Anna Mackmin Devoured Oh, but this struck a chord. This is a bizarre coming-of-age-novel in which the initially unnamed protagonist — a girl on the verge of puberty – recounts her life in a commune living in a ramshackle house somewhere in Norfolk in the the early 1970s. Our girl lives with her (selectively) mute sister Star and her parents who give house room to an eclectic assortment of deluded and self-absorbed poets, new-agers, artists, ne’er do-wells, druggies and dropouts. Eventually, of course, it all falls apart. The bizarrerie is mainly about the writing style, which some will find refreshing, others annoying. Also, recipes. I thought it was a lot of fun, but perhaps because it reminded me of the people I knew back in the day during my education in a Steiner School, when, at the start of the school day, clapped-out vans and Citroen 2CVs adorned with decals saying ‘Atomkraft Nein Danke’ pulled up, disgorging black fumes and an unfeasible number of children, and the gardening was biodynamic.

Carl Zimmer Life’s Edge Age, infirmity and the casting-around for another book idea have led me to catch up with the output of my colleague and friend Zimmer, whom I’ve known since we were both cub reporters and before he started writing books, but, now that we’ve passed a lot of water, he has written quite a few. In Life’s Edge he wrestles with that je-ne-sais-quoi we call ‘life’. Most people know that life begins when the kids leave home and the dogs are dead. Apart from that, telling the difference between the quick and the dead has been a somewhat fraught business, and yet the issue informs many of the debates we have today, from abortion to end-of-life care. The problem is that we all know life when we come across it, but, like jazz or pornography, it seems impossible to achieve a definition that satisfies everyone. In his masterly book How Life Works (reviewed here) Philip Ball suggests that life is that which has meaning, but that probably wouldn’t satisfy everyone either. You can drill down and down to the level of molecules, but then, what do you have? I’ll tell you — bupkes.  As ever, Zimmer recounts his travels and encounters with scientists engaged in this evanescent issue with warmth, sympathy and affection. He doesn’t succeed in finding a definition, but the journey is nothing less than thought-provoking.

Leigh Bardugo Ninth House Where do those bright young witches and wizards go after Hogwarts? To Yale, of course, many of whose Secret Societies practice magic. There are eight Senior societies, and their activities are monitored by Lethe (the Ninth House of the title) which acts as a kind of magical military police. Meet Galaxy Stern, known as Alex, child of a hippy-drippy-trippy Los Angeleno mother of Ladino Jewish heritage, and an unknown father. Alex is a feral high-school dropout, but is recruited by Lethe because she has the remarkable ability to see ghosts without first having to drink the extremely toxic elixir otherwise required. A stranger in a strange land, she finds herself at Yale on a full scholarship, mixing with students much more accomplished (and more entitled) than she, so she has to succeed on chutzpah and street smarts. A deputy (‘Dante’) in an investigative duo working for New England brahmin Daniel Arlington (‘Virgil’), her already fragile world is thrown into confusion when she starts investigating the murder of a young New-Haven woman apparently unconnected with Yale, and Arlington is sucked into a vortex that leads straight to Hell. The parallels with Hogwarts are obvious: the ill-equipped recruit from a deprived home, the exotic and antique setting drenched in ancient ritual, the cast of eccentric and occasionally dangerous characters make it so. Just add a great deal of sex, violence and violent sex, all with or without a copious intake of drugs and not a little gore, and you are most of the way there. But where Bardugo succeeds (Rowling, meh, not so much) is in — well, everything. Ninth House excels: the quality of the writing, the nuanced characterisation, the taut plotting and the watertight world-building shine brightly. It helps that Yale, unlike Hogwarts, really exists, and so (I have learned) do many of the locations and institutions described in the story.  As a novel, it has  a conventional three-act structure. And with its plots, counter-plots, reveals, false trails and twisty ending, it is perfectly poised … and with enough untied knots for a sequel. Which leads me to…

Leigh Bardugo Hell Bent sees Alex Stern and her friends, notably shy, bookish Pamela Dawes (‘Oculus’, in Lethe language), hard-bitten detective Abel Turner (‘Centurion’, Lethe’s liaison with the New Haven PD) and plucky Mercy Zhao (Alex’s Yale room-mate) try and mostly fail to pull Daniel Arlington out of Hell. They succeed, mostly, but Arlington has, unsurprisingly, changed. And all this as Yale’s faculty seem to be dropping like flies. Hell Bent has a lot of Alex’s and Arlington’s  back story, as well as those of the various ghosts and faculty we met in Ninth House. It’s a satisfying entertainment but not quite as  good as Ninth House, which, perhaps, set an impossibly high standard. There are still a few loose ends — who was Alex’s father, for instance? I learn that a  further instalment is in prospect.

