Book review: The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell

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The Old Drift book coverI forget where I saw the recommendation to read The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. I suspect it was a listicle about African sci-fi. And indeed this book won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020. But I feel like calling it sci-fi is a bit misleading. This is an epic saga, incorporating some sci-fi elements in the last 20 years of its 125-year tale. With a touch of magical realism in the earlier part of the story. It’s also brilliant.

This is the story of three families in what is now Zambia. In 1904, on the banks of the Zambezi river, near Victoria Falls, a feverish British man, an Italian hotelier and a local African busboy become connected by what seems like a small incident. Percy Clarke is an archetypal colonist – a bored Englishman looking for adventure. He’s racist, often drunk and generally unpleasant. His is a disturbing mind to be inside.

Thankfully it is just a few pages before the narrative swiftly moves on to “The Grandmothers”. Serpell lays out the stories of three women connected to that moment in the prologue.

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Book review: Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan

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Interstellar Megachef book coverI try to buy ebooks direct from publishers when I can. There are a few small publishers that are really good for this, such as Rebellion. When I go to their site for a particular book I almost always wind up buying a couple of random other books that just sound fun. Such as Interstellar Megachef by Lavanya Lakshminarayan – I mean, that’s quite the title, right?

A queer SF tale about an intergalactic cooking show, this sounded like it would be completely silly fluff. Which I was very much in the mood for when I bought it and when I decided to read it. But this is actually much better and less fluffy than I expected. Though it does have its sillier moments, and comedic ones too, this is largely a story about prejudice, migration, xenophobia and bullying.

Saras has run away from Earth, arriving on Primus with nothing but a small bag of belongings, her little robot Kili and a dream of winning the galaxy’s most watched, most prestigious cooking show, Interstellar MegaChef. As one of Earth’s most celebrated chefs she thinks she stands a good chance, but she is in for a rude awakening to reality.

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May 2026 reading round-up

Well, life just keeps on getting more complicated and frustrating, but also the sun is shining and we survived the first heatwave of the year.

Highlights of the month include seeing Robin Ince live as part of Bristol’s Skeptics in the Pub/Theatre lecture series run by Bristol Skeptics Society. Ince is a comedian, science communicator and all-around lovely human being and his live show is brilliant. Go see him if you can. And either way, read his books. There are quite a lot of them.

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Book review: Passing by Nella Larsen

Passing book coverI probably hold on to more of the books I read than I will ever realistically reread, but there are some I know I will come back to. Like Passing by Nella Larsen, which I recently read for the second time in 14 months. It was chosen by my book club (with my encouragement) and I’m pleased to find I loved it second time around (as did all but one of the book club).

In this 1929 novella, two Black women reconnect years after having been children together. Irene and Clare bump into each other in a whites-only restaurant in Chicago. They’re both passing, but for Irene it’s a brief convenience to drink a cool drink on a dusty summer’s day. Clare is living her whole life passing for white – including being married to a racist white man who has no idea she’s Black.

Irene is married to a Black man who is a doctor and fund raises for civil rights. They’re prominent members of society in Harlem. She doesn’t approve of Clare’s life choices – even more so when Clare starts coming to socialise in Harlem when her husband is away.

“Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro? Absurd! Impossible! White people were so stupid about such things, for all that they usually asserted that they were able to tell; and by the most ridiculous means, finger-nails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other such silly rot…Nevertheless, Irene felt, in turn, anger, scorn, and fear slide over her. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of being a Negro, or even of having it declared. It was the idea of being ejected from any place, even in the polite and tactful way in which the Drayton would probably do it, that disturbed her.”

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Book review: Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

Utopia Avenue book cover

Like many people I discovered David Mitchell through his bestselling novel Cloud Atlas. I went back and read his first two books and declared myself a big fan. I bought his next few books as hardbacks on release and loved them. But then after 2014 I for some reason didn’t pick up his next two novels – until now.

Looking back at my notes from the talk Mitchell gave in Bristol in 2014, he said he was writing “a book largely set in 1960s London and New York, due for publication in 2016”. Well that surely has to be Utopia Avenue, which was finally published in 2020. And which I finally read last month.

This is a novel about a fictional band called Utopia Avenue in 1960s London (mostly). They’re a cross-genre hybrid formed by a visionary manager, Levon Frankland, bringing together musicians he’s individually impressed by. Which at first seems like a plan so misguidedly hopeful it can’t possibly work. As these five strangers gradually become a team, life throws curveballs that could end the dream before it’s begun.

Each chapter centres around the writing of a particular song, told from the perspective of the song’s writer. All the band members and their manager get a turn – though two of the band do the majority of the writing and therefore get more chapters. It’s an interesting way to tell the story, though I did occasionally want more from the perspectives that were largely missing.

