New year, new yarns
Four novels out this month
Happy New Year! I hope you all feel rested. (Parents of toddlers, I see you.) I have some exciting updates for my paying subscribers: starting February, there will be an episode of Book Chat with Bobby dropping the first Saturday of every month, and a brand new segment, a conversation with a fellow book-loving Substacker (more on that next week!) dropping on the third Saturday of every month. This will be in addition to regular programming: a free letter every Tuesday (sometimes Wednesday) aka Books, and a mostly paywalled letter on Friday (sometimes Saturday) aka Bits. 2025, let’s go!
I go through phases — or rhythms — when it comes to reading book proofs (known as ‘galleys’ in the States) that I am lucky enough to receive in my line of work. The demand for newness — to consume it, to provide it — can weigh uncomfortably on me and so I’ll go through periods of ignoring the teetering piles of proofs entirely, blocking my ears to their siren calls from the bedroom radiator (so that I can long-arm one at night, instead of padding downstairs).
And then, like in the last month, when I’ve been out one night in two weeks and not once opened my laptop (divine) I’ll guzzle them down with feral abandon. How lucky am I! I’ll think delightedly, snapping another one shut. When I come across one I don’t like, I toss it to the side and crack the spine of another. I’ve read right up to June, in some cases, but it’s not wildly helpful for me to write about a book you can’t buy for ages, so instead, I’ve got 4 books for you that come out this month.
Homesick by Silvia Saunders (out 30th Jan)
This one surprised me. The blurb reads: An Unexpected Inheritance (tick), An Awful Housemate (tick), The Annoyingly Perfect Couple in the Flat Above (tick) and so on which makes it sound like a perfectly serviceable Paramount+ romcom about a young woman trying to Do Life in London. But while Homesick is that, it’s also sweet and thoughtful and quite sincere, particularly on the topic of depression in young men.
Mara is a 25-year-old librarian who lives with a childhood friend so unpleasant you wonder how they ever came to co-habit (he cooks fish every night, refuses to wash up cutlery, tells her her flowers “fucking stink”) and occasionally sees her sweet university boyfriend, Tom, a stressed teacher who yearns for his family life in Birmingham so much it makes him sick. And therein lies the conceit of the book, this contested idea of home, which Saunders plays with in ways which both stand alone (Tom is depressed and doesn’t like living in London) (Mara has come into an unexpected inheritance from her dead father, allowing her to buy a “marshy” flat in which she still feels rootless) and stitch together (everyone is homesick for a previous era of life, when no-one was depressed, or dead, or living somewhere they didn’t want to.)
I haven’t read many books which explore the south/north divide like this — and even though England is a small country, it’s a very real thing, and Saunders explores this well: the disdain of a barman in Birmingham, for instance, who cannot understand why Mara would choose to live in London over his city. Of course, Tom’s reticence is not about London specifically, or not just about London, rather he feels dislocated and that dislocation leads to severe depression. Mara’s attempts to mitigate his pain and to shoulder the burden — it’s her fault he feels like this, “me and London are inextricably linked now” — are touching and futile.
Saunders’ debut turns the adage, “home is a person” on its head. It can be a person, but it can also very literally be a place. If you care about care, if you care about community, where you plant yourself means something. Homesick grapples with that elegantly and tenderly.
City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim (out 9th Jan)
Korean-American Kim won the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award (a prestigious literary prize in Russia set up by the Tolstoy estate) for her debut, Beasts of a Little Land. That was not set in Russia, but her second — furthering the connection with Tolstoy — is, and Kim’s passion for the Russian arts is evident. City of Night Birds is about the rigorous, intractable world of Russian ballet: the soaring joy, the physical agony, the food deprivation, the machiavellian master teachers (former dancers themselves), the poor pay (unless you are a principal), the futility of friendship or social life (at the two major ballet companies, the Mariinsky and the Bolshoi, you dance 11 months of the year, with only Sundays off), the near impossibility of family life.
