Moveable Feasts: Paris in Twenty Meals by Chris Newens sees the expat Englishman tour the 20 arrondissements of the French capital, sampling the local cuisine of each neighbourhood. There are visits to iconic venues such as the famous Les Deux Magots café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Cordon Bleu cookery school, exploring whether the most obvious clichés about French cuisine really are true or not. It isn’t all fine dining though, and Newens also seeks out some less obvious locations including Rungis which is said to be the largest wholesale market for fresh produce in the world, a homeless kitchen near the Bois de Vincennes and a memorable chapter about the charcuterie brunch buffet on offer at a sex club in Pigalle. Moveable Feasts is ultimately about how gastronomic culture intertwines with gentrification and immigration in France and it is both an insightful and entertaining piece of food writing. Continue reading
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Books I Read in October 2025
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Books I Read in September 2025
The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith is the eighth book in the Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott series. This instalment sees the detective duo investigate the identity of a dismembered corpse in the vault of a silver shop. Decima Mullins hires the agency to confirm if the body is that of her boyfriend, Rupert Fleetwood, but Strike and Ellacott discover that the identity could also fit three other missing people – a young mechanic, an ex-paratrooper and an actor in adult films. I don’t mind a knotty plot, but I think this case had one too many threads, and three mysteries rather than four would have been easier to follow. Nevertheless, I always find the Galbraith books to be so enjoyable to immerse myself in, even if the finer labyrinthine details are difficult to hold together in my head. There are significant developments in Strike and Ellacott’s personal lives in this book, and it’s reassuring to hear that work on book number nine is well under way, given that The Hallmarked Man ends on what can only be described as the mother of all cliffhangers as the longest will-they-won’t-they saga in literary history appears to be finally heading towards some sort of resolution.
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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.
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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. Continue reading
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Books I Read in June 2025
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan won last year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and is a seamless combination of memoir, history, science and ethics. It connects Flanagan’s father’s experience of being a prisoner of war in Japan (which also inspired his Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North) with 1930s nuclear physicists, an affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, the colonial history of Tasmania, and Flanagan’s near-death experience in a kayaking accident in his early 20s, while the title of the book is taken from Anton Chekhov’s exam question parody. This combination of topics probably doesn’t sound very coherent, and some parts are very cerebral and meandering, but Flanagan blends them into a truly unique and poignant piece of non-fiction about the absurdity of life and its consequences. Continue reading
Books I Read in May 2025
One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake documents her gastronomic travels cycling 2,300 kilometres around France and sampling all the regional culinary delights the country has to offer. I enjoyed Red Sauce Brown Sauce which saw Cloake travelling around the UK in search of breakfast food, although that particular tour was frequently scuppered by Covid-19 restrictions, so it was nice to read a pre-pandemic travelogue this time. Cloake writes delicious descriptions of the food she consumes, but there are plenty of stressful moments too, including train strikes, punctures, torrential rain and erratic opening hours. The Pause Café sections about the history of French food were very interesting and Cloake is an enthusiastic Francophile who pokes gentle fun at French idiosyncrasies while developing a system for ranking croissants with the seriousness that the task deserves. I am looking forward to reading Cloake’s new book Peach Street to Lobster Lane about American cuisine.
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Books I Read in April 2025
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie tells the interconnected stories of four Nigerian women who live in the United States. Chiamaka is a travel writer based in Maryland who reminisces about unsatisfying relationships, her friend Zikora is a lawyer, and her cousin Omelogor is a former banker turned grad student. However, the most affecting part of the book belongs to Kadiatou, a maid violently assaulted by a rich hotel guest, and Adichie writes in an afterword that this part of the story was inspired by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case in 2011. The prose is smooth and well-crafted and the characterisation of the four women is rich and multi-layered almost to the point of being ornate, and slightly at the expense of a coherent narrative arc. Overall, I think Americanah was a bit more satisfying as a whole, but Dream Count is a much welcome return after more than a decade. Continue reading
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Books I Read in February 2025
Show Don’t Tell by Curtis Sittenfeld is a collection of 12 short stories by the author of American Wife, Rodham and Romantic Comedy. White Women LOL is a stand-out satire about cancel culture, while Lost But Not Forgotten, the last story in the collection, sees the main character from Sittenfeld’s debut novel Prep, preparing to attend her 30 year boarding school reunion. The Richest Babysitter in the World is a memorable tale about a woman who works for a couple who later become tech billionaires. Sittenfeld tends to focus on the domestic preoccupations of middle-aged women from the Midwest, so while Show Don’t Tell isn’t particularly experimental or diverse in terms of subject matter or themes, Sittenfeld deploys her sharp wit and observation just as effectively in short form as she does in her novels, resulting in a satisfying and consistent collection of stories. Many thanks to Random House UK for sending me a review copy via NetGalley. Continue reading
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Books I Read in January 2025
The Watermark by Sam Mills is a truly wacky and audacious piece of metafiction which tells the story of celebrated reclusive author Augustus Fate who kidnaps Jaime and Rachel so he can trap them in his novel to give more depth to the characters. As they try to escape, they hop between different books and find themselves in Oxford in 1861, Manchester in 2014, Russia in 1928 and London in 2047. The pastiches of different genres are all well drawn as Jaime and Rachel fight against the characters created for them with their real selves. ‘The Watermark’ could easily have become overwhelmed by the sheer number of ideas bursting out of it, and some of them are inevitably more successful than others depending on your genre preferences (I personally struggled with the Russian section). However, the relationship between Jaime and Rachel hangs it all together, and Mills pulls off a dizzying narrative about the boundaries of fiction, reality and fate.
