Reading October to December 2025
I am increasingly hungry for story. Whether it comes in poetry, not alway narrative poetry, but the lyrical and oblique too, or memoir or art process or fiction, this delving into how we work, how the more-than-human world works, how we make meaning, is endlessly fascinating. And we never come to the end of it. I know many of you reading this also love to read and I work with grroups who are endlessly curious and literate, which only makes it all the more sad that fewer and fewer people read at all or much. A recent YouGov survey in the UK, that I discovered Antonellanotes that 40% of the population had not read a book in the last year and another 22% had read 5 or less books. Only 17% read more than 20 books a year.
This isn’t judgement. There are so many reasons for it in an often overwhelming world, but it concentrates the mind and heart. How do we spread the love of story, something that has been foundational to our species and fundamental to how we encounter difference and build empathy and compassion?
I don’t have answers, though I’m interested in what you think and interested in what you are reading and how you make time for story (in verse or prose) in our challenging world. And I hope you find something here to enrich a new year.
Poetry
Victoria Chang, With my back to the world
Formally and linguistically inventive, the poetry in With My Back to the World, employs prose poems, lineated and visual poems in conversation with the sketches and pencil drawings of the artist Agnes Martin and with the artist herself.
It’s poetry that uses the artwork as a springboard for deep questions about loss of depression. Written with both raw honesty and grace, there are no answers but the role of art, written and visual, becomes something more than solace, something existenial and vital, in Chang’s poetry. Throughout the collection there is an insistence on not glossing over what it is to live with depression. This refusal to pretend to be ‘okay’ is both vulnerable and confident, as in ‘Play, 1966’:
Once I write the word depression, it is no
longer my feeling. It is now on view for others to walk
toward, lean in, and peer at
a poem that goes on to consider what we mean by ‘the self’ and how this relates to depression.
And in ‘Falling Blue, 1963’, she writes:
Someone wrote that Agnes made small simple repetitive
gestures that led to something larger. This resembles a life,
each day a mark on a canvas. Or the way a prisoner might
carve each day into a wall.
This is profound, careful, intelligent poetry.
clare e potter, healing the pack
When Cinnamon was a very young press, we published a collection called spilling histories — an extraordinary debut — tender, sharp, bodiful and full of phrases and poems that sang off the page.
What a delight to discover this heart-rendingly beautiful new collection. Grounded in place and family relationships, the collection explores how we are mothered and mother, how we can become lost to ourselves and what enables us to find ourselves again.
The language is supple and strong, the images startling and fresh. There is myth at work here, but it is anchored in the stuff of everyday, embodied in a working class community with its own registers and legacy. There is darkness here, but there is also the power of bodies and birds and transformation. The poems are strong on the page, even stronger read aloud. There is a sense of spell and chant here that is mature and well-travelled, particularly in the ‘Bird Prayer’ poems that wind through the collection, as in this final stanza of ‘Bird Prayer II: Golden Eagle’:
Beyond the boulders, sliding naked into my own
hot waters, on my back, a surrender
to the tapioca of bullfrog spawn, fingers
let go in a mass of beating hearts,
a thousand budding eyes until holy cries fill
the canyon and the golden eagle
riding the thermal I set to rising —
my joy in echoes, blessing.
A moving, powerful collection.
Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise
Mosab Abu Toha’s second collection is an extraordinary experience — and act of witness, an elegy for loss and immersive testimony to what it is to live under occupation and displacement. There’s a rich history here that bleeds into resistance that will not be silenced. There’s a sorrow here that is unspeakable, yet has to be spoken.
Raw, complex and tender the poetry is rooted in the particular place of Palestine and the devastation there, but speaks universally.
The everydayness of what is lost, the small things that texture life with safety erased, are particularly poignant, as in ‘Gaza Notebook (2021-2023)’:
Frying pans miss the smell of olive oil
Clotheslines everywhere pine for soapscent
The flowerpot the window the key
Stones of houses after explosion get amnesia
While the opening poem of the book sets the scene:
Tanks roll through the dust,
Through eggplant fields.
