"Forgive me" by Susan Lewis

An audio book.

Sections about Archie's letter alternative with the main timeline.

Archie, 19, is writing a letter to "you" for Dan, who's about 40. "you", because of a crime commited by Archie, might be unable to read. Archie started delivering drugs when he was 10 and went on to deliver guns. His mother's an unreliable druggie, in and out of prison. Archie doesn't want to write about his mother and his handler BJ.

Claudia's late husband Joel died when their daughter was 11. She remarried rich, controlling Marcus. Now, 5 years later, Marcus has been sentenced to at least 18 months in jail for insider trading. Claudia and Jasmine, with the help of Claudia's mother Marcie, 64, have run off and changed their names, fearing Marcus. They've taken an attache case belong to him. They have at least £3m. They settle in Kesterley by the sea. Only after weeks do they contact the police - their missing persons case has aroused media interest.

Andi (45, female) lives with Graham in Kesterley. They do up properties. Friend Dan's wife Ellen died 5 years before. Liane Delany (about to marry Tom) is Andi's friend. When Andi sees Claudia's interior designer work, she's impressed. Andi wants to start a restorative justice scheme (where criminals contact their victims) with Dan. They get funding from a local businessman.

Marcie has a boyfriend, Henry, who used to own the law firm that Dan took over. Dan and Claudia are becoming friends. Abby, Lianne's daughter, is becoming violin-playing Jasmine's best friend. Andi works out that Claudia, Marcie and Jasmine are the missing people who had been in the news. Claudia et al move into a big house. Archie's paid to set it alight. He didn't know that Marcie was inside. [It's here that Archie's PoV and the main timeline sychronise.]

There's a long section about Marcie's burn treatment. Archie's mother goes to the police about Archie's involvement, thinking that he'd be safer in prison. BJ is Archie's uncle! Archie is encouraged to say that he delivered drugs to Marcus. Marcie finds Archie's letters useful and wants a meeting. Claudia is against it, angry about it, then gives in.

Marcie speaks up for Archie in court. He gets a suspended sentence and lots of letters from women - he's cute.

Marcus offers Claudio a divorce. Henry and Marcie become a couple. Dan and Claudia become a couple. Marcus is arrested. Archie, who's turned his life around, offers to testify. He writes to Marcie that "Getting to know you is the best thing that's ever happened to me."

Some of Archie's diction is surprising - e.g. he writes "I've already touched on [that topic]"

Other reviews

• tealeavesandreads (Having worked on a Restorative Justice programme myself in the past, there were a few points within this book that made me cringe. Firstly, Dan seeing someone he knew in the pub and disclosing to Claudia that it was a person on the Restorative Justice programme… Secondly, Maria’s portrayal is a little unfair. Yes she has a learning difficulty or disability – from the way she is described. However misspelling words when she speaks to highlight a speech impediment and difficulty with words is not necessary. You can portray someone’s dialect or way of talking quite easily with a few descriptive words after their speech marks have closed and with a brief background of the character when we first meet them. I’m sure other characters in the book would have had different accents but the Author did not choose to misspell words to indicate their speech. ... I would have liked to see the serious theme of forgiveness further explored when it came to Claudia and her daughter)

"Things like this" by Dave Alcock (Arroyo Seco Press, 2026)

37 Flash pieces, all of which have been previously published from 2017 onwards in the "Journal of Radical Wonder", "MacQueen's Quinterly", "The Dribble Drabble Review", etc.

I read it in one sitting. Even just flicking through, the variety is evident: "Mortician" is laid out like a poem - 24 lines with at most 4 words per line; "Sun squares" is a 3 page prose piece, conventionally laid out. Most of the pieces have something of interest - sometimes the characters' struggles and realisations, sometimes a phrase (e.g. a flock of lorikeets "flushes through the treetops like a psychedelic wind"). There's no whiff of gimmickry or workshop exercises. It's an enjoyable read. I've a slight preference for the shorter pieces.

