book-review

Claire’s and Tim’s Top Books of 2025

/ Claire Fuller / 2 Comments

In 2025 I read about the same number of books as the previous year – 85 books, mostly contemporary or a novel from an author’s backlist, and I also made a promise to my friend Lizzy to read a ‘classic’ – this year, Pride and Prejudice. A couple of my top ten books came late in the year (A Sport and a Pastime and Heart the Lover, and one, The Infamous Gilberts (which isn’t published until 2026) jumping into my top three. I always feel a little sad for those books that are bumped off my ever developing list of ten favourites. Perhaps I should do a second post about almost made-its.

Two of the books in the picture are mock-ups. We listened to the audio book and forgot to buy the physical book. Can you spot which ones?

So, here are my and Tim’s favourite ten books of the year. We share a record-breaking three this year: Take What You Need by Idra Novey, Heart the Lover by Lily King, and Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry which we read over twelve months in our book group.

All of my and Tim’s books can be bought from my list on Bookshop.org.

Let me know if you’ve read any and which catch your eye.

You can see previous year’s lists here: 2024 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

Claire’s Top 3 (in no order)

The Infamous Gilberts by Angela Tomaski

My lovely, funny, frustrating father died in last March, and I’ve been clearing his flat. One thing I brought home to put on my own wall was a family tree. There is dust along the top of the frame that has been there for years and I cannot bear to wipe it off. Angela Tomaski gets this. She writes about loss, but in such a darkly funny, brilliant way, that I have fallen in love with The Infamous Gilberts.
Maximus, an enigmatic neighbour, takes us on a tour of Thornwalk, a dilapidated stately home, just before its contents are removed and it’s made into a hotel. Object by object he introduces us to the Gilbert siblings, Lydia, Hugo, Anabel, Jeremy, and Rosalind, and their morbidly amusing tragedies. It is an unusual narrative style, one I’ve never read before, but it is so worth sticking with. The chapter headings give a hint and flavour of the book: ‘A Small Pile of Mouldy Hay,’ ‘Some Very Small Socks’, and ‘The Greasy Window’. I was swept into the siblings’ lives, even while most of them are pretty awful human beings.
I laughed, and sniggered and underlined and yes, I cried at the end. Although it might have been dust in my eye.
Buy The Infamous Gilberts from Bookshop.org

Leaving by Roxana Robinson

Leaving by Roxana Robinson was one of three books recommended by author Huma Qureshi as part of my Books under the Radar series on my website and Instagram. I couldn’t possibly read all the books suggested in the series each week but this one caught my eye and I bought it and read it as soon as it arrived, and it completely absorbed me. It reminded me of the very best Sue Miller in that it is at the heart a family drama but with a lot to say about loyalty, love, and parental relationships with adult children.
Sarah and Warren meet each other again at sixty by chance. They were girlfriend and boyfriend when they were twenty or so, but split up and lost touch. Now they reconnect and start a relationship even though Warren is married. He decides to leave his wife for Sarah but this act has consequences far beyond anyone can imagine. The ending hit me really hard (don’t go into this book thinking it will be a light family drama) especially since almost this same scenario recently happened to someone close to me. Highly recommended, and very likely to be on my top reads of the year.
Buy Leaving from Bookshop.org

Take What You Need by Idra Novey

Take What You Need by Idra Novey was recommended to me by fellow author and friend, Judith Heneghan, and I loved it. In rural Pennsylvania, sculptor, Jean is mourning the estrangement of her step daughter, Leah, and remembering how four years ago their relationship broke apart. Jean is a sculptor in her sixties welding metal alone in the sitting room of her father’s old house, when a family move into the almost derelict house next door, where the water has been cut off. Jean starts a friendship with the young man of the family who helps her with her work. In alternate chapters we hear from Leah who is returning, to Jean’s house having learnt of her death – and is examining the prejudices she encounters and finally, her own.
Goodness, this is so good. Propulsive and with brilliant writing. It looks at the sexuality of older women, American poverty, sculpting, bias and expectations, motherhood – there is so much to think about, but without the story feeling overloaded. Highly recommended.
Buy Take What You Need from Bookshop.org

