"The In Crowd" by Charlotte Vassell

An audio book.

Harriet, newly engaged to Indigo, doesn't want her old friend Calli (a hat-maker) to be bridesmaid because she's too pretty. Arthur, an important (gay) MP, is at her party. He doesn't get on with her father, Peter. Her mother's from a rich family.

A woman's corpse is found in the Thames - Lynn, an old lady. An alcoholic?

Caius, a policeman (34, politics degree, mixed race, a year at the Sorbonne) is stood up at a date at an alternative theatre event. The're performing "How to beer Ernest" where some of the cast are very drunk. Calli sits beside him. A man dies in the audience. He's Martin, an amateur sleuth from Cornwall who's interested in a cold case about a missing schoolgirl Eliza. One of the cast was in her class.

Arthur tells Caius that Lynn used to work at a place where her boss Robert stole the pension fund and the 2 of them went to Brazil. He wants the case investigated. Caius discovers that Peter worked for the company then.

Cali had been hoping to marry Max. Caius and Cali sleep together on their first date. She resigns from help at Harriet's wedding. Peter is her landlord. Rupert, a writer (rich cousin of Arther) starts chasing Cali.

Peter's a self-made man, having built up a fashion firm. His wife Jane might be the brains of the couple. Were they involved with the pension-fund theft? Did they kill Lynn?

Cali's dad left when she was 8. She's known Peter since about then.

The police learn from the school that the fees of Harriet and Cali were paid by Peter, and they both left a year before the girl went missing. There's a fight at Jane and Peter's house - Peter gets concussion. Cali distrusts Caius, thinking he deliberately met her and knew about her connection to the cases. Cali is Peter's daughter. Harriet isn't Peter's daughter but Robert's

Cali tries to have sex with Rupert on the bounce but he can't perform.

Henry (the 21 y.o. son of the headmistress at the time of the girl's disappearance) has been sought for questioning for a while [often a sign that they're the guilty character]. The police track him down to a remote house. Eliza is his wife. They have 5 unregistered children. He'd groomed girls at school and had imprisoned her.

Lynn had suicided. Caius is related to Arthur!

Other reviews

• Jen med

"A spy by nature" by Charles Cumming

An audio book.

Alec is 24, doing a useless job. He has a friend Saul from his LSE days. He applies for a Foreign Office job and gets put onto a spy-suitability exercise for 2 days. He's one of 5. He asks about the role of spouses, and though he broke up with Kate, an actress, 6 months before, tells some people they're still together. He tells them her address. He's not accepted.

In part 2 he's working for Abnex - an oil company with interests in the Caspian Sea. His boss is Hawkes. He befriends Caroline and her 20 years old husband Ford, both american, who work for a rival oil company. When, after 6 months, he complains to them about his work, they offer him money for information. He asks if that's why they befriended him. They half admit it. But all along we know that this is what Alec wanted. He's been assessing their performance - and his own.

Ford deals with the business/admin issues, Cathy with the emotional side. Maybe she really likes him? He gets £10k per drop. At work his boss Cohen begins to suspect him. The double deception tires Alec. He wants to open up to Saul, who's friends with the couple. He asks for £200k in return for some especially important info. He passes it over to them (it's fake), but Cohen from work catches him out. Cohen tells him that he's off on a 3 week business trip and expects Alec to have sorted things out by then. 2 people in Abnex know what Alec is doing (the job is just a cover to investigate the 2 CIA spies), but all the same, Cohen complicates matters. Alec contacts his spy boss and is alarmed when a few days later he hears that Cohen has been badly assaulted. He has nobody to talk to - Saul's away - so he contacts Kate for the first time in 2 years. In her flat (where there's evidence of a sleep-over boyfriend) he tells her everything (filling in for us some of the plot between parts 1 and 2). He says he played a role which made him look vulnerable to corruption. He doesn't perhaps realise that his personality is similar to that role. When she probes for details he provides them!

He phones Cathy because his spy boss has said that the couple's activity has been strange since the info transfer - Ford has dashed to the States. She knows he's seen Kate, but gives nothing else away.

He reads about Philby - how his deception was uncovered and what happened.

