Books I Read in May 2026

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans became a word-of-mouth bestseller last year and recently won the Women’s Prize for Fiction. It is an epistolary novel told entirely through letters, most of which are written over several years by septuagenarian Sybil van Antwerp  to members of her family, friends, former colleagues, and a few famous real-life authors she admires. Sybil is a retired lawyer, divorced and living in Maryland, slowly losing her eyesight and grappling with feelings of guilt and grief over events in her past, including the death of her second child and tracing the story behind her adoption as a baby. A few of the replies she receives are included, as well as some unsent letters which are very raw, and the epistolary form therefore reveals a lot about how Sybil expresses herself through writing in different circumstances in a way that regular prose may not have done so subtly or effectively. I will be interested to see how the epistolary form translates in a film adaptation which is reported to be in the works.

Always Home, Always Homesick by Hannah Kent is the author’s memoir of  her love of Iceland. She first visited the country as a teenager on an exchange programme in 2003 and the first half of the book covers how she integrated to life in the north-west of the country and learned Icelandic. She stayed in touch with some of her hosts and visited the country again several times over the years, firstly to research the life of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last person to be executed in Iceland in 1830, for her debut novel Burial Rites, and ending with her most recent visit in 2023 as a guest at Reykjavik International Literary Festival. Always Home, Always Homesick gave me a new appreciation of Kent’s debut novel which I read several years ago, and how carefully she fictionalised Agnes’ story, and I was pleased to hear that Kent is involved in a film adaptation which has been in development for several years.

Farewell to Europe by Joe Luc Barnes is a travelogue of the former states of the Soviet Union in the recent years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Most people have a certain idea of what life was like there before the fall of the Iron Curtain – industrial amounts of vodka, freezing weather, the KGB – but since the collapse of the USSR 35 years ago, the 15 nations spanning from the Baltic States to central Asia have taken very different paths following independence. Many of the encounters Barnes has with the locals during his travels are absurd or darkly humorous, particularly his closely monitored visit to Turkmenistan. The sketches of each country are brief, but this insightful book gives the reader a sense of how vast and diverse the region is and also how relatively few Westerners venture to many of these countries. Many thanks to Elliott & Thompson for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet recounts a grisly triple murder that took place in 1857 on Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides.  As with his Booker Prize-shortlisted break-out novel, His Bloody Project, Burnet has stuck to a tried and tested formula of fictionalising the story behind a real crime. Angus McPhee, a labourer on the island, killed his mother, father and aunt in one afternoon, and the story is recounted many years later by his brother, Malcolm, who has been ostracised by the local community following the chilling events that day. Angus was declared criminally insane during his trial in Inverness, while it also becomes clear that Malcolm’s own state of mind is far from stable. As always, Burnet is excellent at the psychological analysis of characters’ narratives and perceptions, exploring the hereditary nature of mental illness and opening up alternative versions of events.