Blue Giant is a 2026 novel by Australian author Jordan Prosser.

Abigail Horne feels destined for greatness, and on leaving college, fashion design seems to be the field in which this greatness will be expressed. But a visit to an Asian clothing factory soon shatters that dream. When subsequent forays into tiger preservation and yoga teaching peter out, Abby seems to reach the point where she feels too important for mere achievement – always more disappointing than the preceding aspiration. Her ambitions then become almost entirely untethered from reality. She decides to enter a competition to win a place on a one way journey to Mars, organised by a supposedly visionary tech billionaire. Abby can now enjoy feeling superior to anyone trying to achieve an Earth-bound goal.

So, you could say that Blue Giant is about the nature of success. But can the book itself be described as a success?

Maybe the verdict could go either way.

An initially funny, ultimately bleak journey from dream to disappointment, undertaken by a smug, abrasive, sometimes violent protagonist who is unlikely to carry a reader with her.

A sparky, hilarious, powerful exploration of progress, at a time when human success seems to be more of a curse than a blessing.

In passing judgement, I feel we should follow the example of final chapter Abby, who, while sitting sadder and wiser in a restaurant, decides that having a humble something is better than having skies-the-limit nothing. She looks at her fellow diners, who no doubt harbour all kinds of workaday aspirations, and decides that the belittling of others is not a healthy basis for a sense of self worth.

“Once upon a time she would have sneered at their little lives, their meaningless striving… tonight, though, she wished them well.”

In my book reviews I’d rather not sneer, given the choice. According to the philosophy of success that Abby eventually comes to embrace, writing is a brave act, undertaken even when we know the end result will always fall short of that great potential book that somehow never gets written. Nevertheless, a real book is better than a potential, perfect, nonexistent book. That’s what I tell myself anyway, when I read one, or even try to write one.

The Hopkins Manuscript by R.C. Sherriff is a 1939 dystopian science fiction novel. Scientists discover that the moon is going to collide with Earth. We watch events unfold via the memoirs of one Edgar Hopkins, former school teacher, now retired to a West Country village, pursuing interests in poultry breeding and amateur astronomy.

This is not a story that makes sense on a realistic level. The process of the Moon crashing into Earth, and its aftermath, is plainly ridiculous. But then a lot of old science fiction is ridiculous, as is a lot of new science fiction, if not now then in a few years time. Not much science fiction will remain scientifically accurate, even if it was somewhere close in the first place. This is fitting really, when truths in science always tend to be replacing earlier truths.

So is that a problem? Is it a problem that Shakespeare in As You Like It refers to the world as almost six thousand years old, because that was the prevailing wisdom in his day?

Maybe there is something else about a story that lasts better than the facts of it. For example, we could look at The Hopkins Manuscript as allegory. I wouldn’t be the first to suggest that the Moon disaster might be intended to symbolise World War One, followed by reconstruction, followed by people engaging in absurd nationalism, causing a slide towards another war. Of course you could question the value of complicating the issue by getting all enigmatic and symbolic. Why not just write about World War One? Well, maybe you could answer that in terms of putting a manuscript into a different font to help check for mistakes and typos. The change helps you look with new eyes, and possibly see errors more easily

So there may be some historical allegory going on. Personally I prefer to see the story’s factually absurd events as standing in for the more realistic experience of witnessing a falling apart of what we assume is stable and permanent. We all have our own universes where reliable moons sit in steady skies. It’s impossible to think of the Moon falling. And yet it does. I think we all know that feeling, or we will know it at some point.

So, The Hopkins Manuscript is ridiculous. And yet maybe there is something to be said for ridiculous – when life is like that sometimes.

On the orders of his aunt Agatha, Bertie Wooster is obliged to visit a country house busy with romantic confusion amongst multiple couples. He endeavours to sort things out, whilst saving himself from marriage to a woman he doesn’t love.

Amongst all the chaos, Jeeves tries to comfort Bertie by quoting Marcus Aurelius:

“Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.”

Bertie is not best pleased to be told this, The idea of a great web is meant to be comforting, but for most of the book the opposite is true. There is a sense of hopeless entanglement. The mess of circumstance has a web-like feel of one problem leading to another in a disastrous chain reaction. It is not until late on, once Jeeves has done some of his arranging, that the web changes its nature, to become something where solution leads to solution in a virtuous circle.

So is the web of fate a spiders web where we are trapped, or a knitted hammock where we can find peace and repose? Well, take your pick. The Mating Season explores both interpretations. I don’t think you will be too surprised, if you know anything at all about Wodehouse, to hear that the final outcome suggests the optimistic view. Nevertheless, we have to go through the tangles of pessimism to get there. And while the tangles are comedic, they do nevertheless explore the light and shade inherent in the idea of fate. Not bad for frothy comedy.