Carl Zimmer Planet of Viruses Originally written as a means of public education for the National Institutes of Health, Planet of Viruses is now in its third edition, and so covers Covid. Written in plain and simple language, this primer on what viruses are and what they do should be on everyone’s bookshelf. Essential.

Leigh Bardugo The Familiar Searching for more by Leigh Bardugo but avoiding her Young Adult  fantasy,  Offspring#1 suggested I try this. Set in Spain some time between the failure of the Spanish Amanda Armada and the death of Queen Elizabeth I (so, between 1588 and 1603), it concerns the life of Lucia, a cloddish scullion in a Madrid household at the lower end of the upper class, in a society absolutely obsessed with ancestry and status. Every nuance matters, and the slightest mistake could mean ostracism, exile, torture, even death. Spain’s Jews  had been either expelled or converted a century earlier, but ‘Secret Jews’ could still be punished by the Inquisition, and Lucia’s family is of Jewish heritage. She is unwittingly thrown into the spotlight when it’s revealed she can perform magic (‘little miracles’) and finds herself in a tourney of magicians that will be set before the King, seeking a Vengeance Weapon against the heretical English. As with Alex Stern in Ninth House, the heroine is of Jewish heritage; of humble beginnings; can perform magic; and is thrown into a milieu she can barely understand and in which she can succeed only by her own ingenuity. The unfamiliar setting was a little off-putting — all those Spanish names made it sometimes hard for me to distinguish who was who in a large cast of characters — but it was as well-wrought as I now have come to expect.  Despite the setting, the atmosphere in which people can be ‘cancelled’, their lives ruined by a chance remark that reaches the wrong ears, might be horribly familiar to those who fall foul of the self-righteous and sanctimonious guardians of public morality today. Should be subtitled Everyone Expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Shirley Jackson We Have Always Lived In The Castle I seem to have settled into a groove by reading novels in which the protagonists are young, female and a bit odd. In this novel she’s Mary-Katherine Blackwood — ‘Merrikat’ — who is 18 and lives with her elder sister Constance and her Uncle Julian in a rambling old pile just outside an unnamed village in the United States, sometime in the mid-twentieth century (there are cars and telephones). Six years earlier the rest of the family had been killed in a mass poisoning for which Constance was blamed but later acquitted. The event has alienated the Blackwoods from the increasingly hostile villagers, and had catastrophic consequences for the surviving Blackwoods. It left Uncle Julian disabled and increasingly senile and Constance an obsessive agoraphobic. Only Merrikat goes out to run errands in the village. We see the world through her eyes, and as a narrator she is extremely particular, and peculiar: it’s clear that she has what we’d now call autism and learning disabilities. I don’t want to spoil it by revealing what happens next. After listening to this on Audible I discovered that the novel was written in 1962 and has become a minor classic. Jackson wrote several novels and stories, mainly mysteries and tales of horror. We Have Always Lived In The Castle was a late work and is now seen as a masterly study of  otherness and alienation, and even a metaphor for the antisemitism that Jackson and her (Jewish) husband reportedly experienced in their own lives, with its themes of ostracism, persecution and social isolation from the outside world, and the obsessive maintenance of ritual despite (and because of) increasingly desperate straits. Jackson’s best known work is The Haunting of Hill House and I think I’ll try that next.

Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time The British government has acquired a device to transport people from past centuries to the present day. The people concerned are recorded as missing or dead, so the course of history should not be changed. At this end, Ministry employees have to give house room for the ‘immigrants’. Our protagonist, a young twenty-first century woman of mixed British-Cambodian parentage, is put in charge of an officer from the doomed Franklin Expedition to the North-West Passage. Cue many misunderstandings concerning the role of women, people of various ethnic heritages, and so on. This is not a comedy, however, and there’s more – it appears that the device to bring people to the present day is a gift from the future, and there are all sorts of other shenanigans going on. I enjoyed this mainly for the interesting use of metaphor. The protagonist describes the taste of Guinness, for example, as ‘angry Marmite’. Which was fun.

