Book review: Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

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Taiwan Travelogue coverSince its English translation was first published in 2024, Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ has generated a lot of positive buzz in bookish circles. Lin King’s translation from Taiwanese Mandarin won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2026 International Booker Prize. On top of all that, this book was recommended by Leah of Bristol’s Very Small Bookshop.

So I was disappointed to find that I didn’t love this novel. But it did grow on me, and the translation is undoubtedly astonishing.

Taiwan Travelogue is a complex layered study of language, colonial occupation and queer love. We are told this is a long-lost manuscript by Japanese novelist Aoyama Chizuko, translated into Chinese multiple times and now tidied up and released in full for the first time. The story is supposedly auto fiction based on Chizuko’s travel diary from 1938. Nested inside multiple forewords and afterwords is a first-person narrative, all with footnotes from both the fictional translator into Chinese and the real translator into English.

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October 2026 reading round-up

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Happy autumn, folks! October was well and truly a transition month this year. From what still felt like summer three weeks ago, to rains and storms, to wrapping up in thick jumpers, scarves and gloves. Dog walks are now crisp, colourful leaves under misty skies. And I feel no guilt curling up all day with a book when the wind and rain are howling outside.

Beckett and I had a lovely week in Devon with our friend T (Tim was able to join us for the weekend). I was working during the week but really loved being able to go for beautiful clifftop walks before and after work each day.

I’m not much of a Halloween person, but I do enjoy a good horror film/TV show. So I did enjoy watching the new Carrie miniseries. But more than horror, I feel like this is the time of year for cosy crime. Which is what led me to read not one but two Agatha Christies last month.

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Book review: The Coral Bones by E J Swift

Coral Bones book cover

Is it something in the water or have I stumbled on a new micro genre, Australian eco fiction? After the dark, thriller approach of Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, there was a tinge of sci-fi to The Coral Bones by E J Swift. And I loved both books

In the vein of, say, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, The Coral Bones has three interleaved narratives, all set in the same section of Australia’s coastline just under 200 years apart. In the present day, marine biologist Hana is doing all she can to save the coral of the Great Barrier Reef. In the early 19th century, 17-year-old Judith persuades her ship captain father to take her on a sea voyage. In the future, after massive climate and biodiversity catastrophes, Telma’s job is to track down rare animal sightings to help rebuild the world.

We meet Hana first. The novel opens with the discovery of a dead body on an island she’s visiting to help her friend and colleague Aaron with his research. The body, painted entirely white, is found on an inflatable painted with the words “This is what it looks like when coral dies.” Hana writes daily to her ex, Tess, switching between current events and musings on their relationship. She’s unhappy but believes her work is essential, painful as it is.

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Book review: Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen

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Freezing Point book coverThe first Danish book I read on holiday this summer was Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen (translated from Danish by Joan Tate). But it’s taken me time to put together my thoughts about it.

This 1969 sci-fi novel begins in 1973. In this near future, a young man called Bruno is offered a radical new solution to inoperable cancer. He can choose to be cryogenically frozen until medical science is capable of curing him.

Bruno’s life before this point is a lonely one. He’s an editor of a literary magazine. His greatest asset is coming up with ideas for short stories, which he communicates to his roster of regular writers. He doesn’t have close family or friends. But he does have a strange growth on his neck.

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September 2026 reading round-up

Boozes

September has been a quiet month after our busy summer. We have been expanding our cocktail repertoire. On our summer holiday we discovered some fantastic amari, most of which you can only buy at tiny Italian vineyards, but we’ve picked up a few more for our collection. Now we are experimenting with combining them. There are worse hobbies.

It has been a less productive month on the reading front – partly because I spent 10 days struggling through a book I then abandoned. Of the books I did finish, my favourite was The Coral Bones by E J Swift – an eco thriller, I guess you could call it? Definitely climate fiction, which I’m starting to think is a genre I really like. I really should finally read Tim’s copy of The Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Any other climate fiction recommendations?

