Spring Reads 2023

Spring has sprung and along with the crocuses, you will need something decent to read and for once, there is a fecund crop of upcoming new books to choose from.

From ex-aide Cleo Watson’s “sex and skulduggery” romp in Westminster, Whips, to Max Porter’s latest, there should be something to suit all tastes.

1. Big Swiss by Jen Beagin

Big Swiss is currently being turned in to HBO series starring Jodie Comer and it has a very juicy premise indeed. Greta works as a transcriber for a sex therapist and she becomes particularly fascinated by one client who has never had an orgasm and whom she nicknames ‘Big Swiss’ (Comer plays her) and later meets in the dog park. The two women embark on a passionate affair that flips upside down what they think about fidelity, honesty and also, donkeys.

Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

Nothing is quite what it seems in Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, and that isn’t meant entirely as a compliment. While Old God’s Time is a powerful story, I will surely not be the only reader who’s occasionally baffled by its cast of ghosts presented initially as living people. After 200 pages, I lost count of the number of times one character explains to another that the person they think they have just seen is actually dead.

The protagonist is the recently retired and somewhat haunted policeman Tom Kettle, who feels ‘his pension was his gun, his weapon against work’. He now lives in a lean-to annex of a Victorian castle in Dalkey, overlooking the Irish Sea, where he catches only glimpses of his landlord and neighbours. The arrival of two former colleagues at his door disturbs this placid existence.

The policemen want his help with an unsolved murder that he had worked on 30 years earlier, in the 1960s