"One moment" by Becky Hunter

An audio book.

Evie (29) and Scarlett (fashion designer) live together. Scarlett dies in an accident because she went in the road to help Nate, who went through a red light on his bicycle. We get Evie's PoV and Scarlett's afterlife PoV. Evie has M.S. Will (Evie's ex, who dumped her) turns up to see if she needs company. They have sex and he leaves. Astrid (13) and her mother move into the flat opposite Evie's. Astrid's learning the violin. Evie had wanted to be a violinist until her diagnosis. She helps Astrid. Nate, a journalist, invites Evie out on some of his jobs. He's found out who was driving the car that killed Scarlett - Tessa. When he was 15 his older brother killed himself. He invites her to a family meal. She gets some tips on bereavement. Scarlett can go back in time (or recall very well). She recalls her affair with her cute boss Jason. She knew he was married. He confessed his love. She'd asked him to choose.

Evie's never met her father. Scarlett and Evie had met at A&E while they were at different junior schools. They'd been friends ever since. Evie finds a letter to Scarlett which makes her think Scarlett was planning to move out, but Scarlett was hoping that they'd both move out. Scarlett realises that if she hadn't died, Evie would never have met Nate. Because of Nate, Evie feels she's not broken after all. Jason had made a dress for Evie from designs left by Scarlett. He wants to start a posthumous designer label.

Nate asks Scarlett if he should leave for Australia. She doesn't answer. On the day of the flight he asks her to come with her. She does. At the end Scarlett hints that there may have been a hint of suicide.

Having a ghost instead of an omniscient narrator solves some problems. I believed in Evie's MS more than her sadness about Scarlett

Other reviews

• fivesentence (The premise of this story is compelling, but I found myself frustrated as (especially during Scarlett’s narration) the message was spelled out repeatedly for me rather than trusting me to figure it out for myself. The dual perspective, although valuable for showing the backstory and full picture, also gave away so much that I never really got to feel surprised; the events played out just as I expected they would. ... This is a sweet story exploring how sadness and happiness can be intertwined, and if you’re looking for a straightforward celebration of friendship and love, this might be the right book for you.)

"A complete success" by Colette Paul (Batis Books, 2026)

Stories all set in Glasgow written over 20 years from Litro, Edinburgh Review, Manchester Review, etc.