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Books I Read in December 2024
It is inevitable that You Don’t Have to Be Mad to Work Here by Dr Benji Waterhouse will be compared to This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay. Waterhouse does for the field of psychiatry what Kay did for obstetrics and gynaecology, describing the harsh reality of working in NHS hospitals with dark gallows humour while making serious points about underfunding, bed shortages and staff burnout. The nature of serious psychiatric illness poses diagnostic challenges, particularly when patients can’t report their own symptoms and believe that they are werewolves or about to marry Harry Styles, and Waterhouse quickly finds the system is too overwhelmed to provide compassionate care. As well as portraits of colleagues and patients, Waterhouse also navigates the sources of his own anxiety and dysfunctional family issues. He still works for the NHS alongside gigs as a stand-up comedian, and he deploys humour with great effect in his insightful book about the mental health crisis. Many thanks to Random House Vintage Books for sending me a review copy via NetGalley. Continue reading
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Books I Read in November 2024
Impossible City by Simon Kuper is an expat’s view of Parisian society in the 21st century and how it has changed over the last two decades. Kuper bought an apartment in Paris in 2000 and still lives in the French capital with his American wife and their three children. From the point of view of a middle-class British journalist, Kuper outlines the mysterious codes which dictate how Parisians socialise, and the chapters about elitism and the rise of Emmanuel Macron are particularly fascinating (Kuper is the author of a book called ‘Chums’ about similar networks in the UK). ‘Impossible City’ also covers changes to the city’s infrastructure ahead of hosting the Olympic Games last summer, and the impact of the terrorist attacks in 2015 and the pandemic. Brexit prompted Kuper to finally apply for French citizenship, and ‘Impossible City’ is a fond but not overly romanticised portrait of Paris told with dry humour. Continue reading
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Books I Read in October 2024
Lives of the Wives by Carmela Ciuraru outlines the tempestuous relationships and careers of five literary couples: Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal. I knew a bit about Kingsley Amis and Roald Dahl already, but very little about the others, and the brief portraits in ‘Lives of the Wives’ provide a solid overview of their careers. As a group biography though, I think there needed to be a more central hook that linked the couples more coherently together, or at least some analysis that’s a little more groundbreaking than the revelation that creativity and ego usually put strain on marriages.
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Books I Read in September 2024
Ruskin Park by Rory Cellan-Jones is the former BBC journalist’s memoir about how his parents met in the 1950s. His mother, Sylvia, was separated from her first husband and worked at the BBC as a secretary. She had a brief affair with James Cellan Jones, a producer who was 15 years her junior. When Sylvia found out she was pregnant at the age of 42, James abandoned her and didn’t meet his son until 23 years later. Two decades after her death in 1996, Cellan-Jones sifted through 60 years’ worth of his mother’s correspondence to piece together what happened at the time of his birth and why. The letters present both a social history of mid 20th-century Britain and a gripping personal story about the challenges of being a single parent in a south London council flat in the 1960s. Readers who enjoy family memoirs in the vein of Romany and Tom by Ben Watt will definitely enjoy ‘Ruskin Park’ which is a moving and compassionately written book.
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Books I Read in August 2024
My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss is a memoir about the author’s eating disorder which developed during her childhood with a serious relapse during the pandemic. I have enjoyed reading several novels by Moss over the years which often deal with food and illness, and her latest memoir is a complex account about these themes and also addresses control, memory and unreliable narrators. She writes about her emotionally neglectful childhood in Manchester and the books she sought solace in, with some analysis of their depictions of food and femininity. ‘My Good Bright Wolf’ is mostly written in the second person, an unusual style for a memoir and a very powerful one too. The prose is intercut with Moss often berating herself, which sometimes felt relentless and intrusive to read but is very effective at showing the mental toll of anorexia. Many thanks to Pan Macmillan for sending me a review copy via NetGalley. Continue reading
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Books I Read in July 2024
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year and is even more impressive than his second novel Skippy Dies which I read last year. It is a portrait of the Barnes family who live in a small Irish town and have fallen on hard times following the financial crash in 2008. Dickie Barnes runs a car dealership which he inherited from his father Maurice. His marriage to town beauty Imelda is also in trouble. Their teenage daughter Cass is aiming to go to Trinity College Dublin and their 12-year-old son PJ is obsessed with video games.
