Books I Read in December 2025

Homesick by Peter Apps is a study of the current housing crisis in London. The specific failures that led to the fire at Grenfell Tower are covered in Apps’ excellent book Show Me The Bodies, while Homesick examines the broader landscape of housing in the capital and how working people have been priced out of both buying and renting in London. The first half of the book looks at the last five decades of housing policy in the context of rapid deindustrialisation and deregulation of the private sector, and the impact of those policies is brought to life through profiles of various people who reside in London who explain how this economic transformation has affected their living situation and their local communities. It’s mind-boggling that people on relatively low incomes used to be able to afford property in zones 2 and 3 just a few short decades ago. After a couple of terrifying chapters about London’s ageing population and the current and future risks of flooding, fire and climate change, Apps attempts a slightly more optimistic conclusion by covering how other cities in Europe have addressed issues with social housing, although I can’t say I felt very hopeful about how these ideas could even begin to tackle the scale and complexity of the problem in London. Nevertheless, Apps is an excellent reporter and Homesick is essential reading. We Pretty Pieces of Flesh by Colwill Brown is a debut novel about three girls named Kel, Rach and Shaz who meet at secondary school in Doncaster in the late 1990s. Opening with a night out in Sheffield in the early 2000s, the narrative moves back and forth between the three characters through significant episodes of their lives as a collection of linked short stories, culminating in a reunion in the late 2010s when some long-standing tensions all come to a head. The prose is almost entirely rendered in phonetic south Yorkshire dialect whose rhythm quickly becomes easy to absorb for non-locals and adds an extra layer of authenticity. While the early 2000s northern England setting and slang are all very specific and will particularly resonate with UK readers who grew up during that era, the dynamics of a friendship group of three teenage girls will be recognised more widely and Brown is excellent at observing how bitterness can linger and differences in social class become magnified. Many thanks to Vintage Books for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Translated from the French by John Lambert, V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère covers the 10-month trial of the surviving terrorist associates involved in the Paris attacks in November 2015 in which over 130 people were killed. Drawn from his weekly columns from September 2021 until June 2022 for the political magazine L’Observateur, Carrère skilfully depicts the painstaking forensic processes of a long criminal trial, covering the testimony of survivors in detail as well as the backgrounds of the defendants, lawyers, reporters and family members of the victims. It’s grim reading, but very well reported.