has as much heart and plot as any good novel, interweaving the fascinating diaries of a simply splendid woman farmer in World War 2, with the author’s own passionate relationship with the land, as she attempts to advocate for a nature-depleted countryside.  Within it, there’s a marvellous account of Chester’s teenage years when she worked in stables at the weekends and early mornings, her reward being the opportunity to learn to ride;  I was always envious of those tough, responsible little girls that I glimpsed on the rare occasions I bumped into that world, but I'm not aware that they’ve ever been written about in non-fiction before.  It’s all part of the rich and riveting texture of a book that I’m already looking forward to reading again. 

Lissa Evans' latest novel is Small Bomb at Dimperley, reviewed on the blog by Penny Dolan.

Judith Allnatt recommends The Book of Fire by Christi Lefteri. In Greece, a family is left physically and emotionally scarred by a fire that destroys their home and a vast tract of beautiful forest. They are Irini, a bazouka player, Tasso, an artist, and Chara, a sweet child. The story switches between the present with the family struggling to recover and the past – their terrifying jump from a cliff into the sea to escape and the fire’s aftermath.

Alongside the family’s journey from despair to hope there are questions to answer about who is responsible for the disaster. Is it Mr Monk, the man who illegally started to clear land for his hotel development, the emergency services that were slow to respond, the government, or is climate change and therefore all of us? To what extent are each to blame?

This is a moving book and, as with Lefteri’s other novels The Beekeeper of Aleppo and Songbirds, it brought me near to tears. The author has a clear-sighted view of human destructiveness but also has great compassion.

Judith Allnatt's latest publication is The Poet's Wife

Mary Hoffman: My Book of the Year is Helen Castor’s magnificent The Eagle and the Hart, an imaginative historical comparison of the two first cousins Richard II and Henry IV. Richard, with his effeminacy, love of luxury, preference for male “favourites” and refusal to name an heir, was unsuited to kingship in every way but he was the legitimate next in line to the throne, the remaining son of Edward (later known as the Black Prince). His grandfather, Edward III, and his older brother, another Edward, predeceased him, so Richard became king at the age of ten. 

Henry, on the other hand, had every quality needed in a king. He was intelligent, brave, a champion jouster, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart and the father of four lusty sons and two daughters before tragedy struck and his wife Mary died in her last childbed. But Henry was not the heir. The two men were born within months of each other, married close together and lost their wives only weeks apart. 

Henry’s father was the great magnate John of Gaunt, the richest man in England after the king, Edward III’s third son. They were both mistrusted and overlooked by King Richard. Things came to a head when Richard sent Henry, who had not been tried or convicted for any crime, into exile in France. Gaunt died months later and Richard stole Henry’s great inheritance – all titles and lands. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Historical storytelling at its best.

Mary Hoffman's latest publication is David: the Unauthorised Autobiography.

From Cathy Cassidy: This is Happiness by Niall Williams had me hooked from the first sentence. Fiction disguised as memoir, it's light on plot but brimful of heart, humanity, grief and love, a kind of time machine taking you back to 1950s rural Ireland. Both place and character are drawn perfectly, and the prose is clean, clever and beautiful in its simplicity. The novel charts the unlikely friendship between seventeen year old Noe, fresh from the seminary, and sixty-something Christy, who has been tasked with siting the poles that will connect the village of Faha to the National Grid. The novel unfolds slowly, but along with the details of village life come shards of pure beauty and insights into love, life and loss. I've read a LOT of books this year, but none have moved me as much as this one. I absolutely loved it.

Cathy Cassidy is the author of  the Chocolate Box Girls series and other children’s books.

Pippa Goodhart chooses The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley: this novel is a breath of fresh air. Far from perfect, but full of energy, ideas and beautiful writing, it’s rich and original, and I’ll certainly read it again.

Kaliane Bradley is a Penguin book editor who found herself shut-in alone and bored during Covid lockdowns. She watched a television programme about the HMS Erebus polar expedition, and semi fell in love with naval officer Graham Gore (look online for his photo!) who died, but it isn’t known quite how. She found other enthusiasts online, and began writing a bit of time travel fantasy for their entertainment. To her surprise, that then grew into this, her first novel, The Ministry of Time.

It's written in the first person by disaffected female civil servant, brought into The Ministry of Time to become a ‘handler’ for an ‘expat’ brought from the past to be studied. Thus, gorgeous but of his time Graham Gore comes to live in her flat, bemused by washing machines, Spotify, doing your own cooking, feminism, computers, but gallantly trying to assimilate. Also brought from the past at moments when they died alone, and therefore history won’t be disturbed by their removal from it, come characters from 1645, 1665, 1793, and 1916, from whores to soldiers. Friendships and tensions arise, sometimes very funny, often poignant.

What to do with this situation she has created? The story becomes a tangle of sci-fi, rom-com, study of race and empire, and it doesn’t all convincingly resolve. But, no matter. The ride has been thought-provoking and fun!

Pippa Goodhart's latest publication is You Choose Bedtime, illustrated by Nick Sharratt.

Linda Newbery chooses Etta Lemon - the Woman who Saved the Birds by Tessa Boase, and will post a full review soon. Its wide sweep covers not only Etta Lemon's outrage at the mass killing of birds - almost driving some species to extinction - to provide feathers for fashionable hats, but also the suffragettes/suffragists, whose campaign began shortly after Etta Lemon's and who were of course far more prominent. There's much about social history, conditions of workers and the rise of feminism alongside the origins of the RSPB - now one of the UK's largest conservation organisations. Yet until now, and the publication of this book, Etta Lemon and her colleagues were barely acknowledged. There's much to learn and enjoy in this fascinating account.

Linda Newbery's latest publication is The One True Thing.

