Practice – Rosalind Brown

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In an unnamed Oxford college, Annabel sits at her desk preparing to write an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. It is a Sunday, 6am, ‘at the worn-out end of January’. Her phone and computer are off; it’s just Annabel, the sonnets and her thoughts. At least that’s what Annabel tells herself.

She starts well enough, but soon she’s making another peppermint tea, contemplating breakfast and coffee. This leads on to thinking about her stomach and which combinations of food and drink cause issues.

Giving up one thing exposes her to the next thing, which soon becomes intolerable: like, the more sensitive she becomes, the more sensitive she becomes.

Her body is a theme which continues throughout the novel, undercutting the pretentiousness of Annabel’s belief in her status as a scholar and the sanctity of her routine. Something we observe her break repeatedly throughout the day, even as she holds it up as sacred.

A significant amount of her time is spent fantasising. Sometimes it’s thinking about the different types of orgasms her body produces and how she achieves them. Sometimes it’s the hungover housemate she bumps into in the kitchen who smells good. Sometimes this takes the form of a long running sequence of scenarios involving the SCHOLAR and the SEDUCER, two characters Annabel uses to work through situations. It is never clear, to her as well as us, whether these two characters are ciphers for her or independent creations.

She also has a dilemma: whether or not to agree to her boyfriend, Rich, spending the entire following weekend with her. An arrangement which would ruin her routine and would force her to put something other than her work first. The decision is complicated by the 16-year age gap between her and Doctor Richard French, who’s a friend of her mothers. So far they have kept their relationship secret from both her family and most of her friends, but Annabel is aware this can’t be sustained.

Practice is one of those novels about which some people say nothing happens. Bar a few interactions with Rich, friends, a housemate and some other students from her course, it is entirely internal: the thoughts of a final year Oxford undergraduate procrastinating over an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the wrong hands, this could have been tedious, but Brown brings Annabel to life with a wide range of thoughts, ideas and challenges. This is an interesting, inventive piece of work.

I borrowed a copy of Practice from my local library.

Seven – Joanna Kavenna

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I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and future and in some way involve the stars.

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ – Jorge Louis Borges (translated by Donald A. Yates)

Joanna Kavenna’s sixth novel, Seven or, How to Play a Game Without Rules is told to the reader by an unnamed, ungendered narrator. Hired by Icelandic philosopher Professor Alda Jónsdóttir, who is working on a project titled Thinking outside the Box (about Thinking outside the Box) (mercifully shortened to TOTBATOTB), our narrator travels across Europe, discussing Box Philosophy.

Seven, a game invented by Kavenna for the novel (and done so well, I looked to see if it really existed), consists of a spiral board inside a circular box. Each player has seven pieces, which move from the outside of the spiral (the Edge) to the centre (Home). Players can block their opponents with pebbles and there are Angels and Dragons on the board. If a playing piece lands on an Angel, they go straight Home and are removed from the board. If it lands on a Dragon, it is sent back to the Edge and must start again. The object of the game is to bring all your playing pieces Home and remove them from the board.

Early in the novel, our narrator is sent to the Greek island of Hydra to meet Theódoros Apostolakis, a dentist and poet who is obsessed with Seven. Apostolakis has created a Fanouropiton, or Catalogue of Lost Things, the name a pun on the Greek cake fanouropita. Frustrated with having to erase things from the catalogue when they are found, Apostolakis has created a box – a Fanouropithos – and a website where people advertise their lost things, including an entry for the ‘Meaning of Life. Help!’ Apostolakis’ greatest loss, however, is a Seven box from Crete that belonged to his family.

In pursuit of this box, the narrator learns its history, which begins during World War 2, and meets some of the most prominent players of Seven: Eleni Hikaru Jones, former Seven World Champion; Indrek Laar, the European Champion, and Ashok Deo, the World Champion, who is described as ‘unbeatable’. Through them, Seven, or at least the way players relate to it, appears to become a metaphor for life and how we should live it.

