Some books read in 2025

‘When I Fell From The Sky’ by Juliane Koepcke

I remember reading a version of Juliane Koepcke’s story as a child and it was one of those stories that stuck with me (though Koepcke observes at several points in this 2011 memoir that many of the accounts written in the 1970s about her experience took a lot of liberties with the truth).

On Christmas Eve 1971, Juliane, then 17, was the sole survivor of a plane crash that killed her mother and left her stranded in a remote part of the Peruvian rainforest, where she spent 11 days before being picked up by forest workers and taken to safety. (Her survival of the crash seems incredible, though evidently some people have contrived to survive plane crashes.) Koepcke notes that the forest canopy probably served to break her fall, and there is a suggestion that because she remained strapped into her seat, part of a bank of three that had originally contained her mother and another passenger, this had a slowing effect similar to a parachute; she also observes that she landed underneath the seat, which may have given her some protection from the elements until she recovered consciousness. Her subsequent survival in the jungle is attributable partly to her familiarity with it but also to her own determination, given that she was injured, presumably suffering from some degree of shock and must have realized that her mother was probably dead. “I think of my mother during each of my nights, in which I barely sleep.” “I have to keep going. Keep going. Here I will perish.” At one point she comes across three corpses, still in their seats but driven head-first into the ground with only the lower portions of their bodies visible; Juliane is only able to tell that the female corpse is not her mother because she knew her mother never painted her toenails.

Her recall of how she managed in the days after the crash, and the strategy she adopted, make for fascinating reading. On regaining consciousness, Juliane was unable to locate any of her fellow passengers and although she could hear search planes overhead, realized that the tree cover was too dense for them to ever see her in the area she was in, so decided to move off. She remembered advice her father gave her: “If you get lost in the jungle and you find flowing water, then stay near it, follow its course. It will bring you to other people.” She locates a tiny rivulet nearby, which becomes a stream, and eventually a river, the Río Shebonya. Finding it difficult to proceed on foot – she had lost a shoe in the crash, and was worried about stepping on a stingray – she resorted to swimming in the river. The water contained caimans – a type of alligator – but she knew that these creatures did not generally attack people. Koepcke acknowledges her debt to her parents in teaching her what creatures to look out for and avoid and which could be ignored. Before reaching the river, she had heard and recognised the calls of hoatzins, which she knew nest exclusively near open stretches of water, which had reassured her that she was on the right track.

After the crash, Juliane spent four weeks recovering in a mission station in Yarinacocha, home of the missionaries of the Wycliffe Bible Translators. Her father, perhaps understandably, appears to have been distracted, going daily to the temporary morgue that had been set up, waiting for his wife’s body, but I did think that his daughter ought to have been better protected and shielded from journalists and visitors: in addition to their hanging around the mission station, she seems to have been relentlessly mobbed by them after returning to Lima. She must have felt like public property, at a time when she needed to get back to as much normality as was possible. On a lighter note, Koepcke relates the vast numbers of letters she received, including, inevitably, some from weirdos, including a bizarre letter urging Juliane to learn Esperanto and to write a book in that language about her experience.

Koepcke is German but was born and brought up in Peru, and lived there her whole life until her father sent her “back” (she’d never lived there) to Germany after the crash to complete her schooling. For the three years prior to the crash, Juliane had been living with her zoologist parents at ‘Panguana’, the biological research station they had established in order to analyse the ecosystem of a small area of the Peruvian rainforest. She relates incredible journeys with her parents from Lima over the Andes and into the rainforest to the research station, the whole thing about a week’s journey. Koepcke’s affection for the rainforest permeates the book: “It is no green hell. It is a part of me.” Koepcke followed in her parents’ footsteps and became a zoologist, doing her doctoral thesis on rainforest bats.

Koepcke frames her memoir from the viewpoint of a present day trip to Peru with her husband to wrestle with the Peruvian authorities to have Panguana declared a nature reserve and in doing so hopefully saving it from encroaching civilization and deforestation. The book’s cover shows a still from Werner Herzog’s 1998 documentary Wings of Hope, which featured Koepcke returning to the crash site in the company of Herzog and the film crew (it's available to watch on YouTube here).

