Minnie's Fiction Addiction

👀 First impressions:
I first heard about The Finest Hotel in Kabul when it started picking up serious literary attention, landing on the Baillie Gifford Prize longlist and eventually winning the 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction. Lyse Doucet is the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, one of the most respected voices in war reporting, and this is her first book. That alone was enough to make me curious. But what really drew me in was the premise: the entire modern history of Afghanistan, told through the lens of a single hotel.

The book centres on the Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul, a gleaming white luxury hotel that opened on a hilltop in 1969, back when Afghanistan was still a kingdom with bold dreams of modernisation. Doucet first arrived at the hotel on Christmas Day 1988, the day after her thirtieth birthday, to cover the Soviet withdrawal. Over the next four decades, she kept returning, and the hotel became her anchor point in a country that was constantly shifting beneath everyone’s feet. This is narrative non-fiction at its most ambitious, weaving together the personal stories of the hotel’s staff, from housekeepers and chefs to desk managers and wedding planners, with the sweeping political upheavals that reshaped their country again and again.

✅ What I Liked:
Where do I even begin? The genius of this book lies in its framing device. By choosing to tell Afghanistan’s story through the people who kept one hotel running, Doucet sidesteps the trap that so many books about conflict fall into, where everything becomes about politics and military strategy, and ordinary people are reduced to statistics. Here, the people come first. You meet Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who has worked at the Inter-Continental for decades. You meet Abida, who became the hotel’s first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, only to be pushed back to the margins when the Taliban returned. These are not footnotes in a political narrative. They are the beating heart of the book.

Doucet writes with a warmth and empathy that clearly comes from decades of genuine connection with the people she interviews. There is a tenderness here that never tips into sentimentality. She has a wonderful eye for the small, telling detail, the kind of observation that only comes from having spent real time in a place, listening and watching. The book moves through coups, Soviet occupation, civil war, the American invasion, and the Taliban’s return, but it always keeps its gaze trained on the human cost of each upheaval. You feel the hope of the early 2000s when women could work and music could play at weddings. And you feel the creeping dread as those freedoms are stripped away once more.

There is also a surprising streak of dark humour running through the book. The absurdity of successive regimes trying to control a hotel, each with their own bizarre set of rules and priorities, would be funny if it were not also so devastating. Doucet handles this tonal balance beautifully.

I also want to highlight the structure. Rather than a dry chronological march through history, the book reads almost like a novel. Multiple reviewers have compared it to A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, and those comparisons are not unearned. There is something cinematic about the way Doucet uses the hotel as a stage on which history plays out.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
As much as I loved this book, it is not without its flaws. The pacing is uneven, particularly in the first half. There are stretches where the detail about the physical renovations and rebuilding of the hotel becomes a bit excessive, and I found my attention wandering during those sections. Some readers on Goodreads have echoed this, noting that the book could have benefited from a tighter edit in places.

Doucet also makes the somewhat unusual choice to refer to herself in the third person throughout the book, which I found distracting at first. It creates a strange distance between the author and the reader, especially in a book that otherwise feels so intimate and personal. I eventually got used to it, but it took a while.

There is also a fair critique to be made about whether the conceit of telling an entire country’s history through one hotel can fully deliver on its promise. There are moments where the connection between the hotel and the wider political narrative feels a little strained, where you sense Doucet working hard to pull the threads together. Some reviewers have pointed out that the prose occasionally slips into a style that sounds more like television reporting than literary non-fiction, which is perhaps inevitable given Doucet’s background but does jar slightly on the page.

That said, the second half of the book is significantly stronger than the first. Once the narrative reaches the post-2001 era and the stories of the staff become more deeply intertwined with the political situation, everything clicks into place, and the book becomes genuinely riveting.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you are someone who cares about understanding Afghanistan beyond the headlines, this book is essential reading. It is not a military history or a political analysis. It is a deeply human story about resilience, community, and the quiet courage of ordinary people living through extraordinary circumstances.

Fans of narrative non-fiction will find a lot to love here. If you enjoyed The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan, The Places in Between by Rory Stewart, or A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (for its use of a single building as a lens on history), this will be right up your street. It is also a wonderful entry point for anyone who has not read much about Afghanistan before and wants to understand the country through the voices of its own people rather than through the perspective of foreign governments and armies.

I would also recommend it to anyone interested in travel writing, journalism memoir, or stories about the hospitality industry in unexpected places. There is something universally compelling about a hotel that refuses to close its doors, no matter what the world throws at it.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Finest Hotel in Kabul is one of those books that stays with you long after you finish it. It is not a perfect book. The pacing wobbles, the third-person narration is an odd choice, and the first half takes a while to find its rhythm. But when it hits its stride, it is extraordinary. Doucet has achieved something rare: she has written a book about war and politics that is, at its core, a love letter to the people who endure them. The staff of the Inter-Continental are not victims or heroes in any simple sense. They are complex, resilient, funny, proud, and deeply human, and Doucet gives them the space and respect they deserve.

This is a book that earns its prizes. It made me laugh, it made me angry, and it made me think about Afghanistan in a way I never had before. That is about the highest compliment I can pay a work of non-fiction.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★★★ –

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👀 First impressions:
I will be honest, I had never read anything by Ruth Ozeki before picking up this book. Her name had been on my radar for a while, mostly because of all the praise for A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness, but I had never actually taken the plunge. The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions is her first short story collection, and it felt like a natural entry point. It is a literary fiction collection made up of eleven stories that span decades and geographies, from 1970s New England to 1990s Manhattan to a rain-soaked Pacific Northwest island during the early days of the pandemic. Ozeki is a Booker Prize finalist, a Women’s Prize winner, a filmmaker, and a Zen Buddhist priest, and honestly that range of experience shows up on every page.