Eleni wants to change the rules to ones she thinks ‘are much more fun’. These involve translating the inscription at the centre of the spiral not as Home but as ‘Go Home!’. In which case, you have to get your pieces to the centre of the spiral and back again. She recommends some books to the narrator, including one about play in which the argument is made that we should make space for play, regardless of the state of the world.

It is an irrational thing, to play, and so the existence of play demonstrates – perhaps – that human lives exceed the rational, logical order of things.

She writes an article about playing against her father and on winning one day, bursting into tears. Her father quoted a line from Steve Harley’s ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’ that confused her: Win or lose, it’s hard to smile, but which she later recognises as life being challenging.

Laar and Deo’s trajectories involve the intervention of AI, which causes unexpected issues, and one player taking an unexpected path which he describes as ‘freedom’.

Kavenna is certainly interested in spirals – and owes a debt to Borges, whose short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is referenced several times throughout the novel. One character tells the narrator,

You can’t move [in the ancient world] without hitting a spiral. The whirlpool, the Gordion knot. The cycles of time, the changing of the seasons. Birth, death, growth, reincarnation. You travel through the labyrinth to the source. The cycle continues.

There are no rules, or perhaps there are multiple versions of the rules. There is no way out and there is a way out. We’re all just making things up as we go along and we might be right and we also might not be. As the novel moves towards its conclusion, Professor Alda Jónsdóttir finds herself stuck, unable to finish her work on TOTBATOB and, perhaps, in a world where we think we know the rules but they don’t always work for us, that’s where we all are. Until the day we’re not.

Seven probably isn’t a novel for everyone, but I absolutely loved following Kavenna’s philosophical enquiry disguised as a book about a game.

Thanks to Faber for the review copy.

All Consuming – Ruby Tandoh

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In All Consuming, Ruby Tandoh examines how society has shaped what we eat. From recipes to influencers to cookbooks to trends, she considers the ways in which culture and changes in technology have brought different products and dishes to the fore.

She begins with the shift in how we discover recipes, from those passed down within the family to the viral trends on Instagram and TikTok with ‘photos and videos that seem to have been engineered to bypass rational thinking and go straight to the pleasure centres of the brain’, noting there’s no context to the images, or to the recipes themselves. The connection between cooking and our heritages removed.

Moving back in time, Tandoh discusses the Sunday supplements – ‘No medium has swerved the course of British food culture as sharply as those columns’ – which appeared at the same time supermarkets were on the rise and local grocery stores were closing down. Aspirational cooking had never been easier.

As legacy media’s influence has lessened, social media has enabled influencers to become the most powerful critics of our time. Tandoh cites Keith Lee (who I admit I had not heard of despite his more than 15 million followers), who reviews everyday food at small restaurants and is capable of keeping ailing businesses afloat. As she traces Lee’s predecessors back to Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book, Tandoh points out that we’re rarely allowed a Black food critic.

In the UK, pretty much every major restaurant critic has been white, and nearly all of them – and I need to stress this – went to private school. Several of them went to Eton. One is King Charles’ stepson.

For all its ills, social media remains somewhat of a leveller in the world of food.

However, the most interesting sections for me were the ones on cookbooks and how changes in what we buy take place. The cookbook section begins with the likes of Mrs Beeton and how household management or domestic economy has led us back to the tradwives advertising the purity of their lifestyles on the internet, before Tandoh delves into the 700 cookbooks a year published in the UK (!!!), examining whether any of them actually have an impact on the culture, including Rukmini Iyer’s ubiquitous Roasting Tin series (of which I own several), before interrogating why ‘nobody admits to throwing dinner parties anymore’, even though they clearly do. In the section on tastes, I learned about the rise of the supermarket; why almost every ice cream you can buy today was invented between 1976 and 1990, and why all these bizarrely flavoured wellness drinks have suddenly appeared.