He phones Cathy again. She knows about him - they'd bugged Kate's place because he'd lied that they still slept together. He's taken for questioning by his bosses. They politely ask how it went wrong - 100s of millions of dollars were at stake. He threatens to tell the press about it all unless they promise to protect his mother and friends. That night Blair wins the election - a young man who's achieved his ambitions while many others face defeat. He transfers money to a private account.

He and Saul drive to Devon for a holiday. He suspects they're being followed. They get a phonecall - Kate's died in a car crash. He phones Cathy, his spy boss, his boss's boss. They're all out. He guesses that the UK secret service are hoping that they'll eliminate him too - part of the special arrangement. He decides to tell Saul about the case, making sure they're not being bugged.

I was wondering if he already knew.

Part 1 seems expendable to me.

Other reviews

• Leo Benedictus (a readable, if slightly contrived, yarn, let down badly by flat characters, stale prose and a charmless hero. Alec Milius's simplistic pronouncements on the real motives behind human behaviour may be typical of an arrogant and solitary young man, but that does not make them any less irritating.)
• speeshreads (Both sides are playing at something they aren’t and I think both sides know it. It’s just that it goes on and on and on and on in the central part of the novel. ... I really expected a lot more from A Spy By Nature. But I got a lot less. Less plot, less suspense and tension and less of a story. ... I think this is essentially a short story padded out to 500-odd pages. A back of an envelope plot stretched to breaking point. And beyond. And then some.)

"Games and rituals" by Katherine Heiny (4th Estate, 2023)

• Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented - Colette has been a driving examiner for 12 years, in a little team of men. Alejandro is a charming new arrival who she fancies. She rehearses conversation topics. He organises an Xmas party at his flat. She waits for all the other guests to leave then sleeps with him. When they next meet at work, he tells her that they're just friends (giving her the news like he might tell a driver that they've failed). "Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented" is the team's code for a pretty girl. Colette takes one out for a test. They nearly crash. The girl says she's pregnant and needs to pass her test so she can drive to the next state and have an abortion. Colette offers to help. At the end Colette says to Alejandro that they have to talk. She thinks she'll be a good mother.
• Damascus - Mia's 17 y.o. son Gordey is clever and, she thinks, quite good-looking. Scenes with her and Gordey are interlaced with scenes involving teenage Mia and her mother (who lives in Damascis, USA). Mia used to smoke grass in her teens - it helped her find her self. She thinks Gordey is coming home high on something. She checks his friends and workplace. She visits Gordey's father, has cocaine and sex with him, stays out late without telling Gordey. When she returns, she's the teenager and he the disappointed parent. Mia thinks that she, her mother and her son were "rotating through the roles of parent and child, child and parent"
• Twist and Shout - a mother (kids doing well at college) visits her widowered, deaf, rather senile father for a few days. She feels like her teenage self, rebelling against his right-wing attempts. He often sacks his house-keeper of 40 years for reading an Obama book, etc. After arguing with him about recycling the daughter sits in the car and recalls other times she did that. He has a heart attack and she rushes back indoors. The ending is "It will be so much harder to move through the world, now that you move through it alone"
• Turn back, turn back - Lindy (news producer) and Rob (actor, house-husband) have 2 daughters (4 and 8). One evening, when Lindy comes home, Rob's about to leave for acting class. She reads the girls a Grimm story about a girl who avoids a bad marriage at the last moment. The girls bicker and soon fall asleep. Rob had been able to get little TV parts when they had one child. Now auditioning was hard. She checks their joint bank statement and finds that Rob had been at a Queen's Starbucks, which didn't match what 4 y.o. Maud had said. She learns that he's not actually at the class, that he's been working with "Eliza". Her picture's on Facebook - "the kind of very intense freckles that looked like she'd sneezed into a plate of crushed red pepper flakes and suffered the blowback. The kind of freckles that make you look twice: the first time thinking That girl would be so beautiful without all those freckles, and the second time realizing she was so beautiful because of them". When he gets back home he tells her about the class. Lindy realises that he's "Fleshing Out His Character", "Building the Backstory", "Creating an Identity". She tells him what she thinks is happening. He admits it all. The ending is "Lindy had never wanted to live on the edge. She knew that if you weren't careful, you sailed right off".
• Games and rituals - She moved with Conrad to NY so he could do his degree. She didn't get on her course. They live apart. She has games/rituals that she does with Conrad and friends. E.g. Harriet guesses the fate of couples they see; Conrad picks out people they could adopt when married. She discovers at 10 days notice that Conrad's changing university. She thinks of games they used to play - the Lullaby Ritual.
• CobRa - William's worried that his wife Rachael Coburn (ER nurse) will donate him to charity because he no longer sparks joy in her. She starts reading a Japanese de-cluttering book. William calls her CobRa (name-mangling the Japanese way). She's going through perimenopause and keeps having fads, giving his things away - clothes, then books, then bric-a-brac. Finally, she tackles the garage. Without consulting him she gets rid of £1000 snow tires. They're both angry, sleeping in separate rooms. Next day he realises he secretly likes many of the changes (the rules of marriage had made him resist saying so before). She's not so happy - she'd hoped that her efforts would be more "life changing". He realises that this is the start of a new stage of their marriage, not the end of anything.
• 561 - Charlie and her husband Forrest (a surgeon) are helping Forrest's ex, Barbara, move out. When Barbara and Charlie were volunteers at a Suicide Prevention center, Charlie's code-name was 561. There are memory-triggering items around the house. Barbara has migraine -"She doesn't say that having Charlie in the house is the cause but it's sort of implied ... She ... dons a pair of oversized sunglasses that make her look like an insane welder". The 2 women don't like each other. The story goes back to a night 20 years before when Barbara and Charlie were on duty at the call centre. A regular phoned, then phoned again to say that he's overdosed. The ambulance got there too late. Back in the present, packing is done. The (typically low-key) ending is "Of course Charlie knows - everyone knows - that the top three most stressful life events are death, divorce, and relocation. But suddenly she realizes that she and Barbara had gone through a death and divorce together and, as of today, also a relocation. ... And now it's done, as Forrest says. Charlie and Barbara don't have to do anything else together because there isn't anything left for them to do."
• Pandemic Behaviour - On the 63rd day of the pandemic Daphne Zooms Dr Ventura to say that she's getting more migraines. "what migraines really feel like is being tied to a railroad track while the world's longest, loudest freight train thunders over you". Before the pandemic she helped prof Rossignol with his book. "His speech was full of exclamation points, but they were proclamatory rather than excited - imagine Cicero if he'd lived in Florida instead of Rome and wasn't so interested in politics". Her room-mate Lohania is a cosmetics buyer for Macy's. Prof Rossignol dies. Lohania thinks that Dr Ventura is chatting Daphne up. At the end, Lohania and Daphne venture out together.
• Bridesmaid, Revisited - Marlee, 24, wears her bridemaid outfit to work. What will people think? "Maybe that my building burned down and this was the only dress I saved? .... Or that I'm having an odd kind of mental breakdown ... Or that you escaped from somewhere ... from a bridal shop or wax museum". She wore it at the wedding of Rhonda, a hanger-on at school "(being a bridesmaid is like a prison sentence where you try to serve your time and keep your head down and hope no one will rough you up in the shower)". But by the afternoon, the fun's wearing off. "A terrible thing happens that afternoon. Well, actually two terrible things". There's a long flashback to the wedding 3 years before, the fault-finding bride, how Marlee was caught kissing the bride's father. Back in the story's present, she cries at a meeting. The story ends as she's on the way home - "She should have thrown the dress away ... she's a different person now ... She closes her eyes and focuses on changing, renewing. Three stops away from home now. When they get there, she'll be that much closer to being somebody else"
• King Midas - Oscar's 52. He's been married to Winifred for 25 years. "if you were in a good mood, you might describe her as petite and determined, and if you were not in a good mood, you might describe her as a birdlike control freak". His girlfriend of 8 months is Tessa, 33. She has a 7 y,o. son. She's wacky and unreliable. She sees him going into a local bar when she said she was away. He realises that it was only his efforts that kept the relationship going. He gives up [the weakest piece].
• Sky bar - Fawn, 39, used to be married to much older Joel, who owned a music shop. She'd married young, having been unhappy at school. They split after 8 months, 20 years ago. After returning to her hometown to help her parents move, she's stuck at the airport waiting for a delayed flight. "It wasn't accurate to say she lost weight - it was more like she chased the weight off her body the way a farmer would chase a stray dog off his property. And like a suspicious farmer, Fawn still patrols the borders of her body.". She ends up drinking with a drunk woman, Meredith, and 2 men. Joel happens to phone. She apologies for not dropping in. She looks after Meredith, making her vomit in the toilets. When flights are called off for the night, they leave. Joel's waiting outside. They briefly chat before she catches up with her new "friends". At the end "It's just like high school. Only now it's fun" [a good ending]