What drew me in most was the premise itself: a collection threaded through with typewriters, letters, manuscripts, and the physical traces of writing. As someone who loves stories about stories, I knew this was going to be my kind of book. Going in with fresh eyes and no expectations of her style, I was curious to see what all the fuss was about.

✅ What I Liked:
Where do I even start? Ozeki’s writing is an absolute pleasure to read. Her prose has this rare quality of feeling effortless while being incredibly precise. She shifts her voice and style to suit each story’s narrator, and the result is a collection that feels genuinely varied without ever losing its sense of cohesion. The thread of typewriters and the physical act of writing runs through the stories in a way that could easily have felt like a gimmick but instead feels organic and meaningful.

Several stories stood out as particular highlights for me. “Leafblower” follows Mel, a struggling MFA graduate who has split from her partner and ends up living with an elderly retired professor and his wife. As the wife’s health declines, Mel is drawn into the role of caretaker, and the emotional complexity of that situation is rendered with such tenderness and honesty. It is one of those stories that sneaks up on you and lands a quiet punch.

“The Problem of the Body” is another gem. It is funny and surprising and heartbreaking all at once, following a writer whose granddaughter lives with her as the two cook up schemes to help the grandmother avoid a book tour. Underneath the humour, though, is a story about grief for a lost husband and a daughter taken too soon by illness, and it is extraordinarily moving. Then there is “Dead Beat Poet,” where the ghost of Allen Ginsberg possesses a young publishing assistant during a sales meeting, which sounds wild and absolutely is, but it is also razor-sharp about the realities of modern publishing and life in New York.

What ties all of this together is Ozeki’s deep interest in how we record our lives through language, and how the stories we write and tell end up shaping who we become. There is a lovely meta quality to the collection, a playfulness with the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, that keeps you guessing and thinking long after you finish a story. Her Zen background gives the writing a contemplative quality, but it never feels heavy or preachy. She wears her wisdom lightly, and that is one of the things I admire most about this collection.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
As with most short story collections, this is inevitably a bit of a mixed bag. Some stories hit me with full force, while others felt more like quiet sketches that I appreciated intellectually but did not connect with emotionally. That is just the nature of the form, and it is hard to hold it against the book, but I did find my attention wavering in a few of the middle stories.

I also think readers who are not already interested in the world of writers, writing, and publishing may find the collection a little insular at times. Several of the stories deal with authors, professors, MFA students, and people working in the book industry, and while Ozeki handles these settings with wit and self-awareness, the recurring focus on the literary world might feel niche to some. If you are looking for a collection with a wide variety of settings and character types, this one stays fairly close to its territory.

Finally, while the metafictional elements are one of the collection’s strengths, they can also be a bit disorienting. The blurring of Ozeki’s real life with her fictional characters is clearly intentional and often delightful, but there were moments where I found myself wondering whether I was missing a reference or an inside joke. It is a minor quibble, but worth mentioning for readers who prefer their fiction to stay firmly in its lane.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you are a fan of literary short fiction, especially the kind that is smart and warm in equal measure, this collection is absolutely for you. Readers who loved A Tale for the Time Being or The Book of Form and Emptiness will find Ozeki’s voice just as compelling in the short form. This is also a fantastic pick for anyone who loves stories about storytelling, the creative process, or the strange and beautiful relationship between writers and their words.

Fans of authors like Lily King, George Saunders, or Carmen Maria Machado, writers who blend the deeply personal with the slightly surreal, will feel right at home here. It would also be a wonderful choice for book club discussions, since each story raises rich questions about memory, identity, grief, and ambition that you will want to talk about with someone else.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Typing Lady is a thoughtful, playful, and emotionally resonant collection from one of the most interesting literary voices working today. Ruth Ozeki proves herself to be just as compelling in short fiction as she apparently is in her novels, and now I understand why she has such a devoted readership. The highlights are genuinely exceptional, the prose is consistently gorgeous, and the thematic thread of writing and language gives the whole book a satisfying sense of unity. It is the kind of collection that made me want to slow down, savour each story, and then immediately go back and reread my favourites. A few uneven moments aside, this is a deeply rewarding read.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★★ – Playful, poignant, and threaded with quiet magic

This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase through these links, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This helps support the blog and allows me to keep sharing book recommendations.

👀 First impressions:
that is exactly the kind of reader Elin Anna Labba wrote this book for. Labba is a Sámi writer and journalist from the arctic region of Sweden, already celebrated for her nonfiction debut, The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow, which won Sweden’s prestigious August Prize for Best Nonfiction. With The Home of the Drowned, she turns to fiction for the first time, drawing on her own family’s history of forced relocation to tell the story of three women whose summer settlement is swallowed by rising waters after a hydroelectric dam is built on their land.

The novel follows Iŋgá, her fierce mother Rávdná, and her ailing Aunt Ánne across four decades, from 1942 to 1982, as they navigate loss, displacement, and the slow erosion of everything that once made their world feel stable. When I first read the premise, I expected something quietly devastating, and on that front, the book delivers completely. But what I was not prepared for was how intimate and textured the storytelling would be. This is not a sweeping political novel that keeps you at arm’s length. It pulls you right into the smoke-filled goahti, right to the edge of the rising lake, and asks you to sit with these women as their world changes around them.

✅ What I Liked:
The writing in this book is extraordinary. Labba has an almost sensory approach to prose. You can feel the cold, smell the damp wool, hear the water lapping against places it was never supposed to reach. The translation by Elizabeth Clark Wessel deserves huge credit here because the language feels effortless and deeply poetic without ever tipping into something overwrought. It reads like a novel written in water, to borrow a phrase from Swedish critics, and that description is remarkably fitting.