In short, it very much tallies with what you see in Black Swan and Joika, which is based on the life of Joy Womack, the first American ballerina to be accepted into the Bolshoi. (Also starring Diane Kruger as the ballet teacher, a role she was aesthetically born for, I thought it was a decent watch, but it appears to have had very little critical attention when it came out last year.)
If you are interested in extreme sports, which ballet very much is, then you will likely find this book fascinating. It reads almost like a non-fiction book about ballet and Moscow. Kim’s attention to detail is forensic and she delights in the cultural traditions: everyone is referred to by their first and second names, they drink tea with raspberry jam in (thought to ward off ailments), and the few hours that the ballerinas don’t spend dancing, they spend sewing up their own pointe shoes (only in Paris are they provided with a pointe seamstress). Here is our principal, Natasha, watching a ballet dancer named Nikulin dance at the Mariinsky for the first time.
“You never recover from the first time you see beauty like that. Talent was common in my world, such that a middling amount of it could even seem vulgar. Everyone I knew, even students who were expelled, were prodigies by any normal standards. But they were the shallow seas visible from the shore, and [Nikulin] was the open ocean, so vast that direction lost its meaning; water as far as the eye could see, creating its own weather, its own laws and logic. Above all, dangerous. I was frightened and tempted, and now live with the consequences of that wreckage in my own body.”
The tone of the book is quite sober, as earnest as our leading lady. If you are looking for dry humour, this book — and Russian ballet — are not it. On stage, the dancers stand for joy. But their lives frequently read as tragedy.
Given the Ukraine war, some have criticised Kim’s decision to celebrate Russian ballet, but I suspect (given that it is not out yet) that those who critique have not yet read the book: Nikulin, who is Ukranian-Russian — a character I imagine to have been inspired by Sergei Polunin — is put on a leave of absence from the Paris Opera Ballet for his public loyalty to Putin. The role of the Russian ballet is complicated: it is heavily funded by the government, in this case making art indivisible from politics. (The reason Russian ballet is the best in the world is because of the political focus on the arts.) But I don’t think that means we shouldn’t read about an aggressor’s culture — fiction can tell us things that a newspaper can’t. Especially when the writer is as thoughtful as Kim.
The Book of George by Kate Greathead (out 30th Jan)
Calling all fans of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P (and that titanically famous mid-century bildungsroman, Catcher in The Rye), I have a treat for you. Kate Greathead’s second novel, The Book of George, tells the story of a young man named George, from the age of 12 to 36, during which time he changes both a lot and not at all. It’s a charming, clever, insightful book about an average man and his average life.
George is a lethargic, cynical, dismissive, sometimes sweet, sometimes depressed young man. He’s moderately smart, moderately droll, but he’s keenly aware he’s not enough of either to excuse his selfishness (to his family, his girlfriend, his jobs, occasionally his friends.) It’s a smart move: Greathead has made her protagonist keenly self-aware, which means he acts like an ass on the regs and is filled with self-loathing while doing so. It makes it a much more interesting book, to read about someone who knows they are capable of so much more, but has decided, somewhat on principle, not to dig any deeper into their own psyche.
We move through George’s life in chapters sub-titled by age — 12-18, 18-21, 22-24, 26 and so on — which tells the story of George’s life at that time (school boy, uni student, waiter, hedge fund intern) so we may understand why he has come to be the man he is. The surrounding cast of characters are well-sketched: George’s pathetic, shopaholic father; his resilient, arch mother; his witty, abrasive sister; and his earnest girlfriend, Jenny. You gnaw at your fist for Jenny. Greathead writes beautifully about her protagonist’s inability to connect with his lover. George’s disgust for people — for himself — is what keeps him static.
“George inwardly cringed at the shitty-sitcom-level banter that came so easily to him, but Jenny laughed. It really was easy to make her laugh… After his dad died, George had briefly joined a bereavement group on his campus. He didn’t get much out of the meetings, except for something that someone had said: “It’s like your whole life you’ve been in this one room, and now you’re not in that room anymore, and you can never go back.” Jenny was very much in the first room of her life, and George increasingly found such people difficult to relate to, naive, and a bit simple. Rather than being uplifting, their cheery innocence was like an abrasive on a wound.”
