Absolutely chuffed to bits to announce that my story ‘Ghost Walks’, originally published by The Fiction Desk, is included in this year’s Best British Short Stories, the prestigious anthology of the year’s best short stories, published annually by Salt Publishing.
It’s not published until November, but until 31 July it can be pre-ordered from Waterstones for a massive 25% discount: https://www.waterstones.com/book/best-british-short-stories-2025/nicholas-royle/david-bevan/9781784633530
Really pleased that my spooky new short story ‘Ghost Walks’ has been published in the new Fiction Desk anthology Inside Voices, just in time for Halloween! It can be purchased here.
Sunburnt Saints is published today! It’s a fantastic achievement by editors Andrew Leach and Hannah Persaud to get this anthology from conception to publication in just a few months.
My contribution, ‘Outage’, is a story of love and darkness, and I’m very proud and honoured to be among so many talented writers.
The book can be bought from Big Green Bookshop here: https://www.biggreenbookshop.com/big-green-exclusive-funstuff/sunburnt-saints-a-seventy2one-anthology/prod_1111.html
Read more about publisher Seventy2One and their exciting future publication plans here: http://massiveoverheads.com
Many thanks to writer and broadcaster Antonia Honeywell for dedicating her latest Chiltern Voice Book Club programme last Sunday to Seventy2One’s new anthology Sunburnt Saints. I was one of several contributors interviewed for the show, and we all got to choose a favourite song. So tune into the podcast to find out our picks. Oh, and to hear us talking about writing, of course: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/chiltern-voice-book-club/id1540563708?i=1000543272780
Antonia’s show is a great mix of book chat and music, and she’s got some fantastic guests coming up. It’s on http://chilternvoice.fm every Sunday 2pm-4pm, with the podcast landing shortly afterwards.
This month I have mainly been reviewing Colm Tóibín’s new novel The Magician, which follows the life and times of Thomas Mann. You can read the review in the Literary Review‘s 500th issue: https://literaryreview.co.uk/thomas-his-brothers
Many thanks to Alex Pearl for inviting me onto his website for a chat. We discuss writing, reading, Milkman and Mr Bump here: https://booksbyalexpearl.weebly.com/interview-with-ian-critchley.html
I’ve loved Nicholas Shakespeare’s previous novels, particularly Snowleg, but it came as a bit of a shock to discover that this is his first novel since 2010. It’s a kind of sequel to The Dancer Upstairs, and you can read my review here.
(photo: Tobias Fischer on Unsplash)
I’ve previously devoured the books in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books series (The Shadow of the Wind, The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven). Set in Barcelona before, during and after the Spanish Civil War, they are gripping literary thrillers, and the latest instalment, The Labyrinth of the Spirits (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), didn’t disappoint. The books can be read in any order, and for sheer storytelling exuberance they are hard to beat.
Diane Setterfield made her name with two wonderful gothic mysteries, The Thirteenth Tale and Bellman and Black. Her new novel, Once Upon a River (Doubleday), has a very different but equally evocative atmosphere. At an ancient inn near the Thames in Oxfordshire, the locals pass the time telling stories, but one night they witness something far stranger than any story they can tell: a drowned young girl is pulled out of the river and brought to the inn, only to wake a few hours later.
Two really enjoyable debuts: Isabel Rogers’ Life, Death and Cellos (Farrago) is a very funny tale of musical shenanigans set in the febrile atmosphere of the Stockwell Park Orchestra, while Rónán Hession’s Leonard and Hungry Paul (Bluemoose) is a charming and poignant story of two friends seeking to make sense of a confusing world.
Zoë Folbigg’s The Postcard (Aria) is the highly entertaining sequel to her bestselling novel The Note, based on the true-life story of how she met her husband. In The Postcard, Maya and James set off on a round-the-world trip, which tests their relationship to the limits. There’s a particularly grim description of a claustrophobic journey in the luggage rack of an Indian bus which has stuck with me long after reading it, and made me very glad that my backpacking days are long behind me.
Golden Child by Claire Adam (Faber) tells the story of twin boys in Trinidad, one of whom is considered a genius, while the other is seen as a bit odd. When one of them is kidnapped, it opens up huge fissures in the family. This was one of the most disturbing and affecting novels I have read in a long time, a real gut-wrencher, and hugely deserving of this year’s Desmond Elliott Prize.
Several short story collections stood out this year. Vicky Grut’s Live Show, Drink Included (Holland Park Press) was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and comprises stories published over a period of almost thirty years. One of the stories, ‘On the Way to the Church’, also featured in this year’s Best British Short Stories (Salt). Linda Mannheim’s This Way to Departures (Influx), Being Various: New Irish Short Stories edited by Lucy Caldwell (Faber), and the latest Mechanics’ Institute Review anthology featured some outstanding examples of the genre.
But my book the year is the only non-fiction title in this list: George Szirtes’ The Photographer at Sixteen (MacLehose), a memoir told backwards from the moment of Szirtes’ mother’s death in the 1970s. As we go back in time, we are drawn into some of the most horrific events of the twentieth century, including the Hungarian uprising against communist rule and the Holocaust. It’s a profound book about memory and family, and utterly compelling.
(Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash)
I never keep track of how many books I read in a year, but one thing is for sure: it’s never enough. I spend most of the year thinking how great it would be to finally read that novel by so-and-so, or re-read such-and-such, or even tackle Proust, but time is short and seems to get ever shorter, while my to-be-read pile gets ever higher.
I have, however, read some excellent books this year. One of the great things about reviewing is that I often discover authors and books I would never have otherwise read. Highlights this year include Andrew O’Hagan’s book of essays The Secret Life, which contains a gripping account of his abortive collaboration on Julian Assange’s autobiography; Philip Hoare’s wonderful RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR (though I never did work out why the title is all in caps and run on like that); and Richard Ford’s moving memoir about his parents, Between Them.
Fiction-wise, the novel I loved most this year was actually published last year: Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk. I had never read any of her books before, so this was a real revelation: a hypnotic read, drenched in Spanish sunshine, and quite unlike anything else I have come across. I also very much enjoyed Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land and Paul Theroux’s Mother Land.
But my overall book of the year was one of the first I read back in January: Xiaolu Guo’s terrific Once Upon a Time in the East, her memoir of growing up in an impoverished Chinese village. I mentioned earlier in the year in this blog that it would definitely be a contender for book of the year, and as it turns out nothing since has quite matched it. It very much deserves its shortlisting in the biography category of this year’s Costa Awards, and I hope it wins.
Ian Critchley 