We Pretty Pieces of Flesh – Colwill Brown

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Ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punch line of a joke or place they changed trains once ont way to London.

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh tells the stories of three girls growing up in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Rachel and Kel have known each other for years before, on the first day of secondary school, Rach meets Shaz, introduces her to Kel, and their friendship expands to three. Rach, who will go on to university and become a teacher, lives in the posh end of town, referred to as ‘the Village’, despite being one of many villages beyond the town centre. People from t’Village called where Kel lived ‘t’Shit End’. People from t’Shit End called people from t’Village ‘tossers’.

Initially, Rach wants thin, pretty Shaz to be her friend, but knows from primary school that this is unlikely. When Shaz speaks to Rach outside the dining hall and they have lunch together, Rach is excited. But then she introduces Shaz to Kel and, almost immediately, the pair are laughing and Rach feels excluded. The balancing act of being a friendship group of three continues throughout the novel into adulthood.

We couldn’t have been more than eleven when we realised it weren’t alreyt to have girl bodies. We couldn’t tell you how we knew this, all we can remember is that we wa itchy and restless in us girl skins.

Told in chapters that read like short stories in their own right, Brown covers clubbing, drinking, boys, eating disorders, the complications of female teenage friendships and sex. The latter creating the pivotal moment that echoes throughout the book; an assault in the chapter ‘You Cannot Thread a Moving Needle’ – which won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2025 – and is then not spoken about until the victim is forced into a situation which leads to her telling all. A move that might just wreck the friendship between the three of them for good.

Brown is superb at portraying teenage girls, particularly their insecurities and how they attempt to hide them. One of the ways she achieves this is by changing the narrator of the chapters so Rach, Shaz and Kel all have the opportunity to tell stories from their own perspective. Her characterisation of Shaz stands out in particular. We’ve all known a Shaz. She’s the girl who comes across as hard as nails, who you wouldn’t mess with. According to a former friend she’s ‘gobby’ and ‘too bossy’, but mostly Shaz is bored and grieving her father’s death.

Shaz wont trying to look bored. When she wa nervous, her face just arranged itsen into boredom, too-good-for-thee disdain. She wouldn’t know she looked that way for decades, not till she warra grown woman who finally asked her girlfriend one day while lasses always called her intimidating.

These girls live and breathe. I was there with them on every adventure, every day at school, every moment of danger. Alongside them, Doncaster becomes another character. Brown mentions in succinct moments what the town was like in the early noughties and what it’s like now; mentions of closed shops and people addicted to spice. In one of the most affecting set pieces, adult Shaz sees a ‘zombie’, a woman addicted to spice. When three lads start filming her, Shaz tackles them, reminding us of the woman’s humanity and of the events that have led to this moment:

He’s carrying hissen wit righteousness of a union man bravely sticking it to Thatcher. It’s been decades since anycunt had claim to that kind of pride. Meka you glad pit killed your fatha. He hated Thatcher then and he’d still hate her now. You wa raised to hate her an’ all, hate every cell of her, cheer when she died and say, ‘Ding, dong, t’witch is dead.’ Your fatha would be like all blokes in your village, and all other villages that used to be built around pits and are now built around nowt. Anger in every follicle, every fleck of skin.

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh is a testament to working class girlhood. Yes, we can argue that Rach, Kel and Shaz represent all girlhood and deserve not to be pigeonholed, but there are many stories about middle class girls and so few we can claim for our own. The novel’s been nominated for several literary prizes – the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Gordon Burn Prize – but it’s disappointing that it wasn’t up for any of the major prizes, the Booker in particular. If this wasn’t about teenage girls, we’d been talking about it in the same way we talk about Trainspotting. It’s the best debut I’ve read since A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and deserves to be read widely.

Thanks to Chatto & Windus for the review copy, although I loved it so much I bought a hardback copy too.

Mother Mary Comes To Me – Arundhati Roy

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In that conservative, stifling little South Indian town, where, in those days, women were only allowed the option of cloying virtue – or its affectation – my mother conducted herself with the edginess of a gangster.

Following the death of her mother, Mary Roy, in 2022, Arundhati Roy began to write this astounding memoir focused on the woman with whom she had a complicated relationship.