What impressed me most was how Labba builds her characters. Rávdná is a powerhouse of quiet, stubborn resistance. She refuses to accept the loss of her home and takes it upon herself to build a proper wooden house on higher ground, even when the authorities deny her a housing loan on the basis of her so-called racial characteristics and nomadic lifestyle. Her defiance is not loud or dramatic. It is steady and bone-deep, and it made her one of the most compelling characters I have read in a long time. The tension between Rávdná and her daughter Iŋgá is equally well drawn. Iŋgá is a teenager who just wants a normal life, and her frustration with her mother’s activism feels painfully real. That generational push and pull between holding on to your roots and wanting to belong somewhere less painful gives the novel so much emotional weight.

Aunt Ánne, meanwhile, carries the grief of the story almost silently. Her declining health mirrors the decline of the community itself, and Labba handles her arc with such tenderness that it left me genuinely moved. There are cultural details woven throughout the novel, from reindeer herding traditions to deeply held superstitions about death and photography, that make the world feel richly alive even as it is being dismantled.

The way Labba uses water as both a literal and symbolic force is masterful. The lake that once sustained the community becomes the thing that destroys it, and that transformation haunts every page. The drowned trees tangling fishing nets, the decomposing plant matter changing the biology of the water, the father’s grave slowly disappearing beneath the surface. These details accumulate into something that feels less like a novel and more like a remembrance.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
If I have one reservation, it is the pacing in the middle section of the book. The novel spans forty years, and while the early chapters set the scene with vivid urgency, the middle stretches can feel repetitive as the cycle of loss and rebuilding plays out again and again. I understand that this is partly the point. The relentlessness of displacement is exactly what Labba is trying to convey. But as a reading experience, there were moments where I felt the momentum dip, and I had to push through passages that covered similar emotional ground to what had come before.

I also found that some of the secondary characters in the wider village community could have been more developed. Rávdná, Iŋgá, and Ánne are drawn with such care and specificity, but a few of the neighbours and community members blur together. Given how much the novel is about a collective experience of dispossession, I would have liked to feel more connected to the broader community rather than encountering them mostly at the edges.

Finally, while the novel is beautifully restrained, there were a handful of moments where I wanted just a little more interiority from Iŋgá, especially in the later sections when she is an adult looking back on her childhood. Her perspective is often observational, and while that restraint suits the tone of the book, I occasionally wished for a deeper dive into her emotional processing of everything she witnessed.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you are drawn to literary historical fiction that centres Indigenous experiences, this is an essential read. Fans of authors like Ann-Helen Laestadius (Stolen) or Linda Hogan will find a kindred spirit in Labba’s writing. If you loved the quiet power of books like Burial Rites by Hannah Kent or the environmental and cultural themes in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, this sits in a similar emotional space.

This is also a book for anyone interested in Scandinavian history beyond the usual narratives. The story of hydroelectric expansion in northern Sweden and its devastating impact on Sámi communities is not widely known outside of the Nordic countries, and Labba brings it to life in a way that feels urgent and deeply personal rather than didactic. If you appreciate fiction that teaches you something about the world while breaking your heart a little, this belongs on your shelf.

It is also a wonderful choice for book clubs. The themes of home, identity, resistance, and the cost of so-called progress provide plenty to discuss, and the relatively compact length makes it accessible even for slower readers.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Home of the Drowned is one of those novels that stays with you long after you close the final page. It is quietly devastating, beautifully written, and rooted in a history that more people need to know about. Labba manages to tell a deeply political story through the most personal of lenses, and the result is something that feels both intimate and epic. The relationship between Rávdná and Iŋgá alone would be worth the read, but layered on top of that is a profound meditation on what it means to lose your home, not to a single catastrophic event, but to a slow, deliberate drowning carried out in the name of progress.

The pacing wobbles slightly in the middle and a few secondary characters could have used more depth, but these are minor issues in a novel that otherwise does so much so well. Labba’s prose is stunning, her empathy for her characters is boundless, and the translation preserves every ounce of that beauty. This is a debut novel that reads like the work of someone who has been writing fiction for decades, and I cannot wait to see what she does next.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★★ – A slow, beautiful flood of grief, resilience, and home

👀 First impressions:
I will be completely upfront: I went into The Ladie Upstairs with a healthy dose of scepticism. Jessie Elland is best known as an actress from the North East of England, famous for playing Chloe Harris in Emmerdale, and celebrity novels do not always land well. But Elland has been open about her literary influences, citing Shirley Jackson, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Angela Carter among her inspirations, and that reading list alone told me she was not aiming for something safe or commercial. She was swinging for something strange. And strange is exactly what she delivered.

The novel follows Ann, a scullery maid toiling away in the dank kitchens of a grand country house called Ropner Hall. Ann loathes her life downstairs. She despises the other servants, finds the men repulsive, and is consumed by a burning desire to become a lady’s maid. When a chance encounter with Lady Charlotte, the mysterious woman who lives above stairs, opens the door to that opportunity, Ann is convinced she has finally clawed her way out of hell. But the higher she climbs in Ropner Hall, the more disturbing things become. The book has been described as femgore, a subgenre that channels horror through the lens of female rage, bodily disgust, and desire. That label fits, but it only tells part of the story. This is also a fever dream about obsession, class, isolation, and the terrifying gap between who we believe ourselves to be and what we actually are.

✅ What I Liked:
The writing. I have to start there because Elland’s prose is the beating, bloody heart of this novel. She writes with a sensory intensity that is almost overwhelming. You can smell the damp stone of the kitchens, feel the grime under Ann’s fingernails, taste the foul food the servants choke down. The descriptions of Ropner Hall itself are extraordinary. The house is not just a setting. It is practically a character, a living thing with eyes and moods and a suffocating gravitational pull. There are echoes of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House in the way the building seems to watch and breathe and trap, and Elland earns that comparison honestly.

