The elements of good storytelling.

John Boyne’s elements quartet

“The first thing I do when I arrive on the island is change my name.”

So begins the first novella of John Boyne’s quartet – and I’m hooked. The stories, Water, Earth, Fire, and Air, were published separately between 2023 and 2025, are cleverly and subtly interconnected, but hold as stand-alone works. “Each book looks at sexual crime from a different perspective,” says the author, “enabling, complicity, perpetrator, and victim.” Written in first-person by four separate narrators, the four novellas feature characters dealing with past trauma and looking for some measure of contentment in the present.  

The titular element of each book plays its part within the story. Water, for example, is set on a remote Irish island where Willow has gone to live a hermetic existence. Evan, the narrator of Earth, is confronting the earthy consequences of his past traumas and actions. There is also a thematic connection to the earth with the nature of his career as a professional footballer – his life-skill ‘grounded’ in his feet. In Fire the main protagonist, Freya, is a surgeon specialising in skin grafts: “…after all, a doctor in a burns unit should know better than to play with fire.” The last in the series, Air, is narrated by Aaron – the story beginning thirty thousand feet in the air, as he travels back to Ireland with his fourteen-year-old son to meet a woman who isn’t expecting them. You might have picked here that the initial letter of each narrator’s name matches their respective book title.

I watched an interview with John Boyne where he talked about creating characters in novels.

“You have to make your characters as ambiguous, as complex as possible –

because all of us in life are complex people. Nobody is really a monster or a saint. Most of us are somewhere in the middle trying to do our best. We’re all capable of moments of great kindness but we probably all have moments we’re ashamed of in our lives – that’s just what makes us human.”

John Boyne.

Boyne never planned to write this as a series – after having previously written some lengthy novels his intention was to write a shortish novella. But as he mapped out the plot for Water – the story of an enabler in sexual crime, he realised there was a broader exploration needed to look at the consequences from four different perspectives. This led to the creation of the four novellas with their respective elemental theme. With the order of the sequence, Boyne felt it was important to finish with the victim/survivor. To finish with some hope.

“You can go through these terrible experiences; you can have these terrible things happen to you – but you can survive them. You do not have to give every minute of your life over to the abuser. You can find peace.”

John Boyne.

Boyne took on a logistical challenge in writing these four novellas, each worthy and compelling as individual works, yet he found masterful ways to weave strings of connection across the series. The writing is intelligent and humane, and the whole achingly sad. Closing the last page of Air, I sighed audibly. Fitting, then, that I should expel a short breath – of air.

All’s well that ends well. Reading list for 2025.

Space-stations, woodcutters, orphans, pumas, and ageing kings.

These are the books I read in 2025, including one I re-read after almost fifty years. Favourites were Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo and Ian McEwan’s What We Can Know. These were closely followed by Collum McCann’s Twist and Annie Proulx’s Barkskins. I’ve written a brief note on each novel – maybe there’s one among them that might appeal to you?

The River is Waiting Wally Lamb

The story is propelled by an unthinkable tragedy that tears a family apart and lands a father in prison. Can he ever be forgiven? Can he forgive himself? Wally Lamb exposes prison life in all its brutality, while throwing light on occasional moments of kindness.

Clear Carys Davies

On a remote Scottish island, the last resident, Ivar, is about to be evicted. John Ferguson is the minister charged with the task of clearing the island. But an unexpected event leads to Ferguson relying on Ivar’s care. In this rugged, inhospitable landscape a tale of surprising tenderness evolves.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store James McBride

A skeleton is found at the bottom of an old well. This murder mystery travels back decades to unravel the secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill. An engaging read bursting with human endeavour, community, and love.

Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte

Told in the first person, Jane Eyre is an orphan in Victorian England where she endures a miserable childhood under cruel relatives. She becomes a self-reliant young woman battling adversity and rebelling at society’s expectation of what her rightful place should be. It is, at heart, a tale of a rebel spirit. “I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.”

Twist Colum McCann

Colum McCann’s Twist begins with a fact that amazed me: Satellites account for only a trickle of internet traffic – nearly all the data is carried in fragile tubes within cables on the sea floor. What happens when a cable breaks and needs to be repaired? And what if the man who is to make repairs is himself broken.

Orbital Samantha Harvey

This book won the Man Booker Prize, 2024. Six astronauts on the International Space Station orbiting the Earth: 16 chapters equate to 16 orbits. In this slim novella Samantha Harvey studies the thoughts of our six weightless travellers and explores the fragility of our blue planet as witnessed through the spacecraft’s windows. On the challenge of writing of the novel, Harvey asked herself: “Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer?”

Jack Meggs Peter Carey

This novel sat on my ‘to read’ pile for many years – unfairly so. Historical fiction set in 1837 London, it’s a lively re-imagining of Dickens’ Great Expectations. Ex-convict Jack Meggs leaves Australia illegally, risking his life in doing so, and returns to London for reasons unknown. There is menace in the character of Meggs: “Orbs of his eyes everywhere reflecting an unearthly flame and glare.”

Intermezzo Sally Rooney

I hadn’t read a Sally Rooney novel – somehow I missed out on the whole Normal People phenomenon. In Intermezzo, Peter and Ivan, brothers of vastly different natures, are dealing with the aftermath of their father’s death. The intermezzo refers to this interlude – the period of grieving and loss. The seeming chasm between the brothers is eventually crossed in a tenderly moving denouement. May have to pick up a copy of Normal People, after all.