Needless to say, this book was a genuine delight to read and an education in how our tastes are influenced by the internet, legacy media and changes in where we buy our food. Tandoh’s interest and enthusiasm is apparent in her writing and she makes for an excellent guide to the ways the world of food intersects with society, economy and culture.

My copy of All Consuming was my own purchase.

On the Calculation of Volume 2 – Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara J. Haveland)

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I’m starting 2026 more or less where I left off in 2025, with the second book in the series I’m currently obsessed with. There are mild spoilers for On the Calculation of Volume 1, my review of which is here.

It is the Tara Selter with a future who is gone. It is the Tara Selter with hopes and dreams who has fallen out of the picture, been thrown off the world, run over the edge, been poured out, carried off down the stream of eighteenths of November, lost, evaporated, swept out to sea.

After Tara realises that her November eighteenths aren’t running parallel to a normal year and that she’s not suddenly going to find herself back on standard time, she decides to create a year by travelling through different countries looking for the perfect weather for the season she wants it to be.

She begins by travelling to her parents’ house and having Christmas with them and her sister. Obviously, she has to explain her situation and, on a more comical note, keep some of the Christmas food with her at night so it doesn’t disappear when the day resets itself. Tara’s revelation leads to her sister contemplating joining her; that seemingly universal idea that if only we could step out of our lives for a while, everything would somehow be better.

One of Tara’s revelations during this period, is that nothing significant is ever going to happen to her. She has a few minor mishaps and inconveniences as she negotiates her day in new places, but there is not, and will never be, any great disasters. The tragedies, once again, focus on how humans choose to live: the shelves piled high with fruit, berries and vegetables from every time of the year and part of the world; the seasons that we expect to look typical, as though taken from photographs in books and scenes in films; the reliance on phones which leads to other people, including children, being seen as objects rather than fellow humans.

In this second volume, Balle continues to search for answers to the questions she set out in volume one. To maintain the readers’ interest, she adds travel, some mild peril and an obsession with things that have dropped out of history, as Tara herself has done. It left me wondering what has happened to Tara in the ‘real’ world? Where do Thomas and her family think she is? Questions perhaps for a later volume. For now, Tara has revealed something she’s been keeping from us and volume three beckons.

Thanks to Faber for the review copy.

Books of the Year 2025

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When I’ve done these lists before, I’ve separated backlist and new titles. This year, I’m doing one mixed list. Mostly because that’s how my reading panned out this time.

Helm – Sarah Hall (Faber)

Britain’s only named wind becomes the central character in this hybrid work of fiction, twenty years in the making. Told through a series of humans, from NaNay a neolithic tribe leader to Dr Selima Sutar a meteorologist, Hall examines the beliefs we’ve held about the wind, the ways in which we’ve interacted with it and what the future might hold. Full review here.

On the Calculation of Volume 1 – Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara J. Haveland) (Faber)

Tara Suter wakes every day on the 18th of November. We meet her on her 121st day and she tells us how’s she’s been living and what she’s learned about the world as it exists for her now. The novel turns into a meditation on how we live. When I reached the end, I was desperate to start volume 2. Full review here.

Old Soul – Susan Barker (Penguin)

An older woman who’s lived many lives takes a young female influencer into the Badlands. Jake meets Marika in Osaka airport and discovers his friend and her brother died in similar circumstances: a friendship with a mysterious woman and then their organs were reversed. As Jake tracks the woman down via multiple stories, the young influencer’s life hangs in the balance. Full review here.

Intermezzo – Sally Rooney (Faber)

I’m not a fan of Rooney’s fiction. I didn’t finish Conversations with Friends; contrary to most of the population of the UK and Ireland, I didn’t like Normal People, in fact I was furious with it; I didn’t even bother with Beautiful World, Where Are You. However, I was doing some research and Intermezzo kept being mentioned as something I might want to look at. I borrowed it from the library and found it one of the most rewarding reading experiences I’ve had this year. The tale of two grieving brothers, Ivan, a 22-year-old chess player, and Peter, a 32-year-old lawyer. Peter is seeing Naomi, a student who sells explicit photos online, as well as spending time with his ex Sylvia, a chronically ill literary academic. But it all kicks off between Ivan and Peter when Ivan starts seeing 36-year-old venue manager Margaret, who is separated from her alcoholic husband.

