Two shorter reviews for you today – a page-turning sliding doors type novel that was much hyped – and loved – last year, and an eloquent hymn to a immigrant in Venice.

The Names by Florence Knapp

This is going to be a short review, only because I really don’t want to divulge what happens in this fabulous debut novel. I have been urged to read it by many friends, but wary of the hype, put it off until now. I thought I was immune to the charms of a sliding doors type novel in which multiple possible lives are explored in parallel as the years go by. Paul Auster’s wonderful 4 3 2 1 obviously springs to mind, but also Laura Barnett’s debut The Versions of Us in particular.

But I loved Knapp’s mechanism for telling three versions of the same group of peoples’ lives. It’s 1987, Cora is married to Gordon, a GP. They’ve a nine-year-old daughter, Maia, and now just had a baby son, and Gordon is impressing on Cora the need to get the baby registered, his parents will come for dinner at the weekend, and he wants to proudly announce the name of their son. Gordon is a name that’s been passed down through all the men in her husband’s family – Cora has never liked it.

Do you not see the risk? she’d wanted to say. Do you not see that calling our son Gordon might mean he ends up like you? But she couldn’t. Because surely that was the point.

On their way to the registrar’s office, Cora and Maia talk about names. Maia favours ‘Bear’, for a soft and cuddly brother. Cora, having looked at names that mean father, likes Julian – sky father. Gordon as we know, wants Gordon.

And that’s it. Bear, Julian, and Gordon. Three names with very different feels. Three names that could lead to very different lives. After this prologue, the narrative splits into three strands, one for each name, told in seven year intervals. But each strand begins with what happens when Gordon gets home and is told the registered name of his son. We’ve already intuited that Gordon is not a good husband, but what happens next will shock…

And that’s all the plot you’re getting. The main narratives in each strand revolve around Bear/Julian/Gordon and Maia, plus Cora, her Irish mother Sílbhe and her partner Cian, and Cora’s best friend Mehri, with a supporting cast of friends and lovers of the siblings. Gordon Sr lurks in the background ominously. Stylewise, Knapp straddles the line between commercial and literary fiction with ease, giving each of the three strands a distinctly different trajectory. Characters like Sílbhe, Cian and Mehri may overlap but the events differ enough to make events easy to follow, although I did get slightly confused with Maia’s partners later on.

Full of drama, shocking, but with many moving moments, this novel absolutely gripped me from start to finish, and when I turned the last page, I let out a big laugh, for Knapp found the perfect way to end the story! This novel is worth the hype.

Source: Own copy. Phoenix hardback, 2025, 342 pages. BUY at Waterstones via my affiliate link.

Venice Requiem by Khalid Lyamlahy

Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz

When I analyzed my reading stats last Christmas, one thing stuck out in particular – I had read nothing by authors of African origin in 2025. Something I aim to correct this year. My first comes from a Moroccan author (now Assistant Professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of Chicago), and is translated by one of my favourite translators, Ros Schwartz. It comes from indie publisher Hope Road on their Small Axes imprint (both owing the origin of their names to Bob Marley).

The novella is based on a true event. On the 22nd of January 2017, Pateh Sabally, arrived in Venice from Milan. The twenty-two-year had arrived from Banjul in The Gambia to Sicily via a circuitous route. He may be a refugee, but does have an Italian residence permit. His death by drowning, after plunging into the Grand Canal by the Scalzi Bridge, was witnessed by many, and no-one put themselves out to help beyond throwing lifebelts, but Pateh can’t swim, he can’t reach them and drowns in the freezing water.

The novella is narrated by a young French writer. He is outraged on hearing Pateh’s story, and starts reading up about Gambian refugees, then goes to Venice to see where Pateh met his fate. It opens as our narrator considers his own reactions if confronted with a similar event.

I’ve never seen a man drown. Writing these words already feels unbearable. I don’t dare imagine what is to follow. But I have wondered what I would do if I were one day confronted by a drowning man. Would I have the courage to jump into the water to try and save him? The word “courage” would probably not have the same meaning. I tell myself I would at least shout for help, alert passers-by, call the emergency services – in other words, shift any responsibility onto others. A way of confessing my helplessness in the presence of the unspeakable: seeing the spectre of death and instantly admitting defeat.

This is the first of several hundred vignettes, all single paragraphs that gradually piece together Pateh’s arrival in Venice, the writer’s own reaction to arriving in Venice, his piecing together the events leading to Pateh’s death, contrasting with the deaths of others trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa, what life was like in Banjul to make people want to escape it, and more. But he always comes back to Venice itself, and its fatal allure. As the variant of the Italian proverb,  “vedi Napoli e poi muori” says, “See Venice and Die.”

The narrators circles round and round these themes, always coming back to Pateh’s arrival at the Santa Lucia train station, contrasting with his own – making himself feel like a tourist, which makes him uncomfortable. We never learn why Pateh jumped, but we do read many comments on newspaper articles that the narrator collects, some of which frankly disturb:

“I wouldn’t jump into the Grand Canal in January, not even to save my wife, as we’d probably both die and our children would be orphans. We wanted to die, let’s not blame others.”
“I am profoundly convinced that if a dog had fallen into the canal, more than one person would have dived in. . . and now they’d be guests on all the daytime TV shows.”
“We couldn’t do more to help the invaders if we tried.”

To be honest, I found the narrator a little repetitive, but it’s a more subtle way of pressing his message home in the novella’s 118 pages of how refugees deserve and need our help and care, than just hitting us with it. As always, Ros Schwartz rises to the challenge of providing an elegant translation. Venice Requiem was a thought-provoking read that made a great start to my African reading this year.

As previously mentioned, Hope Road is a small indie publisher, whose ‘mission is to promote literary voices from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean’. I previously read A Long Way from Douala by Max Lobe from them.

Source: Own copy. Flapped paperback original, 118 pages (Jan 2026). BUY at Waterstones via my affiliate link.