# Trema > Books that make small worlds feel enormous—often in translation, often slim. Recommended by Daniël van der Winden. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### Short writing about books worth reading URL: https://www.trema.website/about/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T10:52:42.000Z On *Trema,* I publish one book recommendation per month. I’m drawn to books that make small worlds feel enormous—often in translation, often slim, rarely what you’d call a page-turner; the compressed fury of [Natalia Ginzburg](https://www.trema.website/natalia-ginzburg-the-dry-heart/), the waking thoughts of [Claire-Louise Bennett](https://www.trema.website/claire-louise-bennett-pond/), or the wandering eye of [Teju Cole](https://www.trema.website/teju-cole-open-city/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/2026/02/daniel-square@2x.webp) That's me, speaking at a launch event for [**TRANSCRIPT*](https://transcriptmag.store/?ref=trema.website) issue three. Photo by [Remy van der Winden](https://www.remyvdw.nl/?ref=trema.website) My name is [Daniël](http://www.daniel.pizza/?ref=trema.website). By profession I’m a software designer; by inclination, I’m a reader and a writer. I write in English and in Dutch. For commissions, [you can email me](mailto:daniel@trema.website). *Trema* is the Dutch word for the diaeresis—the two dots above a vowel that tell you to slow down and pronounce each syllable. A small mark that changes how you hear a word; a small publication to change how you read a book. --- ### Colophon This website runs on [Ghost](http://ghost.org/?ref=trema.website), an open-source publishing platform. The theme is custom, designed and built by myself. Typography is set in [*Degular*](https://ohnotype.co/fonts/degular?ref=trema.website) by Oh No Type Co. for headings, and Foster Type’s [*Blanco*](https://www.fostertype.com/retail-type/blanco?ref=daniel.pizza) for body copy. If you’d like to read more about how I went about creating it, you can do so on my [personal website](https://www.daniel.pizza/journal/trema-ghost-theme/?ref=trema.website). [A fresh coat of paint for Trema, my publication about the books I loved reading · Daniël van der WindenAfter over two years of writing a book recommendation per month, it was time to design a new and improved reading experience.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/favicon-32x32-1.png)Daniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/trema-featured-img-1200.jpeg)](https://www.daniel.pizza/journal/trema-ghost-theme/?ref=trema.website) ### Thank you for subscribing! URL: https://www.trema.website/thank-you-for-subscribing/ Last updated: 2025-11-03T11:05:14.000Z In the meantime, catch up on some recent posts. [Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, by Roddy DoyleThe perfect balance between humour and heartbreak: a vivid portrait of childhood innocence set against a backdrop of a family’s quiet collapse.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-transparent-1.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/roddy-doyle-paddy-clarke.png)](https://www.trema.website/roddy-doyle-paddy-clarke-ha-ha-ha/) [Collected Works, by Jo-Ann Beard“My first love was poetry, my second love was fiction and my third and lasting love was the essay.”![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-1-10.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/jo-ann-beard-collected-works-1.png)](https://www.trema.website/the-collected-works-of-jo-ann-beard-2023/) [The Alternatives, by Caoilinn HughesA cleverly composed family novel about care and climate.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-transparent-3.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/caoilinn-hughes-the-alternatives-1.png)](https://www.trema.website/caoilinn-hughes-the-alternatives/) [Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie JacobsenA cinematic glimpse into Armageddon.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-1-11.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/annie-jacobsen-nuclear-war-a-scenario.png)](https://www.trema.website/annie-jacobsen-nuclear-war-a-scenario/) I publish this brief newsletter once per month. Subscribing is free, and will remain so forever—thank you for reading. If you'd like me to write similarly for your publication, [send me an email](mailto:d.vanderwinden@gmail.com). Thank you, Daniël ### Authors URL: https://www.trema.website/authors/ Last updated: 2025-09-01T21:15:09.000Z An automatically updated and alphabetised list of every author featured on this site. ### Highlights URL: https://www.trema.website/highlights/ Last updated: 2026-02-23T15:10:13.000Z ### Pond An odd collection of short stories by [Claire-Louise Bennett](https://www.trema.website/tag/claire-louise-bennett/), and a bit of a cult-classic. A book about solitude that made me want to inhabit a cottage somewhere and pay more attention to every little thing. [Pond, by Claire-Louise Bennett“In solitude, you don’t need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you.”![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-transparent-4.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/claire-louise-bennett-pond.png)](https://www.trema.website/claire-louise-bennett-pond/) --- ### Every Man for Himself and God Against All [Werner Herzog’s](https://www.trema.website/tag/werner-herzog/) memoir can't be trusted, and that makes it a brilliant read. [Every Man for Himself and God Against All, by Werner HerzogHerzog has lived many lives and exudes an endless curiosity — as if, as a child, he fell into a Bavarian creek awash with potion and clambered out anew, like some German Obelix.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-transparent-6.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/werner-herzog-every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all.png)](https://www.trema.website/werner-herzog-every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all/) --- ### Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha An all-time classic novel, written by [Roddy Doyle](https://www.trema.website/tag/roddy-doyle/), about a boy in Dublin whose world is small and whose imagination looms large. [Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, by Roddy DoyleThe perfect balance between humour and heartbreak: a vivid portrait of childhood innocence set against a backdrop of a family’s quiet collapse.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-transparent-7.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/roddy-doyle-paddy-clarke-1.png)](https://www.trema.website/roddy-doyle-paddy-clarke-ha-ha-ha/) ## Posts ### The Bee Sting URL: https://www.trema.website/paul-murray-the-bee-sting/ Last updated: 2026-09-23T06:35:47.000Z > “The rain is falling again in soft sheets and the sun through it makes the pitch glitter like broken glass” The Barnes family is in a spot of bother. It’s 2008, and their car dealership, run by Dickie Barnes, is buckling under the coming financial crash. Nobody in town is buying cars, and those who already own one have stopped bringing it to the Barnes garage for a service. Dickie seems oddly resigned. He’s no salesman. A soft fellow; after his daughter learned about climate change at school and told him about it, he pretty much started talking customers *out of* buying petrol cars. His wife Imelda, the town beauty, grew up poor with an abusive father and married into the well-off Barnes family almost by accident. Here, she tries to take matters in her own hands. Compared to Dickie she’s a bolt of lightning, always zapping forward. She keeps up the family’s appearances for a visit from Dickie’s father, Maurice, flying back to Ireland from Portugal, where he retired to enjoy his golf and his sunshine. *He’ll get them back on track.* In the meantime she sells her clothes on eBay to bring in some cash. Their teenage daughter, Cass, a teenager on the verge of heading off to university, isn’t coping all too well. The garage’s troubles are the talk of the town, and it’s not a good look when your father is mucking it up for everyone to see. The *goss*! On top of it all there’s Elaine, her manipulative best friend since forever. They *must* go to college together. They must stay *together*. It’s a lot, and Cass starts having a drink, and another one, and then another. Their son PJ is a pretty lonely kid. No one seems to really notice him. He’s being bullied, needs to come up with some money to pay off a debt to the town bully, who claims Dickie ripped off his father, and wants PJ to settle it. Besides Nev and Zargham, he has a friend who lives in Dublin, and they talk online. He might visit him soon. It’s a few hours from the country. He’s working on an escape plan. He also wears shoes that are a few sizes too small; his feet have outgrown them, but he won’t tell his mam. Save the family some money. Around them are Victor, Dickie’s cross-eyed, doomsday-prepping mate, whom Imelda can’t stand to see the sight of. And Maurice, of course, who can do no wrong. Known and hailed by everyone in town (“From the other side of the street Georgie Moran hollers out There’s the man! Howya Maurice!”). And Frank, Dickie’s brother, whose presence looms over the entire family. Murray gives each character their own chapters, alternating between their present day and the formative events that took place a few decades earlier. Bringing out in great detail their personalities and their histories, he reveals the layers of this dysfunctional family from their point of view—what drives them, the secrets they keep, what haunts them. The writing is very clever. Making use of the space between his characters, of the things they don’t know about each other, Murray expertly hides narrative twists that left me with a knot in my stomach. His writing is heartbreaking when he tumbles his characters into trouble, and hilarious when he chronicles small-town life and a fumbling family (“You don’t have to tell me EVERY SINGLE DETAIL of your life Cass’s voice returns from beneath the duvet”). From the first pages it’s clear that you’re about to witness the Barnes’s unraveling, but despite its tragedy, it’s funny, too. The book runs to over 600 pages, and I still *raced* through it. Take the moment Cass, on a drive with Imelda, says she wants to study English literature in Dublin, where her father went: > “The windows of the Camry are down too but somehow it only becomes hotter Imelda’s fingers are sticking to the steering wheel It just seems a long way to go to read a few poems she says” Or years earlier, when a young Imelda tried to wrap her head around the football: > “Now Imelda didn’t know one end of a ball from the other and until then she’d have imagined how obsessed an entire town could be about kids playing football Wherever you went you heard the same conversation Would Joe Blah’s knee hold up Did Seanie Whatshisface deserve another crack at a starting place Had they a chance of making it to the next round” You’ll have noticed the missing punctuation. It threw me off at first, too, and makes for a more demanding read. Murray uses it in Imelda’s chapters, I think to capture the rush of her inner thoughts. At first it bothered me, but after a while it engulfed me. When I closed the book and looked at the passages I’d noted down, nearly all of them came from her chapters: > “The bloody roads were clogged up the whole way and Daddy was in a jock Kept honking the horn at the unmoving cars then complaining about his headache STOP HONKING THE HORN THEN she yelled at him but he didn’t hear Her own head was full of chaos” That breathlessness carries the book. As the family’s points of views start to converge, the gaps Murray has left between his characters narrow, and the tension tightens page by page. Weaving past and present, personal and family history, Paul Murray has pieced together a layered, technically impressive and thoroughly engrossing novel. It’s the perfect beach read, or an autumn companion to sink your teeth into. --- > **The Bee Sting* by Paul Murray* > Published by Hamish Hamilton in 2023 ### The Silver Book URL: https://www.trema.website/olivia-laing-the-silver-book/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T11:53:29.000Z A young artist from London is plucked out of Venice by Danilo Donati, the set and costume designer who works with film directors [Federico Fellini](https://letterboxd.com/director/federico-fellini/?ref=trema.website) and [Pier Paolo Pasolini](https://letterboxd.com/director/pier-paolo-pasolini/?ref=trema.website). Donati takes him to Rome, first as his lover, then makes him his apprentice, working from Cinecittà, the film studios, on Fellini’s [*Casanova*](https://letterboxd.com/film/fellinis-casanova/?ref=trema.website) starring Donald Sutherland; then to a farmhouse in the north, for Pasolini’s [*Salò*](https://letterboxd.com/film/salo-or-the-120-days-of-sodom/?ref=trema.website), a gruesome fascist hellscape. > “It is Danilo’s snoring that wakes Nicholas in the night, heart pounding, one unfamiliar leg flung over his. Sex he wanted, sex has never made him feel bad, but he has traded away his name. He said Nicholas before any alternative presented itself. Now he has tied his face to his identity when he could have taken the opportunity to throw it away, to reinvent. Nicholas Wade, art student.” Nicholas arrives in Italy by ferry, distressed, escaping a death, and is plunged into a world of beauty, albeit artificial. He meanders through Rome in spring and summer, and Laing’s writing is sticky like the city is—makes you wish you were there, strolling through the heat, Wayfarers on, pack of cigarettes tucked in the pocket of a linen shirt. The others on set call him *mozzo*. “Cabin boy, gopher. Bottom of the heap, sure, but part of the team.” He draws, paints, and makes what he is asked to make, learning to fake snow from feathers, rolled oats, tissue paper, Parmesan cheese. > “If he’s lucky, if he’s quiet, he will be able to watch Danilo at work. It is fascinating to Nicholas, the way he converts the real city they are travelling through into scenes from a story. Even without people, his rooms are thick with narrative potential. It’s the frame, Dani says. The frame and the direction of the light. He makes a garden tucked beside a church, furnishes it with cypresses and a well, gives it a moon, scratches pale blue ripples of light into the trees. You can feel the presence of the water beyond the steps, an invisible mirror.” The book’s perspective shifts seamlessly between that of Danilo and that of Nicholas, helped by its fragmentary composition. Laing dips in and out of their inner worlds, keeps sentences short, and propels the reader forward. I was most enamoured of the scenes in which the two of them travel, taking note of and drawing the city, or a detail in an abandoned building. Or their hands at work within the confines of those film sets—the lucidity with which Laing writes sometimes reminding me of Claire Wilcox’s [*Patch Work*](https://www.trema.website/claire-wilcox-patch-work/), a memoir by the V&A’s curator of fashion. > “There is no music, just the clack-clack of sewing machines, the sound of the big dog breathing. He is in it like a dancer, off the book, note-perfect. Everything is at a finger’s reach. It’s like he exhales dresses, a chorus line of red and blue and pink, stretching as far as the eye can see.” Laing writes a slim, fictional narrative over a rich, real-world history previously written about in [large biographies](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo25160318.html?ref=trema.website). At 239 pages, a lot of that history is inferred rather than explored. The characters, the textures—the world they inhabit and the worlds they construct—move to the front of the frame, and Laing describes them impressively, in short, delicate strokes. As a whole, it feels unforced. Light, and funny, too (“Why are Italians so obsessed with tiny cars? Because we like to look impressive climbing out of them, Dani says”). But it’s not all sweaty, sticky, and sensual. Nicholas gets mixed up in a noir plot of film canisters, blackmail, and Pasolini, Laing building on a theory of what happened that November. On paper, a thriller, though I think it never quite reads like one. The tension stays diffuse, the plot waiting patiently while Laing looks at a doorway, a dress, the light. Really, it’s where the book is best. Read it before the summer’s heat fades. *My thanks to Scott, a reader from Louisville, who recommended I read this book.