From Pyrenees to Pennines

As I turned the last page of one of the very first books I read this year, I knew it would make my 2025 Top Ten. It may even be my Top Read. It’s Lucy Steeds‘s The Artist, set in rural Provence in the years after WWI. Rupert is sent off to France to write about the reclusive and wildly successful artist, once a friend of the deceased Cezanne, Edouard Tartuffe. Here he meets the idiosyncratic and uncommunicative painter, and his timid, almost invisible niece, Ettie, who serves his every need. This is their story – evocative, involving and completely immersive.

Shortly after this, I read Tessa Hadley‘s The Party. Hadley packs a lot into this novella about two student sisters, Evelyn and Moira, living in Bristol on the cusp of the 1950s. We meet them at a party in an all-but abandoned pub. We’re introduced to their home life, and to their sortie out of this stifling environment. A thoughtful and enjoyable evocation of a period of recent history and its awareness of class, its sexual and societal mores that feels at once so distant, yet so very recognisable.

Douglas Bruton‘s Woman in Blue next. He must have been fascinated by Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, in the Rijksmuseum: he knows it so well. In his story, an unnamed man visits this picture every day, for several hours, knows it intimately and interrogates it for meaning. The other narrator is the young woman in the picture, who describes how it is she comes to sit for this particular portrait, and her own feelings. This book explores the boundaries between reality and illusion in art, inspecting the portrait and the two protagonists intimately. It’s a captivating novella, with a surprise ending, and beautifully expressed throughout.

Joseph O’Connor‘s The Ghosts of Rome now. A thriller that starts where My Father’s House leaves off: though it can be read independently of the earlier book without difficulty. We’re in Nazi-occupied Rome in 1944. The novel details the activities of a group in the Vatican known as The Choir, daring Escape-Line activists, who have real achievements under their belts despite the disapproval of the Pope, and the efforts of Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann to have them brought down. The writing is immediate, graphic and authentic; and the book is based on a real knowledge and understanding of this particular slice of Rome’s wartime history. It’s a thrilling and involving story that I was captivated by from the very first page.

Georgina Harding‘s Land of the Living has two settings: the Burma campaign towards the end of WWII, set in the beautifully exotic and remote landscape of Nagaland with its rains, forests, waterfalls and exotic birds; and the muted grey, flat Norfolk farmland to which Lt. Charles Ashe returns to farm following his wartime soldiering. Ashe soon marries the woman he was engaged to, Claire, and embarks on the hard day to day life of a Norfolk famer. He can’t – won’t – communicate with her about the horrors he’s encountered. She doesn’t know how to break his protective shell, finds she hardly knows him. Their mutual incomprehension, and Ashe’s two vastly different worlds is well-wrought. A vivid and emotionally charged book.

The Safekeep: Yael van der Wouden. We’re in a small Dutch town in the 1960s. WWII has cast a long shadow. Memories of the hardships endured then, and of the fall-out from the defeat of Germany intercede in every day life.This book keeps on delivering surprises. Is it about a lonely – and frankly unpleasant – young woman, Isabel, left living in the family home after her parents had died and her brothers departed? Is it about an astonishingly unexpected lesbian love affair? Or perhaps something else altogether? An absorbing, cleverly plotted book, which made me aware of a part of Dutch history about which I knew little.

We Germans, by Alexander Starritt, takes the form of a long account written by an elderly German, shortly before his death, to his British grandson, who has, perhaps clumsily, been asking what the old man did back in WWII. In 1944, Meissner, a German artillery soldier, had been fighting with his unit in Russia, in Ukraine. But in Poland, he and a few others somehow got separated when detailed to look for a rumoured food depot. They’re forced to kill as they attempt to muddle their way back to their unit, They witness horror. They steal. They squabble. This is a well-drawn book, a deft exploration of the moral contradictions inherent in saving one’s own life at the cost of the lives of others. Though fiction, it’s clearly deeply rooted in the reality of the helpless, pointless horror of the last period of the war for those often starving people, both army and hapless civilians who found themselves marooned on the Eastern Front.

