august 2026 books…

A House In Flanders (Michael Jenkins): I first read this book 32 years ago(!)… where did the time go/how did that happen? It’s set in the early 1950s (but was not published until 1992): a 14-year-old English youth is dispatched to France to live for a long summer with the ‘French side’ of his family. It contains the following lovely note from the author (who, incidentally, went on to study at Oxford, become a British diplomat, receive a knighthood and was made a KCMG in 1989): “This book is based on a real period in my boyhood, but the telling of it owes much to my imagination and any resemblance between the characters and persons now alive is both accidental and coincidental”! I’d long forgotten much of the book, but am so pleased to have re-discovered it. I really enjoyed reading about Jenkins’ coming-of-age experiences in Flanders and thought his elegant descriptions and portraits of the people he came across were really rather wonderful. A very pleasurable read.
Scratch City (Philip Gross): I’d not previously read any of Gross’s poetry, but was really impressed with this collection. As the title implies, these poems relate to city life (as it happens, he lives in Bristol!)… the everyday things that you see, but don’t notice perhaps? Gross’s words are frequently funny, challenging, haunting and unsettling… and I was duly impressed. I will definitely be seeking out more of his poetry.
The Ferryman And His Wife (Frode Grytten): I came across this book purely by chance, read it and really enjoyed it… and now my bookgroup has chosen it for its monthly book (theme: women in translation). No pressure then! It’s a tender, poetic, and meditative Norwegian novella. The ageing ferry driver Nils Vik wakes up knowing it is his final day alive and takes his boat out onto the fjord one last time. As he sails, deceased passengers - including his talking dog (I absolutely LOVED their conversations) and figures from his logbook - board the vessel to prompt reflections on his life… including Nils quietly waiting for his late wife, Marta, to join him on the boat. I thought it was quite, quite beautiful… a lovely treasure of a book.
Night (David Harsent): Yet another book of Harsent poetry… which, again, I read out loud to myself in my early mornings. There’s something about the way Harsent uses words that really works for me. The first part of the book is a sequence about a garden “in which the sureties of daylight become uncertain: dark, unsettling narratives about what wakes in us when we escape our day-lit selves to visit a place where the dream-like and the nightmarish are never far apart”. Powerful and thought-provoking.
The Rossettis (ed Carol Jacobi+James Finch): I bought this book (which accompanied the 2023 exhibition at Tate Britain) at the £5 Bookshop. I knew a fair amount about the art and writings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-82), but far less about the work produced by Christina (1830-94) and Elizabeth, born Siddal (1829-62). The book explores the ‘ground-breaking careers’ of these three influential individuals in a series of new essays and illustrations surveying their work. A fascinating book of a fascinating time.