Read about the great books, new and old, that our staff have been enjoying.
Baz has been reading
Chilean Poet
Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell
For me, 2025 has been the year of Alejandro Zambra. A couple of years ago, I read two novellas – Bonsai and The Private Lives of Trees – and became a fan. But it was in January of this year that I truly fell for his fiction, when I read his story collection My Documents. Since then, I’ve been devouring everything he’s written that has been translated and published in English.
Chilean Poet might be my favourite. At around 400 pages, it’s by far his longest work, yet the story and prose maintain the same crispness and vitality I loved in his shorter fiction. It’s about family, parenthood, step-parenthood, love, relationships, separation, and poetry – Chilean poetry. It’s full of warmth, humour, melancholy, failure, and joy. It feels like life – and it is exquisite.
Aurelia has been reading
Clytemnestra
Costanza Casati
Recently I set a personal project to read all the Greek mythology retellings that I'd collected, and the one I loved the most was Costanza Casati's Clytemnestra. Focusing on the perspective of Queen Clytemnestra, wife of King Agamemnon of Mycenae, the story explores her tragic and powerful life, full of loss, grief, abuse, and war.
The author handles the complexity of her protagonist with care and beautiful prose, underscoring Clytemnestra's humanity and love for life in a dark and deceitful world that's forced her to turn her hands bloody. Her story of revenge is one I'd recommend to everyone.
Joanna has been reading
Service
John Tottenham
Narrated by Sean, a bookseller fast approaching 50 and (still) trying to write his first novel, Service offers a pitch-black view into what it’s like in the year 2025 to try and make art while working in retail, a time when bohemian living is now something only the wealthy can afford to do.
Sean works at Mute Books, in a rapidly gentrified Los Angeles neighbourhood. He doesn’t like the people who have moved in; he resents his friends’ successes and he’s chronically unlucky in love. But he’s also drowning in credit card debt and can’t afford to have his teeth fixed. Bent on self-destruction, he turns his disappointment and anger outwards to the customers who come into Mute, which makes for some very funny and also quite cringy exchanges. Many observations cut close to the bone – who amongst us hasn’t also wished that people would conduct personal business on their phones more softly or somewhere else entirely? – but I also felt genuinely anxious for what Sean might be about to do next (and his next bad online review).
Service made me laugh and squirm – as someone around the same age as Sean, also a bookseller and also trying to balance paid work with writing a novel, it felt like Tottenham had crawled inside my head and pulled out quite a few of my own fears. I think any member of Generation X who has worked a service job might feel the same.