Ann is a brilliantly unsettling narrator. She is obsessive, unreliable, seething with contempt for everyone around her, and utterly convinced of her own superiority. Her disgust is relentless. She is revolted by the bodies and habits of her fellow servants, by the men who leer and grab, by the filth and crudeness of life below stairs. But she is also deeply fixated on Lady Charlotte in a way that blurs the line between admiration, desire, and something far more unhinged. That tension keeps you gripped because you never quite trust what Ann is telling you, and as the story progresses, the ground shifts beneath your feet in ways that are genuinely unsettling.

I also loved the atmosphere Elland builds. The novel exists in an intentionally unspecified historical period, which gives the whole thing a timeless, dreamlike quality. You feel trapped inside Ropner Hall the same way Ann does, cut off from the outside world, unsure of how you got there or how to leave. That claustrophobia is relentless and effective. When the narrative starts to unravel in the second half and Ann’s grip on reality loosens, the book becomes genuinely difficult to put down. There is a slow burn quality to the horror here that rewards patience.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
This is a polarising book, and I can understand why. The first half is slow. Elland takes her time establishing Ann’s world and her seething inner life, and while I appreciate the deliberate pacing, there were stretches where I felt the story was circling rather than progressing. The plot is thin by conventional standards. This is far more a novel of voice and atmosphere than it is a tightly plotted narrative, and if you go in expecting twists and revelations at a steady clip, you may find yourself frustrated.

The prose style, while stunning in places, can also tip into excess. There are moments where the writing feels like it is trying too hard to be literary, where the metaphorical language becomes so thick that it obscures what is actually happening in the scene. A few readers have compared this to wading through beautiful mud, and I think that is fair. When Elland relaxes into her natural voice, the sentences sing. When she pushes too hard, they can become opaque.

I also think the secondary characters suffer from the intensity of Ann’s perspective. Because Ann views everyone around her with such contempt, the other servants and even Lady Charlotte to some extent can feel more like projections of Ann’s psychology than fully realised people. That is clearly an intentional choice, and it serves the unreliable narrator device well, but it does mean the emotional stakes feel somewhat limited. It is hard to care about what happens to people when the narrator herself barely sees them as human.

Finally, there has been some discussion around the marketing of this book, particularly regarding sapphic romance elements that some readers felt were overpromised. There is desire and obsession between women here, absolutely, but calling this a sapphic romance would be misleading. It is much darker and more ambiguous than that framing suggests, and I would encourage readers to go in expecting gothic horror with queer undertones rather than a love story.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you love gothic fiction that makes you feel uneasy in your own skin, this is for you. Fans of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and the darker end of Sarah Waters will find a lot to admire here. If you enjoyed the feral, class-obsessed energy of the film Saltburn, this book scratches a very similar itch. It has also been compared to Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito, and if you loved that unhinged energy, The Ladie Upstairs belongs on your radar.

This is a brilliant pick for readers who prioritise voice and atmosphere over plot, who enjoy unreliable narrators, and who are not squeamish about visceral, body-horror-adjacent imagery. It is also a strong choice for anyone interested in the femgore subgenre, which centres female rage and bodily experience within horror and literary fiction. If you like your gothic fiction weird, unsettling, and dripping with contempt, Jessie Elland has written your next favourite book.

I would add a content warning, though. The novel includes scenes of sexual violence and some readers have noted descriptions that could be uncomfortable regarding bodies and disgust. Go in prepared.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Ladie Upstairs is a genuinely bold debut. Jessie Elland has written something strange, ambitious, and completely her own, and that alone deserves respect. The prose is frequently beautiful in the most grotesque possible way, the atmosphere is suffocating, and Ann is one of the most memorably unpleasant narrators I have encountered in a long time. This is not a book that wants to be liked. It wants to get under your skin, and it succeeds.

It is not without its flaws. The pacing in the first half asks for patience, the density of the writing occasionally works against clarity, and the thin characterisation of everyone who is not Ann can make the world of the novel feel narrow. But the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses, and when this book works, it really works. Elland has announced herself as a writer with a distinctive, fearless voice, and I will absolutely be picking up whatever she writes next. For a debut from someone best known for a soap opera, this is a remarkably assured and literary piece of work that should silence any doubters.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★★★ –

👀 First impressions:
I had high hopes for The Bright Years. A multigenerational family saga set in Texas, spanning sixty years, with secrets, addiction, and three intimate points of view? That is exactly the kind of story I tend to gravitate toward. Sarah Damoff’s debut follows Ryan and Lillian Bright, a couple who marry young and deeply in love, but who are each hiding something significant. Lillian gave up a son before they met, and Ryan is quietly battling an alcohol addiction. Their daughter, Georgette, grows up in the wreckage of both secrets. Damoff has a background in social work and a Child Protection Certification from Harvard, which felt like a promising foundation for a story dealing with addiction and family trauma. The comparisons to Mary Beth Keane and Claire Lombardo on the cover had me excited, and I went in expecting something emotionally rich and deeply character driven. I came out the other side with more mixed feelings than I anticipated.

✅ What I Liked:
There is no denying that Damoff can write a gorgeous sentence. Her prose has a warmth and a Southern cadence to it that gives the novel a distinct voice, and she has a real talent for capturing small, specific moments of family life in ways that feel true and lived in. Some of the quieter domestic scenes, a marriage proposal, a bedtime routine, a grandparent meeting a grandchild for the first time, are rendered with such tenderness that they genuinely moved me.

