This excerpt from M John Harrison's The End of Everything hooked me and left me wanting more. The novel is a post apocalyptic tale about a man who makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It has been shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

“For years Phillip Tennent lived at the edge of the sea, where artefacts were washed up every day. Scavengers, professional and otherwise, came and went. Turnover was higher than you’d expect given the relaxed lifestyle, the constant good weather, the ease with which some sort of existence could be pursued.

Most of the beachcombers took away the first item they could easily carry and sold it on elsewhere. If you had contacts in the hinterland, there was no doubt about how slickly that could be done. But the hard core like Tennent hung on, out there dawn and dusk, shine or shine, throwing the small ones back, waiting for an item that would give them pause for thought. They were committed. They could be seen from orbit. Their living structures glowed at night a hundred miles up and down the coast. By day you saw that temporary qualities had defined over the decades a permanent aesthetic: bothies and benders made of whitened sticks; mirrors and bits of rag; almost anything the tide left, although to incorporate an artefact would have been considered bad taste as much as bad luck. The beachcombers had their limits. Their superstitions gave the tideline its social structures and distinctive quality on the palate.

Further back from the shore, the hinterland was dark, a little more threatening, with its flattened hashmark of streets and its differing sets of rules. There was a lot of poured cement and half-functioning neon, a lot of territoriality; you had to talk your way through the bars, blockhouses and abandoned car parks to get your item out to market.

Coming up from the intertidal, out of the dusty salt wind with his latest find under one arm, Tennent met a woman on her way down. She looked at the object – which was at that time about the size of a baby, and which he had wrapped in some bleached-out rags – and nodded with a kind of measured approval. They studied the horizon together for a moment, and she asked him what condition the sea was in down there that day.

‘Eventually it’ll turn into speech,’ Tennent said, without knowing why.

They both laughed.

She was carrying a week’s groceries in a bag for life with a broken handle. No one was eating much down there. He thought he’d seen her before, living mostly on her own in a hut a hundred or so metres south of his.

‘I’m off,’ he said. ‘Take anything you want of mine. If you need anything, it’s yours.’

Loose white sand blew into the air and whirled around at the edge of the sea like a fog. They turned to face it with similar body language – expectant, alert, anxiety tempered with what could only be described as longing. For a moment Tennent had a sense that something huge was approaching over the water; something fast, which hadn’t been there – or indeed anywhere – a minute or two before. But it never arrived, and the woman shrugged.

‘You’ll be back,’ she predicted. ‘No, I won’t.’

They laughed again and she walked away towards the tide across the perfect sand, the sound her feet made reminding him suddenly of the sound of feet on snow. She waved without looking back.”

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My Person

This is an excerpt from Canadian writer Téa Mutonji's first novel My Person. Tania and Margot have been friends and roommates for decades. Tania tells Margot this isn’t working for her anymore—they’ve been entangled for too long, she wants to "unknow" her.  I was immediately engaged by this story and look forward to reading more but I admit that, while reading the first paragraphs, I was hoping that there would be a recipe for meatloaf, my favourite food group. 

Margot and I were preparing to host our monthly dinner party when I told her this wasn’t working for me anymore. I had decided to end our friendship earlier that evening while grocery shopping at the Metro in our neighborhood. I’d filled my cart with all the ingredients I would need to make meat loaf, which I made every Sunday when we’d host these parties—our Sunday Loaf parties. It was Margot’s favorite meal, my mother’s recipe, a staple in our home. It was my way of saying: Yes, I want this to end, but look at how much I still care. It took eight minutes to walk through the Metro parking lot and back to the apartment. I wasn’t thinking of anything. Our friendship did not flash before me like some kind of dead-wife montage in a film. I did not experience some kind of come-to-Jesus moment in which the Earth cracked open. There was no sudden realization. It was all just cool.

Outside, it was dark. Women wore workout sets while walking their dogs, goldendoodles in their creamy apricot coats. Really, I wasn’t thinking of anything critically, except dodging dog shit. The air was stiff and shifted my mood; I became melancholic, felt even a little exhilarated with anticipation. We’d been hosting these dinner parties since I moved in, not this past August, but the August the year before. It began with a housewarming. Weeks later, on the first Sunday of the following month, I made the meat loaf again for the exact same group of people, and like that, we’d created a tradition.

Before all this, when I had floated the idea of us living together, our friends expressed concerns about our compatibility. She’s so type A, they said. And you’ve just sold your next book, don’t writers need solitude to write? Still, the Sunday Loaf parties had evolved into a celebration of our love: Margot and I always color-coordinated our dresses—merlot or crimson in the fall, shades of blue in the winter, pastels in the spring. We decorated the apartment according to the season and collaborated on the menu. But the meat loaf remained the centerpiece. We both agreed this was proof that we really were in this for the long run. “This” being our friendship, our community, the fine china we displayed in the wooden cabinet behind the dining table.

I was aiming for a clean separation without any complications. I couldn’t figure out an exact reason for wanting to leave. This was causing me a lot of stress, because Margot was the kind of person who’d need an exact reason. There was a void I couldn’t quite explain and this voice in my head that kept saying: It’s time to go. But I couldn’t say that to Margot because I did not want to be therapized. She’d gently present that I was just “being a poet” then suggest I needed a meaningful vacation, somewhere like Delhi. I’d find myself crazed with a sudden loss of faculties and agree with her, and if I wasn’t careful, I might even end up on a red-eye to a meditation retreat, paid for by Margot. A gift she’d then hold over me for the rest of our lives.

