books 2026
📚 Books 2026, 8: The Spirit of Science Fiction, by Roberto Bolaño, Translated by Natasha Wimmer
On the cover of this there is a quote from The New York Times describing it as ‘A gem-choked puzzle of a book.’ Which is a very fair point. I ended this book and said, ‘I didn’t understand that.’ Which has nothing to do with its being in Spanish, as I was reading a very good translation.
I didn’t really get what it was trying to say, what the point of its existing was. Which sounds horribly dismissive, and I don’t mean it that way. I enjoyed it while I was reading, which didn’t take long, as it’s only 196 pages. But the ending…
Well, let’s start at the beginning. It’s a novel by a Chilean author who is very well thought of, at least posthumously. It’s about two twenty-something would-be poets from Chile, recently arrived in Mexico City. It has three strands. One is a fairly straightforward telling of their life, from the point of view of one of them, Remo. Trying to find writing workshops, learning about the literary magazines of their adopted city, partying.
In another strand, someone is interviewing someone else. The interviewee appears to be Jan, the less active of the two poets. In that first strand, it’s clear he hardly leaves their room. But in this one he has just won a major award. The interviewer may be Remo, but it’s never stated, and there are suggestions it’s someone else.
And in the third strand, Jan writes letters to real-life science fiction authors. Alice Sheldon, Ursula LeGuin, Philip Jose Farmer, and others. They are partly fan letters, partly weird philosophical discussions.
And that’s more or less it. They both get girlfriends, Remo gets a motorcycle. The book ends with a section entitled ‘Mexican Manifesto’, which describes Remo and Laura’s experiences in the bathhouses of the city. And then it just… stops.
Honestly, I feel as if there’s a whole chunk missing at the end. Especially since there are no pages after the last one, either with information or even blank, which is quite unusual.
Another review comment, from the Paris Review, says this book ‘functions as a kind of key to the jewelled box of Bolaño’s fictions’. So maybe I need to read more of his books, and I’ll understand them collectively?
A couple of reviews linked from the Wikipedia entry suggest strongly that this — an early draft, not published in Bolaño’s lifetime — was indeed the wrong place to start.
📚 Books 2026, 7: Raven Black, by Ann Cleeves
I heard Ann Cleeves on the Radio — probably Radio 3’s Private Passions — a couple of years ago. I must have seen her books in shops before that, but hadn’t really paid attention. And I vaguely was aware there was a BBC detective show called Shetland.
Turns out that show is based on this novel and its sequels.
Anyway, she sounded interesting on the radio and I seem to read almost as much crime fiction as SF these days, so when I was exploring a bookshop on our recent trip to Devon, and saw this, I thought I’d give it a try. I devoured it in a couple of days. Really good page-turner, engaging characters, unexpected ending, Just what you want.
📚 Books 2026, 6: The Twenty Days of Turin, by Giorgio De Maria, Translated by Ramon Glazov
I don’t recall where I first heard about this . It was probably Warren Ellis, but I seem to recall there being a second source. Anyway, I lived in Turin, or between Turin and my then-home in Walthamstow, for the best part of a year, 1989–90. My employers had a big contract with an Italian bank, and most of the work was done on site. Which seems amazingly old-fashioned for software development today, when we mostly don’t even visit our employers' premises very often.
All of which has nothing to do with the novel. It was written in the 70s and is set then. The unnamed first-person narrator is researching the titular event, which happened ten years earlier. It’s not entirely clear to what extent he experienced the ‘Twenty Days’ himself, but many people still living in the city did, and they don’t talk about it. It started with mass insomnia. Sleepless people took to the streets, some in their nightclothes. Then the violence started. Mysterious, brutal murders of the insomniacs.
But before all that, there was the Library. It seemed to be a project by well-meaning young people, possibly religious, who set up a kind of pre-computer social network. People were encouraged to share diaries or other writing — original manuscripts only, no published work. For a small fee, anyone could visit the archive thus formed, and read any of the pieces. For slightly higher fee, they could find the name and address of a chosen contributor.
The idea being ostensibly to help lonely people find like-minded folks. With a strange inevitability, that isn’t necessarily how it was used.
The implication is the Library somehow led to the sleeplessness, if not the violence. Perhaps not the violence, as our narrator’s explorations appear to find a more supernatural, if not downright bizarre, explanation for that.
And it all seems to be starting up again. The Library didn’t go away, it just went underground. And the narrator and at least one of his interviewees may be in danger.
It’s an odd one this. Reviews of the recent English-language publication speak of its prescience, comparing the combination of the Library and the insomnia with people up all night doomscrolling on their phones. Which is interesting, but takes no account of the violent attacks, and the supernatural element.
I think this will bear repeated readings.
📚 Books 2026, 5: Red Menace, by Joe Thomas
Red Menace is the sequel to White Riot. As the first book starts with the 1978 anti-Nazi festival in Victoria Park, this one starts at Live Aid. We have similar backstage access, with Suzi Scialfa, photographer and writer, and her partner Keith, sound man to The Style Council.
Thomas does a very clever thing in this book: he makes us be sympathetic to, on the side of, one of the main characters, Parker, who is a spycop, with all that implies. He’s in a relationship with a woman who doesn’t know he’s an undercover police officer. He’s gathering information on left-wing and community protest movements.
He seems to be doing it for good reasons — one of the main crimes he’s trying to father information on is police corruption. This is a time when Stoke Newington Police station was the source of much of the illegal drug traffic in Hackney, a hotbed of police corruption. Parker and his handler are working agains that. At least partly.
In the last one Parker was infiltrating the National Front, which makes me wonder why nobody in the left-wing organisations he’s involved with in this one are aware of that. I suppose you didn’t really do background checks if you were a community organisation on the Broadwater Farm estate, or union organisers in the Wapping dispute. Those being two of the real-world political struggles the novel covers.