As demonstrated in ‘Skippy Dies’, Murray is excellent at writing accurate teenage dialogue, although I was a bit less convinced by the absence of punctuation in Imelda’s section, which supposedly reflects her desperation and how her mind works. ‘The Bee Sting’ is less comic than ‘Skippy Dies’ and much more about anxiety regarding both the past and the future. The lengthy flashbacks eventually reveal that it is the events, decisions and near misses in Dickie and Imelda’s past which have really shaped the family’s current circumstances, leading to an unsettling but fitting conclusion. ‘The Bee Sting’ is an ambitious novel with satisfying character development.
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Books I Read in June 2024
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein won the first Women’s Prize for Non Fiction last month. I read Klein’s first book No Logo several years ago, which I felt had already dated somewhat over a decade after its release. In contrast, the ideas explored in ‘Doppelganger’ are very much of the here and now, having been published just last year, but I think this book will remain relevant for a long time. What starts out as an amusing anecdote about being repeatedly mistaken for anti-vax right-wing conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf becomes a deep dive in the world of post-truth politics and the ways in which doubles are reflected in the “mirror world” particularly online. This includes frequently discussed topics such as how people curate their online personas and how political divisions are fuelled by disinformation and misinformation, alongside digressions about autism, doubles in literature, climate change and antisemitism. This sounds like a jumbled mix of ideas, but Klein is astute and erudite and balances personal reflections with rigorous journalistic analysis.
Books I Read in May 2024
Knife by Salman Rushdie recounts how the world-famous author survived an attempted murder at a literary event in New York in August 2022, over three decades after a fatwa was issued which forced him into hiding for several years. Rushdie manages to create suspense despite the outcome of the shocking attack being well known, and describes his distressing injuries and long recovery in some detail. The passage where Rushdie imagines a conversation with his attacker, who he refers to only as “The A”, is a creative and moving way of addressing such a traumatic event. Above all though, Rushdie is keen to emphasise that ‘Knife’ is also a love story. Many people were unaware that he had quietly married author and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths less than a year before the attack, and the book is a moving tribute to her support. Rushdie said that writing about the attack was the only way he would be able to move forward, and I hope that this has helped him achieve that. Many thanks to Vintage Books for sending me a review copy via NetGalley. Continue reading
Books I Read in April 2024
Pandora’s Box by Peter Biskind is about how the golden age of prestige television drama series in the early 2000s has evolved to an era of “peak TV” in which a saturated market produced 600 new scripted series in 2022 alone. It’s a three act story which begins with how the cable channel HBO distinguished itself from network television and found enormous success and critical acclaim with complex, gritty dramas such as The Sopranos at the turn of the century, inspiring several other series led by antihero protagonists. Then the DVD rental service Netflix disrupted everything, committing to series without pilots and introducing the concept of dropping all episodes of a series at the same time. And then its competitors arrived with tech giants creating their own streaming arms, notably Apple TV, Disney+ and Amazon Prime among others, churning out new series at great expense but not always succeeding in producing high quality content. Some of the detail about the financial side of the business is quite dry, but there are some interesting anecdotes about how some of the best known television dramas were made and why HBO rejected shows like Mad Men and House of Cards. Biskind is best known as a film critic and comes across as someone who doesn’t much care for television which results in an unusual and abrupt tone. However, his deep scepticism for the subject is well placed when discussing the flawed business models and rampant corporate greed in the industry. Continue reading
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Books I Read in March 2024
A Tomb With a View by Peter Ross is a fascinating book about graveyards in Britain and Ireland and the stories of some well-known and forgotten residents as well as the work of those who care for them. The famous Victorian cemeteries in London such as Highgate and Kensal Rise face issues with limited space and expensive upkeep. Ross writes sensitively about a variety of subjects such as Muslim funerals in east London, the infant burial grounds known as cillini in Ireland, graveyards in Northern Ireland in the context of the Troubles and the work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who recover the remains of soldiers found in northern France and trace the living relatives. Ross is a true taphophile – a lover of cemeteries – and a compassionate guide rather than an overly nostalgic one. ‘A Tomb With a View’ is an excellent book about reckoning with death in a life-affirming rather than morbid way.
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Books I Read in February 2024
A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs is a blend of literary criticism and mini biographies of eight female authors and how they carved out creative freedoms for themselves, alongside Biggs’s personal reflections on her experience of going through a divorce in her 30s and losing her mother to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago. In this book, she examines the lives and works of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante. Biggs demonstrated her skill at pen portraits in her 2015 book All Day Long about people at work and she is astute and concise in her analysis of how their hard-won independence is reflected in their work.
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