The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout

A middle-aged school teacher struggling with life finds himself not waving but drowning

​Artie Dam is a much liked teacher and member of his community. He is married to Evie, who works as a therapist. She is more laconic and laid back, often giving questionable advice to her clients. They have a son, Rob, who was involved in a tragic accident that killed his girlfriend. It’s never spoken, but it is implied his negligence could be responsible. Artie is going through a period where it feels the weight of the world is on his shoulders. He also feels his country is on the wrong track, with the election of Donald Trump as president. In short, he’s not coping. Not only that, many people around him, friends and colleagues, are not coping either.

Into this dark and foreboding atmosphere a bomb is dropped by his son. He has discovered a family secret that threatens to blow them apart. With his mental health already perilously close to the edge, Artie must do his best to keep everything together, even when it seems that not only his family, but the whole country is falling apart. 

The Things We Never Say is the eleventh novel from American novelist Elizabeth Strout. It’s a concisely written portrait of small town America, but one that reflects a larger national mood. The novel simmers with a terrible despair, occasionally relieved with flashes of humour and warm humanity. Strout has one character, the simple yet pure-of-heart Rhonda Lazarre, a victim of classroom bullying, represent the noble yet fragile values of protecting the weak and always seeing the best in everyone. Her portrayal gives grounds for hope that decency and grace are still possible in a world filled with indifferent cruelty.

A psychologically rich look at everyday lives of quiet desperation.

The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout. Published by Viking. $35

JUNE 2026

Another Man in the Street, by Caryl Phillips

The life of a West Indian migrant is explored in this all-too-human novel.

It’s the 1960s, London. West Indian man Victor Johnson is sailing on a boat from St Kitts, a Caribbean island. He’s leaving behind a girlfriend, Lorna, in the hope of making something of himself in England. When he arrives he finds work in a pub. The owner, who can’t be bothered inquiring into his real name, calls Victor “Lucky”. At the pub he meets all sorts of characters, most notably Peter Feldman, an unscrupulous landlord. Peter has an interesting backstory too, a German-Jewish war refugee, he has lost his home and parents. Victor starts work with Peter as a rent collector, chosen for the job because his boss thinks he will have a better chance of extracting money from fellow West Indian migrants who tenant his substandard properties. While working for Peter he takes up with Ruth, a white working class girl who had to give up her daughter for adoption. The two set up a home together of sorts, but the relationship is plagued with challenges and insecurities. Despite all of Victor’s difficulties, he does experience a degree of success as a journalist, writing up articles on the West Indian migrant experience.

Caryl Phillips is an award winning Kittian-British writer who has published plays, essay collections and novels since the early 1980s. Another Man in the Street, his latest novel, addresses issues of class and race in England from the 1960s up to today. The novel is written from many perspectives and intimately fleshes out the experiences of working class and coloured people, the prejudices they face, and how this shapes not only their destiny, but how they see themselves. Victor is presented as a deeply flawed man, as are the other characters, including his girlfriend Ruth and former boss Peter. All three have a great degree of self-awareness about their limitations, which makes their portraits all the more painful and filled with pathos. Ruth constantly tries to re-imagine her life, torturing herself with what-ifs, while her daughter treats her like a moral outcast. In a harrowing chapter Peter ends up as a doorman in a New York apartment building, routinely humiliated by the entitled residents. And finally, Victor is haunted by regrettable scenes from his life.

Difficult subject matter sensitively handled in a tightly written narrative about broken people. For readers of Elizabeth Strout and Claire Keegan.

Another Man in the Street, by Caryl Phillips. Published by Bloomsbury. $22.99

The Lost Soldiers, by Andrey Kurkov

Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov returns with a new Kyiv mystery.

Kyiv, 1919. It’s a time of great political instability. Only a year ago the entire Russian royal family had been shot. The Red Army is in control, but the White Army and anarchists are lurking in the background. Everything is in flux and anyone could be swept into power at any moment. Against this tumultuous background, humble police investigator Samson Kolechko works to solve the mysterious case of twenty-eight Red Army soldiers who have gone missing at the Halystka bathhouse, their clothing left behind. It’’s a surreal case, with many strange characters and bizarre twists. While Samson works in earnest to solve the mystery, he must also negotiate a maze-like underworld filled with corruption and nepotism. There is also the dreaded Cheka - secret police - who are keeping an eye on Samson’s activities.

