"Pulse" by Cynan Jones (Granta, 2025)

• Peregrine - 2 nestling-stealers at night launch an inflatable for a raid. The small one (who's bossed by the big one) who's on the cliff side is haunted by an incident with a boy he'd bullied years before, throwing away his rucksack - a boy he thought he saw on the clifftop the day before. Something had happened to the boy after. The man feels guilty. A rope slips and he thinks he'll fall like that boy's rucksack did. He's left dangling. The ending's fragmentary - maybe the nestlings escape and the man feels absolved.
• Reindeer - A man is asked by a policeman to shoot a bear. He goes up into the mountain, wounds a deer as bait, and determines that the bear is more hungry than rogue. The bear knocks him out and drags him. He finds dead reindeer tied to a buried sleigh with bells and presents. He returns down the mountain, gets a lift from a farmer who says "That guy. Last year. There's a lot of us think it was right, what happened to him". There were earlier hints about the man having been involved in an incident.
  Odd. Was the man hallucinating?
• Cow - A pregnancy test is negative. He lives on a farm with his wife and her parents. It's lambing/calving time. He's unfit, hasn't played football for weeks - "Thought of his knee, opened up, the physio saying, You wouldn't need a general. Then, of her, a cannula in the back of her hand" (who is "she"? His mother-in-law?). They look after the orphaned lambs in the "hushed shed, the hospital sense of compromised bodies. Resting, recovering, waiting. Relegated to a purpose". A calf is stuck during birth. The father tries brute force and asks his son-in-law for help. His daughter is angry and makes them call the vet. He does a caeserian. The son-in-law thinks the calf is dead but it shows signs of life. The ending is "Come on, he begged. Come on."
• Stock - His shop is closing down(?) so he gives carrier bags of goods away to his regular clients. He visits his nan who lives an hour away. He helps Ifan, who's having to sell his animals. Someone lives in a converted chapel. Annie drives a car, Mari's in the back. He's scared about the police. He has locked a grocery delivery man in the back of their van, threatening to kill them.
  I think I can learn from this. What's gained from fogging the details? This isn't just delaying facts to add suspense. It's not simple "Unreliable narrator" tactics. Even when we know what's going on, details are withheld. From the start of the piece we suspect that the main character is under strain - "He sat integrated amongst the felled trees". Later, the odd sentence loses clarity - e.g. "Bones of a sudden watery, as if he was unmixing". His thoughts come fast, and not always clearly. In "He waited. Bloomed with heat again. A slight chill immediately meeting the edges of his sweat. His neck vein thick, suddenly. Too small." what is too small? His vein? I had to re-read too much. Is the shop his? Is Ifan his uncle? Is Mari his daughter? Everything is closing down, coming to an end.
• White Squares - A man shoots ducks on a river with an air-rifle. The other ducks in the flock don't react. Further downriver kids and parents wait on the bank, his ex and son (who he's not allowed close to) among them. Each has a piece of white paper with a number on it, the number of a plastic duck. He wants his son's duck to win. He wants his son to be lucky. Right at the end the man recalls how his father (who had also left his wife) taught him to shoot - How his father had moved the bottles further and further away each time he hit one. How he'd at last been allowed to shoot targets on a small white square of paper
• Pulse - a couple with a young child are in an isolated wood cabin in Wales. There's a storm which threatens to make a tree fall onto power lines which might dangle into the wet ground, electrocuting them all. He tries to cut the tree down, then calls from help. Tree surgeons cut down the tree then go. They said that "It's not the trees that go.It's the ground". A week later he's still trying to clear the fallen wood. Another tree is coming loose. There are sparks from the power lines to a bough. They rush from the house. The ending is "The air was like the sea. The storm alive. Stepping off the porch like leaving a boat, into the deep crashing water// If the power's in the ground. If the force is in the wet ground.// The cattle, catching fire. His tiny child in his arms". It was in "The New Yorker"

There are blank lines between paragraphs. The paragraphs are often short and often combine description with figurative language or sonics -

• The landscape regained its vastness when he cut the engine before the ground got too steep. With the gradient rising sharply, the trees loomed (p.19)
• In the firelight, the world was only the immediate trees and the circle within the firelight. Beyond was a thumping blackness (p.20)
• The prip prip prip of postage stamps parting from their perforations. The thudunk of inking pension books (p.97)
• Her scream smashed him from sleep (p.172)