And Claire’s next 7

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

This is Salter’s third novel, written / set in the early – mid 1960s in rural France, and it is AMAZING. For its prose – descriptions of France and travelling by train and food and buildings. For its atmosphere – out of season France, a slow, languid feeling where nothing really happens. And for its characters and very graphic descriptions of sex.
An unnamed and unreliable American narrator goes to stay in his friends’ house in Autun, a small town in Burgundy. While he is there, summoning up courage to speak to a local woman, another American man – Philip Dean arrives in a Delage convertible, and decides to stay. Dean meets a local shopgirl, Anne-Marie and they start a relationship. From here on, the unnamed narrator imagines the time Dean and Anne-Marie spend together: their trips out for meals in the car, their overnight stays in hotels, their visits to her parents, and the sex they have. Soon Dean runs out of money, and although naive Anne-Marie is expecting marriage, something else happens that Salter cleverly foreshadows if you pay attention.
Buy A Sport and a Pastime from Bookshop.org

Castaway by Lucy Irvine

Who remembers this from the first time around? First published in 1983 it’s about the year that Lucy Irvine spent on an uninhabited island in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and Australia, with Gerald Kingsland who is twenty-five years older than her (she is 25). I think I read it in the 1980s (I took this copy from my dad’s shelves recently), and on this re-read I loved it.
On the island Lucy wants to be busy fishing, making a shelter, exploring, but Gerald either wants to lie in the shade or persuade Lucy to have sex. As they nearly starve and run out of water, instead of Gerald, Lucy falls in love with Tuin, the island. And her writing, about the sun, the interior and the sea, is incredibly sensual. She is also, it feels, very frank with her own frustrations, desires, and needs – and in fact some details that made me squint as I read – and the book opens up all sorts of interesting questions about couples, compromise, affection, and sexual needs. In the end, the couple are ‘saved’ by local islanders who bring their engines to Gerald to repair in return for food and water. Even this adds a complication, because it means Lucy can stay on the island but at what price?
It’s fascinating stuff and I’m still mulling it over.
Buy Castaway from Bookshop.org

The Adversary by Michael Crummey

This is the fourth Michael Crummey novel I’ve read, and like all the others I loved it. In the late 18th Century two siblings – the Widow Caines and Abe Strapp are fighting for commercial supremacy in Mockbeggar, a small town on the shore of Newfoundland. Abe is an awful man – a drunkard, a thief, a murderer, and you can only hope that the Widow Caines is better. She seems to treat her servants and the villagers better, but she has her own devastating schemes that are only shockingly revealed at the very end of the novel. There is weather and plague, and curses, and brilliant characters. In a weird way it reminded me of Lonesome Dove – in the way the POV shifts, in the language that they use, in how they both feel like a brilliant saga that you never want to end. Highly recommended.
Buy The Adversary from Bookshop.org

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Five big stars for The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. I chose this book for the book club I run at the Cabinet Rooms in Winchester. It was pretty divisive, with lots of people actively disliking it but I adored it. An unnamed narrator is a writer and creative writing teacher living in Manhattan when a close friend of hers – someone she had a brief affair with and is also a writer and teacher – kills himself. The narrator is persuaded by the man’s widow to look after his Great Dane, Apollo even though her apartment doesn’t allow pets. This rather slight story is interspersed with musings about creative writing teaching, loss, suicide, friendship and much more.
And it made a brilliant book club book even though many people hated it. There was so much to discuss and some of the things other members pointed out were brilliantly revealing.
Buy The Friend from Bookshop.org

You Like it Darker by Stephen King

Twelve creepy, weird and brilliant short stories. I had my favourites and they tended to be the longer ones: Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream (Danny dreams that he discovers a person, murdered and buried behind a gas station, when he visits he discovers his dream is true); Rattlesnakes (a man befriends his neighbour – a slightly mad but harmless woman who pushes a stroller around with, supposedly her dead twins in it); and Slide Inn Road (a family take a wrong turn in their car and are apprehended by two men who terrorise them). Plenty here to get your teeth into and keep you up at night.
Buy You Like it Darker from Bookshop.org

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

An epic – in storytelling, in length and in writing ability. 843 gripping pages. I don’t really understand how McMurtry did it, kept all the storylines interesting, all the characters completely real, kept surprising me with who he killed off. And how he wrote the women who have so often been left out of, or relegated to inconsequential characters in Westerns.
In the late 1870s, Gus and Call, the owners of the Hat Creek Cattle Company decide to make a cattle drive north from their Texas home of Lonesome Dove to Montana, where they hear the grass is greener and there is plenty of land. They take with them an assorted bunch of cowboys – some teenagers, some experienced hands, some troublemakers – as well as a local prostitute, a cook and a couple of pigs.
Some men are lost, others are hanged, there are fights along the way with Indians, and the reuniting of a long lost love. I fell so hard for this book, and if I’m being truthful, Gus. Oh Gus. Sob, Sigh.
I read it split into about 10 chunks with my book club. It was universally loved.
Buy Lonesome Dove from Bookshop.org

