January 2026
Conversations With Friends
Sally Rooney
This book which has sold millions of copies worldwide was suggested by John as, I think, something of a provocation, since our group is deeply suspicious of hype, and several people in our group had consequently avoided reading it. Once it was suggested, however, everyone decided that we should give it objective attention and read it.
It is the first-person narration of Frances, who relates how, one summer when she and her female fellow student and ex-partner Bobbi are performing their poetry together in Dublin, they meet an older couple, the reasonably well-known and glamorous photographer Melissa and her actor husband Nick. Frances embarks on an affair with Nick, and the novel charts the push-me-pull-you course of their relationship, and the effects of it on their relationships with the other two.
Reactions to the book in the group were interesting. All but one of us who had read it found it a fairly quick, indeed compulsive read, with a smooth prose that pushes things along at pace. Margeret liked the book unequivocally, but she was the only one to do so. Clare said she did enjoy it as she read it (others, including me, agreed) but when she got to the end she questioned whether it had amounted to very much in terms of substance and theme. Others had substantial criticisms, and Ann said she really hated the book and wouldn't have finished it had it not been for our impending discussion.
What Ann said she hated was the characters - she really disliked every one of them - and much of the discussion centred on the character of the protagonist and narrator Frances. It was generally agreed that Frances was a very damaged character - self-consciousness and vulnerability seem to be what characterise her, and she self harms, pinching herself and even cutting a hole in her leg as a way of dealing emotionally with situations. However, people pointed out that this is simply laid out for the reader and never really addressed on any deep psychological level: there is no real indication of why she should be like this, apart perhaps from the fact that her father is alcoholic, with one possible hint that she and her mother had needed sometimes to avoid her father. Introducing the book, John had said that he found it interesting for France's masochism. At one point, when they are in bed together, Frances asks Nick to hit her, although he refuses. Clare pointed out that that's a known pattern, that abuse in childhood can lead to masochism, but none of us felt that the book made any conscious or satisfactory connection between these things.
I said that I thought a curious thing about Frances's character was that although she seemed so vulnerable much of the time, there was in fact a certain arrogance about her, although everyone else in the group was surprised at this idea. It is Frances, after all, who first makes a move on Nick, kissing him at a party with his wife nearby, and there is surely an arrogance about the fact that when she sends off her first short story after being introduced to an editor, she doesn't even bother reading through the draft before doing so (and of course it's immediately accepted). As a result, a lot of her self-consciousness - the constant care about what impression she is making on people, what she should wear etc - seemed to me to tip over into self-obsession. When she and Bobbi are first invited to Melissa's house, as they travel with her in the taxi, Frances's thoughts are for herself rather than their new acquaintance:
I felt excited, ready for the challenge of visiting a stranger's home, already preparing compliments and certain facial expressions to make myself seem charming.
There's a lot of obsession with how beautiful and interesting Melissa keeps making Frances look in her photographs, however surprised Frances purports to be by this, constant stress on what she (or Nick) is wearing at each pivotal moment, and when Melissa's sponsor-publisher visits while the four are staying in her French house, her only interest for Frances, and, more importantly, for the novel, is how much attention she pays Frances (none, until she finds she is a writer). I have read quotes from reviews calling this novel 'funny', and I assume those reviewers were taking the characters' self-obsession as ironically intended, but our group had read it all as deadly serious. As the novel develops, Frances suffers severe and debilitating period pain which turns out to be caused by endometriosis, which can in no way be seen as ironically intended, but which seems to me to be the novel over-egging, indeed over-dramatising her vulnerability, since it is not integrated in any deep way with theme or even in fact plot.
Doug said, to the agreement of others, that in fact you never really get to know the characters, they are cyphers. The novel is titled Conversations With Friends, but Doug said 'What conversations?' The title may be ironically intended, since there is a lot not said between the characters and consequent unknowing, but it is problematic that there is little in the way of character-revealing dialogue between the characters. So little, too, is actually described, so that there is little sense of atmosphere, and Doug and others said that as a result they just couldn't engage. Ann said she hated the way the novel simply named areas of Dublin without giving any indication of what they were like, which meant that if you didn't know them, which she didn't, you couldn't envisage them or know their atmosphere.