Learning to Swim is a 1999 novel by Claire Chambers. I was surprised to learn that it won the Parker Romantic Novel of the Year Award. It didn’t really come over as a romance to me, more a very good coming of age story.

Young Abigail Onions lives a conventional life in suburban South London, doing quite well at school, practising her cello, having a few problems making friends. She meets Frances, and is introduced to her bohemian family. Frances’ brother Rad is a presence in the background, then the foreground. They all go through school together, enjoying some happy times, enduring a number of disasters, water often common to both. Just as school years come to an end, events split the group, before a reunion between Abigail and Rad about a decade later.

Despite the title of the book, Abigail never learns to swim. But without giving anything away, she does eventually learn that if you fall in the water, it’s best not to struggle and thrash about. Drifting and floating will make it easier for someone to come to your aid.

In general terms this water survival philosophy is expressed as:

“Over the years I’d discovered that the key to contentment is low expectations.”

Learning not to struggle will help Abigail survive, and ironically might also allow her to achieve her most heartfelt desires. Low expectations aren’t the same as not trying. Grown up music teacher Abigail tells a reluctant cello student that a musician is the product not of great breakthroughs, but of hours of mundane practice over many years. The thing is to practice everyday, like doing the housework. Do that for long enough and you’ll be a musician.

I took the same approach to writing this review. Just write another one. Don’t try too hard. Float through it.

This book is a great read, funny, moving, and in its own self-effacing way, wise.

Everything is backwards in a Jeeves novel. Most stories involve some kind of desire which seeks to be satisfied, mystery to be solved, love to be won. The central character here, Bertie Wooster, doesn’t want anything. It’s the people around him who want things. In this book, Boko seeks love. Florence is determined to better herself intellectually. Uncle Percy schemes to merge his shipping line with another shipping line, to make a bigger shipping line. Bertie himself is just buffeted around by these people’s wants.

Bertie seems a dissolute young man interested only in ease and comfort. He has no curiosity, no drive to seek anything beyond his pleasant routine centred on the Drones Club. But his lack of interest in love, money, improving books, also amounts to a kind of profound innocence. He cannot be corrupted. He is immune to all forms of temptation or greed. He has enough money, love, wisdom. Enough is fine. He is used by others who want things, by Uncle Percy to make his shipping company deal work, by Boko to win Nobby as a wife, by Florence who wants to make a suitor jealous. But Bertie himself has something that all these people lack. He has contentment. The best of him comes out of the worst, like day coming out of night.

Jeeves in one of his quotes gives us George Bernard Shaw: ‘Fate drives us all to find our chiefest good in what we can, and not in what we would.’

In the Jeeves and Wooster mirror world, the superficial becomes significant. These books are wonderful examples of the serious potential of comedy, always such an underestimated, self-effacing genre of literature.

May We Feed the King, a 2026 novel by Rebecca Perry, opens with a medieval palace hiring a curator to dress its rooms to celebrate an important anniversary. This curator is all over the details of her job. She is particularly interested in representations of food, using various cleverly crafted fake food items to give the illusion of long-lost meals in progress.

The curator’s background research in the palace archives takes us on an imaginative journey through the reign of a reluctant king. This account takes up much of the book, presenting a story based on much gossip and hearsay. Even contemporary witnesses could not be sure what was really going on.

I was intrigued that the curator, initially a fussy eater, starts to develop a good appetite through the course of her project. Maybe she comes to terms with the fact that real food does not hang around for long. We live in a world where what keeps us alive is perishable. The curator is clearly dealing with relationship dramas in the background. Although there is plenty in life we can’t rely on, food, such a here-today-and-gone-tomorrow resource, is ironically what keeps us going.

This book might be about history, but I preferred to think it was about finding something we can rely on in a world where nothing lasts.

An interesting read, brutal in parts, sometimes confusing. It’s more a bruised windfall than shiny, freshly picked Braeburn – and all the better for that.

Right Ho, Jeeves is the second full length Jeeves and Wooster novel, published in October 1934.

In this book the order of things is challenged, and I don’t mean in the usual sense of modern governments wanting to offer opportunities for greater social mobility. In this book the person who gets above their station is not the servant but the master. After Bertie returns from a long holiday in Cannes, Jeeves discovers a white mess jacket with brass buttons, a memento of the trip. Bertie announces that he intends wearing this item routinely in London. The servant insists the jacket is unsuitable. The master resists. Big mistake.

