Held is a 2023 novel by Anne Michaels, shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s a loosely linked collection of stories, starting with the wandering thoughts of a soldier wounded during the First World War, then moving back and forth, via family generations and recurring themes, through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Photography is a big thing, with a linked excursion into the early history of X-rays, providing various metaphors to describe permanence and transience. The first story sees the injured soldier resuming his peacetime career as a photographer, only to find his images capturing the ghostly presence of dead people. In a later story, the long exposure times of early cameras depict empty streets, since anything that moves does not remain in one place long enough to register on film. All the people who were really there only exist as ghostly absences. This is typical of the book’s enigmatic concerns.

Held, as a title, seems to refer to approaching life with a light touch, as opposed to a firm grip that tries to restrain something defined by movement.

Held is certainly interesting, but when you are reading it, there is an up front feeling that this is meaningful stuff. There is no sense of a beguiling story that seems straightforward and entertaining but has hidden depths. The depths here are those of an open-cast grit quarry. Personally I prefer a story where the meaningful is less overt, which just seems a bit politer to me, as well as being closer to real life, where the profound material is not likely to be making itself known at breakfast. Some of the plotting felt like a creaky frame around which the author could expound on science and history. Maybe, in the terms of Held, the story held on too tight, grasping at its ideas rather than letting them develop more naturally through characters and events.

Wild Houses is a 2024 novel by Colin Barrett, nominated for the Booker Prize.

Sometimes in writing a review I feel constrained by the idea of a spoiler. You mustn’t give too much of the plot away because it will interfere with someone’s reading pleasure. Every book is a production of The Mouse Trap where some post-script figure will get up on stage and implore the audience not to give away who did it.

Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to a novel with the sort of thriller feel where you’re wondering how things will work out. Ironically, however, the setting is a world where nothing much happens, the sort of place where people lead monotonous lives, maybe repeating the experience of their parents, going round and round a daily grind without moving on.

Events unfold in the Irish town of Ballina and its surrounding countryside. Cillian English has landed himself in trouble with some drug dealers. He hid a stash in a field, but the field flooded, the drugs were destroyed, and now he owes the dealers for their value. In an effort to extract this money from Cillian, two local hard men kidnap his younger brother Doll, and hold the boy hostage in a remote house. Will Cillian get the ransom together in time? Will Doll be saved?

I won’t tell you what happens to Doll, but it is ironic that this book is structured in a series of reverses, showing what happens, and then going back and describing how we got there. So the story has internal spoilers of its own. There is also a central character who has given up on anything to do with waiting to see what happens. Dev owns the remote house where Doll is held captive. Dev is massive in stature but quiet in personality. He suffered bullying and depression at school. His mother has recently died. He likes to be alone even though loneliness is bad for him. His only contact with the outside world is through the drug dealers who have insinuated themselves into his life, using his property as a safe house.

So without giving anything away, what have we got here? We have a beautifully written book, with sentences describing a man’s face as a ‘derelict church,’ dawn skies becoming ‘blue and clean as the ring of flame from a gas stove’, and crockery in a dishwasher portrayed as ‘jangling dentition’. It is very good at picking out little details, rather than focusing on a big picture revealing itself. Maybe there is no big picture.

The biggest spoiler is perhaps finding out that despite your hopes, nothing much will happen. Cillian has a little box of sand and a few stones which he calls his Zen Garden. ‘Game changer’ he says picking up a little rake and smoothing the sand. Cillian’s Zen Garden is a silly little thing, but it does suggest something important in this book, the tension between waiting for something to happen, and giving up on it, between what you might call peace on the one hand, hopeless inertia on the other. Wild Houses is really an exploration of this conundrum. It offers the reading pleasure of anticipation, while also having a wider quality that makes a book valuable long after you find out what happens.

The Sleepwalkers is a 2024 novel by Scarlett Thomas.

Evelyn and Richard, a newly married couple, spend their honeymoon at the luxury Villa Rosa Hotel on a Greek island. She’s a writer, he’s a City trader. Evelyn thinks the hotel’s young woman owner is trying to seduce her new husband. It all starts to unravel. And there seems to be a history of things unravelling at this odd establishment. The previous summer, a couple of guests seemingly sleepwalked into the ocean and drowned.