• Rats - A couple has moved because of his job. She's unemployed with a philosophy degree. They have rats in the garden because the old widow next door scatters food for birds. She reads about socialising in new places. She realises she's "stuck with a grumpy know-it-all who is obsessed with his bike, who can't keep still for a moment, who has never had a mixed feeling". They don't want to force the widow to stop feeding the birds because it's how she's coping with grief. He tries to shoot the rats with a BB gun. They wonder whether they'll be ok. She thinks they will.
• Diddled - She passes her driving test on the 12th attempt. Her boyfriend (23) "had opinions about everything". He advises her to put a lower offer on a car advertised on Gumtree. They go to a party of his colleague - a baby and child are there. She knows nobody. He's struggling too. They leave early. She impulsively buys a car from a colleague's brother. It's rusty and dented. She feels she's been diddled. She discovers she's pregnant, though she's on the pill. Her boyfriend's unhappy. She goes for a drive (because that's what happens in films) and hits a car while trying to do a 3-point turn. She gives money to the car-owner. The story ends with "For months afterwards, as I got bigger and bigger, I saw Hakim driving around, the children lined up in the back seat, his wife in front. There was still the big dent in the passenger door. We waved at each other, until the traffic moved us away in different directions."
• Mine - The midwife visits her at home for the first time. She mentally frail. The baby's underweight. Colleagues visit, then her mother-in-law. The baby keeps crying. They stop following rules about intervals between feeds. The baby settles down.
• A complete success - Callum has dashed from LA to Glasgow because his 80 year-old mum is in ICU. They've barely talked for years because he's gay. He lives with Simon - they have a pool and a Porsche. He visits his old friend Gerry in his little room. Gerry, a confirmed bachelor, was top of the class and got nowhere. His mother was always welcoming to Callum. After beer and pizza, Callum returns to his hotel, wondering whether the point of his visit - to Gerry - had been to forgive or be forgiven.
• Days - Louise argues with her neighbour Michelle about her noisy dog. Louise's son Tom leaves for a holiday with his father and Louise's ex-friend Gwen. Louise goes for a drink with a colleague and (without knowing why) holds his hand. He, divorced, is shocked by her inappropriate behaviour. When she gets to her block she realises she's left her bag on the bus. Despair overcomes her. Michelle, divorced, lets her in. She gets through the night.
• Marrakesh - Hannah, Rosemary's student daughter, died crossing a road without looking. Rosemary's husband doesn't want to dwell on the past. She does. When she finds out that Hannah had a boyfriend, she arranges a meeting. He tells her that they'd only been going out for a few weeks. Now he was going with friends to Marrakesh to get over it. Rosemary likes him, thinks of giving him holiday money. Later, she sees him holding hands with a girl. [The twist was predictable. I liked the story though - the mother's attempt to recreate the last weeks of her daughter's life]
• Mother and son - Philip, 48, suddenly moved away to Aberdeen, leaving his mother Maureen, a young 78, alone. He quickly met Diane and lives with her. Maureen finds her bossy ("full of opinions about everything") and prematurely aged. When Maureen falls, she recovers at Philip's house. After 3 weeks there, she doesn't want to return home. She overhears Diane tell Philip to get rid of Maureen. Maureen hopes that Philip will fight back. He doesn't, so she lies to him that she has cancer.
• Ancient History - Natalie (soon to start Uni) meets Sharon while doing a summer job at Asda. Sharon gets sacked for stealing. They meet weekly to go clubbing. Nobody picks them up. Sharon plans for them to have a break in Blackpool. They save up (Natalie reluctantly). Then one week 2 older man chat them up at the club. Outside, one of them is rough with Sharon. Natalie decides not to see Sharon again. 30 years later, Natalie sees Sharon at a bus stop talking to a boy who could be her son or grandson. Their eyes meet. Had Sharon's face "registered pure aversion" or hadn't she recognised Natalie?
• Jeffrey - Elaine (62, childless) has been left by Duncan. She's kept Jeffrey, their 13 year old dog. She had got on well with her mother-in-law, who'd told her that Duncan was living with a mother of teenage kids. She's been seeing old friend Craig and is shy about the thought of sex with him. Jeffrey collapses while Elaine's walking him. He dies on her bed. Should she phone Duncan? The ending is "She lay in the darkness in that half-dreaming state where all the people who crowd your thoughts are both familiar and strange and you cannot tell where you start or they end. The moon shone quietly through the trees, giving nothing away"
• Chance - Anna's called by her son Danny to say he hit someone in self-defense who's now in a coma. Anna says that the sister of Brian, her partner, might be able to help. Danny has just returned to Tiffany (19) with whom he has a child. Anna's never met Tiffany. Anna thinks that Tiffany's tricked Danny into a relationship. Danny's father Dom (now 66) had an affair when Danny was months old, then some others, finally leaving when Danny was 9. Danny cried easily at school and lashed out. Anna hasn't contacted Dom for years. She does now, telling him to contact Danny. He has a new baby. When Danny phones Anna later he says that Dom's friends will help. He's not complimentary about Anna or old Brian. At the end she's phoned in the night "For a moment she is unable to face whatever has happened. She grips the bed, to push herself up or hold herself down, she can't tell."
• Best Friends - On her first day at uni, Iris meets Josh (a retaker) at a philosophy course. He had mental problems the year before. His parents are capitalists who wanted him to study engineering or medicine. She often sees him in his shared house. Her friends and someone from his house tell her to avoid him, but she persists. When they cuddle on his bed he avoids sex and says he has a sort-of girlfriend. They don't see each other for months. When they finally meet again he says he's off to Germany. She goes to his room and tries to have sex with him. She spends the night there without sex, clothed. [Lots of student/shared-house detail]
• The tutor - Her mum encourages her to attend creative writing classes at the local library. She's 16. She's working over summer in a cafe with 40 year-old, thrice divorced Caroline, who's looking for a man. At the classes he's hoping to meet a young poet. They're all pensioners. The tutor (his books are out of print) isn't too complementary about the contributions. She reads out a story about a boy visited his dying dad in hospital. He quizzes her on the details (she visits her grandpa in hospital). He asks her to babysit on Fridays. He doesn't pay her. His wife thinks there's something going on - though he's "sweaty, pie-faced", he's been married at least twice before. The girl says she's not going to babysit anymore. The wife accuses her of stealing a gold watch. The girl's mother suggests that the wife is punishing her because she can't punish her husband, and suggests she should write a story about it. She doesn't. Years later the girl sees a story by the tutor in an anthology, with the hospital details she's researched for him.
• Robert Wilson's last weekend - Robert, 81, has terminal cancer. He and his wife Sheila are in A&E. They married in middle age. He proposed before they'd kissed. Their son Christopher, now in Australia, had more dramatic marriages. Robert recalls significant moments in Christopher's life, then his father's death. Sheila phones Christopher, who decides to get a flight back. This worries Robert, who says "We've had a good life haven't we?" He recalls waiting at a station for her long ago. [Needs more.]
• Condition - Her neighbour Sheila was a catholic for over 30 years before becoming a Jehovah's Witness. Her other neighbour Irene has a bedbound husband and twins the narrator's age. The narrator dreams about her dead mother doing ordinary things. She's pregnant - a one-night-stand after a colleague's leaving party. Princess Diana dies. The narrator goes to the ante-natal clinic - a waiting room of pregnant women. She has an ultrasound scan.