The Lost Soldiers is the third installment of celebrated Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov’s Kyiv Mysteries. The novel has wonderfully earthy descriptions of people, streetlife and Slavic food, bringing the Kyiv of a hundred years ago vibrantly to life. Kurkov mixes these gritty aspects with many humorous, almost absurdist elements, giving the story a bittersweet feel. We know Samson walks a perilous tightrope, with danger always nearby, yet the comic tone lightens this emotional burden. Deeply satisfying literary fiction.

The Lost Soldiers, by Andrey Kurkov. Published by MacLehose Press. $34.99

JUNE 2026

The Perfect Passion Company, by Alexander McCall Smith

A matchmaking agency presents a moral quandary for its new owner 

Thirty-year-old Katie has been offered The Perfect Passion Company, an old school introductions business. Her cousin Ness, who started the business and grew it into a respectable concern, has decided to take a gap year in Canada. She may return, she may not. With some trepidation, Katie takes on the business and its bulging files of lonely hearts. 

The matchmaking agency’s next door office on Little Mouse Street is occupied by a man four years Katie’s junior, William Kidd. Before leaving for Canada, Ness introduces William to Katie. It will be helpful, she decides, if the two get to know each other as Katie learns the ropes. William, it turns out, is the perfect gentleman - handsome, intelligent and courteous. There are no drawbacks, although he runs a curious business as a designer of woolen jumpers. He knits the designs up himself, which does lead to some assumptions about his sexuality, but the reader is assured that such reductive masculine stereotypes need not apply here. In fact, William has a fiance, Alice, back in his home city of Melbourne, Australia.

As Katie works through her first few matchmaking cases, William helps out in an advisory role, and the two strike up quite a friendship. Alice, the fiance back in Melbourne, often looms ominously in the background as Katie and William become closer. Is William and Alice’s  relationship really on firm ground, or are there cracks starting to show?  As Katie feels herself falling in love with William, she must do her best to keep her emotions in check.

The Perfect Passion Company started out as two e-book novellas, and now finds itself expanded into a four hundred page novel. All of the usual themes of Alexander McCall Smith’s fiction are present: sticky emotional entanglements, moral dilemmas, questions of how to live ethically. There is a good deal of stoicism in the pages of McCall Smith’s novels. Characters often must practice self-restraint and make decisions that prioritise the welfare of others. When Katie realises that her feelings for William could not only endanger herself, but cause cascading grief and heartbreak, she displays admirable self-control. Reading Alexander McCall Smith’s fiction, it’s always easy to empathise with his characters, to walk in their shoes and wonder, “What would I do?” 

In the end, all moral quandaries are resolved, and the good are rewarded for their exemplary behaviour and steadfastness. The not-so-good, if not punished, are certainly found out. The Perfect Passion Club is an entirely satisfying fiction about real lives and real world problems, with a cast of likable characters muddling through life as best they can.

The Perfect Passion Company, by Alexander McCall Smith. Published by Polygon. $39.99

MAY 2026

Long Island, by Colm Toibin

When an old flame comes back to town, a spurned lover can’t decide what he wants, or what is best. 

​Eilis Lacey moved from Ireland to Long Island, New York in the 1950s and secretly married an Italian American, Tony Fiorello. It’s 1976 and she now has two teenage children, Larry and Rosella. One day a complete stranger - an aggressive Irishman - knocks on her door and tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child, and that he intends to dump the baby on her doorstep when it is born. The news knocks Eilis for six, but worse is to come. Her mother-in-law, Francesca, concocts a plan to take care of the baby herself. Eilis doesn’t want the baby anywhere near her family. 

Stressed and not knowing what to do, she travels alone to her hometown of Enniscorthy in Ireland, ostensibly to celebrate her mother’s 80th birthday. An old flame, Jim Farrell, is running the local pub. The two had originally intended to marry, but Eilis ran out on him, starting a new life in America. Jim never married, but has now started a clandestine relationship with Nancy Sheridan, an old friend of Eilis’s. They are planning their own marriage, but carefully timing the announcement. When Eilis turns up in Enniscorthy, Jim’s is plunged back into the emotional turmoil of some two decades ago, when he was abandoned. He meets up with Eilis, which only opens old wounds; he also entertains naive hopes. Could he start a new life with Eilis in America, or is this mad, wishful thinking? And what of Nancy, who has invested so much in her relationship with Jim?

Samuel Johnson, the great English essayist and lexicographer, once wrote that “Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.” This piece of wit goes some way to explaining the themes of Long Island. Jim is hopelessly intoxicated with the possibility of a rejuvenated affair with Eilis, and he knows it is seriously upending his judgment. But still he ploughs into danger. The sensible path, staying with the practical and stable Nancy, seems like a let down when compared to Eilis, who represents a youthful passion that can maybe be recaptured.