Our kids hide in the basement,
Backs against concrete pillars,
Heads between knees,
Parents silents.
Loaves
Of stale bread.
At the time,
I was seven:
Decades younger than war,
A few years older than the bombs.
And through all the grief, an indomitable and expansive spirit persists.
Hoa Nguyen, A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
A project a decade in the making, Hoa Nguyen’s fifth collection is a memorial to her mother, Anh Diệp / Linda Diệp Lijewski, part of the all-female motor-cylcle stunt troupe, whose rides on ‘walls of death’ or in formations that look impossible cut across ideas of what Asian should be.
Focussing on her mother before she was an American immigrant, the poetry is as visually and formally inventive as the stunts and life reflected. Intimate and intense, the poetry is not meant to be a whole life, but a sliver, and nor is it a paean, as she says in ‘Hagiography’:
A saint she ain’t.
But there is a sense of mythopoetics here. There are lines that read like chant, oneiric images, fragments and photographs. And there is the impossibility yet centrality of language, made all the more complex by writing in the language of the coloniser whilst Vietnamese is lost. As we find in ‘Failed Tower Ca Dao’:
myth and history twist
exile into a tower structure
also called “mouth”
that feeling of headlong
the site of mother
my longing in language
There is the story of a mother who is known, who had to be her own teacher in Vietnam, where women were not educated and then had to advocate for herself in America, where Asian women were invisible. And there is the story of a mother who was unknown, the place she came from, her native tongue, aspects of her life, including the devastation of war, much of it fought with chemical weapons…
This is a complex, rich and tender collection.
John Burnside, The Empire of Forgetting
John Burnside’s final collection is a slender, beautiful volume, put together after his death and with only 19 poems. Yet it reads as a piece, each poem facing his own mortality; deeply interior, yet always with a sense of relationship and connection — to the natural world, to others, to beauty.
How mortality is faced is not monolithic. In many of the poems there’s a sideways glance, a deep subtlety that is part of his ability to speak to everyone. In others there is a more face-on approach, though always empathic, as in ‘As If from the End Times’,
Last day of birdsong; salt rain in the trees;
the echo of someone going about
their business, making good or making hay
– you never know for sure, although you know
that something here is coming to an end.
The theme of ‘last’ things runs through the poems, as does the theme of memory and forgetting. In his remembering, what he makes holy is his relationship to his mother, and his profound connection with nature. He longs for ‘evening dusk’, for ‘quince, or damson, strafed into the grass’, for ‘foxgloves, purple / loosestrife, sprawls / of clematis’ and the sound of ‘small rain in the leaves’. The beauty is so precise, so emotionally-freighted, so drenched in love, that the impending death becomes unbearable. But Burnside doesn’t curse the darkness or pretend it’s not there, but instead lights a final light. As he writes in final line of ‘The Memory Wheel’,
those mornings
when we shivered from our beds
and lit a fire
to magnify the dark.
A heart-breaking and exquisite collection that I keep returning to.
Yordan Efftimov, (Jonathan Dunne, trans,), The Heart is Not a Creator
Layered, innovative and moving between the personal and the political, this is a complex and highly crafted collection. It is not the easiest of reads — the narratives break, the voice reflects on itself and its own limitations, the images are strange and language shifts. But these devices mirror a world that is absurd, a world in which borders and history cut across bodies. A world in which nothing is as it seems.
If it’s cerebral and challenging, it’s also ambitious and attentive to the fragmentation of modern life.
Simon Armitage, New Cemetery
New Cemetery is the story of a place — a nature reserve turned graveyard and how the poet makes peace with the change and with the dead that inhabit the place in the year he loses his father. Each poem is the name of a moth and although he says there are no intrinsic links between the titles and the poems, the moths lend a sense of the liminal an shadowy to the pieces. Moths are also an indicator species, warnings of species loss and the unease of nature.
