Category Archives: Serious

July 30, 2026 · 3:06 pm

With her Own Hands – Nicole Nehrig

With Her Own Hands – Nicole Nehrig

This book was all the rage among my crafty friends. Who doesn’t like to read a book about textiles, grief, mental health, etc.?

Here’s the description

A rich and intimate exploration of how women have used textile work to create meaningful lives, from ancient mythology to our current moment.

Knitting, sewing, embroidery, quilting?throughout history, these and other forms of textile work have often been dismissed as merely “women’s work” and attached to ideas of domesticity and obedience. Yet, as psychologist and avid knitter Nicole Nehrig wonderfully explores in this captivating book, textile work has often been a way for women to exercise power. When their voices were silenced and other avenues were closed off to them, women used the tools they had?often a needle and thread?to seek freedom within the restrictive societies they lived in.

Spanning continents and centuries, With Her Own Hands brings together remarkable stories of women who have used textiles as a means of liberation, from an eighteenth-century Quaker boarding school that used embroidered samplers to teach girls math and geography to the Quechua weavers working to preserve and revive Incan traditions today, and from the Miao women of southern China who, in the absence of a written language, pass down their histories in elaborate “story cloths” to a midcentury British women’s postal art exchange. Textiles have been a way for women to explore their intellectual capacities, seek economic independence, create community, process traumas, and convey powerful messages of self-expression and political protest.

Heartfelt and deeply moving, With Her Own Hands is a celebration of women who have woven their own stories?and a testament to their resilience.

This was incredibly well researched – a PhD thesis, but still accessible to a casual (uniformed) reader. I did get a bit stuck with all of the terrible things that happened and how women used textile craft to find solace and meaning. There is only so much misery I can read about it one go.

If you are at all interested in social history, textiles, women’s history, then you will find this book fascinating and insightful.

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July 29, 2026 · 4:31 pm

A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki

A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki

I don’t know where I first heard about this novel. I think it was one of the Lit Hub Recommends emails, which is a fabulous resource.

Here is the blurb …

Nao lives in Tokyo. She is sixteen, and has decided to write a diary before she kills herself, she particularly wants to chronicle the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun. Ruth lives on the Pacific coast of Canada. A few months after the 2010 tsunami she finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore.

This is a beautiful, enchanting novel. Like Ruth, I wanted to keep reading Nao’s story. The structure is fabulous, we switch between Nao’s and Ruth’s perspective. Learning about their lives both inner and outer. Who knew that Japanese school children could be so brutal?

A review

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July 24, 2026 · 5:17 pm

The Matchbox Girl – Alice Jolly

The Matchbox Girl – Alice Jolly

All I knew about this novel was that it had won the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. I love historical fiction, so I bought both a digital and audio copy (instant gratification!).

Here’s the blurb …

Adelheid Brunner does not speak. She writes and draws instead and her ambition is to own one thousand matchboxes. Her grandmother cannot make sense of this, but Adelheid will stop at nothing to achieve her dream. She makes herself invisible, hiding in cupboards with her pet rat, Franz Joseph, listening in on conversations she can’t fully comprehend.

Then she meets Dr Asperger, a man who lets children play all day and who recognises the importance of matchboxes. He invites Adelheid to come and live at the Vienna paediatric clinic, where she and other children like herself will live under observation.

But the date is 1938 and the place is Vienna – a city of political instability, a place of increasing fear and violence. When the Nazis march into the city, a new world is created and difficult choices must be made.

Why are the clinic’s children disappearing, and where do they go? Adelheid starts to suspect that some of Dr Asperger’s games are played for the highest stakes. In order to survive, she must play a game whose rules she cannot yet understand.

I listened to it – this version – the narrator is fabulous. I didn’t even read the blurb, so I went into this novel completely cold. It took me ages to realise who Doctor A was! It is beautifully written, Adelheid is a fabulous character (I enjoyed being in her head). Ms Jolly must have done a huge amount of research, but the novel wears it lightly – it just felt like someone was telling me a story about Vienna, neurodivergence, and the children’s hospital. I didn’t know anything about the history of autism (despite being a neurodivergent family), so that was all fascinating (and horrifying when the Nazis got involved).

