Like Water Like Sea is a novel about loss, self-discovery, love, and mental illness, as it follows a queer woman in three moments of her life. Nia lives in London and ten years after her sister’s death by suicide, she is struggling for what she wants out of her relationships and how to relate to her mother, who has bipolar, now that she is also an adult and with their shared grief. When she makes two new friends, a couple who found her at a low point, a journey starts in which she will make mistakes, navigate her connections to other people, and emerge at fifty years old with fresh realisations.
This is a complex novel that weaves together a lot of emotion, exploring not just the grief that runs through the book but also types of love, queerness, race, and ways of living in a harsh world. The styles of narration change, with Nia’s perspective predominantly, but also sections near the start that explore the lives of her sister and mother, and also a final part that is more ambiguous, offering up three potential endings (with one marked as most probable). This offers a cacophony of perspective and the idea that there’s not just one way of living, especially living with grief and in different kinds of relationships. Queerness plays an important part in these endings, exploring how family structures are created, and generally the book explores how relationships are often not made on equal or matching emotions, and must be navigated as such.
Another very crucial part of the book is bipolar and cyclothymia, and the impact this has on Nia’s mother and sister, but also how it is not everything about them. It is refreshing to see this kind of depiction and the complexity of mental illness and how different people experience things. Generally, the book explores the fluidity and messiness of many things, and always returns to kinds of love. Though the narrative is more of a self-discovery, meditative one than big events happening, changes in relationships do mark the passing of time and structure in the novel.
Like Water Like Sea is a powerful book, at times bittersweet, and filled with different snippets of experience and emotion. It is great for fans of literary fiction that engages with feelings and self-discovery, and with ways of forming families and relationships.
No-One’s No One is a coming of age novel about friends, bands, and DIY culture, as an aimless seventeen-year-old finds something to pour his heart into. Thomas has just finished exams at college and has a long summer ahead of him, and longer. As everyone else makes plans, his main plans are to continue going along to the weekly Car Boot Sale with his dad, where he finds secondhand cassettes to develop his musical education, and doesn’t think about his estranged best friend. When he meets a new guy at the Boot Sale, Thomas’ world starts to widen, far more than he originally expects, and soon he has found a world of house shows and bands he couldn’t have dreamed of.
This is a book thoroughly infused with music, not just rock and pop and punk as you might expect, but also jazz and classical, and a love of discovery. In fact, that’s what the book really is about: discovery of not just new music and books and films, but of friends and what the world might be. Alongside this, it’s about queer discovery, and the importance of all the steps that open your eyes to the world and who you could be in it. Thomas has fairly secluded and sheltered life, particularly for someone who is almost eighteen, and the novel delves into what he needs to go beyond that, and to take up something for himself rather than because his parents thought he might like to do it. This positions the novel in that space coming of age books often inhabit, the time after teen fiction when things aren’t neat, they are messy and experimental and uncertain, and it embraces this, as Thomas learns from others and also passes on recommendations to other people, full of community spirit and sharing and pitching in.
There’s something so fun about books that are a love letter to a scene like No-One’s No-One is (and Thomas is highly aware of this, wanting to be part of an artistic scene and have that community), and the reader gets to experience the DIY house show scene like Thomas does: as an overwhelming, exciting experience that changes the whole feel of the novel. From the drifting feeling of the start to the hope and disappointment in love Thomas experiences to the fresh promise that makes up the ending, this is a book that offers a hopeful, realistic queer story of finding the right people (and a few wrong ones along the way).
Bad Habit is a novel about a working class trans woman growing up in Madrid and navigating communities and places, death and violence. The unnamed narrator grows up from a young child barely able to understand why she’s drawn to groups of women and to the one trans woman in the neighbourhood, to a teenager living with the weight of hidden first love, and then an adult finding and losing community, and then returning to her original neighbourhood and someone she never knew well enough before. All the while, she grapples with how to live as herself amidst the violence of being working class and different.
