Books I Read in May 2025

One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake documents her gastronomic travels cycling 2,300 kilometres around France and sampling all the regional culinary delights the country has to offer. I enjoyed Red Sauce Brown Sauce which saw Cloake travelling around the UK in search of breakfast food, although that particular tour was frequently scuppered by Covid-19 restrictions, so it was nice to read a pre-pandemic travelogue this time. Cloake writes delicious descriptions of the food she consumes, but there are plenty of stressful moments too, including train strikes, punctures, torrential rain and erratic opening hours. The Pause Café sections about the history of French food were very interesting and Cloake is an enthusiastic Francophile who pokes gentle fun at French idiosyncrasies while developing a system for ranking croissants with the seriousness that the task deserves. I am looking forward to reading Cloake’s new book Peach Street to Lobster Lane about American cuisine.

The Elements by John Boyne comprises four interconnected novellas – Water, Earth, Fire and Air – which have been released at approximate six-monthly intervals between September 2023 and May 2025. The series looks at the consequences of trauma and sexual abuse from different perspectives, including those who enable abuse or are complicit in it, as well as those who are perpetrators and victims. In Water, Willow has moved from Dublin to a small island to escape her past. In Earth, Evan is a talented footballer on trial for rape. In Fire, Flora is a surgeon who suffered childhood trauma. In Air, Aaron travels from Australia to Ireland with his teenage son. I can understand why the books were published separately because they do work well as distinct stories in their own right. However, the themes and the connections between characters become richer and more powerful when read as a complete work. Fire stands out as the most memorable and confronting of the four parts, while Air is very satisfying as a conclusion which ties up several loose ends. Overall, this is easily Boyne’s best work since The Heart’s Invisible Furies.

The Story of a Heart by Rachel Clarke won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction this year. Clarke, a palliative care doctor, reports on a heart transplant case alongside the history of all the medical developments which enabled the operation to take place, from emergency trauma care to the computer system that matches transplant donations with recipients. Nine-year-old Keira suffered catastrophic brain injuries in a car accident in 2017, and her heart was donated to another child called Max in north-east England when he suffered acute cardiomyopathy. The outcome of the story has been widely reported in the UK and led to a change in the law where all adults are considered as potential organ donors unless they opt out. Clarke handles an inspiring story with compassion and sensitivity.

Ripeness by Sarah Moss tells the story of Edith across two timelines, as a teenager in the 1960s supporting her pregnant sister in Italy and as a divorced woman in present day rural Ireland. Motherhood has long been a dominant theme in Moss’ fiction, whereas migration becomes the main focus here, exploring Edith’s identity as a daughter of Holocaust survivors. After a series of short and brutal novellas in recent years with more direct social commentary, Ripeness is broader and more reflective in tone and seems to represent a new and more ambitious era for Moss’s fiction, perhaps a response to publishing her memoir My Good Bright Wolf last year. Many thanks to Picador for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.