Books I Read in April 2025
From a plea for moral AI to a British state of the nation novel, here's what I read this month.
The Shelf of Trump
What if we could extract a creative and inspiring new reading project from the man at the centre of the dark times we're living through?
Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn
My take on the new novel by this Booker Prize winning author, in which the lives of a disparate set of characters suddenly intersect.
Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico
My thoughts on Vincenzo Latronico's beautiful novel about millennial expats in Berlin, recently longlisted for the International Booker Prize.
Borges Marathon, Part 18: Funes, His Memory
My thoughts on Funes, His Memory, aka Funes the Memorious, a short fiction by Jorge Luis Borges about a man with an infinite memory.
Reading Wales Month: Clear by Carys Davies
A church minister is sent to evict the last inhabitant of a remote island, but things don't go as planned.
What Is Literary Fiction Anyway?
Literary fiction is hard to define, but I'm going to try anyway. The debate tends to be poisoned by debates about elitism and being "better" than genre fiction, which I'd like to avoid here. Instead, I want to identify the…
Books I Read in January 2025
With novels set in Malaysia, Russia, Germany, India and Serbia, along with some interesting non-fiction, here's what I read this month.
Borges Marathon, Part 17: The Garden of Forking Paths
A pacy wartime thriller mixes with an abstract meditation on the forking paths of time and fate in a classic short story by Jorge Luis Borges.