Translated from Spanish, this is a lyrical novel and the translation really captures this, moving through scenes in sometimes a hazy way, a remembered way, and also a constructed way, as the protagonist builds up a mythology for herself, her neighbourhood, and the people around her. The narrative focuses around particular moments and scenes in her life, rather than a main story, and it has a coming of age feel, as she discovers forms of sisterhood and community even whilst a lot of her connections with people are fleeting. By the ending, this becomes a memorable concluding vision, bringing with it an idea running throughout the book: that we are and become part of a lineage, that the people and stories that come before are important, and also why we must keep going.
This is a beautiful novel that depict darkness and violence, but also connection and forms of community, and particularly the importance and complexity of finding role models as a trans woman growing up. It questions putting people on a pedestal whilst also acknowledging it can be hard to avoid when you need proof that you have a future and can exist in, or outside of, society.
Evenings and Weekends is a novel mostly spanning a weekend in London and Basildon, as an interconnected group of characters across two generations face up to the messiness of life. Maggie is pregnant and on the cusp of moving back to Basildon from London, but she doesn’t want to leave, and her boyfriend Ed seems distracted. Her best friend Phil is falling for his housemate Keith, but Keith’s in another relationship and Phil doesn’t want to upset the current balance. Phil’s mum Rosaleen has a cancer diagnosis she wants to share with her son, but doesn’t know how, and Phil’s brother is soon to get married, but keeps disappearing. And there’s a whale stuck in the Thames.
This is the kind of kaleidoscopic literary fiction novel in which there’s not a huge amount of plot, but there is a lot of character moments of crisis and change, and you can get deep into the world of the interconnected characters. At first, it seemed that the “normal” life of Maggie and Ed wasn’t very interesting, but then it became apparent how much of an act this was. Other characters, particularly Phil and Rosaleen, have engrossing narratives around being haunted by their past and looking towards who they are now and how they relate to other people. There’s a lot of supporting characters too, who sometimes get a POV moment, and though this often doesn’t work in books, in Evenings and Weekends it did feel like it added colour to the tapestry, so to speak.
I liked how there was a lot about queerness underpinning the novel, and various characters’ relationships with queerness, particularly in a London millennial way, but also relating to class and growing up. The messiness of the characters’ lives felt very real and their complex experiences of love and sex brought a lot to the book, particularly by the ending. It was refreshing to have a novel explore some of these realities, alongside a great sense of London atmosphere, and the title is reflected in the way that the book is all about the times outside of work, the human moments, rather than another novel about millennials hating their jobs.
The ‘whale stuck in the Thames and a marine biologist who looks like Princess Diana’ subplot was a great element, but I did wish that it felt like it had an actual conclusion or connected with the characters by the end. Weirdly for a literary fiction novel without much plot, I feel like it could have a sequel, which explores further the characters’ decisions, maybe with a time jump to make them older and have different experiences.
Evenings and Weekends is a novel about not wanting to give up who you could be, that potential for excitement and fun and love, and it is also an exploration of London and small-towns, and the complexities of what futures you could have as a queer person. The range of points of view through the narrative will be divisive, but I didn’t lose track of how anyone was and enjoyed the little insights you got from a sudden change to a supporting characters’ POV.
Blue Ruin is a novel about art and power, as a former artist finds himself facing his past. Jay was an artist in London, where he was in a relationship with Alice until she ran off with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. Now, however, it is the early days of the pandemic, and Jay is an undocumented gig economy worker delivering groceries. When a delivery to a huge house in the countryside reveals Alice, suddenly Jay is confronted by the art world once again.
It doesn’t feel surprising that Hari Kunzru has written a pandemic novel, even though Blue Ruin is a far more an exploration of being an artist, culture, immigration, and money, than it really is about Covid. The pandemic forms the weird coincidence that ignites the plot and fuels the paranoia of the rich that compares with the way in which rich people fund the art world, something that the characters, particularly Jay, reckon with throughout the book. The book follows a present day narrative of a lockdown in a country house, but also extended flashbacks to a much younger Jay, Alice, and Rob, their relationships, and, particularly, their art. There are twists and turns, particularly in the present day story, whilst the book asks, what are the conditions to make art, if any exist, and can you live a life of art.