In the early 1970s, when Roy was almost three and her brother four and a half, their mother left their alcoholic father and moved to a cottage which had been owned by their grandfather. A few month’s later, G. Issac, Roy’s uncle attempted to evict them, an act which, many years later, led Mary Roy to be successful in overturning the Travancore Christian Succession Act which states that daughters have no rights to their father’s property.

Prior to this legal battle however, they moved to Ayemenem, living with their grandmother’s older sister and their maternal grandmother. (G. Issac lived in an annex.) It was while they were here that Mary Roy created the school in Kottayam that formed the other part of her legacy. Working with a white missionary and renting rooms from the Kottayam Rotary Club, the school was successful and Mary Roy thrived.

However, there was another side to Mary Roy, the woman who became ‘Mrs Roy’ to her children the moment they started attending her school.

My mother unloaded the burden of her quarrels and the daily dose of indignity that she had to endure on to my brother and me. We were the only safe harbour she had. Her temper, already bad, had become irrational and uncontrollable. I found it impossible to predict or gauge what would anger her and what would please her.

When Roy’s brother came home with an average school report, she made him get out of bed and beat him with a ruler. She treated Roy as a stand in for whoever she was angry at but couldn’t hit or insult in the way she did her children. Despite this, Roy’s portrait of her is not one-dimensional. It is clear that her mother was formidable and this allowed her to get things done. Roy describes the school that expanded year after year as ‘a cult’ due to the women Mrs Roy recruited:

When she heard of women in distress or read about terrible incidents in the papers, she walked into hospitals and courtrooms and offered women her protection […] She gave scholarships to orphans and jobs to women who had been abandoned or abused by their husbands or other men. She had a way of comforting children who were traumatised by the death of a parent or grandparent, a way of insulating them from the pain before the blow fully landed. The campus was buzzing with bright-eyed little humans going about their busy days. It was such a happy place. Quite often I found myself wishing I was her student and not her daughter.

Roy acknowledges the way in which her mother’s behaviour towards her flips with the line: She could break my heart and mend it too. At the point this appears, it is in response to Mrs Roy arriving to see Roy for the first time in seven years carrying her old typewriter.

The memoir covers Roy’s period at university in Dehli, studying architecture and building a life for herself; meeting her biological father; her filmmaking alongside Pradip Krishen, who later becomes her husband and she stepmother to his two girls; the writing of The God of Small Things and the impact of winning the Booker Prize; her activism; the writing of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and her reconciliation with her mother. Arundhati Roy has had a life and she writes about it beautifully. If I hadn’t been reading a borrowed copy, I would have underlined something on every single page. But it is Mrs Roy and the impact she has on Roy’s life and how she chooses to live it that leaves the biggest impression. Living under and then alongside someone with such presence and, let’s be blunt, abusive tendencies is incredibly difficult, but there seems to be another layer to this when the people involved are mother and daughter. When Mrs Roy died, Roy’s brother was ‘jovial’, welcoming people to view her coffin. Roy, however, ‘came undone’.

There is something knotty here, something puzzling about the human condition in all of this. But maybe it’s best to leave some things un-understood, mysterious. I’m all for the unclimbed mountain. The unconquered moon. I’m weary of endless theories and explanations. I think I have begun to prefer descriptions.

I borrowed a copy of Mother Mary Comes To Me from my local library.

On the Calculation of Volume 3 – Solvej Balle (translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell)

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This contains spoilers for On the Calculation of Volume 2. My review of Volume 1 is here.

I have met someone who remembers. Yesterday. That is to say, I met him yesterday. But he remembers yesterday, too.

Despite attempting to create a year by travelling through the seasons, Tara Selter remains trapped in the 18th of November. However, she is no longer alone. Her newfound obsession with all things Roman has led to an expansion of her world and new doors opening ‘to rooms and lecture theatres’. It’s in one of these lectures that Tara notices a man wearing a different coloured shirt to the one he was wearing the previous day. The man is Henry Dale.

An academic, Henry has taken a more pragmatic and more pessimistic approach to being stuck, believing that he can’t ‘capture what has been lost or come up with an explanation’. When he found himself waking to the same day, he used it to get through his to do list:

Proofreading an article, giving feedback to students, writing emails he had forgotten to respond to […] For a long time, his days had felt like an endless train of tasks hurtling towards him. It had felt this way for years, in fact. As soon as one carriage had passed, the next was already on its way. And once the entire train had passed, a new one with just as many carriages would appear in the distance.

