Monthly Archive

As always: the best books I read last year, not those that were released last year.

Depending on your device, this post may look hideously mangled, text running directly next to or even over the images – my apologies, but this is beyond my control and is occurring because WordPress is a dying platform that is no longer fit for purpose, and is more interested in pushing “AI” “assistance” than providing basic HTML editing functionality. If I blogged more than a handful of times a year I’d shift elsewhere, but given the broader enshittification of the internet it seems likely everywhere else is just as bad, so never mind! Read a book instead. Here are six good ones.

6. Arc Light

“If you mean the moral justification for it, I would point to the eight million Americans who have died or are dying from the grossly negligent safeguards you maintained over weapons aimed at my country. If you want the statement of a policy goal, I will say to disarm you of the nuclear arsenal of which you have proven untrustworthy custodians. But if you want a geopolitical analysis, Pavel, if you want an answer that the historians many years from now will write, it is because our two countries were bound to each other with a strange attraction, fascination mixed with mistrust. We were bound so closely for so long, war was never far away, and when it happened, we were strong, and you were weak. We win, you lose – that’s the way of it.”

In some ways extremely dumb and in some ways very well-written, this meticulously researched novel by Eric. L. Harry (whom you can tell without checking must have been a long-time national security wonk in Washington) is a classic early ‘90s Clancy-esque thriller about a nuclear war breaking out between the United States and a freshly post-Soviet Russia. It’s a fascinating time capsule of the 1990s, the film Crimson Tide being another great example, a time when it alarmingly seemed like forty decades of strategic doctrine around mutually-assured destruction between rational state actors might be about to fall apart in the face of Russia collapsing into a bunch of balkanised warlords. Good to know that all those nuclear warheads are still sitting there and Russia turned out to be a perfectly sane and reasonable actor on the world stage, then!

5. The Magus

I did not think about the future. In spite of what the doctor at the clinic had said I felt certain that the cure would fail. The pattern of destiny seemed clear: down and down, and down.
But then the mysteries began.

Ostensibly this is a novel about an intelligent but lower-class Ripley-esque twenty-something being lured to an idyllic Greek island to teach English to the local schoolchildren, while the real purpose of his time in the Aegean is the mysterious villa further down the coast, and the enigmatic old man who resides there. The Magus is the very definition of a psychological thriller, with the protagonist witnessing events which seem certain to have only a supernatural explanation – or perhaps it’s all a charade – or perhaps both these things are true, the first servicing the second, and there’s a deeper scheme at play? The novel definitively answers all these questions, possibly to its detriment; but in many ways it’s one of those novels that’s more about the vibes. John Fowles is a tremendously descriptive writer who perfectly captures the sense of an ancient, unspoiled island in the dry Greek summer: a land which to English eyes seems like a place out of time and space, an island where, perhaps, the impossible really is made possible.

4. Be Mine

“Where are you, Frank? I’m coming. I have something you’re going to like. Something very different and new.”

This is a bleak novel. It’s a difficult novel. Richard Ford introduced us to Frank Bascombe in 1986 as a thirty-something ex-husband and father grieving the premature death of his son, but as a man who could possibly still put the pieces of his life back together, which – more or less – he did. 2023’s Be Mine is a novel that reminds us that the security of our lives can still be pulled out from underneath us at any time: aged seventy-six, Frank’s second wife has left him, his relationship with his daughter on the other side of the country is frosty, his first wife and the mother of his children has died, and his surviving son has been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Be Mine, which I would fairly guess is going to be the last of the Bascombe books, is necessarily a novel about death, but it’s also – as always – a novel about life. Frank tackles his circumstances with his expected sense of introspection, folk wisdom, stoicism and aplomb. He is Frank Bascombe: suburban man, real estate agent, failed writer, decent neighbour, unfaithful husband, good father, observer of the human condition. He is an American. He is a human. He is a fictional character I’m glad to have known.

3. Rebecca

“There was never an accident.”

Sometimes you read a novel from a bygone era and the voice is uncannily modern. Rebecca is one of those novels, a story told from the perspective of a young woman enchanted by an older widower; a murder mystery in one sense, a psychological thriller in another, and a very English story about a grand old country house and the secrets it keeps. Daphne Du Maurier’s prose is so surprisingly contemporary that it feels like Rebecca could’ve been on a 21st century Booker shortlist, when in fact it was published in 1938. A deeply engaging novel that draws you in and carries you along all the way to its torrid end.

2. Young Lions

Across the Channel, Noah knew, no man could raise his voice thus, and across the Channel were the men who were finally going to go down in defeat. The world was not going to fall into their hands, but into the hands of the people who sat nodding, a little sleepily, perhaps, a little dully, before their ancient preacher. So long, Noah thought, as such voices could be raised in the world, stern, illogical and loving, so long might his own child live in confidence and hope…

World War II interests me more than it previously did, part of which is because I’m getting older and about to enter my Dad Era, I suppose, but also because as you get older and the world changes around you, you come to realise that history is still being written, and that if it the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice it is often only because it was bent that way by force. We unfortunately once again find ourselves living in interesting times, and freedom and justice and liberal democracy may not, as it turns out, have won a final victory. So as an older man you come back to look on an event which a million films and books and TV series and cartoons have rendered as more of a vibe or an aesthetic, and it feels almost absurd to think: this was a real thing which actually happened. I don’t just mean the brutal individual experiences of tens of millions of men, women and children, but the gargantuan state-level struggle for the future of humanity. Fascism versus freedom, liberty versus oppression, genocidal totalitarianism versus anything but that.

I first encountered Irwin Shaw reading his excellent short story Act of Faith in a New Yorker collection, a story in which a Jewish-American soldier in Europe uneasily considers the anti-Semitism of his own country. Young Lions follows three characters – a young Jewish GI, an older Anglo-Saxon GI, and a young Wehrmacht soldier – across the war, and while the Jewish character’s outsider status is certainly a factor, the novel is much more broadly about every aspect of life for these young men called to war. It reminded me strongly of The Caine Mutiny: an excellent World War II novel written by somebody who had been there, and seen it, and was acutely aware that even a titanic struggle for justice involves at its core human beings, and all the seemingly petty and ordinary aspects of their lives which they bring along with them.

1. My Brother Jack



“My brother Davy’s not the sort of bloke who ever let anyone down, you know.”

I thought this would be an obligatory eat-your-vegetables Australian classic, in all likelihood over-egged and over-emphasised by the class of boomers and Gen X-ers that still hold a vice-like grip on Australian cultural discourse. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and my expectation is ironic in retrospect, given that My Brother Jack is in large part about Australian cultural cringe and the strange and unattractive effect it has on the out-of-sorts young nerds who fall victim to it and imagine greener intellectual grass abroad. In addition to being a truly excellent novel about sense of self, family ties, national identity and much more, My Brother Jack is a brilliantly realised period piece of Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s: a city at turns glamourous and seedy, a city of dockside slums and Art Deco newspaper offices, a city of bohemian artists and unimaginative salesmen, a city the protagonist longs to escape but finds himself drawn back to. The final sentence, quoted above, is for my money the most heartbreaking in Australian literature. A remarkable literary accomplishment and one of the finest Australian novels ever written.