There are leit-motifs giving the book coherence, though I wondered whether the effect of some pieces was diminished by being beside stories which shared details and tropes. Unsure whether I was being objective about this, I did some counting -

• Light effects - "sparks of the bonfire" (p.1); "sloping column of light" (p.4); "Cones of streetlight" (p.8); "beams of his headlamps" (p.15); "Shafts of yellow light" (p.19); "A ray of light" (p.57); "a sunbeam ... broke on a wind wave into a galaxy of stars" (p.57); "a yellow shaft of light" (p.57)
• Cars - p.8, p.14, p.27, p.33, p.42 (Some car-parks and "traffic" too - hardly a mention of public transport)
• Hands - p.1, p.17, p.23, p.35, p.38, p.41, p.49, p.57. (some fingers and thumbs too)

None of that's out of the ordinary - when one reads a book non-stop, one is bound to notice such preferences. I'm less sanguine about the recurrent tropes. For example, there's a lot of staring into the distance, especially towards the end of stories (symbolically transcending the story, looking to the future) -

• "John looked through the window" (p.5, penultimate paragraph)
• "He looked through the windscreen" (p.9, final paragraph)
• "Her father looked out at the garden" (p.11)
• "Pete kept staring through the window" (p.15, final paragraph)
• "Richard ... turned to look again out to sea" (p.19)
• "Richard blinked and looked out at the sea" (p.21, final paragraph)
• "He turned his head and looked beyond the car park into the near distance" (p.25, final paragraph)
• "looked at the sea" (p.33)
• "She looked at the skyline" (p.34, final paragraph)
• "he would look down at the lights of the pit" (p.43)
• "He looked up from the page ... into the darkness downstairs" (p.48)
• "looked out across the field" (p.50)
• "looked through the trees to the wide brown river" (p.57)

Even if there's no staring at the end, there's sometimes a hint of distance -

• p.18 ends with "launch him skyward, on a one-way journey from the world"
• the last sentence on p.39 includes "distance"
• on p.51 the penultimate sentence include "distance" and the penultimate paragraph includes "distant yellow field"

The sea, the horizon, darkness and fields play the role that stars and the moon might in other books.

Another recurrent (though less so) concept is the idea of background movement/noises repeatedly punctuating the foreground dialogue/action. p.11 has buses and motorbikes. Elsewhere bicycles and wipers provide the contrast.

The abiding, endearing theme is parenthood, passing knowledge on -

• The first piece ends with "your words of guidance I seem always to forget"
• The last story ends with "he took the boy's hand and they set out again along the path"

Father and young son is the most common pairing, the father trying to do his best - p.4, p.8, p.13. On p.8 a father teaches a son about hiding emotions. On p.11 a father teaches a daughter about white lies. p.23 has a father with son (4) and daughter (7). On p.36 the son is at least 21. p.39 has mother and son. p.56 has parents and children. The fathers/husbands aren't perfect - they have affairs or they separate. "Transients" has a female PoV - I'd have welcomed more.

p.s. "Succour" is mentioned in the Acknowledgements but isn't in the book.

"My Husband's Wife" by Alice Feeney

An audio book.

Eden Fox, 39, (her PoV) has recently moved into a house called "Spyglass" in a Cornish fishing village called Hope Falls. She hasn't had sex with her husband Harrison for a while. She was her daughter Gabriella's carer for a decade following her bicycle accident. Now 18, Gloria lives in secure accomodation, electively mute since the accident. When Eden returns from her run she finds that another (older?) Eden Fox has replaced her. She complains to the police, fancies a policeman, breaks into her house, runs away to Gabriella. She's been doing paintings of Spyglass, which she's never seen.

6 months before, Olivia Bird ("Birdy"), 40 (her PoV), living in London with her dog, Sunday, is told she has terminal cancer and that she's inherited her gran's house, Spyglass. She hints that she has an immoral profession. Her mother killed herself when Olivia was 10. She meets a 30 y.o. policeman, Carter, and has sex with him. He tells her that her gran died, was buried, then came to life again and lived to nearly a 100. In Spyglass Olivia finds Christmas cards to her for years ahead, and a letter from a company, Thanatos, that correctly predicted the day of her gran's death. Olivia contacts the company. She sells the house.

Olivia becomes DCI at Hope Falls (i.e. Carter's boss [ah, so she works for the police!]). She finds out that Harrison is CEO of Thanatos. Eden's clothes have been found at the waterfalls, a notorious suicide site. We get some chapters from Carter's PoV. More significantly, we get Harrison's PoV. He knows about Olivia (when she signed up for Thanatos she waived privacy). He has something to hide and the police suspect him. Thanatos is about to receive a big investment. A woman's body is found at the foot of the falls, disfigured. Eden?