* --- > **The Silver Book* by Olivia Laing* > Published by Hamish Hamilton in 2025 [Buy the book](https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-silver-book-olivia-laing/8f15f8d5cdce9857?ean=9781405982290&bkshp-astro=t&ref=trema.website) ### Frog and Other Essays URL: https://www.trema.website/anne-fadiman-frog/ Last updated: 2026-07-06T12:01:02.000Z What I like about reading a great collection of essays is how it can pull you in and, to borrow an image from Virginia Woolf, draw its curtain around you. How, in a great collection of essays, each essay becomes its own little expedition, and for the duration of that expedition nothing exists outside of it. A great writer will refer elsewhere, let you peek through the curtain now and again to heighten your anticipation and appreciation for what’s *out there*, but, for the most part, keeps you cocooned. The writing of Joan Didion comes to mind. Zadie Smith, of course. But so too do [Jo Ann Beard](https://www.trema.website/the-collected-works-of-jo-ann-beard-2023/) and [Elisa Gabbert](https://www.trema.website/elisa-gabbert-any-person-is-the-only-self/), as previously recommended in this publication. And now, Anne Fadiman. In *Frog and Other Essays*, published this year, are seven essays, swinging from the historical (on Hartley Coleridge, and *The South Polar Times*) to the mundane (frogs, printers, Zoom). There’s the titular essay on her family’s pet frog Bunky, who lives with them, undisturbed and largely unnoticed, for many years. Inevitably, at some point Bunky passes away, and Fadiman and her husband agree to wait until their children—both moved out—are home again, before they bury him under the weeping cherry. > “We filed Bunky’s Ziploc at the back of the second shelf from the bottom. Sometimes we worried that a guest might find him while rummaging for the English muffins and become alarmed. But mostly we didn’t think of him at all. It’s easy to forget you have a frog in your freezer when he’s behind the frozen tamales.” Is it strange to have a frog in your freezer? Yes. Does it make perfect sense within the confines of the piece? Also, yes. There’s a great essay on Fadiman’s printer, the *Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Series II*—a device she clung to for decades after its discontinuation, and kept alive with parts cannibalised from its fallen brethren. (Flipping through the pages of the book again while writing this, I realise “My Old Printer” only takes up ten of them, yet it feels—and this is a compliment—like I’ve spent a life with that old machine.) “All My Pronouns”—on the long search for a gender-neutral singular in English, and on Fadiman’s students who live outside the binary—is perhaps the most thoughtful writing on the subject I’ve read. And then there’s the closing “Yes to Everything”, a beautiful and sad but life-affirming essay on Marina Keegan, a student of Fadiman’s who died in 2012, five days after graduating *magna cum laude* from Yale University. > “I was familiar with some of the pieces because she’d written them for my class. As I started to read the rest—a profile of an exterminator called “I Kill for Money,” an essay on why so many of her classmates were forgoing creative work and taking jobs in finance, a short story about a woman who thinks her Chinese ankle tattoo means “inner resolve” but finds out it really means “soybean”—I was astonished by the range of her subjects and the strength of her voice.” Keegan’s own collection of essays and stories, *The Opposite of Loneliness*—published posthumously in 2014—became a *New York Times* bestseller. Throughout her writing, Fadiman strikes a tone that is expertly balanced. She’s sharp, witty, sincere, and above all, whenever appropriate, very funny. “Screen Share”, her essay on the pandemic, is thoughtful and hilarious. It recounts her coming to terms with *Zooming* to keep teaching her nonfiction writing classes to her students, rather than doing so in person inside a classroom (preferably Linsly-Chittenden 212, “a tiny room in a faux-Gothic hall built in 1907”). She zigzags between the everyday (“It’s touching to hear *Pulitzer Prize* winners share cyber tips”) and the existential: > “Another weird thing: I can see myself while I’m teaching. It’s as if when I taught in Linsly-Chittenden 212, a small mirror had been positioned in front of my face at all times. I’m mesmerized. How have I lived for sixty-six years without knowing that when I talk, the right side of my mouth is lower than the left?” A friend, a teacher at another university, tells her that a new Yiddish word has been invented to signify your overexposure to Zoom: *oysgezoomt*. “Ich bin azoy oysgezoomt!” If you’re feeling *oysgezoomt* yourself, I recommend you let Fadiman draw the curtain around you. --- > **Frog and Other Essays* by Anne Fadiman* > Published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in 2026 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/frog-and-other-essays-anne-fadiman/d4d8133315d1470a?aid=93138&ean=9780374608743&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### The Wild Birds URL: https://www.trema.website/wendell-berry-the-wild-birds/ Last updated: 2026-06-17T22:29:58.000Z During a recent visit to Louisville, Kentucky, I stopped in at [Carmichael’s](https://carmichaelsbookstore.com/?ref=trema.website) on Bardstown Road. In business since 1978, it’s reputedly Louisville’s oldest independent bookstore. Whenever I’m abroad I like to visit one such bookstore, to buy a book by a local writer (though, on a recent trip to Stockholm I made an exception: the international collection at [Söderbokhandeln Hansson & Bruce](https://www.soderbokhandeln.se/?ref=trema.website), established in 1927, is just *too* good). The Carmichael’s employee I asked, eyes shining, steered me towards Wendell Berry, perhaps the writer Kentucky is fondest of. At ninety-one he is celebrated for his essays, novels and poetry, much of it turning on rural and agrarian themes. I took her advice and picked up a recently republished collection of his short stories, *The Wild Birds*. [Going Home with Wendell BerryThe writer and farmer on local knowledge, embracing limits, and the exploitation of rural America.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/favicon-db0e0341-a6a5-40f7-8137-69d72148d8ee.ico)The New YorkerAmanda Petrusich![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/Petrusich-WendellBerry-2-fc8a802a-c4ae-4843-bbfe-9d8cf1f07e28.jpg)](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/going-home-with-wendell-berry?ref=trema.website) *The Wild Birds* spans three decades of life in Port William, a fictional community in Kentucky’s river-valley farm country that forms the recurring setting of Berry’s novels and stories. The particular stories in this collection revolve around Wheeler Catlett, a lawyer whose clients are also his friends and neighbours, and whose roots are planted firmly in that Kentucky soil. At 158 pages, the collection makes a gentle introduction to Berry’s work. With stories taking place between 1930 and 1967, his account of country life is warm and affectionate. In just a few pages he conjures characters complex enough to justify placing a family tree in the back pages, and a map of the township beside it—you won’t need either, but they show just how much Berry cares about this world he imagined. The stories move chronologically through the life of the community, and two in particular stood out to me: *Thicker Than Liquor* and *The Boundary*. In *Thicker Than Liquor* we meet Uncle Peach, Wheeler’s uncle, whose drinking problem get him into every kind of trouble. > “When he worked, which was far from all the time, Uncle Peach was a carpenter, and for a while he was known as a good one. His failing in his younger years was merely infidelity. He was absolutely dependable as long as his pockets were empty. Money made him thirsty; once he got thirsty, he left; and then there was no getting him back until he had passed through flight, gallantry, drunkenness, devastation, and convalescence.” Wheeler often is left to sort him out or settle whatever debt he owes, and travels to Louisville to do just that. It’s a comic, slightly melancholy portrait of family duty—of loving someone who can’t be relied upon. It quietly sets the book’s tone, too: in Port William people are bound to one another, whether they like it or not. In *The Boundary* we follow Mat Feltner, an elderly man walking his farm’s fence line on a warm day because, he realised, it had been years since he did. > “But when he came out onto the porch and sat down and lit his pipe, a thought that had been on its way toward him for several hours finally reached him. He does not know how good the line fence is down Shade Branch; he would bet that Nathan, who is still rushing to get his crops out, has not looked at it. The panic of a realized neglect came upon him.” After dinner, to his wife’s surprise, Mat forgoes his nap to walk that length of the boundary line that runs down Shade Branch. > “He has it all before him, the place that has been his life, and how lightly and happily now he walks out again into it! It seems to him that he has cast off all restraint, left all encumbrances behind, taking only himself and his direction. He is feeling good. There has been plenty of rain, and the year is full of promise. The country looks promising.” As he sets out, his mind drifts and memories surface: a walk he has made many times before becomes a meditation on age, and his lifelong bond with the land. The walk out is easy enough; the walk back nearly kills him. What carries him is the land itself, and the memory of everyone he ever worked it with. Nothing much happens, and that’s the point: Berry lets a single afternoon hold a whole life. The four other stories work in much the same key, and I left Port William the way I gather Berry’s readers tend to: a little homesick for a place I’d never visited, and thankful that Carmichael’s in Louisville had sent me home in such good company. --- > **The Wild Birds* by Wendell Berry* > First published by North Point Press in 1986 > Published by Counterpoint in 2019 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-wild-birds-six-stories-of-the-port-william-membership-wendell-berry/9083f24aed5f8abc?aid=93138&ean=9781640092105&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Greyhound URL: https://www.trema.website/joanna-pocock-greyhound/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:27.000Z I was on an airplane making its way to America when I started reading Joanna Pocock’s *Greyhound*. I read it during my stay in Louisville (Kentucky), and I finished it at a Chicago airport on my way back home. I thought it fitting to read it while traveling, as it details her journey across America on a Greyhound bus. Ideally, I would have read it while moving continuously myself, lines painted on a highway blurring beneath my wheels, on a roadtrip to an elsewhere. It doesn’t always work out that way; I do recommend you read it while on the move. We follow Pocock going from Detroit to Los Angeles. She made the same journey before, in 2006, in the wake of her third miscarriage and the passing of her sister. This second time around, in 2023, her crossing the country is a way of checking in with the land, and with herself. She crosses the same highways she did then, takes in the cities and, as much as that’s possible, sleeps in the motels she visited previously, documenting how everything has changed—in her notebook and with her camera. How *she* has changed, and how America has changed, too—not for the better. She doesn’t have a driver’s license, so traversing the country by bus isn’t entirely by choice. She relies on public transportation and the occasional Uber, mostly when the Greyhound station she disembarks at is located in a godawful and forgotten corner of a city. Her car-less existence means she can’t control her journey like someone else would, and she pits her experience against the literature written by men behind the wheel, like Steinbeck and Kerouac. Hers is the wilder ride. It becomes clear that America has long forgotten about its public transportation, as she documents missing timetables, bus stops situated in dangerous locations, and near-abandoned stations without any amenities or facilities whatsoever. Long waits in unshaded areas, heat rippling off the boiling tarmac. Frequently, there are no ticket machines (losing your phone means you lose your ticket); often, there is a near-absence of sympathy. Her book tells the story of a fading communal experience, of travel as an act of isolation. Back when she took her previous journey across the country she’d meet her fellow travelers more easily. Have conversations, get to know them. This time around, most everyone is absorbed by their phone (and, to be fair, severing oneself seems like the right thing to do when the conditions of travel are so poor). Trash bags filled with clothing regularly outnumber suitcases; the Greyhound comes across as a last resort for many. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/2026/05/joanna-pocock.png) Photos by Joanna Pocock Pocock writes: > “There are only three accounts of women undertaking The Great American Road Trip that I know of: Simone de Beauvoir’s 1948 *America Day by Day* (beautifully translated by Carol Cosman), British writer Ethel Mannin’s travelogue *An American Journey*, written some twenty years later and *The Great American Bus Ride* by Irma Kurtz, which was published in 1993.” She traces the footsteps of women who traveled before her, though it becomes clear that Simone de Beauvoir’s experience was markedly different: it was new, and seemingly free of worry (though she has her complaints, too). Pocock’s travels, I can’t say otherwise, seem mostly chaotic, sometimes unbelievably so. Here’s a particularly chaotic scene, featuring one of a few of the erratic drives (and drivers) she encountered: > “‘I wasn’t supposed to do this route,’ the driver repeated as she turned the bus around and headed back to where we had come from. The Marine behind me was still swearing at the Greyhound customer service people: ‘She’s just done a U-turn on the highway!’ A woman across the aisle from me one row ahead was watching videos of a baby crying. She had the sound on. Was this her baby? Someone else’s baby? Was it being looked after by relatives? Friends? Between bouts of crying there was the sound of shattering glass. Maybe it was some kind of game. Someone else was watching a violent film with the sound up. Gunfire rang out from his iPad. Crying, glass shattering, automatic weapons. We drove on. The sign language guy was keeping us informed about what he was telling the deaf woman. We approved of his running commentary.” Reading this scene, like so many in the book, made me want to curl up in the comfort of my home. It also made me want to take a Greyhound bus across America. Pocock creates an impressive tapestry, combining memoir, reporting, and deeply researched environmental writing. She sharply observes the characters around her, the conversations she overhears, and the landscapes passing her window—writing devastatingly about the concrete but lovingly about the land. In Amarillo “the earth would be turning ochre and red, the light would travel for miles”. Or in Abiquiu, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Albuquerque: > “I had never seen such a place. Such light. Such red earth. What Willa Cather describes as ‘a sweep of red carnelian-coloured hills’. Where these reds met the blue on the horizon was a shimmering line, an almost imperceptible now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t ribbon of violet, almost white. The magnetic pull of this land was powerful. What writer or artist with the means would not want to move here forever?” Photographs taken by Pocock accompany her writing. Printed in black-and-white, they strip away the ochre and the violet. Still, America shines through in full colour. --- > **Greyhound* by Joanna Pocock* > Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2025 > Read an excerpt on [Orion Magazine](https://orionmagazine.org/article/greyhound/?ref=trema.website) [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/greyhound-a-memoir-joanna-pocock/1e723243c777e915?aid=93138&ean=9781593768010&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### The Memory Police URL: https://www.trema.website/yoko-ogawa-the-memory-police/ Last updated: 2026-04-02T16:05:23.000Z > “And what will happen if words disappear?” From the island, things tend to disappear. Usually, there are a few weeks between every disappearance. Whenever one occurs, the island’s residents wake up in the morning—“eyes closed, ears pricked, trying to sense the flow of the morning air”—and something feels off. The air is dense, weighted. They gather outside and wonder aloud, until someone points out what it was this time. Birds, roses, calendars, hats. Ships are gone. Photographs no longer exist. When something disappears, so too will the residents’ memory of it, and then their memory of it disappearing. Before they forget, it’s up to them to make sure they eradicate every trace of the thing they can find at home. Let’s say, on the day birds disappeared. They fly off, leaving the observatory in shambles, and you own a few pictures of birds. If you don’t destroy them, *The Memory Police*—oppressive enforcers of a regimen of disappearance—will raid your house, destroy any evidence of birds, and load you and your family into a truck to be taken away. It’s unclear to where, but all anyone knows is you never return. The day the birds disappeared was straightforward, as they all flew away. Photographs were difficult. Fruit, too, was easy: “a pattering sound could be heard everywhere, and in the northern hills and the forest park, fruit came down like a hailstorm.” The (unnamed) narrator is a novelist. She has two friends: the old man, a former ferryman who lives on a forgotten boat, and R, her editor. R is one of just a few people who never forget. He remembers that which disappeared, and for this he is in danger of being taken by *The Memory Police*—a fate that befell the narrator’s mother in the past, when she was taken away, presumed to be murdered. When the narrator learns R cannot forget, she concocts a plan, and the old man helps her build a hiding place between two floors in her apartment, where R must take residence. He hides, leaving his family behind. The space in which he now lives is tiny, with hardly any room to move. All he does is little administrative jobs on behalf of the narrator, or he polishes her spoons, reads and edits her work. She cares for him, in secret. Cooks his food when supplies permit, brings him water, speaks to him through a makeshift intercom. And, she works on her novel. She writes about a woman who loses her voice and can only communicate through her typewriter, as taught by her typing teacher. Ogawa has interspersed her own novel with fragments of that of her narrator, who writes them to make sense of what’s left of her world. Her previous three works all revolved around disappearances, too. As the narrator’s world shrinks, the mystery of the disappearances remains, which can feel unsatisfying. What struck me when I first read this novel a few years ago, was the lack of outright anger. There’s a persistent undercurrent of unease and fear, but never the outrage you’d expect to accompany the injustice of life disappearing without a trace, under the watchful eye of a regime. For a while I thought this was a shortcoming. Upon re-reading it now, I realised it must be a translation of the forgetting. A slow numbing to the injustice inflicted upon a population, just as *The Memory Police* intended. --- > **The Memory Police* by Yōko Ogawa* > *First published in Japan in 1994* > *Translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder* > Published by Pantheon in 2019 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-memory-police-a-novel-yoko-ogawa/de022ea94a911d13?aid=93138&ean=9781101911815&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Big Kiss, Bye-Bye URL: https://www.trema.website/claire-louise-bennett-big-kiss-bye-bye/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:29.000Z > “Comments will be made, and eventually, if the procurement of outlandish flowers persists, questions, I’m sure, will be asked. How will I explain them? ‘There’s a man,’ I’ll say ‘who likes me to always have flowers. He sent me them regularly for years when I lived in the old place, and now he’s found a way to make sure I never go without any while I am here.’” Where Bennett’s [*Pond*](https://www.trema.website/claire-louise-bennett-pond/), which I’ve [written about before](https://www.trema.website/claire-louise-bennett-pond/), reads like a collection of short stories, or vignettes, *Big Kiss, Bye-Bye* is closer to the diary of an unnamed narrator, who lives in a temporary limbo. She’s moved to a shed in the Irish countryside, and spends the book’s 158 pages revisiting memories, mostly of Xavier, an older man she loves but no longer desires. She hasn’t told him where she’s gone, and (or because) he does not want to accommodate her wish to be alone (“I will not exchange my LOVE for friendship”, he writes to her—emphasis his). She writes about their correspondence—her exchanges with this now much older man, near dying—and mixes in her memories of their time spent together, retracing the steps of their travels and rehashing their conversations. Or, of the flowers he had her buy on his dime: he had an account at the flower shop, and she had a minimum spend of—she thinks—fifty euros per week, which always seemed to be too much. If she didn’t hit the fifty, it would accumulate, turning the act of buying herself the flowers that her lover wanted her to have into some kind of to-be-dreaded event. Alongside her post-breakup correspondence, she receives an unexpected letter from a previously forgotten professor, Terence Stone, who got through to her via her publisher. He found her latest book in his local library and, having read it, he sends her his compliments. Hesitant to reply at first, she does start an exchange with him, and their writings pop up throughout, triggering waves of memories, most of them unwelcome. I’ll admit she can be a bit hard to follow, Bennett. If you’re not in the right mind, it must be difficult to let yourself be taken by the current of her writing, which ebbs and flows, often interrupting itself mid-sentence. The narrator’s memories appear as murky, or fully formed; thoughts bubble up or flutter away, sometimes repeat themselves; conversations accurately reflect the state of mind of their participants. For me, the dialogues as well as the interior monologues, as she puts them to paper, are all a thing to admire. Take a sex scene, early in the book, set in London’s financial district, that breathlessly stammers forward: > “Sizeable corinthian columns. Broad enough for us to disappear behind. The grooves of the column right behind me and one leg, the left leg, lifted, lifted up and out. The shoe gaping midair, possibly seen. \[...