Heart the Lover by Lily King

“A long tender farewell to youth”, as one character says in this intense, emotional, lovely book. The narrator (only named at the very end) has her first relationship at college, unsurprisingly there are issues, but through this man she starts a love affair with Yash, someone who will move in and out of her life with desire, and love, and pain. I don’t want to say too much about what happens, but there are mostly two parts: youth in college, and middle-age. I cried. You will cry too.
Buy Heart the Lover from Bookshop.org

Tim’s Top Reads of 2025

Tim’s Top 3 (in no order)

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

What an epic! – I’ve never read a Western before but this is something else. Enthralling characters, blistering dialogue and storylines that are both brutal and tender. It’s very long, but when I got to page 843 I wanted to start all over again. I travelled every mile from Texas to Montana with the Hat Creek Cattle company. Everyone I’ve met who has also read it has felt the same way.
Buy Lonesome Dove from Bookshop.org

Back in the World by Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff’s short stories are amazing. I seem to have read some every year for the past 5 years, and keep coming back to them. Favourite one in this book is ‘Coming Attractions’ where a precocious teenage girl working late in a movie theatre makes prank calls to strangers, including a man named Mr. Love. She thinks she’s smart but in reality she’s lonely and abandoned. Top marks.

Flesh by David Szalay

Szalay has written a cracking, and Booker Prize winning worthy, tale of a man’s life – from Hungary to England, from poverty to money and from brutality to peace. It’s such great writing – where you find yourself rooting for István even though he can be a git. Every bit as good as ‘All that Man Is’ by the same author. Thoroughly recommended and surprisingly fun.
Buy Flesh from Bookshop.org

And Tim’s next 7

Click here to buy any of these from Bookshop.org

That’s it from us in 2025. I’d love to hear about your favourite reads of 2025.

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My novel, Hunger and Thirst will be published in May in the UK, and June in the US and Canada. Buy it from Bookshop.org in the UK. In the US, if you pre-order on 30th or 31st December 2025 from Barnes and Noble you can get 25% off if you are a Premium or Rewards member (free to join). Just type PREORDER25 at the checkout.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

/ Claire Fuller / 2 Comments

Five big stars for The Friend by Sigrid Nunez. I chose this book for the book club I run at the Cabinet Rooms in Winchester. It was pretty divisive, with lots of people actively disliking it, but I adored it.

An unnamed narrator is a writer and creative writing teacher living in Manhattan when a close friend of hers – someone she had a brief affair with and is also a writer and teacher – kills himself. The narrator is persuaded by the man’s widow to look after his Great Dane, Apollo even though her apartment doesn’t allow pets. This rather slight story is interspersed with musings about creative writing teaching, loss, suicide, friendship and much more. My father had recently taken his own life when I read it, and rather than it distressing me because of the links (I am still distressed by everything, so a book makes no difference) it brought everything into focus.


And it made a brilliant book club book even though many people hated it. There was so much to discuss and some of the things other members pointed out were brilliantly revealing.

Buy it from Bookshop.org here.

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What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

/ Claire Fuller / 1 Comment

I love how whatever Ian McEwan writes surprises me. He hasn’t settled for a genre and I like that it feels as though he’s still playing and enjoying himself.

In What We Can Know, which will be published in September, it’s about 100 years in the future from now, the seas have risen and in England only islands remain. Tom, an academic, is obsessed with a lost poem from about 2014 written by a famous poet for his wife, Vivian, whom Tom also obsesses over to the detriment of his own relationship with Rose.

The first part of the book is Tom’s search, both in surviving papers and then via an actual treasure hunt (I love this bit especially), where Tom tries to piece together where the poem might be and what it is about. The second of the novel is the ‘true’ story, which I also really enjoyed, although none of it came as a revelation (maybe it wasn’t supposed to). But of course, there is throughout the brilliant McEwan writing, and the easy story-telling. I really enjoyed this.

Does this sound appealing? Are you going to be reading it?

Buy it from Bookshop.org UK here.