Colm Toibin perfectly describes a slow moving trainwreck as Jim gets sucked further and further into this romantic delusion. A sense of suspense builds as it becomes obvious that none of what his characters are planning can possibly come to good. There are some humorous moments. The portrait of the prickly yet crafty Mrs Lacey, Eilis’s mother, is a delight. And the descriptions of Nancy’s business, a fish and chip shop which is subject to multiple complaints because of the smell, are wonderful for their relentless dinginess. The lives of Enniscorthy are often pathetic and small, but are nonetheless filled with warmth and humanity. 

There are some uneven notes, however. The novel doesn’t really resolve the plot involving the unwanted child and the family dynamics of the Italian family back in Long Island. The trauma this has caused for Eilis is pretty much left up in the air. And Nancy’s revenge on Jim perhaps stretches credulity a bit far. Having said that, this is a story I thoroughly enjoyed, with  characters whom I became totally involved with. 

Long Island, by Colm Toibin. Published by Picador. $34.99

MAY 2026

The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts, by Robert Thorogood

The latest installment of the beloved cozy crime series.

Murder is afoot in the idyllic English town of Marlow. Football star Gary Wise is shot dead at the rear of his property, and soon local thriller writer Mike Saxon  succumbs to the same fate. It seems the town’s celebrity class is being targeted, causing flighty TV presenter Angela Guthrie to worry she’ll be next. This is obviously a job for amateur sleuths Suzie Harris, professional dog walker, Becks Starling, the vicar’s wife and the crossword setter Judith Potts, their unofficial leader.

A spanner in the works is the appearance of Judith’s step-daughter, Eleni. Eleni is the daughter of Judith’s Greek husband Philippos, who died in 1976 on a boat trip off the coast of Corfu in suspicious circumstances. Eleni claims to have proof that Judith was responsible, even though Greek authorities cleared her name. Eleni dogs the three women, leaving Judith seriously rattled and unable to perform at her best.

​The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts is the fifth book in the successful Marlow series. Like all previous books, it’s a tightly plotted story with three irrepressible characters that readers will love. The Marlow novels balance entertainment and humour with the feel good themes of enduring friendship and personal resilience. 

The Mysterious Affair of Judith Potts, by Robert Thorogood. HQ Fiction. $32.99

Hot Chocolate on Thursday, by Michiko Aoyama

Twelve interconnected stories from the celebrated Japanese author Michiko Aoyama.

Michiko Aoyama is a bestselling author in her native Japan. Two of her books, What You Are Looking For is in the Library and The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park have recently found their way into English translation. Now her first novel, Hot Chocolate on Thursday, has been published. (The sequel, Matcha on Monday, is due out later this year.)

The novel is comprised of twelve interconnected stories, each featuring a colour theme. Characters are briefly introduced in one chapter, then expanded up in the next, until the final chapter where the original main two characters, a waiter and his customer at a cafe, are brought full circle. In between there is a broad cast including mothers, child care workers, artists, gallery owners, students, travellers and an elderly married couple. These are everyday people, hoping for love and connection, but fearful of rejection and loneliness. Aoyama’s books have sometimes been described as therapy, and there is a self-help quality about her writing, but her light touch also succinctly captures the human dilemmas we all face. The fiction of Alexander McCall Smith - stories that explore the moral quandaries of everyday people - would probably make a good parallel.

I was struck by one paragraph in Aoyama’s novel, where she neatly encapsulates how the mind often works against itself:

“We live in ignorance of what the next second holds. There are things beyond our control that come to us unbidden. In those moments, anxieties that multiply endlessly cause us to imagine fearful scenarios. Even though these are stories of our own fabrication, we are threatened by them as if they were immutable futures handed down to us by someone.”

Gentle, easy reading, feel good fiction, containing a core of wisdom and truth.

Hot Chocolate on Thursday, by Michiko Aoyama. Published by Doubleday Uk. $34.99

APRIL26

Glyph, by Ali Smith

 

Scottish novelist Ali Smith shows how the weight of history is still felt in the present. 

Two sisters, Petra and Patricia, are very close when growing up in the 1990s as young girls, but fall apart during adulthood. Petra, the older sister by two years, recalls strange incidents from their youth, in particular a story told to them by an elderly woman at a family party. The woman was some type of messenger during the Second World War and during an errand came upon a dead flattened body, probably run over by a tank. The remains of the body are like a thick leathery strap. The story haunts the girls as they play games that try to recreate the dead soldier. Another story, this one from the First World War, is equally shocking. A sensitive young soldier leads a horse rendered blind by chemical warfare into the woods, and doesn’t return. He is later found guilty of desertion and shot. 

