Rosemary Kaye is a favorite of some of our Thursday readers who enjoy her descriptions of life in Scotland. Thank you, Rosemary, for your ongoing posts. Today, she’s sharing her Favourite Reads of 2023. I’m sure they’ll be a little different from others, with a viewpoint that isn’t American-centric. Thank you!

Favourite reads of 2023
On looking through my reading journals for this year I was surprised to find that I’d read fifty-two
books (that includes some audio books on BBC Sounds and Spotify.) I was equally surprised to see
how much non-fiction I’d read. So here, in no particular order, are the books I loved the best in 2023.
I’ve marked up the fiction and crime fiction to make things a little clearer.

Madly, Deeply: The Alan Rickman Diaries

I remember when I heard of the death of Alan Rickman. I was crossing the road outside St Mary’s
Cathedral in Edinburgh, and I couldn’t stop myself crying out ‘oh no!’ Nowadays we are accustomed
to seeing people talking into the ether, but in 2016 far fewer people had ear buds. No matter; Alan
Rickman was more than worthy of my cry. One of our greatest actors, gone at the age of just 69.
What a terrible waste.

The star of films as diverse as Die Hard and Harry Potter, Rickman was a complicated character.
Coming from an Acton council estate, he clearly loved having success, lots of celebrity friends (he
was an inveterate name-dropper and knew everyone from Ruby Wax – one of his closest friends – to
Juliet Stevenson, Emma Thompson, Bruce Willis, Ian McKellan, and hundreds more) and money – he
was a great spender and had a London flat, a house in Italy and an apartment in New York City.

Rickman was always out socialising (‘I probably own half of The Ivy by now’), but very critical of both
his own and other people’s work. He loathed most directors, all reviewers and quite a few actors. He
was impatient, volatile, morose and self-indulgent but also witty, charming, kind, interesting, and
extremely generous with his time and his money. He met his partner Rima at the age of 15; they
were still together when he died. These diaries begin in 1993 and end shortly before his death.
Rickman was fundamentally a very good person. I loved this book.

One Body by Catherine Simpson

Author Catherine Simpson’s memoir of her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment is about so much
more than this one thing. Through the lens of her own life she looks at how women are conditioned
from childhood to be ashamed of their bodies, to try constantly to shape and control them to please
others (usually men.) She recalls years of dieting, push up bras, girdles, high heeled shoes, make up,
leg shaving… When her own body lets her down, she feels ashamed and guilty – she ‘mustn’t be a
nuisance’, she ‘must Be Positive.’

Slowly, Simpson dismantles all of these strictures, while at the same time providing a brutally honest
account of life with cancer – the side effects of treatment, the psychological impact of illness, and
the acceptance she eventually reaches (she has now been in remission for some time.)

A brilliant, raw, perceptive and illuminating memoir.

Forever by Judy Blume (Fiction)

I imagine that every American teenager has read this book, but I only discovered it this year, after
reading a very much enjoying Are You There God? This Is Me, Margaret, in 2022.

When it was published – almost 50 years ago – Forever was highly controversial because it depicts a
sexual relationship between teenagers. Now I think the more interesting thing about it is the way in
which Katherine rather than Michael ultimately emerges as the stronger character.

I also appreciated Blume’s handling of teenage pregnancy in a supporting character – it would have
been easy to fall into the cliché of landing Katherine with this and turning the story into a moral
diatribe, but instead Katherine herself can observe the results of unprotected sex and draw her own
conclusions, while still being allowed to get on with her own life.

Blume really understands the intensity of teenage love, but also how quickly this can change for
young people transitioning into adult life. I found Forever both realistic and empowering.

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

This is a collection of Olivia Laing’s writings on artists and authors, ideas and experiences. She
discusses people as diverse as Hilary Mantel, Derek Jarman, Freddie Mercury, Sarah Lucas, Ali Smith
and Jean- Michel Basquiat. She looks at immigration detention centres, (consensual) mouth sewing,
AIDS, Grenfell Tower, Queer Art, alcoholic female writers, portraiture, conceptual art, fan art, and
much more.