Claire’s and Tim’s Top Books of 2024

/ Claire Fuller / 3 Comments

I read about 85 books this year, and three of the ones on my top ten reads of 2024 I listened to as audio books. An excellent audio book does depend on an excellent narrator as well as a brilliantly written book, and while I always have an audio book on the go as well as a physical book, when I’ve finished listening, if I’ve loved the audio book, I always buy a physical copy. I sometimes use my library to get my audio books, but recently, I also been using xigxag – a UK-based audio book company where you can buy audio books without a subscription, are usually only £7.99, and where some books are ‘x-books’ which allow you to switch between the audio book and an ebook. (If you’d like to get your first xigxag audio book for £3.99 click this link to download and register in the xigxag app – I will earn a free book when three people buy their first book via this link.)

So, here are my and Tim’s favourite ten books of the year. We share one: Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke, which we read for our book group.

All of my and Tim’s books can be bought from my list on Bookshop.org.

Let me know if you’ve read any and which catch your eye.

You can see previous year’s lists here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

Claire’s Top 3 (in no order)

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman

Rachman is just so damn good at writing completely believable characters, those I love and those I hate. I listened to this read by Sam Alexander (who read it exceptionally well), and I loved it so much I bought a physical copy. This novel covers the life of Charles (Pinch) Bavinsky, and we first meet him when he is five in his father’s painting studio in Rome, in 1960. Bear Bavinsky is a famous, philandering, egotistical, larger-than-life painter and Pinch is both terrified and in awe of him, and really remains so for the whole of his life. And yet although everyone crumples in the path of Bear – his several wives, his many children and so on – Pinch has the last laugh, although it’s still not funny. For the most part Pinch’s life is a sad one – solitary, unfulfilled, dissatisfied, but so real. I wanted to shake him; I wanted to hug him; I loved him.
Buy The Italian Teacher from Bookshop.org

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Another book I listened to and then bought when I fell in love with it. Beginning in the 1760s, the novel starts with a couple fleeing a community to exist on their own as lovers in a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire. And from there we meet the occupants of the cabin – which is developed to a house – through the ages and even into the future. We meet an apple farmer and his two daughters who die in extraordinary ways; a man hunting for a slave; the doctor of a man with schizophrenia who lives in the house; and after his death his sister who finds his videos of the woods with titles that relate to those who have lived there before; a closeted painter in love with a poet; a young biologist, and many more. The most perfect snippets of human life and the nature that surrounds them and how all histories leach into each other, leaving traces behind. I was sad to say goodbye to every character.
Buy North Woods from Bookshop.org

Maurice and Maralyn by Sophie Elmhirst

This might be my perfect kind of book. I LOVE true stories of physical danger and survival, and have read many. But this non-fiction account of how Maurice and Maralyn Bailey’s boat capsized and how they survived in the Pacific for four months in a raft and a dinghy, goes beyond that (fascinating) story, to what happened immediately afterwards and in the rest of their lives. It is a love story, and yes, there was a moment when I cried. In 1973 M&M set sail from England, heading for New Zealand, but in the pacific their boat is hit by a whale and sinks. They manage to grab a few provisions and scramble into the life-raft. They survive for 118 days floating on the ocean, catching fish and birds and sharks, and eating them raw. When they are finally rescued they are given celebrity status. Elmhirst writes their story in wonderfully clear and precise prose, without melodrama and with exactly the right amount of detail. The audio book is beautifully read by Florence Howard.
Buy Maurice and Maralyn from Bookshop.org

And Claire’s next 7

Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford

A slippery, fever-dream of a novel. Unsettling, puckish, and brilliantly written, it’s an absolute one-off. I loved it. Written mostly in the first person plural, a group of young cousins gather with their parents for a birthday party at Aunt Frankie’s house in upstate New York. They see something from a bathroom window moving from the treeline to a shed, ‘…we just knew it was the same thing over and over, which was worse, somehow, even though it should have been better that there was only just one.’ Abi, only three goes charging outside, and the others go in search of her. It gets darker and weirder as the children encounter many inexplicable things in the woods. These sections are interspersed with ‘Intermezzos’ giving some of the history of the family and Beezy the matriarch and how she died. There is creepiness, and surprise, and craziness, all of it brilliantly written. At the end there is some kind of resolution but just enough to leave me thoroughly unsettled. Highly recommended. It will be published in the UK in April 2025. Pre-order it and thank me later.
Buy Idle Grounds from Bookshop.org