Initially unaware that his day is resetting itself and all previous correspondence has disappeared, when Henry does notice, he has a greater revelation: Most of what he had done had been entirely meaningless. While this is probably not entirely true, none of the work he does as an academic has meaning for him. Tara disagrees but her meaning is drawn from nature and the cycle of life, hence her quest in Volume 2: I would rather be a hamster in a hamster wheel, growing leeks and chard to no purpose, than a monster stuck in a single day. Henry counteracts this with the point that your life can change in unexpected ways; death, divorce and disasters are all possibilities.

The other major theme is our understanding of the past and whether or not it helps us to understand the world we’re living in, particularly at a time of systemic collapse. Again, Tara and Henry disagree. Her interest stems from her curiosity about things that fall out of history, not how it links to the present time. Henry tells her it isn’t surprising she isn’t interested in history as ‘It has always been written by men, for men, about the world of men’. Tara takes him to task beautifully.

In terms of plot, two other things happen: One, Henry goes to visit his ex-wife and five-year-old son in America and Tara finds herself alone and directionless for a while. Two, a young woman, Olga, arrives at Tara’s door asking for help to find a man, Ralf, who she was travelling through the 18th of November with for a while. Then there are four people and the discussion about how they should spend their time takes on a new dimension.

I love these books because they’re chewy. They spark my brain in the same way that memoirs do, a sensation I rarely get from fiction. This series is superb and I’m enjoying every minute of it. Obviously, I’ve already bought a copy of Volume 4.

My copy of On the Calculation of Volume 3 was my own purchase.

The Hyena’s Daughter – Jupiter Jones

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‘She has fine intellectual capital,’ says Godwin, reasonably, in Fanny’s defence. He means on her Wollstonecraft side by nature, and by nurture from his parenting. And besides, he is fond of her.

‘Intellect!’ snorts his wife. ‘Is that what the young man’s after? The lecherous cock-a-doodle-dandy that he is.’

Set across the years 1814 to 1816, The Hyena’s Daughter focuses on the three sisters Fanny Godwin, Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont. Fanny’s father, Gilbert Imlay has long absconded while the death of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft has left her in the care of Willam Godwin, father of Mary. When Godwin remarries, Claire Clairmont becomes their stepsister. Soon all of their lives are upended when the Romantic poet Percy Shelley enters the scene as a potential sponsor for Godwin’s political writing.

Fanny: We had all read Mr Shelley’s letters, and we were all a little in love with him, how could we not love him, with his lofty ethics and words that flew like birds? […]

Mary: Yes, he was married. But marriage – according to my father’s philosophy – is an evil and odious monopoly. The worst of all shackles, preventing people from following the dictates of intellect and inquiry.  […]

Claire: I’m not entirely sure that any of us were following the dictates of intellect and enquiry.

Initially, Shelley courts Fanny but Godwin and his wife prevent a scandal by sending her away to a relative in Wales. While she is gone, Mary and Claire run away with Shelley to Europe. The rest of the novella deals with the fallout and particularly the impact it has on Fanny.

Fanny is left at home, lying to the tradesmen who come to collect payment as the household sinks further into debt, and soothing the only father she has ever known as he attempts to write. She misses her sisters whom she is initially prevented from visiting and, when she does see them, is rejected by Mary. She obsesses over the details of her mother’s suicide attempt.

Jones tells the story in fragments, getting straight to the core of each scene and understanding where the story around the story takes place. Yes, there is mention of Mary’s pregnancies, Claire’s relationships with Shelley and Byron, and, briefly, Mary’s writing of Frankenstein, but the point here is what was happening beneath all of that. Her prose is often rhythmic and playful; several chapters are dedicated to definitions of the words ‘stays’ and ‘stay’, linking Mary Wollstonecraft’s bodice with the qualities Fanny is expected to have. Despite the subject matter, this is a joy of a book: vibrant, often laugh out loud funny, and precise. It was the joint winner of the Weatherglass Novella Prize 2025, judged by Ali Smith, and it isn’t hard to see why. A gem.