The poems themselves move across moods. Some are reflections on the poet writing them and the places where he writes, often wry and self-deprecating. Some are macabre, containing descriptions of embalming. Some are wry and witty. Others are poignant. Always, the language is muscular and surprising:
Time – what else –
propped in a corner
like a cricket bat
Each poem is composed in composed of short-lined tercets and there is something vulnerable and impermanent in this choice, reflecting an unstable climate. A deeply engaged collection that brings to life a tiny piece of earth to illustrate the fragility of the world.
Joy Harjo, She had some horses
Powerful, incantatory and rooted in themes of womanhood, transformation and land, this is an evocative and intense collection. Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation and was US Poet Laureate, 2019. I’ve read lots of her work, but was late coming to this early collection, first published in 1983, which was a delight to read.
Heritage, myth and the quotidien wind through these pieces that carry emotion as identiy and resilience are explored. Her imagery is drawn from land and tradition, but grounded in daily lives and she goes to some dark places, including a poem about a woman contemplating suicide. (The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window). The poems are vivid and lyrical and have the flavour of oral tradition, making them more resonant when read aloud.
From ‘I Give You Back’
I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you
as myself. I release you with all the
pain I would know at the death of
my children.
You are not my blood anymore.
[…]
I release you.
I release you.
I release you.
I release you.
[…]
I take myself back, fear.
You are not my shadow any longer.
[…]
But come here, fear.
I am alive and you are so afraid
of dying.
Non Fiction
Rose-Lynn Fisher, The Topography of Tears
This is a strange, unique book, mostly images and beautiful. Each image is from a slide of tears seen as though from great distance like a landscape. Each slide has tears that flowed from different causes. Rose-Lynn Fisher writes,
One day I wondered if my tears of grief would look any different from my tears of happiness – and I set out to explore them up close, using tools of science to make art and to ponder personal and aesthetic questions.
The result is mesmerising. The emotional landscapes come from grief and fury, chopping onions, laughing and more.
Tears are the medium of our most primal language in moments as unrelenting as death, as basic as hunger, and as complex as a rite of passage. They are the evidence of our inner life overflowing its boundaries, spilling over into consciousness. Wordless and spontaneous, they release us to the possibility of realignment, reunion, catharsis: shedding tears, shedding old skin. It’s as though each one of our tears carries a microcosm of the collective human experience, like one drop of an ocean.
A fascinating project, beautifully realised.
Suzy Bennett, Artisans of Dartmoor
I picked this book up in an artisan shop in Ashburton on our way from the ferry to Avebury for our ninth anniversary. It’s full of gorgeous pictures and short stories about the craft of the makers featured.
The sixteen craftspeople featured are not simply producing beautiful objects but keeping traditions alive. Three of them work in areas that are on the Heritage Crafts’ critically endangered red list. One has revived an area with his teaching and passing on skills.
Apart from being sumptuous and yes, probably a bit escapist, there’s a serious point to the book. How do we preserve and honour dying skills in the face of mass production and throw-away consumerism? How do we make that accessible and part of a vibrant society? Why does it matter that objects are made with hands and heart in a society that lauds A1?
A beautiful way to provoke some important questions.
Do Ho Suh, Works on Paper
Adam and I saw the Do Huh Suh exhibition at the Tate Modern in May and went back again. The Korean artist is well-known for Suh is well known for large-scale installations — a series of fabric houses of different styles joined together and made from fine gauze in bright colours, rubbings of whole rooms that he inhabited in New York or of a whole traditional Korean house, every part of the skin of the structure made from rubbings. Home and memory recur in his work and the installations carry these themes powerfully.
But the book (which is huge) is a record of his experiments in collaboration with a Singapore-based creative collective and gallery (STPI). Here he has made intricate and exquisite thread drawings, often of how people ‘carry’ former homes with them as though pulling them on threads. He has experimented with his rubbings, which he seems as preservations of memory and has played with cyanotypes, using them to capture spontaneous images.
Running through all of his work are questions of how the personal and universal cohere in art and in people, how intimacy and politics work on us as human beings and how we portray this in art.
Featuring in-depth essays from his collaborators, as well as the products of their co-operation and experiments, this is a book to return to again and again.
Olivia Laing, To the River
Following a break-up, Olivia Laing sets our to walk along the Ouse, on her way reflecting on her own relationship to bodies of water, on her life and to the stories of the river.