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

The Shards: Sex and death in 1981 in LA. This is a lustful, gory, page-turnery, meta, fictional writer’s origin story, and I loved it. I did love the second half more than the first, but by the end I was eating it up and then I had to spend another hour on Reddit to work out what the hell I just read (and still didn’t know). Seventeen-year-old Bret Ellis is alone for the start of his senior school year at Buckley – a private LA school where everyone is rich and good looking (and where the actual BEE went) – his parents being on an extended trip around Europe. When new student, Robert arrives, Bret immediately believes he’s got something to hide and is lying about a great deal. At the same time there is a serial killer on the streets of LA, as well as a weird hippie cult, and girls and animals are disappearing. Bret believes that Robert has something to do with it. But Bret himself is unreliable, writing this story age 57, telling us many times that it’s a narrative, and that he is prone to embellishment. He scatters the story with clues which are slippery and clever so that by the end you realise nothing was as you thought…or was it? Bret is a semi-closeted lust-filled young man with a girlfriend, and the sex – of which there is a great deal – is graphically described.
Buy The Shards from Bookshop.org

Birdeye by Judith Heneghan

Yes, I’m quoted on the cover of this, and yes, Judith is a friend of mine, that wouldn’t be enough to make her second novel (for adults) on to my top ten reads of the year. The book is here because I stand by every word of my quote: Evocative, haunting, masterful. I loved this book. Liv Ferrars, born in England, has lived in a ramshackle house in Upstate New York since the ’60s when Birdeye was a thriving commune. Now there is only Liv, her two closest friends Sonny and Mishti, and one of her adult daughters left. And then one April morning a young man turns up unexpectedly. At the same time, Sonny and Mishti make an announcement, and shortly afterwards Liv’s other daughter arrives from England, and everything that Liv thought was stable and ongoing is upset and unreckonable.
Buy Birdeye from Bookshop.org

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke

Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke is a re-issue from 1973, which apparently was met with horror on its first publication. I can see why, but I loved it. It is repulsive, disturbing, grotesque, and mordantly funny – I laughed out loud many times and then felt bad about laughing. It’s a clever writer who can make a reader feel both delighted and appalled in the same moment. Dinah Brooke’s writing is clear and crisp, and the images she creates in the reader’s head are vivid and nightmarish.
Lord Jim at Home is a story in three parts about the life of Giles Trenchard, born between the wars into an upper middle class family where he is cruelly treated by his father and his first nursemaid. He learns to keep his head down, and by doing this he survives school and escapes to the Navy. The second part is about long stretches of time doing nothing, and an hour or two of intense and terrible fighting. When Giles returns to England he finds he doesn’t fit in anywhere, can’t understand what he’s supposed to be doing, and the third part is completely unexpected and yet makes complete sense in a weird and very dark way.
Buy Lord Jim at Home from Bookshop.org

People who eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry

This non-fiction book tells the story of twenty-one-year-old Lucie Blackman, from England, who disappeared in Japan in 2000. She’d been working as a hostess in a nightclub and had gone with an unknown man to the seaside. Her father, Tim worked hard to keep her disappearance in the newspaper headlines, until finally her body was discovered buried in a cave some months later. This is the story of what kind of person Lucie was, how her disappearance and the search for her unfolded, and what happened after her body was discovered. Lloyd Parry is a master at giving us all the details without sensationalism, yet as a narrative which makes us want to read on. Utterly compelling, and highly recommended if you enjoy true crime.
Buy People Who Eat Darkness from Bookshop.org

The Night Interns by Austin Duffy

I loved this novel about three surgical interns in a Dublin hospital working the nightshift. And the more I think about it, the cleverer I realise it is: a novel with a structure that matches the content.
It’s told from the point of view of an unnamed, ungendered narrator who’s working several shifts, mostly at night with two other interns, Lynda and Stuart. They are continually beeped on their pagers and have to go to different wards around the hospital to carry out various tasks – mostly mundane but some highly pressured. Sleep deprivation, and terror at doing something wrong or being accused of doing something wrong by the toxic hospital consultants is pervasive, which means there’s alternately a dream-like quality to what’s happening or everything is lit up with a hideous brightness.
Some reviews criticised the book for a lack of a plot and that many (all?) of the crises fizzle out, but I think that’s the point. Instead of the usual Western structure of everything leading to a single climax, here is scene after scene that might go badly or might go well (just as the narrator feels). And these brightly lit scenes and are linked both physically and metaphorically by the long dark corridors that the interns have to traipse up and down to get to the wards and back to the res where they can (perhaps) rest. Lynda and Stuart talk and laugh with each other and just like the narrator we don’t always understand why. This kind of confusion just made me feel more like the narrator must be feeling – too tired, too discombobulated to work things out. I love novels set in places of work, and I love reading about hospitals, so The Night Interns was always going to appeal to me, but I think it’s a brilliant novel.
Buy The Night Interns from Bookshop.org