This sets up a foolish challenge to the status quo. There are various relationship dramas going on amongst Bertie’s friends. Scholar of newts, Gussie Fink Nottle, is too shy to propose to Madeline Bassett. Tuppy Glossop has broken off his engagement with cousin Angela. So Bertie, still resentful about the mess jacket, dismisses Jeeves as the authority in these matters, and decides to sort everything out himself. The scene of his struggles is Brinkley Court, home of his Aunt Dahlia. Things go wrong, with the terrible inevitability of a chain reaction. This includes a riotous school prize-giving, where Gussie, full of the alcohol which Bertie prescribed as a way of providing courage, makes a compete exhibition of himself.

Jeeves sits back, watches as everything goes to pieces, then moves in to sort out the mess and punish insolence. This carefully organised slap down, involves a plan that appears to go awry, only for a deeper plan to go perfectly. Jeeves persuades Bertie to sound the Brinkley Court fire alarm late at night, in the supposed hope that acting on instinct, Tuppy will rush to rescue Angela, Gussie performing the same service for Madeline. In the event these individuals are just part of a disgruntled crew of evacuated residents and house guests milling about on a cold evening. And then in what appears to be a further unravelling, it is impossible to get back inside the house, because the servants are all at a dance at a neighbouring property, and the absent butler apparently has the key. Now the deeper plan comes into effect as Jeeves sends Bertie off on a gardener’s bike to the venue of the servants’ dance, eight miles away. He is supposed to retrieve the key, which Jeeves actually already has in his possession. The idea is that the entire company at Brinkley Court, now united in their loathing of incompetent Bertie, will reconcile their differences. This is exactly what happens.

Jeeves then accidentally on purpose puts a hot iron through the mess jacket, and his revenge is complete. Bertie, exhausted, a beaten man, with a very sore bottom from a spanking administered through bike riding, is in no position to resist, meekly accepting a restored order of things.

And this is such an interesting conception of order, a back to front arrangement where social levels are mirror images of each other, where things can seem all wrong, when they actually working out just as planned. Gussie’s speech at the prize giving is both a total disaster, and a glorious success, in the sense of providing the best entertainment the pupils have ever had at school. The reassurance of structure is combined with a freedom where anything can happen.

Next time plans seems to be unravelling, Right Ho Jeeves might be a book to remember. The same goes for times when you might be discontented with your lot in life. Maybe we should accept that no matter what happens, we will always be both master and servant, our failures somehow linked with our successes.

When I read people’s reactions to Jeeves and Wooster books, there’s usually mention of joy, positivity, everything working out, and no one really getting hurt. All this is true. Who am I to spoil a good thing.

But then, would a sense of darker undertones serve to lessen the books? If they were nothing more than frothy accounts of high jinks amongst the 1920s/1930s smart set, would I admire them as I do? Would anyone admire them as they do, without light and shade, whether shade is consciously acknowledged or not?

Now that I’ve got that of my chest we can have a look at Thank You, Jeeves, published in 1934. This was the first novel length Jeeves and Wooster story, and ironically it begins with Jeeves leaving Bertie’s employment due to the young master’s stubborn insistence on practising the banjolele. Jeeves is apparently a servant, but when his wishes are thwarted there is going to be trouble.

After Jeeves resigns, Bertie is left to his own devices. With a replacement valet called Brinkley, he goes off to live in a seaside cottage in Chuffnel Regis. Here Bertie gets tangled up with the affairs of old school friend, and Jeeves’s new employer, Lord Chuffnel, who is hosting American tycoon, J. Washburn Stoker. Chuffy hopes sell his mansion to Stoker, and propose marriage to his daughter, Pauline. When both deals threaten to fall apart, an apparent challenge to Stoker’s inheritance forces through the mansion sale, and removes any objection to the marriage plans. Both concessions are required to keep happy a psychiatrist friend of Chuffy’s, a vital expert witness proving that Stoker’s benefactor was of sound mind. A helpful side effect of all this is the setting free of Bertie from any risk of having to marry Pauline himself.

Bertie thinks the challenge to the inheritance is a stroke of luck. But no – Jeeves reveals that he called one of his American friends and arranged the whole thing as a ruse. Bertie realises Jeeves’s brilliance, and embraces the suggestion of his return.

So Bertie is back in his place, a ‘pawn in the game’ as the young master himself humbly admits. The former cosy arrangement is restored – Bertie as a non-banjolele playing, not very bright bachelor, an ideal employer for Jeeves, easy to dominate with intellect, with no wife around to relegate a powerful valet back into an ordinary servant role, or maybe replace him completely.

After Jeeves reveals his scheming, I couldn’t help wondering whether he has admitted to all his machinations. The replacement valet, Brinkley, turns out to be a drunken revolutionary. He chases Bertie with a knife and burns down the Chuffnel Regis cottage. Such a terrible experience discourages taking a risk on a new valet ever again. And Brinkley’s destructive antics destroy the hated banjolele, which was in the cottage. That’s convenient. It is hard not to question the nature of these events, given the planning of other situations that favoured the all-knowing Jeeves. It’s a testament to the quiet shades of this book that I found myself engaged in such conjectures..

