"Somebody I Used to Love" by Eve Ainsworth

An audio book.

In 2022, Gemma is 32, living with Richard. They're both teachers. Her father died 27 years before in a house fire. Her mother is still struggling. V, her friend, wants a child. When Gemma was 20, Will gave up the chance of touring the States with a band to put down a deposit on a flat for the 2 of them. He's now engaged to Nicola and his brother is touring with the band.

On the 2022 anniversary of Gemma's father's death, Will crashes the car he's in and loses some memories. He thinks it's 2019 and that Gemma is his girlfriend. Nicola takes him back to their home. He feels like "a stranger in my own life". He doesn't like his new friends. He moves out to live with Gemma's mother, Di. He used to work in Mel's pub. She was a good friend but she's moved away. The last thing he recalls is an evening in her pub. What happened that night? Gemma still likes this old version of Will. She fantasises about him when in the shower. His brother Jack is on tour in the States. Will slept with his girlfriend Abby in the bad days.

We're repeatedly told that Will messed things up without us being told the details - variously excuses are given by people for not telling him or us. Finally we learn that Di's unextinguished fag had started the fire. She got drunk in Mel's pub one anniversary. Mel (banned from driving) drove her home. On the way she knocked Will off his bicycle. He'd seemed ok, but his behaviour changed. The recent knock seems to have undone the damage. Gemma doesn't understand why Will and Di got on so well, and still do. Di and Will talk about accepting the kind of person they are.

Will recalls arguing with Nicola about her buying too much. He recalls that he hadn't proposed.

We now get Nicola's PoV. She knew he never loved her. she manipulated him into the type of person she wanted him to be. She tells him everything that happened that last night. She visits Gemma, showing bruises that she claims were made by Will. Later, Nicola's brother phones Gemma to tell her that Nicola had been in the car with Will and had caused the crash. Richard had convinced Will that Gemma was pregnant by showing him V's scans. In the end Gemma decides to go travelling in a campervan, and Will going to join his brother's band. They'll meet up again in a year and see if they're still in love.

We're told too many times that Will messed up everything before we find out what happened. Will's voice sometimes becomes too literary ("still feeling insecurity gnaw at me", he thinks). Di has lofty moments too - "you refused to be drawn into negative thinking". In "What Alice Forgot" by Liane Moriarty, the main character loses her memory and feels like an imposter in her own life. She's puzzled that she fell out with a man who seems ok. She's more self-analytical than Will is.

Other reviews

• urban bookworm (they all come up with excuses as to why they can’t tell him. The guy has a brain injury! Surely someone would tell him? To me this plotline felt contrived to keep the anticipation building and pad out the book a bit – the whole ‘what did Will do?’ interested me at first, but by the time we finally find out, it wasn’t a surprise as we’d pretty much worked out what happened by then anyway.)
• Goodreads (3.6 at the moment)

"The Word Is Murder" by Anthony Horowitz

An audio book.

Diana Cooper (in her 60s) goes to a funeral director to arrange her funeral. Within 6 hours she's dead at home, found by a cleaner (Andrea, who has a criminal record) days later.

Horowitz, wanting to be thought of as more that a writer of children's fiction, has written a Sherlock Holmes book. His ex-policeman contact Hawthorn has been called in to investigate the Cooper case and asks Horowitz if he wants to write a book about it. Horowitz declines at first, then remembers that he turned down a chance to do "Mamma Mia". Horowitz insists that he needs to know more about Hawthorne first - married? favourite football team? - but Hawthorne is resistant. Hawthorne doesn't like Horowitz's first chapter - this book's first chapter.

Cooper had a famous acting son, Damien. When 52 she killed a twin and injured the other in a driving accident at Deal. She got off lightly.

They visit Judith Godwin, mother of brain-damaged Jeremy, 18. Mary O'Brien is still his carer.

They visit Damien. He has a wife and young child. He received a txt from his mother in her last hour, saying that she'd seen a significant male.

Hawthorne interrupts a meeting Horowitz is having with Spielberg and Jackson (about a TinTin film) to take him to Cooper's funeral. At the funeral, "The wheels on the bus" plays from the coffin. It was the twins' favourite song. The father of the twins becomes the prime suspect. Damien is killed soon after the funeral. Hawthorne gets the twins' father and their nanny that they were lovers - a contributing factor to the accident. Somebody tries to set the judge's house alight. They visit Damien's wife, who's with her father. She was neglected by Damien. She gets all his property and money.

Anthony visits the funeral director who paralyses him while he tells him what happened. He was Damian's rival at RADA. He tells Anthony how he killed Diana to get Damien back to England so he could kill him. Hawthorne arrives and saves Anthony - "You should have stuck with your stupid children's books," says the funeral director, who kills himself. The twin's death had little to do with it. Anthony and Hawthorne still don't much like each other though they're useful to each other and respect each other's skills. It's an interesting, edgy relationship.