Thanks to Weatherglass Books for the review copy.  

Dominion – Addie E. Citchens

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Reverend Sabre Winfrey, Jr., believed without a shadow of a doubt that an idle mind was the devil’s workshop, but an idle hand belonged on a behind.

The preacher at Seven Seals Baptist Church in Dominion, Mississippi, Sabre owns a local radio station, a barbershop and multiple houses. He coaches the local football team and sings in the barbershop quartet. He’s also a serial womaniser.

Sabre and his wife Priscilla are the parents of five boys. Alongside Sabre, the novel focuses on the youngest Emanuel, known as Manny or Wonderboy. Manny is talented and he knows it, ‘if anyone could truly sing his ass off, Wonder wouldn’t have nothing to sit on’. He plays multiple instruments and football. ‘If he didn’t have a big dick, somebody should have stoned him, but everybody knew all the Winfreys did.’

The story’s told by the two prominent women in their lives: Priscilla and Diamond. Priscilla is judgemental, an attitude that becomes more understandable in the light of Sabre’s affairs. She is unimpressed with Manny ‘throwing eyes’ at Diamond in church: it’s a shame someone saw fit to give that child a stripper’s name. However, Priscilla isn’t as squeaky clean as she tries to tell herself; she has a pill addiction, which helps her manage her bad hip, and her driving licence is suspended for a series of DUIs.

The difference between Priscilla and Diamond is that the Winfreys are rich and well-established in the town. Their influence, that of Sabre particularly, is all-pervasive. Diamond lives with her foster mother, Maggie. She has multiple siblings, although we only meet one of them as she is largely ignorant of their whereabouts. She is besotted with Manny and blind to his faults. His upbringing and lifestyle is so different to hers he struggles to comprehend her perspective.

The two women first meet when Priscilla walks into Manny’s bedroom to find him over a naked Diamond as she gives him a blowjob. Needless to say, relations between the two are far from cordial. But what this serves to reveal is Priscilla’s thoughts about her son and his connection to Sabre.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t naïve or old-fashioned. I understood teenaged urges were natural, but I couldn’t shake the energy that radiated off of him, and it didn’t feel curious at all. It felt nuclear, dangerous, like someone I didn’t and couldn’t ever know.

Despite this, Priscilla avoids confronting the situation. Eventually, following a random occurrence that ends in an unexpected act of violence, she notes the further change in Manny’s behaviour and tries to discuss it with Sabre. But when the father of a girl he has assaulted comes to the house to confront them, Priscilla accepts Manny’s denial and defends him. Her response is complicated by the fact we know that Sabre can be violent. If she takes the girl’s side, she cannot guarantee what Sabre’s response will be. Citchens shows how the intersection of patriarchy and class can protect men.

The novel asks who’s responsible for male violence, particularly against women. Citchens points a finger at a religion:

“To woman he gave a womb, and to man he gave dominion – that’s what I teach my boys because that’s what the living Word say.”

and also fathers, whose behaviour sets a precedent for their sons. Manny tells Diamond:

that Rev used to hit his mama. […] His daddy said sometimes a woman needed a little attitude tune-up, but there was something wrong with your manhood if you had to beat on her all the time. Wonder said you shouldn’t have to hit your woman at all. The threat of you should be enough.

Almost as worrying is Diamond’s response, ‘I loved how safe he made me feel’. An indication of the impact of the patriarchy’s conditioning of women.

Despite this, there is hope for the women at the end of the novel. However, without a shift in society, it left me wondering what hope there is for the men and boys and the girls and women they will encounter as their lives progress.

Dominion is longlisted for the 2016 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Thanks to Europa Editions for the review copy.

Base Notes – Adelle Stripe

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In this excellent memoir, Adelle Stripe recounts her 1980’s childhood through the prism of perfume. Growing up in Tadcaster, West Yorkshire with a farmer father and a hairdresser mother, Stripe feels as though she doesn’t fit into the role her mother wants her to have:

Already you are too much of a deep thinker. All she ever wanted was a normal daughter, one like the other girls in town, but instead she has ended up with you, a child who was suspended from school for biting another girl’s face, a child who cannot comprehend numbers, a child who believes she can levitate and see ghosts and predict the future. A child who is not quite right.

