What I’m reading, including the 2025 Booker Prize longlist

The UK’s major award season is upon us with the announcement of the longlisted nominees for its Booker Prize. The shortlist of final contenders will be released September 23. The former consists of thirteen novels. The latter six. Typically, I wait for the shortlist to start reading, but this year’s preliminary finalists are particularly appealing.

The Prize website offers a quiz you can take to find out which book to read first, according to your literary tastes. (Take the quiz.)  The result for me was The Land in Winter, which you can read about below. Meanwhile, here are my thoughts on books I’m reading now.

I was mesmerized by this novel on the Booker longlist. The unnamed narrator, a translator and interpreter, actively helps immigrants who come into her orbit, putting herself in risky situations without fear of the consequences to herself. I kept thinking, Aren’t you worried? Don’t you see where this could lead? Her calm, combined with self-awareness and humility, nevertheless felt easy to trust. In one situation, she interprets at the dentist and during a therapy session for a married Kosovar, who’s attracted to her; and in another, she offers a Kurdish poet, who’s being dangerously stalked, residence in her apartment while she and her husband Billy are away. Billy worries for his wife’s safety, encourages her to stop interpreting and instead translate texts. She continues, though, to take risks, and the discord creates marital strife. Misinterpretation takes place in New York City and Tirana, Albania.

The Greek coastal setting in One Boat, also on the Booker longlist, includes an atmospheric town square overlooking boats in the bay, shadowed by mountains and the ruins of an ancient palace. The narrator Teresa first visited the unnamed town after her mother’s death. Now, it’s nine years later. Her father has died and she’s returned. The story interlocks the past visit and the present one, as Teresa reconnects with the residents she first came to know. She sits at a cafe, reading The Iliad and capturing observations in a notebook, which effectively provides insight into her state of mind. Meanwhile, a subtly constructed plotline, concerning a strange conversation with a grieving businessman, slyly fuels a mystery. It’s gripping, the story of his nephew’s murder and his sister’s suicide. The man confesses to Teresa he knows where the murderer lives. There’s so much in this book that I loved. (To be published September 16.)

It seems a little early to be reading about ghosts, as if it should be October; however, this book is coming out soon, September 2, what the publisher writes in the press release as just in time for “spooky season.” Author Alice Vernon states, “I don’t believe in ghosts. And yet.” — which I could say for myself. (The “and yet” happened after I read the excellent Ganbare!: Workshops on Dying by Katarzyna Boni.) I’m in the early pages of Ghosted: A History of Ghost Hunting, and Why We Keep Looking and already swept up in Vernon’s narrative style that’s facts and history and stories within, covering science and spiritual unknowns. From the press release: Vernon “embarks on a journey to encounter a ghost, travelling to some of the UK’s most haunted locations and encouraging readers to interrogate their own skepticism and belief.”  (A review to come next month.)

The Dancing Face is a thriller, released this month, an interesting story about a museum theft of a valuable African mask. Gus, a Black university lecturer in London, plans to return it to its rightful country, Nigeria. He’s not after money, rather achieving awareness that African artifacts acquired by the Brits during colonial rule do not belong in British museums. Of course, the plan goes awry, with Gus’s assistants becoming greedy, and a powerful, conniving millionaire exiled from his native Nigeria – a man who funded the heist — wanting the mask turned over to him. Trickery and secrets create roadblocks. It’s all very clever, and very page-turning. A pet peeve: I don’t like it when narratives over-push the message button, which this one does, the characters too often veering into their opinions about race and colonialism. That said, their views are tautly written, and believable within character, so I sighed a lot but was able to get over my grumbling.

This one I’m very much looking forward to reading. The Land in Winter takes place in England’s West Country, during winter 1962, a story about two married couples living side-by-side. A doctor begins the day with rounds in the village while his pregnant wife wonders about their growing apart. Across the field, a farmer tends to the needs of his dairy cows while his pregnant wife thinks about her role as a farmer’s wife. The dramatic change arrives with violent blizzards, the harshest winter in memory, unraveling the lives of these two couples. From the dustjacket copy: “Where do you hide when you can’t leave home? And where, in a frozen world, can you run to?”  This book will be released November 4.

Finally, I began reading the Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly this past weekend. A new book, it was published August 12. From the book’s description: “Born in 1939, [Stanley] Plumly wrote poems that explored the deep interiors of the human heart and mind against a wide backdrop of cultural and historical events. Profoundly personal yet socially astute, his work is both descriptively exact and allusive, engaging nature and art as well as family and friendship.” Mr. Plumly died in 2019. Here are a few lines from his poem “Middle Distance.”

[a] boy on a barge on canvas is taking
a cloud-white horse to its destination
far downriver. And I am the water.
And the light on the water. And if it
is possible, having also been of
the plowed and planted and replanted earth,
I am the sky domed over the boat boy’s
possible future, when he then arrives
and puts to work all that really matters.