Other reviews

• writerinahat (Author self-inserts are an age old trope and can be done to good effect. But I find them, to put it bluntly, uncomfortable. I feel like I’m simultaneously being lectured to by a real person while witnessing a caricature of said real person playing out the real person’s secret fantasies. ... The meta humour, the choice of a self-insert, and the bait-and-switch narrator were all intentional to build to this punchline. ... The plot is a story about revenge, and the book itself is a petty tool for revenge.)
• cafethinking ( The far more interesting aspect of the book and what makes it worth reading (for it is definitely that) is how Horowitz the writer, Horowitz the narrator and Horowitz the character work together as a kind of writerly and incredibly meta trinity.)
• debbish

"28 Portuguese Poets" by Richard Zenith (ed) (Dedalus, 2015)

In the introduction Zenith writes -

• [Melo Nato] broadly divided poets into bleeders, whose writing is an overflow of what they intensely feel, and crutch poets like himself, who write to compensate for what they lack in feeling (p.xvi)
• Mário Cesariny was the most prominent poet of Portugal's late-blooming surrealist movement, founded in 1947 ... he dedicated an entire book of poems to parodying and to deconstructing Fernando Pessoa and his heteronymic system (p.xx)

I liked "from The keeper of sheep" (Alberto Caeiro) and these extracts -

• The gods who gave us this path/ Of love that we call beauty/ Did not place it only in women/ Or only in fruit./ They also gave us the flower to pluck./ And perhaps we pluck with better love/ What we seek for using (Ricardo Reis)
• Around its silent centre/ The sunflower, falsely pleasing,/ Speaks, yellow and astonished/ By the black centre that's everything (Fernando Pessoa)
• I wake up from my dream .../ And I'm nothing (Florbela Espanca)
• I want to speak of houses as a man speaks of his soul,/ in the midst of a fire,/ next to the example of the wheat fields,/ learning the patience that watches them rise/ and die with a hint, a hint/ of beauty (Herberto Helder)
• sometimes... when I woke up/ it was because we'd arrived (Al berto)

"A little hope" by Ethan Joella

An audio book.

Freddie Tyler (female), 39, wants to be a writer. She has a daughter Addie, 6. She works as a seamstress 4 days/week for Darsie. Freddie's husband Greg, 39, is dying. He thought he'd eventually help Addie with her economics paper at 2am, that he'd play golf with her boyfriend.

Darsie wonders if she's too pushy a mother. When her husband died 10 years ago, her son Luke (about 20 then) got into booze and pills. His current girlfriend Hannah has pink hair.

Ginger, now a successful vet, used to like Luke. She still does. She wonders if he still sings on stage. She's been with her cute boyfriend Johnny for 2 years, but she has doubts. He has a son. She wonders whether to break up with Johnny. She looks for Luke. He dies in a car accident.

Kay and Alex (Greg's boss) have been together 50 years. Their son Benny died in a bicycle accident. Alex discovered that he'd had a daughter, Iris, by another women, Melinda. He told Kay, who didn't want to know. Alex kept in touch. Now when he's about to be a grandfather, Kay wants to meet the daughter.

When a student, Suzette returned from Finland after a week, bottling out of an opportunity. She's marrying Damon in 8 days and is having cold feet. Her older sister Liza died. Damon's friend Ahmed hasn't found love. He wants kids. He's falling for Ginger who's now broken up. He confesses his love for her.

When 4, Iris learned that her father Doug wasn't her real father. Her new dad Alex often visited. Now she's about to give birth. Dave, who she's only known a few months, is supportive. She wonders if she's making the same mistake as her mother, missing out on fun. The baby dies in the womb but she still has to give birth. She thinks about her half-brother Benny, dreams about him.

Suzette worries about her social services clients. When a girl who she's trying to help attacks her, Greg intercedes. He looks bad.

Ginger has found someone new - Ahmed. She visits Luke's mother, who's still deciding what to throw away. She's angry with Ginger, who saw things in Luke that she, his own mother, hasn't seen.

Freddie's accepted on the Iowa writing course. Greg has recovered.

An ensemble piece in a small American community. Over the course of a year there are births, marriages and deaths. Some people change greatly, some barely at all. I note that some reviews suggest it's more a story collection than a novel but chapters are chronological and are informed by each other, so I'd call it a novel. There's sadness in each story, the main Tyler story being the backdrop, an abiding source of hope.