Stripe’s mother and grandmother loom large throughout the first half of the book. In the opening chapter, Stripe recalls a trip to Bradford where her mother buys lychees and they go ice skating. Her mother wears ‘an emerald dress with puffed sleeves and matching eyeshadow’; her hair three tints of red. She is described as ‘carefree’ on the ice and much is made of how trapped she feels in her life, and her body. There’s a suggestion that her life is not as she expected – ‘Your parents proudly describe themselves as workaholics and live separate lives’. She competes in hairdressing competitions, chasing the winners’ title.

Like Stripe, her mother feels she does not live up to her own mother’s idea of who she should be. On a lengthy visit to her grandparents in Withernsea, Stripe plays her grandfather’s Yamaha E45 organ as her mother and grandmother argue in the next room:

…until the door opens, and your grandmother races through into the kitchen, her chin held high from the latest victory she has delivered over her errant firstborn daughter, the one who never lived up to expectations.

Her grandmother is a Jehovah’s Witness who’s ‘convinced that if she tries hard enough, she will be one of the 144,000 let into the Kingdom of Heaven’. Thankfully, Stripe’s grandfather takes her out for treats and an afternoon at the arcade and her father, whose interest lies largely in his cows, accepts her as she is.

However, as she gets older, Stripe works in a local bar before leaving Tadcaster for Edinburgh, New York and eventually, London. It is when she reaches her late teens that she encounters a number of predatory men. At the same time, it also becomes clear that being working class will continue to mark her as different. As for many of us who leave working class towns for other pastures, it takes a while for her to find her tribe.

Base Notes is episodic and written in second person. It takes a moment to orientate yourself in Stripe’s writing, but I enjoyed the non-linear approach which assumes the reader is intelligent enough to join the dots. While the use of ‘you’, which makes you complicit in the action, soon feels normal. The subtitle of the paperback version of the book is ‘Scenes from a Northern Girlhood’ but you don’t need to be northern to enjoy this examination of what it means to become a woman in a world in which you don’t seem to fit.

I borrowed Base Notes from my local library.

Almost Life – Kiran Millwood Hargrave

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Paris, 1978. Two young women meet on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur. Laure is French, haughty and magnetising. Erica is English – from King’s Lynn, fat and beautiful, spending the summer as a solo traveller before university in the autumn. When a man harasses Erica, Laure barks at him until he leaves and then invites Erica for a drink. Laure is gay and enjoys seducing women.

It was as if Laure spoke a language only they understood. She could make them laugh and blush and later, come as they never had before.

She is having an affair with a married woman and has sex with her friends, including Hilde, who is in love with her. Erica has never kissed a woman before Laure, earning her the nickname ‘the tourist’. Regardless, an issue with a lost bag and Erica’s lack of money leads to her moving into Laure’s squat for the summer and engaging in a passionate fling that will change the course of both of their lives.

Although they both know that this could be something more, they are both stubborn. Laure, used to doing as she pleases, does not know how to tell Erica that she loves her and wants her to stay. Erica is too bound by convention to see the relationship through:

The idea of telling her parents she was staying in Paris to live in a squat with a lover was unthinkable, the idea of telling them it was a woman laughable. […] She knew she could not live how Laure and her friends lived, at the edges, of things, even in Paris. Their bars raided, their friends beaten. She didn’t want to exist like that. She wanted to get married, to have children. She wanted to write novels, but she was not Gertrude Stein or Virginia Woolf, someone extraordinary or content to struggle with unhappiness. She wanted simple joy, simple happiness, simple love.

The novel then follows Laure and Erica’s separate, but often converging paths, right through to 2013. Beyond the two women, the supporting cast are equally well drawn, particularly Laure’s friend, Michel.

Millwood Hargrave is interested in the paths we choose and those from which we branch away. By choosing a more conventional life, what does Erica lose? How does one live a life filled with art, literature and intelligent conversation despite the banalities we all have to contend with? And, perhaps more conventionally, in terms of the realm of literature at least, does your first love ever truly leave you?