The portrayal of addiction is one of the novel’s real strengths. Damoff does not simplify alcoholism into a villain or a plot device. She shows how it creeps into a family slowly, how it distorts love, and how the people around the addict carry their own invisible weight. Ryan’s sections, where you see him wrestling with the legacy of his abusive father while slipping into the same patterns, are some of the most compelling in the book. You can feel Damoff’s professional experience in those pages, and they ring with an authenticity that some of the other storylines lack.

I also appreciated that the reconciliations in the final act are not wrapped up in a neat bow. Characters who have been hurt over decades do not simply forgive and move on. That felt honest and earned.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
Unfortunately, the novel’s weaknesses held me back from fully connecting with the story. The biggest issue for me was a persistent habit of telling rather than showing. Damoff often explains exactly what a character is feeling or what a moment means, rather than trusting the reader to absorb it through action and dialogue. At times, it felt like the novel was narrating its own themes at me, spelling out the connections between generations instead of letting them emerge naturally. The symbolism and parallels between characters are laid on quite thickly, and rather than feeling like satisfying echoes, they sometimes came across as overplanned.

The pacing was also uneven. The book covers such a vast stretch of time that certain periods are rushed through in a handful of pages while others are drawn out at length, and I did not always agree with which moments got the most attention. Georgette’s sections in particular felt underserved. She is positioned as the character who must make sense of her family’s legacy, but her emotional journey sometimes felt compressed and underdeveloped compared to her parents’ storylines. I wanted to spend more time with her, and by the time her arc reached its resolution, I was not as invested as I think the novel needed me to be.

There were also moments where the prose, lovely as it often is, tipped into sentimentality. Some of the metaphors and reflections felt a little too polished, a little too ready made for an Instagram quote card, and that undercut the rawness the story was reaching for. When the writing worked, it really worked. But when it overreached, it pulled me out of the moment and reminded me I was reading a constructed narrative rather than living inside one.

Finally, while the three point of view structure is ambitious, the shifts between narrators sometimes disrupted the momentum of the story. Just as I was settling into one character’s world, the novel would jump forward in time and hand the reins to someone else, and I found myself having to re-engage emotionally each time.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you are a reader who loves sweeping family sagas and prioritises beautiful writing above tight plotting, you will likely get more from this than I did. Fans of Claire Lombardo’s The Most Fun We Ever Had or novels that trace generational patterns of love and damage will find familiar territory here. It is also a strong pick for anyone looking for a thoughtful, nuanced portrayal of how addiction shapes a family across decades. Damoff writes about that subject with real authority and compassion. Book club readers will find plenty to discuss, as the novel raises big questions about forgiveness, inheritance, and whether we are destined to repeat our parents’ mistakes.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Bright Years is a debut that shows real promise. Sarah Damoff has genuine talent as a prose stylist, and her understanding of addiction and family dynamics is clearly informed by years of professional experience. There are passages in this book that are truly beautiful and scenes that hit with real emotional force. But for me, the novel was held back by uneven pacing, an over-reliance on telling rather than showing, and a tendency toward sentimentality that softened its emotional impact. I wanted to love this book more than I ultimately did. The bones of a great family saga are here, and I think Damoff is an author with a lot of potential. I would still be curious to read her next novel, because the things she does well, she does very well indeed. This one just did not come together for me as a whole in the way I was hoping.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★ – Beautiful writing, but the story never quite found its footing

👀 First impressions:
I picked up Those Who Disappeared by Kevin Wignall knowing him primarily as a writer of slick, fast-paced thrillers involving spies, assassins, and shadowy government dealings. His novel The Hunter’s Prayer was adapted into a film, and several of his other works have been optioned for Hollywood, so the man clearly knows how to tell a gripping story. But this book felt like a departure the moment I read the premise, and that intrigued me.

The setup is immediately compelling. A body is discovered in a Swiss glacier, thirty-two years after a young man named Charlie Treherne vanished during a mountain walk. His son, Foster, a successful modern artist who never knew his father, is contacted by a State Department official with the news. What initially looks like a tragic accident takes a darker turn when the autopsy reveals signs of a struggle. Foster sets out to track down the people who knew his father, a tight-knit group from their university days, and quickly discovers that none of them want to talk. Some are evasive. Others seem genuinely unsettled that the body was ever found. It is a mystery, yes, but it is also something quieter and more personal than I expected.

✅ What I Liked:
Wignall’s writing here is restrained and elegant, and I mean that as a huge compliment. At only 238 pages, this novel wastes nothing. Every scene earns its place, and the pacing is beautifully controlled. There is a sense of slow, mounting tension as Foster peels back layer after layer of his father’s past, and Wignall never rushes it. He trusts the reader to stay with him, and that patience pays off.

Foster is a genuinely likeable protagonist. He grew up essentially alone, raised without real parental love after his mother took her own life when he was just a baby. Neither set of grandparents showed much interest in him. And yet, despite all of that, he has become a thoughtful, morally grounded person. There is something quietly heartbreaking about a man who has everything in terms of talent and wealth, but has never truly belonged anywhere. His search for his father becomes, without ever being heavy-handed about it, a search for himself. Where does he come from? Where does he fit?

The settings are gorgeous. Foster’s investigation takes him across western Europe, over to New York and Connecticut, and ultimately to the Venice Biennale, and Wignall brings each location to life with an easy, confident touch. The world of contemporary art, university friendships, and old secrets gives the whole book a rich, textured atmosphere that sets it apart from your average thriller.