There are some unfinished threads (for instance, Jay never quite has to face up to anything external, like his app-based job), but generally, this is a book that poses a lot of questions, pokes fun at the 90s art scene, and also looks at race, immigration, and how people can move through the world. It plays with the joke that an artist could do anything and claim it is art, whilst exploring where the power and the money is. As someone who knows very little about the art world, I nevertheless found this a gripping novel, that has a lot of modern commentary but tempers it with an across the decades look at what makes an artist and how an artist makes money.
I’m New Here is a novel about a Taiwanese-British man who goes to Taipei looking for meaning, only to instead find a mysterious man with an unusual request. Sean has been fired from his job as a photojournalist and has split up with his girlfriend, and he’s at a loss, in Taiwan even though he feels caught between his heritage and not part of Taiwan. In a doughnut shop he meets Charles, an older man who seems to take a sudden interest in him, wanting his photography and skills, and as Sean is drawn into Charles’ world, things get weirder, and Sean can hardly be sure what is real.
The distinctive writing style of this book draws you in to Sean’s head, not always a great place to be as he’s depressed and self-loathing, full of internalised racism and a lack of belief in his own abilities. It’s hazy yet fast paced, reflecting the dream-like way in which Sean experiences things and the uncertainty around what might actually be happening or not, especially as the novel draws towards its conclusion. The kind of style, which feels similar to other recent novels, isn’t one that I’ve seen before used for this kind of caught between cultures narrative, and it works well to position Sean as an outsider who also seems to be alienated partly due to his own mindset.
In terms of the narrative, it feels almost like a film to me, with the photography element lending itself to making the book feel quite visual, and the strange events add to this. I liked this visuality, and the way that the narrative itself could almost have been a black comedy crime story at times, but also a literary exploration of alienation and depression. I’m New Here dives into the mind of a self-hating man looking for purpose, combining hazy ambiguity with internalised prejudice, and it’s a great short novel that was gripping and hallucinatory.
Cinema Love is a novel spanning decades that explores the relationships of gay men, and their wives in China and in Chinatown in New York. Old Second and Bao Mei live in New York City, in an ever changing Chinatown, but they first met in China, at the Workers’ Cinema that had become a cruising spot for gay men and where Bao Mei worked selling the tickets. After tragedy there, they married and came to America, but the ghosts of the past followed, and in modern day New York during the pandemic, they must face it all.
This is a sweeping, epic novel that captures the everyday sadnesses and intimacy of human relationships, particular those born out of forbidden circumstances. It is told from multiple perspectives, weaving together a range of central characters with entangled relationships and showing the choices that can have great impact on each other. Particularly intriguing is the way that the book explores both gay men and the women they marry, and the complexities of love and human emotion that can occur in different circumstances. The cinema, though central to the plot, doesn’t actually feature that much, making it almost feel like a lost ideal, despite being run down, and throughout the book there’s a constant yearning for things, people and places.
This kind of decades-spanning epic novel can be confusing or meandering, but in Cinema Love Tang uses vividly-drawn characters to hold the heart of the novel together and tells an unseen story of both gay and immigrant experience.
Enlightenment is a novel about science and faith, as two unlikely friends push at the edges of belief and love. Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley both worship at Bethesda in the Essex town of Aldleigh, long time friends despite being very different ages. When Thomas meets James Bower, and they are drawn into the mystery of nineteenth century astronomer Maria Veduva, he falls in love, but as they are frustrated in their searches for Maria’s history, Thomas realises that James doesn’t love him in the same way. And Grace meets Nathan, a teenager with no connection to Bethesda, and is caught between different kinds of love and faith, until one moment throws all of them apart.
This is a hard book to describe, with the feeling of a historical novel at times despite being set in the 90s onwards, and with the narrative intercut with Thomas’ articles for the local paper. It is about different kinds of beliefs, from religious to astronomy to love, and Perry mingles all of these ideas together in a way that transcends any of them, really. The book focuses in on very human moments and emotions, such as love that wasn’t meant to be, and the seemingly small things people do that have huge consequences, and you really feel this from the way it moves perspective, the narrative voice flying through Aldleigh at times to show you what is going on.