On a side note: the safety record of LANSA, the Peruvian domestic airline that the Koepckes were flying with on the fateful flight, would read as comical if so many deaths hadn’t been involved. At the time of the 1971 crash, LANSA had already lost two planes in crashes, with a total of around 150 fatalities. The airline was notorious in Peru and Juliane recalls a Spanish saying that roughly translated as “LANSA lands on its belly”. Hans-Wilhelm Koepcke had urged his wife not to fly with LANSA but all other flights for that day were booked up. The plane itself was a type that had been taken out of service in the US some years earlier, and of a design that had trouble withstanding turbulence; to top all that off, it had been assembled from spare parts of other aircraft. It was LANSA’s last airworthy plane and the airline’s operating licence was revoked shortly after the 1971 crash. Shame it took that long.

When I Fell From The Sky was published in 2011, and in English in 2012, translated by Ross Benjamin.

‘The Corset’ by Laura Purcell

It’s Victorian times. Dorothea Truelove is 25, wealthy and does charitable work that includes visiting women prisoners at New Oakgate Prison, the Oakgate Charitable Women’s Society having deemed it “beneficial for lady visitors to call upon the inmates and improve them with edifying conversation”. Ruth Butterham is 16 and has just been banged up in said prison for – allegedly – poisoning her mistress with arsenic. The novel alternates between Ruth’s telling of her own story to Dorothea, and Dorothea’s perspective on things.

Ruth’s story is relentlessly grim from start to finish. After her father, a struggling artist, commits suicide, her mother, a seamstress, is left impoverished and is reduced to having Ruth, a talented needlewoman, apprenticed to a dressmaker in order to pay off her debts. Unfortunately, the dressmaker is the vile Mrs Metyard, who has four other girls, all foundlings, already apprenticed to her and living a wretched existence. Mrs M enjoys occasionally dressing up as her late husband and administering brutal thrashings. Early on, Ruth had become convinced that she can cause damage to people with her needle and by the time Dorothea meets her in prison, is convinced that she has caused the deaths of more than one person. It started after she embroidered a silver angel on a blanket for her baby sister and, when her sister died from the “strangling angel” (diphtheria), was convinced that she had caused the baby’s death. While at Metyards, she sews a corset for the bridal trousseau of Rosalind Oldacre, a former schoolmate who had tormented Ruth, and Rosalind subsequently dies – actually from arsenic poisoning from green dye in her clothes, but the death further confirms to Ruth her own terrible powers.

Dorothea’s mother is dead and she has a tense relationship with her father, who wants her well married. Dorothea is an enthusiastic amateur phrenologist and keeps a human skull in a drawer in her desk, hidden from her father, who disapproves of her interest in phrenology. Dorothea seems to be of the view that phrenology has the power to detect evil propensities through head mapping and that the shape of the skull may actually change if certain organs of the mind are developed; she measures Ruth’s head regularly while Ruth is in prison, and is forced to conclude that Ruth is irredeemeable because she has observed no change in the shape of her head, though she also observes that Ruth’s “moral organs” are more developed than she expected, and is confused by this.

Late in the novel, the theme of poisoning spills over into Dorothea’s life, when a concerned family friend informs her that Dorothea’s father poisoned her mother, and that he believes Dorothea to be in danger from the same fate. At Dorothea’s last visit to the condemned Ruth, Ruth embroiders an ‘R’ onto Dorothea’s handkerchief and bids her deliver it to her late mistress’s husband. I have to say I was a bit confused by the ending: has Ruth somehow killed Dorothea’s father? How has the handkerchief ended up back at the Trueloves’ home? Maybe I missed something here.

The Corset was published in 2018 and was Purcell's fourth novel.

‘Trust Me, I'm a Junior Doctor’ by Max Pemberton

“Medical school has been rather like a long holiday, punctuated by the odd sick person.”

Engaging memoir based on Max Pemberton’s Telegraph columns, recounting his first year of working as a doctor in the NHS. It kicks off as he and his medical school peers start their first jobs as junior doctors, aka “house officers”.