The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller

I loved this from the very beginning. I took it on holiday with me and could not put it down. In fact it gave me such a book hangover that it spoiled all the other books I took with me. Reading it as a writer, I was alternately thinking, How does Andrew Miller do that?, and I might as well stop writing now. In the winter of 1962 to 1963, two women make a connection through their pregnancies. Rita and Irene are isolated, facing difficulties with their husbands, and everyone begins to struggle with the worst winter in living memory, and the snow. We hear also from the husbands’ point of view: the local doctor and a man who has decided to take up farming. Not a huge amount happens, but it is all absolutely gripping, fascinating, and beautifully written. I was completely smitten.
Buy The Land in Winter from Bookshop.org

Tim’s Top Reads of 2024

Tim’s Top 3 (in no order)

The Horse by Willy Vlautin

I love all Willy’s novels and his most recent, published in 2024 is no exception. Ann Patchett describes this book as extraordinary, and I don’t argue with Ann Patchett. She’s also very perceptive when she says “Willy Vlautin writes about people overlooked by society and overlooked by literature.”
65-year-old Al Ward lives alone, miles from anywhere, in Nevada. One morning, a blind horse arrives outside his home, seemingly unable to feed itself or stay safe from coyote attacks. 30 miles from the nearest town and broken by alcoholism and anxiety, Al has to decide what to do. Ageing, memory, longing, music and the American landscape, even a hint of autobiography – it’s all in there! Heartbreaking. The Horse is just Brilliant.
Buy The Horse from Bookshop.org

Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld is remarkable. Her short stories are as complete as her novels and her novels are a sharp as her short stories. This collection will be published in February 2025 and contains 12 brilliant stories, 3 of which I’ve read before – but was excited to revisit. All her characters are so believable with their insecurities and anxieties. Familiar themes of divorce, relationships, female friendships and everyday life. All written in a way that no one else can get close to. Claire and I read this to each other and it was so difficult not to binge on.
Buy Show Don’t Tell from Bookshop.org

The Archive of Feelings by Peter Stamm

I’ve only just found Russell Banks. I have no idea why it’s taken me so long – everything I love about contemporary American fiction is in this one. It’s his last collection, published after his death in 2023. Three stories all set in the same upstate NY town. They all work so well – individually and together. A man sells property to a temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man’s character. A couple grow concerned when a family move next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes them. I’ve already made a start on his back catalogue.
Buy American Spirits from Bookshop.org

And Tim’s next 7

Click here to buy any of these from Bookshop.org

That’s it from us in 2024. I’d love to hear about your favourite reads of 2024.

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Are you currently editing a novel or a non-fiction book? I’ll be teaching Editing Fiction and Non-fiction for Arvon in Shropshire (UK) in January 2025. More information.

The Memory of Animals, a novel about love and survival is published in paperback in the UK

/ Claire Fuller / Leave a comment

The Memory of Animals is published in paperback in the UK today, 4th July. There might be other things on people’s minds on the day of the general election, but I’m delighted to see this novel about love, survival and octopuses out in the world. I’ve heard from my editor at Fig Tree Penguin that lots of copies have gone out to Waterstones, and independent bookshops, and of course there are plenty of places online to buy a copy.

Click here to buy a copy from Bookshop.org

Newsletter giveaway
I’ll be running a giveaway for a signed copy to a UK-based reader on my newsletter. So sign up here.

Instagram collaborations
I’m very excited to be collaborating with four fantastic authors over the next four weeks on Instagram to giveaway copies of their novels and The Memory of Animals. I’ll be starting next week with Sarah Freethy, the author of the fabulous The Porcelain Maker, and culminating in a very exciting giveaway in conjunction with my publisher. So do follow me on Instagram.

Book club visits
If your book club would like to read The Memory of Animals (lots of meaty themes and issues to discuss) I’d be delighted to visit your group when you meet to discuss it, either in person if you’re in Hampshire, or online. All I ask in return is a donation (of any amount) to Read Easy Winchester – an organisation that helps adults learn to read. Drop me a line to discuss further.

Book club questions and signed bookplates
If you would like book club questions for The Memory of Animals (or any of my previous novels), or signed bookplates, please get in touch. No charge, but I would appreciate a small donation to Read Easy Winchester.

Event in Wendover, Buckinghamshire
I’m delighted to be celebrating the publication of the paperback with an event at Real Magic Books in Wendover, Buckinghamshire on 9th July. Tickets and more information here.