It’s a wonderful way to learn history – Vienna during the war, autism research, and the treatment of neurodivergent children. I hope all children have a Sister Viktorine in their lives.

A review

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July 3, 2026 · 10:05 am

John of John – Douglas Stuart

John of John – Douglas Stuart

Someone recommended this online and I immediately downloaded the Audible book.

Here’s the blurb …

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.

While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.

I have been having a bit of a Scottish islands thing – this novel, and the movie The Road Damce. This is my first Douglas Stuart novel, but it won’t be my last. I loved this story of religion, family, community, and forbidden love. The writing is beautiful – I particularly enjoyed all of the references to colour. John is a weaver (as well as a farmer) and he and Cal have an extraordinary eye for colour. The descriptions of the landscape and the farming practices are brilliant. It is a small, poor, very religious community with not a lot to keep the young people at home – fishing and farming. Cal is gay, openly on the mainland, but not out at home. His community is presbyterian (of the old sort) and he would be demembered if anyone knew. However, his father, who leads the singing at church, has a secret.

John, with his casual violence, would be a monster, but we see things from his point of view and can appreciate his struggle between faith and love.

This is the story of many remote communities where the living is hard, money scarce and opportunities few. Yet it is not depressing to read and in the end there is hope for a better future.

A review.

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June 15, 2026 · 11:15 am

Mrs Osmond – John Banville

Mrs Osmond – John Banville

Is that not a great cover? This is a continuation of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. I read Portrait of a Lady years ago – I think it’s my favourite Henry James novel – so this sounded intriguing. I was always disappointed that Isabel married Gilbert Osmond.

Here’s the blurb …

Isabel Archer is a young American woman, swept off to Europe in the late nineteenth century by an aunt who hopes to round out the impetuous but naive girl’s experience of the world. When Isabel comes into a large, unexpected inheritance, she is finagled into a marriage with the charming, penniless, and–as Isabel finds out too late–cruel and deceitful Gilbert Osmond, whose connection to a certain Madame Merle is suspiciously intimate. On a trip to England to visit her cousin Ralph Touchett on his deathbed, Isabel is offered a chance to free herself from the marriage, but nonetheless chooses to return to Italy. Banville follows James’s story line to this point, but Mrs. Osmond is thoroughly Banville’s own: the narrative inventiveness; the lyrical precision and surprise of his language; the layers of emotional and psychological intensity; the subtle, dark humor. And when Isabel arrives in Italy–along with someone else –the novel takes off in directions that James himself would be thrilled to follow.

As I wrote earlier, it has been a while since I read anything by James, but the prose style of this novel feels Jamesian. We have the old characters; Madame Merle, Pansy, Aunt Lydia, Ralph Touchett (just in passing), and Henrietta Stackpole. The settings range from London, Paris, Florence and Rome – quite the Grand Tour.

No spoilers, but I was happy with how this ended.

I do think you need to have read A Portrait of a Lady before tackling this one, but, if you have, then I highly recommend this one.

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June 1, 2026 · 12:33 pm

The Things We Never Say – Elizabeth Strout

The Things we Never Say – Elizabeth Strout

I love Elizabeth Strout novels – my favourite is Olive Kitteridge, so I pre-ordered this one.

Here’s the blurb …

Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: how is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?
 
 And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.
 
 With exquisite prose and profound insight, Elizabeth Strout captures the way grief reverberates through decades, the comfort found in deep friendships and the freedom that comes when we break free of our secrets. The Things We Never Say is a stunning new novel from one of our most acclaimed observers of the human heart.

Artie is a good guy in a world gone mad – the election is looming in the US, is it possible that ‘that man’ will be re-elected? He thinks he wants to be gone, but not in a way that would be distressing for others. Then there is a boating incident and he realises that he, in fact, wants to live (this is not the secret). He has a profound impact on two of his students, and develops a relationship with the man who saved him from drowning, is close to his son, but distant from his wife. He is a good man trying to navigate his way in the world – the new principal chastises him for saying ‘boys and girls’ (it’s demeaning and some might not identify as boy or girl).