Other reviews

• Kathryn Eastman
• Walter Cummins (With attention given to the complications of so many people, A Little Hope can be considered a novel in stories, but that category usually refers to a group of related pieces, each with its own resolution. In A Little Hope, the episode shifts from character to character depict a step in a life process, ongoing developments until the novel’s multiple conclusions, the various ways in which the characters reach an outcome to their pending uncertainties. The method is similar to that of multi-character, multi-plot dramas like Downton Abbey that juggle the issues of a group of characters, cutting back and forth episode by episode to advance the situations of each. The creative burden for the writer using this approach is to juggle a group of equally important characters, each with compelling personal story that coheres with that of the others for a larger significance. Joella succeeds.)

"Pain Songs" by Daniel Sluman (Nine Arches Press, 2026)

Poems from "Bad Lilies", "Ink, Sweat & Tears", "Poetry Wales", etc.

White space predominates - lines are very short; I think the longest stanza has 3 lines; there's lots of indentation, at tab intervals. The effect to me is like those melodramatic pauses on a reality show before the name of the week's eliminated person. I think all the c.1.5-page poems could be improved by being compressed onto a single page - or half-page. Only "Deserted carpark" is left-aligned - 21 couplets (cars?) and a final isolated line, all the lines about 5cm long.

Imagery abounds. For example, light spills, eddies and sputters. It's tilted over the world, it slips clean from the window, rolls over me. It pools into an open room. It makes for a pleasant read though I sometimes wondered if there was too much, as if the poet in a piecemeal way had replaced plain clauses by imagery even if the imagery didn't do much.

Here are some extracts -

• each night the bulb in the hallway/ sputters a ragged breath// until you twist it loose/ in your palm// pulling darkness through the flat (p.9) (or "each night the hallway bulb ..."?)
• the spray// of water lifting my car/ off the road// held momentarily/ neither in pain or at ease// between the ground/ & the air (p.16) (between the ground/ & the air? How?)
• I must ring the ambulance// & wait/ for the soft blue lights// to spill through/ the window & over// our sheets (p.18)
• MRI/ like a man about to travel/ a great distance// I slide my wallet/ & wedding band into the tray/ .../ before I am drawn/ into the open mouth// of the truth again (p.19)
• all night I've been waking/ to the sound of moths// striking the window// of our kitchen/ like scattered applause (p.24) (or "striking our kitchen window"?)
• the ceilings/ we are pressed beneath change// in aspect & colour// each evening they drop/ a little closer// in rooms that carry us/ from one year// to the next (p.37)
• time is always in deficit// catching up or catching on/ to something half-gone (p.38)
• we keep waking inside the notion/ of bodies in love// how one broken person// slides their tongue into another// until there is nothing left// of the sadness or shame/ that otherwise// divides them (p.60)
• the spasm of lightning// & thunder/ rolling its applause// over this half-decade/ we've built// our life into (p.64)

"Small Worlds" by Caleb Azumah Nelson

An audio book.

London. Steve, the first-person protagonist, is in the last week of school, soon to go to university. He plays trumpet in a jazz group with Adeline (Del) sometimes. He has an older brother Raymond. His parents came from Ghana. He's interested in his parents' past. In particular he'd like to know how his father coped with being 18.

His grades aren't as good as expected. He does business studies at Nottingham while Del does music in London. He gives up after a term, goes home. His brother moves out, having got his girlfriend pregnant. His father chucks him out because he's a disappointment to the family. He trains to be a chef. He likes Annie, likes who he is with her - open, vulnerable - but she goes to Brazil. Del and Steve meet again, admitting to love each other. She gave up music college because she wasn't learning anything. His mother dies of a heart attack. They'd been planning to go to Ghana together. He goes anyway, finds out more about his mother's early life, gets drunk.

Ray teaches him how to drive, saying that he thinks their father's struggling. Steve hasn't seen his father for a year, not since the funeral. He tried to make up. He goes through his father's old records. He wants to know how to choose what to remember.

At the end, "you" (his father) tells of the struggles in `1986 London. Prejudice, poverty and love.

He prefers "small worlds" - being with one person. The voice is poetic in the way that an 18 year old's might be. "light" triggers phrases like the repeated "we find a way to walk in the light they left behind" (of the dead). "space" (the word or concept) is added to many otherwise straightforward phrases to replace "moment", etc - "into that space where", "the way desire might spill into the space", "somewhere between content and melancholy", etc. Other examples of imagery and poetical phrasing include -

• "Del's lips hold a brief home on my cheeks and we pull each other close. We give no goodbyes, we know death in its multitudes"
• "It's funny what you remember, what palaces you make to store the fragments"
• "I am the beach disappeared by the tide, I am the breath between two notes"
• "the way thunder asks you to check the sky for rain"
• "June veers towards July"
• "light clasps onto her neck"
• "shyness visits upon us"
• "it was the time of day when the sun was leaving the sky"

At times I find it too lush, but maybe that's the point. However, the vocabulary is elevated too - he uses words like "discern" - and he's aware that he sometimes "mirrors" people's gestures.