My Sister and Other Lovers – Esther Freud (Bloomsbury)

Freud returns to Lucy and Bee, the siblings from Hideous Kinky. Told in three sections, from teenage years to drama school to marriage and motherhood, Lucy’s self-awareness leads to a realisation about family and men with an ending that had me punching the air. Full review here.

Stone Yard Devotional – Charlotte Wood (Sceptre)

A woman leaves her life and enters a convent. A plague of mice descends, the bones of a nun murdered in Bangkok are washed up, and Helen Parry, a celebrity nun bullied by the narrator and her friends when they were at school, returns them to the convent. A novel that questions our responsibility to ourselves and the world, with no easy answers. Full review here.

The Parallel Path – Jenn Ashworth (Sceptre)

As Jenn Ashworth walks Wainwright’s Coast to Coast path, her friend Clive, who has terminal cancer, writes to her about life and death. Ashworth contemplates the values of walking, caring and solitude from a working-class perspective. Full review here.

The City Changes Its Face – Eimear McBride (Faber)

McBride returns to Eily and Stephen from The Lesser Bohemians. Eighteen months on, they’re living in a flat together and Stephen’s teenage daughter is very much present. Told across one night as they fight about their relationship, the story interweaves the events of the past, including Stephen making a film about his life.

The Persians – Sanam Mahloudji (4th Estate)

Three generations of women from an Iranian family split between America and Iran. While Shirin waits for her court appearance after soliciting a police officer, matriarch Elizabeth reveals long held secrets about her first love. Complex and satisfying. Full review here.

Model Home – Rivers Solomon (Merky)

Ezri returns home to their siblings to discover their parents have died in an apparent murder-suicide. The siblings believe the house they grew up in – in a wealthy, gated, predominantly white community – is to blame. As they attempt to discover what happened, racial and childhood trauma is unearthed. Full review here.

Thanks to the publishers, as named, for review copies. I borrowed Intermezzo and Stone Yard Devotional from the library.

Model Home – Rivers Solomon

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The world unfolds according to a logic most strange when you’re a child, and it wouldn’t do any good to try to parse it. If a house has claws, a house has claws.

Ezri has made a life for themselves as far from their upbringing as possible in a mold-infested, old house in England with their daughter, Elijah. Their sisters, Eve and Emmanuelle, summon them back to 677 Acacia Drive, Oak Creek Estates, Dallas, Texas; a wealthy, gated community where the siblings and their parents, Eudora and Edward, were the only Black family. Ezri arrives at the house, which has tortured their family for years, to discover the bodies of their parents, dead in a seeming murder-suicide. The siblings do not believe this and instead are convinced that it is the house that has killed them.

The novel simultaneously details the aftermath of the deaths, the grief the siblings feel while they attempt to discover what really happened, and their time in the house when they were younger. The latter comprises two strands: Ezri’s relationship with their mother and the horror that the house produces.

Eudora is a former academic and formidable parent who expects excellence from her children. She also pits them against each other – Both of us look at Mama to see which of the two of us will be praised and which of the two of us will be discarded…; is unpredictable – I could never know how Mama was going to react to anything, though. I hated tossing the coin. I preferred to keep secrets. If I didn’t show her who I was, she couldn’t mock me’, but also does not allow others to question or critique Ezri’s genderqueerness – She thrived and felt loved, purposeful, when she was the centre of attention, and by advocating for me, she got that. This leads to Ezri saying how they could long for Mama’s approval. Bask in it. Get drunk on it. Want to fuck it. Her sycophant to the end. And what about Edward? Well, their response to him provides one of the most devastating lines in the book: Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

As for the house, Ezri was haunted by a woman without a face who pulled her into the attic, a place they could not have got into on their own; Eve is covered in scars from the acid that came out of the taps, and a young boy, Hogan, disappeared in there and was never heard of again.