In adulthood, Petra revisits these stories and out of the blue, contacts her estranged sister, Patricia. The two women re-connect, and Petra discovers Patricia now has a teenage daughter, Billie. Billie has gotten into a spot of bother with the police when attending a free Palestine protest. 

For the most part, Glyph (the name given to the flattened man) constitutes a dialogue between two sisters, seen from the perspectives of both women. A third perspective is offered by Billie, who brings a contemporary critique of war. The language Ali Smith employs is light and playful, with lots of amusing word games, giving the novel an immediate and of-the-moment aspect. It feels like the characters are there with you. Where things get dark is in the descriptions of war violence and the questions raised about the morality of portraying - whether in literature or child’s play - those who have died in tragic circumstances. Hence the novel swings from cheerful childhood innocence to the horror and violence of war.

A deceptively simple story told in a loose style that could have gone off the rails in the wrong hands, but Ali Smith shows a deft hand in balancing the light and the dark.

Glyph, by Ali Smith. Published by Hamish Hamilton. $39.99

APRIL26

A Shadow of Myself, by Peter Flamm

A man troubled by war tries to lose himself by impersonating someone else.

While roaming the scarred battlefields of Verdun in north eastern France, a German man named Wilhelm Bettuch comes across the corpse of a dead surgeon, Hans Stern. A working class baker himself, Wilhelm decides to steal the papers of this professional man, return to Germany, and impersonate him. Things go surprisingly smoothly. Posing as Hans Stern, Wilhelm discovers he has a wife, named Grete. She recognises him as her husband, and any differences in personality she puts down to the traumatic effects of war. Hans/Wilhelm also discovers that neighbours and friends easily recognise him.

But a troubling inner voice says he will be caught. The family dog, Nero, treats him suspiciously. And family friend and prosecutor Sven Borges claims to be on his tail. When Hans/Wilhelm is summoned as a witness in a court case, he risks serious consequences. 

Peter Flamm (real name Erich Mosse, 1891-1963) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin. First published in 1926, A Shadow of Myself is on one level about survivors of trench warfare during the First World War, but on another level it delves into themes of self and presentation of self in society. Hans/Wilhelm (the two are somehow convincingly mixed into one entity) very much hides behind a mask, his inner self a roiling ocean of doubts, anxieties and fears. The text  denies the idea of concrete personality and identity, that hard surface and false veneer we try to wear. In an extraordinary passage, Flamm describes individuals as mere expressions of biology and mysterious nature:

“...our parents aren’t our father and mother, not their blood alone, we have every animal inside us, every plant, all of them speaking their muffled language, as embryos we still have all their shapes, breathing with gills, we’re fish and reptiles and animals, the whole of creation is inside us…we’re all brothers, we’re all one, there’s no guilt because we’re not ourselves…”

The novel’s narration is paced like a thriller, as Hans/Wilhelm constantly fears detection. Even though he is surrounded by friends and family, and  lives in a bustling city, he is nevertheless haunted by a terrifying isolation, a world that can never understand him. In tone and atmosphere, A Shadow of Myself is reminiscent of Kafka’s nightmare existential classic The Trial (the framing device Flamm uses is that of a courtroom confession, where Hans/Wilhelm tells his story.) 

A hundred years after it was first published, this exceptional work of war time fiction can now be enjoyed by English readers. (Translated by Simon Pare.)

A Shadow of Myself, by Peter Flamm. Published by Pushkin Press. $32.99.

MAR26

Vilhelm's Room, by Tove Ditlevsen

An abandoned wife takes a victory lap of sorts, giving an excoriating commentary on her friends, lovers and family. 

Lise Mundus is a celebrated poet. Her husband, Vilhelm, is an equally famous newspaper editor. After twenty years of marriage, he has abandoned his wife. From a psychiatric ward, Lise publishes a lonely hearts ad, searching for a lover. She takes up with Kurt, an aimless drifter  who lives above her flat. The relationship is pretty meaningless to Lise, just a way of filling in the empty hours. What really gives her life a semblance of meaning is a steady stream of exasperated, ironic and often comical commentaries on Vilhelm and his many lovers. Lise is also critical of herself and her own behaviour in the relationship, although the tone of these self-reproaches is breezy and glib. 

As this mad, patchwork narrative barrels along, we know a reckoning is ahead, for in the first page we learn that Lise is already dead.