Barkskins Annie Proulx

When I eventually put down this 713-page epic, I could feel the razor-sharp edge of the woodsman’s axe and smell the sweet tang of fresh-cut pine. The story begins in the late seventeenth century with two penniless French migrants who must serve three years as wood-cutters – Barkskins – in exchange for land. Unsurprisingly, the native Indians don’t fare well in proceedings as more grasping colonialists arrive. The lumber-men set about greedily clearing North America’s great forests over three centuries – denuding them and leaving in their wake ravaged hills pocked with stumps.

Pine Francine Toon

Gothic and atmospheric thriller set in the Scottish Highlands. Lauren and her father live alone in a small village closed off from the outside world by an encroaching forest. Eery and unsettling, the story opens with the apparition of a lone figure, a woman, in a white dressing gown. The ending, in its deliberate ambiguity, taunts the reader to decide what has occurred.

Kataraina Becky Manawatu

Kataraina is both a sequel and prequel to the author’s acclaimed debut, Aue, which I read last year and very much enjoyed. Like the previous book, Manawatu’s writing is unflinching in its portrayal of violence among families. We cross back and forth in time with a writing style I’d describe as mythic-folk. The reader is never entirely sure what is happening but is drawn along willingly in order to discover the secret – the identity of the murderer.

Arborescence Rhett Davis

A bizarre premise that, through persuasive writing, slowly becomes somehow plausible. People who believe that if they stand still for long enough they will become trees – hence the title: Arborescence. “From her bare feet, small roots reach into the ground, anchoring her. If we tried to pick her up now, we’d need a saw. It would hurt. It might kill her.” One reviewer described the read as ‘mind-bending.’ I concur.

Our Evenings Alan Hollinghurst

Opening in a boarding school where Dave Win, a gentle boy from a middle-class upbringing, meets Giles Hadlow, entitled bully. Over the course of fifty years, Our Evenings follows the boy’s very divergent careers. Dave graduates from Oxford to become a respected, if not uber-successful, actor. Giles, ever the bully, goes on to become an egomaniacal politician: powerful and dangerous. The writing, at once tender and poignant, delivers a well observed account of two lives and deals with themes of class, gay sexuality, race, and politics.

The Hummingbird Effect Kate Mildenhall

Four women connected in a series of time-shifting chapters from the 1930’s Depression era to an uncomfortably imagined 2081. The Hummingbird Effect explores themes of domestic violence, capitalism, fertility (egg-freezing), and the prevalence of AI – the Hummingbird Project is an AI program that is hoped can save mankind. Mildenhall interweaves a complex set of threads that can be occasionally tricky to follow, though her ambition and invention are to be commended.

Dusk Robbie Arnott

Dusk is a puma loose in the wilderness of Tasmania’s highlands – and it’s killing shepherds. Twins, Iris and Floyd, struggling to make a living, hear about the bounty that has been placed on Dusk. Despite the dangers, the pair head for the mountains – and so begins their quest. Robbie Arnott’s prose sparkles with mesmerising detail that captures the mythic beauty and majesty of Tasmania’s vast wilderness.

What We Can Know Ian McEwan

This is my favourite McEwan novel since Enduring Love – although Atonement was excellent, as was Saturday. His latest novel, What We Can Know, is bold in scope –

Travelling between a future world 2119, where Britain has been turned into an archipelago by rising sea waters, then back in time to 2014 where a legendary lost poem is read aloud at a dinner party – and never heard again. It’s part love story, part indictment of a generation that failed to address a looming environmental catastrophe. At the last, typical of McEwan, this compelling novel leaves us with just a glimmer, a tiny flicker, of hope.

King Lear William Shakespeare

I hadn’t read King Lear since high school, so I decided to round out my year’s reading by re-visiting this play about an ageing king. Lear decides to spit his kingdom between his three daughters – providing they agree to flatter him with their praises. Goneril and Regan duly pander to their father’s whims – but the youngest daughter, Cordelia, declines to fawn over him. Cordelia is banished and weds the King of France. Now there’s a start to a story – you just know things aren’t going to end well. This play, written over four centuries ago, got me thinking about the current state of world politics: ageing and flawed autocrats stubbornly holding the reins of power and flouting the rules of decency – you just know things aren’t going to end well.

Happy reading for 2026, everyone.

Buried treasure, murder, apocalypse, and a love story.

Some are calling it McEwan's best novel since Atonement.

It’s the 22^nd Century, and Britain has been broken up into an archipelago as a result of the ‘inundation.’ Thomas Metcalfe, literary scholar, is in search of a famous lost poem written for, and dedicated to, a woman named Vivien. He studies Vivien’s journals and email records written a hundred years before his time looking for clues that might help trace the poem. In the process, he becomes more than a little infatuated by some romanticised notion of this woman, Vivien. Part two of the novel is set in our time, and we are now with Vivien as first person protagonist. Much of what Thomas Metcalfe’s investigation had seemingly uncovered about her is then proven to be flawed. Vivien’s life; her hopes, lusts, and ambitions, propel the second half of the story. We get to know the fleshed-out character that the scholar, for all his meticulous research could only ever speculate on – hence the title: ‘What We Can Know.’ McEwan explores a post-apocalyptic world where sea levels have risen, life expectancy has dropped, the internet is fractured, likewise the world’s manufacturing industries. Oh, and there’s a murder, intricate plot twists, and intrigues aplenty. The writing, with McEwan’s trademark precision, gleams on every page. Here’s Thomas Metcalfe, looking back from the ravaged world of Britain in the 22^nd century, thinking about all that has been squandered:

‘…the past that from here seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems seems whole and precious, when many of humanity’s problems could have been solved. When too few understood how sublime their natural and man-made worlds were.’

A perfect world lost, then, like the precious lost poem the scholar is sifting through historical archives in an effort to find.