I haven’t loved a book as much as I loved Almost Life since The Essex Serpent ten years ago. The characters felt real, their flaws and dilemmas true to life and their trajectories convincing. The novel’s been compared to David Mitchell’s One Day (a book I did not enjoy), but, for me, it is everything I wanted but didn’t get from Lily King’s Heart the Lover. I savoured every word, thought about moving to Paris and becoming part of an artistic movement, and wondered how many women were going to read this and radically overhaul their lives. Almost Life is this year’s All Fours. Expect to see it everywhere and with good reason.

Thanks to Picador for the review copy.

Practice – Rosalind Brown

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In an unnamed Oxford college, Annabel sits at her desk preparing to write an essay on Shakespeare’s sonnets. It is a Sunday, 6am, ‘at the worn-out end of January’. Her phone and computer are off; it’s just Annabel, the sonnets and her thoughts. At least that’s what Annabel tells herself.

She starts well enough, but soon she’s making another peppermint tea, contemplating breakfast and coffee. This leads on to thinking about her stomach and which combinations of food and drink cause issues.

Giving up one thing exposes her to the next thing, which soon becomes intolerable: like, the more sensitive she becomes, the more sensitive she becomes.

Her body is a theme which continues throughout the novel, undercutting the pretentiousness of Annabel’s belief in her status as a scholar and the sanctity of her routine. Something we observe her break repeatedly throughout the day, even as she holds it up as sacred.

A significant amount of her time is spent fantasising. Sometimes it’s thinking about the different types of orgasms her body produces and how she achieves them. Sometimes it’s the hungover housemate she bumps into in the kitchen who smells good. Sometimes this takes the form of a long running sequence of scenarios involving the SCHOLAR and the SEDUCER, two characters Annabel uses to work through situations. It is never clear, to her as well as us, whether these two characters are ciphers for her or independent creations.

She also has a dilemma: whether or not to agree to her boyfriend, Rich, spending the entire following weekend with her. An arrangement which would ruin her routine and would force her to put something other than her work first. The decision is complicated by the 16-year age gap between her and Doctor Richard French, who’s a friend of her mothers. So far they have kept their relationship secret from both her family and most of her friends, but Annabel is aware this can’t be sustained.

Practice is one of those novels about which some people say nothing happens. Bar a few interactions with Rich, friends, a housemate and some other students from her course, it is entirely internal: the thoughts of a final year Oxford undergraduate procrastinating over an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. In the wrong hands, this could have been tedious, but Brown brings Annabel to life with a wide range of thoughts, ideas and challenges. This is an interesting, inventive piece of work.

I borrowed a copy of Practice from my local library.

Seven – Joanna Kavenna

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I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and future and in some way involve the stars.

‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ – Jorge Louis Borges (translated by Donald A. Yates)

Joanna Kavenna’s sixth novel, Seven or, How to Play a Game Without Rules is told to the reader by an unnamed, ungendered narrator. Hired by Icelandic philosopher Professor Alda Jónsdóttir, who is working on a project titled Thinking outside the Box (about Thinking outside the Box) (mercifully shortened to TOTBATOTB), our narrator travels across Europe, discussing Box Philosophy.

Seven, a game invented by Kavenna for the novel (and done so well, I looked to see if it really existed), consists of a spiral board inside a circular box. Each player has seven pieces, which move from the outside of the spiral (the Edge) to the centre (Home). Players can block their opponents with pebbles and there are Angels and Dragons on the board. If a playing piece lands on an Angel, they go straight Home and are removed from the board. If it lands on a Dragon, it is sent back to the Edge and must start again. The object of the game is to bring all your playing pieces Home and remove them from the board.

Early in the novel, our narrator is sent to the Greek island of Hydra to meet Theódoros Apostolakis, a dentist and poet who is obsessed with Seven. Apostolakis has created a Fanouropiton, or Catalogue of Lost Things, the name a pun on the Greek cake fanouropita. Frustrated with having to erase things from the catalogue when they are found, Apostolakis has created a box – a Fanouropithos – and a website where people advertise their lost things, including an entry for the ‘Meaning of Life. Help!’ Apostolakis’ greatest loss, however, is a Seven box from Crete that belonged to his family.

In pursuit of this box, the narrator learns its history, which begins during World War 2, and meets some of the most prominent players of Seven: Eleni Hikaru Jones, former Seven World Champion; Indrek Laar, the European Champion, and Ashok Deo, the World Champion, who is described as ‘unbeatable’. Through them, Seven, or at least the way players relate to it, appears to become a metaphor for life and how we should live it.