Vilhelm’s Room was Danish poet and author Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel, published in 1975. It is a bit of a train wreck, but one you can’t look away from. The story jumps all over the place, characters come and go erratically and the narrator’s voice is hard to pin down. Sometimes it’s Lise narrating, sometimes a third person narrator, sometimes it’s hard to figure out who’s who. That might make it sound like a challenging read, and it is to a degree, but the novel’s extraordinary psychodynamics - the ex-lovers, the self loathing, the sexual competition, the painful loneliness- make it compellingly universal. Our darkest moments are here laid bare in a prose that is both despairing and witty. The reader doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Interspersed through the madness are insightful passages where Ditlevsen discusses relationships, childhood and personal struggles. If Vilhelm’s Room has a theme, it is the latter. Lise is flighty, cheerful and witty, even if this is at core a very rancid type of wit, the enjoyment of Vilhelm’s character assasination. Underlying all this is a serious mental illness. Lise talks in earnest about suicide, claiming the thought of it is her only happiness in life, as it provides her the freedom to choose when her misery will end.

Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel is shocking and raw. It’s also darkly comic, with a nervous energy that propels the story. The book should perhaps come with a warning, especially anyone suffering from mental illness. 

Brilliant and original, but also deeply saddening. (Translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell.)

Vilhelm's Room, by Tove Ditlevsen. Published by Penguin. $26.99

MAR26

A Stocking Full of Spies: The Ministry of Unladylike Activity 3, by Robin Stevens

When two mysterious deaths occur at the famous wartime code breaking centre Bletchley Park, the guilt is pinned on a most unlikely suspect.

It’s 1941. The British are secretly breaking German codes at Bletchley Park. When their school is bombed, twelve-year-olds May Wong and Nuala O’Malley find themselves working as messengers at the famous code breaking centre. Secret codes aside, there are other mysteries afoot at Bletchley Park. An adult family friend of May’s has been implicated in murder. Bertie Wells, while doing routine military night training at the park, accidently killed fellow code-breaker Llewelyn Huxley. Or did he? There were others there during the training session, and it was nighttime. Anxious Bertie, lacking in confidence, thinks his gun went off accidently, but he can’t be sure. As May, Nuala and fellow sleuth Eric investigate, another murder happens. The obnoxious Colonel Hugo MacNair, leader of one of the code breaking teams, dies suddenly after drinking a cup of tea laced with strychnine. Could the two deaths be linked? And what of rumours that a spy, working for the Germans, is in their midst.

Children’s author Robin Stevens has made a well deserved name for herself as the Agatha Christie of children’s literature. In this second series (the first, Murder Most Unladylike, was set in 1930s England) Stevens concentrates on the Second World War. The characters, language and expressions all brilliantly capture the time, right down to the timing of jokes and delivery of punchlines. Besides Agatha Christie, there is even a hint of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh in Steven’s effervescent storytelling. The plot is endlessly ingenious and the narrative superbly paced. There’s not a dull page in sight. An added bonus is the novel’s educational aspect, which teaches readers about the workings at Bletchley Park, and its role in helping the Allies win the war. 

Kids’ detective fiction that doesn’t disappoint.

A Stocking Full of Spies: The Ministry of Unladylike Activity 3, by Robin Stevens. Published by Puffin. $16.99

FEB26

Discipline, by Randa Abdel-Fattah

Award winning Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah addresses the contorted way Middle-Eastern issues are dealt with in media and academia.

Ashraf is an academic trying to keep his head above university politics. He  can’t speak his mind too freely on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict without seeming like an Islamic extremist. His postgraduate student, Jamal, has no such qualms, and posts articles and comments that gets them both into hot water.

Hannah is a journalist - the only Muslim in her workplace - trying to shift the lens on reporting Middle Eastern politics. Her stories are often reworked by editors to give a more pro-Western slant. It’s frustrating, but what options does she have? Turn her back on a good paying job (she has a young family to raise), or try to change attitudes from within?

When a year 12 student at an Islamic college protests a university’s ties to an Israeli weapons manufacturer, both Hannah and Ashraf are drawn into the affair. The issue presents a terrible personal crisis. Respond honestly, unapologetically highlighting the hypocrisy, falsehoods and blindspots of Western thinking on the Middle East, or compromise and feel you’ve sold out?

Discipline is about self-censorship. How false narratives are powerfully embedded. Randa Abdel-Fattah has written an engaging and accessible novel with very relatable characters, highlighting the perilous tightrope Australian Muslims are compelled to walk. 

Discipline, by Randa Abdel-Fattah. Published by UQP. $34.99

FEB26

Freezing Point, by Anders Bodelsen

Danish writer Anders Bodelsen (1937 - 2021) considers the high price of living indefinitely.