By Pemberton's account, new house officers are dropped in at the deep end, immediately expected by nurses to know how to do everything without being shown and kicked around by the more senior doctors. It does sound a complete baptism of fire. The junior doctors feel tyrannized by their pagers; addressing his, Max says: “Bleep, I know you’re going to, and you know I won’t know what to do.” He relates being alone on night shift, sprinting from one ward to another, having to put in endless cannulas.

Pemberton’s first, six month, stint as a junior doctor was on a surgical ward, after which he decided surgery was not for him. Apparently the system is: six months on general surgery, six on general medicine. The eventual completion of his 12-month stint meant registration with the General Medical Council, and becoming “a slightly more senior junior doctor”.

He has a bit of a rant about various things. He has a dig at hospital managers and targets. Good nurses leaving because they are overwhelmed by excessive demands and excessive paperwork. He relates how, during his first year, he had doubts, despite all his training, about whether medicine was for him. Towards the end of the book, he bemoans how medical school did not prepare him for life on the wards: although he knew the details of how paracetamol worked on the body, he had not been taught how to prescribe it. He also relates plenty of amusing incidents, including how the man turning up at A&E with a hairbrush inserted into his rectum provided enough amusement to make six years at medical school seem worth it.

“Max Pemberton” (it’s a pseudonym) is an NHS psychiatrist who also writes a column for the Daily Mail.

Ruth's birthday 2025

3-4 January 2025

We did that thing we’ve done a few times now of having an overnight stay in London and going to a show of Ruth’s choice. This time, she chose the long-running Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap, probably from curiosity at its having been knocking around in the West End for so long, which I’d guess is the reason most people go and see it. We booked an overnight stay at the Hub by Premier Inn Covent Garden, and dinner beforehand at the cellar wine bar The Cork & Bottle – a gem of a place that we’ve now been to two or three times.

With this journey in mind, Ruth had recently renewed our Two Together Railcard. I don't currently take trains as much as I used to, but these are useful to have, enabling Ruth and me to get a third off the price of journeys we take together. Ruth was particularly pleased to change the photo she had in last year’s card. The pair of us did look a bit mugshotty. This year’s pictures are definitely better. Well, I think so.

Last year's railcard

The pictures on last year's railcard reminded me of a photo on a library card I had while a student that Dad said made me look like a member of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Looking back, I had a number of cards from that era, and can't now say for sure which one it was, but it might have been this one. I didn’t really know who the BMG were but I seem to remember taking it as a vague compliment, though I’m not sure whether that was what he intended.

Also: best not to ponder photographs of yourself from c. thirty years ago, as I now realise having looked at that photo.

Our renewed railcard

Felt very high-tech managing to get both my theatre ticket AND our train tickets into my Google Wallet – no old-fashioned bits of paper for me on this trip. Ruth has been doing the electronic train ticket thing for a while but I haven’t really dabbled with it up until now, probably due to mild paranoia at the unlikely-but-possible prospect of my phone’s battery dying. Of course, it’s also possible to lose a paper ticket, which I certainly remember doing on one occasion.

Before dinner we went for a bit of a stroll around the Covent Garden/Bloomsbury area - Ruth had had a notion of popping in to the British Museum but we were put off by the enormous queue. Dinner was lovely, and as previously, we admired this mammoth wine bottle. There's probably a name for a wine bottle of that size, but neither of us knew it. I had crab and prawn linguine; Ruth had a steak. Definitely a special occasion restaurant. The white wine I tried - the Viognier shown on the bill - was delicious.

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

The mammoth wine bottle

St Martin's Theatre

The Mousetrap started out as a radio play called Three Blind Mice, apparently written for Queen Mary’s 80th birthday in 1947. It has been playing on the London stage since 1952, and at its current theatre (St Martin’s) since 1974. Ruth could have got the performance number stamped in her programme, but after the play we were funnelled out directly onto the street, bypassing the foyer, and she decided she couldn’t be arsed to go back in again.

Before curtain up

The above photo was taken while we were waiting for kick off. I am not someone who keeps their phone switched on during theatre performances, although there are people who do this and they should of course be swiftly ejected and booted down the street for doing so.