Carter finds that Olivia uses anti-cancer drugs. She finds out that he's married. Later we find out that he married, lovelessly, a girl who he drunkenly made pregnant. He visits Gabriella (though he's been told not to). He sees the woman he knows as Eden Fox there - she's a recently joined carer. There's a cascade of plot-twists - the carer is Mary, the erstwhile live-in carer of Olivia's grandmother. Olivia used to be married to Harrison! Gabriella is her child!! Olivia, once she knew she was going to die, visited her for a week. Eden was a babysitter who had an affair with Harrison and caused Gabriella's accident, which she made look like a bicycle accident where Olivia was the driver. Harrison met Mary in the care-home and he hatched a plan to get rid of Eden. Now he's planning to make a getaway with Gabriella and Mary. We learn some of this via Gabriella's [unconvincing] PoV. Meanwhile, Carter discovers that Olivia isn't really her boss - she's an imposter. She's reached the day when she's been told she's going to die, so she overdoses.

One year later she's in remission - Carter saved her (though she was dead for a few minutes, so like her grandmother she lived twice. Gabriella's much better. We learn that Carter's wife pushed Eden over the edge and - because of Carter's infidelity - plans to kill Olivia too.

There are chapter-ending cliff-hangers that turn out to be misunderstandings. Delivery of some info is very delayed (Olivia's profession; Carter's marital status; Olivia's past marriage). The plotting is ingenious at the expense of crediblity - lots of peoples' behaviour seems unlikely in the subsequently revealed circumstances. Once that's accepted, I guess it's a page-turner. I like "ideas trespass in my mind"

Other reviews

• Goodreads
• Farhan N. (Even though I liked the book, there were a few things that bothered me. Too Many Twists ... The Ending Logic - The final reveal was shocking, but it didn’t feel very realistic. I like my thrillers to stay grounded in reality. This one went a bit into “movie logic” territory. It was fun, but it wasn’t as believable as the rest of the book.)

"Like starlings falling" by Dillon Jaxx (Nine arches press, 2026)

Poems from Magma, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, Stand, etc., and several competition prize-winning poems. I found the poems challenging and often rewarding.

Typography

The first person singular pronoun is (I think) always "i" rather than "I".

The poems' appearance varies more than the content - instead of punctuation symbols, p.30 uses "#", p.31 uses "/", p.36 uses ".", p.64 uses small hollow circles. Some poems use a few spaces instead of a punctuation symbol. "unweather" has no line/paragraph breaks, using "|" to separate phrases. I don't understand the point of such superficial variety.

"Y2k" is over 1.5 pages of full-aligned text without line/paragraph breaks, using commas and full-stops but not beginning sentences with upper case. Again, I don't see what's wrong sticking with invisible convention rather than using distracting, quirky alternatives.

Food

There are frequent references to the family and food. The eucharist is frequently referenced -

• In "distended family" (an allusion to "extended family" I presume), foodstuffs are used as adjectives - "an orange squash breeze", "watch with biscuit eyes" but also "lick the ends of batteries to check how much of life is left." The ending is "the congregation mumbling prayers// as though they are ingredients for a meal/ in a language they never plan to serve".
• In "edible family" there is "me eating my nails, my father eating his rage"
• "i eat surrounded by dead people. my brother's// beautiful, bruised cadaver at the head of the table" (p.66)
• "you/ filling that hole in the ground       me eating what remains" (p.51)
• "wet limbs slide over my gums/ as i wait for the body of christ to dissolve" (p.75)

Misc poems

• In "before we were bodies" some lines are repeated with minor variations "we were windows opening out ... i didn't know i had an obsession with locks ... before we were bodies we were doors left on the latch ... before we were bodies we were dutch doors ... before we were bodies we were half this half that .. we were bodies we were doors opening"
• In "w-inter" "on my mother's tongue the initial sound/ of winter is silent much like the first leaf falling not knowing if others will follow ... losing itself to the freezing grip not knowing if it will ever dress again get warming again/ just letting itself go"
• "the Fisher Price hospital" is a page of full-aligned text without line/paragraph breaks, using commas and full-stops but not beginning sentences with upper case. It could so easily have been Flash.
• In "press one for emergencies" "a paper aeroplane drifts in through the window/ and lands on my bed, it smells of strawberry/ sweets and freshly cracked days. i unfold it/ to find three words think yourself better"
• In ":to cease to be visible", the persona wonders why someone's absence wasn't noticed for "one hundred and fifty-seven days" (why not "157 days"?). They imagine being a detective, asking the mother, cashier and neighbour. At the end "i ... watch as i rub a window into the steam on my mirror and think about my own disappearance. wondering when anyone will notice my absence, and how long i've been gone. how much i've been missing"
• "geography of falling", in 10 numbered parts, looks at the use/etymology of "fall" "in Italian/ the word for pregnant gravidanza shares its roots with gravity." The final part is "if you feel yourself fall,/ put your hands out, if you feel/ someone else begin to fall/ hold your hands out"

