Bibliography, August 2026

BOTM: A. Massie, A question of loyalties (1989)

C. Brenchley, Radhika rages at the Crater school (2025)
E. Carrere, I am alive and you are dead (1993)
T. Cole, Open city (2011)
E. Frank, Stranger than Fiction (2023)
A. Gide, Strait is the gate (1909)
V. Hugo, Les Miserables  (1862)
M. James, Black leopard, red wolf (2019)
P. Ormerod, David Bowie and the search for life, death and God (2026)                   
N. Slater, 1000 feasts (2024)
H.G. Wells, The island of Dr Moreau (1901)

There was quite a bit of rubbish here - Ormerod's was overwhelmingly the worst. Facile and cherrypicked. And I was starting to worry that I hadn't read an outstanding book for months. But I reckon there are three here. Most marginal was Teju Cole's novel where the main character is really New York, so I had an uneasiness that this will read very differently if you know that city well. It's still an excellent evocation about place and - through omission - person. Next up, Hugo, which I took to France as my long holiday reading and it was magnificent. I discover it's basically as long as War and Peace which was not obvious when I started, but is well worth the effort. It is crammed with brilliant observations and - as far as one can tell in translation - marvellously written passages. The structure and plot are also superb. I may even break my historical reservations about 80s musicals as a result. However, BOTM, and the reason why was read Hugo in the first place was Alan Massie's (much shorter) book on the legacy of Vichy. I thought this was the best novel I've read in ages. It's is a window into a very particular and I think now very little known slice of French history, and it integrates that organically into the trunk of France in a way that's fascinating. It's written very well, with the right level of distance: neither author, nor narrator, nor reader here are French. Alongside it, the narrator subplot also threads well. It's not perfect - I think the ending could have been landed a couple of degrees better - but it did make me want to read more French literature and history, which I am very glad I did.

NB.  Because I have the stats, it's worth noting that France is actually my fourth country in terms of literature. However, the ratio is extraordinarily fat headed. Since I started recording these things, I've read just under 2,000 novels, 950 of them by English authors, 550 by Americans. France (43) lags Scotland (5) by a small margin. Ireland (36) and Russia (29) bring up the top six. It's embarrassingly narrow. Only about 250 are not from Anglophone countries. Anyway, I'm reading more French literature for the next year.