Other reviews

• Colin Grant (Small Worlds is determinedly not another rehearsal of the kind of voyeuristic tabloid interest in Black people’s lives marked by violence and social deprivation; rather, it’s a love story. At least it sets out that way ... The novel would also benefit from a more generous inclusion of the rich hybrid of London/Ghanaian vernacular. One of the challenges Nelson wrestles with is how to make soap opera-ish everyday dialogue support the narrator’s intimation of the characters’ sophisticated interior lives ... Other pivotal scenes [] are bolted on, and read like a shortcut towards unearned gravitas. In a novel told in three sections, not only is there a mystifying shift in register from a gentle love story in part one to the opening of part two, [] but the narrator’s reflections on the ensuing conflagrations, though sincere [] are unconvincing.)
• jacquiwine (I also love how Azumah Nelson uses repetition throughout the novel ... A great example of this is the relationship between remembering and forgetting. At times, we want to forget things because they feel painful (e.g. ‘Right now, I don’t want to remember. I only want to forget’), while at other times, the emphasis shifts to remembering because we want something to endure (e.g. ‘Sure you’ll remember me?’ […] ‘How could I forget’). Other themes that Azumah Nelson continues to revisit include: the link between solitude and loneliness, which ultimately feeds depression; the sense of feeling trapped between a desire to cry and the inability to do so; and the need to ‘lean into’ life’s uncertainties, especially to access new possibilities.)
• Liz Dexter

"The House of Broken Bricks" by Fiona Williams

An audio book.

It's autumn. Tess, brought up in Lewisham of Jamaican ancestry, black, with an Architecture degree, is married to Richard (white, a small-scale farmer), who tempted her to live in the English village he was born in. Now she hates it. They argue a lot. They have twins, 10. Max is white and Sonny is black. Sonny, the only black in the school, is popular. Max, for reasons we're not initially told, needs counselling. He has identity issues - a section ends with Tess reading an illustrated bedtime book to him and he thinks "The last thing I remember is seeing Tom, completely covered in soot, frightened by the face looking back at him in the mirror.". Once a week Tess visits Cyril down the road. He has a terminal disease. Their boat, Bernadette, is kept by Cyril's jetty. Tess doesn't want to be reminded of it. Floods last for 3 weeks. Richard drinks and has unexplained absences.

They have a subdued Xmas. [Ah, I'm beginning to think that Sonny is dead. Max uses "we", and sees/hears Sonny. Tess reacts to what Max says Sonny's doing.] Tess and Max visit Tess's mother in London. Tess's older sister Peaches is there, with her son Nathan. Tess's mother, a widow, says she's going to sell up and move to Jamaica. Peaches tries to set Tess up with David. David gets her a job. She finds a place for Max for the next year in a London school. When they return home, Tess discovers she's pregnant - a forgotten drunken night with Richard. She keeps it secret. Sonny senses the foetus. Sonny says "I died on a summer's day" - a boating accident. Cyril dies. When villagers see that Tess is pregnant they see it as sign that Tess and Richard have got over their problems. Tess changes her mind about moving with Max to London.

Richard's been secretly preparing a polytunnel in their garden, with Jamaican plants and parakeets (naturalised, not foreigners). It's for her. And Cyril's left them money. Maybe it'll all work out.

Sections are from the 4 main characters' PoVs (Richard 3rd-person, the rest 1st). The boys (Sonny in particular) are thoughtful, observant, and poetic. They discuss their parents' relationship. It's not that the author is describing in adult language the insights and feelings that 10 year-olds have. They think and feel like adults even though they don't behave like them - "gossamer", "my quiet feet follow the rhythm of silence", "her voice sinks into me", "till darkness spilt". The status of Sonny is hinted at several times before it's revealed. I think Tess changes her mind/emotions too easily at the end.

Other reviews

• Stephanie Merritt (an elderly lady tells 10-year-old Max Hembry that the broken bricks employed to build his family’s cottage were also used as ballast at sea, “to weigh down them clipper ships sent to collect sugar from the Caribbean … yes, where your nana and grandad came from”. The symbolism could not be more explicit: that which appears damaged can, from a different perspective, offer stability.)
• aminasbookshelf (the standout element of this novel is how delicately she treats the themes. ... At times, I also wanted Tess and Richard to just split up and get a divorce, because it started to feel a tad repetitive. However, there were enough plot escalations to keep me interested)
• Gannah Elsoul (There is a childhood innocence to the children’s chapters, an overriding feeling anxiety in Tessa’s chapters, and a sense of isolation in Richard’s chapters. ... The story’s only weak point is that it becomes a little too repetitive, as the reader becomes the onlooker of a growing rift in Tessa and Richard’s marriage and parenthood. Although we root for some productive communication and intimacy between the married couple, the placid hum of their detachment continues)