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April 2026 reading round-up

My reading last month was boosted by the Easter long weekend, sunny evenings in the garden and a short holiday in Bannau Brycheiniog (the Brecon Beacons).

We had fantastic luck with the weather considering it was a holiday in the UK in April. It was gorgeously sunny and warm while still early enough in the year that the UV was only high for brief periods each day. Which meant I could be outside for hours at a time without triggering a lupus flare. Cue 3-4 hour walks in peaceful countryside with picnics or pub lunches. Then getting back to our holiday cottage mid-afternoon to sit in the garden with books, wine and snacks.

On holiday we stumbled across Hy Brasail, a strange house that looks like a hybrid of ordinary Victorian house and an Italian villa. Which is basically exactly what it is. There is some mystery surrounding it, but what seems agreed on is that it was owned by a local lawyer, Mr James, in 1912. He made some quirky additions to the building after he went on holiday to Italy. He may have fallen in love with a contessa and promised to build her a house reminiscent of her Tuscan childhood. She may even have lived there with him. Though more likely she broke his heart and never came to Wales.

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TV review: Gimbap and Onigiri

Gimbap and Onigiri poster

I’m a sucker for a romance based around food, and I love Korean and Japanese food, so Gimbap and Onigiri (TV Tokyo 2026) seemed like a good bet. A Korean woman studying in Tokyo strikes up a friendship – and then romance – with a Japanese man who cooks at a small diner. They bond over food, and the relationship helps them both move past stumbling blocks in their lives.

Rin (played by Kang Hye-won) is studying for a master’s in animation but at the start of her final year, she is falling behind her peers and struggling to find somewhere to live. Her mother is nagging her to move back to Korea and work as an art teacher but Rin dearly wants to stay in Japan. Though it’s unclear why as she seems lonely, with only one friend in Tokyo.

Taiga (Eiji Akaso) is clearly a good cook and is valued by his employer, though he’s had no formal training. His family are hard on him about what they see as an unskilled part-time job. But while working he’s happy and popular, if a little too shy to see how liked he is.

So they’re both insecure, and working unsociable hours that make it hard to have much of a life outside work/university. When Rin stumbles on the diner and they start talking, it seems like a perfect match.

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Book review: Christopher and His Kind 1929–1939 by Christopher Isherwood

Christopher and His Kind 1929–1939 by Christopher Isherwood book coverI really enjoy Christopher Isherwood’s books and have always been curious to know more about him. Though most of his novels are loosely based on incidents in his own life, they are of course fictionalised. But it turns out that in 1976 Isherwood published Christopher and His Kind 1929–1939 – a memoir that revisits that 10-year period in his life and retells it as a, well, tell-all.

The period of 1929–1939 is when Isherwood lived mostly in continental Europe – after his childhood and early years in England, before his emigration to the USA where he remained until his death. He spent the first four years of this decade in Berlin – a time famously memorialised in his novel Goodbye to Berlin, which formed the basis of the play I Am A Camera and later the musical Cabaret. While living in Berlin he wrote and saw the publication of The Memorial, which was his second novel but the first to achieve some success.

Isherwood was gay and out to his friends and family for pretty much his whole life. He socialised with fellow queer intellectuals and lived openly with his partners. But he didn’t write about this aspect of his life publicly until the 1970s. Understandably, as California – where he had settled – did not decriminalise homosexuality until 1975.

Christopher and His Kind is gossipy and confessional, with some interesting quirks. For one, Isherwood describes his younger self in the third person, as though this is just another novel with a main character called Christopher. Which would maybe make sense if this was a straightforward narrative otherwise. But Isherwood’s future self injects commentary and later memories using first-person “I”. He also repeatedly compares this telling of events to the versions in his novels (and subsequent plays and films). Which is informative, if a little overly defensive at times of his past self’s decisions.

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March 2026 reading round-up

A fairly uneventful month – which is maybe better than the alternative. We went to see Project Hail Mary at the cinema, which was very entertaining and does kinda make me want to read the Andy Weir book. And we watched the film of The Thin Man – accompanied by martinis, of course – which is great fun and if anything makes more of the role of Asta the dog than the book did.

The garden is full of flowers and the park is full of wild garlic. Even my house plants are in flower, one of them after two years of no buds at all. That’s exciting.

This coming weekend is Easter, which I will as is now traditional spend mostly reading books and eating chocolate. Happy Easter to all who celebrate!

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Book review: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle book cover

I have a new book club and our first read was We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, which it turns out is excellent book club fodder.

This is a classic for a reason – a deliciously creepy southern gothic tale packed full of mystery. First published in 1962, it feels like it could be set much earlier – until the occasional car reminds us it must be the 20th century.

Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood and her older sister Constance live in a big house on the outskirts of a village with their very ill uncle Julian. Outcasts and subjects of gossip since the rest of their family died six years earlier, their lives are shrinking and filled with superstition. Yet they are, in a way, happy.

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