She often compares appearance with reality -

• "He looks like a retired history teacher and is, in fact, a retired history teacher" (p.4)
• "It seemed extremely important that the Uber driver understand that Mia was not the sort of person who did drugs and fu**ed lawyers and stayed out all night. She did that, yes, but she was not the sort of person who did it, or at least not the the sort who did it regularly" (p.44)
• "Georgia sounded world-weary, or at least as world-weary as an eight-year-old can sound" (p.67)

People are (sometimes consciously) playing roles within a convincing setting/institution (marriage, workplace, etc). The most common setting is the family, between generations. Roles slip and slide - adults go back to being teenagers when with their parents; people adopt the work-roles when off work. I enjoyed all the stories - they had momentum and good one-liners. But I wasn't completely convinced by any of them - the endings often seemed tame.

Other reviews

• booksaremyfavouriteandbest (There are some standouts – ... Bridesmaid, Revisited ... Damascus ... Twist and Shout ... CobRa ... In all of the stories, Heiny demonstrates how to create normal, believable characters while maintaining tension and humour and startlingly good writing.)
• Ian MacAllen (Both the first and last stories look outward, even as the main body of the collection is focused inwardly toward the home. The contrast amplifies the differences in these relationships.)

"North in the world: Selected poems of Rolf Jacobsen" by Roger Greenwald (ed) (Univ of Chicago Press, 2002)

Greenwald writes that the Norwegian Rolf Jacobsen (1907-1994) "is now widely regarded as the poet who launched modernism in his country". The introduction makes several interesting points -

• "The subject [of railroads] seems inexhaustible for Jacobsen, and his meditations on it increased in complexity" (p.xiv)
• "Jacobsen's writing combines an ancient way of looking - a way that searches for connectedness - with an openness to the new" (p.xvii)
• "We learn only a little about his everyday life from his poems, and almost nothing about his personal relations" (p.xvii)
• "Nature is a powerful presence in Norway" (p.xviii)
• "Jacobsen attempts, "to create a balance between metaphor and myth, that is, between transformation and unity ... That this myth is empty is a basic condition in modernism and in the twentieth century" (Paul Borum)
• "when the poems fail, [personification] can seem to be little more than a device. But when the poems succeed, they capture a strange and delicate quality, and can sometimes give us the eerie sensation that we are being regarded" (p.xix)
• "In reading some of his early poems ... we may wonder whether the poet has detected a truth behind appearances or rather too readily fantasized an alternative existence and sailed off into it ... The notion ... crops up so often that it takes on the flavor of an escapist wish, quite aside from any insights it may offer" (p.xxii)
• "Poetry in Norwegian usually moves more slowly than poetry in English - in large part because of differences between the sound qualities of the two languages. The frequency of hard consonants, the clustering of consonants, the diphthongs and the long vowels combine to make Norwegian a language that gives one more to chew on than English does" (p.xxv)
• "Norway saw five official spelling reforms in the course of Jacobsen's lifetime" (p.xxvii)

I've never been to Norway, but I've spent a few days in Sweden. I can understand how trees, water and silence can be an intense influence, and how trains become significant, especially in winter.