\] The crotch of my knickers, black. The black crotch I take hold of either side and pull across, or perhaps he did that. Yes, he did that.” Reading it in full (it’s five pages!) is not so much reliving it, but more akin to remembering it. “Or perhaps he did that”—memories of that day (those minutes? seconds?) fade in and out as the narrator writes them down, losing her footing sentence by sentence. Even punctuation marks disappear as the writing—and the act its subjects were caught in, absorbed by—drives forward and forward, time melting before your eyes as the words rush by. It’s a riveting bit of writing that, when it arrives, *pours* in—much like all of the memories the unnamed narrator attempts to capture: unsolicited, presumptuous and entirely disorienting. Not so different from all those *fucking* flowers. > “All in all though I’m beginning to realise I don’t like receiving flowers, not from anyone, not for any reason. Maybe one day when I live in a house of my own it will be alright. But until then it seems I find their unbidden arrival into my precarious world intrusive, presumptuous and increasingly disorienting.” --- > **Big Kiss, Bye-Bye* by Claire-Louise Bennett* > Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2025 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/big-kiss-bye-bye-a-novel-claire-louise-bennett/774bd248e082097e?aid=93138&ean=9798217046645&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Any Person Is the Only Self URL: https://www.trema.website/elisa-gabbert-any-person-is-the-only-self/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:29.000Z At the centre of this collection is an essay called [*Second Selves*](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2024/05/07/second-selves/?ref=trema.website), which starts by outlining examples of people who suffer from *highly superior autobiographical memory*, or *HSAM*. It’s a rare condition, and the people afflicted have a near perfect memory. She writes: > “If you throw them any date from their conscious lifetimes, they can tell you what day of the week it was and any major events that took place in the world; they can also tell you what they did that day, and in some cases what they were wearing, what they ate, what the weather was like, or what was on TV.” It’s a great essay, one in which [Gabbert](http://www.elisagabbert.com/?ref=trema.website) meanders from memory to journaling (one of the hyperthymesiacs, as they’re called, kept them religiously), and highlights journals kept by writers like Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath. > “I’m interested in the journals of writers (I suppose anyone who writes journals is a writer) as sites of self-loathing, of disappointment and failure”. That’s what she does: most of the collection circles back to writing, to writers, to reading and books, and to the community (or sense thereof) they provide. Quite a few harken back to the pandemic, to a longing for connection (or literal “skin hunger”) that was difficult to satisfy if it wasn’t for books, and the lives lived within them. Most of the essays feel light, even fun. The opening essay concerns recently returned books in the library, an unvetted shelf that presents a perfect cross section of what a library has to offer. > “Sometimes, when I was in a hurry, it was the only shelf I looked at. There were art books and manga, self-help and philosophy, biographies and thrillers, the popular mixed up with the very obscure. I liked how it reduced the scope of my options, but without imposing any one person’s taste or agenda upon me, or the generalized taste of the masses suggested by algorithms.” There’s an essay about a *Stupid Classics* book club (“read all the corny stuff from the canon that we really should have read in school but never had”), one on Frankenstein, one on Proust (“Everyone says you should read Proust, of course, but no one had ever told me, specifically, that *I* should read Proust”). And, one of her best—*Somethingness (or, Why Write?)*—on the joy of writing, or the *why* of writing, where she pulls together (and relates to or pokes fun at) a great big group of writers and their reasons for doing what they do. There are a few essays that felt a little tight, like she was trying to squeeze them into a mould they had no business of fitting into. When she doesn’t try too hard though, her writing brims with a self-assured nonchalance. Her essays then dance off the page, are often funny, and never snobby. They pull you in with an idea, thought, or observation, and when you leave them you’re left wanting to dig down deeper, for more. She often negates making ‘a point’, or leaving you with a clear conclusion. Instead, with every essay, it’s her personal experience that lingers most after you finish reading it—like flashes on your retina—as if you’ve been offered a glimpse inside her own memory or journals. She left me feeling grateful for those glimpses, newly excited about literature, and hungry for reading more of her work. --- > **Any Person Is the Only Self* by Elisa Gabbert* > Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2024 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/any-person-is-the-only-self-essays-elisa-gabbert/99b2a9e1d68c2c4f?aid=93138&ean=9780374605896&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### War and Turpentine URL: https://www.trema.website/stefan-hertmans-war-and-turpentine/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:29.000Z Urbain Martien, the hero of this book, is the author’s grandfather. At some point in his long life (1891–1981) he sat down at a table and started writing down his memories. Memories of his difficult and impoverished childhood in Ghent. Of his decorated service in the Great War. Of his wife, and his wife before her—her sister, as it happens—whom he loved more than anything in the world. And of his father, a gifted church painter who struggled to make ends meet, and died early. Shortly before his own death, Urbain handed these memories to his grandson, Stefan Hertmans. Decades later, Stefan mustered up the courage to dig through the notebooks he’d been given—hundreds of pages—and wrote a book recounting his grandfather’s life. A novel. Or part novel, part memoir: a beautiful and lovingly layered reconstruction of his grandfather’s life. At the centre of the book is a chapter recounting Urbain’s time in the Great War. At just twenty-three years old, he is sent to the front, where he grows into an intelligent, capable, and heroic soldier. The scenes in the chapter—which Hertmans describes from his grandfather’s first-person perspective—are harrowing and superbly written. He describes numerous battles, often lost before Urbain and his company have even had a chance to find their footing. Grenades tearing fellow soldiers apart, bullets whizzing past, not a clue from which way they arrived; crawling, unarmed, through hundreds of metres of mud and under the cover of darkness to scope out the enemy’s position; getting ambushed in a village, outgunned and drunk of gin. Blisters forming upon blisters. Frostbite, gangrene—soldiers dressed in rags, their bodies unable to cope with the harshest of conditions. Rats scurrying about, spreading disease. The enemy deploying mustard gas. Rarely have I read an account of war so lifelike and powerful. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/2025/11/image-2.png) Written in the bottom corner: “this is how Urbain arrived back home to mother, brothers and sisters, after the war 1914-1918” Sent on bewildering, often suicidal missions, Urbain escapes a certain death time and again. Once, wounded and recovering from his injuries in Liverpool, he visits a church and—miraculously—finds one of his father’s frescoes. Urbain, too, had drawn as a child; his sketches once brought his father to tears after he returned home from a long period away, spent painting. Painting serves as one of the book’s important undercurrents, another way of preserving what might have otherwise been lost. After the war, Urbain takes up painting himself. He produces skilled copies of masterpieces, alongside original works: portraits and self-portraits. He relishes the calm after the horrors of war. And his wife—yes, Gabrielle. In the years following the war, Urbain is first engaged to be married to Maria Emelia, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, counting himself lucky. Then the Spanish flu takes her. Devastated but dutiful, Urbain marries Maria’s older sister, Gabrielle. She wears a raincoat in bed and, through his recollections, comes across as one of the starkest, most prudish women ever put to paper. I could just imagine a painting of hers, her mouth a hard line, her eyes calm and unsmiling. A torturous marriage follows. Maria never leaves his mind. Comprising Urbain’s efforts in war, in art, and in love, *War and Turpentine* is an astounding read. [Longlisted for *The Man Booker International Prize*](https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/books/war-and-turpentine?ref=trema.website) in 2017, it has all the makings of a classic, and had me in its grip almost as soon as I opened it. Hertmans unearths layers of his grandfather’s life that might otherwise have remained undiscovered. And they would have remained so, had Urbain not handed him his notes. His luck in that regard, if I can call it that, had me mulling over my own inquisitiveness. I know more of another man’s grandfather than I do of my own, and he left no notes. What a life. What a testament. *Thank you to* [*Iris*](https://buttondown.com/EasyPuddings?ref=trema.website)*, for gifting me this book.* --- > **War and Turpentine* by Stefan Hertmans* > Published by De Bezige Bij in 2013 > Translated into English by David McKay in 2016 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/war-and-turpentine-a-novel-stefan-hertmans/d135ccec0ae3676b?ean=9781101872116&next=t&aid=93138&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Open City URL: https://www.trema.website/teju-cole-open-city/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:29.000Z In the summer of 2022, my feet dangling in a pool of glistening water, located in the commune of Saint-Montan, I first read Teju Cole’s [*Black Paper*](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo119247871.html?ref=trema.website), a bundling of his essays. I haven’t reread it in full since, but think of it often. One essay specifically, titled [*After Caravaggio*](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/magazine/caravaggio.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.x08.ETDP.8%5Fkm0tS-O4Xh&smid=url-share&ref=trema.website), crosses my mind time and again. After killing Ranuccio Tomassoni in 1606, Caravaggio—the prodigious, masterful painter and, then, murderer—fled south from Rome to Naples, Sicily and Malta. In 2016, Cole retraced his steps, visited and wrote about works of his—works he produced while on the run—and pitted the unsettling and violent paintings created in the 1600s against the reality of his (and our) own environment in 2016. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/2025/11/image.png) Rome at dusk, by Teju Cole (taken from [“In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio’s Paintings”](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/magazine/caravaggio.html?unlocked%5Farticle%5Fcode=1.x08.ETDP.8%5Fkm0tS-O4Xh&smid=url-share&ref=trema.website), for The New York Times Magazine) An art historian and photographer—for years, he penned the [*On Photography*](https://www.nytimes.com/column/on-photography?ref=trema.website) column for *The New York Times—*Cole’s writing struck me as calm, and visual. *Calming*, even. He guides your gaze carefully, made me look at and feel the weight of these paintings, and their surroundings, in ways I can’t recall experiencing often. Reading Cole’s essays opened the door to his novels. *Open City*, the first of his I’ve read, follows Julius, a doctor in New York in the final year of his psychiatry fellowship. He’s estranged from his mother, his father passed away, his relationship recently ended. He wanders, spends his evenings taking long walks to balance his busy days at the hospital, often meandering for so long that he’s forced to take a subway home. Much like its protagonist, the novel roams, too. On the first page, already, we find a representative paragraph: > Not long before this aimless wandering began, I had fallen into the habit of watching bird migrations from my apartment, and I wonder now if the two are connected. On the days when I was home early enough from the hospital, I used to look out the window like someone taking auspices, hoping to see the miracle of natural immigration. Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs massed in a grove. The book’s form is diaristic, but never *dull*. There aren’t major transformations, nor is there a real plot, and that’s exactly what I appreciate about it. This is a walking novel: while reading, I felt like Cole took me along on a journey of discovery, as if strolling by Julius’ side, following his gaze into New York alleyways or up at its skyscrapers; sitting down next to him at the places he frequents; listening in on his stimulating conversations, and picking up every fascinating little morsel he scatters on his path. Julius—half-Nigerian, half-German—meets a wide range of people, many of whom are immigrants or emigrants. He briefly trades New York for Brussels, where he makes a half-hearted attempt to visit his grandma. There, he spends time with Farouq, a Moroccan student working at an internet café, who he finds intimidatingly intellectual. Farouq takes Julius to meet Khalil, they drink together, and they speak about politics and religion—about America, about Isreal. The conversations between the three of them are so lively and animated, I could very well imagine the other patrons’ chatter fading away as Julius—captivated—learned about the lives and preoccupations of his new companions. Comprising the longest section of the book, his time spent in Brussels is my favourite. Despite its lack of a clear narrative structure, *Open City* is a novel that reads like a great essay might, pulling in references to art, music, literature and history, weaving in facts and stories, building a collage that invites further discovery beyond its pages. His prose, rippling calmly like a park pond on a fall day, soothes me. Sometimes he overdoes it, trying to fit in a few too many things, perhaps out of fear of delivering a novel that doesn’t feel broad enough in scope. But, this is no such thing: while the book’s universe is small, Julius’ inner world easily holds the power to expand yours. *Thank you to Chantal, for gifting me Teju Cole’s Black Paper, and Open City.* --- > **Open City* by Teju Cole* > Published by Faber & Faber in 2011 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/open-city-a-novel-teju-cole/03ea8bbaaa64e9f7?aid=93138&ean=9780812980097&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha URL: https://www.trema.website/roddy-doyle-paddy-clarke-ha-ha-ha/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:30.000Z When I celebrated my birthday earlier this year, my friends gifted me a great big pile of books and a gift card to spend at a local book store. I stuck that gift card in my pocket, rode over to the book store and, on the way there, decided to use it to purchase books by Irish authors, because I like Ireland even though I’ve never been—but I’d like to go—and, as it didn’t look like I would travel there in the very near future, this was the closest thing I could think of. I settled on a new Irish book and an old Irish book. The new was written by [Caoilinn Hughes](https://www.trema.website/tag/caoilinn-hughes/), and I’ve recommended it here before; the old was a classic, a Booker-prize winner I hadn’t yet heard of, titled *Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha*. [The Alternatives, by Caoilinn HughesA cleverly composed family novel about care and climate.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-transparent.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/caoilinn-hughes-the-alternatives.png)](https://www.trema.website/caoilinn-hughes-the-alternatives/) Paddy is a little boy, nine or ten years old, and lives in Barrytown, a working class neighbourhood in the Dublin of the 60s. Paddy and his friends pretty much *own* the neighbourhood, with its near constant expansion and aboveground tunnel system of soon-to-be-installed sewer pipes. His world is small. His imagination—his most prized possession—looms large. > We walked; we ran. We ran away. That was the best, running away. We shouted at watchmen, we threw stones at windows, we played knick-knack—and ran away. We owned Barrytown, the whole lot of it. It went on forever. It was a country. The book is written from Paddy’s perspective, and there are no chapters. Reading it feels like tapping into his consciousness, jumping from one subject to another, leaving you to piece together why the kid’s thinking or saying what he does. Time feels irrelevant, and every event seems important—a mosaic of childhood, you can feel the cogs in his brain constantly turning, piecing things together, trying to figure out the world. Why Charles Leavy is so effortlessly cool; how to retrieve the jumper they left at the building site without the workers noticing; when a scab is perfect and ready to be picked off his knee; why his parents can’t seem to get along anymore. The book very precisely captures the joys of a childhood spent playing outdoors, and the terrors of wanting to belong; the tightrope you need to walk not to get left out from one day to the next. And, seen from Paddy’s point of view, Doyle brilliantly describes the tension between two parents who can’t see eye to eye, their relationship unraveling. A child of divorced parents myself, he made me feel Paddy’s anxiety in every bone. Paddy tries to keep his parents from fighting to protect his little brother Sinbad (his real name is Francis), by staying up all night and thinking magic thoughts. He listens for the hissing noise that indicates parents’ screamed whispers, scans for changes in the rhythm of their comings and goings (*did one of them go to bed earlier? Did they close the bedroom door differently than they normally do?