I’m now going to admit that the Jeeves and Wooster books sometimes remind me of Casablanca, written a few years after Thank You, Jeeves, in 1938. Wealthy refugees fleeing wartime Europe are trapped in neutral Casablanca. Do they make some compromises and sit tight? Or do they try to escape? Bar owner Rick Blaine takes the route of acceptance and accommodation, until he eventually works the system to help someone get away.

Struggle against your lot, or accept what you have? Shades of this conundrum don’t just apply to Bertie. Brinkley is a revolutionary causing mayhem. Jeeves, meanwhile, accepts the system, choosing manipulation from within for his own advantage, and sometimes the advantage of others. He is a Rick Blaine whose power to make things better comes from his cynicism.

This book is an easy evening at Rick’s Bar in the 1930s. The band is playing, Sam is tinkling the ivories. But there’s a lot of hidden stuff going on amongst the apparently carefree clientele. Rick is keeping a watchful eye.

I’ve have often read P.G. Wodehouse but never got round to reviewing one of his books. The idea of trying was unsettling. How would it be done? I thought vaguely along the lines of arguing for hidden depths. But in the world of Bertie Wooster, depths, literary or otherwise, would be impolite at best, hazardous at worst. In The Code of the Woosters, characters displaying deep wells of intensity do not come over well. There’s aspiring fascist dictator, Roderick Spode, and incurable romantic Madeline Bassett. Easy-going Bertie is always struggling to avoid getting dragged down by these fanatics. Spode, disdainful of happy-go-lucky clubmen, is pushing for arrest and imprisonment. Madeline, under the impression that Bertie loves her madly, keeps proposing marriage.

While novels are often built around a central character trying to achieve something, Bertie has no aspirations beyond muddling along in his accustomed pleasant manner, going to the Drones Club and enjoying the cooking of Anatole, his Aunt Dahlia’s wonderful chef. The worst are full of passionate intensity, as Yeats put it, while Bertie feels at his best in lacking all conviction.

Well, I say that, but Bertie does have one conviction. He subscribes to the ‘Code of the Woosters’, whereby you should ‘never let a pal down’. A person who lives happily without aims finds himself in constant moral conundrums when pals try to recruit him in their plotting and scheming to achieve their own much desired ambitions, whether that’s getting married, procuring some silly milk jug as part of a silverware collection, or running financially precarious women’s magazines. Bertie tries to help while maintaining the Wooster neutrality. And in the end he will go to great lengths to protect his humble non-aspirations. If Bernie lives merely for Anatole’s cooking then he does so with gusto. At one point he is ready to go to prison for his principles in this regard. Even moderation can be carried to extremes it appears. And by the same token, there are occasions when hardliners seem slippery pragmatists in comparison to Bertie. They also, in their ridiculous strength of feeling, reveal themselves as superficial and silly compared to him.

In Yeats’ poem, which mentions the worst being full of passionate intensity, we are given the bleak news that ‘the centre cannot hold’, but in P.G. Wodehouse the centre and the extremes end up sharing attributes so that everything balances out in the end. Moderate people might not seem strong enough to win out against the Spodes of this world, and yet the centre eventually pulls everything towards it, under the influence a kind of benign gravity. Maybe that is why these books feel so reassuring, making them a great choice of reading when times are difficult, which is most of the time.

The Correspondent is a 2025 epistolary novel by Virginia Evans, winner of the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer. Letter writing has been a passion since she was young. Her letters have gone out to all sorts of people – friends and family obviously, but also to famous authors – P.L. Travers, Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, Larry McMurtry, amongst others. And these people reply. So that was fun. It was also interesting. Usually we think of a novel as a one way method of communication. Here it’s much more of a conversation.

Authoring is different to letter writing. A letter is for one person. A book has to try and manage the trick of feeling relevant to lots of people at the same time. And when you review a book, you are dealing with something that has become separate from the person who wrote it, which is maybe why people write bad reviews so easily. They forget that an actual individual spent years at a desk somewhere tapping on a keyboard. So there is an impersonality on both sides. The Correspondent reminds us that there are real people involved, and a novel is an invitation to conversation between them. Certainly I feel that in writing down my thoughts about a book – replying to the author in effect – I get more out of it. And fittingly there are discussion topics included at the end of The Correspondent.

Maybe it is good to be reminded that an author is an actual person, just like a reader. This book brings those two usually distant correspondents closer together. Certainly, mutual understanding is a major theme of Virginia Evans’ book. There, I have used her name. Well done, Virginia.

The Correspondent is funny, moving and interesting on the business of communication. What’s not to like? And it gives good book recommendations – I’m going to read Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry at some point.