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I bought this with the end of a gift voucher I received from a friend. I loved Enriquez' debut collection of short stories, Things We Lost in the Fire, and was delighted to find this one on the book shelves. Also, it's an appropriate time to read some horror stories!

Sheila Armstrong's debut novel is about a real-life mystery. A John Doe was found in 2009 sitting calmly on Rosses Point beach in Sligo, Ireland. Tracing his family or identity took years, and this novel takes on this strange and sad story.

Each chapter is written from a different person's perspective: those who found the body, investigated its mystery, and those who were on a boat that crashed ashore in the 1990s. Introducing a new character every chapter is a brave approach that could suit this tale of a village and a body, but the execution is a little clunky. Each person is given a back-story including very obvious moments of trauma or trial that alter their lives in very literal ways. Human beings aren't usually like this, and the result ends up feeling like an exercise in writing lots of characters for a play or television, without producing any heart or story in between. Some of the writing, too, is repetitive and clumsy, for example the word 'foreign' pops up to describe non-Irish things far too often.

A couple of the chapters are brilliant, particularly the ones that begin each section of the book, and they are standalone as striking short stories. The potential to go deeper hangs temptingly there, but in the end the story stays in the shallow waters it begins in.

Colum McCann has no fear of taking on novels that involve years of research. Previous works Let The Great World Spin and Apeirogon manage to tie together many fragmented stories and characters into a coherent whole. In Twist, McCann takes a different approach: an insular first-person narrative in a story about subsea cables and the internet.

The first half of the book works very well. Our protagonist, Anthony Fennell, is a writer recovering from past addiction issues. He has been commissioned to write an article for a magazine about subsea cable repair, and gains a berth on a cable repair ship after a major break in a cable off Ghana. He is an unreliable narrator, becoming obsessed with the lead cable repair technician and his love, an actress who is working in England on tour. While at sea, his addictions resurface, not in substance abuse but in data abuse. He becomes obsessed with his moments of internet access and the fragments he pieces together into intrigue, scandal and paranoia. As they search the ocean floor for a cable the width of a drainpipe, the story becomes brilliantly claustrophobic, manic, and desperate.

The second half of the book drops off, and becomes a bit too fantastical. Fennell is not a likeable narrator. His obsession with other peoples' more interesting lives is a good narrative device for the disconnection and individualisation that McCann has decided to write about, but it never really feels true enough and he wraps up his assumptions a bit too easily. For an author who thrives in writing multiple narratives simultaneously, trying to hold it all in one narrator's voice doesn't seem to work as well, particularly when the story becomes mostly speculative. It is a good experiment, and with McCann's sharp style and prose it remains enjoyable, but the result lacks the impact it might have had.

Flights is a story where the protagonist seems to be travel itself. Billed as a novel, the book is split into many short chapters, some only a paragraph long, some many pages. Each chapter visits a specific moment of travel, or some part of the books other linked themes: preservation of bodies, colonialism and hierarchy, or disconnection and disregard of women.

I adore Olga Tokarczuk's writing. Her understanding of the craft and her breadth of imagination are a wonder, and her worldview is so respectfully and carefully entangled in her books that she is one of very few authors I read who can open new worlds in her works. So many moments of this book will stay with me. She builds worlds in moments and then discards them just as rapidly, as if all the stories were constructed out the window of an airplane leaving the runway. Her observations on travel feel like a post-air-travel epithet, recording for future generations what it was once like to fly in airplanes around a world that came to feel so small.

The book is a marvel for all of its small moments and its clever way of putting travel at the centre of a story. At times I felt it a little jarring to leap from one story to the next, although that is clearly the intention of a book written in such an experimental format. On the whole, this is another masterpiece by one of the best living authors in the world.

String figures are temporary artworks made from string, very often known in the western world through the associated children's game 'cat's cradle'. They are a storytelling device, using shapes made from string. Their potential was recently popularised by philosopher Donna Haraway, but their history stretches back centuries and they are still found in almost every country in the world, albeit less common than they may have once been in many cultures. In the early 20th Century, film, photographs and the actual string figures were collected from many places featured in this book, including the Solomon Islands, Nigeria, Brazil and Greenland. These artefacts were collated by western anthropologists for European museums, one colonial hand recording their history while the other erased it.