He's happy to stretch a metaphor, sometimes all through a poem -

• The sky has rested its harp aslant on the earth/ and is moving the thousands of strings in deafening harmony ... Across the great, singing tapestry gentle hands weave speaking dreams. Rain was the first thing the senses grasped on the earth ("Rain")
• "The age of great symphonies is over now ... They rose toward the heavens ... Now they're pouring back down as rain ... every day on this earth that is thirsty and drinks them in again ("The Age of Great Symphonies")
• Our day ... moves off quietly for a little while,/ throws the blue coat around its shoulders,/ rinses its feet in the ocean and walks off;/ then it comes running back again, with roses on its cheeks,/ and with good, cool hands/ it lifts up your chin and looks you in the face ("Day and Night")

He likes flat lakes -

• the mirror image in the still lake ... Do I know where reality lies? Am I/ root or am I crown. Aren't these stars/ there too, made of faintly shining stone? ("The Inverted Summer")
• it's good for the mind ... to stand on your head down there a while ("Mirror Lakes")

There are Flash-like fables that can be paraphrased, with punchlines -

• "The Lonely Balcony" (from the balcony's PoV) - "it thought why can't the good Lord ... use me as a little shelf to put his knickknacks on ... they cut it down in less than 8 minutes and hung up a crackling red and blue neon advertisement for Scotch Whiskey"
• "The Archaeologist" - "when he ate his homemade sandwiches he thought slowly as he chewed that it was his own heart he was digging up today with teaspoons ... For people, he thought, have lived deep down in my darkness before me. ... Later he dug up an umbrella from an era when they didn't have umbrellas, and a monthly rail-pass to Blommenholm but that was surely his own"

Endings which are too easily mystical include -

• Sails are unfurled in the night - our dreams;/ unknown ships go by/ on oceans no one can see ("Thoughts upon listening in on a radio telescope").
• we can still manage to think ... that there's something [the woods are] hiding from us. Something they don't know yet. Beyond the sounds and sight. Truths beyond the truth ("The Media Poem")

Some miscellaneous imagery -

• And up in the light somewhere I, of course, stand and watch how/ the cigarettte's blue soul flutters like a chaste angel/ through the chestnut leaves towards eternal life ("Metaphysics of the City")
• Colors are words' little sisters. They can't become soldiers (the first line of "Cobalt")
• Express train 1256, eight soot-black cars,/ turns toward new, endlessly unknown villages./ Springs of light behind the windows, unseen wells of power along the mountains -/ these we travel past, only four minutes late/ for Marnardal ("Express Train")
• swallows dash out in wide loops in the air/ like silent strokes of a whip ("Mournful Towers")
• I believe in the dark churches, the ones that ... like deep red roses carry a fragrance/ from times that perhaps had more love ... Now they are ships ... there's no hope of being saved, but we keep sailing, sailing, sailing ("Stave Churches")
• Where do the streets go/ when there aren't any trolleys in them ("Where do streets go")
• The tree drinks its muteness from the earth,/ extends its enormous root down there like an elephant trunk/ and draws up silence/ and lifts it to the stars and the wind/ so they can taste it too./ The dead in their graves don't talk much ("Blind Song")
• Your hand at rest is an upturned boat/ pulled halfway onto the beach,/ and full of breathing as a conch's shell/ it waits for you to come back ("Small lights at sea")
• The old cities of Auvergne ... collect years as the bees collect honey/ and hide them away in their attics and in cool vaults./ They have towers that look like clenched fists/ and walls of forgotten sun ("Old cities in Auvergne")
• The veil of birds around the earth can not be seen from the satellites ... photograph our days like the orbiting spies, but they don't tell ... Seen from underneath everything is large. ... From the dead's point of view, it's you who are in heaven ("From above, from below, and from the side")

My favourite poems are "The Archaeologist" and "Some", followed by "Hallingskeid" and "The Sewing Machine".

"Chimera" by Alice Thompson

An audio book.

Prologue - Artemis has returned from a 9 month space journey, back to Jason. She's the only survivor. She recalls nothing. She decides to write a novel about being on the Chimera on a trip to Oneiros (a distant moon).

The ship goes faster than light. A tree grows in it. They're seeking bacteria that will consume CO₂ back on a dying Earth. There are 12 dryads (humanoid robots with DNA). Luther is the crew leader - he's neurodivergent because they're better leaders. Her father was a leading AI expert. In her childhood she was shielded from VR and remote learning. She's an expert on dreams at the neuron level. The 4 crew take anti-dreaming sleeping pills.