It’s 1973. Magazine editor Bruno discovers while shaving a weird lump on his neck, causing him to bleed. He visits specialist Doctor Ackerman and is assured it’s nothing to worry about, but some tests will have to be performed nonetheless. What was presumed to be a benign condition, turns out to be terminal cancer. Bruno hasn’t long to live. But extraordinary leaps in science present Bruno with a terrible choice. Doctor Ackerman offers a radical new procedure. He could be part of an early medical experiment where his body would be “frozen down” and then brought up again decades later when a cure was found. 

Bruno is torn over what to do. He has just started a new relationship with a dancer named Jenny. With limited time to think out his options, he impulsively decides to be frozen down. 

Twenty-two years later he is revived, but finds changes have been made to his body without permission. He has been sterilised and certain organs have been swapped out for synthetic ones. Society has been divided into two classes - “now-life” and “all-life”. Now-life mortgage their organs and live like “hippies”, not having to work. All-lifers work long and hard hours to afford all the medical interventions needed to keep them alive, ostensibly forever.

Bruno hopes to meet his girlfriend Jenny in this brave new world. He persistently asks for a meeting and the hospital authorities keep putting it off, as Jenny has also had some medical interventions. Eventually the reunion occurs. Bruno is  shocked by what Jenny has become. 

Anders Bodelsen was a Danish writer of experimental thrillers. Freezing Point was first published in 1969. It’s a tightly written story that looks at the ethics of medical interventions to prolong life indefinitely. As a sideline, the book also questions the economics of prolonged life. In the imagined society of 1995 and 2022 (the book jumps first 22 years into the future, then 27 years) all resources are directed towards extreme medicine. People who opt to live a natural lifespan sell their organs, while those who wish to live eternally must pay in endless (and by extension, eternal) work.  The novel also plays with ideas of narrative, as editor Bruno muses on different modes of storytelling. In a dehumanised future world, it seems that fiction may have died, as Bruno tries in vain to obtain magazines or books to read.

A gripping and ghoulish thriller offering the reader plenty of ethical conundrums to wrestle with. 
​
Freezing Point, by Anders Bodelsen. Translated by Sophie Mackintosh. Faber Fiction $24.99

FEB26

Fall, Bomb, Fall by Gerrit Kouwenaar

A Dutch youth itching for some excitement in his life gets more than he bargained for in this classic coming of age novel.

Karel Ruis is a seventeen-year-old fed up with his dull life and unhappy parents. He wishes for something to happen, anything really. His ennui makes him even wish for a bomb to fall and shake things up. There are rumours afoot that Germany intends to invade his country, the Netherlands. There is an atmosphere of denial and trepidation among the adults. Surely the English will come to their rescue and all will be well.

Karel has an uncle, a jolly fat man who claims to have found the secret of a happy life, despite all the personal tragedies he’s had to endure. Uncle Robert gives Karel a letter, to be delivered to a Mrs Mexocos, a Jewish woman. Karel is to wait for Mrs Mexocos to write a reply. He performs this mysterious errand and finds himself enchanted by the woman - an artist - and her Bohemian style apartment. Mrs Mexocos also has a daughter, named Ria, whom Karel  immediately falls in love with. 

The gathering storm of threatened German invasion happens. Karel’s new and enchanting friends Mrs Mexocos and Ria must flee. They book tickets to London. Karel dearly wants to follow, to escape his miserable family and live a charmed life in London. But he must return home, with only heartache for company. When he arrives back in the city he finds the bombs he had wished for have caused untold tragedy.

Gerrit Kouwenaar (1923 - 2014) wrote Fall, Bomb, Fall when he was a mere twenty-three. The novel’s depth and maturity suggest an author of a much older age, looking back on their youth. Kouwenaar perfectly captures the flightiness and restless energy of youth. Karel is compulsive and reckless, but also warm and earnest. The text is light and playful in tone, almost humorous, despite the dark subject matter of Nazi invasion and looming Jewish persecution and murder. The novel presents a vibrant slice of life, a time when everything is normal and tomorrow can be trusted in, that is soon to be turned upside down and forever destroyed.

First published in 1950 and now translated into English for the first time, this is a literary gem not to be missed.