Laing is a perceptive and well informed writer. She does occasionally indulge in a little more name-
dropping than I feel necessary – we don’t really need to know that X is her cousin, or that she ‘knows
Y very well’ – but minor quibbles aside, this is a fascinating and valuable book.

Holding by Graham Norton (Crime Fiction)

Holding is Graham Norton’s first crime novel – which he cheerfully admits he only got published by
refusing to write the memoir his publishers wanted unless they published this too.

The plot (a skeleton is found when a farm is excavated for building work) isn’t very challenging, but
the characterisation is excellent, and – unsurprisingly given Norton’s own background – the
observations of life and conversation is small town Ireland are absolutely spot on.

The local sergeant in particular is a wonderful creation, as is the city detective sent down from Cork.
Norton also handles a very sad episode in one character’s life with great sensitivity, and addresses
the way in which people who can’t move on risk wasting their lives. This is in contrast to the
sergeant himself, and to Brid, another of the characters who has suffered past wrongs, both of
whom eventually turn their lives around in realistic and convincing ways.

Norton is one of my favourite TV hosts. With Holding he shows that he’s a man of even more talents.

Darling by India Knight (Fiction)

In 1945 Hamish Hamilton published Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love – a story largely based on
Mitford’s own upbringing in an eccentric upper class family, and her love affair with a Free French
officer, Gaston Palewski. The Pursuit of Love is fascinating, funny, and occasionally tragic. It was an
instant hit, selling 200,000 copies in its first year.

Now, almost 80 years later, India Knight has written an updated version of this classic story. I must
admit that I wondered if she – or indeed anyone – could pull this off. I needn’t have worried – Knight
has done an excellent job – I loved Darling and raced through it in a couple of days.

The Mitford sisters and their cousin Fanny (the narrator) are now marooned in the country because
the Mitford father, Matthew, an aging rock star, and their rather posh mother Sadie, want to protect
their children from the world, and especially from the fame that follows Matthew everywhere. Lord
Merlin – the Mitfords’ extremely wealthy neighbour – is now a fashion designer (a cross between
Lagerfeld and McQueen) who arrives at Louisa’s 21 st birthday party on a stallion. Fanny’s aunt Emily
is still married to the lovely Davey, who’s now an interior designer with an address book stuffed to
the gills with the glitterati. (And he’s still a complete hypochondriac.)

Darling follows the original plot, but with plenty of contemporary detail – none of it forced, all of it
accurate. Linda still makes a wholly disastrous marriage, escapes to London and (with Merlin’s help)
becomes a model. She still makes the fatal trip to Paris. The ending is every bit as poignant as the
original.

It’s hilarious. It’s heartbreaking. I loved it.

Nevada by Imogen Binnie (Fiction)

Maria, a trans woman, lives in New York with Steph, a lesbian. The couple splits up, Maria takes
Steph’s car (without her consent) and sets off on a road trip to Nevada.

Here she comes across James, a young stoner living a dead-end life in a grim community. She
unilaterally decides that James is a suppressed trans woman and tries to help him recognise this.
Ultimately James rejects Maria’s help.

That’s the basic plot, but there is so much more to this book. Maria is neither loud, sorted nor
confident; transitioning was essential for her but has not solved all of her other problems – and this
is one of the points Binnie is making; trans or not, everyone still has issues.

Nevada taught me a great deal about trans life (in particular the way in which trans people who have
not yet transitioned feel disassociation), life in New York City, and life for Maria’s generation
whatever their gender. The New York abbreviations and slang, and indeed the trans-specific vocabulary, took me a little while to understand, but the book is easy to read and includes some very funny scenes too.

Verdict of Twelve by Raymond Postgate (Crime fiction)

I most often struggle with the British Library Crime Classics; I am seduced by the beautiful cover art
only to be bored and disappointed by the actual stories, which seem so often to revolve around train
timetables or some other precise and finicky detail, and to have little in the way of character
development.

Verdict of Twelve is different. It focuses on the jury at the trial of a woman accused of the fatal
poisoning of her nephew. Postgate examines the character and background of some of the jurors,
and shows just how impossible it is for any of them to approach the evidence with true impartiality.
He also looks at the accused’s household staff, especially the cook and gardener. Are they really
‘good Old Retainers’? Does this trope exist in real life?

