Books I Read in August 2025

It’s rare for me to binge-read multiple books from a series close together, but having devoured the Apple TV series Slow Horses earlier this year, I gulped down the first four books of the Slough House series by Mick Herron which follows Jackson Lamb and his team of washed-up MI5 spies who have been exiled to desk jobs in Slough House near Barbican underground station in London. They usually end up there in professional disgrace for misdemeanours such as leaving confidential documents on a train (Min Harper) or for personal reasons like addiction issues (Marcus Longridge and Catherine Standish) or simply for repulsive personalities (Roderick Ho). Too difficult to sack for gross misconduct, the incompetent “slow horses” take on the menial tasks shuffling papers and sorting through bins while the powers that be at the main HQ at Regent’s Park hope they will eventually choose to resign.

The first book, Slow Horses, opens with River Cartwright messing up an assessment exercise at King’s Cross station due to being given false information, while the main plot revolves around the kidnapping of a British student by a terrorist cell. There is a lot of background and character development to take in at the beginning, but once established, the series takes off with pacy plots and plenty of twists. In Dead Lions, a Cold War-era spy is found dead on a rail replacement bus and turns out to have a connection to a Russian oligarch. In Real Tigers, one of the Slough House team, Catherine Standish, is kidnapped and held hostage. In Spook Street, River’s grandfather, David Cartwright, is becoming forgetful, which is less than ideal given that he is also a former spy.

The Slough House books have the slick plotting you would expect from spy thrillers, but what makes the series addictive both on screen and on the page is the tongue-in-cheek tone and dry humour, skewering the workplace politics and bureaucracy of MI5 with caustic wit worthy of The Thick of It (and it seems to be no accident that one of The Thick of It’s writers and actors, Will Smith, became the showrunner for Slow Horses). Rude and unkempt, Jackson Lamb is the complete opposite of James Bond’s suave sophistication, and his meetings with Diana Taverner, the ambitious Deputy Director-General of MI5, are always a highlight. The huge budget available from a major streaming service lifts the set-piece action scenes in the TV series, whereas the strength of the books lies in how Herron depicts the characters’ inner monologues, which is particularly effective for characters like Roddy, the gifted and arrogant hacker.

Slow Horses was first published in 201o and the series has gradually become a word-of-mouth success. With the ninth book in the series published this month, long may it continue.

Elsewhere, I enjoyed Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton about the plays, novels and poems most commonly taught in UK schools. Almost all of the works on my GCSE curriculum make an appearance – An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestley, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and My Last Duchess by Robert Browning – as well as other books that have since been added later such as Noughts + Crosses by Malorie Blackman and Coram Boy by Jamila Gavin. It’s cleverly structured and weaves in Atherton’s own experience of studying English at school and university and training to be a teacher, culminating with The History Boys by Alan Bennett and a discussion of the value of teaching English literature and how it has changed over the decades.