It’s told from multiple viewpoints again, most of them characters from the previous novel, and mostly in third person. There are a couple of the younger characters who get first-person sections. And one mysterious gang-boss character whose italicised chapters are in the second person. We’re told ‘you’ are behind various criminal activities around corrupting land deals in the London Docklands redevelopment, corruption involving ‘Right to Buy’, and so on.
I’m not sure why exactly Thomas chooses to do things in this way — particularly the different grammatical persons. Perhaps to help with keeping the different voices distinct; perhaps just as an exercise for himself (or to show off, you might say). It could be confusing, but it never is.
As before, the story is not finished, with a third volume planned. But most things that concern us in this book are wound up, for better or worse, and stories in the real world don’t really have endings, do they?
The striking thing about these books is how he weaves his fictional characters into real-world events that he — and most of his readers, I’d imagine — lived through. Or at least lived through the time in which they happened. And how he has real people interacting with his fictional ones. He gets away with it, I imagine, because he doesn’t have real people say anything they didn’t actually say, and he cites his sources. Political pamphlets, interviews with The Style Council, and so on.
It’s tense at times, and I recommend it.
📚 Books 2026, 4: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O'Hagan
I really enjoyed this. It’s set in London (mostly), in a later year of the pandemic (2022, probably), and across just over a whole year. The characters are people from the upper-middle to upper classes, and some of the lowest classes in society, including criminals and illegally-trafficked people who have to work for them.
Some of the blurbiness on the cover describes it as a ‘state of the nation’ novel. It doesn’t quite seem like that for me (though I don’t know if I could give you an example of one that is), not least because the main characters exist at a fairly rarified level of society. They are things like academics, authors, journalists, MPs and lords. Or else they’re would-be drill rappers in street gangs. There’s nobody who’s just normal; whatever that means.
There are so many characters that O’Hagan provides a list of them, a dramatis personae, which I approve of.
Anyway, it’s very good, and I read it much faster than I expected to, which is usually a good sign.
📚 Books 2026, 3: How to Seal Your Own Fate, by Kristen Perrin
As I said a couple of days ago, the second Castle Knoll Files book isn’t quite as good as the first. It’s a fun enough read, but it feels slight as a work of detective fiction, compared to, say, Christie or Rowling, the main crime writers I’ve read recently.
And there are some incongruities. The writer is American, though she has lived in the UK for years, and it shows. Especially in the parts that are written as being a diary from 1967 (the main narrative is present day). Modern terms are used in ways that they wouldn’t have been back then. No examples come to mind right now, but I might update this if they do.
And there are occasions of dialogue that reads more like exposition. People just don’t talk like that.
Apart from those relatively minor points, I enjoyed it a lot, and will doubtless get the third book, which is due out in April. I wonder both for how long Perrin will be able to keep coming up with titles that match the style; and for how long our intrepid investigator, Annie Adams, will be able to find cold cases in great-aunt’s notes.
📚 Emily Tesh wrote the best SF book of the last couple of years (not just my opinion, it won the Hugo). Now The Incandescent is an incredible fantasy book, a magic-school story for adults.
She’s so good she almost scares me. Yet she just seemed to appear out of nowhere.
📚 Books 2026, 1: The Cold Six Thousand, by James Ellroy
The first book of this year, or the last of last? I started reading James Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand a couple of weeks before Christmas, set it aside for some Christmas books, and then went back to it.
I started reading it once before, years ago, and didn’t get far. And I think that’s because of its very strange style. Ellroy uses a chopped-up style of extremely short sentences, much repetition of names, and almost no use of pronouns. For example:
The witnesses were antsy. The witnesses wore name tags. The witnesses perched on one bench.
Or:
Wayne ducked by. Wayne passed a break room. Wayne heard a TV blare.
And that kind of thing is repeated across 600+ pages. It can be hard work at times. The only relief comes in some chapters that purport to be transcripts of phone conversations recorded by the FBI.
We are in the real world here, in the sixties. Right at the start, JFK is assassinated. The three viewpoint characters are all dodgy members of various law-enforcement agencies (Las Vegas police, FBI, CIA) and are all connected to the conspiracy behind that event (spoiler, it was the mob, but certain others, like J Edgar Hoover, weren’t too bothered and/or were sort of involved).
The story carries on through the sixties up to the other to big political assassinations, of Martin Luther King and RFK. And guess what? Our antiheroes — or some of them, at least — are involved in those too.
It’s a novel of the sixties, then, about conspiracies and secrets. Not unlike my beloved Illuminatus! trilogy. So why don’t I love it, then? Mainly, I think, it’s that stylistic choice. I don’t see the point of it, and I found it quite annoying, until eventually it became almost comical. And I did enjoy the book (otherwise I would have stopped reading, what with life being too short to read a book you’re not enjoying). Just not as much as might be expected from the setting.
There’s also this: I learned when I was around half way through that this is actually the middle volume of a trilogy. I’ve noted before, though perhaps only in footnote, that publishers seem to hate putting numbers on books1, or otherwise letting the reader know important details like that. And it doesn’t matter that much here. It works OK as a standalone novel. But I realise now, part of the strangeness at the start may have been a kind of sense that we were expected to know the characters to some degree. I wrote about something like this fifteen(!) years ago, and the sensation I had this time (I now realise) was similar.
Lastly, it’s a very brutal book. There are many acts of extreme violence, described in casual, if not loving, detail. And the casual racism of the language will probably upset some people even more than the violence.
So I’m glad I’ve finally read it, but I don’t see me searching out the other parts of the trilogy.
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‘The Cold Six Thousand? I haven’t read volumes one to 5999 yet!’ ↩︎