Never trust my Booker predictions! Yet ‘Flesh’ is a great winner of the 2025 prize. In my last go at a prediction of the 2025 Booker [see this link], I placed David Szalay’s novel Flesh , 3rd out of the 6th. And now we find it has won. It is more than a worthy winner, … More Never trust my Booker predictions! Yet ‘Flesh’ is a great winner of the 2025 prize.
The 2025 Booker Shortlist – My experience & predictions for those I read The Longlist blog is still available – and still messy. It is here at this link, if you want to access link to blogs on books not shortlisted. Tash Aw was definitively cheated of a shortlist place with his best book ever … More The 2025 Booker Shortlist – My experience & predictions for those I read
What does your ideal home look like? What does your ideal home look like? Of course, it shall look like number 1, Nova Scotia House. This is a blog on Charlie Porter’s 2025 novel, ‘Nova Scotia House’, and the impossible queer magical thinking it makes possible. The prompt question here is a kind of trick! … More What does your ideal home look like? Of course, it shall look like number 1, Nova Scotia House. This is a blog on Charlie Porter’s 2025 novel, ‘Nova Scotia House’, and the impossible queer magical thinking it makes possible.
‘Hills: … For many years these hills stayed safely in my memory. Even now, I can bring them to mind, or the feeling of being amidst them. Sometimes when I’m alone, my right hand lifts, and the hand sweeps diagonally upward, as if to trace the curving flank of one of those hills: a slow, … More If it is the job of the novelist is to render the form of memory through many aspects of mind and bodily sensations, then this is one of the most superb novels ever. This is a blog on Claire Adam (2025) ‘Love Forms’.
‘She felt a small pang of resentment: the endling’s last moments on Earth, and it pined over not getting laid. Of course this was normal. If anything, endlings should pine all the louder for the end of their species. … // At least gastropods yearned in silence, …’.[1] This is a blog on the role … More This is a blog on the role of endings in the modern metafictional novel and the light shed on that role by Maria Reva (2025) ‘Endling’ London, Virago Press.
The Edinburgh Book Festival may be anybody’s kicking post for at least some of the time. For years, it was supported financially by Baillie Gifford with known assets in some very illiberal regimes and ethically if not legally (as far as we know) shady practices. That tie now severed, the right wing press led by … More On the Edinburgh book festival: why I still go and on whether I should keep going.
“Working families, small communities, traditional British industries and jobs. We used to value these things”.[1]Sometimes we wonder if this was said by a fictional columnist or own present prime Minister (and I won’t answer ‘whether I have a problem with our prime minister’: Natasha Brown meant Rishi Sunak; I, of course, mean Sir Keir Starmer’s … More This is a blog on Natasha Brown (2025) ‘Universality’.
Is the idea that psychosocial or other roles are ‘parts’ played upon the stage a tired metaphor (from the too-often quoted lines of Shakespeare’s jester, Jacques, from As You Like It: ‘All the world’s a stage, …’). Why might modern novels then take up that idea again, other than to keep saying and showing the … More This is a blog on Katie Kitamura (2025) ‘Audition’.
The illustration – by Liz Zonarich/Harvard Staff – is from the Harvard Gazette article cited below, but to give up a book because it makes you uncomfortable may not be to ‘bin’ it but just re-shelve it in your mind (source: https://content.news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/10/when-to-quit-a-book/ ). After all the bin in the illustration has a l;ong shadow – … More Is giving up on a challenge a strategy that ever brings comfort? An example from my reading.
My current reading Being retired and in one’s seventh decade of age leaves the issue of time open and yet I seem forever to find certain nagging questions pressing on my mind as if they mattered top anyone – even myself. Here is a case in point. i have resolved to do a blog a … More When I do strange things, fortunately I laugh at myself. A case in point …
‘I’ve done worse things, things I am not proud of including standing here in the dark with David, I know there’s a little bit of hypocrisy there, there are shades of hypocrisy in everything. Our principles stretch like elastic bands’.[1] When certainties fail us, as they must in time, there may be no alternative to … More ‘I’ve done worse things, things I am not proud of including standing here in the dark with David, I know there’s a little bit of hypocrisy there, there are shades of hypocrisy in everything. Our principles stretch like elastic bands’. This is a blog on Nicola Dinan (2025) ‘Disappoint Me’.
Of a ‘chert the size of an olive pit’, that travels with the narrator through the spaces and times of the novel Juice [2024] by Tim Winton, the narrator says that ‘… a stone is an expression of the earth, a signal of time. But it’s also a relic of experience. A thing propelled into the world. … More Of a ‘chert the size of an olive pit’, that travels with the narrator through the spaces and times of the novel ‘Juice’ [2024] by Tim Winton, the narrator says that ‘… a stone is an expression of the earth, a signal of time. … but its journey isn’t over, and neither is its destiny fixed’. In the dystopia imagined by Tim Winton whether destiny is fixed or not at any point in the globe’s political and environmental history is the central ethical problem of the novel.
Steve_Bamlett_blog 