I enjoyed the play (though not the cramped seating – this is common in old London theatres but does make me assume people were smaller in the olden days). I have only ever read one of Christie’s novels, more through not having got around to it than from any distaste for the idea. Dad has a large collection of Christie novels that belonged to his mother. The one I’ve read was 4:50 from Paddington, which I remember thinking a bit meh. No idea whether it’s considered one of her better ones. 

The Mousetrap is set in a country guesthouse that’s recently been taken over by a young couple; a motley crew of guests arrives, and it goes from there. In addition to the inevitable murders, it has a reasonably gritty theme (child abuse). In terms of whodunnit, there's a tradition that anyone who goes to see the play is supposed to remain schtum about the twist towards the end: after curtain call, a member of the cast steps forward and tells the audience never to reveal the secret of The Mousetrap. I had, as it happened, correctly guessed which one of the characters it was who was not quite who they seemed.

Walking back to the hotel after the play

It was my second time staying in one of Premier Inn's 'Hub' hotels, after a solo stay in the Soho hotel in 2021. The Covent Garden hotel on St Martins Lane is wonderfully placed for any theatre activity, and priced accordingly. The 'Hubs' have tiny rooms, most of which is the bed. There's no room for any tea and coffee-making facilities, but you can get free hot drinks from the hotel bar/restaurant.

We could have got a continental breakfast at the hotel the following morning but decided we fancied something in the cooked line. We ended up at Ristorante Roma on Irving Street, one of a line of restaurants behind the National Gallery. Italian restaurants in London often seem to do breakfast and they always have good coffee, as this one did. They sat us outside, which I was initially sceptical about given that it was early January and quite cold. However, we were seated in a covered area next to an outdoor heater and they gave us a blanket each, and it ended up being nicer than sitting in the dark interior, although a number of lightweights who arrived after us did request to be seated indoors.

Ristorante Roma

Blanket supplied

Celebrations of Ruth’s birthday over the past few years:

2024: London day trip. We went to the Red Eight Gallery in the Royal Exchange building to see a collection of Hannah’s paintings that were temporarily being exhibited there. Then for lunch at Larry’s in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery. Ruth had a bacon roll that was so posh it was barely recognizable as one such. I can’t remember what I had but I think it was some sort of artsy Ploughman’s.

Hannah's paintings

Extremely fancy bacon roll

2023: Oxford day trip to see an exhibition at the Bodleian of photos and other bits and pieces from the Tutankhamun dig. Then later for dinner at the London Street Brasserie in Reading.

2022: Cabaret! At the Playhouse Theatre, fully decked out as the Kit Kat Club. With the ORIGINAL LEADS, Jessie Buckley and Eddie Redmayne. I am not a huge fan of musical theatre so Ruth normally refrains from picking it for a joint theatre trip, but she is a big fan of the 1972 film and felt she couldn’t pass up the chance of seeing this stage version while it still had its original cast. In fairness, it was very well done and I was glad to have seen it. I wasn’t familiar with Buckley but she has a belter of a voice. It was apparently Redmayne’s musical theatre debut. This London Theatre piece notes that they both won Olivier Awards for their performances. We stayed at the Premier Inn London Waterloo, part of which is a former lying-in hospital.

The Playhouse, done up as the Kit Kat Club

2021: from looking back, nothing – we would still have been under the newly-invented ‘Tier 4’ restrictions that had prevented me travelling to Mum and Dad’s for Christmas a few weeks earlier.

2020: The Woman in Black at the Fortune Theatre. Trip already blogged about here. We had dinner beforehand at the Cork & Bottle then too and almost lost our table through failing to spot the entrance to the restaurant (it's got two, and we'd been in via the Bear Street entrance previously).

Previous dinner at The Cork & Bottle

2019: Circus 1903 at the Royal Festival Hall. Stayed at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge. Mentioned here.

2018: in Wales. Windy walk up Blorenge and then afternoon tea at The Angel in Abergavenny. This was one of a couple of hill walks in 2018 that resulted in my decision later that year to take up running.

In 2017: This House, a political play, at the Garrick Theatre. Mentioned in this post. We ate at the Cork & Bottle before that one too.