*). He’s a keen observer, his feelers working overtime. > They were fighting all the time now. They said nothing but it was a fight. The way he folded his paper and snapped it, he was saying something. The way she got up when one of the girls was crying upstairs, sighed and stooped, wanting him to see that she was tired. It was happening. They probably thought they were hiding it. > — I didn’t understand. She was lovely. He was nice. Depicting school smells and fistfights, football games and family time, backyard adventures and dialogues, Doyle renders it all in the most recognisable detail. His dialogues in particular are masterful; I don’t think I’ve ever come across anyone who has portrayed mumbling dads more accurately. It’s funny, touching, beautiful. The heartbreak of two parents on the verge of separating forms the novel’s spine, but the miniature world Doyle assembles around it is extraordinary and hilarious. --- > **Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha* by Roddy Doyle* > First published by Martin Secker & Warburg in 1993 > Re-published by Vintage in 2019 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/paddy-clarke-ha-ha-ha-booker-prize-winner-roddy-doyle/f3a1f5b4ba4bdcf7?aid=93138&ean=9780140233902&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Burning The Days URL: https://www.trema.website/james-salter-burning-the-days/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:30.000Z There are a few, old [fighter jets](https://eurodemobbed.org.uk/locations.php?location=5279&ref=trema.website) propped up throughout Civitella di Romagna, a small *comune* in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna. They put a smile on my face when I drove past them a week or so ago, as they immediately reminded me of James Salter, whose recollections I was reading at the time. James Salter, the writer of novels, short stories, screenplays and other works, and former Air Force fighter pilot. I didn’t know much about him when I started reading the book. I’d read [*A Sport and a Pastime*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%5FSport%5Fand%5Fa%5FPastime?ref=trema.website), his 1967 novel. *Burning The Days* came highly recommended by a [dear friend](http://iriscuppen.com/?ref=trema.website), and is mentioned often in bookish podcasts. Salter is a *writer’s writer*, you see, and his works, by most, are highly regarded. Early on in *Burning The Days*, Salter makes it clear he’s not going to turn his life inside-out. He likens a life to “a large house with various rooms, visitors and occupants” and, he says, “at some windows you may wish to stay longer, but alas. As with any house, all within cannot be seen”. We are to learn about his life, sure, but the person will remain somewhat shrouded in mystery. The first half of the book is dedicated to his life as a West Point cadet and fighter pilot in the Air Force, and its writing is electric. You can feel the adrenaline when he describes chasing MiG fighter jets over Korea, the shame when he explains a landing gone awry, the terrors of losing a friendly pilot, or the craft, elegance and beauty that come with flying a jet. Here, on airfields to remember: > “Apart from those that finally appeared when you were coming in, nose high, in fog or heavy rain, the most beautiful field I ever saw was in Morocco, down towards the south. It was called Boulhaut, a long, flawless black runway built for strategic bombers and never used, the numbers at each end huge and clear—no tire had ever marked them. You could not but marvel at its extraordinary newness.” I, too, want to touch down on that airfield. Or here, on his first solo flight: > “I felt at that moment—I will remember always—the thrill of the inachievable. Reciting to myself, exuberant, immortal, I felt the plane leave the ground and cross the hayfields and farms, making a noise like a tremendous, bumbling fly. I was far out, beyond the reef, nervous but unfrightened, knowing nothing, certain of all, cloth helmet, childish face, sleeve wind-maddened as I held an ecstatic arm out in the slipstream, the exaltation, the godliness, at last!” His writing about this whole period of his life is effortlessly ecstatic. In the second part of the book he digs deeper into his life as a writer (he left the Air Force after the publication of his first novel). Loosely chronological (these are recollections, after all), he romantically outlines time spent in various European cities (Paris, Rome, Bologna), dinners or meetings with writers, actors, agents and musicians (Hemingway, Robert Redford, Yoko Ono, Roman Polanski); long days and longer nights. Vividly he describes his years spent toiling away, writing screenplays and books, driving around to meet interesting characters (or, primarily, women) in cafés and restaurants. Snapshots of a life that seems at once well-lived—and, in many ways by now, out of fashion—Salter’s nostalgic and melancholic memoir drips with a Don Draper-esque masculinity. *Burning The Days* possesses a kind of mystical quality. Salter manages to get the magic of his life and of his writing across while keeping his readers at an arm’s length. We can peek through one of his windows in admiration until he decides to draw the curtain, leaving us hastily scurrying towards the next. Late in the book, a woman asks Salter what he wants. A friend replies on his behalf: “To be an immortal”. Little did he know. --- > **Burning The Days* by James Salter* > First published by Random House in 1997 > Re-published by Vintage in 1998 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/burning-the-days-recollection-ambassador-book-awards-james-salter/e9de9936da02fd0b?aid=93138&ean=9780394759487&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over URL: https://www.trema.website/anne-de-marcken-it-lasts-forever-and-then-its-over-2024/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:30.000Z All the way through its 132 pages I could very much *feel* this novel in my chest, which is a fascinating sensation given the fact that the heroine of the book is an unnamed, undead narrator traversing a post-apocalyptic landscape with a muttering crow stored away inside *her* chest. The book begins like so: > *“*I lost my left arm today. It came off clean at the shoulder.” And, before she traverses that post-apocalyptic landscape with that crow in her chest, she is holed up in a hotel for the undead (all of whom have forgotten their names and who they were, and are saying different names out loud to figure out which one might be theirs). By now, I think we’ve established that this is not your typical zombie novel (or so I’ve been told, as I don’t usually read zombie novels). She is grieving her lover. She cannot remember their name, but she has memories of their time spent together. > *I think about how we used to take a blanket into the dunes and wrap up together. Wake with sand in our hair and in the corners of our eyes. Sound of the ocean big as the sky. I miss sleep. I miss you.* And so she traverses out west, towards the ocean, perhaps trying to find the lover she grieves, traveling through uninhabited residential areas, houses and gardens, all the while blurring the lines between what is real and what is imagined. I finished reading this book more than a week ago and it keeps running loops inside my mind, its eyes glazed over, its arms outstretched before it. The more I’ve thought about *how* I’d recommend it, the less I’ve found myself wanting to say about it. It captures the feeling of grief, interspersed with fond memories, blanketed by the darkest of humour. It is sad and pensive and melancholy and then there’s Mitchem, who preaches, and broke off his penis, and says “it is important to do small, ordinary tasks when you’re depressed”. > He picked up the arm from where it was lying on the floor and held it out like something I needed to account for. He said, “You’ve experienced a significant loss.” He said, “It isn’t just your arm.” He said, “You’re grieving your life.” Since he broke off his penis he’s Mr. Wisdom. *It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over* is a hypnotic read, and I already want to re-read it. I recommend you seek it out, but—if you’re unsure—you can [read an excerpt on Lithub](https://lithub.com/it-lasts-forever-and-then-its-over/?ref=trema.website) before you do. *Thank you to Nena, Arjanne and Mirthe for gifting me this book.* --- > **It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over* by Anne de Marcken* > Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2024 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/it-lasts-forever-and-then-it-s-over-anne-de-marcken/20161783?ean=9780811237857&next=t&aid=93138&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Collected Works URL: https://www.trema.website/the-collected-works-of-jo-ann-beard-2023/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:30.000Z *The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard* combines essays from two of her books, *Festival Days* (2021) and *The Boys of My Youth* (1998), into one fantastic collection(her novella, *Cheri*, which I’ve [written about before](https://www.trema.website/jo-ann-beard-cheri-2023/), is part of *Festival Days*)*.* More than a few of the essays found here completely swept me off my feet. They are (mostly) autobiographical and, mining experiences from her own life in the American Midwest, nearly every one of them reads and feels like a short story. Jo Ann Beard’s books, as far as I can tell, have mostly flown under the radar (she was once dubbed “the literary world’s best kept secret”), and I don’t understand why: her writing is so brilliant, so lively. All she needs is a few words to paint the most vivid imagery. A baton hurled into the air hangs there for a moment, “a silver hyphen against the hot sky”; a bar is “dark as a pocket”; a landscape can “levitate with colour”. The five pages that make up *Behind the Screen*, in which she suffers an allergy attack and is forced to watch 1962’s Fourth of July fireworks display from behind a screen door, have circled around in my head for weeks. In *Cousins*, she describes time spent with her cousin as a child and as an adult, weaving in the perspectives of both their mothers, too, and the contrast between both time periods works wonderfully. I think she’s so impressive whenever she writes from the perspective of (herself as) a child. She does so, brilliantly and believably, in a few of the essays. Reading that writing somehow made long-forgotten memories of my own youth bubble up to the surface. Much of her writing is melancholic and tender. Many times though, it is brutal. *Last Night* doesn’t even fill four pages but devastatingly recounts the loss of a pet. In *The Tomb of Wrestling,* a stranger invades a woman’s home and nearly kills her. And, in [*The Fourth State of Matter*](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1996/06/24/the-fourth-state-of-matter?ref=trema.website), an awe-inspiring essay, she recounts the 1991 shooting at the University of Iowa, where a former graduate student killed four staff members and a student, seriously injured another student, and committed suicide. Beard worked as an editor for a physics journal at the university and knew the shooter and several of his victims, including her dear friend Chris. It’s beautifully written, but gut-wrenching: her loss can be felt through every line. Beard’s writing is fastidious, and she takes her time. She put out two collections of essays and one novel between 1998 and 2021 and, until she publishes another book of essays, I know I’ll be rereading this collection again and again. --- > ***The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard*** > Published by Serpent’s Tail in 2023 [Buy the book](https://serpentstail.com/work/the-collected-works-of-jo-ann-beard/?ref=trema.website) ### The Alternatives URL: https://www.trema.website/caoilinn-hughes-the-alternatives/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:31.000Z I first read something by Caoilinn Hughes last winter when The Paris Review published [*Two Hands*](https://www.theparisreview.org/fiction/8368/two-hands-caoilinn-hughes?ref=trema.website), her short story about Gemma and Des. They take a driving lesson after a car accident that left their Italian Fiat Panda totalled and Gemma in tatters. They’re there to build up confidence, Gemma says, not quite sure whose she means. The story made me snicker and laugh on multiple occasions—the first time at this bit: > *“But having a wrong-sided vehicle also meant that the only way to navigate the country roads, with all their ditherments, was to have a passenger in the car always, pressing their cheek to the side window, telling the driver, Yeah, you’re fine, or, Plunge into the thicket for the love of jeeezus.”* Her writing has a kind of jazzy musicality to it, can be funny, and is imbued with that cool kind of carelessness, or effortlessness rather, that comes with total control. The way she describes situations and unfolds her dialogue, she puts you right there with them, right in the midst of it. I found it very impressive and picked up her latest novel, *The Alternatives,* soon after. The book follows the Flattery sisters: Rhona, Maeve, Nell and Olwen, three of whom have Ph.D. degrees. Rhona is a professor of political science, Maeve is an Instagram-famous chef and author of cookbooks, and Nell a celibate philosophy professor. Olwen is a professor of geology and a high-functioning alcoholic (gin and rhubarb is her drink of choice). One day, she disappears, cycling away from her life, seemingly deliberately, not wanting to be found, in search of solitude. The four of them grew up orphaned after their parents tumbled off a cliff (relatives moved in and out, but they preferred “unsupervised sadness”), and haven’t seen each other in a few years. They get wind of Olwen’s departure, and when Rhona locates her hiding place months later (this is not a spoiler, I promise), they reunite to (perhaps) save her, driving up to County Leitrim in the north of Ireland in Rhona’s Tesla, accompanied by her baby, Leo. Hughes starts the novel off by giving each of the sisters a chapter or two, allowing us to get to know them and the worlds they’ve created for themselves. She then introduces the structure of a two-act play. By then we’re in the thick of it, with all four sisters dancing around each other’s quirks at Olwen’s hideout. The shift—after readjusting for a few pages—works surprisingly well as a way of framing their behaviour in each other’s company: their petty arguments, their philosophical conversations, and their (cautious, evasive) sisterly bonding. *The Alternatives* is a novel about care, for ourselves and for our loved ones. While family dynamics take center stage, there’s an undercurrent of climate, too: of care for our planet. It’s not spelled out, yet she combines both brilliantly, urging her readers through these characters to care more deeply for the Earth and to connect with friends and family. Once I closed the book, I felt the need to do both. --- > **The Alternatives** by Caoilinn Hughes > Published by Oneworld Publications in 2024 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-alternatives-a-novel-caoilinn-hughes/e1111a0cbdca3d86?ean=9780593545010&next=t&aid=93138&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Nuclear War: A Scenario URL: https://www.trema.website/annie-jacobsen-nuclear-war-a-scenario/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:31.000Z *Nuclear War: A Scenario*, written by *Pulitzer* *Prize* finalist Annie Jacobsen, appeared on my radar through a combination of end-of-year lists (which I can’t ever help but scroll), paired with the [news of Denis Villeneuve potentially picking it up for a film](https://deadline.com/2024/04/nuclear-war-movie-denis-villeneuve-legendary-dune-part-two-bestselling-book-1235876114/?ref=trema.website) after he wraps up [*Dune: Messiah*](https://letterboxd.com/film/dune-part-three/?ref=trema.website)*.* From the moment I started reading, I felt an invisible clock ticking down—like the relentless timepiece that permeates the soundtrack of Christopher Nolan’s [*Dunkirk*](https://letterboxd.com/film/dunkirk-2017/?ref=trema.website). My experience reading *Nuclear War*,no doubt influenced by the news I read beforehand, was instantly cinematic. Its scenes unfolded vividly as I gobbled up its pages. Of course, I’ve read books about war before. They are often admirable, dense, factually accurate, immensely well-researched tomes. But in their factualness, they aren’t the most *human* reads. They deal with what happened and why it happened and how it happened, and they get it right, but they can read like reports—making it seem as if the reader isn’t meant to *feel* too much about it. John Hersey’s [*Hiroshima*](https://www.trema.website/john-hersey-hiroshima/) was first to show me a more human way to write about war. It recounts the aftermath of nuclear devastation through the eyes of its survivors. Annie Jacobsen’s *Nuclear War* follows in a similar tradition by shifting the focus to the terrifying moments leading up to the catastrophe—mapping out, in chilling detail, how a modern nuclear conflict might unfold. She outlines a scenario: nuclear missiles are launched at the United States by North Korea. The United States has six minutes to respond and launch fifty missiles back at North Korea’s weapon sites and command centres. But the limited range of their missiles means they have to fly over Russia, inadvertently inviting them to their doomsday party: the clock is ticking, and in 72 minutes the world as we know it—*civilisation* as we know it—is no more. Jacobsen’s thoroughly researched retelling—she spoke to dozens of experts over more than a decade—covers the catastrophe minute-by-minute. Reading its 400 pages feels like watching a high-stakes thriller that *also* manages to get across the most human ramifications of a civilisation-destroying catastrophe. It made me marvel at the complexity of nuclear warfare, question the stupidity of those with their ham-fisted fingers on the buttons, and—given recent events—feel somewhat more terrified of the future. **Further reading** [Hiroshima, by John HerseyAn raw retelling of the destruction and death visited upon a population almost eighty years ago.