Claire’s Books at Breakfast

The River by Rumer Godden

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The version I have of The River has a preface written by Godden, which I read before I started the novel, and I think if I hadn’t of read it, I might have given the book five stars. Why didn’t the publisher put it at the end! In the preface Godden gives away the big thing that happens, and I think I would have had all the feelings if I hadn’t of known it was coming. Very frustrating. Still, it is a wonderful coming of age story about a girl and her siblings in colonial India. It reminded me very much of Barbara Comyns, but less strange. Highly recommended, just don’t read the preface. 

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Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld

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In these twelve short stories, Curtis Sittenfeld doesn’t so much pin contemporary middle-aged women, as let them fly. There were some I’d read before in a previous very very short collection, but they definitely were worth reading again: Show Don’t Tell, and White Women LOL especially. The things the (mostly) women have to deal with are funny, awkward, sad, and joyful. All of life, I suppose, but written with such a wonderful ear for humanity. Highly recommended. 

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Buy Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld from Bookshop.org.

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Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof

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Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof, translated from Danish by Caroline Waight has a complicated, fascinating and unusual structure. As well as being about a fictional couple – Kurt and Maggie – it is about the narrator’s (who is, I’m assuming, Nordenhof) investigation into insurance scam around the fire onboard a ferry called The Scandinavian Star in the 1990s, when 159 people died. Kurt invests in the company that buys the ferry, and as well as learning all this, and having the narrator / Nordenhof interact with her characters, we get Kurt’s and Maggie’s backstory – which made me feel much more sympathetic towards the difficult characters they have both become in their adult lives. See? Complicated. But it really worked for me. I got Kurt and Maggie. The characterisation is wonderful, the true-crime element surprising, the narrator / Nordenhof’s interruptions really interesting. And there are apparently another seven in the series.

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Buy Money to Burn by Asta Olivia Nordenhof from Bookshop.org.

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The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey

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Most of you will probably know Samantha Harvey from her Booker Prize-winning novel, Orbital, even if you have read it yet. I’ve read all four of her novels and her non-fiction book about insomnia, and I recommend them all, including The Wilderness, her debut.

Beautiful, tragic, moving. The Wilderness really deserves to be better known. The book starts as Jake, in his sixties, has a trip in a plane given as a present by his adult son, Henry. Jake’s plane flies over the prison where Henry is incarcerated. Four years later, at the end of the novel, when Henry has been released, the two men, and Jake’s girlfriend / carer look through a book of photographs. In between these two events we see, feel, experience, the unravelling of Jake’s mind as Alzheimer’s takes hold. We learn about Jake’s life with his parents, his birth, his affair, his marriage, the birth of his children and his tragedies in a series of spirals that change and fracture each time Jake remembers them – are they even memories or are they simply taken from the photographs he looks at? It’s a wonderful novel but also sometimes difficult to read, not just because of how this man loses so much as he loses his mind, but the writing is dense, sometimes unfathomable, complicated and twisty, which of course befits the subject. Recommended.

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The Imposters by Tom Rachman

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The Imposters is the second novel where Tom Rachman has chosen to tell the narrative in short stories. He did the same with his debut, The Imperfectionists. Maybe I didn’t like it quite as much as that book, and my favourite is still The Italian Teacher, but The Imposters has made me no less of a Rachman fan.

Dora is an aging Dutch writer whose last novel didn’t sell, and who seems to want to give up writing, but then appears to be writing the book we’re reading, taking memories from her own life and expanding those into stories about other people.

Some of the stories are incredibly moving, disturbing and wonderful. The best of them would be my favourite stories of the year, but of course in any story collection, even those that form a novel, there will be some that are less successful.

The best include a girl backpacking in India in the 1970s when one of the men she meets disappears and there is nothing to be done; Beck, a comedy writer in LA stuck inside during COVID; Amir detained and then tortured in an Iranian prison; and woman who decides to meet the murderer of her children.

Read it and forgive Rachman for Dora and the slightly weaker stories. Highly recommended.

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Buy The Imposters by Tom Rachman from Bookshop.org.

I listened to this as an audio book from Xigxag. Buy it here.  

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Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry

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It was a joy (in the saddest way) to read this straightforward story about the death of Sarah Perry’s father in law, David.

I have been tired for a long time of memoirs about death, bereavement, grief or illness that feel the need to bring in some kind of healing journey or action. I think I was was tired of them before H is for Hawk and that was quite a while ago.

This story, told simply and very beautifully (I underlined so many sentences) documents David’s cancer diagnosis and only nine days later his death. Sarah writes about the facts and about her feelings, including the frustrations, the irritations and the love. There is so much love in this book, and it moved me to tears.

I suppose I am in place (dealing with, thinking about the recent death of my own father albeit in utterly different circumstances) where I am open to the message that its helpful to talk (write) about death in the most uncomplicated ways, but still, I recommend it to all. 

Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry will be published on 2nd October 2025. You can pre-order it from Bookshop.org here.

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The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

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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

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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.

Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

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Well, that was brilliant, and weird.

It’s the late 1970s in California and housewife Dorothy lives with her husband Fred whose been having affairs since their son died and Dorothy miscarried a daughter. She hears on the radio that a monster / frogman has escaped from a nearby laboratory. Later that evening as she is cooking dinner for Fred and a colleague, the frogman who introduces himself as Larry walks into Dorothy’s kitchen. She gives him some celery and he eats it. She lets him stay in the spare room without Fred knowing and she and Larry start a relationship – sexual, emotional, loving. Dorothy tells no one, including her best friend, Estelle…

Ingalls packs so much into this novella (really a long short story): grief, difference, frustration, feminism, female friendship and more. I loved it. We read it for book club (my choice) and there was surprisingly, a lot to discuss, and it was mostly well liked. 

Thanks to Gina Chung for bringing it to my attention when she chose her three Books Under the Radar.

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Whose Names are Unknown by Sanora Babb

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I’m not sure where I saw Whose Names are Unknown by Sonora Babb recommended but at some point I put it on my presents list and my Librarian Husband bought it for me.

It was written in the 1930s and bought by Random House but never published by them because five months later The Grapes of Wrath was published and sold 430,000 copies and they believed it covered the same ground.

The Dunne family, mother, father, grandfather, and two daughters are barely getting by farming in Oklahoma when the dust storms arrive. Their neighbours are struggling too and everything depends on the crops surviving. When they don’t, the family scrabble the money together to buy a car and leave for California. There, things are different but just as bad. This is a story about small farmers not making a living, being hungry and being poor in America. It’s also about the very start of unionisation.

I really enjoyed it, if enjoy can be the word.

Buy it from Bookshop.org

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