Postgate constantly challenges our preconceptions.

The second half of the book covers the trial itself and the state of mind of various jurors as they are
swayed this way and that by the evidence AND by their own ideas and experiences.

At the end of the book the reader still doesn’t really know if the verdict was correct.

Verdict of Twelve is an excellent book.

Incidentally, Postgate was a very interesting man. A conscientious objector in World War One, he
married the daughter of a labour party politician, George Lansbury, and was immediately barred
from the family home by his Tory father. He was a writer, social historian, journalist and educator,
and later in life the founder of The Good Food Guide. His son Oliver Postgate was the creator of the
much loved children’s television series Bagpuss, Ivor the Engine and The Clangers.

Apricots on the Nile by Colette Roussant

Roussant is the child of a French Catholic mother and an Egyptian Jewish father. Her mother was a
socialite who was not much interested in parenting, so Colette spent much of her childhood at the
wealthy and opulent home of her paternal grandparents in Cairo. Here she gleaned a great deal
about food, both from her grandmother and their Syrian chef.

The house accommodated three branches of the family, each living on different floors. Colette
always had company, but still felt very much alone. She loved to visit the city’s extensive food
markets with her grandmother, where she learned how to choose produce – and saw live chickens
meet their end.

Roussant describes in brilliant detail the huge formal dinners that were served every single night, the
kitchen food, and the delicious snacks sold on the streets of Cairo. Weddings were held at frequent
intervals – grandmother and her friends being inveterate matchmakers; Roussant tells us about the
splendid wedding feasts that went on for days, but also about the tragedy caused by her grandparents’ absolute insistence that a daughter with learning difficulties must still be married off. Life isn’t perfect, even in the lap of pre-war Egyptian luxury.

Summers are spent at the sea; life is less formal there, but Roussant still gives us mouthwatering
descriptions of the delicious food served at picnics and barbecues on the beach. Back in Cairo,
grandmother and her friends take it in turns to host elaborate poker parties, which go on all day and
require the polishing of all the silver, the wearing of precious jewellery, and of course food on a
serious scale. In the evening the men join the women, and the games continue into the early hours.

Roussant eventually married an American architect and has lived in New York City for many years.
She is a food writer.

I loved this little book for its descriptions of a way of life now long gone. Rousssant has visited Cairo
from time to time; many of her old haunts are gone, and life is far more restricted, for women in
particular, than it was when she was growing up.

Apricots on the Nile captures a moment in time.

What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close (Fiction)

I was sent a review copy of this book, which will be published by Saraband in February 2024.

Liz is an ambitious police officer in 1980s Leeds, but she’s held back by the rampant sexism in the
force, and also by her working class background.

When she leaves her violent boyfriend and moves into a radical women’s collective, she is torn
between her job as an upholder of law and order, and the collective’s determination to usurp the
patriarchy.

When Rowena, an upper class, opinionated, radical man-hater, arrives at the collective, the women
are unaware that she’s a known agitator under MI5 surveillance. Rowena is determined to push the
women into extremism, while carefully avoiding any exposure herself. MI5 want Liz to pass them
information about Rowena.

Meanwhile the murders continue. The police are getting nowhere.

I recently watched the excellent drama series The Long Shadow, which is set in the same time period
and focuses on Peter Sutcliffe’s victims, and on the inept and often disastrous police operation to
catch him. Both What Doesn’t Kill Us and The Long Shadow took me back to those terrible times, to
the overt sexism and racism, and the appalling attitudes to sex workers (‘they were asking for it’); all
of these hampered the police investigation – preconceptions and prejudice led the police to ignore
evidence and to follow blind alleys. (In the end Sutcliffe was caught by a routine police tyre check on
his vehicle. Prior to this he had been interviewed and passed over nine times.)

What Doesn’t Kill Us also highlights the problems in the women’s movement in the 70s/80s, and the
issues that arise with radical politics in general when they start to disconnect with people’s real lives.