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/icon-1-13.png)TremaDaniël van der Winden![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/john-hersey-hiroshima.png)](https://www.trema.website/john-hersey-hiroshima/) --- > ***Nuclear War: A Scenario*** by Annie Jacobsen > Published by Dutton in 2024 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/nuclear-war-a-scenario-annie-jacobsen/20335598?ean=9780593476093&next=t&aid=93138&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### ### The Repeat Room URL: https://www.trema.website/jesse-ball-the-repeat-room/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:31.000Z A room has been erected in front of an audience. It’s made of concrete, its door is thick like a vault, *“a kind of killing jar”*. The procedure is simple: the accused (*“surplus person”*) is brought into the room by two guards, long poles attached to the neck so as to keep their distance. Once placed inside the room, the door is closed. Then, slowly, oxygen is extracted from the room and everyone in attendance waits, long enough for the accused to be deceased. Clean and simple. *“Try all they like, the lungs learn they have no job to do.”* The juror reading the verdict in cases like these is a civilian selected from hundreds of candidates through a series of grotesque tests. One of the first steps of the process is agonising enough to make your skin crawl. Every participant is forced to step into a booth for cleaning. The booth then gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and a deep-frequency tone begins and shakes their legs, arms, bones and bowels, so violently their excrements are forced out of their bodies like mayonaise from a tube. Then they are rinsed, dried: ready. One such person is Abel Cotter, summoned to undergo the prescribed plethora of tests in this harrowing, dystopian future. Cotter, a sanitation worker, cuts a lowly figure. His life is bleak. We don’t learn much about it, but we do find out his child was taken from him by the authoritarian state, as his wife and him were deemed emotionally and culturally incompetent. Cotter passes the tests and is elevated. To pass judgement, he needs to step into the repeat room, in which he gets to experience the defendant’s life in order to decide whether they are meant to live or die. Whether they are culled from the community or can proceed to take part. At this point the book switches perspective, and the tone and style of writing change to reflect the shift to the record of the Black Hill, the experience of the accused. The accused, we learn, grew up in an abusive home, in isolation with his sister, his parents training them with an “electric shock device” and forcing them to act out different fictional characters, like in a play. The accused has never been given a name, only a dossier of roles to memorise (*Medellin K*, *Michael B,* *Argus F*) in a disturbing childhood filled with torture and incest. Ball’s writing throughout it all is rigid, sparse, effective. Very fitting, the way he uses few words to establish a fairly detailed, frightening society of interchangeable robes, telescreens and plastic trays, much of his writing landing with the potency of a punch in the stomach. The second part of the book is shocking and uncomfortable, but convincing: when it started, for a moment, it felt like I was ripped from the book I was reading and plunged into an alternate reality I didn’t ask for—much like the inhabitants of Jesse Ball’s nightmarish society. --- > ***The Repeat Room*** by Jesse Ball > Published by Catapult in 2024 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-repeat-room-jesse-ball/21060775?ean=9781646221400&next=t&aid=93138&listref=trema&next=t&ref=trema.website) ### Intervals URL: https://www.trema.website/marianne-brooker-intervals/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:31.000Z In 2022 Marianne Brooker [won the *Fitzcarraldo Editions Mahler & LeWitt Studios Essay Prize*](https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/2022/05/marianne-brooker-wins-the-2022-fitzcarraldo-editions-mahler-lewitt-studios-essay-prize/?ref=trema.website) for her essay proposal, *Intervals*. Through this annual competition she was given the opportunity to shape her proposal into a book-length essay, to be published by *Fitzcarraldo Editions* in February of 2024. Her essay is about her mother, Jane, who suffered from Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. The disease became unbearable for her and a decade after her diagnosis, to end her suffering, she decided to end her life. As an assisted death at home was out of the question—it would mean prosecution, and possibly imprisonment for her daughter—she chose to refuse food and water, and deny life-saving treatment by her carers. Brooker, then 26 years old, writes about the surreal experience of caring for a loved one ending their life in such a way. About the turbulence of worries stirring inside of her, and the day-to-day logistics that weirdly—stupidly, naturally—exist in the wake of something so momentous. She manages to get across the whirlwind of chaos that swooshes through their lives, as well as the deep love she felt for her mother, and the grief she experienced; she finds ways to make the reader feel like they’re right there in the room with them, holding hands, listening to music, dabbing her mother’s lips with water; and captures not only the weeks leading up to her mother’s death but the years of her life, too, most tenderly. She weaves into the book what she’s read throughout this period, quoting from and finding solace in the works of other authors (Chantal Akerman, Maggie Nelson and Emily Berry, to name a few). From philosophers to psychoanalysts to poets, she uses their writings as glimmering, guiding lights throughout, and finds ways to make those writings sparkle, triggering (for me) an immense appreciation for and interest in their works. She writes, fiercely and impressively, about the politics surrounding her mother’s disability, the stupidity of her country’s hollowed-out health and social care systems, and the ethics of end-of-life care. As the author wrote [in a letter](https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/2024/02/a-letter-from-marianne-brooker-author-of-intervals/?ref=trema.website) in February of last year: > *Intervals* is an attempt at reckoning with personal, ethical and political questions of choice: what does it mean to defend one’s autonomy in a world choked by austerity, or to speak of dignity without denying the realities of dependency and doubt? The questions are not individualizing—*did she jump or was she pushed?—*but collective: *was there even ground beneath her feet? What kind of world have we built for one another*? Never have I read such a precisely worded book about care, grief, love and death. *Intervals* is perfectly composed: a story of personal hardship, a philosophical look at care and being cared for, and perhaps most importantly, a beautiful memorial and testament to the author’s mother. --- > ***Intervals*** by Marianne Brooker > Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2024 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/intervals-marianne-brooker/21003433?aid=93138&ean=9781804270837&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) --- ### And, on Fitzcarraldo *Fitzcarraldo Editions* has quickly established itself as my favourite publisher, and I’ve previously recommended books by [Claire-Louise Bennett](https://www.trema.website/claire-louise-bennett-pond/) and [Olga Tokarczuk](https://www.trema.website/olga-tokarczuk-drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead/). I thought I’d share a profile on them, written by *The New York Times* in 2022\. They are a small publisher, steadily putting out works of high quality and becoming the home of a few Nobel laureates in the process. It’s incredible to see, and I recommend keeping an eye on their work. [How a Tiny British Publisher Became the Home of Nobel Laureates (Published 2022)Fitzcarraldo Editions is not yet 10 years old and has only six full-time staff members. Since its founding, three of its authors have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/ios-ipad-144x144-28865b72953380a40aa43318108876cb.png)The New York TimesBy![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/12fitzcarraldo01-facebookJumbo.jpg)](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/books/fitzcarraldo-nobel-prize-ernaux.html?ref=trema.website) ### The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast URL: https://www.trema.website/sh-fernando-jr-the-chronicles-of-doom/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:32.000Z > *“It happened, you know? It happened like anything else happens. It’s just a happening. You don’t figure out happenings.”* > — Bob Dylan, to a reporter, when asked to explain his popularity (1965) As listeners, and as fans of music, we want to figure out how brilliance came to be. To find out how a fuse was lit, to learn when and where the air started crackling with a certain creative electricity. To be able to point a finger and say *this here, this is it—we solved the puzzle.* Time and again we tell and retell the stories of Miles Davis’ [*Kind of Blue*](https://open.spotify.com/album/1weenld61qoidwYuZ1GESA?si=Noe0TCK0S8Wl8-TCwwhAwQ&ref=trema.website), of J Dilla’s [*Donuts*](https://open.spotify.com/album/5fMlysqhFE0itGn4KezMBW?si=RNQUZxwBT%5Fe3sUKUm61SBA&ref=trema.website), or Radiohead’s [*OK Computer*](https://open.spotify.com/album/6dVIqQ8qmQ5GBnJ9shOYGE?si=4qJ2mj%5F%5FQCeRcDoHvFIslw&ref=trema.website), because timeless creation captivates endlessly. [Fernando Jr.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiz%5FFernando?ref=trema.website) took it upon himself to unpack the myth of Daniel Dumile (*DOO-mə-lay*), a rapper and producer primarily known as [DOOM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF%5FDoom?ref=trema.website), who passed away in 2020, aged 49\. DOOM was lauded by his peers and cherished by his fans: a singular musician, often described as “your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper”, the height of his towering figure allowed him to peek into the mainstream, yet he chose to keep his feet firmly planted in the underground. My initial worry was for the unpacking to break the spell. I was worried I’d discover that he tried too hard, disappointed too many people, or that knowing too much about his come-up or his process would undermine his output. Fortunately, this book doesn’t begin to threaten his mystique; it enhances it. DOOM carved his own path and approached the creation of rap music differently than anyone did or had ever done before him. Wearing a metal mask (allowing him to slip into character as *the Supervillain*), he reached great heights in the 00s by crafting a clump of characters and building a universe not unlike the comic book series and monster movies he admired. In comparison, the braggadocio of his peers was boring. DOOM was like a director, an arranger. He was funny, mischievous—a prankster. Often referring to himself in the third person, everything he did had an air of playfulness—like he didn’t take himself too seriously so that he could produce work that others would. Through this book I learned just how deliberate he was. He considered himself [a writer first](https://www.mvremix.com/urban/interviews/mfdoom.shtml?ref=trema.website), penning different characters, different scenes, and approached his music as if he were writing novels, scripts, or even stand-up comedy—the latter confirming the laugh-out-loud nature of his work. Here he is in an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, back in 2009: > *“When I’m doing a DOOM record, I’m arranging it, I’m finding the voices. All I have to do is listen to it and think, Oh shit, that will be funny. I write down whatever would be funny, and get as many ‘whatever would’ funnies in a row and find a way to make them all fit. There’s a certain science to it. In a relatively small period of time, you want it to be, That’s funny, that’s funny, that’s funny, that’s funny. I liken it to comedy standup.”* [The Mask of Metal Face DoomFrom 2009: The Doom persona felt as though it had emerged from the graveyard of rappers murdered by glam-hop.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/icon/favicon-19.ico)The New YorkerTa-Nehisi Coates![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ce/3c/ce3cae12-b59e-4a20-9685-5ed4802e1aab/content/images/thumbnail/090921_r18825_p646.jpg)](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/21/the-mask-of-doom?ref=trema.website) Fernando Jr. traces DOOM’s universe with great care—his outstanding biography precisely outlines his life and work, and makes it abundantly clear how meticulous DOOM was in his approach. As with any musician’s biography, it helps to know (of) his music to appreciate the *deep cuts,* but if you’re less familiar, the book also succeeds as an absorbing chronicle of the inner workings of the (hiphop) music industry and its (underground) labels. Through conversations with his peers and loved ones and past interviews and material, the author paints a picture of DOOM that will leave no fan unsatisfied, confirms his status as a wonderfully caring individual, and hopefully highlights his universal genius for those less familiar with his unique body of work. --- > ***The Chronicles of DOOM: Unraveling Rap’s Masked Iconoclast*** by S.H. Fernando Jr. > Published by Astra House in 2024 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-chronicles-of-doom-unravelling-raps-masked-iconoclast-s-h-fernando/21144799?aid=93138&ean=9781662602177&listref=trema&new-list-page=true&ref=trema.website) ### Orbital URL: https://www.trema.website/samantha-harvey-orbital-2023/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:32.000Z I could read a tower of non-fiction books about space, climate change and humanity, and they wouldn’t pack the same punch as this 144-page novel. In it, six astronauts and cosmonauts circle our planet on the International Space Station. There’s two Russians (Roman and Anton), a Japanese (Chie), a Brit (Nell), an Italian (Pietro) and an American (Shaun). They’ve all been given a sliver of backstory, just enough to light a spark, and all have their specialties (one focuses on microbes, while another runs experiments on mice). The book comprises twenty-four hours, during which they orbit Earth sixteen times (“the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes”). A day in space starts with time on the treadmill or lifting resistance-devices to prevent their weightless muscles from faltering; a day in space ends in something of a floating cocoon, strapped to a bed. In-between, they go about their tasks—running tests and experiments on their bodies, or photographing a typhoon heading towards The Philippines—and spend time together eating their dried food, playing cards or watching a movie. Through it all, Samantha Harvey’s writing feels like it glitters and levitates, at times applying the lightest of touches. She pictures the cramped confines her characters find themselves in, the inconveniences you never knew they’d experience, and the beauty they have the privilege to witness. Of sleeping in space, she writes: > *“You feel all the fizzing stars and the moods of the oceans and the lurch of the light through your skin, and if the earth were to pause for a second on its orbit, you’d wake with a start knowing something was wrong.”* Or, on the jetlag that comes with adjusting to time in space: > *“The mind is in a dayless freak zone, surfing earth’s hurtling horizon. Day is here, and then they see night come upon them like the shadow of a cloud racing over a wheat field.”* She zig-zags, as if weightless, and as she describes the magnificence of our planet through minute details or outlines the destruction an ever-more common storm leaves behind, she manages so well to capture the frailness of our planet and our existence in a way that feels hopeful. Alarming, yes, of course. But ultimately, it becomes the kind of book you wish everyone would read: to get as close as possible to experiencing the [Overview effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview%5Feffect?ref=trema.website) without hopping on a rocket, and to rekindle their appreciation of the speeding planet we inhabit. --- > ***Orbital*** by Samantha Harvey > Published by Jonathan Cape in 2023 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/orbital/19729720?aid=93138&ean=9780802163622&listref=trema&&ref=trema.website) ### Pond URL: https://www.trema.website/claire-louise-bennett-pond/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:32.000Z Shortly before the halfway mark of this book, there’s a tiny story named *Stir-Fry*. It goes as follows: > *I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that, so put in it all the things I never want to see again.