We learn about all this through a set of documents – letters between the main characters, a confession of past misdeeds from Richard, a transcript of a conversation recorded on Evelyn’s phone, an extract from the hotel guest book.

Beyond that it’s hard to say what’s going on.

I suppose as well as being a story, this is also a look at how we make stories.

I remember an episode of The Comic Strip Presents back in the 1980s where a Hollywood studio accepts a script about the miners’ strike, written by a real miner.

“This doesn’t say mining town to me,” says a sulky director arriving in an actual mining town. From that moment, as far as reality is concerned, it’s down hill all the way. There are similar ideas, and laughs and pulling the ground from under your feet jump-scares, in The Sleepwalkers. An American film producer and his wife are also staying at the Villa Rosa. They have heard the story of the tragic, drowned, sleepwalking guests and plan to turn those events into a film. But the director doesn’t like various details narrated to him, which will need changing in the script.

“What really happened is no good.” A film has other requirements.

Maybe the most ‘real’ part of The Sleepwalkers is an automated transcript of sound recordings on Evelyn’s phone. Have you ever seen automated captions below a video or a television programme mangling the dialogue by being too literal? Well that’s what the transcript section is like. Literal reality comes out as barely comprehensible gibberish. Once again we could say “what really happened is no good.” What really happened needs shaping, sorting out before it starts to make sense. If you are writing a book, you can’t expect to just note every single event during a day, write them all down and have a story. Picking and choosing is necessary, shaping, moulding. Only then will you have a story that people might want to read. Making the point more generally, you could say that “what really happened” has so many aspects to it that there is always the need for some manipulation before we can understand it – which can lead to both confusing distortion, and a considerable smoothing of sharp edges.

In many ways this novel definitely has sharp edges, unflinching in its portrayal of moral murkiness and human failings. Richard’s confession is uncomfortable reading. In other ways the book has anaesthetic qualities that soften the picture. Sleepwalkers, being asleep, don’t know what they’re doing, existing in a state of slumbering misapprehension, vulnerable to unappreciated dangers. They are also protected from any pain they might have experienced in a clearer, more awake scenario. That’s what reading, or ‘sleepwalking’ through this novel is like – disorienting, bewildering, and sometimes as unpleasant as going to the dentist for root canal work. At other times, however, it offers the relief of a deep inhale of pain-relieving laughing gas. Both extremes are aspects of a sophisticated, cleverly constructed read.

The Short Straw is a novel by Holly Seddon, published in 2023.

The plot concerns three sisters, Nina, Lizzie and Aisa, who have come back from scattered adult lives to visit their aging father in the Lake District. On a dark and stormy night, suffering car trouble, they seek shelter in a remote and creepy manor house, which might or might not be deserted.

Very Rocky Horror. A cliche you might be thinking. But in this case there’s a twist. The house is well known to the sisters. Their mother was on the domestic staff. The girls played here when they were little. You could say this mysterious house in the middle of nowhere has all the familiarity of home.

The book is about the unfamiliar hiding in the well-known, homes mirrored in distant destinations, fresh stories concealed in well worn tropes. We take little notice of what we see every day, which means that strange things, both good and bad, can hide in plain sight. This theme develops into an interesting reflection on ideas of fate and destiny. As people grow up, they appear to shape their own course by leaving home and setting out on journeys. But when end points start reminding us of where we came from, our choices become ambiguous to say the least.

The sign identifying the creepy house – Moirthwaite Manor – has been damaged by time and weather. On the night when the three sisters arrive, it reads MOIR AI. In Ancient Greek mythology the Moirai were three sisters who personified human destiny. The Moirai clearly parallel the three sisters stuck in the spooky mansion. These marooned women are sometimes in control of their lives, sometimes not. On occasion, control exists in the same things that take it away. Lizzie, the most diffident of the sisters, in realising her unassuming ambition to look after animals, has managed to live as she wants – unlike her more driven siblings who are more likely to strive for what they cannot reach.

The Short Straw can simply be read as a good thriller. But I would describe that as a starting point for a much more original and philosophical piece of work.