I am haunted by waters. It may be that I’m too dry in myself, too English, or it may be simply that I’m susceptible to beauty, but I do not feel truly at ease on this earth unless there’s a river nearby…
Discursive, haunting and lyrical, we walk along the stretch of water where Virginia Woolf drowned herself and take tributories of story in a style reminiscent of W.G. Sebald. It’s a gentle, enchanting read and was her non-fiction debut — a wonderful start.
Augustine, Confessions, trans Sarah Rudden
Where do I begin? It’s been a long time since I read serious theology, though it lodges in the blood. Confessions tells a life story. It’s told though theology, philosophy and the details of a society in the last half of the fourth century and beginning of the fifth. It is told through examing an interior life in order to focus on relationship. A story told through contemplative questioning, prose poetry and prayer. Written by someone who’d been a professional rhetoratician and became one of the most influential Christian theologians of all time. And it’s all the more fresh and alive for Sarah Rudden’s new translation, which has ruffled feathers, but is packed with scholarly rigour and a determination to do justice to Augustine’s literary genius.
My main justification for this new translation, after several learned and serviceable ones have become established, is the previously hidden degree to which Augustine makes his life and ideas vivid in the style of his Latin. In Augustine, the manner of presentation is especially compelling, because of his stress on beauty and joy on the one hand, and intellectual helplessness on the other.
She talks about how Augustine goes to great lengths to denigrate himself and all humans in order to focus on divine grace, but how,
It’s necessary, in this schema, for the author to denigrate his own expressive genius even as he parades it, and he makes this reversal many times with considerable wit and charm.
What unfolds in this translation more than any other (depsite my love of Henry Chadwick’s translation, having heard his lectures at university) is the enormity of Augustine’s love affair with God . A love placed alongside constant human resistence in the face of redemption, making for a dramatic and turbulent journey. But for all this, Augustine relishes salvation, his language embodied and muscular, his references deep, both Biblical and classical.
This is a great and passionate mind at work. And I’m grateful for the introduction to this new translation via a workshop with Garth Greenwell. Like me, Greenwell is not on the same faith journey as Augustine. But Augustine’s writing has had huge influence not only on theology, but also on literature. It was an ambitious, deeply rewarding workshop to accompany a unique voice. A wonderful way to examine how we grapple with language, values and aesthetics as writers; how we write and embodied conssiousness and how the writing self is always defined in relationship to those they love.
Fiction
Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes
Published in 1926, it was a delight to read this book alongside others from Katherine May’s Substack. When Laura’s father dies, the assumption that she will either marry quickly or become a maiden aunt, is stifling and all too realistic. Living with her brother’s family, safe, dependable and wholly predictable, she is bored by potential suitors, finding here is never,
an opportunity of mentioning anything that she had learnt from Locke on the Understanding or Glanvil on Witches.
Her days are taken up in societal niceties and caring for her brother’s children, but a bouquet of beech sprays captures her imagination and heart and to the total consternation of her family, she follows a trail to a village in the Chilterns, where things change.
I won’t spoil the story for you, but this is a gentle, witty, but profound exploration of female bodies and their power and all the more so for being Sylvia Townsend Warner’s debut novel.
Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter
Andrew Miller is a seasoned fiction writer with an impressive list of awards, but this was the first time I’d read him. Attracted by the cover when we were in the wonderful Heron Books in Bristol while visiting the UK earlier this year (a bleak winter scene on its side), the characters immediately invited me in.
The chapters revolve between characters. Two young couples in a west-country village in the post-war years. Eric is a doctor, working alongside Gabby, a Holocaust survivor, learning how to navigate a country practice and harbouring a secret. Irene, his wife, is pregnant and conventional. From a ‘good’ family with middle-class sensibilities and determined to be a good wife and mother, her days are routine, but enlivened when she meets Rita.