* *Stir-Fry* is followed by a delightful seven-page story named *Finishing Touch* about throwing a little party (*“I have so many glasses after all”*), which I loved. After that comes *Control Knobs*, my favourite in the entire book, about the deteriorating knobs on the narrator’s outdated Salton mini-kitchen. I don’t often read books of short stories. And, as I’m sure you can tell by now, this book is not your average book of short stories, either. But, it struck a chord. It moved me. You see, when you live alone, how you see the space around you changes. When you’re not required to move along with the rhythm of another, you may start doing things at odd hours: eating dinner when others don’t, or doing your laundry when others sleep. Noticing peculiar things on objects, the growth of a plant, or the way the sunlight hits the bookcase—thinking deeply about things you otherwise wouldn’t grant the freedom to roam in your head. *Pond* consists of twenty stories outlining such moments in the life of a woman who lives alone, in a cottage on the coast of Ireland. I’d say they’re daydreams, more so than stories—vignettes or observations of time spent alone. There is no overarching narrative, and reading the book is akin to experiencing time and space in the same way its writer did when she wrote it. Because of that, and despite its lack of narrative, it leaves a mark—I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I closed it over a week ago. As Bennett wrote in [*The Irish Times*](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/claire-louise-bennett-on-writing-pond-1.2226535?ref=trema.website), *“in solitude, you don’t need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you”*. With her way of writing she achieves a perfect translation of those impressions—reading her thoughts, a calm enclosed me, and it felt like I was floating through the space with her, making me want to inhabit a cottage in a village somewhere for an extended period of time or, at the very least, try to achieve a similar sense of peace throughout my days. --- > ***Pond*** by Claire-Louise Bennett > Published by The Stinging Fly Press in 2015 > Re-published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2022 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/pond-claire-louise-bennett/11365097?aid=93138&ean=9780399575907&listref=trema&&ref=trema.website) ### All Fours URL: https://www.trema.website/miranda-july-all-fours/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:32.000Z In Miranda July’s latest novel, its nameless main character (a ‘half-famous’ artist) sets out to drive across the United States to celebrate her 45th birthday. She leaves her husband and child behind, promises to update them on her progress and, through a series of rapid decisions, she winds up in Monrovia, the next town over. In Monrovia, where she stopped for gas, she meets a man—more of a boy, perhaps, given their age difference—named Davey, who washes the windshield of her car. They make eye-contact, which is enough for her to rent a motel room nearby, visit him at his workplace, and contract his partner to give her room in that motel a make-over, paid for with money she earned writing a slogan for a whisky brand—money intended to finance her trip across the country. She makes the room her own, her safe haven: a lush, protective, womb-like retreat in which she lives out a parallel life while teetering on the edge of a mid-life crisis. There, she receives Davey, embraces Davey, *engulfs* him (as much as he lets her), and keeps up appearances: she informs her husband and child of the progress she’s made on her road trip and sends them selfies taken in front of make-believe skylines. When she finally makes it home, still head over heels, she doesn’t know how to behave and makes up a story about how perimenopause is affecting her: a story that, days later, catches up with her when a doctor confirms she is, in fact, suffering from perimenopause, causing her to recalibrate her life and relationship in major ways. While it may sound like I’m giving away a lot, I’m merely scratching the surface here. *All Fours* is an engrossing read, bursting with (mostly unconsumed) sexual energy, filled with (mostly unrequited) love, fantastic dialogue and inner monologues. It’s a story about a woman who has the power and the privilege to turn her life around, who knows she’s risking it all to do so, and tries nonetheless. She doesn’t know how she’ll come out at the other end of the tunnel but plunges in, head-first, eager to find out. As I read its final pages, a song from [*Kajillionaire*](https://letterboxd.com/film/kajillionaire/?ref=trema.website) (the film directed by Miranda July) came on in a playlist I was listening to, which prompted me to re-watch it. Doing so made me realise how much the idea of loneliness—or of *wanting to be loved*—seems to be a common theme in July’s work, and how much this book and that movie have in common. The protagonists in *All Fours* and *Kajillionaire* are both trying to find a sense of connection but without compromising too much, which makes them stand out. They both seem a little lost, and a little lonely—drifters, if you will—but that’s the price they pay for being their authentic selves. Above all, both works—once again—made me appreciate the sheer originality of July. When she first arrived at the scene her work was often called quirky (for the sake of), even gimmicky—[I was guilty of this, too](https://www.trema.website/miranda-july-the-first-bad-man/). But the more I take in her (film and writing) work, the more I realise she is a masterful and unstoppable artist. Here we are, witnessing her perfecting her craft. --- > ***All Fours*** by Miranda July > Published by Canongate in 2024 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/all-fours-miranda-july/20578438?aid=93138&ean=9780593190265&listref=trema&&ref=trema.website) ### Every Man for Himself and God Against All URL: https://www.trema.website/werner-herzog-every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:33.000Z Werner Herzog says he is a writer first and a filmmaker second. To many, the opposite is true: a quirk, according to him, that will hopefully be ironed out with time. I’ve admired Herzog for years—I haven’t seen every film of his, nor have I read all of his books, but whenever I take in any of his work I can only appreciate his skill and relentless originality. I’m most fond of his documentaries. He pierces through to the soul of the people he interviews on camera and relays their unique human experience to his viewers in a way few people can. In no way is he your average interviewer: Herzog tends to drill deeper than any other interviewer would dare to do. *“Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?”*, he once asked a scientist. I think of it regularly. It’s a question only he could ask, and get away with asking. Last year, as part of an exhibit at [*Eye Film Museum*](https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/programme/werner-herzog/950711?ref=trema.website), I watched [*Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans*](https://letterboxd.com/film/bad-lieutenant-port-of-call-new-orleans/?ref=trema.website)*.* Directed by Herzog, starring Nicholas Cage, it is the most ridiculous crime film I’ve ever seen. Hilarious and uncompromising: here’s a director who had a film he wanted to make that is borderline insane, and somehow managed to have everyone—studio, crew, cast — see it through from concept to execution, which may well be a greater achievement than shooting any of its material. [Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009)Terrence McDonagh is a New Orleans Police sergeant, who recieves a medal and a promotion to lieutenant for heroism during Hurricane Katrina. Due to his heroic act, McDonagh injures his back and becomes addicted to prescription pain medication. He then finds himself involved with a drug dealer who is suspected of murdering a family of African immigrants.![](https://s.ltrbxd.com/static/img/icons/letterboxd-decal-l-16px.a8f34e0d.svg)Letterboxd![](https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/sm/upload/ud/yh/il/i2/bad-lieutenant-port-of-call-new-orleans-1200-1200-675-675-crop-000000.jpg?v=19628380e3)](https://letterboxd.com/film/bad-lieutenant-port-of-call-new-orleans/?ref=trema.website) In the same period I watched a documentary on Herzog, [*Radical Dreamer*](https://letterboxd.com/film/werner-herzog-radical-dreamer/?ref=trema.website), and learned nearly nothing. What I remember, though — and have paraphrased numerous times since — is him saying the images one can shoot on Earth are spoilt, “the landscapes embarrassed”, and how he’d signed himself up to become an astronaut for NASA, only to be denied. “They always send technicians up there, but never a poet.” These three bits — the penguin, the crime film, and the poet wanting to travel into space — do a decent job of exposing the breadth and vastness of Herzog’s world. He has seen, done and documented things most of us can only dream of, seemingly living the lives of many people all at once. Through his work he exudes an endless curiosity—as if, as a child, he fell into a Bavarian creek awash with potion and clambered out anew, like some German Obelix. This memoir, I think, provides a glimpse into most of those lives. I say *I think* because there were times while reading it that I didn’t believe a word of it. In his recounting of stories and experiences so outlandish it’s difficult to gauge when or if he’s telling the truth (Herzog himself [previously said](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/04/24/the-ecstatic-truth?ref=trema.website) he is always looking for the ‘ecstatic truth’, and if he were to read his own book after publication (which he’d never do), I’m not entirely sure he’d find it). Yet, I hung on to nearly every word, his accounts an enjoyable jumble of priceless anecdotes. I enjoyed learning about his upbringing, his relationships, his early endeavours in setting up a film studio, and his retellings of roaming our planet. Of all the physical harm he has endured while doing so, as the human punching bag he apparently is, and all the physical harm he has narrowly avoided (missing a flight that crashed, being shot during a BBC interview, or nearly avoiding a beheading in Peru). I thoroughly enjoyed a chapter about projects he dreamed up but never executed, one wackier than the next, all of them distinctly *Herzogian*. My favourite: > “I always wanted to direct a ‘Hamlet’ and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under 14 minutes.” [Other reviewers](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/books/review/werner-herzog-every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all.html?ref=trema.website) say his ego gets in the way of his wives, lovers and collaborators. I disagree. His towering personality takes up a lot of space, and he never shies away from writing down a compliment he’s received from a famous person, which is jarring. Though, where possible, he writes about the people he lived and worked with in a way that is deeply kind and caring, singing their praises where they are due. --- > ***Every Man for Himself and God Against All*** by Werner Herzog > Published by Penguin Press in 2023 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all-a-memoir-werner-herzog/19650207?aid=93138&ean=9780593490297&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### The New York Trilogy URL: https://www.trema.website/paul-auster-the-new-york-trilogy-1987/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:33.000Z In March of this year I picked up Paul Auster’s *Baumgartner* in a bookshop in Brussels. Known to be a revered author (‘one of the great American prose stylists of our time’), I hadn’t yet read any of his books before. I decided to start digging into his body of work with his latest novel, released at the tail-end of 2023. I liked *Baumgartner*. An oddball novel, it spins up several threads, and its construction somehow reminded me of a more down-to-earth version of worlds created by [Charlie Kaufman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie%5FKaufman?ref=trema.website). [Extract: Baumgartner by Paul Auster | FaberRead the opening pages of Baumgartner, a late masterpiece of love, memory and grief by Paul Auster, ‘one of the great American prose stylists of our time’.![](https://static.faber.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/cropped-cropped-cropped-android-chrome-512x512-3-180x180.png)https://www.faber.co.ukFaber![](https://static.faber.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Paul-Auster-Simple-1.jpg)](https://www.faber.co.uk/journal/extract-baumgartner-by-paul-auster/?ref=trema.website) In April, Auster died of complications from lung cancer. His wife [Siri Hustvedt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri%5FHustvedt?ref=trema.website), a seasoned writer herself, penned a [beautiful piece](https://lithub.com/remembering-paul-auster/?ref=trema.website) recalling his long career, reflecting on the extensive body of work he produced, and providing a glimpse into their many years together. Reading about Auster’s life and work, I decided to jump back in time to read the three books he released at the start of his career, now bundled as *The New York Trilogy*. If *Baumgartner* was his latest effort, I wondered, what had the polished diamond looked like when it still was rough? *The New York Trilogy* consists of three short books of fiction: *City of Glass* (1985), *Ghosts* (1986) and *The Locked Room* (1986). Together they make up a slim volume of less than 400 pages. In *City of Glass* we follow an author of detective fiction turned private investigator. In *Ghosts*, we follow a private investigator named Blue, in turn following a man named Black for a client named White. And, in *The Locked Room*, a writer named Fenshawe disappears; his childhood friend, an unaccomplished writer himself, is tasked with publishing the work of Fenshawe on his behalf. The three books are loosely connected, sharing overarching themes of paranoia and impersonalisation. At every step of the way, they feel as though they were written by an author unburdened by expectations. They exude a confidence and a machismo that make it feel as if Auster wrote them wearing his sunglasses, a cigarette dangling from his lip—a confidence I am aware not every reader will appreciate, but enjoy immersing myself in now and again. In each book Auster outlines the quest ahead at its outset, before continuing to unspool its thread with precision. He takes you down a rabbit hole that fits snugly at first but becomes ever more claustrophobic as the pages zip by. The trilogy is often described as ‘detective fiction’, which is a denomination Auster [disagreed with](https://lithub.com/paul-auster-i-dont-even-know-if-the-new-york-trilogy-is-very-good/?ref=trema.website). As [Tom Leatham writes](https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/paul-auster-subverts-detective-fiction-the-new-york-trilogy/?ref=trema.website) in Far Out Magazine: *“Auster merely uses the tropes and motifs of mystery literature to explore the deeper philosophical meaning of human life.”* The books brim with unease, loneliness and claustrophobia: its protagonists criss-cross the streets of New York to solve what seems like a mystery, but are effectively journeying down their psyche, into the depths of identities, taking us along for the ride to witness the madness they encounter. --- > ***The New York Trilogy*** by Paul Auster > Published by Faber & Faber in 1987 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-new-york-trilogy-penguin-classics-deluxe-edition-paul-auster/11697775?aid=93138&ean=9780143039839&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### The First Bad Man URL: https://www.trema.website/miranda-july-the-first-bad-man/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:33.000Z In the wake of her new book [*All Fours*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/639464/all-fours-by-miranda-july/?ref=trema.website) lining the shelves of my go-to bookstore as of this month—and following her [dazzling profile](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/20/miranda-july-profile?ref=trema.website) in *The New Yorker,* written by Alexandra Schwartz*—*I decided to re-read Miranda July’s previous novel, *The First Bad Man*, published in 2015.It was her first novel, following 2007’s *No One Belongs Here More Than You* (a collection of short stories). I remembered it being a bizarre read. I remembered finding it funny, but somewhat gimmicky. I remembered the absurd situations she conjured up, and the jokes she told, and them landing, too, only to be stretched a little too far, perhaps, by its author. The novel’s main character was somewhat unlikable, a bit too passive, and, well, a little farfetched, because no one in their right mind would do the things she did. Nearly a decade later, then, I devoured the book in no time at all, and couldn’t get enough of the hilarious, mind-boggling settings its characters found themselves in and the stupendous behaviour they exhibited. The book follows Cheryl Glickman, a neurotic who lives a peculiar life, works for a non-profit women’s self-defence studio, and longs after Phillip, one of its board members. She likes to keep her home tidy—so much so that she uses a single set of cutlery to avoid the remote possibility of dirty dishes—and, when her bosses dump their apathetic, provocative and violent twenty-something daughter Clee on her, Cheryl’s life, unsurprisingly, turns upside down. Told in Cheryl’s own voice, July invites us to live inside her head for the duration of her story, shifting between her careful reflections, unfiltered thoughts, vivid imaginations, and the kind of socially awkward dialogue that is entirely unusual and relatable at the same time. Like this bit, about a baby, that made me chuckle: *“Did he seem standoffish to you?” he asked.* *“Standoffish? Jack?”* *“Maybe I misread him. I felt a chilly reception.” He squinted intently at the sleeping shape.* She does many things: she acts out simulations from self-defence DVDs; she orders 100 snails for Rick, her homeless gardener, and keeps picking them off her ceiling when they escape; she speaks with babies; she fights Clee, and creates a plethora of sexual fantasies between her new roommate and nearly everyone she meets; and, she discovers her therapist may well be another therapist’s receptionist. All of those things sound ridiculous, and they are. But July, who possesses a writing style that is soft-footed and whimsical, weaves them into a story that is funny, and disturbing at times, yet engrossing throughout. And, in doing so, through her unconventional characters, she brings a lightheartedness to complex topics that is difficult to find. So, while I dig into her second novel—if you can handle a little peculiarity, and posseses a healthy sense of irony—I’d urge you to seek out her first, if you haven’t already. --- > ***The First Bad Man*** by Miranda July > Published by Canongate Books in 2015 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-first-bad-man-miranda-july/10578767?aid=93138&ean=9781439172575&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### Prophet Song URL: https://www.trema.website/paul-lynch-prophet-song/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:33.000Z Paul Lynch was asked, during [an event organised in Amsterdam](https://debalie.nl/programma/paul-lynch-on-prophet-song-literature-and-violence-28-03-2024/?ref=trema.website), to read the first paragraph of his Booker Prize-winning novel, *Prophet Song*. Happily obliging, he read that first paragraph: a sprawling, vivid text spanning multiple pages, setting the stage for the totalitarian version of Ireland we’re about to meet, painting a picture of the moment Eilish Stack’s life starts to unravel, and introducing us to his relentless style of writing. On a wet, dark evening in Dublin, Eilish Stack (a scientist and mother of four) learns that the Irish secret police is looking for her husband and immediately we—the reader — are placed right there with her. We never know more than she does, and her fear, her disorientation and her adrenaline becomes ours. As she tries to take care of her children and her demented father, and attempts to find her missing husband, I could feel the grip of totalitarian Ireland tightening around my throat while I read, the novel becoming ever more claustrophobic as its pages flew by. That same evening in Amsterdam, Lynch mentioned that he always tries to *find the music* when writing a book — a certain flow or rhythm that fits the story he’s creating and can carry forward the words on the book’s pages like a wave. When reading *Prophet Song* a few months ago, the music I found inside it was fast-paced, raw and unforgiving; metallic (but not metal), industrial and cold—some freakish amalgamation of *Fontaines D.C.