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WHISTLER - Ann Patchett

 

Daphne Fuller, a 53 year old teacher, and her husband Jonathan are visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City when he notices an elderly man following them. Jonathan is not surprised because older men often find Daphne attractive. It turns out that the man is Eddie Triplett who was briefly married to her mother and was a stepfather to Daphne and her sister when they were in elementary school. Something happened back then which led her mother to divorce Eddie and Daphne has not seen him for four decades. Because the two of them had been quite close their reconnection makes both of them very happy and they make arrangements to keep in touch. The book slips back and forth between the present and the incident that changed the direction of their lives. The characters are all ordinary, decent and mostly likeable. I found the adult relationship between Daphne and Eddie intense to the point of being creepy but I needed a palate cleanser after reading Switzy, a novel about assisted suicide, and Whistler filled that need.

Perfect Breakfast

“Perfect Breakfast”  excerpt from “The Fallen Trees Are Also the Forest”

By Alejandra Kamiya (trans. Daniel Hahn)

*Sensitive Content Warning*

You won’t wait for the light to slip through the window. You will look at Takashi sleeping beside you. It’s good he’s resting, you’ll think, because he has a long day of work ahead. You’ll get up from the futon without a sound, and walk light-footed across the tatami to the kitchen, and you’ll dress there so as not to tear Hiro and Takashi’s paper sleep.

A perfect breakfast calls for fresh fish and the freshest of all is around the Tsukiji market. It’s mackerel season.

You’ll take the train to Tsukiji for a perfect mackerel.

There, every single one will look lovely to you. That blue reflection, the tiger stripes on black that is wet, always wet, like a recollection that never dries, a memory of the sea.

You will shut your eyes, and choose. You won’t allow yourself to be carried away entirely by what you see.

You’ll travel back home with the perfect mackerel in a bag, hoping for no delays. That would be a loss of freshness. A crack in the smoothness of your plans.

Back home, you will slice the mackerel in half and salt it, so it retains the spirit of the sea. You’ll leave the rice to soak, having washed your hands with that coconut soap Mariko gave you. How lucky you are. How many Japanese women wash their face and hands in the morning with coconut soap?

You will imagine a beach like the ones in travel-agent advertisements and focus your imagination up at the tips of the palm trees: you’ll see the coconuts, the ones they used for making the soap so that your hands could be soft this morning. You will wish that something of this beach and this coconut whiteness might pass into the rice through your hands as you wash it and leave it to rest.

The resting is important. In all things.

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Caro Claire Burke invites you to see NAZA.

Caro Claire Burke, author of bestselling novel “Yesteryear”, is asking all her followers to see a movie. That movie is NAZA, an award-winning documentary that explores Israel’s brutal military tactics in Gaza.

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Switzy Review

“… the day would come and he’d find that the contents of his brain had been excised with an ice cream scoop instead of these dainty little teaspoons, here and there.”

Emma Cline’s novel is about David Hastings, a long divorced, retired American executive who suffers from dementia and has opted to seek assistance in dying at a Swiss clinic before he becomes too impaired to make an informed decision to end his life. On his corporate flight to Zurich, provided by his former boss, he stops in London  to visit his daughter Rebecca, and her young son with whom he has only a distant relationship. They have a cordial visit and he does not disclose his intention to them. He is accompanied by Cody, his assistant/caregiver, who appears to anticipate his every need. It gradually becomes obvious that David has another visit he wants to make before signing off. Tom was David 's former boarding school roommate. They developed an intimate relationship and David was also drawn into Tom’s family circle. We are made privy gradually to an incident that put an end to Tom and David’s friendship and is driving David’s need to make amends. 

Switzy was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026 but was eliminated from the shortlist.

A Poem by Denis Johnson

 Looking Out the Window Poem

By Denis Johnson

The sounds of traffic   

die over the back lawn   

to occur again in the low   

distance.

The voices, risen, of

the neighborhood cannot   

maintain that pitch   

and fail briefly, start   

up again.

Similarly my breathing rises   

and falls while I look out   

the window of apartment   

number three in this slum,   

hoping for rage, or sorrow.

They don’t come to me   

anymore. How can I lament   

anything? It is all

so proper, so much

as it should be, now

the nearing cumulus   

clouds, ominous,   

shift, they are like the

curtains, billowy,   

veering at the apex

of their intrusion on the room.

If I am alive now,   

it is only

to be in all this

making all possible.   

I am glad to be

finally a part

of such machinery. I was   

after all not so fond

of living, and there comes

into me, when I see   

how little I liked

being a man, a great joy.

Look out our astounding

clear windows before evening.   

It is almost as if

the world were blue

with some lubricant,

it shines so.

Copyright Credit: Denis Johnson, “Looking Out the Window Poem” from The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New. 

Via TMN

Gift For Readers

This enamel pin is available at The Reader’s Catalog

Transcription - Kate Atkinson

Transcription is a 1981 British spy novel by Kate Atkinson that tells the story of Juliet Armstrong. It opens in 1981. Eighty year old Juliet has been struck by a car. Grievously injured, she begins reflecting on the complex life she has lived. In 1949, at the age of 18, Juliet was recruited by MI5 to transcribe secret recordings of meetings between British fascist sympathizers and an undercover agent. She is drawn deeper into espionage and is asked to infiltrate another British nazi group. She becomes part of a sting operation that leads to the arrest of its members.

Ten years later in 1950 Juliet has left her work as an agent behind and works as a producer of children’s radio shows at the BBC where she finds herself confronted with figures from her past and realizes that she herself is being spied on by MI5.

There is a zigzagging chronology from 1981 to 1950 to 1940 and back again. There are so many characters who mask who they are and plotlines that veer off in unexpected directions that I had to keep doubling back to keep them all straight.

I was interested in the author’s note at the end where she talks about the source materials from which she drew her inspiration for the novel. I may return to some of the novels I read years ago about the Cambridge spies.

 

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