Solomon combines the horror that the house provides with childhood trauma and the trauma of being the only Black family in a wealthy, white neighbourhood. They question what is inherited through the generations, both familial and racial, and whether it is possible to break these cycles. Model Home is both an intense, thoughtful exploration of Black excellence, siblinghood and existing in a queer body, and a page-turning, genuinely scary, haunted house novel. One of my books of the year.

Thanks to Merky Books for the review copy.

On the Calculation of Volume 1 – Solvej Balle (translated by Barbara J. Haveland)

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Tara Selter wakes every day to the eighteenth of November. When we meet her, it is her 121st iteration of this day and she takes three days / approximately half of this first volume to tell us how she has lived the previous 120 days.

On the seventeenth of November, Tara was in Bordeaux to buy works for clients of the antiquarian book company run by her and her husband Thomas. She then went to Paris, called Thomas from the hotel, had a bath and slept. On the eighteenth, she visited some bookshops, made some purchases and then spent the evening with her friend Philip and his girlfriend. During the visit, she burnt her hand on a portable gas heater. The following morning, a dropped piece of bread on the floor at breakfast alerts Tara and when she looks at the books she has purchased, those from the previous day have disappeared. However, the burn on her hand has not. After repurchasing the books, she returns home and attempts to explain to Thomas what has happened.

For 27 days, she wakes in the morning, explains the situation to Thomas and they experiment, attempting to figure out the rules of this loop that Tara now lives in. Spoiler: their discovery is that the loop is inconsistent. Depending on your perspective, this is either a cop out or feeds into one of the central ideas of the book:

That strange moment when the ground under one’s feet falls away and all at once it feels as though all predictability can be suspended, as though an existential red alert has suddenly been triggered, a quiet state of panic which prompts neither flight nor cries for help, and does not call for police, fire brigade or ambulance. It is as if this emergency response mechanism is there on stand-by at the back of the mind, like an undertone, not normally audible, but kicking in the moment one is confronted with the unpredictability of life, the knowledge that everything can change in an instant, that something which cannot happen and which we absolutely do not expect, is nonetheless a possibility. That time stands still. That gravity is suspended. That the logic of the world and the laws of nature break down. That we are forced to acknowledge that our expectations about the constancy of the world are on shaky ground.

Eventually, Tara moves into the spare room in order to stop upsetting Thomas, who wakes up every eighteenth of November for the first time, and because the amount of information she has to convey about what they’ve learned has become overwhelming. It’s at this point she begins to write her story.

It would be incredibly easy for this type of novel to become repetitive, but Balle turns it into a meditation on how to live. Tara has to figure out how to spend her day in the cracks of time where Thomas is either absent from the house or there is enough noise that she won’t be noticed. This forces her to contemplate the distance that time has forced upon them, a distance that only she has to live with. She also has to come to terms with her impact on the world, particularly when she realises that the things Thomas takes reappear, while the things she takes do not:

It was me who made things disappear. I am living in a time that eats up the world. […] Without me Thomas is a ghost, but I am a monster, a beast, a pest. […] How long can my little world endure me?

Obviously, there are parallels with our own consumption of the world’s resources and as Tara creeps towards having spent 365 days in the eighteenth of November, I was prompted to think more and more about how we spend our time and the damage that we’re perpetrating as a species.

On the Calculation of Volume 1 is one of the very best things I’ve read this year. Completely gripping, provocative and unique. I’m excited for the rest of this seven-part series; the only thing stopping me from diving straight into book 2 was writing this review.

Thanks to Faber for the review copy.