Repeated themes include - getting in contact with friends/relatives after a gap of months/years; separated mothers who want their grown kids to be happy; best friends; short women; pregnancy. At the launch the author said she wasn't too convinced by jump-in-time endings. In general the situations and key moments are too commonplace - "Robert Wilson's last weekend" a case in point. "Favourites are "Marrakesh", "The tutor"

"The housekeeper" by Rose Tremain

An audio book.

Danni, Polish, has a little shop in Truro called "Dani's Invisible Mending". She likes measuring the women. She recalls when she was housekeeper of Manderville Hall, showing Daphne du Maurier about the house in 1936. They liked each other straight away, and nearly got caught having sex in the boat house. Her mistress Edwina had died. Her master (who Danni had serious chats with, talking about grief) wanted to hand the house over to Miss Adelade, his unladylike neice. The staff didn't like her. Danni recalls her Jewish childhood, her mother dying. "Learn from them," her father had said to her, seeing patient mules awaiting to be loaded up.

Daphne said "the drought has ended. And now the river flows." She neglected her 2 daughters. She said "I had drowned in the ocean, and the ocean was you." They spent a weekend in Hampstead, London, Danni pretending to be a poet published in Poland. Back at Manderville, they opened a room that had been closed since Edwina's death. Miss Adelade wanted to hold a masquerade for her London friends. When it was held, Miss Adelade saw Daphne and Danni together, blaming Danni for Edwina's death, and insisting on Danni's resignation. Daphne recommits herself to her marriage. War is in the offing. Nothing will be the same again.

Danni, now in her shop, imagines Daphne writing Rebecca based on the manderville characters. She finishes the book and cuts it into pieces, feeling betrayed. She decides that Daphne saved herself by making Mrs Danvers (based on her) into a monster. She tells Emerald, a well-off customer about to marry, to run off with her artist female friend and start a new life. Rolly and Florence, other ex-staff, have started a sweet shop. Rolly's seen Danni and Daphne in the boathouse and demands that Danni gets money from Daphne. Later, Florence apologises. She tells Danni that all the servants knew. Danni's touched they they were so nice to her anyway. She moves her sewing machine into the shop's front window. Poland's invaded, Rolly apologises. Danni hires a fisherman to take her to Manderville cove. Soldiers are putting barbed wire there. She has to turn back.