Laura Spinney: Proto Your Starter for Ten – what connects Slovakian and Sinhala? Phrygian and French? Hittite and Norwegian? The answer is that all are Indo-European languages, connected by historical and linguistic roots so deep that the similarities can be hard to trace. Yet it was the deep similarities of grammar and vocabulary between the languages now spoken more widely than any other on the planet that led to our modern understanding of language change in general, and new work on archaeology and ancient DNA has enriched and sometimes complicated the picture. Laura Spinney traces the tortuous history and geography back to the steppes of southern Russia, the plains of Anatolia and the high deserts of the Silk Road. I listened rather than read this – as an audiobook – and I am glad I have a decent knowledge of geography, as having a map in front of me would have been helpful. Perhaps the dead-tree version has suitable visual aids. I was fascinated to learn about Tocharian, a lost branch of Indo-European, and the deep connections between, say, English and Sanskrit. Spinney takes an interesting and controversial view on the preservation of languages that otherwise might have died out. Languages change all the time (and that’s rather the whole point), borrowing words from other languages. The Celtic languages spoken today, for example, are much corrupted by loans from English, so the Irish, Welsh and Gaelic that people work so strenuously to preserve are hardly authentic. Languages also change  much faster than one would imagine, as people move from place to place. Not many young, working-class people in London today speak the cockney that they might have done a couple of generations ago. Instead they speak a dialect called Multicultural London English, what the politically incorrect might call Jafaican. I could find only two irritants in this absorbing book. Shakespeare wrote in early Modern English, not Middle English. And why is the country Turkey rendered Türkiye? We don’t refer to Greece as Hellas, or Germany as Deutschland.

Paul Hayes: Dr Who: Pull To Open Regular reader of these annals will note that I recently delved into the literature concerning the BBC’s long-running SF series Dr Who, notwithstanding inasmuch as which Exterminate, Regenerate by John Higgs (review here). Whereas that was a complete history of the show, Pull To Open is a account of its genesis, up to and including its very first airing in November 1963, so goes into much more granular detail about the circumstances, and looks at contemporary world events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo affair. Hayes makes the case that BBC Head of Serials Donald Wilson deserves as much credit as Sidney Newman for the invention of the show. Absorbing, but probably for diehard fans only.

Taylor Jenkins Reid: Atmosphere I first came across Reid as the author of Daisy Jones and the Six, a rockumentary about a seventies soft-rock band with uncanny similarities to Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac, and found the televisual emission much better than the book. I believe there is a movie adaptation in the works for this, too, though the book is good in itself. It follows the career of Joan Goodwin: astronomer and wannabe astronaut. Goodwin is all work, work, work and is sexually repressed, living her personal life somewhat vicariously through her appalling and selfish sister Barbara. Her sexual awakening comes through meeting Vanessa Ford, another astronaut candidate, and the trials they face keeping their passionate relationship hidden from any overt sign of ‘sexual deviancy’ that would get them kicked off the program. The sex scenes are poignant and passionate without being explicit, and the space scenes are (as far as I can tell) authentic. The story is bookended as Goodwin, the Cap Com at Mission Control, helps Ford land a damaged space shuttle. Gripping until the end.

Catherine Chidgey: The Book Of Guilt Britain in the 1970s, full of ’70s nostalgia, but in an altered universe in which Hitler was assassinated in 1943, and the Second World War ended in a treaty in which the UK shared some of Nazi Germany’s darker scientific secrets. Our scene is set in what at first looks like an orphanage for boys in a grand but fading country house. All the inmates have left except for a final set of pre-teen triplets, cared for by Mothers Morning, Afternoon and Night, who teach them out of the Book of Knowledge (an out-of-date Children’s Encyclopaedia); record their dreams in the Book of Dreams, their transgressions in the Book of Guilt,  and who dose them with medicines to protect them against some mystery illness. All the other residents have, they believe, been promoted to a grander house in Margate, a paradise for children. Elsewhere, Nancy is a girl  kept by her parents as a guilty secret. The dystopia slowly winds out, mostly told through the eyes of Vincent, one of the triplets. And so the shocking horror slowly unspools. Echoes of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