Heart the Lover – Lily King

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A young woman at university meets two young men in a seventeenth century literature class. Soon she is dating Sam, the ‘one with coppery brown hair’ and hanging out in the house he shares with Yash, the one ‘with a thick black ponytail’. They call their dates daisies after Daisy Gatsby but, after learning our narrator got into the school on a golf scholarship, declare her more of a Jordan Baker and thereafter refer to her only as Jordan.

The men spend their time playing card games and having intense discussions about literature. Our narrator (who is actually Casey from King’s previous novel Writers & Lovers) notes the difference between the way she lives, studies and is received at the university and the way the men do and are. They’ve been automatically placed on the honours programme; Casey has to apply for it and take an extra semester. They’re living in one of the professor’s houses while he’s on sabbatical in Oxford; she shares a room in a house which accommodates twelve people and barely any heating. Unsurprisingly, Casey starts to spend more time with the men.

Sam is very religious and against sex before marriage. However, this did not prevent him from having sex with his previous girlfriend which lead to their breakup and feelings of guilt which Sam still carries. Regardless, Casey continues to date him. The fact that he can be extremely unpleasant and is insufferable does not deter her even as she and Yash, who is kind and funny, become closer. By the time she sits in the library with Sam, as he translates Ovid back into Latin while she reads a paperback, and has an epiphany:

It really is like we go to different schools […] Since I lost my golf scholarship, my college education has been funded by a series of loans and my job at High Five. I’m going to have to pay it all back, this paltry dabbling I’ve done, these wasted years. I haven’t been serious […]

He looks at me. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’ve made all the wrong choices.’

I’d been screaming at the book for pages wondering what the hell she was doing. Obviously, she gets together with Yash, although it takes far too long and is made complicated in the ways in which only young people can make things complicated. The first half of the book ends when they have both made huge mistakes with consequences bigger than they realise because neither of them is emotionally mature enough for the relationship they’re trying to have.

The second half takes place after the events of Writers & Lovers. (You can read Heart the Lover without having read the previous book. However, Writers & Lovers also includes Casey choosing between two men and the second half of Heart the Lover reveals who that is.) Casey is now married, has two sons and is a writer with several published novels. After an absence of 21 years, Yash returns to her life. Initially passing through on his way to visit friends, his life later takes a more dramatic turn. As Casey leaves the family home to spend time with Yash, her eldest son is preparing to have a fourth surgery to remove a tumour in his brain. Again, Casey is torn but this time between her first deep love and the family she has created.

The novel considers the impact that a relationship forged at a young age can have and how it reverberates throughout someone’s life. It also holds that relationship up against the mature version, where the lives of children are at stake, and asks if it is possible to hold space for both.

The book world, or at least my social media corner of it, seems to have gone wild for this novel. While I read it fairly quickly, unfortunately, I didn’t love it and found Writers & Lovers the more sophisticated piece of work. Sam, Yash and their friend Ivan’s pontificating on various white, male canonical works was tedious, while Casey made terrible decision after terrible decision. I can see why people have fallen for the romanticised notion of sitting around reading and discussing ‘great’ literary works and then later running to be with a transformative love, but I just couldn’t lose myself in the idea of it. A shame because I love Writers & Lovers and really wanted to love this too.

My copy of Heart the Lover was my own purchase.

The Persians – Sanam Mahloudji

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‘We didn’t come here for a better life. We left a better life.’

The Persians concerns the lives of five women across three generations of a family, some of whom emigrated to America during the revolution, some of whom have remained in Iran. Shirin, whose story provides the central thread of the novel, is wealthy and restless. At the beginning of the book, she is arrested for soliciting a police officer. A joke gone bad, although only Shirin views it so. Taking the charge less than seriously, despite warnings that it may lead to her deportation, she employees her niece Bita’s girlfriend Patty, who’s barely out of law school, to defend her.