Other reviews

• David Hayden (These stories are spaced out in very short paragraphs, many of only one sentence, and these often of just a few words. It is a device that in less skilful hands might produce a false reaching after of poetic effect; here it brings a physical rhythm that generates a maximum of force, presence and meaning.)
• Rhys Thomas (you can feel the cadence and delivery, the tension, how each word has been painstakingly considered – but it’s subtle, never distracting, and never reads as though forced. In fact, as with many great prosaists, it is so distinctive and hypnotic that occasional moments where it falters feel almost jarring. This very rarely happens; where it does more commonly is within the dialogue which is by no means bad, but can lack the same poetic magic of the prose at times, pulling you out of rhythm slightly. ... Often these stories, particularly ‘Peregrine’ and ‘Stock’, show that Jones has pass to roam the same corridors as [Hemingway and McCarthy].)
• bookmunch (he is fond of rural settings, of short stichomythic sentences, of sudden shocking incidents (in which you may not always know quite what has happened) and back stories delivered like rumour that the narrators tend not to want to discuss. The writing at its best is frequently obtuse, alien and beautiful.)
• Carl Wilkinson (beyond the crystalline details of the moment that holds our horrified gaze lies the pain carried by the characters that is only hinted at: the old farmer with his constant dry cough, his wife ill in bed and the young couple longing for a pregnancy that has failed to materialise. ... “White Squares” feels under-developed, packing less of a punch than the other tales. But it underlines how powerful Jones’s writing is in the rest of the collection.)

"Highway cottage" by Ralf Webb (Penguin, 2025)

Poems from Poetry Review, Stinging Fly, etc.

Lines begin with capitals, and stanzas of a poem are more or less equally sized rectangles, making the pieces look like poems. Many pieces are a little more than a page - removing some of the line-breaks would have saved a lot of paper. I'm struggling to find much that's worthwhile - I don't understand what poems like "The Poet's Dream" are trying to do.

"A Singing contest on Thorn Hill" has an "xaxa" rhyme scheme ("country" rhyming with "bloody" etc).

Here are some extracts -

• Somewhere around here, in a postwar ex-council house/ My stepdad will be falling asleep/ In front of localised cremation ads./ What dreams of your own are you siloing away/ In the folds of those vintage ermine coats? (p.15)
• In summer, bindweed flowers like thousands/ Of tiny dish antennae. 'Environmental Protection'/ Is a misnomer. Phone them and it just rings. And rings. (p.27)
• a vein throbs like a slow-moving worm (p.29)
• The old muscles of his adolescence/ Come out of retirement, and stretch/ His tattoos into nonsense symbols (p.49)

"The Rose Arbor" by Rhys Bowen

An audio book.

In 1968 a child, Lucy (3), goes missing from London. DI Jones (50+, male, single) and DC Marisa Young are sent to Weymouth to investigate. Liz, 27, a reporter and Marisa's flatmate, goes there too. A lead takes them to Tydeham, a village taken over by the Army in 1943 and never returned. Liz senses she's been there. She phones her father, a retired brigadeer, who says he's never been there. His wife is getting forgetful. There's a 1943 timeline in which we learn about the big house in the village being emptied, the artworks going into storage.

Liz stays while the others return to London. She meets James Bennington, who used to live in the big house and now lives in London. She recalls having seen someone being buried nearby. The police find a woman's skeleton there. Liz returns to London. Jones says 3 girls disappeared years ago - an early case of his. Marisa suggests that Liz might be one of them (an only child, Liz was born when her parents were in their 40s). Lucy's parents have blackmailable pasts - her father (actually stepfather) is rich and secretly gay. Her mother Susan used to live in a squat.

In a flashback we learn that one of the missing girls was an evacuee picked up by a man.

Liz and James become friends. James' mother killed herself. Liz visits her birthplace in Devon, which doesn't quite match her memories. She works out that Lucy's real mother was a friend of Susan - Lark. She finds Lark and Lucy just as Lark kills herself. She finds an evacuated girl. She discovers that Alice, a maid of her family, was somehow special - her mother? She confronts her father about it by phone. That night her mother dies of an overdose. Her father tells Liz that her mother accidentally killed Alice (the buried body) and that he administered the overdose. He doesn't say if he's Liz's biological father.

An enjoyable read. It sounds well researched. Did people "process" new emotional info back then? Maybe. She's lucky in her investigations, surprisingly certain about her hunches, and not shocked (or even affected) by the revelations about her past and parents.

Other reviews

• literarytreats (the book’s strength isn’t so much in the mysteries that its characters need to solve, but rather in the characters themselves and the world they inhabit)
• historywomanperspective ( I found Liz to be one of the most frustrating characters that I have ever read. She had no likable trait about her. ... The main problem I had most with her was that she had no sense of justice. I could not believe that she sided with those who had committed horrible deeds. She did not care about what was morally right. I hated the decisions that she made, and I greatly disliked her. ... I was really confused why there were no morals in the story. ... I was really disappointed in this book and could not believe it was written by a popular mystery writer. As for the mystery, it was very convoluted and all over the place. I also found it to be very unconvincing. ... Therefore, this was Mrs. Bowen’s worst novel that she has written.)