This book is a gem of a page-turner – the story is fast paced and gripping, and whilst Ajay Close also
addresses important issues, she always does so subtly, within the confines of the plot, never veering
into history lesson territory. Excellent.

Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor (Fiction)

Paul, a bisexual student in Iowa City, cruises through life, enjoying (or not) casual sex, mainly with
men, hanging out in bars, clubs, smart cafes, cool shops, zine stores and bookstores. He’s constantly
on the lookout – not only for a hook up, but also for cool and/or famous people with whom to
associate. He’s only ever had one long term relationship, with a schoolfriend called Trevor.

For Paul appearances are all; clothes are just part of his obsession with image, with the need to
impress and the Fear Of Missing Out.

He’s also a shape-shifter and can turn into a woman just by thinking about it. At a Wymn’s Festival
(hilariously described by Lawlor – and I discovered that this event actually existed for many years)in
Michigan, which he attends as a woman called Polly, he meets Diane. Diane and Polly start a
relationship. Polly/Paul becomes infatuated with Diane and follows her to Provincetown, where she
lives with a group of women.

The story drips with 1990s cultural references, but it’s so well written that these never feel forced.
Paul is a chancer who can justify any of his (often highly amoral) actions to get what he wants – but
he’s also, inadvertently, very funny. He frequently fails, he has constant money problems, he
changes his mind continually, but he’s irrepressible and irresistible. And he makes great compilation
tapes (playlists if you are under 30…)

Then Trevor tries to contact him. The 1990s are no longer fun.

I only read this book because one of my daughters recommended it. I’m so glad she did, as it was
one of the best works of fiction I read in 2023. Entertaining, informative, funny, sad, and unlike
anything I’d read before, Paul Takes The Form of a Mortal Girl has stayed with me all year.

East of Croydon by Sue Perkins

Sue Perkins is probably best known as one of the presenters of The Great British Bake Off (which she
left in 2016), but she’s actually been a stand up comedian, performer and radio and TV presenter
since her undergraduate days at Cambridge in the early 1990s.

In 2014 Perkins was asked to make a TV travel documentary in which she would follow the Mekong
River from its source to the sea. She hates travel, discomfort, lack of hygiene, strange food, lack of
privacy – so she decided to look them all in the face and accept the offer. East of Croydon is her
account of the trip.

Perkins writes very well about the places she sees and the people she visits. This is no coffee table
book – she holds nothing back about the reality of the river dwellers’ lives; they are not, she says, ‘poor but happy’ and would all rather be Westerners. She is brutally honest about the effects that climate change and pollution are having on what is an already precarious existence.

She’s similarly honest about her own fears and failings, her inability to control her fury and despair
at what she sees, and the commitment phobia that blights her personal life. She writes movingly
about her own family back in Cornwall, especially the death of her beloved father.

Perkins has since made seven more travel documentaries, all of them well worth watching. I hope
she’s also still writing; we need her razor sharp commentary even more as the world spirals out of
control.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald (Fiction)

1959. Widow Florence Green decides on a whim to open a bookshop in the run down eastern
      coastal town of Hardborough (presumably Hapoisburgh.)

She houses the shop in a very old and semi-derelict building, but one that the local lady of the
manor, Violet Gamart, still says she has earmarked as an arts centre (she’s had decades to do
something about this and hasn’t.)

When Violet is unable to dissuade Florence, she sets out to undermine her. The shop becomes
reasonably (but not ridiculously – we are not in chick lit territory here) successful. Violet rachets up
the subterfuge.

Like life perhaps, this book has no happy ending, nor even a tragic one. What eventually transpires is
presented simply as an example of how life is. Penelope Fitzgerald is such a subtle writer that the
reader almost doesn’t realise anything has happened at all. Gradually, however, light dawns.

As ever with Fitzgerald, the minor characters are very well drawn – the patronising bank manager,
the resigned lawyer, the Colonel (Violet’s more sympathetic but ultimately weak husband), and
especially Christine, the organised and straight talking child who comes to help in the shop.

And life on the East Anglian coast, with its mists and dampness, and the ever increasing erosion of its
cliffs, is a physical presence throughout this story.

A vignette of a book, and one that is hard to forget.