In Iran, Elizabeth, Shirin’s mother, reminisces about her childhood and Ali Lufti, the son of her family’s chauffeur and her first love. Although her family disapproved of the relationship, they did not prevent it. This meant it burnt out when Elizabeth realised she needed to marry within her own class. At least, that’s the story she’s been telling all these years.

The novel is very much concerned with stories. The ones we tell ourselves, the ones that become family lore, the ones that shape our lives and the lives of others. There are the decisions that were made when Shirin left Iran, leaving her daughter Niaz to grow up with her grandmother. There are the things Bita has been told about Iran and the tales that were lost when her mother Seema (Shirin’s sister) died, although Seema does narrate part of the novel from the afterlife. There are the numerous confrontations that take place when those stories are stripped away and long held secrets are revealed.

The Persians is a multi-voiced narrative with a structure that makes it feel like each of the women’s stories are happening simultaneously. Like a big family at a meal, voices cross each other, attempting to put their perspective over. It is credit to Mahloudji that this is skilfully handled. The characters are well-drawn and distinctive, each with their own personalities, hopes and viewpoints. It was a pleasure to spend time with them.

Thanks to Fourth Estate for the review copy.

Stone Yard Devotional – Charlotte Wood

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In Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel, a woman leaves her life – her job, her marriage, her home – and enters a convent. Despite not being religious, she stays for a few months, returning several times until her stay becomes permanent. Over the course of the narrative, we learn some information about her life although this is largely limited to the aspects she thinks about as she carries out her daily tasks, many of which are memories from childhood and the death of her parents thirty years prior.

While the plot is sparce, three key things do happen: a plague of mice infects the convent to the extent that they chew through cables – leaving washing to be done by hand – and car seats; the bones of Sister Jenny, a nun who, against advice, ran a shelter for abused women in Bangkok, are washed up and returned to the convent, and Helen Parry, a celebrity nun who was bullied at school by the narrator and her classmates, arrives with Sister Jenny’s bones. These incidents disrupt both the equilibrium of the convent and of the narrator who has to reckon with guilt, grief and the nature of forgiveness.

The novel asks what responsibility an individual has in the world. To what extent are we responsible for our fellow humans? The narrator worked in species conservation and prior to entering the convent unsubscribed from all the action groups she had previously engaged with. Despite this, the mice arrive as a reminder that her attempts to disengage are futile. As you cannot escape yourself regardless of where in the world you decide to go, you cannot live in pure isolation. As the narrator notes when she attends prayers and finds herself ‘drenched in a weird tranquillity […] In the contemporary world, this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit.’

The return of Helen Parry to the narrator’s life makes her feel uncomfortable. She wants forgiveness for her part in the bullying of Helen when she was a child and, possibly, also the lack of intervention from anyone in the community in Helen’s homelife. Her single parent mother was said to abandon Helen, leaving her to fend for herself for periods of time.

The theme of women leaving reoccurs throughout the novel, whether this is through choice – the narrator’s mother saying she was going to disappear when she wanted to work in the garden – or the women who are murdered by men and either criticised for their role – Sister Jenny – or praised for maintaining their virtue – Maria Goretti. Helen Parry stands in opposition to these women and it is this that makes the narrator afraid of her.

What struck me in the forest, and does now, is how nothing appears to have changed in Helen Parry; how the things we schoolgirls hated her for were exactly the qualities that now gave her such unsettling power. The unashamed demand for space. The way her clothes sat on her body, the animal carnality of her. Her unwavering, absolute readiness for a fight […] The way she remained utterly herself, hiding nothing, this made me admire her too.

Other than the narrator at the beginning of the story, Helen Parry is the only woman to leave the convent during the novel. She is a woman of action, of the world, rather than one of quiet contemplation.

Stone Yard Devotional provides no easy answers. Attempting to retreat from the world seems to be a sane decision in an age of collapse but it’s a privilege to be able to do so and leaves us with the question: if everyone who is able does disengage, to whom does it fall to campaign, support and fight?

I borrowed Stone Yard Devotional from my local library.