Fall, Bomb, Fall by Gerrit Kouwenaar. Published by Pushkin. $26.99

FEB26

Discontent, by Beatriz Serrano

A young woman tries to survive the hypocrisy of the corporate world

​Marisa is a creative director at an advertising agency in Madrid, Spain. Everything, it would seem, is pretty much perfect. A well paying job, nice apartment, all in all a comfortable life. But she is going through an existential crisis. Her job, she knows, only exists to push vulnerable people into buying crappy products, preying on their insecurities. The people she works with -  ambitious, sycophantic, and duplicitous - are stomach turning. They make her feel literally sick. To cope she’s taking a steady stream of tranquilizers. There is one co-worker, however, that she admired. Erika. Sarcastic and ironic, Erika wasn’t the type to bend over backwards to please management, and often dropped zingers that made her attitude plain. But she died suddenly, in mysterious circumstances never explained. Was it suicide? A drug overdose? Misadventure? Rather than investigate too deeply, the superficial office culture moves on. Her death is deemed sad, even tragic, but the bland workday has its own momentum that buries such deaths and disappearances.

One day Marisa gets terrible news. Her manager is organising a team building retreat. She will have to travel and stay with the workmates she can’t stand. The trip goes from bad to worse, until Marisa comes up with a plan to subtly sabotage the whole event. 

Beatriz Serrano is a young writer who has written for BuzzFeed and Vanity Fair. Discontent is narrated in the first person, giving the reader an almost stream-of-consciousness ride through Marisa’s dissatisfied mind. The novel is a rancid comedy, with plenty of excoriating lines about the meaninglessness of modern work. It also provides astute observations on the intersection of feminism and capitalism, and how women have been betrayed by its promise.

A withering critique dressed up as a single-woman-in-the-city story, there is much to enjoy in this often heartfelt book. 

Discontent, by Beatriz Serrano. Published by Harvill/Secker. $34.99

JAN26

A Room Above a Shop, by Anthony Shapland

Two men embark on a precarious love affair in late 1980s Wales.

The late 1980s, a small village in Wales. B (main characters are identified by first initial) is a somewhat aimless young man setting out in life. M is eleven years older and owns the local ironmongery business, which he inherited from his parents. They meet at a local pub during a boozy Christmas event and M invites B out on something between a date and an expedition. They visit a scenic hill and share a sandwich and a thermos of tea. They are awkward around each other, yet there is a connection. “Few words. More gestures than chat.” The two men begin a secret relationship, B taking on a job at M’s hardware store and moving into the spare room above the shop. It’s a time of political strife. The AIDS crisis has exploded and homophobia is rampant, especially in a small town. The men exist simultaneously in two different worlds, one of intimacy and togetherness above the shop, but publicly playing socially acceptable roles. 

A Room Above a Shop is sparsely written, mirroring the fractured, hidden lives of its characters. Anthony Shapland describes a fragile intimacy, eked out in the shadows. The atmosphere is one of fear and vigilance, ensuring the right gestures are made and that secrets are not unwittingly betrayed. It’s a reminder of how societal rules and moral codes can hollow out life and soul, and yet love can still find a way . Readers of Claire Keegan will enjoy this brittle, haunting novel about forbidden love. 

A Room Above a Shop, by Anthony Shapland. Published by Granta. $29.99

NOV25

A Quiet Place, by Seicho Matsumoto

A wife dies suddenly. Are suspicious circumstances involved?

Tsuneo Asai is a government bureaucrat working in the agriculture department. He has spent many years studiously doing all the right things to advance his career. One day while on a business trip he gets a phone call. The news is not good. His wife, who has long had a heart condition, has suddenly died. Discombobulated and shocked, he leaves the business meeting and goes about organising the funeral and other details. 

The relationship with his wife, Eiko, had not been a particularly close one. She was his second wife, and their intimate life together had pretty much ended. However, there were details about her death that don’t seem quite right. Why was she in a rather seedy part of town, where there are hotels that serve as a rendezvous point for secret lovers? Could Eiko have had a secret lover?

As Asai begins to investigate this possible double life, more and more clues point to a tantalisingly complex story. 

Famed Japanese master crime writer Seicho Matsumoto published A Quiet Place in 1971. It appears now as a Penguin Modern Classic, with a 2016 translation by Louise Heal Kawai. There are many twists and turns in this gripping crime mystery, and the story takes a shocking, completely unexpected turn half way, pivoting from a tale of a wife’s sudden death to a psychological thriller along the lines of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Tell-Tale Heart. Gripping and seductive  crime fiction.

A Quiet Place, by Seicho Matsumoto. Published by Penguin Modern Classics. $24.99

NOV25

Lady Living Alone, by Norah Lofts

A woman too frightened to be alone comes to regret the company she keeps.

Norah Lofts (1904-1983) was a British writer who specialised in historical fiction, but wrote occasional nail biting thrillers under the pseudonym Peter Curtis. Lady Living Alone was first published in 1945 and here gets a new printing from the British Library Women Writers series. 