Sarah LeFanu chooses Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman: My friend Hannah sent me this wonderful short story collection for my birthday in the summer. I had never heard of Edith Pearlman, although she has been writing short stories for 40 years and has won numerous awards in the USA. She’s nowhere near as famous as the writers to whom she is most often compared, Alice Munro and John Updike. Each of Pearlman’s sentences provides pleasure. She has a broader scope than Munro, and is more subtle and compassionate than Updike. The stories range widely in place (New England, old Russia, Central America, the remote mountains of Hungary), in character and voice, and in subject-matter. They are utterly serious, shot through with humour, and quietly surprising. Now I am slowly re-reading them, savouring their rich complexity. When I looked her up, I found she had died in early 2023. I shall track down her earlier collections.

Sarah LeFanu's latest publication is Talking to the Dead: Travels of a Biographer

Nick Hodges: My book of the year? Sean Dooley's The Big Twitch: One Man, One Continent, A Race Against Time - a True Story about Birdwatching, wherein the writer spends his inheritance attempting to see and tick off 700 species of Australian birds. Dooley gives himself a year and when the book starts - dead on midnight - so does he: positioned with spotlight in a dark forest. A nocturnal sooty owl is the first target. And it's raining.

He could of course be partying; celebrating the arrival of the new year; doing what ordinary people do. But no: he's a twitcher. And so we follow Dooley's adventures as he travels and ticks his way through the country: its swamps and sewage works (yes, you read that right); its heat and dust. Seasickness plays its part as well as flat tyres in the desert. A book written by a man aware of his own eccentricities. And no girlfriend. 

Nick Hodges is a wildlife journalist living in Sydney.

Sam Barnes of Books & Ink Bookshop recommends Craftland by James Fox: This is the most beautifully written book documenting the lives and careers of master craftspeople whose trades are critically endangered. James Fox demonstrates a vast breadth of research and a true, authentic passion for his subject, giving voice to craft trades spanning the length and breadth of the British Isles, incorporating not just rural crafts but those found in our towns and cities too. The author explores trades from the Scottish Islands in the north down to the Scilly Isles in the south. From watchmakers, coopers and bell founders, to bodgers, rush cutters and letter cutters. This isn’t a travelogue, though the author visits all these places and people; it is a love letter to crafts and trades, a living history and a reminder to us all to look around at all the crafted objects we use every day and consider their story. Britain is a nature of crafters and hopefully this book will also inspire a new generation to take up some of these threatened trades. A delight to read but also a delight to listen to as James Fox narrates his own audiobook, interjecting his passion for the trades he talks about into his audio delivery (available on Librofm and presumably on other audio platforms too).

Books & Ink is in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. Proprietor Sam Barnes, back in the days when her shop was in Banbury, was our very first independent bookshop contributor.

Graeme Fife chooses Facing Down the Furies by Edith Hall. I’ve known five men who committed suicide, two of them close to me, and nurse my own feelings as to their loss. In this remarkable book, Hall, with great candour, insight and courage explores her own emotional reaction to the suicide of past members of her family and the ‘miasma of corruption’ as she puts it, which clung to the survivors and lingers, yet, near irresistibly, in her. Into this investigation of her own emotional responses she weaves the result of deep study of many Greek tragedies which delve undaunted into the unkindly matter of self-destruction.

The Greek idea of three Furies, known, euphemistically, as Eumenides ‘kindly ones’ (an interesting paradox in itself) underpins this vital study of a dark corner of the human psyche. Greek myth emerged from an extraordinarily acute sensibility which, in its turn gave birth to the tragedies of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles, the work that forms the very foundation of our own drama. Full review coming in 2026.

Graeme Fife's latest novel is Memory's Ransom.

From Caroline Pitcher: As Christmas hurtles near, I’m re-reading eight of Claire Keegan’s short stories in the collection Walk the Blue Fields.

The title story begins: the women came with flowers, each one a different shade of red. Later, the priest stares at the line of her scalp where the shining red hair is parted.

At the wedding feast there is humour, and threat. After the best man urinates, he turns before his cock is put away. It is a huge cock and he has difficulty getting it back into the rented trousers.

Walk the Blue Fields is the bittersweet story of a man whose love got away. The spare writing is full of sadness, yet after the visit to the mysterious Chinaman, the priest thinks after all that, The spring has come, dry and promising.

In Claire Keegan’s writing, there is so much more than meets the eye. Ireland struggles with its dark past. (Here I want to mention So Late in the Day, a shattering novella about Cathal’s inherited misogyny, which destroys his own happiness.

Hilary Mantel said that Keegan writes with a certain stony-eyed realism about human experience. Yes. And she doesn’t write enough stories for me.

Caroline Pitcher's latest book is Mariana and the Merchild, illustrated by Jackie Morris.

And finally: Julia Jarman's choice is The Glory Cloak by Patricia O’Brien. The glory cloak of the title fixes this novel in my memory, sparking others of people, places and actions, some of which I’d rather forget. The novel is an alternative biography of Louisa M Alcott, written from the point of view of a fictitious character, Susan Gray, who gets closer to her than even her sisters did, joining her in the Union Hospital in Washington DC where, during the American Civil War, Louisa nursed soldiers and fell in love. It’s a story of passionate love and passionate self-denial – and it rings true, because of the writer’s skill and meticulous historical research.

The glory cloak itself was real. Luxurious, made of red and green silk, it was confined to the dressing-up box in the Quakerish Alcott household. But Louisa’s mother once placed it round her shoulders to inspire her ‘to do great things’.

Julia Jarman's latest novel is Widows Waive the Rules.

What are your own best reads of the year? Please tell us in the comments, and do come back next week for our final selection.