Shorter reviews today so I can close out my pile of books read in 2025 finally!
Persuasion by Jane Austen
This was our bookgroup’s Christmas Classic read – our celebration of Austen’s 250th anniversary too. All bar one of us really enjoyed it, the other preferred her earlier lighter fare. I loved it; it was a re-read for me and as I read I mixed the two TV adaptations together in my head – envisaging Amanda Root from the 1995 series (with Ciaran Hinds as Wentworth) with Rupert Penry-Jones (and Sally Hawkins as Anne) from 2007.
Poor Anne, considered an old maid at just 27! Having been persuaded out of her engagement to Wentworth by Lady Russell, who controlled everything, she resigned herself to being useful – a good ompanion, babysitter, piano player for dancing. When Wentworth comes back on the scene, now a naval Captain, with an inheritance to come, she is also resigned that he is bring groomed to wed one of the Musgrove girls, probsbly Louisa (the silly girl who jumps off the Cobb in Lyme). However, he has kept that candle burning for Anne, and in a ‘Pemberley-type moment’ when he learns that Anne had turned down another offer of marriage, his mind is made up and we get that lovely letter scene.
I don’t read many classics, but so enjoyed revisiting this one, my only caveat being that there are too many characters named Charles, small beef indeed! I read from the Penguin Classics edition with a foreword by Gillian Beer, and loads of other supporting material, which was interesting to return to after reading the novel itself.
Source: Own copy. Penguin paperback 2003, 290 pages incl appendies etc. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK + P&P)
Here, and Only Here by Christelle Dabos
Translated by Hildegarde Searle
I really enjoyed Dabos’ Mirror Visitor Quartet, especially the first two parts. It is an epic YA/crossover fantasy, so I was really keen to see what she did next – and it was this – a short novel set in a slightly strange secondary school, the ‘School of Here’.
Told mainly through the voices of four pupils in different years, Iris, Pierre, Madeleine and Guy we experience life at a school which isn’t quite normal. As Iris explains:
At secondary school, the worst isn’t the lessons, it’s all that happens in between them. The very consistency of time is different Here. Recesses are eternities. It’s not that they’re boring, oh no, boredom at least has something mellow, almost comfortable about it. No, we spend every second of every minute fighting the fear of putting a foot wrong, while pretending to have fun.
All the pupils defer to one they refer to as the ‘Prince’ who rules the school, we see what happens later when someone takes him on. Strange things happen, like a pupil vanishes into thin air; one of the pupils becomes revered as a prophetess; one outsider removes himself permanently. Then there is the ‘Top Secret Club’ – a group of students who are investigating the phenomena, hidebound by their own rules.
Wound up in all the strange phenomena, this portrait of tribes and outsiders in school is an odd read, lacking the immediacy of the bullying in Kawakami’s Heaven which I just reviewed. It’s a bit aloof and abstract at times, and I couldn’t decide whether the Top Secret Club’s meetings were comic interludes or not. Dabos continues to be an author with interesting ideas though.
Source: Review copy – thank you! Europa Editions paperback, 2025, 228 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s
The Cat by Georges Simenon
Translated by Ros Schwartz
Having republished all the Maigret novels in new translations, Penguin are now turning to his ‘romans durs’ – standalone, twisty, dark novels of which The Cat is the first, published as a larger C format flapped paperback. It’s one of Simenon’s later works, published first in 1967.
The Cat is the story of the decay of a decades-long marriage of convenience that should probably have never happened in the first place, narrated by the husband. They end up essentially living separate lives, not talking except through cryptic notes, each playing a power game in this toxic relationship they’ve ended up in, waiting for each other to die. NB: For those who can’t stand to read about animal cruelty, the titular animal doesn’t do well, not the parrot.
I still intend to write this up more fully for Shiny, so I’ll stop there, but say it is a very dark and twisted novella indeed, translated expertly by Ros Schwartz who is behind many of the Maigrets too. I long to read more of Simenon’s romans durs.
Source: Review copy – thank you! Penguin classics flapped pbk, 2025, 154 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s
The Artist by Lucy Steeds
This novel has been winning prizes including the Waterstones Debut of 2025, then their Book of the Year. I can see why, for it drips atmosphere and wonderful detail of 1920s Provence. The story is told through two pairs of eyes. Joseph, is a young journalist, keen to make his mark, and Ettie keeps house for the reclusive artist Edouard Tartuffe.
We begin with a rather provoking prologue. It’s 1957 and a woman approaches a painting in the National Gallery, The Feast – the only painting known to have survived the blaze at Tartuffe’s studio in 1920. She remembers it well, she set the blaze.
Remember, we’ve yet to meet Ettie. The novel begins proper with Joseph arriving in the hamlet where Tartuffe lives. He’d written to request an interview many months ago, and when a one word reply came, ‘Venez’ he hotfooted it to France. He finds Tartuffe irascible and confused by the letter, but Sylvette, Ettie, comes to his rescue. ‘Here is your Young Man with Orange.’ Joseph is given bed and board for posing for Tartuffe, he relishes the task, to see how the great man works, confident he can write a profile of him for his editor.
As the days turn into weeks, Joseph is finally getting to know his hosts slightly, and naturally he is attracted to Ettie, who is a young woman of many secrets, not least her desire to escape her life. Tartuffe needs her though… You can tell, it’s going to get complicated and I shall give no more away.
The pictures that Steeds weaves, of the Provencal countryside, and particularly of tthe food, (Tartuffe is obsessed with painting food) are glorious. Her three main characters are superbly drawn and you feel for each of them in turn, even Tartuffe. Her descriptions of the processes of painting are fascinating and obviously well-researched. All in all a wonderfully atmospheric tale with some thrilling twists.
Source: Own copy. John Murray hardback 2025, 304 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s.
