Thoughts on Some Books

I had a pretty good week in reading, and I'd like to tell you about the books I read. 

Some Bright Nowhere is a beautifully written, emotionally resonant novel about love, loss, and the quiet complexities of a long marriage. Ann Packer returns after more than a decade with a story that feels both intimate and universal, a portrait of two people facing the inevitable, and the way one shocking request reframes everything they thought they knew about each other.

Packer’s writing is as graceful and precise as ever. She captures the rhythms of a decades-long relationship with real honesty, including the small kindnesses, the familiar irritations, the enduring affection that deepens even as the body and spirit begin to fade. Eliot’s voice, in particular, is rendered with empathy and depth. His reflections on caregiving, love, and identity feel heartbreakingly true to life.

The novel’s pace is quiet, even meditative, which suits the subject matter but may feel slow to some readers. And while Claire’s “startling request” drives much of the emotional tension, it’s handled with restraint rather than melodrama and might be more an exploration of what love demands of us than a shocking twist. I really disliked Claire and her coven of friends and didn't understand what she wanted in her final days. Maybe I didn't understand her reasoning because I've been lucky enough not to be facing the end of my life, but I mainly felt sorry for her poor husband Eliot.

Ultimately, Some Bright Nowhere is a tender, thoughtful look at what it means to honor another person’s autonomy and to keep loving when love becomes hardest. Fans of Packer’s earlier work, like The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, will recognize her gift for emotional clarity and moral complexity. A moving, quietly powerful return from a writer who understands the human heart. Three and a half stars rounded up.

Thank you to Edelweiss and Harper for providing me with a copy of this book. It was published on November 11, 2025, and there is a Goodreads giveaway for it if you are interested. 

Julian Borger’s I Seek a Kind Person is a deeply moving and meticulously researched family memoir that bridges the personal and historical with impressive grace. What begins as a journalist’s investigation into a long-buried family secret becomes a powerful meditation on survival, silence, and the human capacity for both cruelty and compassion.

When Borger discovers the small newspaper ad that saved his father’s life in 1938 Vienna, he opens a door to a world of lost stories of children sent into exile by desperate parents, families torn apart, and the quiet heroism of strangers who answered those heartbreaking pleas. The author’s background as a journalist serves him well here; his research is exhaustive, and his attention to historical detail exacting. Yet what keeps the book from feeling overly documentary is its emotional core and the empathy Borger extends to both the remembered and the forgotten.

The book moves across continents and generations, weaving together accounts from Vienna, Britain, Shanghai, and beyond. At times, the sheer number of stories and names can feel overwhelming, but that may be true to the chaos of the time and a reflection of the fragmented lives left in the Holocaust’s wake. The passages about Borger’s father, Robert, and his lifelong silence are especially affecting, offering a sensitive portrait of inherited trauma and the difficulty of knowing those who survived by not speaking. 

While occasionally dense and perhaps a bit too detailed in its later chapters, I Seek a Kind Person remains a remarkable act of remembrance, both personal and collective. It’s a testament to the power of archival research, but more importantly, to the persistence of kindness in a world that so often forgets it. This was four stars for me.

Brightly Shining by Ingvild H. Rishøi is exactly the kind of book I’ve been craving: a story filled with gentler, kinder characters even as it faces hard truths head-on.

Christmas is approaching, Ronja’s father is once again out of work, and the family’s stability feels as fragile as ever. When Ronja manages to get him a job selling Christmas trees, it looks like fortune might finally shift, until the pull of the local pub proves stronger than his responsibilities. With social services close to intervening, Ronja and her sister step in, determined to keep their small family intact by selling the trees themselves.

What could easily have been a bleak or overly saccharine story instead becomes something quietly luminous. Rishøi writes with such warmth, tenderness, and deep understanding of the ways children create hope out of even the most precarious situations. Ronja and her sister aren’t idealized; they’re simply good, loyal kids trying their best in a world that hasn’t given them much. And again and again, kindness shows up, sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes in small gestures that feel nothing less than life-saving.

Caroline Waight’s translation deserves special appreciation. Her rendering of Rishøi’s prose is clean and vivid, capturing both the humor and the heartbreak without tipping into sentimentality. The emotional truth of the story shines through in every scene.

Brightly Shining is a novella that carries surprising depth. It’s about addiction and responsibility, certainly, but even more about love, resilience, and the quiet generosity of strangers. For anyone seeking stories where goodness still has a place in the world, this four star book is a bright, moving gift.

Having just finished The Book of Guilt, I’m left with a strong sense of admiration for Catherine Chidgey. This book is ambitious, deftly written, and morally provocative. The author imagines an alternate Britain in 1979, with an unnerving under-current of institutional control and moral ambiguity. I found the world-building compelling; the three teenaged triplet boys in the Sycamore Homes, the daily routines of “The Book of Dreams”, “The Book of Knowledge” and “The Book of Guilt” work as powerful metaphors for surveillance, control and internalised shame.

Vincent’s voice (one of the triplets) is believable and his gradual awakening to the reality around him is quietly haunting. The way Chidgey layers the children’s trust in their "Mothers" with the creeping sense of something deeply wrong was, for me, the strongest part of the novel. Beyond that, the themes of dehumanization, complicity, science-ethical reckoning and what it means to be “other” in society feel both timely and deeply human. The prose, while at times understated, often glowed with small moments of vivid imagery: e.g., the description of the gazing ball “shimmering in the ferns like a great eye” was one of my favorite touches.

While Vincent’s sections were the most gripping, some of the other narrative threads (for example the Minister of Loneliness subplot) felt less emotionally grounded in comparison. The shift in perspective is clever, but I found that I was more invested in the boys’ story than the parallel ones. As a result, the latter parts of the novel, while thematically rich, didn’t quite land with the full force I was expecting.

If you enjoy literary-dystopian fiction with strong moral underpinnings, this four star book is one you’ll want to read. It has shocks, slowly-gathering dread, and characters you care about, and it leaves you with lingering questions about power, difference, and guilt. Both Remote Sympathy (the only other book I have read by Chidgey) and The Book of Guilt showcase her remarkable ability to explore moral complicity and the quiet, human face of institutional cruelty, but they do so in very different settings. Remote Sympathy is historical, set in and around a Nazi concentration camp, where Chidgey examines denial, guilt, and the uneasy intimacy between perpetrators and victims. The Book of Guilt moves into a near-future dystopia, an invented Britain where social control and moral judgment are systematized through eerie institutions. Together, they form a compelling diptych: one rooted in the atrocities of the past, the other in the moral dangers of the present and future.

I hope your weekend ahead includes some good reading!