The dialogue is fabulous – very natural sounding.

I think it would be nice to get this story again, but from Evie’s point of view. Let’s just say the reader (or this reader) doesn’t warm to her.

A review

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April 18, 2026 · 5:27 pm

The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky

I thought it was time to tackle another Russian classic (after War and Peace and Anna Karenina). I listened to this one, which, I think, is my preferred way of reading these long classics.

Here’s the description

The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, driven to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family’s rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. Dostoyevsky’s dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil, blur and everyone’s faith in humanity is tested.

As you can imagine, this was long with lengthy philosophical/religious tracts. It took a long time to get to what I think of as the ‘meat’ of the novel – the murder, trial, etc.

Here is the Wikipedia article

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March 23, 2026 · 11:51 am

A Family Matter – Claire Lynch

A Family Matter – Claire Lynch

I am not sure where I first hear about this novel – definitely via the internet maybe someone on substack. I borrowed it from the library, so I mustn’t have known much about it (and was a bit loathe to commit to a purchase).

Here’s the blurb …

A mother following her heart
A father with the law on his side
A child caught in the middle

It’s 2022, and Heron, an old man of quiet habits, has just had the sort of visit to the doctor that turns a life upside down. Sharing the diagnosis with Maggie, his only daughter, seems impossible. Heron just can’t find the words to tell her about it, or any of the other things he’s been protecting her from for so long.

It’s 1982, and Dawn is a young wife and mother penned in by the expectations of her time and place. Then Hazel comes into her life like a torch in the dark. It’s the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly Dawn’s world is more joyful, and more complicated, than she ever expected. But Dawn has responsibilities, she has commitments: Dawn has Maggie.

A Family Matter is an immersive and tender debut, at once heart-breaking and hopeful, that asks how we might heal from the wounds of the past, and what we might learn from them.

This had an interesting chapter structure – short and split into sections. I was compelled to keep reading. We have two time periods – 1980s and contemporary, and three major characters – Heron, Dawn and Maggie. Maggie has some great thoughts about being a mother and wife and all of the tasks involved.

It is a beautifully written story – heart break, wit, prejudice, and outrage (mine). And all within recent memory.

A review

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March 2, 2026 · 11:41 am

Flesh – David Szalay

Flesh – David Szalay

This is my latest book club book. I had it in my digital pile, having bought it thinking I would read all of the Booker prize shortlist for 2025 (I am still going). This won.

Here’s the blurb …

A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. 

Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control. 

As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.

Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it. 

This has a pared back, direct writing style. It is also like a group of short stories connected together with István being the connection. Each chapter has him in a new place or a new phase of his life, and we don’t know how he got there. In the bits we read he seems very passive, but he joins the army, moves to England, moves back to Hungary so he has some agency. This is a biography told through relationships; the older neighbour, his mother, Helen, Thomas, and his son. He seems attracted to women who have power over him (Helen and the neighbour). Despite not being a sympathetic character, I did feel for him in the end.

Service 95 – David Szalay Interview

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October 22, 2025 · 12:41 pm

South Riding – Winifred Holtby

South Riding – Winifred Holtby

I watched the 2011 TV adaptation (which is great), then I read a paper copy, and now I have listened to it. Clearly a bit of a favourite.

Here’s the blurb …

Winifred Holtby’s masterpiece is a rich evocation of the lives and relationships of the characters of South Riding. Sarah Burton, the fiery young headmistress of the local girls’ school; Mrs Beddows, the district’s first alderwoman—based on Holtby’s own mother; and Robert Carne, the conservative gentleman-farmer locked in a disastrous marriage—with whom the radical Sarah Burton falls in love. Showing how public decisions can mold the individual, this story offers a panoramic and unforgettable view of Yorkshire life.

I really enjoyed this novel. I think it shows a slice of rural life in England between the wars. The machinations of the local council, the living conditions of the poor (lack of sanitation, not to mention birth control), the lack of welfare services (I am thinking of Lydia having to leave school to look after her siblings after her mother dies), but there is also community spirit and a hope that things will improve.

A review and more about Winifred Holtby.

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