I also loved how Wignall plays with the idea of truth and whether it is always worth pursuing. The people Foster confronts are not cartoonish villains. They are complicated, flawed individuals who made choices decades ago and have been living with the consequences ever since. That moral ambiguity is what elevates the book beyond a simple whodunit.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
If I am being honest, the understated tone that makes the book so distinctive is also, at times, its limitation. Because Wignall keeps things so measured and controlled, there are stretches in the middle where the momentum dips slightly. Foster meets another evasive contact, gets another half-answer, moves on to the next. The rhythm becomes a touch predictable, and I found myself wishing for a moment or two of genuine surprise to break up the pattern earlier in the book.

Foster, for all his appeal, can also feel a little too composed. Given everything he uncovers about his father and the circumstances of his parents’ deaths, I sometimes wanted more raw emotion from him. He processes things almost too calmly, and while that fits his character as someone who has learned to keep the world at arm’s length, it occasionally kept me at a slight emotional distance too.

The supporting cast, particularly the members of his father’s old university group, could have used a bit more individual distinction. A few of them blur together, and since their individual motivations and loyalties are central to the mystery, I think the book would have benefited from sharper characterisation in that area.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you are a reader who appreciates a thriller that operates on a quieter frequency, this book is absolutely for you. It will appeal to fans of literary mysteries where character and atmosphere matter just as much as plot. Think along the lines of books by authors like Mick Herron in his more reflective moments, or the kind of intelligent, European-flavoured suspense that writers like Joseph Kanon produce.

It is also a wonderful choice for anyone who loves stories about identity, family secrets, and the question of how well we can ever truly know the people closest to us. If you enjoy books where the real mystery is not just who did it, but who these people really were, you will find a lot to savour here.

And if you are already a Kevin Wignall fan, this book shows a different, more emotionally layered side of his writing that is well worth experiencing.

💭 Final Thoughts:
Those Who Disappeared surprised me. I went in expecting a conventional thriller and came out having read something far more thoughtful and emotionally resonant. Wignall proves here that he can do more than just entertain. He can make you feel something deeper, that lingering ache of a man searching for roots he never had and uncovering truths that are both devastating and, in their own way, liberating.

It is not a perfect book. The pacing softens in places, and some of the secondary characters needed stronger definition. But the writing is sharp, the central mystery is satisfying, and Foster’s journey is one that stayed with me well after I turned the last page. For a book that is under 250 pages, it packs a remarkable emotional punch, and it has made me want to go back and read everything else Wignall has written.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★★ – A glacier gives up its secrets, and a son finally finds his place

👀 First impressions:
I had never read anything by Andrew Hunter Murray before picking this one up. I knew he was the author behind the Sunday Times bestseller The Last Day and that he is one of the writers and researchers on the BBC show QI, which was enough to make me curious. A novelist who also works on one of the sharpest panel shows on television? That suggested someone with real intelligence and wit, and I wanted to see how that translated onto the page.

The premise drew me in right away. In a near-future Britain that feels unsettlingly familiar, a young painter named Ben learns that his fiancée, Cara, has decided not to come home. She has been living and working on a remote island called Sanctuary Rock, the private domain of a wealthy and enigmatic philanthropist named Sir John Pemberley, and she has chosen to stay there permanently, ending their engagement by letter. Unable to accept that it is over, Ben makes the difficult journey to the island to speak to her face to face. But when he arrives, he discovers that the community Pemberley has built is far stranger and more secretive than he ever imagined. What appears to be a paradise on the surface may be hiding something much darker underneath.

It is a setup that blends dystopian fiction, mystery, and psychological thriller, and I went in hoping Murray would deliver on all three fronts.

✅ What I Liked:
Murray’s greatest strength in this book is his world-building. The near-future setting he creates is quietly chilling precisely because it requires so little imagination to believe in. This is not a distant, fantastical dystopia. It is a world where things have simply continued to slide in the direction they are already heading. Society is crumbling at the edges, resources are strained, and the gap between those with power and those without has only widened. The death of the world’s last elephant is mentioned almost in passing, and that small, devastating detail tells you everything about the state of things without Murray having to spell it out.

Sanctuary Rock itself is a brilliantly realised setting. The island functions as a kind of modern Noah’s Ark, curated and controlled entirely by Pemberley, a man who sits somewhere between visionary billionaire and cult leader. Murray captures that type of figure with real precision. Pemberley is charismatic, articulate, and utterly convinced of his own righteousness, which makes him both fascinating and deeply unsettling. You can see why people would follow him, and that is exactly what makes him so dangerous.

The novel also does something genuinely interesting with the theme of generational guilt. Without giving too much away, the book explores how the choices made by one generation ripple outward and trap the next, and Murray handles this thread with real thoughtfulness. There are moments scattered throughout the story that land with quiet, unexpected power.

Murray’s dialogue is another highlight. He has a natural ear for the way people speak, particularly in tense or uncomfortable situations, and some of the exchanges between Ben and the island’s residents crackle with unspoken meaning. You can feel people choosing their words carefully, saying just enough to seem cooperative while revealing as little as possible.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
Here is where I have to be honest. For a book marketed as a thriller, The Sanctuary does not always feel like one. The pacing is very slow, and while I appreciate a slow burn when it is building toward something explosive, the tension here does not always sustain itself across the middle stretch. There are long passages where Ben wanders the island, observes things, and has conversations that nudge the mystery forward only slightly. It can feel a bit meandering.

Ben himself is a somewhat passive protagonist. He reacts to what happens around him more than he drives the story forward, and there were times when I found myself wanting him to push harder, ask sharper questions, or take more decisive action. His motivation for coming to the island, winning Cara back, is clear enough at the start, but it gradually fades into the background as other mysteries take over. When the resolution of his relationship with Cara finally comes, it feels almost like an afterthought, which is disappointing given that it is the emotional engine that sets the whole plot in motion.