Rita’s background is shadowy and remains so, but the hints of nightclub work, possible abortions, characters Rita cannot imagine, make Irene’s nearest neighbour an unlikely farmer’s wife. But then Bill is an unlikely farmer. He’s abandoned his studies at Oxford and his incredibly rich, but criminal family, particularly his father of unspecified east-European origin whose notoriety Bill wants to escape. But he has big dreams of a new kind of farm and no illusions about Rita who he simply accepts and who is also pregnant.
As the weather closes in and darkens, so does the plot and the slow, but compelling, burn of the first half of the novel gathers pace with the storm and takes unexpected twists. Perhaps there is more to Irene than we first expect. Perhaps the relationship between Bill and his father has more tenderness than he’d realised. And perhaps the angle of the cover reflects the final heart-breaking moments of this complex, emotionally tense story.
Georgi Gospodinov, Death and the Gardener
Beautiful and soul-wrenching, this is book is marketed as a novel, but is clearly memoir. In the year that the Bulgarian writer won the International Booker Prize, his father was dying. Gospodinov writes a death with tenderness and through stories, each one postponing the moment he has to tell of the death, each one adding to the often unspoken love of a father for his family and theirs for him.
The details are exquisite and revealing. His father’s care for a garden that several people might baulk at managing together is a symbol of his determination to remain useful, even as cancer ravages his body. The Dutch blue tulips, the tomatoes and peppers, take on larger meanings. And as his father’s illness finally confines him to a bed in his son’s home, so too do the small daily routines of care.
What is deeply moving as well as innovative about the book, whether it is memoir, novel, eulogy or all three, is how Gospodinov structures his narrative to mirror what he finds almost too much to say. Each diversion to tell us an anecdote about his father, a quiet rebel against the totalitarian regime, or to relate the absurd inadequacies of the health system, mirror the way we all circle away from things we don’t want to say, but know need to be said.
The effect is poignant, not sentimental, illuminating and inclusive as the reader both takes in the story and ponders their own losses.
Georgi Gospodinov, The Time Shelter
If Death and the Gardner crosses the border between memoir and novel, The Time Shelter does the same between dystopian, exploratory, historical fiction and literary fiction. The novel won the International Booker Prize and it’s not hard to see why. When the narrator meets Gaustine, strange, brilliant and perhaps not from the same time, he’s introduced to a daring idea to treat Alzheimer’s by immersing patients in meticulously reproduced ‘worlds’ from former decades they feel familiar with.
Gaustine’s clinic has different floors with different decades, but all raise ethical questions, not least what happens when someone returns to a decade that was marked by trauma.
But despite this, the hunger for previous times is enormous and not only from those whose memories and identities are fragile. Relatives want to live in the clinics too – feeding nostalgia and a longing for what they have storied as ‘simpler times’. As the demand to shelter from time-itself grows, more clinics will never be enough and Europe finds itself restructuring politics and daily life. Each country votes on what decade it will return to in order to right all its problems.
The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory.
Gaustine remarks, becoming an increasingly shadowy figure.
This is a novel of ideas. What happens when a country yearns for its past, wanting ‘greatness’ again (even if it never had it?
Is it possible to live in the past, even with all the trappings of seeming-so?
What is time, anyway and what do we learn of it from great writers, from Thomas Mann to Homer to W.H. Auden, whose poetry provides a thread through the narrative?
As life ‘in the past’ becomes increasingly strange and strained, what will the future hold?
A fabulous, intelligent novel.
Han Kang, Greek Lessons
This is one of several novels I’ve read by Han Kang this year. I’ve loved all of them, particularly We Do Not Part and Greek Lessons, which stands out for its tenderness. Han Kang is known for hard-hitting, transgressive and often deeply unsettling works that deal with political violence and the trauma it leaves. Greek Lessons is the story of two strangers, both struggling and lonely, who find solace in each other in unexpected ways. On the surface it’s very different from the other novels, but in fact Kang is always concerned with relationship and intimacy. What has changed in this novel is perhaps the lens she’s looking through.
Emily Yae Won, divorced and losing custody of her young son, has become mute in response. But she decides to attend a class in Ancient Greek to,
reclaim language of her own volition.
Her teacher is dealing with his own failing sense, losing his sight more and more rapidly.
