Books I Read in July 2025

First published in 2000, Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain is the celebrity chef’s memoir of working in restaurants in New York City. In a loose collection of anecdotes, some drawn from magazine articles, Bourdain recounts how he started out as a line cook fresh from culinary school through to becoming executive chef at Brasserie Les Halles. Like other industries without human resources departments, the working culture is not for the faint-hearted, even if the details are less surprising today. A natural storyteller, Bourdain writes with charismatic force, as though he’s barking orders at the reader, capturing the intensity of the long amphetamine-driven hours in a professional kitchen. Although the graft is undoubtedly hard, the chapter about Tokyo is a highlight and Bourdain’s passion for discovering and appreciating new food is truly engaging. Kitchen Confidential is a modern classic both as a behind-the-scenes memoir and as a delicious slice of contemporary food writing.

Havoc by Rebecca Wait sees 16-year-old Ida Campbell flee Scotland to attend a failing girls boarding school on the south coast of England in the 1980s. However, a mysterious illness causes several pupils to develop seizures with mass hysteria sweeping through the school. The campus setting combined with manipulative teenage girls and the background threat of nuclear holocaust is appropriately claustrophobic for the type of dark humour and psychological dysfunction Wait depicted so brilliantly in I’m Sorry You Feel That Way and Our Fathers. Overall, Havoc is more eccentric in tone compared to Wait’s previous novels. There are a few too many diversions to the inner lives of minor characters, but the farcical elements of the plot such as the school play are very funny and well done. Many thanks to Quercus Books for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan is a sprawling state-of-the-nation novel set in and around London in 2021 and 2022. Campbell Flynn is an ambitious celebrity art historian at UCL who has recently anonymously published a self-help book called Why Men Weep In Their Cars. He has also befriended one of his students, Milo, who has other ideas about how to utilise his skills as a hacker to cause Campbell’s downfall. Against a backdrop of lockdowns lifting and cancel culture, a state-of-the-nation novel set in the UK capital inevitably focuses on money and corruption, specifically examining how wealth is intricately tangled in the doings of oligarchs, cryptocurrency investors and people traffickers. I don’t think O’Hagan was wholly successful in his depiction of Gen Z, particularly in the dialogue, but he handles an impressive range of characters with excellent plotting, showing how complacent people are about how their conception of the world and behaviour impact society. Read it now before all the social commentary becomes horribly dated, or in a couple of decades’ time when it will probably be a quaint period piece.