*, *The Cure*, and *IDLES* comes to mind. Right from the get-go, the book swept me up and carried me forward, not on a wave but on a waterfall, hurling me forward and forward and forward and spitting me out with a thunderous splash at the other end, disoriented and impressed. If you’ve seen [*Children of Men*](https://letterboxd.com/film/children-of-men/?ref=trema.website), you’ll remember the [one-take car scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOyAXPn1V9k&ref=trema.website), which is what I keep coming back to as a visual reference for this book (as I write this, I realise it must be a matter of time before someone, somewhere buys the rights to turn it into a limited series, if they haven’t already). Tyrannical governments, crumbling societies, devastating violence, migrant crises: *Prophet Song* touches upon large themes and does well to capture social and political concerns currently felt around the world. One could argue, [as Benjamin Markovits did](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/books/review/paul-lynch-prophet-song.html?ref=trema.website), that the political crisis at the heart of the book isn’t fleshed out entirely satisfactory, but the book is less interested in the question of *“(how) could it happen here”.* Rather, *“would you know when to leave?”*. --- > ***Prophet Song*** by Paul Lynch > Published by Oneworld Publications in 2023 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/prophet-song-paul-lynch/20428618?aid=93138&ean=9780802163011&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### The Living Mountain URL: https://www.trema.website/nan-shepherd-the-living-mountain/ Last updated: 2026-03-26T22:21:00.000Z During the pandemic I discovered the joys of reading great nature writing. With the world in lockdown, books by [Robert Macfarlane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert%5FMacfarlane%5F%28writer%29?ref=trema.website) and [Peter Matthiessen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter%5FMatthiessen?ref=trema.website) helped me travel to faraway destinations — places that, come to think of it, I wouldn’t dare visit even if I could. I’ve kept reading similar books since, and I’ve now learned that most writers in the genre must in one way or another have been inspired by, and are certainly indebted to, the hundred or so pages Nan Shepherd wrote in 1944\. Born in 1893, she wrote three novels, a selection of essays, a bundle of poetry, and this slim volume of masterful non-fiction — its manuscript initially rejected, then untouched for over three decades, and finally published in 1977. Shepherd walked the hills of the [Cairngorms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairngorms?ref=trema.website), a mountain range in Scotland, and the way she describes these walks is spellbinding. I’ve read the book once, and as I flicked through its pages once more to jog my memory, I noticed I kept discovering things I couldn’t quite remember seeing on my first pass, as if I myself traversed a landscape that was ever-changing. She writes of things as enormous as the sky and the landscape, and as tiny as a hare’s tracks in snow, describing how finding tracks gives winter hill walking *“a distinctive pleasure”*. *“One is companioned, though not in time”*, she writes, immediately making you feel at one with the nature she shows you. She describes plants I’ve never heard of (and want to find) and trees I thought I was familiar with (and clearly am not): *“Birch, the other tree that grows on the lower mountain slopes, needs rain to release its odour. It is a scent with body to it, fruity like old brandy, and on a wet warm day, one can be as good as drunk with it.”* Her sensory descriptions are vivid, sensual. Sun-warmed dried mud flats have a *“delicious touch, cushioned and smooth”*; *“a flower caught by the stalk between the toes is a small enchantment”*. The book’s pages, oozing with beauty, find themselves bookended by an introduction written by Robert Macfarlane, and an afterword penned by Jeanette Winterson (added to the 2011 and 2019 editions), both expertly crafted they make the purchase worth your while in their own right. As Winterson puts it: > *“Reading it seems to me to explain why reading is so important. And odd. And necessary. And not like anything else. There is no substitute for reading.* And: > *“I am not a mountain climber or even a hillwalker. I know nothing about the Cairngorms. The book was sent to me and because books and doors both need to be opened, I opened it. A book is a door; on the other side is somewhere else.”* --- > ***The Living Mountain*** by Nan Shepherd > Originally published by Aberdeen University Press in 1977 > Re-published by Canongate Books in 2011 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-living-mountain-a-celebration-of-the-cairngorm-mountains-of-scotland-nan-shepherd/11975991?aid=93138&ean=9780857861832&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### Cheri URL: https://www.trema.website/jo-ann-beard-cheri-2023/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:34.000Z > *“In a way, I borrowed the stories and then tried to infuse them with metaphorical meaning. I wanted to experience, as a writer, what happens when you get all the way to your moment of death and then don’t die. Or in the case of Cheri, what happens on the march towards, and through, your own certain death.”* > — **Jo Ann Beard** ([The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/12/jo-ann-beard-nothing-in-writing-is-ever-particularly-enjoyable-to-me?ref=trema.website), 2023) I am prone to finding and reading books that relate closely to difficult occurrences in my own life, which often gives me a certain sense of discomfort. I don’t think I seek these books out on the shelves of stores or libraries, necessarily—I am not a literary masochist—but they cross my path at key moments, as if someone placed them there for me to happen upon, and I plunge into them with conviction. I always feel the discomfort they provide is a necessary evil for me to experience, for me to learn from and to grow, and I get the sense that avoiding that discomfort is akin to burying my head in the sand, which I prefer not to do—perhaps I am a literary masochist, after all. Enter *Cheri*, released as a 74-page novella by Serpent’s Tail, and simultaneously as part of [*The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard*](https://serpentstail.com/work/the-collected-works-of-jo-ann-beard/?ref=trema.website) who, according to *The Times*, is “the literary world’s best kept secret”. The title of the book refers to Cheri Tremble, who died of cancer assisted by Jack Kevorkian, an advocate of euthanasia tried for murder on four occasions. The slim book is “a combination of fiction and memory”, as Beard attempts to imagine Cheri’s thoughts, memories and experiences in the weeks leading up to her death. In doing so, she succeeds masterfully—I was completely in awe. Expertly folding and bending language, she chooses her words carefully: a tumour is *“a dreamy smear on the X-ray”*;when describing metastasised cancer, the spine is *“caught and held by the shadowy fingers of the monster”*; the pain she experiences *“has a sharp, glittering realness to it, like a diamond lodged in her hip”*. The subject matter weighs a ton, but she gets it across with such brevity, clarity and creativity that, yes, I imagined the horrors of the sickbed and the pain and the scars and the setbacks, but I also smiled at a life well lived, felt the warmth and appreciation of a good day, the trees on her street *“vibrating in the afternoon sun light”*, and how, on days like those, *“the landscape can levitate with color”*. Somehow, she makes the weight of it all feel bearable, sunlight glistening between her lines. Elegant, yet devastating. Moving, but cathartic. As Anne Enright noted on Jo Ann Beard’s writing in *The Guardian*: “you should read her and not look away”. --- > ***Cheri*** by Jo Ann Beard > Published by Serpent’s Tail in 2023 [Buy the book](https://serpentstail.com/work/cheri/?ref=trema.website) ### August Blue URL: https://www.trema.website/deborah-levy-august-blue/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:34.000Z A blue-haired concert pianist, Elsa M. Anderson, walks off stage in the Golden Hall in Vienna. She’s gone off script and played a few minutes of her own composition, because her fingers refused to play what the conductor of the orchestra, and the many people who bought a ticket to witness her immense talent in person, so desperately wanted her to play — Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2. Three weeks after that evening—considered catastrophic by onlookers and fellow professional musicians—we find her in Athens, where she watches a young woman who seems to be her doppelgänger, complete with the identical fitted green trench coat, buy a pair (*the last pair!*) of mechanical horses, objects Elsa also wants to have. The woman leaves behind her hat, which Elsa takes, and wears from then on as some strange form of retribution. Elsa is intrigued by this woman, an elusive figure, who she seems to run into once or thrice more as she herself floats around Europe, teaching the children of wealthy parents to play the piano, trying to come to terms with who she is in the wake of her professional disaster. Her travels take her from Athens to London, from London to Paris, and then on to Sardinia, where her adoptive father lives, who trained her to become a concert pianist from an early age. *August Blue* very much reads like those travels, the writing meandering like a piece of music could. Her prose ebbs and flows, the storyline stops and starts (like the backdrop of the pandemic lockdowns it is set against), as Levy weaves in conversations with Elsa’s doppelgänger, repeating the sentences they utter and injecting them between paragraphs, leaving her reader never entirely sure who they’re coming from, whether this is Elsa speaking, or her doppelgänger, or — aren’t they one and the same? I’ll admit that, on the surface, the novel’s strokes sometimes feel a bit broad, and the writing can come across as a little on-the-nose. Many a time, though, Levy’s brilliance surfaces, and she draws up sentences — sometimes dreamlike, sometimes crisp—that pull her reader in with a few seemingly simple flourishes, as if gracefully running her fingers along the keys of a piano. The mood she manages to depict repeatedly reminded me of [*The Lost Daughter*](https://letterboxd.com/film/the-lost-daughter-2021/?ref=trema.website), a film featuring Olivia Colman that I think would pair well with this novel. As always, and as I’ve come to expect from Deborah Levy since reading her [*Living Autobiography*](https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/livauto/living-autobiography?ref=trema.website) series, she vividly depicts beautiful scenes, textures, tastes and smells so that, long after finishing the book, its outline lingers—like the wobbly edges of a hallucination, or the trace of a doppelgänger in the corner of one’s eye. --- > ***August Blue*** by Deborah Levy > Published by Hamish Hamilton in 2023 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/august-blue-deborah-levy/18789107?aid=93138&ean=9780374602048&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### The Year of Magical Thinking URL: https://www.trema.website/joan-didion-the-year-of-magical-thinking/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:34.000Z This month I read this book by Joan Didion for the third time. I found myself sat at a bar while on vacation, with this book in my pocket, and I read it cover-to-cover before I got up and left. It is a captivating read: a meditation on grief unlike anything I’ve ever read. Didion wrote this book after her husband of forty years, [John Gregory Dunne](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John%5FGregory%5FDunne?ref=trema.website), with whom she frequently collaborated, suddenly passed away from a heart attack on December 30th of 2003\. She recounts that evening and covers the year that follows in its wake, as well as the life they had together (and that of their daughter, Quintana, who was very ill and in hospital at the time of Dunne’s death—an event weaved into the story, too). > *“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”* I will say that the book did not bring me down. Grief, and especially your own, is not an easy subject to write about (nor is it easy to read about), but Didion manages to inject the book with remarkable precision—she takes her reader by the hand, like a dependable confidant, and guides them through her experience of her grief with a striking sense of calm. She expertly—or surgically, even—uses language: timing her words and sentences, embracing humour, and employing repetition to make the words leap off its pages. She lets her readers peek down into the valleys of her grief in breathtaking ways. If you’ve experienced grief, this book will make you nod with appreciation, laugh a little at Didion’s witty remarks, and perhaps tear up at moments of recognition. *“In time of trouble I had been trained since childhood, read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information was control. Given that grief remained the most general of afflictions its literature seemed remarkably spare.”* As Didion found, literature on grief, at the time, was not satisfactory. With this book, I dare say she wrote the most powerful and unforgettable book on grief ever written. --- > ***The Year of Magical Thinking*** by Joan Didion > Published by Fourth Estate in 2005 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-year-of-magical-thinking-joan-didion/16636427?aid=93138&ean=9781400078431&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life URL: https://www.trema.website/anne-lamott-bird-by-bird/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:34.000Z I was once told that, if I’d like to write, or write well, it’s best not to read any books on writing and just sit down for an hour every day to plow right ahead. Needless to say, I’ve ignored that advice and read a great number of them; books by writers like [John McPhee](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4?ref=trema.website), [Brian Dillon](https://www.nyrb.com/products/essayism?ref=trema.website), [Vivian Gornick](https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/06/22/vivian-gornick-the-situation-and-the-story-personal-narrative/?ref=trema.website) and [Annie Dillard](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-writing-life-by-annie-dillard-not-a-work-of-genius-but-a-source-of-pleasure-1.4249736?ref=trema.website), covering a variety of ideas and tools—things to remember, and things to forget. Writing, or the writing life, has always held a mysterious allure to me, even though my rational side understands that, at the end of the day, it is a job, perhaps more so than an overly romanticised calling—a job that requires a lot of discipline and effort, sustained Monday through Saturday. Though, that’s not to say writing can’t be a fulfilling thing to (learn how to) do, and Anne Lamott paints that picture beautifully in *Bird by Bird*, originally published in 1994 and subtitled *“Some Instructions on Writing and Life”*. I’ve read it twice before and, together with Annie Dillard’s [*The Writing Life*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-writing-life-annie-dillard/1452363?ref=trema.website), it is my favourite book on writing (though its advice can be applied to any creative pursuit). Lamott taught writing classes at UC Davis and *Bird by Bird* is her attempt to put those classes in writing, so others could benefit from them, too. The book, then, is her personal account of the writing life. Wittily, and in the most down-to-earth manner, with her infectiously dark sense of humour, she covers (among other things) the need to write shitty first drafts, giving yourself small assignments, how to cope with the jealousy that keeps popping its head around the corner, letting go of perfectionism, listening well to people around you, taking notes to remember things for later, and why writing for the sake of publication is the wrong way to go about it. The anecdotes and nuggets of advice in this book are wise and useful. Every time I read this book I experience a certain warmth, and an eagerness to excavate the stories I may have inside of me, waiting to be put to paper, while at the same time feeling giddy with excitement about the many magnificent books out there I’ve yet to read. Because, as Anne puts it, and I can only agree: *“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again.”* --- > ***Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life*** by Anne Lamott > Published by Anchor Books in 1994 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/bird-by-bird-some-instructions-on-writing-and-life-anne-lamott/8649952?aid=93138&ean=9780385480017&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead URL: https://www.trema.website/olga-tokarczuk-drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:34.000Z Janina Duszejko lives in a remote Polish village in the Klodzko Valley where you’re unlikely to find cell reception, and where only two of her neighbours, Big Foot and Oddball, stick around for the winters. She’s a bit of a recluse. A former engineer of bridges, she likes to translate the poetry of William Blake with her friend Dizzy, teaches English now and again, studies astrological charts (writing down the dates and places of birth of everyone she meets, when possible), and is what many would consider an oddball, herself. She suffers from “Ailments”, the most pronounced ailment being her weeping without a cause. She’s old—how old, I’m not sure, but, she says, “I am already at an age where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night”. One day, Big Foot is found dead. Murdered, the first in an array of violent deaths. Janina takes it upon herself to investigate, as she has strong suspicions the murders were committed by the animals in the region as some form of retribution against what was done to them; the villagers have a strong love for hunting, for both sport and for meat. The police don’t believe her (or don’t bother reading the long, impassioned letters she pens, stating her case). To the police commander, she was “just an old woman, gone off her rocker living in this wilderness.” The atmosphere Tokarczuk creates in this novel is eerie, haunting, and darkly comedic at the same time. The best way to describe it would be *gothic noir*. It’s *not your average murder mystery.