Eleni wants to change the rules to ones she thinks ‘are much more fun’. These involve translating the inscription at the centre of the spiral not as Home but as ‘Go Home!’. In which case, you have to get your pieces to the centre of the spiral and back again. She recommends some books to the narrator, including one about play in which the argument is made that we should make space for play, regardless of the state of the world.

It is an irrational thing, to play, and so the existence of play demonstrates – perhaps – that human lives exceed the rational, logical order of things.

She writes an article about playing against her father and on winning one day, bursting into tears. Her father quoted a line from Steve Harley’s ‘Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)’ that confused her: Win or lose, it’s hard to smile, but which she later recognises as life being challenging.

Laar and Deo’s trajectories involve the intervention of AI, which causes unexpected issues, and one player taking an unexpected path which he describes as ‘freedom’.

Kavenna is certainly interested in spirals – and owes a debt to Borges, whose short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is referenced several times throughout the novel. One character tells the narrator,

You can’t move [in the ancient world] without hitting a spiral. The whirlpool, the Gordion knot. The cycles of time, the changing of the seasons. Birth, death, growth, reincarnation. You travel through the labyrinth to the source. The cycle continues.

There are no rules, or perhaps there are multiple versions of the rules. There is no way out and there is a way out. We’re all just making things up as we go along and we might be right and we also might not be. As the novel moves towards its conclusion, Professor Alda Jónsdóttir finds herself stuck, unable to finish her work on TOTBATOB and, perhaps, in a world where we think we know the rules but they don’t always work for us, that’s where we all are. Until the day we’re not.

Seven probably isn’t a novel for everyone, but I absolutely loved following Kavenna’s philosophical enquiry disguised as a book about a game.

Thanks to Faber for the review copy.

All Consuming – Ruby Tandoh

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In All Consuming, Ruby Tandoh examines how society has shaped what we eat. From recipes to influencers to cookbooks to trends, she considers the ways in which culture and changes in technology have brought different products and dishes to the fore.

She begins with the shift in how we discover recipes, from those passed down within the family to the viral trends on Instagram and TikTok with ‘photos and videos that seem to have been engineered to bypass rational thinking and go straight to the pleasure centres of the brain’, noting there’s no context to the images, or to the recipes themselves. The connection between cooking and our heritages removed.

Moving back in time, Tandoh discusses the Sunday supplements – ‘No medium has swerved the course of British food culture as sharply as those columns’ – which appeared at the same time supermarkets were on the rise and local grocery stores were closing down. Aspirational cooking had never been easier.

As legacy media’s influence has lessened, social media has enabled influencers to become the most powerful critics of our time. Tandoh cites Keith Lee (who I admit I had not heard of despite his more than 15 million followers), who reviews everyday food at small restaurants and is capable of keeping ailing businesses afloat. As she traces Lee’s predecessors back to Victor Hugo Green’s Green Book, Tandoh points out that we’re rarely allowed a Black food critic.

In the UK, pretty much every major restaurant critic has been white, and nearly all of them – and I need to stress this – went to private school. Several of them went to Eton. One is King Charles’ stepson.

For all its ills, social media remains somewhat of a leveller in the world of food.

However, the most interesting sections for me were the ones on cookbooks and how changes in what we buy take place. The cookbook section begins with the likes of Mrs Beeton and how household management or domestic economy has led us back to the tradwives advertising the purity of their lifestyles on the internet, before Tandoh delves into the 700 cookbooks a year published in the UK (!!!), examining whether any of them actually have an impact on the culture, including Rukmini Iyer’s ubiquitous Roasting Tin series (of which I own several), before interrogating why ‘nobody admits to throwing dinner parties anymore’, even though they clearly do. In the section on tastes, I learned about the rise of the supermarket; why almost every ice cream you can buy today was invented between 1976 and 1990, and why all these bizarrely flavoured wellness drinks have suddenly appeared.

Needless to say, this book was a genuine delight to read and an education in how our tastes are influenced by the internet, legacy media and changes in where we buy our food. Tandoh’s interest and enthusiasm is apparent in her writing and she makes for an excellent guide to the ways the world of food intersects with society, economy and culture.

My copy of All Consuming was my own purchase.