Penelope Shadow is temperamentally fragile, almost timid. She’s not cut out for the practicalities of life and is a bit of a dreamer. One area of her life where she’s fully competent, however, is as a novelist. After a few false starts, she begins churning out best selling fiction. The money is soon coming in. But there is one problem. A single woman, she is forced to move out of her half-sister’s house and find her own accommodation. She has the money to buy a handsome house of her own, but is terrified of being alone in it. It’s her achilles heel. To try and assuage her fears, she hires staff, women to look after the housework, but they tend to leave. 

Then Penelope meets the young Irishman, Terence Munce. He is working as a menial at a rooming house she stays at. In a rash moment she asks him to come and work for her. Everything turns out smoothly. Penelope is back to hammering away at her typewriter, while the ever attentive Terry takes care of everything. Things take an unexpected turn when Terry professes to love Penelope and the two get married. All is well in this new if surprising arrangement, until Terry starts draining Penelope’s purse of funds at a great rate of knots. Ever forgiving, she makes allowances for Terry, until secrets emerge about her husband’s life and Penelope feels her life is imperilled.

Lady Living Alone is a solidly written domestic drama about a vulnerable and too eager-to-please woman and her young, seemingly perfect but scheming husband. The tension is wonderfully sustained right up to the last page and the novel gives vivid glimpses of life in 1930s Britain (the book is set in the previous decade to which it was published). The steadily darkening plot will remind readers of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and Elizabeth Von Arnim’s Vera, two novels about duplicitious, villainous husbands. 

A sturdy, page-turning thriller with valuable insights into British society in the 1930s.

Lady Living Alone, by Norah Lofts. Published by British Library Publishing. $22.99

OCT 2025

Suspicion, by Seicho Matsumoto

A beautiful woman with a violent past is accused of killing her husband. But did she really do it?

Onizuka Kumako has a shady past. She hangs out with the local yakuza (crime gang) and has done prison time for stealing and assault. She has an imposing, almost glamorous look, and instills fear in those who have to deal with her. When she meets rich and lonely widower Shirakawa Fukutaro, the two are soon married. Then the unimaginable happens. One rainy night their car veers off course and into the harbour. The husband dies, but the wife manages to escape. But how? Many questions surround the case and the media has whipped up a storm of theories, all pointing the blame at Onizuka Kumako. It’s clear she’s guilty, or is she?

At the head of these efforts to convict Kumako is Moichi Akitani, a jumpy, nervous journalist who is terrified at the prospect of her release. A freed Kumako, he is sure, would turn the yakuza onto him and his family. As he endlessly ruminates on the possibility of the suspect’s innocence, he whips himself up into a near frenzy of fear. 

First published in 1982, this short Japanese thriller is translated for the first time into English. Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1992) is a hugely influential figure in Japanese literature, credited with popularising the crime genre in Japan. In this moody and taut novella, the pace never relents. Its psychological aspects, specifically the sharp portraits of the journalist Moichi Akitani and several lawyers working on the case, make for compelling fiction. The central character, Onizuka Kumako, who the reader never meets directly but is described by those in her orbit, hovers like a menacing presence, both attractive and repulsive. The only criticism that can be levelled at this gut-wrenching crime tale is that it ends too quickly.

Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Suspicion, by Seicho Matsumoto. Published by Penguin. $28.99

SEP 25

Tree. Table. Book., by Lois Lowry

When an elderly neighbour suffering memory loss is to be put into care, her eleven-year-old neighbour stages an intervention.

Sophie Winslow is eleven-years-old, and her best friend Sophie Gershowitz is 88-years-old. They are neighbors and greatly enjoy each other’s company. If only life could go on as it always has, but changes are afoot. Sophie’s son, Aaron, is concerned about her failing memory and is planning to move her into assisted care. The younger Sophie is alarmed at this, and hatches a plan to prove Sophie Gershowitz’s memory is just fine. She starts to test Sophie’s memory, making her create memorable stories around particular words. And so the younger Sophie starts to learn about Sophie Gershowitz’s traumatic childhood in Poland during the Second World War. 

Lois Lowry is an award winning American children’s author. Tree. Table. Book. is a gentle story about painful change. It has a light tone with comic touches, coming in the form of Sophie’s friend Ralpie and seven-year-old mini-genius Oliver who they often look after. Realistic and full of heart, this is a story that celebrates life - the bitter and the sweet.

Tree. Table. Book., by Lois Lowry. Published by HarperCollins. $17.99

SEP 25