With Benjamin Wood‘s Seascraper, we’re in the 1950s. Thomas is nineteen, and lives in poverty with his mum in a dishevelled house in a depressed Lancashire coastal town , scrabbling a living since his much-loved grandfather’s death by continuing his work as a shankar – prawn collector – using a pony and trap. Though bright, he never completed his schooling. His dream is to become a musician. One day, an American film director who somehow meets his mum involves Thomas in his idea to use a stretch of local beach as the atmospheric backdrop to his latest film. And he’s willing to pay Thomas well. Although he’s sceptical, this is an opportunity perhaps to escape his obligations, the bleak poverty of his situation. Of course, things don’t turn out to be so straightforward, but yet the story ends with a glimmer of hope. This story, unfolding a film-that-might-be is cinematic in its evocation of the bleak seaside landscape and Thomas’ dreary, tough existence. It packs a lot into its 160 pages. Benjamin Wood is someone whose writing is to be savoured.

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr re-imagines two lives: those of Bobby McBride and Robert Colquhoun, two twentieth century painters of whom you may not have heard. Both born in working-class Glasgow just before WWI, they both had a struggle at home to be permitted to attend Glasgow School of Art. Where they met, and soon became inseparable, living and working together, exploring their homosexuality at a time when they risked ostracism and imprisonment by being so much as noticed for this. Early success propelled them to star-status. They worked hard, but played harder, and their tendency to self-destruct sent them on a downward trajectory towards poverty and early death. An immersive, sympathetic imagining of two lives. The first part, where the two men overcome their difficult circumstances to become rising stars is perforce much more enjoyable than the later chapters illustrating their self-destruction. But the book describes well the blossoming of two talents, as well as showing what it meant to be queer in a society which both reviled and punished homosexuality.

The Wax Child by Olga Ravn is beautifully translated by Martin Aitken. This story takes us to 17th century Denmark, where on average, one ‘witch’ was burned every five days. This kind of event was mirrored all over Europe. Our narrator is a little beeswax doll fashioned by a impoverished noblewoman, Christenze Krukow. Omniscient, she sees and hears all that goes on. How her maker is one of a group of women who work, and sing, and gossip, and practice the folk remedies they learned from their own mothers: who protect one another from violence from husbands or others in their household: who become seen in their communities as practisers of magic and witchcraft. The book is interspersed with spells and incantations which exist not to harm, but to protect; to prevent accident and disease; to bid others be kind; to divine if someone’s life may soon end. Inevitably, most die, found guilty of witchcraft. This book is beautiful, horrifying, visceral, poetic. There is a sense of spells being woven on every page. The women in this story existed. They died as ‘witches’ and now they are remembered in this powerfully atmospheric and evocative re-imagining of their circumstances.

I made this list of Top Ten books a week or so ago. But lo! Since then I have had two further 5 ⭐reads. I’ll review those in my Love your Library round-up next week. They couldn’t be more different from each other. They’re Saltblood: Francesca de Tores and Back in the Day: Oliver Lovrenski (Translated by Nichola Smalley).

It’s been a good year for memorable books. Of the 112 or so books I’ve read, well over half have scored 4⭐and above.

Only one has gained but a single star: Horrible Histories author Terry Deary came and spoke at our local Independent book shop about his venture into crime writing – Actually I’m a Murderer. I thought I should give this book a chance, even though Cosy Crime isn’t my thing. I tried. I have concluded that Cosy Crime definitely isn’t my thing.

I already have a pile of books, mainly from the library – fiction, works in translation, and non-fiction, awaiting my attention in 2026. Not to mention the books that sit on our bookshelves, month after month, wondering why I never get round to them. One day …

The featured photo is by Nitin Arya, via Pexels.