John Higgs: Exterminate, Regenerate As someone once said in another context, one should never underestimate the power of cheap music. And it doesn’t come much more powerful, or more cheap, than Dr Who, the long-running children’s science-fiction programme that aired on the BBC from 1963 to 1989, and again from 2005 to the present day. Higgs gives a comprehensive, readable and honest account of the genesis, exodus and revelation of the show. The book is far, far better than most effusions on popular culture, and gets into the grittier details that the show’s enormous publicity machine won’t tell you, such as the bullying, misogyny, racism and sexual harassment behind the scenes; why Christopher Eccleston left the show after just one season series; and the complex relationship between the show and the BBC that affected its content, such that stories featuring the stuffy, bureaucratic Time Lords of Gallifrey (representing BBC higher-ups) tended to happen during particularly fraught periods in this pas-de-deux. He also analyses the show’s longevity, getting into such subjects as myth. Myths tend to feature archetypes such as the Trickster, and Higgs portrays the first iterations of the Doctor in this light. Myths are also not required to be consistent. Only the TARDIS and the signature tune have been constant elements from the first episode: even the Doctor is changeable. Philip Ball missed a trick as Dr Who isn’t discussed in his book The Modern Myths (reviewed here) where he makes the case that literary quality is in inverse proportion to mythic potential. Some Whovian myths are, however, exploded. Terry Nation didn’t get the idea for the Daleks from a volume of an encyclopaedia labelled DAL-LEK. And a reluctance of most of the (white, male) BBC staff to take on a show they felt was beneath their dignity, not a desire for diversity, explains why the very first episode, broadcast on 23 November 1963, was directed by a gay Asian and produced by a Jewish woman, nor that the originator of the show, if there was any single one, was Jewish. Higgs doesn’t make the leap, entirely obvious to me if perhaps nobody else, from these facts to the situation of the Doctor as a wanderer exiled from his home planet, though he could have done: in the same way that it was Jewish writers and artists who created comic-book superheroes who, like the Doctor, would sweep in, right wrongs, and stand up for the underdog. After-images, as it were, of the Golem of Old Prague, a prototype cartoon superhero in itself.  After reading this excellent book I wallowed in the entire Audible collection entitled Dr Who at the BBC, which is mostly fairly dull and repetitive, but features a few nuggets such as a radio play about Delia Derbyshire, the musician and engineer at  the BBC Radiophonic Workshop who turned Ron Grainer’s original score into the futuristic soundscape that’s now instantly familiar (you know the one, tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom tiddly-pom woo-woo); and another radio play about a Dr Who fan convention in Belfast during the Troubles.

Stuart Turton: The Devil and the Dark Water A maritime romance and whodunit with a frisson of horror from the Age of Sail, this, so something for everyone. No swash is left unbuckled as the Saardam, a Dutch East-Indiaman, sets out from Batavia to Amsterdam under a horrible curse, that only the unlikely pair of sleuth Samuel Pipps and his monolithic-yet-sensitive sidekick Arent Hayes have any hope of unraveling. It was all far too convoluted for me, but I enjoyed the ride. Belatedly I see that Turton is another author with a story in The Winter Spirits (reviewed here) but one that didn’t stay with me quite as vividly as those of Natasha Pulley or Jess Kidd.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt: Echo Taking horror from the oceans to the high mountains, this is a love story between two unlikely people. Manhattan socialite Sam Avery and Dutch beefcake Nick Gievers have been  inseparable since pecs were flexed in the gym. Sam would rather mix cocktails, but Nick’s passion ia a good deal more rugged. He is a skilled mountaineer, and the more remote and dangerous the mountain, the better. One day, Nick returns from a rarely-explored peak in the Alps, his face horribly disfigured, his companion lost, and bringing with him an ancient horror that soon spreads. Only Sam seems immune, but in coming to terms with Nick’s new life, he must confront ancient horrors of his own. I loved this book (the mountaineering sequences were especially absorbing), but it was, perhaps, somewhat overlong, and the ending rather too 2001-a-Space-Odyssey for a novel that also references Spandau Ballet.