We've been together a few years longer than that but that'll probably do.

Duolingo postscript

As I've noted before, if you don’t turn off push notifications, Duolingo pings you relentlessly to do your daily practice and bombards you with passive-aggressive messaging.

Am expecting a "You've Let Yourself Down" any day now.

I could, of course, disable the notifications, but I've been observing them for research purposes. I additionally installed the widget, which changes throughout the day according to how long you let things go on without doing your daily session, as per a few days ago:

Monday at 2pm

2:50pm

5pm

5:50pm

7:15pm

7:40pm: happy Duo. I cracked and practised.

A day or so later, I rashly let it go even later into the evening:

9pm

And in fact then forgot to do my practice, with the result that I awoke to this 'frozen wastes' image:

Plenty of people seem to have reported feeling vaguely threatened by the Duolingo owl, e.g. this Mashable piece that begins "The Duolingo owl is ruining my life". There seem to have been some panicked responses to this 2019 tweet, including "Is the Duo owl coming to kill me in my sleep?" and "Please stop I'll do anything I'll even learn Spanish".

Duolingo and other language-learning

Over the past few months I’ve restarted language learning via Duolingo – which, judging by this recent email congratulating me on my 8th Duoversary, I joined eight years ago. I haven’t actually been actively using the app for anything like that length of time: I assume I used it when I first signed up for it in January 2017, and then again briefly during the COVID lockdown, but then had tailed off until a few months ago, spurred back to it by Mum, Hannah and Nia all using it and adding me as a friend, and partly with the idea that it would be good brain activity. I have no idea whether the latter is really true or not, but it is quite fun. It’s easy to use and has a pleasant interface, though I have recently been suckered into paying for ‘Super’ Duolingo to get rid of the annoying ads. Once you’ve done that, though, it then tries to sell you Duolingo Max. IT WILL NEVER END.
 

I’ve tried out a few languages, but German is the one I’ve given most time to so far. A typical lesson includes written sentences to translate (in both directions), German sentences to speak yourself, spoken German sentences to translate into English, usually from a supplied pool of words, and ‘matching’ exercises where you match an English word to its German equivalent.

You can complete quests with your Duolingo ‘friends’, and are moved up and down through various leagues. In addition to languages, I’ve also recently had a go at Music, through curiosity to see what exactly they could offer in this area: it’s essentially some exercises teaching you the position of the notes on a keyboard, and to read music. It’s stuff I already know from learning the piano years ago, but is quite good as far as it goes.

Among the German sentences I’ve been presented with that I don’t foresee myself actually ever needing to use are the following:

I don’t live alone, I have a fish.
My cat runs every day without gym shoes.
I don’t love you, I only love mayonnaise.
Why is a cucumber in the living room?
Can you please buy ninety-nine carrots?
Oscar, are you picking up the turtle?

In reality I've never made serious efforts to become fluent in another language, though post-school I have done a few language classes over the years, all of them some time ago now. At school I missed out on studying German, due to changing schools at the wrong time and it evidently being thought that it would be too much for me to try and catch up with my year group - though I like to think I probably could have done. Perhaps this explains my keenness to have a go at it in adult life. I've also done evening classes in both Spanish and Dutch at various times. French was the only modern language I studied at school. I was fairly good at it, getting an A in my O-level plus my year's O-level French Prize. I did go on to take A-level French but went off it substantially at that stage, mainly because of the literature-heavy course. No idea whether A-level modern language courses are still like this. Probably.

Digressing a bit: for school prizes we had to choose a book (none of that Amazon gift card malarkey in our day), which then got a label stuck inside it before it was presented to us on Speech Day, as per above. The book I chose was William Horwood's Duncton Wood, a fantasy novel involving moles. I still have the book, though it's consigned to the attic. Looking at the back cover, I imagine I would have been swayed at the time by Magnus Magnusson's mention of both The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down, as I read and very much enjoyed both of those books in my teens. I don't think I ever got more than a few chapters in to DW, though Hannah pinched it and read it - in fact we reminisced briefly at Christmas about it and the character names we could remember. According to Wikipedia, Duncton Wood ended up being part of a six-volume series. Horwood must have felt the moles had legs.