Misc forms

• There are too many heavily redacted poems - 5 are mostly black.
• "boy" is a sort-of acrostic. The first 9 left-aligned lines begin with "b". The next 5 left-aligned lines begin with "o". The final 5 left-aligned lines begin with "y". The words in bold say "boy leaves the world with a question".
• "my beautiful bees" is a near mirror poem. It starts with "every time the doorbell screams or the phone stops breathing/ i see a dead message and vomit up my beautiful bees/ upstairs footsteps detonate in the electric lining of my brain/ water mixes into the wiring until i'm brace brace in the landing strip/ underneath my bleeding fingernails"
• "summer fruits" is a shape poem. Don't know why.
• There's a scattered sequence called "disappearing sonnet", the first having 14 lines, the second 13, etc. All begin with "my brother has a knife in his hands".
  Elsewhere in a blog she writes that "The form allows me to play with words, starting with the title disappearing son(net), with rhyme and ideas. The ever-present knife in the poem is the addiction, the knife edge addicts live on, the danger they expose themselves to every time they use, the pain they cause themselves and those that love them, the destruction but also the tool they hold with which only they can cut themselves free. ... I decided to split the sonnet into its stanzas and pepper it throughout the book, like breadcrumbs, or blood trails, like footsteps or the chorus of a song".
  Much of that sounds fair enough, but before it started disappearing was it ever a sonnet? Some of the pieces in the sequence struggle because of the constraint. It ends well - the 12th one is "my brother has a knife in his hand, threatens/ to cut the family photo album to shreds,/ brother cuts into himself instead". The 14th is "my brother has a knife in his hand, now all of us are bleeding".

"Family money" by Nina Bawden (Virago, 1992)

London. Fanny Pye has been a widow for 18 months. Her husband had been a diplomat. Her son Harry is married to Poppy. They have 3 children. Fanny is injured trying to stop street crime. Her daughter Isabel (4 years younger than Harry, married to Max with 3 children) visits her in hospital, as does Fanny's sister Delia, a Baroness with a daughter Rebecca (the youngest, shyest) and 2 other daughters.

The man injured during the street crime might die. Fanny's discharged back to her 5 floor house. The garden is on the canal where narrow boats have moored illegally for decades. Ivy (who used to babysit for her and has been a friend and paid-helper) visits. Her husband is disabled. Delia's daughter Rebecca (26) moves in as housekeeper. Fanny doesn't like being suddenly treated like an old, helpless woman. When with Harry watching a young couple she clumps him with her generation rather than theirs. She wants to sell up and buy Ivy a house without telling her. Fanny's kids don't object.

The crime victim dies. The police try to get her to recall the incident - now a murder case. The next door neighbour's house catches fire, damaging the top floors of Fanny's house (including the attic of souvenirs), thus delaying the already agreed sale. Fanny thinks that Isabel is having an affair (actually she's pregnant). Fanny used to have affairs, we now learn.

Ivy's husband has a stroke, then dies. She's planning to move in with her son's family (Fanny is shocked to discover that the house is twice the size of her own), thus spoiling Fanny's plan of getting her a house. She tells Fanny she should downsize. Fanny wonders about giving the house to Rebecca. Fanny meets Jake, a boat owner. She thinks he may have been involved with the crime.

Fanny meets Tom who she and Pippa knew 40 years before, a widower now. "It had been a pleasant meeting but now the first flush of surprised recognition was over they would become strangers with nothing to say to each other". But they start seeing each other. He sometimes stays in her spare room - he has troubled siblings. He proposes. She rejects, saying that he could be her tenant. Harry's suspicious until he meets Tom. At the end, Fanny's leaving to visit a friend in Pakistan. She's aware of her bouts of inexplicable anger, panic, etc.

Each crisis - Fanny's hospitalisation, the fire - triggers re-evaluations between family members. Fanny re-evaluates her past, her marriage. Conversations come under analysis - "'You usually call me Ma when you are displeased with me'"; "It was simply a coded way of expressing a mild reproach". I couldn't see that Felix's family were worth mentioning.

