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.

Good Girls by Hadley Freeman

The journalist Hadley Freeman’s last book, House Of Glass, was a clear-eyed memoir of her paternal family’s experience of the Holocaust. If anything, Good Girls is an even more personal book as it is a lacerating account of the two-and-a-half years she spent as a teenager in and out of psychiatric wards, being treated for anorexia. Some of these sections are genuinely hard to read but will provide the only insight many of us have into a devastating mental illness. Good Girls is also a study of what anorexia is, who gets it and how it is treated and, as such, Freeman (left) talks to experts and former fellow patients as well as their families. While her writing is never less than compelling, the memoir and the more objective aspect of the book don’t always meld successfully, and at one point the whole threatens to be derailed by her exploration of the parallels between anorexia and gender dysphoria.

But Good Girls is nonetheless a valuable examination of what can fuel adolescent self-starvation and how one individual managed to outgrow it.

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

Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey

Monica Heisey – who spent a spell as a screenwriter on cult sitcom Schitt’s Creek – has written her first novel called Really Good, Actually which has been praised for its wit by everyone from Rob Delaney to Dolly Alderton. Marian Keyes described it as “WILDLY funny and almost alarmingly relatable”.

The narrator is a 28-year-old PhD student called Maggie who lives in Toronto and decides to end her marriage to her husband Jon after 608 days. As she says, “I hadn’t lost my husband, I had left him. Or, rather, I had suggested he leave, and he had taken me up on this incredibly quickly. In many ways it was the last thing we agreed on.”

Heisey who herself got divorced at the same age, describes Maggie as looking like her and with the same postgraduate qualification in Shakespearean literature (a friend of Maggie’s describes her job as “you … explain Macbeth”) but Heisey has said that she wrote the book with enough distance for it not to be about her own experience.

The Ascent by Stefan Hertmans

n 2000, the author Stefan Hertmans was disturbed to discover that the house in Ghent he had lived in for more than 20 years and restored from dilapidation had once been home to a Flemish collaborator with the SS, Willem Verhulst. On the pink and brown marble mantelpiece which Hertmans had become so fond of Verhulst had kept a bust of Hitler.

The fact that Hertmans would use this as a springboard to write a work of auto-fiction seems inevitable, given that his International Man Booker longlisted novel War and Turpentine (2016) and his later novel The Convert (2019), have their roots respectively in notebooks belonging to his grandfather and a historical essay about the village in Provence that Hertmans now lives in.

In The Ascent, which has been translated from the Dutch by David McKay, Hertmans draws on a memoir written by Verhulst’s historian son, but uses it not unquestioningly as he asks: ‘How much reality can a person bear, when the subject is his own father?’ 

Milk Teeth by Jessica Andrews

Jessica Andrews’ debut novel Saltwater (2019) told the story of a young working-class woman from Sunderland making her way in London. Although her second novel, Milk Teeth, flits between Paris, Barcelona and rural Spain, as well as London and north-east England, it essentially returns to the same territory as her first.

This confidence in her material — in placing centre stage a young, unnamed northern woman living a precarious existence but struggling to carve out more space for herself — makes her work reminiscent of Gwendoline Riley, with a hopeful vulnerability in place of Riley’s occasionally caustic edge.

The protagonist dances between vulnerability and assertion as she attempts to grapple with her desire to maltreat her own body In fact, the sincerity of Andrews’ writing is so unusually raw that at first it can seem embarrassing.