Books I Read in June 2026

Death of an Ordinary Man by Sarah Perry is an account of the final days of the author’s father-in-law, David, who died just nine days after receiving a cancer diagnosis in 2022. Perry and her husband Rob nursed David at home in his final days with the assistance of various healthcare professionals. Rather than the usual death memoir themes of grief, sadness and healing Perry describes the specific context of dying, including the bureaucracy and mundanities which continue around that. It is beautifully told, pitched perfectly between pragmatism and tenderness and highlights both the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of David’s life and death.

The Heart-Shaped Tin by Bee Wilson is a series of short essays which explore the significance of kitchen objects and their association with domesticity and memories. The title refers to a rusty cake tin which unexpectedly falls to Wilson’s feet shortly after her husband left her suddenly in June 2020. The book offers an interesting blend of personal memoir and anthropology. The breakdown of her 23 year marriage is threaded through the essays which also include stories of a Ukrainian kitchen cabinet that remained intact after a Russian bombing, the Japanese culture of gift-giving and a spoon used by a prisoner at a Nazi labour camp. Some of the more sentimental passages wouldn’t be entirely out of place in Pseuds Corner in Private Eye magazine, while others are genuinely moving, particularly those concerning her mother’s dementia and the toast rack that she believed had been stolen.

Service by John Tottenham is a blackly comic novel about a curmudgeonly middle-aged British expat who lives and works as a bookseller in a hip neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The main character, Sean, is reminiscent of the grumpy and sarcastic bookseller Bernard Black from the sitcom Black Books, although is more likely to be based on the author himself who is also a British-born novelist, poet and bookseller living in Los Angeles. Sean has to contend with gentrification and vacuous customers in the social media age and is trying to write a novel in his spare time while battling extreme procrastination. Unsurprisingly, not a whole lot happens, but the tedious repetition is painfully necessary to fully depict the drudgery of working in retail. It is a very Marmite book, but I think it works well as very dry satire of autofiction, bookselling and hipster culture.

Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout is the debut novel by the author of Olive Kitteridge. It tells the story of a single mother, Isabelle Goodrow, and her 16-year-old daughter Amy, who is groomed by her much older maths teacher, Mr Robertson, which has significant repercussions for both mother and daughter. Set in the small New England town of Shirley Falls, Strout gradually reveals more of Isabelle’s backstory to show why she reacts in the way that she does to Amy’s rebellion, her awkward encounters with her gossiping colleagues and her reactions to reading Madame Bovary and Hamlet as part of a self-improvement project. While very little is supposed to happen in such a quiet town, Strout’s depiction of Amy, Isabelle and their local community is very rich and packs in a lot of big themes – loneliness, shame, betrayal and relationships between mothers and their teenage daughters – all of which she writes about beautifully.