The ending also felt rushed. After a slow, methodical build, the final chapter packs in a lot of revelations very quickly. It is as though Murray spent so much time carefully constructing his world and its atmosphere that he ran out of room to give the climax the space it deserved. The answers come, but they arrive in a breathless rush that does not quite match the measured pace of everything before it.

I also think the near-future setting, while well-drawn, is somewhat underused. Very little in the story depends on it being set in the future. You could shift the events to the present day with only minor adjustments, and the story would work almost identically. That is not necessarily a flaw, but it left me feeling that the speculative element was more window dressing than structural foundation.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you enjoy intelligent, atmospheric fiction that prioritises ideas and setting over action, The Sanctuary has a lot to offer. Readers who loved novels like Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go or Michel Faber’s Under the Skin, books where something deeply wrong hums beneath a deceptively calm surface, will find a similar quality here. It will also appeal to anyone fascinated by stories about utopian communities, cult-like leaders, and the seductive danger of someone who promises to save the world on their own terms.

Fans of Murray’s debut The Last Day will likely want to pick this up too, and it is also a strong choice for readers who enjoy speculative fiction that stays rooted in recognisable, grounded reality rather than leaping into far-flung futures. If you like your thrillers cerebral rather than breathless, this one is well worth your time.

💭 Final Thoughts:
The Sanctuary is a novel with a terrific premise and a beautifully unsettling atmosphere that does not quite deliver the knockout punch its setup promises. Murray writes with intelligence and skill, and his ability to create a world that feels just a half-step removed from our own is genuinely impressive. Pemberley is a memorable antagonist, the island is a setting that lingers in the mind, and the thematic threads about power, control, and generational responsibility give the book real substance.

But the slow pacing, a somewhat passive lead character, and a finale that feels compressed hold it back from reaching its full potential. It is a book I am glad I read, one that gave me plenty to think about, but it left me with the nagging sense that there was an even better version of this story waiting to be told. Murray clearly has the imagination and the craft. I just wish the execution had matched the ambition all the way through.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★ – A paradise with cracks you can’t stop staring at

👀 First impressions:
If you’ve been hanging around book corners of the internet for any length of time, you’ll know that a new Lauren Groff release is a Big Deal. Three time National Book Award finalist, author of Fates and Furies, Matrix and The Vaster Wilds, owner of an indie bookshop in Gainesville called The Lynx, and now back with Brawler, her third short story collection, published by Riverhead in February 2026. It’s her first collection since Florida, which was itself a Book Award finalist, so the expectations were sky high before I even peeled off the dust jacket.

Brawler is nine stories that move across the country and across the decades, from the 1950s up to the present day, taking in New England, Florida and California along the way. The official line is that they’re all wrestling, in various ways, with the tension between our animal selves and our better angels. Abusive relationships, deathbeds, natural disasters, the slow erosion of family, a teenage swimmer using the pool as escape. Quite the menu. I went in expecting to be put through the wringer in the best Groff tradition, and I was not disappointed.

✅ What I Liked:
Groff at sentence level remains a marvel. Honestly, there are paragraphs in this collection that I read three or four times just to admire the construction. She has this ability to drop a single image or observation that completely reframes what you thought a scene was about, and she does it again and again without it ever feeling like a trick. The prose is muscular and precise and occasionally just gorgeous, and after a few years of reading writers who clearly want to be her, it’s lovely to be back in the actual source.

The opening story is an absolute knockout. It pulls you under straight away and refuses to let you up for air. I made the mistake of starting it during a quick coffee break and ended up late for something because I physically could not put the book down until I’d finished. That alone is a small miracle in a culture where my attention span feels constantly under siege.

The title story Brawler, about a tough, abrasive teen swimmer escaping an awful home life by diving through the water, is exactly the kind of thing Groff does better than almost anyone. She gets adolescent rage and longing and the specific feeling of being trapped in a body that doesn’t yet belong to you. The longer piece in the middle of the collection, which sprawls across time in a way that almost reads as a novella, was another standout for me. It has this claustrophobic, obsessive quality that built and built until I was almost holding my breath.

What I love most about Groff is how unsentimental she is about her women. Mothers, daughters, friends, abuse survivors, dying women, women looking down the barrel of a future with no possibility left in it. She gives them all complexity and edges and contradictions. Nobody in these stories is a victim or a saint, and that moral messiness is exactly what keeps the work feeling so alive. There are also some genuinely funny moments, which surprised me given how heavy the subject matter gets.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
Short story collections are tricky beasts, and Brawler has the same issue most of them do. The stories are not all equally strong. A couple of the shorter pieces felt like sketches to me, beautifully written sketches, but not quite fully realised on their own terms. After the opener set the bar so high, a few of the entries in the back half felt slightly slighter by comparison, even though I suspect they’d land harder if I encountered them in isolation rather than back to back.

The collection also has a fairly relentless emotional register. Crisis after crisis, rupture after rupture, all of these people at their absolute breaking points. Individually each story earns its weight, but read straight through over a few days, the cumulative effect can become slightly numbing. I think this is a collection that rewards being read slowly, with breathing room between stories, and I’m not sure I gave it that. That’s partly my fault, but I do think Groff could have varied the emotional pitch a little more.

There were also one or two stories where I felt the ending arrived a beat too soon. Groff sometimes prefers to cut away at the moment of greatest tension rather than follow through, which is a perfectly defensible artistic choice, but for me it occasionally tipped over from suggestive into frustrating. I wanted to sit a moment longer in the aftermath of certain pieces and wasn’t given the chance.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you already love Lauren Groff, this is essential. No question. Pick it up. If you adored Florida, you’ll find this in conversation with that collection in really satisfying ways, even though the geography is broader this time.