People said that they didn't know what the novel was supposed to be about. I said that my main problem with it is that I think a political point is intended which is not in fact fulfilled. Bobbi and Frances espouse leftwing politics, and I feel it's meant to be politically significant that Frances is relatively poor while the other characters are not: it's a fundamental part of her vulnerability. But the plot, such as it is, does nothing to promote the politics, indeed it undermines them, as it is focussed without critique on the retrograde scenario of a woman masochistically in thrall to a man. (It is true that Nick, it will turn out, has deep emotional problems of his own, but again these are not addressed.) Another problem for me, and others, was that the novel is lacking a narrative arc. Throughout, the relationship between Frances and Nick waxes and wanes and waxes once again, and there is never a sense of denouement or revelation. Everyone agreed that they thought they had got to the end of the novel at a point when the relationship finally seems over (and when we could perhaps draw a conclusion about the meaning of it all), only for the final scene to upend this, and for the last words of the novel to be Frances's phone request to a clearly compliant Nick: 'Come and get me'.
Margeret protested against our negativity, saying that the book was beautifully written. Mark, our ex-member back on a visit, pointed out that being beautifully written on the sentence level is not enough for a novel, that there are many other elements, such as structure, theme etc, that need to be successful, and Doug added, that yes, it needs to convince. Margaret laughed and said that she was convinced and she was engaged by the characters.
Ann however wondered why on earth the novel has been so very popular and successful, and it was suggested that perhaps it appealed to a younger demographic than ourselves. I did wonder afterwards if it is the very self-obsession of the characters that had endeared them to a generation of TikTokers obsessed with lifestyle and image.
Finally, John noted the book's debt to Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls (which we discussed here), another novel about two young girls, an introspective narrator and her more outgoing (and similarly named) friend, in which the narrator becomes involved with a married man - and which Ann said roundly was the far superior book.
February 2026
Black Moses
Alain Mabanckou
Warning: Plot spoil
Margeret's latest suggestion was this widely acclaimed and International Booker long-listed book set in the People's Republic of Congo in the aftermath of the Marxist-Leninist Revolution of the late 1960s. In 1970 our first-person narrator is a boy in a harsh orphanage, taking succour from the pastoral approach of the visiting priest, Papa Moupelo. It is Papa Moupelo who has given him his name, a long name in Moupelo's own language, Lingala, which means 'Thanks be to God, the black Moses is born on the earth of our ancestors' - inevitably shortened to Moses - which imbues Moses with a fundamental if primitive sense of mission and justice. His sense of injustice will lead him to avenge his bullied best friend, Bonaventure, with chilli pepper, which earns him the nickname 'Little Pepper' (the title of the original French edition). One day Papa Moupela fails to appear: the new, anti-religion regime has taken over the orphanage, and there is a suggestion that he may have been disappeared. The harshness increases. Eventually Moses escapes with two others for the metropolis of Pointe-Noire (leaving Bonaventure behind), where their only choice is to join a street gang of petty thieves. Eventually Moses finds a kind of peace with a house of prostitutes, and the madam finds him a job in the docks and a hut in which to live. But then, during a purge of 'Zairian whores', Moses turns up one day to find the brothel house razed to rubble and the prostitutes 'disappeared'. Distraught, Moses descends into madness, vainly consulting various doctors, eventually dressing himself as a latter-day Robin Hood and setting out with a knife to avenge his 'little adopted family'.
On the whole we found the book an interesting and mainly enjoyable read. It is written in a kind of naif yet insightful and skewering wit, which we all particualrly enjoyed - Moses refers to his 'kilometrically extended name' - and Ann commented on the skill of the translator, Helen Stevenson, in capturing it. However, we all found the book 'front-heavy', as I think Clare put it. It is divided into two Parts of equal length. Part 1 deals with the time in the orphanage, covering in detail the few years of Moses' early adolescence and the fascist idiocies of the regime. The pace is consequently measured, and in fact Doug said he found the section repetitive. It ends with Moses's escape. Part 2 opens when Moses has already been in the street gang for three years, and goes on to cover the years right into his middle age, its narrative sweep thus pacier and more eventful. There seems no real narratorial significance in the initial leap, and the absence of any portrayal of Moses's arrival in the city and his adjustment to life there seemed to all of us a lack after the detailed treatment in Part One. In fact, as Doug pointed out, Moses's escape at the end of Part 1 seems rushed and inadequately explained, as if the writer was just impatient to get on with the street scenes, and it is perhaps telling that most reviews give the impression that the more eventful Part 2 constitutes the main bulk of the book.