Again, I think the blurb trivialises the contents (is this the Netflix effect? Bullet-point summaries only?) but The Book of George is a commercial-literary gem for fans of Kiley Reid, Curtis Sittenfeld and Alison Espach (who I’ve just seen has called The Book of George “perceptive, funny and tender”). By which I mean, characters are impeccably sketched and the detail is deliciously precise. It’s also just the right amount of quirky and grief-y, maybe a bar less than Katherine Heiny. It should (I say should, it doesn’t always tally) shift boatloads of copies.
The book jacket makes it clear that George is a trope, not just a man. Inside, readers are encouraged, via a QR code, to share a story about ‘their’ George, with a few examples printed: “I know a George who would rinse his one pair of socks in the sink rather than get any new pairs”; “I know a George who carried a copy of Crime and Punishment in his back pocket at a party”; and “I know a George who cheated on his girlfriend after he read The Unbearable Lightness of Being because ‘nothing mattered after that’”, which made me laugh, because many a young adult has been mind-blasted by Kundera’s depiction of philandering men and accommodating women.
But George is more than just a metaphor for inept, selfish, cosseted young men. The Book of George is an exploration of grief, privilege, romance (more, the fallacy of it), siblinghood, ambition, male friendship, depression in young men (rare and pleasing to read two books on the trot that deal with this) and the effects of SSRIs. It is the life of one man, laid pitiably and wittily bare.
Girl, Ultra-Processed by Amara Sage (out Jan 16th)
I didn’t read young adult fiction as as teen, but as a fully-fledged adult I enjoy it very much. I like finding books for my teenage niece, but I’m also interested to learn more about what teenagers care about and how they communicate with one another and the best YA fiction provides insight in abundance. Amara Sage is a writer in her early thirties, but she writes so fluently about teenage trends, anxieties and yearnings you can tell she has really done her research. It doesn’t feel like she’s ‘writing down’ to her audience, it feels like she takes teenagers seriously and spends time crafting a tone which will connect with them.
I galloped through Sage’s 2023 debut, Influential, about an influencer nepo baby, Almond (born to an OG mommy blogger), struggling with trolling and self-harm, and chased it immediately with her new novel, Girl, Ultra-Processed, which comes out this month. Her first book is good, but her second is considerably better, not least because it has more tangible takeaways for the teenager reader. After all, not many teenagers are hugely successful influencers, but a lot of them will struggle with body image, racism, toxic masculinity and the brutality of teenage female friendship.
What I like most about Sage’s books is how modern they feel. By that, I mean, she has flawlessly navigated the modern conundrum of how to stuff your books with contemporary issues in a way that is fluent and subtle, rather than worthy or laboured. Take her approach to friendship, which always includes male friends. The antidote to falling for rotten men, the reader realises, is to have kind and decent male friends and brothers, who show you what young men are capable of. There’s also a fluency when it comes to race. Most of the characters are not white, but it isn’t something you learn until someone is talking about a parent, say, or doing their hair, rather than from a list of descriptors when we meet each character. In fact, looks aren’t really described. We aren’t told if someone is beautiful, or ugly. Sage describes people by how they feel about, and in, their bodies.
Sage’s approach to self-image in Girl, Ultra Processed feels particularly prescient. Saffron grew up with a mum who runs a weight loss circle, fuelled by crappy diet drinks, and she maintains an Instagram feed of skinny celebrities. That is until she moves in with her uni flatmates, Veronica (who adjusts Saffron’s algorithm so that she’s following body positive bloggers, shares her wardrobe of clothes with her and drags her to dance classes not to lose weight, but to feel good) and Toby, whose love of cooking helps Saffron understand that a healthy approach to eating involves educating herself about food and taking pleasure in food preparation. Of course, under all this, Saffron holds a secret: an AI alter-ego, Sydney, which she uses to talk to boys. But what happens when Sydney and Saffron collide?
Sage’s books are thoughtful, sassy, and full of joy. A gift for a teenage girl — and a very enjoyable read for this adult reader, too.
As usual— adding all to cart. Thank you pandora!!!!
Adding some of these to my goodreads right now :)