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Book review: Vida by Marge Piercy

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Vida book coverEarly last year I read Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy and loved it so much I bought two more of her books. But when I picked up her 1979 novel Vida, it took a while for me to get into. This was not a fault with the writing, the topic or the characters. It was simply too tense a read when I was a little stressed. It was only on the way home from holiday, and in the week that followed, that I was relaxed enough to let this story completely absorb me.

At the start of the book, it’s the end of the 1970s and Vida is a left-wing activist who has been on the run from the law for almost a decade. She is always on the move, changing her appearance and name, constantly weighing up the risks she is taking to be fed and sheltered.

She’s been separated from her husband Leigh for years, but is reluctant to accept that his girlfriend is the main woman in his life now, while Vida is the secret occasional liaison. Leigh is a talk show host at a small radio station, a minor celebrity living a safe, comfortable life.

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Book review: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst

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Waist Deep book coverOn our holiday in Denmark, we found a bookshop with a decent selection of Danish books translated into English. In a surprise turn, I picked out a sci-fi novel (Freezing Point by Anders Bodelsen) and Tim picked a literary novel: Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst (translated from Danish by Sherilynn Nicolette Hellberg).

A group of friends from university, 12 years after they first met, spend seven summer days in a lakeside cabin. It should be a lovely, relaxing time with their favourite people. But desires, anxieties and the realities of adult life are putting everyone under pressure. No-one is saying what they really think or feel.

Sylvia is our main point of view character. She’s a daydreamer, easily lost in her own thoughts and her version of reality. She’s also more than a little pretentious – she longs to be seen as artistic and insightful.

Gry is the mother hen – and the only literal mother in the group. She studies folklore, but worries that she is no longer taken seriously as an academic, or as a person beyond her role as a parent.

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August 2026 reading round-up

What a month. Our Denmark holiday dominated August, in a good way. You know how often within a week or two of coming home from holiday, that holiday feels like a distant dream? I’m glad to say I haven’t yet reached that stage.

The other big moment this August was our anniversary. Tim and I have been together 24 years now. Hard to believe, though I will admit that it feels like a very long time since I was 21.

I read some great books last month. My favourite was probably Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst. I was also impressed with Vida by Marge Piercy, though it took some time to get into. It’s very tense – not recommended on a stressful day.

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Book review: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith

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Strangers on a Train book coverI’m a big fan of the Hitchcock film Strangers on a Train, which is based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. And I have loved the other Highsmith books I’ve read. So this should have been my ideal read. But I must admit something about this book didn’t gel for me.

Perhaps it’s that the plot is quite different from the film, which I have watched many times. I certainly can’t fault Highsmith’s complex characters or chillingly believable depiction of criminal psychology.

The concept is simple. Two men meet on a train, each wishing (to greater or lesser extent) someone dead. Bruno suggests they swap murders – he will murder Guy’s estranged wife Miriam who won’t give him a divorce, while Guy can murder Bruno’s father who won’t pay him his trust fund. There would be nothing to link them to their crimes and they could time it so the obvious culprit is out of town. Guy laughs off the suggestion but two weeks later Miriam is murdered.

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Our holiday in Denmark

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North Atlantic House

We spent three weeks of this summer in Denmark and I loved it. Our first 9 days there were with my family, then another week and a half just Tim and I. We travelled there and back by train, which was a pretty big adventure. I don’t know if every Danish summer is this idyllic or if we got lucky. We had three weeks of sunshine, with temperatures in the 20s (celsius).

Our overriding impression is that Denmark is a very chill place. We spent most of our time in Copenhagen, which for a capital city is entirely lacking that sense of everybody rushing everywhere. It felt like more people were cycling than driving – which isn’t quite true, but there are certainly more cyclists than I have seen anywhere else. At every traffic light, drivers waited patiently for the stream of cyclists to pass before they could turn. At every pedestrian crossing the drivers and cyclists stopped for us.

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