Doug said that although Moses's mix of childish, sometimes clumsy, yet insightful and skewering vocabulary is amusing, there are sentiments and a political understanding expressed in Part 1 that wouldn't in fact have been available to a young boy, and which smacked of the author's own voice and perspective. Others agreed. I thought this could be excused to some extent by the fact that, as we discover at the end, the whole thing is a memoir written by Moses in a penitentiary for the criminally insane, and the problem perhaps was that there was no indication of this at the start to make us read the book in that context.
At the end of the book, Moses is back where he started: the penitentiary is built on the sight of the orphanage, and Bonaventure is still there (using a different name, rather than that of the father who abandoned him), still obsessed with the planes flying over and expecting one some day to take him away. That, as someone pointed out, should make for a very sad book - and on one level it does - but there is the feel of survival in the lively prose of this fictional memoir, and of course the very act of writing it constitutes for Moses a triumph.
March 2026
When I Sing, Mountains Dance
Irene Sola
Ann suggested this book alongside Lord of the Rings (we take turns to make suggestions, and always suggest two for the rest to choose from), since the blurb implies a similar kind of scenario: a group of people, in this case a family, 'grow[ing] up wild' on the land, in this case on the 'hulking Pyrenees'. In fact, it turned out to be a very different kind of book altogether.
It does indeed begin, as the blurb tells us, with the death by lightning of a young farmer, Domenec, and we do get to learn of the fates of his family as the years go by, and it is true that the book ends with a moving reconciliation for one of the family members. But the story of the family is not foregrounded throughout the book, and the point is to illustrate that it is only one thread in an interconnected biosphere. Domenec's death is related dispassionately, not by any conventional narrator, but by the collective voice of the clouds that bring the lightning that kill him. They note the ghosts of women once killed as witches approaching the body and then picking up the chanterelle mushrooms for which he had been foraging, and moving on. The next chapter is related by one of those ghosts, telling of how they were tortured. Each chapter is devoted to a new and different narrator, human or non-human: we hear Domenec's widow, a roe deer, the mountains themselves telling the tale of their geological upheaval, a ghost of the Spanish Civil War, and the chanterelles with their (symbolically) interconnected mycelium: 'the cap of one is the cap of us all ... the spores of one are the spores of us all ... the story of one is the story of us all'.
This might all sound difficult, fragmented, and possibly pretentious, but in fact the book avoids entirely the archness to which it might have succumbed, while reading like a fluid dream. We were all captivated by the lyrical yet earthy prose, the authentic feel of every viewpoint and the author's astounding empathy. The chapter taking the viewpoint of a dog made us laugh out loud - we agreed it was one of best and funniest things we'd ever read. It seemed to us that the translation from the Catalan, by Mara Faye Lethem, was excellent. Ann and Doug were very taken by the fairytale and folklore references threaded throughout, which add to the dream-like quality and underpin the sense of history and time. The book constitutes a moving plea for respect for the earth and its ecosystem, and we were indeed both delighted and moved.
May 2026
Held
Anne Michaels
Clare suggested this book, remembering that she had liked Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces when we read it. The book has been hugely praised by critics and was shortlisted for the Booker, but I'm afraid that our reaction was markedly different.
It begins with very short sections, some only one sentence long, which take the viewpoint of John, a soldier lying wounded in Cambrai, France, in 1917, and thinking he is dying. These sections consist of the aphoristic thoughts that move through his mind - 'We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?' (This is the very first two-sentence section, which poses the central question of the book); 'We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known' - and memories of his lover, Helena, and his mother.
Clare said she liked the novel when she began it, since the preoccupations and the fragmented structure were suitable for the mentality of an apparently dying man, but the whole novel turned out to be structured and pitched in this sonorous way, and she quickly tired of it. There was unanimous agreement in the group. In this style, the novel moves non-chronologically between the years of the twentieth century and between European countries, picking up on moments in the lives of the war-surviving John and his wife Helena, of Anna, the daughter Helena conceives before John commits suicide, of Anna's daughter Mara, who, like Anna before her, is a doctor working in war zones, and of those with whom they connect, sometimes only briefly, including also in its sweep others unconnected with them: Eastern European dissidents on the run and a period in the life of Marie Curie.