"Here One Moment" by Liane Moriarty

An audio book.

On a delayed Australian plane flight an old lady passenger suddenly gets up and tells people at what age they'll die and the cause of their death. We get the PoV of Leo, 43, who will die in months from a work accident (he overworks, neglecting his family); Sue, 63, (who'll die at 66 of pancreatic cancer); Allegra (a pretty, efficient air stewardess who will self-harm); Paula, 36 (with 2 kids - one will drown at 7, the other will live to 103); Ethan, who's back from a funeral (who'll die of assault at 30); Don and Eve who've just married (Eve's spouse will kill her).

We get first a paragraph from the PoV of Cherry, the old lady, then longer snippets that often have a connection with the surrounding material. After the incident she recalled nothing about it. Her mother was a psychic, her father died young, struck by lightning. Her fiance died in Vietnam. She married David, a rather uncaring man half-Korean doctor who was sterile. Good sex but they didn't like each other much. She started to drink. Her husband started sleeping with Stella. They divorced. David and Cherry decide to adopt. Cherry's mother dies, but not before Cherry gets a reading from her - Cherry recognised the tricks. Cherry remarries. After 30+ years her husband dies on a plane (the same route as the strange flight).

Interrupting Cherry's story are the lives of the various characters. Ethan, fancies his wacky, rich house-mate Jasmine who brings home a man then breaks up with him. He becomes obessive, violent and suspects Ethan. Allegra continues sleeping sometimes with pilot Jonny. She bad back pains. Don knows that he has murderous thoughts while sleepwalking so he handcuffs himself at night or sleeps in a different room. Then 3 people (2 nearly 100 years old) die at the predicted age. The survivors take precautions, just in case. They start getting in touch with each other. The ones who'll die old start taking risks.

Cherry still hasn't been identified. Then after a 4th death (faked for publicity) the predictions begin to come unstuck. She releases a statement saying that she had a mental incident on the plane. In an epilogue we discover that the boy who should have drowned at 7 went on to win a swimming gold medal - after the flight his mother had made him do many swimming lessons, so he survived an incident at sea went he was 7.

A probability theme (fallacies etc) is sustained - Cherry's an actuary. I like the details - how someone pushes aside a headphone with a thumb when spoken to, how the atmosphere in a room changes like in a classroom after the teacher's lost their temper. But I was never convinced by the Allegra character.

Other reviews

• Adele Dumont (The far-fetched plot of Here One Moment wouldn’t matter so much were its characters memorable. But there are just so very many, and post-flight they mostly lead their own separate lives, only really reconnecting via a Facebook group. As a result, there are none of the complicated group dynamics that made her other novels so compelling. ... wit is fleeting, and not enough to rescue a narrative that is too baggy and a host of characters who are ultimately forgettable.)
• Anne Logan (Would men connect with this book as much as women? Likely not, as there were considerably more female perspectives, and at times, the men could be infantilized a bit (in good humour, but still, I noticed it). Does Moriarty have a bunch of male fans? Again, probably not)
• libgirlbooks
• capsulenz

"A Neighbour's Guide to Murder" by Louise Candlish

A audio book

Prologue - London. Gwen (OAP) phones the police to say that her apartment neighbour has killed his tenant.

It's Gwen's first-person PoV (with asides). Her daughter Mia has suggested she write it as therapy. She's been divorced for 15 years from Brian, who embezzled from the charity they worked for. Her 36 y.o. son Daniel lives with her now that he's separated from his wife, unemployed and depressed. Pixie moves into her neighbour Alex's spare room. He's about 50, a composer. There seems to be an arrangement that she pay the rent by sleeping with Alec. Gwen thinks that she's curious about Pixie not because she's a replacement for too-often absent Mia, but because of Cindy, a vulnerable girl who started working with her and was propositioned by Brian. She confronts Alec, saying she's tell the committee about his deal with Pixie. He replies that he'll tell them about the embezzlement (she was cleared, and it was years ago, but it won't help her hopes of election). They find a spy camera in the shower of her en-suite. Alec seems unperturbed. Gwen calls the police. Pixie moves in with Gwen and Daniel. Gwen lends her money. She goes on holiday with Daniel. Gwen tells the press about Alec. He tells the police and presses for damages. Gwen realises that Pixie sleeps around and takes money. She accepts a caution from the police and pays damages to Alec. She has to sell the flat. Alec offers to drop damages and charges if she sells to him. She becomes his tenant.