For newcomers, this is honestly a pretty fantastic entry point to her work. Short story collections often are. Fans of Alice Munro, George Saunders, Karen Russell, Deesha Philyaw and Mary Gaitskill will find an awful lot to love here. If you enjoyed Tom Lake by Ann Patchett or anything by Elizabeth Strout, the family rupture territory will feel familiar in the best way.

It would also suit readers who enjoy literary fiction with genuine moral weight to it, the kind of writing that takes ordinary lives seriously and treats them as worthy of close, ferocious attention. If you’re someone who likes a story to leave a mark, Groff will oblige.

💭 Final Thoughts:
Brawler is a really strong collection from a writer at the top of her powers. Not every story landed equally for me, and the relentlessness of the emotional pitch occasionally wore me down, but the highs are extraordinary and the prose throughout is the kind of writing that makes you remember why you fell in love with short fiction in the first place.

What stays with me most is the sense of compassionate clear sightedness that runs through all nine stories. Groff loves her people without ever flinching from their worst impulses, and that combination of warmth and honesty is rarer than it should be. A couple of these stories will be living rent free in my head for months, I can already tell.

Is it perfect? No. Is it the kind of collection that confirms Lauren Groff as one of the most important short story writers we have working right now? Absolutely yes. I closed it feeling lucky we get to read her in real time.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★★ – Fierce, beautiful, and quietly devastating

👀 First impressions:
Every so often a book lands on my radar with so much buzz that I worry it can’t possibly live up to the hype. Coffin Moon by Keith Rosson was one of those books for me. Published in September 2025 by Penguin Random House, it’s been picking up glowing endorsements from the likes of Stephen King and Paul Tremblay, and the horror community has been losing its collective mind over it. Rosson, who you might already know from Fever House or The Devil by Name, has been quietly building a reputation as one of the most interesting voices in modern horror, and apparently this is the book where everything clicks.

The premise drew me in immediately. A Vietnam veteran bartender named Minor and his adopted niece Julia set out on a revenge quest across the Pacific Northwest after a vampire named John Varley butchers their family. Vampires. Grief. Seventies grime. A road trip soaked in blood. Sign me up. Throw in the fact that Rosson reportedly drew inspiration from True Grit, and I was practically vibrating with anticipation before I even cracked the spine.

✅ What I Liked:
The atmosphere is the first thing that grabs you and refuses to let go. Rosson’s mid-seventies America is bleak, grubby and absolutely lived in. You can almost smell the stale beer in the bars, the diesel fumes off the highways, the damp earth on the side of a forgotten road. He has this knack for writing places that feel like real places people have actually suffered in, and that grounding makes the supernatural elements hit so much harder when they arrive.

Minor and Julia are the beating, broken heart of this novel. Their relationship is messy and tender and absolutely convincing. Minor carries his guilt like a second skin, and Julia’s rage is the kind that burns slow and steady rather than flashy. Watching them lean on each other while also tearing each other apart in small ways was honestly more affecting than I expected from a book featuring vampires with monstrous teeth.

And the violence. My word, the violence. Rosson does not flinch, but he also doesn’t wallow. Every brutal scene earns its place. There’s a real cinematic quality to the action sequences, and a few set pieces had me genuinely holding my breath. The vampire mythology he builds, with silver bullet casters, undead children and Varley’s strange gravitational pull on broken men, feels fresh without ever tipping into gimmicky territory.

The prose itself deserves a shout. There’s something almost punk about Rosson’s sentences. They’re lean, they hit hard, and every so often he drops in a line so beautiful you have to put the book down for a second.

❎ What I didn’t Like:
I’ll be honest, the middle stretch sagged a little for me. The road trip structure means there’s a lot of moving from one grim location to the next, and a couple of the encounters along the way felt like detours rather than essential stops on the journey. I found myself wanting Rosson to push the throttle a bit harder in places.

Varley as an antagonist is genuinely creepy, but I wanted more of him on the page. He casts such a long shadow over the whole novel that when he does appear, it’s electric, and I just wished those moments came more often. Some of the secondary characters orbiting him are vividly drawn but vanish too quickly to land their full impact.

There’s also a relentlessness to the bleakness that might be too much for some readers. I generally have a strong stomach for dark fiction, but even I needed a breather at a couple of points. That’s a personal preference thing rather than a flaw, but worth flagging.

📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
If you love horror that takes its emotional stakes as seriously as its scares, this is absolutely your book. Fans of Paul Tremblay, Stephen Graham Jones and Nick Cutter will feel right at home. If you adored Fever House, you already know what you’re in for and you should stop reading this review and go buy it.

Readers who enjoy grimdark Westerns, revenge stories in the vein of True Grit, or any flavour of road trip horror will find a lot to love here. It would also appeal to anyone who likes their vampires feral and frightening rather than romantic and brooding. This is not a sexy vampire book. This is a vampires-are-apex-predators-and-we-are-meat kind of book.

💭 Final Thoughts:
Coffin Moon is a brutal, gorgeous, emotionally wrecking ride. It earns the hype, even if it stumbles a little in the middle stretch. What stays with me isn’t actually the violence, as visceral as it is, but the quiet moments between Minor and Julia, two people held together by grief and the singular need to make someone pay. Rosson understands that the best horror works because we care about who’s being hurt, and he never lets you forget that these are real people bleeding on the page.

It’s not perfect, but it’s the kind of imperfect that comes from a writer swinging for the fences, and I respect the hell out of that. I closed the book feeling drained in the best possible way, the way only a really good horror novel can leave you. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time, and I suspect Keith Rosson is about to become an auto-buy author for a lot more reader.

🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE

Final Rating ★★★★ – Blood, grief, and a road trip you won’t forget”