The problem was, we found, that in spite of this theoretical sweep, it was hard to distinguish between the characters: every character thought and talked the same, asking each other and themselves over and over the same question about life and death posed at the beginning. In fact, every character talks and thinks as the author writes. People complained that it was hard sometimes to tell whether thoughts were meant to be those of a character, or were simply those of the author, and it seemed to me that there was no real distinction, they were indeed conflated. This is perhaps a legacy of Anne Michaels' prior and parallel practice in poetry, with its mode of direct authorial address. There is also much that seems arcane and abstruse, perhaps more admissible in poetry which requires a more contemplative mode of reading than does a novel. There is constant reference to scientific theories that potentially pose the possibility of unknown dimensions, not all of it the kind of science that is commonly known. On the second page of the novel, the wounded John (or perhaps the author?) contemplates:
Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.
None of us knew what Lagrangian meant, and those of us who Googled it encountered an explanation that was not easy for the non-scientifically or -mathematically trained, and gave up trying to relate it to John's situation. There are also, as some of us had found in Fugitive Pieces, statements that sounded profound, but that, once examined, made no sense:
Even when he had no tears left, he would have tears for Anna.
We also found the characters and their relationships unrealistically, indeed sentimentally idealised: every character loves their parent unconditionally and every parent their child; each sexual partnership is perfect and instantly established by love at first sight and a tacit knowledge of permanent togetherness, with an almost fetishistic stress on the beauty or sentimental value of women's handbags and scarves, and bonds frequently sparked or sealed within the romantic ambience of snow. Every character - apart, as Clare pointed out, from the artist Helena poses for in later life - is good: well-intentioned and loyal and capable of huge love (and intent on grasping the truth about the continuance of life and love after death).
Nearly every critic praising the book has mentioned its 'beautiful prose' - a suspiciously vague term in itself - but we found the prose simply pretentious. We also found the whole thing static, repetition being its essence, with its movement forward and back in time without any obvious further insight to the same central question, and with the lack of differentiation between the characters - even the names are passed down the generations, increasing the effect.
Critics have pointed out that the book proposes love as the crucial antidote to the horrors of war with which it begins, and which Anna and her daughter Mara experience as doctors. But as I said to the group, in reality things are not so clear-cut and binary. Relationships and people are far more complex than the idealised versions presented here, and it is indeed the same human flaws that complicate personal relationships (and which novels classically examine) that also lead in the wider context to war. Apart from which, the horrors of war are not truly tackled in this book: they are not directly depicted. Although John does eventually commit suicide (prompted by a realisation that he has not in fact captured proof of the afterlife in his professional photos), at the beginning we are party not to his physical pain or the horrors he experienced prior to the moment, but to his somewhat removed thoughts and memories. Some of the horrors Mara and her war-photographer lover Alan have seen are recalled, but only from the comfort of the home to which they have returned, and as the thing from which their love does indeed cushion them. We are meant to believe that they have been war-traumatised, but there is little evidence apart from a certain disillusion about life on Alan's part, greatly eased by their love. And, as I said to the group, their memories of the moment of their meeting seriously romanticise the explosion in which they are involved at the time:
In the ruins, the smoke chafed the back of her throat, but it was dry and quiet and she slept like a stone. When she woke, she saw him sleeping next to her. Later Alan would tell the story of how he had found her. But she would never forget the feeling that she had found him, simply by opening her eyes.
Our members Ann and John both noted similarities in the solipsism of this book with that we found in Virginia Woolf's The Waves. The group as a whole pondered the fact that this book has received such lavish praise, and Ann said she felt it was a similar instance of the emperor's new clothes. I noted that some of the reviewers had caught the soulfulness of tone and impenetrability of meaning, the Sunday Times declaring that 'Michaels inhabits episodic moments with a quantum quality', which made everyone laugh. Margeret said roundly in conclusion that if she'd wanted to ponder at length whether life goes on after death, she'd have gone to church.
June 2026
Soldier, Sailor
Claire Kilroy
This book (Doug's suggestion), an interior address by a young mother (the Soldier of the title) to her first baby (Sailor), portrays the physical and psychological battle of new motherhood for a young professional woman. Suddenly ripped by the advent of her baby from her social position she is swamped by the conflicting feelings of, on the one hand, loss of identity and entrapment, exhaustion and resentment, and, on the other, overwhelming love for and identity with her child. It is written in an urgent, sometimes desperate, often savagely witty and utterly stylish prose, and Clare, Doug and I found it entirely compelling. (I wished I had written it!)
It charts the sheer loneliness of an experience the narrator's husband cannot share and the stress on the marriage; her mad bid in the very early days to escape through suicide, thwarted by the overriding bond with her baby; the relief (and temptation) of a chance encounter with an old male university friend, custodian of her former identity; and finally, as the child reaches toddlerhood and is no longer so utterly dependent, an adjustment to something more like normality, but also to a knowledge of being deeply changed, bonded to her child forever.
