...it had to be done whole-heartedly or not at all. Not at all! voted Iris the chief clerk, Iris the careful calculator of odds, Iris the prudent investor. All in, all at once, and fuck it, voted the bad girl, and the lover, and the risk-taker, and the suburban slut not willing to be defeated by some whey-faced bitch of a fascist. [loc. 3855]

Another alternate history, in a sense, from Francis Spufford. Set in London during the Blitz, it focusses on Iris Hawkins, an ambitious young woman prevented from success in business by her gender, but determined to make the most of her natural gift for finance. She's also determined to enjoy life: she's sexually active, self-sufficient and eminently pragmatic. She hooks up with Geoff, a young and innocent BBC engineer, on a night out, and finds herself drawn into an occult underworld, an anti-fascist plot, and some unexpected statues.

On the one hand, my favourite read in December and one of my favourites of 2025: on the other, these terrible words which I was not expecting: 'To be continued'. Woe!

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers! Proper review nearer publication, which is due 26 FEB 26.

Read an excerpt here, and listen to The Coode Street Podcast featuring Spufford.

What is it in humans that makes us so eager to believe ill of one another? ... What makes us so hungry for it? Failed idealism, he suspected. We disappoint ourselves and then look around for other failures to convince ourselves: it's not just me. [Prologue]

Audiobook reread, after listening to The Sparrow. It's many years since I last reread: here are my brief notes from 2007 reread. I stand by my original opinion, that this is not nearly as good or as well-structured a novel as The Sparrow. There is gorgeous prose, interesting ideas and a crowd of new characters: but there is also uneven pacing, political manoeuvring, and outright war.  There are, possibly, too many viewpoint characters, and a lack of the precise focus of the first novel. And there are several developments which felt unnecessarily cruel. ('She died last year.')

Narrated by Anna Fields, who manages the many accents and character voices -- across three species and a dozen nationalities -- admirably, with the sole exception of Northern Irish priest Sean Fein. I was especially impressed by her range of masculine voices.

I still hope for more SF from Mary Doria Russell, and I wish more of her books were available as ebooks in the UK.

In politically tense times, differences – rather than similarities – can easily be brought into sharp focus. And such differences can be exploited by any politician who ultimately cares more about their own power, or indeed some abstract idea of nationhood, than about the lives of ordinary people and the ordinary communities that they govern. [loc. 317]

Following Ancestors (which examined several prehistoric burials) and Buried (ditto, but Roman and early medieval), Crypt explores the discovery, social context and archaeological significance of a number of burials that date to between 1000 AD and about 1500 AD. ( Read more... )

• I'm ranking 5 coffees from beyond this world(literally)

• What the moral problem of Large Language Models tells us by Stewart Hotston
• AI’s Innate Bias Against Animals by Tse Yip Fai & Peter Singer
• ‘They didn’t de-extinct anything’: can Colossal’s genetically engineered animals ever be the real thing? by Patrick Greenfield
• I grew up in the world’s coldest city without central heating. Here’s what the world can learn from us by Yangang Xing

• Megson (online)
• Buildings in the Landscape (online)

‘At the end of his description of the first contact, in a locked file, Father Yarbrough ... wrote of you, “I believe that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit. Today I may have looked upon the face of a saint.”’
‘Stop it. Leave me something.’ [p. 298]

Audiobook reread on a lazy Boxing Day -- perhaps inspired by the excellent Jesuit priest in Snake-Eater. I first read this novel in 1997, when it was a submission for the Arthur C Clarke Award (which it won): some thoughts from an informal review back then. I hadn't reread since 2007, and was surprised at how much I remembered -- mostly about the humans, rather than the Runa and the Jana'ata.

The audiobook is splendidly narrated by David Colacci, who manages a huge range of character voices. Listening to the novel gave me a better appreciation of its structure: the pacing, the braided timelines, the suspense. ( Read more... )

• Mum went from being officially terminally ill but mostly coping at the beginning of the year, to the drugs not working and being in a lot of pain in January-February, to actively dying. March-April was all the immediate aftermath of her death.
• I had a few days with jack in Skegness, which I remember basically nothing about because it was in the middle of the final weeks of Mum's life. I think we stayed in a cute tiny house and did a bit of walking in the countryside. I have more memories of our trip to Norfolk in May.
• I spent a very intense and overwhelming week in Germany at an Abrahamic faith retreat.
• doseybat and verazea got married on a lightship on the Thames, and my partners had a Jewish blessing of their 20-year-old marriage, both on the same weekend.
• I did a completely absurd amount of travelling for the High Holy Days, first day Rosh HaShanah in Southampton, second day in the Isle of Wight accompanied by the intrepid cjwatson, Shabbat Shuva in Stoke, Yom Kippur in Cornwall where I had to respond to the first fatal antisemitic attack in this country in my lifetime, Succot back home in Cambridge, a very flying visit to Sweden for the Shabbat during Succot with ghoti_mhic_uait, and back for Simchat Torah and returning to college.

The pull of an undeciphered ancient script comes not only from the fact that its discoverer cannot read it, but also from the knowledge that once, long ago, someone could. [p. 38]

Margalit Fox offers the 'first complete account' of the decipherment of Linear B, the earliest Greek script, which was first identified on tablets excavated by Arthur Evans at Knossos. Fox worked with the newly-opened archive of classicist Alice Kober's papers to uncover her role in decoding an unknown language, written in an unknown script, with unknown meaning. 

‘I put my hands in the mud and it said to come here. Mud, speaking to me in my head. They had a word for that when I was young: touched, they would have said. But here I am, and I’ll be touched if that is what’s next, because I felt certain it was Tom’s voice. Can you tell me—was it Tom’s voice? I suppose it couldn’t have been.’ [loc. 2155]

By the author of Three Eight One, this novel is set in the aftermath of interplanetary war. Two veterans of the war, Isley and Jem, have returned to the Western Protectorate (Devon and Cornwall: 'a small area of a small country that decided to secede from modern life, from space flight, from the Coalition and the conquering spirit of the new age') to run the Skyward Inn, née the Lamb and Flag. Jem is human, and comes from the nearby town, where her brother Dom (the Mayor) looks after her estranged son Fosse. Isley is a Qitan, from the side that lost: he's in charge of preparing the Qitan drink, 'brew', that the pub serves. It may be addictive, and it is certainly popular.

This is fourth in chronological order, though fifteenth in publication order. It dips back to Penric's earlier days when, as assistant to Princess Archdivine Llewen, he's involved (along with his resident demon, Desdemona,  in a conclave in Occo, to decide which border towns belong to which duchy after a war in which the borders became so flexible there are arguments on both sides. A murder leads Penric to investigate what the murdered woman had been trying to tell Llewen the evening before she died. This leads to twisty revelations involving long-time financial hanky-panky and a final revelation and satisfying conclusion.

‘That’s no guitar, ignorant and misguided girl,’ said Sylvester. ‘That’s a lute. Strange tuning; it must be one of these authentic renderings.’
‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Adele.
‘Of course, the house is haunted,’ said Lily in matter-of-fact tones ...[loc. 578]

Comfort reread, which also fulfils my "reread beginning with 'U'" challenge. This is a very Christmassy romantic comedy, set in haunted Haphazard House, in Pewsey's imaginary northern county of Eyotshire. ( Read more... )