Claire’s and Tim’s Top Books of 2023

/ Claire Fuller / 8 Comments

I read 90+ books this year, while promoting The Memory of Animals, and finishing a draft of my sixth novel – there’s still lots of editing to do on that though. People often ask how I read so many and whether I read while I’m writing, and my answer is always, if I didn’t I wouldn’t read at all because I’m always writing. And I read while eating breakfast and lunch, I read before I go to sleep, and I usually have a physical book and audio book on the go at the same time. I’m in a book club which I help organise, and although the majority of the books are selected by me, it does push me to read books I wouldn’t necessarily pick up because I’m also thinking about what the other members might enjoy.

So, here are my and Tim’s favourite books of the year. We share two: Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter, and The Dry Heart by Natalie Ginzburg. One of mine was an audio book (Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens) so I’ve mocked up a physical copy. I also set myself a rule of only one book by each author because I read several books by Carys Davies and Sue Miller this year, and I could easily have all of these in my top ten, but then there wouldn’t have been such a wide selection.

All of these books can be bought from my list on Bookshop.org, which will support UK independent bookshops.

Let me know if you’ve read any and which catch your eye.

You can see previous year’s lists here: 2022 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015.

Claire’s Top 3 (in no order)

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Crying on the M25. Not very safe, but I was listening to the ending of The Great Believers and I couldn’t help it. So good. So good I went out and bought a physical copy so that I can more easily go back to it. The novel begins with Nico’s funeral in Chicago in 1985. He has died of AIDS his younger sister, Fiona and his friends – including Yale – are devastated. We follow Yale through his work acquiring art for a gallery and his relationships as those around him die, and his friendship with Fiona. And thirty years later we follow Fiona’s trip to Paris to try and find her estranged daughter. I guess underlying all of this story (and brilliant writing) is the question of how much responsibility we have for keeping alive the memory of those who have died. Highly recommended.

Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter

Hot Springs Drive by Lindsay Hunter

This book hits a sweet spot that I just love in fiction: beautifully written and with a little bit of mystery and darkness. Theresa and Jackie are neighbours and best friends. They go to dieting cub together, their families socialise together, two of their children are in a relationship, and Jackie is having an affair with Theresa’s husband. And then Theresa is found murdered on the floor of her garage. Yes, there is some tension over who did it, but really this is a literary novel (told brilliantly through many different voices) about the consequences of that terrible event.

Lessons by Ian McEwan

Lessons is the story of the life of Roland Baines, cash poor, house rich, part-time bar pianist, looking back to when he was eleven and went to boarding school, moving forward into his seventies, and sometimes sideways into other people’s lives. And throughout there is comment on the times Roland is living through. The novel is ambitious, sweeping, and wonderful. Roland and all the people who come and go in his life have filled my head for several days as I read voraciously during any spare moment. I hope they will stay for longer.
Roland has three significant women in his life: his piano teacher, Miriam, his ex-wife Alissa, and his second wife, Daphne. There is a reckoning to be done with all of them, although the last is really not her fault (there is a brilliant scene where he fights over her ashes with a junior minister on a bridge in Yorkshire and loses). Miriam seduces Roland when he is only fourteen and changes the course of his life. Alissa walks out on him and their eight month old baby, and becomes a famous and successful novelist.
McEwan clearly draws much on his own life with this novel (North Africa, boarding school, discovered brother) but as Alissa says, everything is fair game. I liked how McEwan plays with this, and I also love the questions he raises around a woman leaving a husband and baby in order to create a masterpiece. It doesn’t happen often, is it worth it?

And Claire’s next 7

Family Pictures by Sue Miller

Family Pictures is topped and tailed by the first person voice of Nina looking back on her childhood and adolescence in a family with six siblings and two parents. One of the siblings is severely autistic and this has repercussions for everyone. The middle sections of the book is told from the POV of various members of the family in third person (including Nina). It doesn’t really have a strong narrative thread but doesn’t suffer from that lack. I absolutely loved it and was fully immersed in this family and their lives. (This novel isn’t available in the UK, so you might need to source a second hand copy)

All That is Mine I Carry With Me by William Landay

It’s ten years since Landay’s previous novel, Defending Jacob was published and here is his next brilliant book. A mother of three children disappears one day and the police suspect her husband of foul play, and gradually two of the children come to believe the same, creating huge fractures in the family. The novel is divided into four sections from different points of view. I wasn’t sure what Landay was up to with the second section. it’s a bit of a risk but has a very clever pay-off. This is an absolutely compelling read with the perfect blend of nuanced and affecting writing and being a real page-turner. Highly recommended.