* A dark feminist comedy and a refreshing take on vegetarianism all packed into \~300 pages. I look forward to diving into the rest of her *Nobel* and *Man Booker Prize*\-winning catalog. *(I read the book in Dutch, translated by Charlotte Pothuizen and Dirk Zijlstra, but here I am linking to the English version—which I will likely also read)* --- > ***Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead*** by Olga Tokarczuk > Translated from Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones > Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2018 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/drive-your-plow-over-the-bones-of-the-dead-olga-tokarczuk/14950549?aid=93138&ean=9780525541349&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### Hiroshima URL: https://www.trema.website/john-hersey-hiroshima/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:35.000Z *‘In referring to those who went through the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Japanese tended to shy away from the term “survivors”, because in its focus on being alive it might suggest some slight to the sacred dead. The class of people to which Nakamura-san belonged came, therefore, to be called by a more neutral name, “hibakusha”—literally, “explosion-affected persons.”’* On August 6th, 1945, at 8:15am, an atomic bomb devastated the lives of approximately 140.000 people living in Hiroshima, Japan. Homes were wiped away like dust from a shoulder, large buildings levelled in seconds, and people obliterated, [their shadows etched into the city’s remaining stone](https://www.livescience.com/nuclear-bomb-wwii-shadows.html?ref=trema.website). Originally published in 1946, John Hersey’s book is a harrowing and celebrated account of the lives of six *hibakusha*—a clerk, a seamstress, a doctor, a pastor, a young surgeon, and a German catholic priest. He wrote it as [a piece for New Yorker magazine](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima?ref=trema.website) in August of 1946—the only story they ran in that edition—and it was later reprinted as a book. Hersey follows the path of these six men and women in the immediate minutes, days and weeks after the attack, and in doing so vividly outlines the destruction caused by the bomb. He tells their stories with great care, building a kind of suspense by switching from character to character, but never overstepping or overstating. The writing is deceptively simple, but with his phrasing he lands blow after blow after blow, and paints a picture of humanity at its worst, and at its best. The book is an account of life amid the rubble, made up of vivid vignettes: Of Mr. Tanimoto, who finds a boat he can use to transport the gravely injured, and who duly apologises to the five dead men he has to take it from; of Dr. Sasaki, who treated hundreds of wounded at the Red Cross Hospital and, when he finally lay in hiding to take a nap behind the hospital, after nineteen straight hours of gruesome work, was found within the hour by more wounded—and got up to continue his work; of Father Kleinsorge, who clambered over dead bodies to fill a teapot with water and stumbles into a group of wounded soldiers—their injuries described as “the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks”—who he knows will not live through the night, but who he provides with water nonetheless. The descriptions of the destruction and suffering are undeniably difficult to read, but read they should be. In its final chapter, [*The Aftermath*](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/15/hiroshima-the-aftermath?ref=trema.website), added in 1985, Hersey revisits the six *hibakusha* forty years later, and documents how they continued their lives. While that final chapter does shine a light of human perseverance on this story, I couldn’t help but feel disheartened, too, as here he juxtaposes his writing with intermissions outlining continued atomic and hydrogen bomb tests carried out by more countries in the years following the blast: driving home the point that the book contains a raw retelling of the destruction and death visited upon a population almost eighty years ago, and a world that has moved on too swiftly. --- > **Hiroshima** by John Hersey > Published in 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/hiroshima-john-hersey/15279254?aid=93138&ean=9780679721031&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### Faith, Hope and Carnage URL: https://www.trema.website/cave-ohagan-faith-hope-carnage/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:35.000Z Nick Cave’s output in the last four years has been very prolific: with Warren Ellis, his leading creative companion, he’s written several albums ([*Carnage*](https://www.nickcave.com/carnage/?ref=trema.website), [*Ghosteen*](https://www.nickcave.com/releases/ghosteen/?ref=trema.website)), an EP ([*Seven*](https://cavethings.com/products/seven-psalms-limited-edition-10-record?ref=trema.website)[ ](https://cavethings.com/products/seven-psalms-limited-edition-10-record?ref=trema.website)[*Psalms*](https://cavethings.com/products/seven-psalms-limited-edition-10-record?ref=trema.website)), a few soundtracks ([*Blonde*](https://www.nickcave.com/releases/blonde/?ref=trema.website), [*Dahmer*](https://www.nickcave.com/releases/dahmer-soundtrack-from-the-netflix-series/?ref=trema.website), and [*La Panthère des nieges*](https://www.nickcave.com/releases/la-panthere-des-neiges/?ref=trema.website)), and he featured on a handful of songs by others. He wrote a children’s book ([*The Little Thing*](https://cavethings.com/products/the-little-thing?ref=trema.website)), starred in a new documentary by Andrew Dominik ([*This Much I Know To Be True*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-f8HDIs6uM&pp=ygUldGhpcyBtdWNoIGkga25vdyB0byBiZSB0cnVlIG5pY2sgY2F2ZQ%3D%3D&ref=trema.website)), put out a concert film and live album with Robbie Ryan ([*Idiot Prayer*](https://youtu.be/7L4WdOl9UAM?ref=trema.website)), created a series of seventeen Staffordshire stoneware sculptures ([*The Devil – A Life*](https://www.instagram.com/p/CinFmfcroVH/?hl=en&ref=trema.website)), and answered many fans’ questions through his blog ([*The Red Hand Files*](https://www.theredhandfiles.com/?ref=trema.website)). And yet, you don’t need to know any of that, or be familiar with any of the work mentioned before, to understand and appreciate the book: [*Faith, Hope and Carnage*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/faith-hope-and-carnage-nick-cave/17839997?aid=93138&ean=9780374607371&listref=trema&ref=trema.website). Starting in 2020, Cave sat down with O’Hagan, an Irish journalist, for over forty hours of conversation. He hadn’t given many (if any) interviews in recent years, making the 294-page book his first appearance of the sort in a long time. The book is an edited version of those conversations and—written in conversation form—provides a fascinating peek into the mind, the work, and the life of Nick Cave. Each chapter details a different conversation they had over the phone, touching on a wide variety of topics: from the biographical (Cave’s upbringing and his musical journey) to the existential (the death of his son Arthur and the role of religion in his life). What struck me is the honesty and the candour with which Cave takes us through the inner workings of his life. His accounts of the lows of his heroin addiction are agonising; the introduction of his wife Susie as his saviour reads like a revelation. Learning about how they’ve dealt with and accepted the death of their son is earth-shattering, yet inspiring. Death features heavily in the book, and much is said about Cave’s productivity being a direct result of the grief induced by the recent passing of family and friends. The book, then, is primarily an excavation of that grief, and the despair that comes with it. Don’t get me wrong—there’s plenty of room for light-hearted discussion about the creative process, his close relationship with Warren Ellis, and how they go about creating the work they’re known for. At times, the writing is funny, and the conversation hilarious. The book is at its best, though, when Cave reflects on topics larger than life. Through prompts previously presented to him via *The Red Hand Files*, and O’Hagan’s thoughtful questioning, Nick Cave provides the most generous and articulate answers. *(Thank you, Timo, for lending me the book.)* --- > **Faith, Hope and Carnage** by Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan > Published in 2022 by Canongate [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/faith-hope-and-carnage-nick-cave/17839997?aid=93138&ean=9780374607371&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### The Dry Heart URL: https://www.trema.website/natalia-ginzburg-the-dry-heart/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:35.000Z > *‘Tell me the truth, I said’.* > > *‘What truth?’ he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what it was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a handkerchief.* > > *I shot him between the eyes.* This is how *The Dry Heart* opens, and for the next one hundred and seven pages, Natalia Ginzburg calmly excavates the cause of death, as its unnamed and plainspoken female narrator outlines the life she lived with an older man named Alberto. She (the narrator) is a lonely woman living in a boarding house. When she meets Alberto, they go on walks and she brings him chocolate. She tells him about herself, and his eyes sparkle when he looks at her. She adores them, his eyes, but little else, yet falls in love, she thinks, although he never tells her about himself. They marry, and they have a child, but Alberto tires quickly of their life together. “But for a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.” The recounting of her regrettable relationship with Alberto—the deception, the infidelity, the unfulfilling marriage, and the eventual murder—reads like a confession told over several evenings, to several people, a slightly different version presented each time she revisits its fatal culmination, as if reciting the sequence of events from memory and not quite repeating them the same during every retelling. First published in 1947, this novella’s tone is modern, its pace is swift, and its style is understated, which caught me off-guard but, if you’re familiar with Ginzburg’s writing, should come as no surprise. “I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes.” A compact book, brilliantly subdued in its anger, about a fierce woman who wrestles back control of her life. --- > ***The Dry Heart*** by Natalia Ginzburg > Translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye > Originally published in 1947 > Republished by Daunt Books in 2021 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-dry-heart-natalia-ginzburg/12421012?aid=93138&ean=9780811228787&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### All The Lovers In The Night URL: https://www.trema.website/mieko-kawakami-all-the-lovers-in-the-night/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:16:42.000Z [Mieko Kawakami](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/07/magazine/mieko-kawakami.html?ref=trema.website)’s books are of the mesmerising and quiet kind, and they often explore friendships. Her characters are gentle, tender, and somewhat passive, but her words sparkle, and in every of her novels translated into English, they leap from the pages. After *Breasts and Eggs* and *Heaven*, two of her previous novels translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, comes [*All The Lovers In The Night*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/all-the-lovers-in-the-night/18900722?aid=93138&ean=9781609456993&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) (translated, again, by Bett and Boyd). In it, we follow the solitary Fuyuko Irie, a woman in her mid-30s who works as a freelance proofreader, and who doesn’t have much in the way of a social life. She prefers the company of fictional characters to real people, but does meet some, now and again. Kyoko, Noriko, or her editor, Hijiri—they are all very different to her, living their lives as one would expect, and we can sense them quietly judging Fuyuko as she goes about her life in her own reclusive way. Fuyuko decides one day to take up drinking. First a beer, then a glass of sake. She attempts to rid herself of her social anxiety, and tries to sign up for a class at a local culture center, but fails. She tries again, makes a bit of a fool of herself, and in doing so, stumbles upon a man, Mitsutsuka, and they begin meeting regularly at a local cafe, where she grows fond of him. As Fuyuko slowly becomes comfortable with who she is as a person, comparing herself to those she meets with, and as I learned of the events of her past that led to her seclusive tendencies, I realised how much I appreciated the writing. How Kawakami very gently reveals this person, letting her reader get familiar—as if getting used to seeing in a darkened room after flicking off the light—she peels away the layers of her social anxiety as the book progresses and carefully outlines the life of this Japanese woman who, with time, finds fulfilment where you wouldn’t expect it. Mieko Kawakami has, yet again, written a calm and gentle treasure. --- > ***All The Lovers In The Night*** by Mieko Kawakami > Translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd > Published by Europa Editions in 2022 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/all-the-lovers-in-the-night/18900722?aid=93138&ean=9781609456993&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### An Immense World URL: https://www.trema.website/ed-yong-an-immense-world/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:35.000Z Now and then, I like to read a big book. [Vast and memorable biographies](https://www.trema.website/benjamin-moser-sontag-her-life-2019/), [monumental essay collections](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/592315/a-little-devil-in-america-by-hanif-abdurraqib/?ref=trema.website), or [sprawling, epic works of fiction](https://ta-nehisicoates.com/books/the-water-dancer/?ref=trema.website)—books that cover long, impressive lives or astonishing topics, and leave you sitting in awe when you close them. *An Immense World*, written by [Ed Yong](https://edyong.me/?ref=trema.website), uncovers the senses found in the animal kingdom (“nonhuman perception”) in splendid detail. It is grand and all-encompassing, yet microscopic. A Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, Yong takes you by the hand and guides you from one mind-boggling observation to the next. From a catfish and its body, which is covered in taste buds (*“if you lick one of them, you’ll both simultaneously taste each other”*) to flowers and the dramatic UV patterns they use to attract pollinators (*“bees can see the UV patches at the bases of their petals, which form vivid bullseyes”*); from forest fire-chasing *Melanophila* beetles (*“the beetles have perhaps the most dramatic sex in the animal kingdom, mating as a forest burns around them”*) to a library of treehopper recordings (*“the songs are haunting, mesmerising, and surprising”*): he makes you feel like our planet is (terrifyingly) larger than it already seemed, and (reassuringly) smaller than ever before. I think this book, filled to the brim with itsy-bitsy bewilderments, has the power to shift the way many a reader observes the world and sees their place in it. If you give it the attention it deserves while you read it, and allow it to draw you in—*really* draw you in—our planet could, possibly, never look, sound and feel the same to you again. A monumental book, bound to leave its readers flabbergasted by nature. --- > ***An Immense World*** by Ed Yong > Published by Random House in 2022 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/an-immense-world-how-animal-senses-reveal-the-hidden-realms-around-us-ed-yong/17476424?aid=93138&ean=9780593133231&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes URL: https://www.trema.website/claire-wilcox-patch-work/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T08:44:17.000Z If you’re looking for a straight-forward memoir from the curator of fashion at the Victoria and Albert Museum (a position she has held since 2004), this is not that. Instead, she weaves together memories—I would say ‘string’, or ‘piece’, but ‘weave’ really does best describe her way of writing—and sometimes offers glimpses of her family, of her upbringing, of motherhood, before quickly moving on to the next subject, as if the most personal revelations were muttered under her breath. Essays are brief, sometimes half a page. “Hair”, “Kimono”, “Silver Thread”, “Flannel”. Reading them feels like carefully lifting objects out of the museum’s storeroom, with gloved fingers, glancing at them from every angle before putting them back and focusing on the next. Like holding a cherished piece of fabric, feeling its texture, and listening to it rustling in your hands. No one is mentioned by name—not her husband, not her children, not the world-renowned designers she has worked with—yet the book feels more intimate than the average memoir. Claire Wilcox effortlessly pulls you into her tales and, with this book, has produced a magical, lingering read. --- > ***Patch Work: A Life Amongst Clothes*** by Claire Wilcox > Published by Bloomsbury in 2020 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/patch-work-winner-of-the-2021-pen-ackerley-prize-claire-wilcox/14837273?aid=93138&ean=9781526614414&listref=trema&ref=trema.website) ### Grey Bees URL: https://www.trema.website/andrey-kurkov-grey-bees/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T11:01:36.000Z I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the subtleties of this war novel. The ways in which its writer, Andrey Kurkov, manages to convey the horror of living through a seemingly never-ending war by carefully lifting out its most minute details; how he’s able to capture the solitude of sticking around the village one calls home—the village battered by shells and left for dead by family, friends, and neighbours—as well as the pride one must feel to survive in that same location; to still call that place home even if the things that made it a home have long ago disappeared. Sergey Sergeyich, the book’s stoic main character, is a beekeeper. As one of the village’s two remaining residents, he’s survived for years in Little Starhorodivka. The village has but two streets, and is located in Ukraine’s “Grey Zone”—the area between Ukraine’s troops, and pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas region. It has been without electricity for years, and he heats his home with a stove, and candles taken from the village’s bombed-out church. He spends his time getting by as best he can, taking care of his home and bees, and arguing and drinking vodka with his *frenemy*, Pashka. With the onset of warmer weather and the increased shelling of Little Starhorodivka, Sergey decides to take his bees to greener pastures, where they can collect their pollen in peace. What follows is an account of war that is at once chilling and warm-hearted—a portrait of humans witnessing the senselessness and absurdity of war, through the eyes of a sensitive everyman, making it one of the best books (if not *the* best book) I’ve read on war. --- > ***Grey Bees*** by Andrey Kurkov > Translated by Boris Dralyuk > Published by MacLehose Press in 2020 [Buy the book](https://bookshop.org/p/books/grey-bees-andrey-kurkov/17279480?aid=93138&ean=9781646051663&listref=trema&ref=trema.website)