Some books I've read (relatively) recently

A few books I’ve finished over the past few months. All these were books we read in Book Group.

'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi

Subtitled ‘What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death’. An end of life memoir by American neurosurgeon Kalanithi, who died of lung cancer in 2015 at the age of 37.

Kalanithi’s parents were immigrants from India, who settled initially in New York City before moving to Arizona. Helped by an academically ambitious mother, he got into Stanford where he completed degrees in English literature and human biology. His decision to apply for medical school came while completing a subsequent masters in English literature. While waiting for the medical school application cycle to go through, he applied for and took a degree in the history and philosophy of science and medicine at Cambridge. After this, he started studies at Yale School of Medicine. The man was clearly a born student though I did find myself wondering quite how many years in total he’d spent in college.

Kalanithi’s cancer developed while he was still in residency – which I loosely understand as meaning you’ve left medical school but are still in training. He was in his final of six years as a neurosurgical resident and anticipating graduating at the end of the year. He was thirty-six at this point and married to Lucy, also a doctor. Kalanithi himself suspects that he has cancer “and not the good kind” before it is officially diagnosed. From the CT scans, he is able to spot himself what it is, and that it has already spread.

The second half of the book is Kalanithi’s reflections post-diagnosis, including on the switch to experiencing medicine from a patient perspective. He notes the passing from subject to object, and the becoming a person to whom things happened. There are some reflections on religion and a turning back towards Christianity, probably understandable from a man facing a premature death. I liked that he doesn’t claim to have had epiphanies through having cancer:

Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany – a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters – and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward.

Towards the end of the book, his reflections on tense are interesting: what tense is he living in now? Should he say “I am a neurosurgeon”, or, knowing that he will never return to duties, “I was a neurosurgeon”? What should he say when friends say that they will see him at some future event? The book ends with some words directed at his baby daughter Cady, who we learn from his wife’s epilogue was eight months old when he dies. Paul’s manuscript, written during the last year of his life, was unfinished, derailed by his rapid decline and death. The epilogue provides context and a concluding chapter to Paul’s story. (The foreword, written by a fellow doctor and author, is turgid – I think if I’d read that first, as I never do, it might just have put me off reading the book.)

This obituary in Stanford Medicine includes a video recording of Kalanithi talking about his diagnosis.

'Hamnet' by Maggie O'Farrell

I read (and enjoyed) this on Mum’s recommendation. It’s a fictionalised account of the childhoods and married life of William Shakespeare (henceforth WS) and his wife, called here Agnes. It’s set in Stratford in the late 16th century and framed (loosely) around the couple’s son, Hamnet, and on his parents' grief following his death.

Hamnet is eleven and has two sisters and lives with his parents on Henley Street, Stratford, next door to his grandparents’ house, where his grandfather John runs a glove-making business. The book opens with Hamnet trying to find medical help for his twin sister Judith, who has been taken ill. Judith has a fever and has developed ‘buboes’ – pale oval swellings under the skin. Hamnet’s mother has a reputation for being able to cure anything with her potions, but struggles to cure this one. In a twist, Judith recovers, but Hamnet falls ill with the plague and dies.

Hamnet’s mother Agnes tends a patch of land at the farm where she grew up. Local legend has it that Agnes’ mother emerged from the forest that bordered the farm, bewitching the farmer, who married her. Local people say that Agnes is a forest sprite and a sorceress. Hamnet’s father met Agnes when he was sent there to tutor the farmer’s sons in Latin. Agnes becomes pregnant, they marry and move in next door to WS' parents in Stratford. In due course, Agnes comes up with the idea of getting her husband to go away to London to find work, with a view to getting him away from his brute of a father; she would then follow him at a later date, with the children. WS’ father John is persuaded that it would be a good idea to expand the glove business to London; in the event, WS does make a great success of working in London, but as a writer leading a touring company of players, rather than in the glove business. WS spends more and more of his time in London, only returning home intermittently. O'Farrell explores Agnes' grief following Hamnet's death, and the shared understanding between the women - Agnes and her mother-in-law Mary have always had a fractious relationship, but both have lost a child, as very many women must have done then. In this fictionalised account, Agnes travels to London to seek her husband, and ends up at the opening performance of his new play, Hamlet.