Both Thomas’ and Grace’s stories are moving, particularly Thomas’ slow realisations of how things might seem or impact other people differently, and in the importance of just knowing people. The depiction of a gay man who had grown up in a faith that made him feel ashamed of that is gripping and sad, but also he does find purpose and peace, not the least within astronomy and science. Grace’s narrative is perhaps a more traditional ‘grown up within a particular church and then leave it’ one, but again, with a lot of wistful longing for what might’ve been.
Enlightenment isn’t necessarily the sort of book I’d immediately pick out, but I was interested by Thomas’ story from the blurb, and actually the book was complex and bittersweet.
This Is How You Remember It is a novel about growing up online and navigating the public and private spaces. Told in the second person, a girl’s family gets a computer when she’s nine, and she quickly finds out how great it is that she can find everything, going on virtual pet sites and talking to strangers who become friends. But soon, she’s finding darker things, and then social media comes into her life, and her attempts to fit in IRL become blurred with who she might seem online, especially as what is posted online is often beyond her control.
I was drawn to this book because I’m really interested in internet culture and its impacts upon people, plus the blurb describes things like virtual pet sites and emerging social media, which is the era of the internet that I grew up with, and I wasn’t disappointed in the way it is immersed in all of this. Particularly for the first half of the book, everything is built around milestones of internet use and misuse, of technology and its impact upon the self, and it is gripping to see this unfold in often horrifying and often realistic ways. The protagonist’s learning about shame and self was particularly powerful, starting with going on websites other people might think are uncool or people questioning online friends, and turning into experiences with sex and trauma.
The chilling narrative does calm down a bit as the book goes on, exploring how the protagonist’s life and relationships are impacted by social media use and also by things that happened to her in the past, but also leading towards a more hopeful ending, focusing on the offline constant she’s had and offering the possibility that people might start healing from things that happened online. I liked that there’s a hinted subplot about online male culture, possibly around incel culture though this isn’t stated, and it is seen through the second person perspective as something that the female protagonist might ignore or try to block out, which feels very realistic. Generally, the book has some broad takes about gendered social media use in a very heterosexual culture, and it is interesting to see how this plays out as time goes on in the story, and what that might say about the present day.
For me, my interest in the internet side of things and appreciation for how this book delved into some of the darker sides of child internet use, particularly through the early 2000s lens, meant that though I was glad the ending was hopeful, I did want a bit more exploration at the end of some of the key things that had come up earlier. For example, the protagonist’s relationship to sex and female sexuality felt like an area that was really explored, particularly through trauma and through a unreal narrative element I won’t spoil, but by the end felt like it wasn’t quite wrapped up. However, the ending does really explicitly go into the themes of public and private and what this means on the internet and for someone’s identity.
This Is How You Remember It is a powerful novel that uses a distinctive tone to chart one history of the internet: a messy, personal one of a protagonist unable to look away from it. Though I’m about the target age in terms of the internet milestones charted in the novel, as a queer person my experiences on the internet (and offline) were quite different, so I’ll be interested to see what people who had more similar experiences as those in the book find it. Early on in the book I thought it was going to keep getting darker and darker as the protagonist disappeared into versions of herself online, and maybe I’m slightly disappointed that it didn’t go that way, but I can see why the book takes a different approach, offering not just a cautionary tale but some form of conclusion.
Henry Henry is a literary fiction loose retelling of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, bringing Hal into the twenty-first century as a gay Catholic son of the Duke of Lancaster. It is 2014 and Hal Lancaster drinks and gets high to avoid his father, but when an unlikely invitation to join family friend Harry Percy at a shooting retreat turns into a romance, Hal’s life is pulled in more directions, balancing shame and guilt and addiction with the possibility of something different to what his father wants for him.