She used to do dream research with Jane. The Elite shut their project down. Jane killed herself. Artemis found out that the Elite had reacted to a tip-off from Jason, who'd recently become her boyfriend. She went mad for a while. The space mission is Jason's.

Bacteria appear on the ship's hull. Ivan, a crew member, studies it. It disappears, then he disappears. Armetis learns from Cressida (Mission Control) that 6 years ago the previous crew had disappeared on Oneiros. The dryads start questioning the team - they shouldn't be able to.

They land, and settle in the moonbase. Fabricators are there - less conscious than dryads. It's arctic cold. Ivan returns at the door. He recalls nothing about the missing days. She can hear churchbells. She has feelings for Troy (an android) and visa verca. Shadows fall over humans and they dream. The bacteria/shadows are somehow transferring human dreams to the fabricators. She finds a tunnel. In the tunnel she finds the brain-dead crew of the first expedition. Someone's attempting to transplant AI brains into the old and new crew. Troy injects Armetis, preparing her for an operation.

Epilogue - she thinks she has Troy's brain - the best of best worlds. She burns the draft of her novel.

Ivan's disappearance isn't explained. The plot (dream transfer) is suddenly revealed. So Cressida and Co planned it all? Did Armetis bring the bacteria and shadows back? Why not try transplanting human brains into androids? How was Oneiros discovered in the first place?

Other reviews

• Ash Caton (the book itself becomes a forceful chimera of old and new; its futuristic environment peopled with characters nominally hailing from antiquity. ... Novels about artificial intelligence are formally obliged to ask what it means to be human.)
• Jackie Law (this is an interesting take on the dangers of space exploration. Having said that, I retain reservations over the plot’s efficacy and my lack of investment in outcomes until the end.)
• Afric McGlinchey (There’s a sense of dissociation and disconnection throughout. The psychology and characterisation feel jerky, disorientating. There is minimal momentum, despite the drama of their situation, and mission. Instead, the focus is on Artemis’s almost clinical observation of the character traits and behaviours of crew members and dryads, which appear incongruous.)
• Alastair Mabbott

"Grey time" by Julia Webb (Nine arches press, 2025)

Poems from Atrium, Finished creatures, Poetry Wales, Under the radar, etc.

The notes mention about 10 poems by others that provided inspiration or a quote. They also point out that one poem is a centina (a form new to me) - 100 words, starting and ending with the same 3 words.

I like the first poem, "I have spent years falling out of each window", but not so much the sequences that soon follow it. I think I've a bias against sequences. They contain recurrent themes/phrases - e.g.

• "I remember nothing of the journey// Nothing even of the summoning phone call, though there must have been one." (p.20)
• "I think we might have taken the train home and come back again// but I can't be sure" (p.24)
• "I barely remember now/ the shape and colour of her coffin/ though I know I must have picked it out" (p.32)

When a poet feeds from the past as much as this one does, keeping the quality high is an achievement in itself. From about p.34 onwards, nearly all the poems have something to like - the title, the ending (on p.72, after his uncle died, her son feeds the caged guinea pigs, "the sunlight dancing across my son's face/ as he hunted for the lushest, greenest leaves"), sometimes an image or the idea of the poem ("When you tell me how you feel" is a specular poem whose theme excellently matches the form), sometimes the emotive content. There a several different reasons for the successes, which is good.

The prevailing themes are familiar - grief; expected responses; being a mother; being a daughter. Previous books haunt this one. The owls of "Bird sisters" are here. In "The Telling" there was the horror of domestic space invaded by water, a reconstruction of the mother from things around the house. Houses (as refuge), doors and windows (the latter not always a good thing) appear here -

• "I have spent years falling out of each window"
• "who was the stained-glass gift to the meanest window"
• "The same mother// who taught you to be a house and not a tree"
• "The house contained a hurricane ... It was a house that welcomed bad news/ and the grief that came with it"
• "The sun was trying to get into the house/ blue at the windows/ blue at the open door"
• "Mourning is a young horse/ careening wildly about the house"

My favourites are "I have spent years falling out of each window", "Mourning is a young horse", "I find my dead lover by the side of the motorway", "If", "without".

