The presents have been opened, the loved ones dispersed and the booze is all gone. What better time to settle down to a good book? The long, dark days between Christmas and the new year offer a time to catch up, but also to explore, reflect and revisit. These suggestions will fatten up your inner bookworm for the year ahead.
Strout’s latest dispatch from the life of Lucy Barton is one of the first post-pandemic novels to have fully metabolised the trauma. It takes the recently widowed Lucy off to a chilly clifftop hideaway with her risk-averse ex, William, from where they navigate the ups and downs of family life at a safe distance from their beloved daughters. It is Strout’s version of The Tempest: a paean to peace and reconciliation at the end of a turbulent story cycle.
There have been so many art histories without women over the centuries that Hessel’s beautifully written 500-year survey is a welcome, necessary, addition to the bookshelves. Quilting, folk art and ceramics – so long dismissed as “women’s work” – are reclaimed as art, in a book which is itself a lovely quiltwork of familiar movements, seen afresh through their forgotten personalities.
This is one of the world’s great short story collections, so intricately patterned that it can withstand any number of re-readings. The 15 “epiclets” – Joyce’s word – are all set in the Irish capital, following a thematic course from childhood to maturity, until it arrives at the maudlin Gabriel Conroy, in The Dead: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Keyes has a voice and a wit that can see off the worst doldrums. So the fact that she reads her own audiobook gives an extra pleasure to the resurrection of alcoholic Rachel, many years dry, and now a group leader at the Cloisters, where she fought her own demons in the 1998 bestseller Rachel’s Holiday. Each of her patients has a poignant story to tell. Meanwhile, Mammy Walsh is about to turn 80, reuniting her five daughters for a surprise birthday bash in this warm hug of a novel.
A little gem – part book, part artwork – from brother-sister team Miriam and Ezra Elia. It’s the latest of a parody series based on the Peter and Jane Ladybird reading scheme of the 1960s and 70s. John and Susan’s sightseeing trip with Mummy includes Kim Kardashian atop Nelson’s column, and cancel culture drones circling the National Gallery. “Run! They have detected your unconscious biases,” says Mummy.