Clare and I both found it captured exactly our own experience of new (and lasting) motherhood, but Doug who has obviously not had the experience, said he too found it entirely convincing, engrossing and moving. Less enthusiastic about the book were John and Ann. John said he had found it boringly repetitive, which seemed staggering to us. It is true that the author portrays with huge honesty the repetitive tedium of looking after a baby, but for us she does it so wittily and with such stylish panache that the reading of it is anything but tedious. She is especially wry about the constant superior and casual advice she receives from her husband who cannot possibly know of her subjective experience, or even of the practicalities, referring to him with savage irony at one point as 'the Child Development Specialist', and at another as 'the Professor of Paediatrics'. As they prepare to leave to go out she asks him to pack the nappy bag:
'With what?'
'The stuff he needs.'
'What does he need?'
'His stuff,' I had repeated... 'The stuff. You know, all the stuff.' But my husband didnt know all the stuff. How would he? Stuff was for the little people. The soother, the spare soother, the nappies, the wipes, the barrier cream, change of clothes, Calpol, a snack, a spare snack for when the first snack was rejected. I'd tried to say the words but there were so many of them it'd be quicker to pack the bag myself.
When she worries that her toddler isnt eating, her husband tells her: 'You need to calm down. He won't eat because you're stressing him out.' She thinks:
It was so easy for him behind his desk. He hadn't lain on his side that morning extending bits of toast under the table while you were playing. You had chewed the first buttered soldier and inserted the second into the cabin of your fire engine.
As her experience goes on, the narrator becomes more and more aware, and angry, and ironic, about the continuing power imbalance between men and women exposed by the basic fact of childbirth. Out with the pram on a country lane she is confronted by a middle-aged man who refuses to move for her, and when she stands her ground, calls her stupid. She rages:
...although the dicks themselves blur, the nature of their dickdom is coming into sharper focus. That man saw fit to chastise me because he had never pushed a pram. He had made no contribution to the enormous effort required to raise a child and regarded me as an obstacle in his path, an obstruction to his business, which, unlike mine, was important. So he pranced around like a country squire reinforcing as best he could the ideologies of patriarchy, Empire ... all along I had believed I was equal, when all along I was not, because all along I had been treading towards this great crevasse called motherhood, and now that I was looking up at the world through my brain fog, I could see that to have presumed Empire and patriarchy were dead was naive at best. Not only were they alive and well: they had won. Trump and Putin were in office...
Ann said perhaps it was because she hadn't had children herself, but she kept feeling a bit annoyed with the narrator, wondering why she didn't get help, by which she meant practical help. The book doesn't spell this out, but Clare and I pointed out that as a professional woman the protagonist was clearly very much alone with new motherhood, as we had both been, far from any family who could help out. Ann did then muse that it was of course traditionally different, when people lived in communities with all the women rallying round to help out new mothers. But it is perhaps the psychological and physical effects of childbirth that are the biggest burden and which can't be shared, and are the biggest thing for those outside of the experience to appreciate: the phenomenon commonly called postnatal depression, which is a combination of hormonal flux, physical trauma and exhaustion, and the unprecedented emotional shock of the overwhelming responsibility for another helpless human being with whom, for the first time ever, you utterly identify. When her husband suggests she should take the baby to the Baby and Toddler Group, she muses,'It was difficult to explain the obstacles to my husband, because they weren't obstacles he recognised. They weren't obstacles I'd recognised before having you, the whole three-steps-forwards, two-steps-back racket.' At another point she comments that people think looking after a baby is simple: 'I know because I once thought so myself.'
When her teething child wakes in the night and begins screaming, before she remembers the health insurance doctor line the narrator panics:
I didn't know what to do and turned one way then the other. Had the abscess burst? Would that poison the blood? Is that what this fever was? Sepsis? 'I'm trying to sleep!' your father yelled from the bedroom.
It was the powerlessness that was so frightening. The middle of the night and my child was in crisis. There was no one I could run it past to check it was okay, it was normal, there was nothing to worry about.
There was some lack of sympathy over this - after all, it was said, the child soon recovers - but both Clare and I had had the same experience and found it entirely emotionally truthful.
A really great book, in the opinion of some of us: emotionally truthful and moving, stylish, funny and exceptionally intelligent.