"All Fours" by Miranda July

An audio book.

LA. A woman (45; mult-media artist? Slightly famous) with partner Harris (record producer) have a kid Sam (they/their). When she watches them from a distance she wishes she felt the same way when she's with them. Her child was still-born, then recovered. She stil gets flashbacks about it - lots of blood. She and Harris sleep apart, having sex weekly. She's had ex-girlfriends.

She's planned a career-changing meeting with Arkanda, a superstar, but first she has a meeting in New York. She decides to drive - over 2 weeks away from home. She pays for an emergency $20k refit of the first room she stays in (room 321 of a motel), and fancies Davey, the 31 y.o. thick but pretty male partner of the female interior designer. Usually her male lovers are older than her. She realises that sex is a way to communicate with beauty. While pretending to continue her schedule, she stays in the room. The affair with Davey is slow. He doesn't want to be unfaithful. No sex, but some intimacy - he helps her change her tampon. He shows her his hip-hop dancing. She realises that he likes her because she's a bit famous. She wanted to be liked for what she was. He doesn't want to be liked just for his looks. She meets his mother who he shares his sex details with.

She returns home, having left the hotel room intact. She remains obsessed. She has signs of menopause and panics that she won't be able to have sex with Davey before her sex drive dips. They get a dog, Smokey.

She meets Audra, the best friend of Davy's mum. Davy had an affair with her for 2 years. She gets Audra to tell her the details of sex with Davy. They end up having sex together. She thinks that Harris is having an affair with 28 year-old colleague Kara. They argue. She has sex with a photographer. She and Harris agree to have a night away from each other once a week. Together they make the dog better. They explain to Sam about their lovers - the narrator's Chris and Harris's Page. Friends congratulate them on how well they've managed.

Arkanda, who'd called the meeting off, gets in contact again. She'd wanted to talk to the narrator because they'd had the same birthing experience. They plan to meet in Room 321 but it's occupied, so they meet next door.

Chris breaks up with her abruptly. A friend is doing a sculpture of a headless woman on all fours - not a vulnerable position, she says, a stable one.

4 years later she flying to New York as part of a book tour. She discovers that Davy is performing there - he's broken through as a dancer performing with a friend. She watches, wishing the rest of the audience wasn't there, or that the "performance" context would somehow be disrupted.

There are noteworthy passages -

• like Buzz Aldrin unloading the dishwasher
• "we walked clumsily close"
• "If I had tried to cash that word, the teller would have said 'we don't have enough money'. There was not enough money in the world"
• "One day when we were both ready I would reveal my whole self to Harris. This would be like presenting a sweater knitted in secrecy. 'Oh my God' he would say, 'how did you find time to do this?' 'Just here and there, whenever I could. Sometimes even with you right there beside me'. 'I didn't even know you could knit'. 'There are a lot of things you don't know about me. That's the whole point of this sweater metaphor'. Of course if you're knitting for years the sweater eventually becomes so huge that it simply can't be hidden"
• "She replied like a customer bot"

Other reviews

• Lara Feigel (July’s characteristic dry observational style can turn with equal ease to insouciant aphorism or to the lyrical eloquence with which she writes the extravagant, ungendering, transfiguring sex that takes the narrator to extremes of her own inwardness while forcing new kinds of contact and honesty
• Emily Gould (It’s impossible to overemphasize how debilitatingly horny the narrator is during this period of the novel. When she isn’t with Davey, she does little but jerk off to fantasies of him that become increasingly baroque. ... For every micro-loss, the narrator gains something more valuable on the other side of her break with convention.
• John Self (What becomes clear on this voyage of self-discovery is that our narrator’s past is not past. Both her grandmother and her aunt died after throwing themselves out of a window – the same window – and she worries “that I was next in this matriarchal lineage”. But most of all, she has never recovered from the trauma of Sam’s birth ... within one idiosyncratic story, this is a book of vast scope, taking in men and women, the mind and the body, and society and solitude. By giving her narrator some of her own biographical details, July is playing with the reader’s expectations )