Other reviews

• bookertalk

"The Final Play" by David Baldacci

An audio book. A novella.

US college footballer Swift has broken a record set by Ruggles decades before. Ruggles disappeared down the players' tunnel and was never seen again. A wig and gown had been found down there. Swift's clever science friend North is curious and investigates. They find the dead body of Linda Daltray in her wig shop. They track down Vilacheck, a player who had been somewhere down the tunnel at the time. He owns a bar - how did he get the money for it? Molly, North's friend, arranges a meeting with Gloria, 75 y.o. widow of the college benefactor. She admits to having an affair with Ruggles. She says he didn't like football that much.

North tells the police where to dig to find the body. He accuses his father of involvement with Ruggles' death. His father's girlfriend of the time was Linda's mother - who subsequently bought a shop. She lured Ruggles down the tunnel. His father says that when he confronted Ruggles, Ruggles said he wanted to sneak away and give up football. His father shoots Swift (a flesh wound, but bad enough to limit his sport career) then kills himself.

4 years later, having got a PhD at MIT, North returns. Swift and Molly marry.

No.

Other reviews

• Kartik Narayanan (I have so many issues with it concerning the characters, the plot, the setting — basically everything. ... inserting words like quantum, time shift etc do not elevate the book ... The main character cannot be awesome suddenly just by imagining he is a photon undergoing quantum tunnelling. ... the only saving grace is that it is short.)

"The expanded earth" by Mikey Please

An audio book

On July 2nd - "The Descent" - people shrank to 10% of their height. Many people didn't survive the shrinking (pacemakers, artificial hips, cochlea implants, etc, didn't shrink). Millions of years ago, therapods suffered the same shrinkage. Elizabeth Godwin runs a research project in the New Forest about plankton being a superbeing - their dead and living bodies forming a binary code. She wants to conect with it, with God. A young researcher Lazlet wants to work with her. He creates a connectome so people can connect with a pool of plankton. Religious fanatics take over the project, taking Lazlet away.

There are various little, independent stories - "Elsewhere". All astronauts but one die. She returns to earch with a memorystick containing data about July 2nd. On an island, battling parties stop arguing because there's so much more land now. Some people see the collective plankton as a God correcting the faults of mankind.

Giles wakes, shrunken. He wants to find his daughters - Eva, who has a weak heart, and Sadie. Seeking a phone charger he finds a tent village of survivors. They build a car needing 6 to drive it. Cats and dogs are frightening. Alwyn is killed with a scalpel by a woman in red (actually it's paprika, to keep animals away). Children have set up their own tribes and try to kill the adults using fireworks, etc.

Matilda (a paramed) and Bob (Police) attend a traffic accident where people's clothes are left, and there's a shrunken body. They visit a nearly building. Shrunken Godwin is there. She thinks her experiment might have caused people to shrink in the range of a km or 2, and is worried that Lazlet will cause an event that will affect the world. She thinks that in a coma aren't affected so she advices people to take barbituates. Matilda and Bob try to inject as many people as possible as the predicted event gets close.

Giles returns to the building where he worked. The women who killed Alwyn is there. She says that Richard isn't a priest. He's fanatical about the end of the world and is killing people. Giles finds his fully grown daughters and Matilda, who's an ex-lover?

Oh, it's the first part of a trilogy. It has elements of SF and fantasy that don't always mesh - wouldn't small people have such high-pitched voices and such different ears that communication with normal sized people would be difficult. I like several of the ideas.

Other reviews

• echoesinanemptyroom
• potsandplots (The Expanded Earth contains two central stories. One is set before “the descent” (where humanity shrank), and the other is in essence a quest, where a disparate group of adults is shepherding a gaggle of children to safety. ... This quest aspect of the story is strangely reminiscent of Watership Down. ... The other thread offers an explanation of how the descent occurred. Hubris and science gone wrong. An eccentric scientist, their research derided, stumbles upon something incredible. This work is appropriated by people who don’t understand its significance, triggering a cataclysm. These events centre around Matilda, a paramedic, as she tries to cope with, understand and contain the initial shrinking outbreak. ... While these are the two main threads, there is a third strand that is arguably even better. A potpourri of stories from around the world, giving wider context to the tale and showing us glimpses of what is happening away from the main story )
• goodreads (3.83 rating; 1,015 ratings)