This book, String Figures, is the research result of an exhibition held in Switzerland in 2024. It combines essays by anthropologists, artists, and other researchers to form a wonderful, broad and coherent history of the artform and a contemporary reflection on it. The book is split into sections: first, a research exploration of string figures including essays on artistic history, mathematical theory and anthropology. The second section features contemporary artist approaches and reflections on the String Figures exhibition, with some high quality photographs. Finally, a series of shorter essays gives some perspectives on string figures today.

The quality of the editing by Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspul throughout is exceptional, and the writing and depth in each essay matches this. Every chapter has something to grab hold of, whether it is another piece of the complex history of string figures, or a personal reflection on how they are made, or a deeper dive into colonial exploitation through museum culture. The result is one of the finest research books I have read on a single topic, and a beautifully in-depth look at an often disregarded artform. As always, there were a couple of essays that were a little forgettable, but none that were of low quality. With so many perspectives and ideas, the book could have been a messy knot, but the result is a beautiful mesh of opinions, perspectives and research that is a joy to read.

Got this from the library after wanting to read it for a long time. It has been referenced in a fair few books I've read.

I am a big fan of McCann's writing, and am doin project on subsea cables, so I pushed this to the top of my list.

I enjoy this writing style and agree with the premise, but I feel I'm deeper into this ethic than the book is offering so am not getting much from it. I stopped reading on the third chapter.

I love things that grow or live where they are not supposed to be. A book about weeds is right up my alley, and I like the way Richard Mabey writes articles, so I expected to enjoy this. This is a book about weeds, their histories, their travels around the world, and why we think of them as we do.

The chapters each begin on a theme or a story about a weed, but often deviate unpredictably, and this makes the book a little loose and difficult to read. Mabey also has a tendency to situate all of the writing within a British perspective on weeds, which would be OK if he stated this as part of the book, but it feels as if it is just unconscious bias. As a result, the anecdotal moments about weeds growing in bomb sites or the paranoia of giant hogweed being a cold war weapon are a little tainted, and the book failed to hold my attention.

In the academic world of writing about fire, environmental historian Stephen J Pyne is regarded as an international expert. He has a deep understanding of the historical and social practices of fire management and fire ritual in many different cultures.

This book is presented as a brief history. It is brief, but the timeline is extensive, covering everything from pre-human period, through the first uses of fire for land management and hunting, to present-day technologies. Pyne is a good writer and the story is compelling, and he reveals many interesting things about the history of fire and how it has been used and manipulated by people in a multitude of ways. It is also refreshing to see that it is not solely a western story of fire, although it is predominantly.

There are very few references, so as a reader I had to trust Pyne's expertise, and while his knowledge is clearly broad, this type of trust is disappointing in a book of this type.

Buchi Emecheta was one of the generation of Nigerian authors who became world-renowned in the 1960s and 70s, but is often the most overlooked. Her incredible writing never loses pace, and her storytelling is always compelling and pointed. This was originally her first novel, and was semi-autobiographical, but the only copy was destroyed by her abusive husband before it was ever published. Emecheta later rewrote it, and this is the result.

Despite that history, it still feels like a first novel. It tells the story of Agu-nna, a girl becoming a woman in Lagos in the 1950s, whose father dies early in the story from illness caused by his time fighting with the Allies in World War II. Agu-nna has to move back to her father's village with her mother and her brother, and encounter the old ways of rural Nigerian life. The pacing and moments in the story show the promise of a young writer, which can be a little jarring at moments, but most of the delivery is that of a seasoned craftsperson; the themes move between imperialism, colonialism, tradition and modernity. It is deeply compelling, and somehow Emecheta manages to show sympathy and empathy to all characters, traditions, and social entanglements, which is the writer's warmest gift.

I am a big fan of the few remaining film snippets of Lenny Bruce doing stand-up or television appearances. His comedy was sharp, biting, and remains incredibly relevant despite his having died too young in the 1960s. This book is his story, originally published in Playboy Magazine for his friend Hugh Heffner, at a time when that magazine was considered counter-cultural and revolutionary.

Bruce's experiences in World War II, his childhood in poor Jewish New York, his con artistry, and his later life being hounded by police for 'obscenity' were all hard tales to read because he wrote them while he was still trying to drag himself out of the depths of this; knowing that he never made it makes it all sadder. He writes with a light humour with dark undertones, with moments that are dated and other that made me laugh until I cried.