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

Oh, I loved this poignant, slow-moving, funny, tender, gem of a book. I listened to it as an audiobook read exquisitely by Ell Porter. The story is narrated by Blanca, a ghost who died in the fifteenth century when she was fourteen. Four hundred years later she is still haunting the same charterhouse near a Mallorcan village when the French author George Sand arrives with her two children and Chopin. Blanca falls in love with George, and is able to inhabit all the characters’ heads and read their history and see their future. It has to be said that not a lot happens, but it’s full of beautiful unrequited yearning, yet written in contemporary English (which really worked). We also get to hear Blanca’s story and how she came to die. Don’t read this if you want a traditional pacey scary ghost story, but do read it if you want wonderful writing, brilliant characters, and a bittersweet ending that will stay with you.

The Weaning by Hannah Vincent

How did this novel not win all the prizes when it was published in 2018? Half way through I was punched in the gut, and gasping, had to be comforted by a hug from #librarianhusband. (I hope you know the wonder of a hug after book-related trauma.) The writing is clean and crisp – which I know is difficult to do – it was easy to forget I was reading. Bobbi is a childminder for Marcel, with two teenage children of her own (they are so perfectly written in all their grumpiness), as well as occasionally looking after Jade, the daughter of a couple who attend Life Skills classes. Bobbi begins a relationship with her neighbour while all the time also trying to keep him at bay. I’m not going to tell you what made me gasp and cry (of course – you have the read the book), but it wasn’t what I was expecting. (It’s not one of ‘those’ nanny books.) Highly recommended.
(Buy direct from the publisher)

Cheri by Jo Ann Beard

Cheri jumped straight onto my top books of the year as soon as I read it, except is it a book, or a novella, or even a short story? Is it fiction or biography or narrative non-fiction? Who cares, it’s amazing. Cheri is about the final days of a woman’s life. She’s dying from cancer and her two adult daughters have come to stay to look after her. It’s very short – 76 pages- but has everything – life, death, memory, love. I cried. A lot. Thanks to Julie Myerson for the recommendation.

Clear by Carys Davies

In the 1840s newly married John, a poor clergyman, leaves his wife Mary behind to take a job which involves travelling to a remote Scottish island where he must ‘clear’ the single remaining inhabitant, Ivar, whom the landowner is going to replace with sheep. Soon after his arrival, John has an accident and is found unconscious by Ivar who despite their lack of a common language cares for him and the two form a bond.
This is a wonderfully tender love story to the land, a disappeared way of life and human relationships. I loved it. And if you haven’t read Davies’ novel, West I urge you to read that too. Highly recommended.

The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginsburg

This is the first Ginzburg I’ve read and why have I waited so long? The Dry Heart (translated from Italian by Frances Frenaye) is written in a very spare, factual style that is never cold. It was first published in 1947 but feels so contemporary. The young female narrator tells us on the first page that she has shot her husband between the eyes with the revolver she took from his desk drawer. She goes out for a coffee and time spirals back to what brought her to this position. A lonely young woman, she falls in love with the idea of Alberto as much as the man himself, and from the start the marriage is not a good one. The books in only 108 page long but contains a whole world and a whole life.

Tim’s Top Reads of 2023

Tim’s Top 3 (in no order)

Those People Behind Us by Mary Camarillo

I read Mary Camarillo’s previous novel ‘The Lockhart Women’ this year too. I loved them both but rules dictate that I can only have 1 in my top 10. All Camarillo’s characters are real, funny, annoying and complicated all at once. This one is set in 2017 in a sunny suburb of LA with a cast of characters who pass in and out of each other’s lives and daily business. It felt as though I was reading lots of Raymond Carver short stories all at once, which is perfect if you run out of Raymond Carver stories. Housing crisis, social status, 2017-Trump landscape all the rest too.

What You Need From The Night by Laurent Petitmangin

A very tense, very short, and heartbreaking novel translated from French. ‘What You Need From The Night’ reads like a new Dardenne Brothers film, which is always a place I want to be. A thoroughly immersive slice of family reality and heartache set in a damp and grey corner of northeast France. Ultimately, a bit of a downer. Perfect!

The Archive of Feelings by Peter Stamm

I love everything Peter Stamm has ever written. He’s my hero. In his latest novel, the paths of childhood sweethearts head off in very different directions. Reflection, angst, regret and hope in not quite equal measure. Just brilliant

And Tim’s next 7