Reviews I read after said it was an expansion of a story she'd written. That's the feeling I often had - sometimes the rendering of an episode added little to what a summary could have said. There's quite a lot about class - the constraints, but also the freedom afforded by being in a different class to someone else.

Other reviews

• Clare Clark (the story has fattened, its devastating reserve giving way to something softer and less substantial. Peripheral characters, evoked with discomfiting economy in Tremain’s original story, swell into caricature)
• shereadsnovels (I felt that Danni and Daphne’s relationship began very suddenly with no real build and I just didn’t feel very convinced by it. I know quite a lot about Daphne du Maurier’s history and background, ... and the impression I got from those books is that she was a complex person – shy, private and reclusive, which could make her come across as distant or aloof, but also loyal and affectionate towards her close friends. There’s not much of that complexity in Tremain’s novel; her Daphne is cold, manipulative and selfish, caring more about her reputation than Danni’s feelings.)
• whatcathyreadnext

"The wax child" by Olga Ravn (Viking, 2025)

170 pages (many not full). The notes (2 pages) say that it's based on Nordic folklore and historal sources, mostly from around 1600.

Initially, the "I" is a wax effigy owned by Christenze. In the 1600s, Anne has lost 15 infants. Christenze, a noble, is blamed. She runs away to Aalborg where she becomes close to some women who are distrusted. Christenze is arrested. The doll's looked after by Karen, Maren's youngest daughter, 9. Christenze, Maren, Dorte and Apelone are all accused of witchcraft. Karen is a witness. The effigy thinks "I was allowed to experience the wonder of weeping, for her tears fell upon my cheek as if they were mine" (p.103). In court, women show signs of being possessed. Maren is sentenced to death by burning. Later Dorte and Apelone are burned. Christenze is transported back to Copenhagen, the wax effigy back with her. She talks with Kirsten, the pregnant queen, who asks for advice. She meets the blindfolded king, who knows who she is. Because of her status she's beheaded rather than burned. The severed head speaks.

The language has fevered moments -

• I saw goldsmiths' stalls and sheeny lemons in wooden crates. Now and then, I turned my back on progress. Everything throws, when entering the path of the sun, a shadow. Time too has its shadow, the ages of man (p.26)
• the needle of St.Botolph's spire pierces the tongue of the sky. The wind moves over tracts of land to which no one yet lays claim. One by one, the decades pass over me like the wind upon the fjord (p.74)
• Were I not a wax child, I think I could have been a wound (p.83)
• Now it comes to me in a vision - a blazing field of red mirrors advancing from the sea towards the coast, the rain shower's dale. A mussel's shell with a human skull for its pearl (p.85)
• How do I know this? The dead fly in the window-sill told me. the grass-pollen as if puffed into the air told me, a brass candlestick told me, a speck of grit. Everything remembers and speaks to those who will listen (p.123)
• Bloody milk of the sick cow upon the ant-hill. Oil in water, fox-teeth by the mouth of the child, flesh and blood of Christ in the fist, under the palate, a yearning, a whole never made light, a fray-boggard, the rosemary bush - dust-covered, kingly in its anticipation, every smallest lance-shaped leaf (p.155)

Other reviews

• Aida Edemariam (There is an argument that this type of feminine group magic is a form of psychological release in a world where this was hard to come by; it certainly stands in stark contrast to the public male narrative according to which the women are tried. ... At its best The Wax Child is richly evocative, beautiful, creepy and visceral. “It is the darkest of times, December. From the curvature of the earth, minutes run like droplets from the day.” At other times, there’s a bit too much research just out of sight; the novel can feel elliptical, even baffling. One misses the space, the clarity and freedom of The Employees. But maybe that’s the thing about weaving spells. About poetry, too: demand it makes neat sense, and you begin to have too much in common with the witch-hunters.)
• karissareadsbooks
• Ian Mond (The wax doll, still alive and buried in dirt, unable to weep or speak, does not understand her mistress’s final soliloquy. “I am only a doll,” it tells us, not for the first time. “A child of wax.” Yet we hear Christenze. We understand that neither she nor her friends are defined by how they died, but by the intimacy they shared.)