As someone who has been obsessed with the Henry IV plays and read plenty of Shakespeare retellings (including Henry IV ones), I was intrigued to see how Henry Henry would approach the play and also how it would be a novel. After finishing the book, I’m still a bit conflicted about how it relates to Henry IV, as it feels to me like it occupies a middle ground between between a faithful adaptation (which it is definitely not) and being a very loose adaption, because it does adhere to having most of the characters from the plays (and more from history) to the extent it almost doesn’t work without knowledge of the plays, but then deviates from the themes and plot of the plays a lot, perhaps making it better to not know what it is based on. In some ways, I like this, because it really does reimagine the plays as something different, but it is confusing that it has such a precise cast and some key story elements retold, and then other elements and the overall arc not matching up at all.
Told from a third-person perspective, the book explores a lot—sexual abuse, Catholic guilt, addiction, eating disorders, the treatment of people with AIDS—whilst also notably not really exploring other areas. The monarchy has been removed, and indeed is barely even referenced to, and the layers of class issues present both in the original plays and the scenarios of this retelling get a bit lost in the mix, so the book ends up being a bit ‘wow rich people’ without really saying anything about this. The Catholicism in the book is A Lot (one of the characters even complains that the Catholic guilt is A Lot), and I imagine people interested in it will really like how entwined it is with everything (and there’s something interesting about taking a play set when the characters were Catholic by default and making the characters Catholic as something more unusual in modern day London).
In terms of characters, the endeavour of having so many of the characters from the plays and real historical figures is a notable choice, and it works well in some places. For example, modern Henry IV retellings do well by making Philippa appear as Hal’s youngest, wayward sister who can be a reflection of him in a different way to other characters are reflections of him. Both Falstaff and Poins are quickly sidelined and generally the ‘Eastcheap’ part of the plays is downplayed hugely, a sort of sticky carpeted Wetherspoons vibe that Hal leaves for Catholic guilt and Harry Percy’s much posher leftism. Hal’s brothers become interchangeable, which is fair, and generally a lot of the characters recede as the novel progresses, so it becomes mostly Hal and Henry, with occasional family members and Harry Percy. The third person narration keeps a bit of distance (there’s a sudden chapter that is narrated by someone to Hal later in the book, which felt suddenly out of place), making Hal a little more unknowable.
Two main elements of the novel are Hal’s relationships to his father, Henry, and to Harry Percy, family friend turned lover. The blurb suggests these are going to be equally important, positioning the book even as potentially a kind of coming of age romance, but going in expecting that will leave you disappointed. This is a much darker take on Henry IV than retellings tend to be (and the marketing suggests), exploring trauma and abuse and victimhood in quite complex ways, but it does feel like it would be helpful to have any sense going into the book that incest and sexual abuse were going to be so crucial in it, given that they aren’t in the original plays. These parts are going to be divisive, especially for people going in for the Hal and Harry Percy romance element or the “queer retelling”, and actually getting much more of a focus on an abusive father-son dynamic. For me, it was a surprise because the opening feels like it might be a more straightforward modern retelling and then suddenly you realise it is not at all, and that’s certainly an interesting choice.
Henry Henry feels part of a lineage of gay literary fiction, bringing hints of Brideshead (Catholicism) and Dennis Cooper (abuse and addiction) alongside occasional 2015 references to try and prove it isn’t actually from an older time. The thing is, I’m still not entirely sure why it is a retelling of Henry IV, and not just a novel about being gay and Catholic and having an abusive father. I might’ve either preferred it to be more of a retelling, at least in terms of narrative structure as this version is a completely different kind of arc, or less of one, with more experimental prose/character framing or less of a reliance on every single character/family member from the play/history. The ending is an interesting choice that says something about this version of Hal and suits a literary novel about abuse and addiction, but for me, doesn’t say enough about the book as a retelling or reworking.
Henry Henry was always going to be a novel I had opinions about, and to be honest I wasn’t expecting them to mostly be confusion about how I feel about it as an adaptation and as a novel that should work without knowing the plays. It is an experience to read—it’s well-written and it brings in a lot of interesting things, as well as darkly comic images of Hal’s life—but it left me frustrated, that it is being marketed as something very different and that it doesn’t always seem to know its own relationship with Shakespeare’s plays. Messed-up, dark gay novels are great, but I think this one would’ve worked better for me if it also wasn’t Henry IV.
Fiendfully Reading 
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