The first thing I perceive is time. I sense it as a slow, cruel current of enormous mass passing constantly through my body to gradually overcome me.
He has also lost the love of his life, a deaf woman who he knew from childhood in Germany.
But in a classroom in Seoul, the protagonist’s move towards a species of romance, one that is about the looks between them, the closeness of bodies and the salve of love.
Colm Tóibín, A Long Winter
A short novella, beautifully produced and with a story behind the story. Tóibín gives a preface about a barn he bought and made habitable with a friend. It was high in the Pyrenees and each year he would visit an old man across the mountain to ask to buy the strip of land next to it as a garden. Every year the man refused until one year he turned up at Tóibín’s home ready to sell him all the land he owned on that side of the mountain. Tóibín only wanted the strip next to his home, but the old man said no, if he wasn’t serious after all these years… and so he agreed.
A while later a neighbour told him that the pile of rubble at the centre of his new garden had once been the home where the old man’s mother was born. She had moved to another village when she married, but many winters ago his mother had disappeared. The rumour grew that she drank heavily and had set off into the snow for some reason no one knew and so began this story.
It’s told through the eyes of one of the women’s sons, though not first person. It’s a deep winter story, full of pain and misunderstanding and lives that became something never envisages, but as full of tenderness and love and doesn’t end where we might expect.
Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records
I was in love with this book from the beginning. It’s set in a strange, liminal place, known as ‘The Sea’ where the protagonist is living with her sick father. They’ve fled from Foshan and a near-future flood, and have lost track of Lina’s mother and brother. They have little of their old life to hold onto, but grabbed three volumes from a series, The Great Lives of Voyagers, before fleeing. The volumes that contain the stories of Hannah Arendt, Baruch Spinoza and the Tang Dynasty poet, Du Fu, which wind through the novel.
Their neighbours in ‘The Sea’, a complex where time is not what we imagine and certainly not linear, and where architecture shifts and has moods, are Jupiter, Bento and Blucher, none of them who they appear to be.
The prose is quietly beautiful, the research stunning, but carried lightly and integrated with subtlety and the characters are heart-breakingly real, filled with longing. Every detail matters — the ginger cat, the music of Beethoven, the name of a hop — everything is a clue, not in a mystery, but in book that is essentially about connection and love.
And when we learn dark secrets about deeply empathic characters, the effect is all the more powerful, all the more human and messy, complicated and expansive. The novel is a tour de force and I couldn’t put it down.
Facing internment and worse while fleeing France, Hanna Arendt’s husband tells her to,
Pack a book that can withstand a thousand readings.
Madeleine Thien has written such a book.
Gunnar Gunnarsson, Advent
There’s a lot of winter in my reading from October to the end of December, and I read Advent at the beginning of Advent, just as the protagonist, Benedikt, sets out into Iceland’s harsh winter with two companions, Eitill, his lead sheep, and Leó, his dog.
For a number of years, these three had been inseparable when it came to treks and had gradually got to know each other, inside and our, with the in-depth familiarity that is perhaps only obtainable between completely unrelated species of animals, such that no shadow of one’s own self, one’s own blood, own wishes or desires confuses or obscures things.
Their annual trek, being undertaken for the 27th year, is to round up stray sheep that have not been gathered in safely during the autumn and will not otherwise survive. None of these sheep are Benedikt’s, but this is the irresistible service he gives each year. He takes provisions for half a month, expecting to return within a week, but it is not only the brutal weather that threatens his survival.
The three companions, ageing and tiring are pitted not only against the harshest elements, but also against how others’ view their selflessness. Yet there is no judgement here. The good shepherd and his comrades have a singular vision, whatever the cost, and a simple, beautiful story unfolds. As Jón Kalman Stefánsson says in the afterword,
It appears it does not take much in terms of contents to create a masterpiece, a book that is timeless. … a man wanders the wilderness with a dog and a wether in December, searching for sheep, gets caught in a storm…
Beneath this simplicity is a subtlety and range that is breath-taking, condensed into a novella.
What were your stand-out books of 2025?
How do you make time to read? And when?