"Barthes: A very short introduction" by Jonathan Culler (OUP, 1983)

• "there is nothing more deplorable than the literary practice called, I believe, poetic prose, which consists of using words for the obscure harmonics that resound about them, made up of vague senses in contradiction with the clear meaning" (Sartre, "What is Literature, p.210).
• "Wrestling attracts Barthes for a number of reasons: it is a popular rather than a bourgeois pastime; it prefers scene to narrative, revelling in theatrical signifying gestures; and it is unabashedly artificial, not only in its signs of pain, anger, and distress but even in its outcome: no one would be shocked to learn that the matches are fixed" (p.27)
• "the writer produces 'presumptions of meaning, forms, as if were, and it is the world which fills them'" (p.9/xi of "Essais critiques")
• "The task of literature, Barthes writes in the preface to Essais critique, is not ... to express the unexpressible ... Literature should attempt, rather, 'to unexpress the expressible', to problematize the meanings we automatically confer or assume" (p.44)
• "he takes no interest in poetry ... Barthes associates poetry with symbols, with plenitudes of meaning, with attempts to create motivated rather arbitrary signs ... for him it is prose that experiments with language while poetry attempts to transcend or destroy it" (p.45-46)
• "Barthes seldom takes part in debates he has provoked and in later years he became increasingly 'laxist', as he put it: uncompromising in his own formulations but uninterested in challenging others or in defending his own positions" (p.54)
• "to invent 'post-structuralism' one has to reduce structuralism to a narrow caricature. Much of what was heralded as 'post-structuralist' was in fact already conspicuous in structuralist writings" (p.65)
• "In the 1960s there seemed no reason to try to distinguish structuralism and seminology" (p.66)
• "In order to understand the functioning of the most interesting and innovatory literary works, one must reconstruct the systems of norms they parody, resist, or disrupt" (p.66)
• "Subjectivity is generally imagined as a plenitude with which I encumber the text, but in fact this faked plenitude is only the wake of all the codes that constitute me, so that ultimately my subjectivity has the generality of stereotypes" (p.68)
• "the version of post-structuralism called 'deconstruction' ... characteristically shows how discourses undermine the philosophical presuppositions on which they rely" (p.74)
• "structuralism has devoted much energy to demonstrating that the conscious subject should not be taken as a given and treated as the source of meaning but should rather be seen as the product of cultural forces and social codes that operate through it" (p.78)
• "A naked body is less erotic than the spot 'where the garment leaves gaps' ... Avant-garde techniques, or disruptions of traditional expectations, are more pleasurably startling as gaps in a readable discourse: Flaubert, for example, has 'a way of cutting, of perforating discourse, without rendering it meaningless'" (p.83)
• "boredom ... is a major theoretical category with a role in any theory of reading. If one reads intently every word of a Zola novel, one becomes bored, as one does if one tries to skim through Finnigan's Wake for the plot" (p.84)

"reminded of something" by Robin Thomas (Cinnamon Press, 2023)

Poems from Acumen, The High Window, Stand, Rialto, North, etc.

I'm struggling. There are poems from magazines I've been happy to have poem in, but I have trouble working out how to read the pieces. As an example take "Houseproud" (After Larkin, 'Home is so sad') - a house complains about its residents, wanting their help to remain neat and well maintained. At the end (the poem's nearly 30 lines long) it hopes the next lot will be more respectful. I don't know how to go beyond the plain meaning.

"Absolute proof" by Peter James

An audio book.

2005. American magician Mike Dalaney got sacked from his TV show and is drinking. Ross Hunter, a UK reporter, had a vision of his twin brother. After, he found out that his brother had died at that moment. Ross had been sent to Afganistan, barely escaped death, returned to find his wife Imogen in bed with another man. She was sorry. Brother Angus, a UK monk, is soon to die. Brother Peter is in a Greek monastery. Big Tony, an assassin, lives in Monaco. Wesley Wenceslas (46) has got rich from preaching. Dr Harry Cook contacts Ross. He says he has proof of God - 3 sets of coordinates that reveal the Holy Grail (at Glastonbury), a possession of Jesus, and the location of the 2nd coming (the last 2 locations coded). Cook says that God thinks the world is in trouble. He tells Ross something only Ross would know, and gives Ross a long document. Someone's keeping Ross under observation.