After a chat with disappointed Pixie (who's marrying Daniel) she wonders if Pixie was telling the truth after all. She checks the circumstantial evidence. She reveals that she and Alec spent a drunken night in bed together. She suffocates Alec in his sleep, confessing to neighbour Dee but to nobody else. 6 months later Gwen is finishing her write-up and kills herself. She didn't mean to leave the write-up behind. Dee saved and edited it. 2 years later, Pixie stars in a film called "A Neighbour's Guide to Murder" about the events.

I kept wanting to read on. The plot is tidy. The characters don't match the plot too well though (Alec's murder is too much of a surprise; Gwen and Pixie's sudden friendship) and too often Gwen isn't told about things (Daniel and Pixie) or doesn't react as one might expect (when Pixie spends her borrowed money).

Other reviews

• lotuswritingtherapy
• mostlymurder (Don't be fooled by the veneer of cosy crime - this is much more complex and twisted than retirement noir.)

“Elevation” by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton, 2019)

In a small US Republican town, Scott Carey (divorced, 6ft 4, a web designer) goes to his retired doctor friend Bob Ellis because he's losing weight without his appearance changing. Not only that, but what he wears/carries doesn't add to his weight.

Married 30-something lesbians Missy (friendly) and Dierdre (pretty and a bit mad) live nearby. They run a failing restaurant and their dogs use his lawn as a toilet. He politely points this out to them (the first time they've talked). Dierdre over-reacts. Missy apologises.

We're already 30 pages into the novella - 25% through.

He overhears anti-lesbian jokes in his usual diner and causes a scene. He tries to befriend the couple. He learns that Dierdre used to be a national-level marathon runner, and is entering the local 12k charity run. He enters and would have won (being so light yet with the same muscle power - he's "never been happier in his life") except that he helped Dierdre win. Chapter 6 is entitled "The Incredible Lightness of Being". The publicity that Dierdre gets saves the restaurant. Dierdre's grateful. When he's almost weightless he asks Dierdre to help him float into the sky with a firework attached. He lights it.

No. Were it much shorter it might have had a chance.

"The A to Z of You and Me" by James Hannah

An audio book.

Ivo, 40, is being looked after in a room (which we later discover is in a hospice). He makes alphabetic lists of bodyparts and related memories to calm himself. These provide a backstory. He's often reminded of anatomy/science lessons. Mia (who he refers to as "You") was his girlfriend years before - a trainee nurse who was a house-mate of his friend Becka. Sheila is his favourite nurse now - the alphabet game was her suggestion. His father died early of cancer, her father was an alcoholic - they compared fathers as if they were playing "Sad Dad Top Trumps". Ivo was first diagnosed as a diabetic, then he needed dialysis. He offers advice to the young daughter of the woman dying in the next room. He tells her that Mia died 10 years ago.

His sister Laura's 5 years older than him. They haven't met since their mother's funeral 7 years before, because she chose Mal (11 grade A GCSEs) over him. She wants to see him now. This upsets Ivo's health. He doesn't want visitors but she comes anyway. She says that she stayed away from their mother at the end because it hurt too much, leaving him to deal with the funeral arrangements. Mal has been in jail for 6 years. Now he's out he's got a drug habit and is desperate to apologise to Ivo. Ivo refuses to see him. Mal was a drug dealer. Mia wasn't happy with Ivo's drug-taking (which he did while she was away). He was diagnosed with kidney failure.

We learn that Mal took him to Mia when he was stoned. Mal drove them to A&E and she died in a crash.

He starts having morphine. He talks about his funeral, wishing that he could have helped people more. He lets reality go, becomes delirious. Mia talks to him. He thinks Mal visits. He forgives him and feels better for doing so, then dies.

The amount of delayed revelation (about his location, Mia's death, the reason for falling out with Laura, the nature of Mal's crime) should have raised anticipation. Soon it made me distrust any piece of information because it might bloat into something else later (maybe Sheila was his aunt but we hadn't been told, etc). In the end though I was won over - the hospice details sounded convincing.

Other reviews

• Ian Sansom (Hannah’s debut is an excellent example of that genre of sophisticated and sentimental fiction in which the terrible perplexities of life are teased into pleasing fictional shape, a genre we might call the “heavylight”. The history of the heavylight can be traced back through Nicholls and Nick Hornby to Thomas Hardy and beyond, but it finds its perfect expression in the work of the undisputed heavylight champion of the world, Philip Larkin.)
• Natalie Xenos
• Jennifer Joyce