In an Author’s Note, O’Farrell notes that only a limited amount is known about the Shakespeare family. The names of Shakespeare’s three children are known, and it is known that the boy, Hamnet, died young, but the cause of his death is not known. Having him die from bubonic plague in the novel is a fiction of O’Farrell’s, influenced, she says, by the apparent absence of any mention of the disease in any of Shakespeare’s literary output – her implication being, presumably, that this is odd given the time period in which they were written.

The suggestion in the novel is that WS named his play Hamlet after his deceased son. O’Farrell notes "Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries" and cites this 2004 article The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet in the New York Review of Books.

Hamnet was published in 2020 and was O'Farrell's eighth novel.

'The Guest' by Emma Cline

Ruth’s choice for our November Book Group book. We read Cline’s first novel The Girls in 2018 and I thought that was well written and atmospheric.

The story opens with a young woman, Alex, swimming in the sea off a beach somewhere “out east” from New York City – we don’t know where, exactly, but it’s somewhere where rich people have second homes. She is there with her older boyfriend, Simon, who invited her there for the summer to amuse herself while he’s working and then to go to parties with him in the evenings. Alex is 22, Simon in his fifties.

It quickly becomes clear that Alex has got herself into a bit of a mess back in NYC – she seems to routinely pilfer other people’s painkilling (and possibly other) medication, she has run up bills on various men’s credit cards, restaurants and nightspots have blacklisted her, her flatmates have thrown her out for non-payment of rent (and pilfering their meds). What she does for a living is not entirely clear but she appears to be some kind of escort, though work has tailed off and she’s had to reduce her rates. We never discover anything about her background or why she is in the position of doing this kind of work. She’s being persistently chased, via voicemail and text, by an ex, Dom, from whose apartment she has stolen drugs and cash.

One evening Alex and Simon attend a party at the home of an acquaintance of Simon’s, where Alex gets drunk and makes up to the hostess’ younger husband, whom she teases to throw her into the swimming pool, which he does. Simon takes exception to this sort of behaviour – and to the fact that Alex dented his car the previous day and didn’t tell him – and buys Alex a train ticket back to the city, suggesting that they talk “in a week or so”. Alex manages to convince herself that Simon doesn’t actually want rid of her but just wants a few days’ space, and decides not to return to the city but to find a way to stay in the area for a few days, planning to surprise Simon by returning to his house on the evening of his upcoming Labor Day party. By then, Alex imagines, Simon will have calmed down and be pleased to see her again. Alex proceeds to inveigle herself into various other houses in the area via making up to a series of complete strangers. In the book’s final scene Alex does, indeed, present herself at Simon’s party as she planned, fresh from the scene of a car crash driven by a troubled teenager she seduced.

Discussing this book, Ali mooted the idea that the ending and the final single-word sentence “Now.” might indicate Alex's death from injuries suffered in the car crash, but that would be too unsubtle a device for Cline, who commendably avoids melodrama, both here and in The Girls. It's enough that Alex has now burned all her bridges, even throwing away her mobile phone on her way to Simon’s, and is now faced with the dawning realization that she has hideously miscalculated.

What is this fascination Alex has with people’s swimming pools? I did wonder whether there was some symbolism being used in the form of the various pools, and of water generally. Early in the story Alex gets carried further out to sea than she intends while floating on her back and manages to rescue herself by swimming parallel to the shore until the current becomes less strong and she is able to return to land. Towards the end of the story, when things are unravelling, there is another incident when sea swimming, but this time Alex mis-times a wave and is thrown to the sand underwater, cutting herself. Early in the story the swimming pools Alex encounters are pristine, well cared for; as the story progresses, one pool is “a little gray”; “the dirty pool, the water probably half beer at this point”; the final pool she encounters is unheated and freezing, the water dirty, “biscuit-colored foam floated on the surface, visible grit settled on the pool’s bottom”. This Guardian review of The Guest does indeed have it that water is used as a leitmotif. So there.

The Guest was published in 2023 and was Cline's second novel.