Ross has amassed a variety of contacts over the years. A friend points out that Ross's life might be in danger, that the messages received by Cook may come from the antichrist. Ross goes to Cook's house. It's been ransacked and Cook's been murdered. Someone's been digging at the first site. Ross finds what might be the Grail there. An attempt is made on his life. Cook's trusted solicitor and a medium give him info on the 2nd location - Egypt. He goes there, finds what may be Christ's tooth in a cave and is attacked by helicopter gunship. He survives, returns to England and gets the 2 items DNA-tested. He doesn't realise that he's being followed all the time - a Pharma company, Kurclew, want to market the DNA. Imogen receives threatening e-mail. Ross finally tells his wife what's going on. The DNA of the tooth and the grail's blood match.

MI5, the Vatican and the Church of England contact him. Though Ross thinks he's been cleverly avoiding being tailed, his movements and purpose seem known to several organisations, including Wenceslas. He hides the relics with Angus (his uncle!). He escapes from a car chase involving 3 other vehicles. The solicitor is killed. Ross's house is ransacked. Imogen moves out.

Ross is driven by ambition and morals more than money, but his pregnant wife is in danger and they're in debt [My hunch is that his dog will be his weak point]. He distrusts everyone (momentarily, at least). He's careful about saying things on the phone. He doesn't realise that his house is bugged. He meets Sally, a flirty Bristol radio presenter whose uncle is on the Kurclew board. Wenceslas is murdered before Ross was aware of any connection with him (Wenceslas had Ross under observation and was ready to get him killed). Brother Angus contacts his cousin Brother Peter, asking him to collect the relics.

At about the same time, both Ross and the Kurclew board discover that the 3rd set of coordinates is a Hollywood location. A friend does a DNA database search and finds that in Hollwood there's a man with a DNA match down both the female and female lines to christ's blood - Mike Dalaney. His parents had been killed in a mock-crucifixion. Ross heads for Hollywood, unaware that Big Tony is following him. Sally happens to be on the same flight - Ross doesn't believe it's a coincidence. In LA he sees Imogen across the road. He discovers that Delaney volunteers in a drug rehab centre, doing miracles according to the manager. He meets Delaney, performing in a cheap bar for drinks. Dalaney knows Ross's name, knows Dr Cook and knows his own identity. He says he's not the second coming, he's checking to see if humanity is ready. Outside the bar Delaney saves Ross from being run over, dying in the process. Ross tells Sally everything [which is a surprise]. He talks to Imogen - she's with 2 Kurclew people. He pours the DNA away while they're watching. Meanwhile, Peter's collected the relics then loses them to yobs. The 2 Kurclew people die in the flight back to the UK. Imogen and Ross break up - she's miscarried. Sally and Ross are together. Around the world the skies suddenly go dark and a rainbow appears. His story is published much more briefly than expected. He gets an offer of millions for the full story.

Over 16 hours long - much the longest audio book I've listened to. Nothing bored me, though several sections could have been shorter while being just as effective. I think the monkey plot could have gone, and I don't see why both John and Peter are needed.

Other reviews

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• Rebecca McCormick (I generally liked the book, although I felt a couple of threads or characters could have been eliminated.)
• carpelibrum (I found Ross's character to be a little irritating at times and I soon grew weary of wading through the endless descriptions of scenery and mundane tasks. Ross's ruminations also took up too much space and only served to recap his thoughts on the goings on; which is boring if you're the sort of reader able to keep up with what's happening. And the ending? Where do I start? The ending left far too many unanswered questions. It was ambiguous and anti climactic)
• Dane Cobain (there were also a few things that I wasn’t too keen on, including the ending, which sort of just petered out. I wasn’t particularly keen on the secondary romance plot either, which didn’t really need to be there.)