Book review: The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard

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The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild coverWhen Tim mentioned our planned France holiday on a night out back in August, a friend recommended a book set (roughly) in the region of France we were heading to. Which seemed like an excellent idea for a holiday read. I duly bought The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard (translated from French by Frank Wynne) and started reading it during our idyllic week on l’Ile d’Yeu.

I didn’t completely love this book, but it definitely added a certain something being in the same landscapes I was reading about. The story is (mostly) set in La Pierre-Saint-Christophe, a small village at the border of the Vendée and Deux-Sevres departements in west France. It’s a rural landscape of farms and villages, getting marshy as you get closer to the Atlantic coast. The Vendée is famous for its salt. Salt pans border the roads, between a grid of narrow channels that help to guide the water, with grazing animals and water birds far outnumbering the signs of human life. It honestly looked a lot like the Somerset levels from the bus we took through the area. Similar weather too!

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October 2025 reading round-up

Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Lego

October just whizzed along. I squeezed in a lot of things, which I guess contributed to time flying by. I went to two gigs – the Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwals and Panic Shack – as well as a handful of delicious meals out and amazing Lego creations at the Great Western Brick Show. And also two author talks! I saw historian Paula Akpan talk about her book When We Ruled: the Rise and Fall of Twelve African Queens and Warriors. And Tim took me to see Nick Offerman, who is touring for the launch of his new book Little Woodchucks. I’m not sure I’ll get that much out of an introduction to woodworking, but he is a very funny man. And the book does include instructions to build your own little free library, which could be a pretty cool addition to our front garden.

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K-drama review: Twenty-five, Twenty-one

Twenty-Five, Twenty-One poster

I occasionally like a more grounded K-drama – less glitz and designer clothes, more money troubles and friendship drama. Twenty-five, Twenty-one (TvN 2022) really hit the spot for me. It’s a coming-of-age drama that reminded me a lot of Reply 1988 – which is no bad thing.

Like the Reply series, we have two timelines. In 2021 a teenage girl, Kim Min-chae (played by Choi Myung-bin), is reluctantly attending a ballet exam. She does badly and in a pique runs off to her grandmother’s house where she find a diary of her mother’s from 1998.

Cue the story of Na Hee-do (teenager played by Kim Tae-ri, who co-starred in the excellent film The Handmaiden; adult played by Kim So-hyun, who is a major musical theatre star). Hee-do was a child prodigy in fencing but, now in her penultimate year of high school, has failed to live up to the early promise. She has developed an obsession with Korea’s top fencer Ko Yu-rim (played by Bona) – a girl her own age, also living in Seoul. When Hee-do’s school axes its fencing team due to the IMF crisis, Hee-do manoeuvres her way into Yu-rim’s school and its fencing team. But Yu-rim’s friendship is not easily won.

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September 2025 reading round-up

Picnic spot

We spent the last 10 days of September on holiday in France. It was glorious. We had a great time, ate great food and are mostly sad to be home. We had a chill week on a small, quiet island bookended by weekends in cities. I have approximately a bajillion photos to sort through but for now please enjoy this picture of my reading spot last week.

I spent most of the holiday reading a book set near where we stayed, The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild by Mathias Enard (translated from French by Frank Wynne). I didn’t quite make it to the end before we got home (it’s a pretty long book) so I’ll save my final assessment, but I do know it won’t usurp The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver as my favourite read this month, as that was truly excellent.

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Book review: Please Look After Mother by Shin Kyung-sook

please look after mother book cover

Last year I looked up recommendations of Korean literature available in translation. Not so long ago, the options were fairly few but that’s changing fast. I have multiple novels by Kyung-sook Chin on my want-to-read list and I’m happy to find I really enjoyed the first one I tried, Please Look After Mother (translated from Korean by Kim Chi-young).

The premise is simple. But the psychology and emotions are far from simple. An elderly woman, Park So-nyo, is separated from her husband in the busy crowds at a central Seoul subway station. The novel follows her family’s search for her and their gradual discoveries about this woman they thought they knew.

Chapters are told from the perspective of different members of the family in turn. Some sections are written in second person, which I don’t always get on with. And it did put me off a little to begin with, but Chin won me over.

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Book review: Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani

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sex and lies book cover

I like essay collections but I tend to buy them at a faster rate than I read them. I fear they’re going to be less gripping than a novel or deal with serious subjects with less levity than fiction usually adds. Neither of which was a problem with Sex and Lies by Leïla Slimani (translated from French by Sophie Lewis).

I first heard about Slimani when her her novel Lullaby was published in English in 2018 and everyone was recommending it. I took one look at the synopsis and decided it was far too dark for me. That novel won Slimani the Prix Goncourt, making her the first Moroccan woman to do so. But it was actually her previous novel Adèle that triggered the conversations that led to Sex and Lies.

Adèle is about a woman living with sex addiction. When it came out in France, there was publicly expressed surprise that a Moroccan woman could have written on that topic, or indeed anything related to sex. Slimani didn’t set out to be shocking or controversial. She was after all following a centuries-old tradition of Arabic-authored literature that is frank about sex. But she acknowledges that in recent decades, things have changed on that front in her native country.

On her two-week Moroccan book tour for Adèle Slimani found that women and young people were keen to discuss sexual topics. But the conversations kept turning to the lack of freedom in modern Morocco. So she kept the conversations going, meeting people – mostly women – who were willing to be interviewed, albeit anonymously for the most part.

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August 2025 reading round-up

I decided this year to put some real effort into Women In Translation month and I think it paid off. Of the five books I read, four fall under that umbrella. And they were all great. I’ve ended the month halfway through three different books, despite trying not to jump between books. Ah well.

It’s been one of those months that felt jam-packed and yet I struggle to think of specific things we’ve done. There was a local brewery trail and an evening watching hot-air balloons and a particularly lovely date night for our 23rd anniversary. We went to a cocktail bar and our table had a chess board on it so of course we had to play a game of chess while we drank. We are not the best players but it was really fun.

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Book review: The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem

The Book of Disappearance

Of the Palestinian books I’ve read in recent years, The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem is possibly the most educational, yet is also highly entertaining.

Alaa and Ariel are friends who live in the same building in Tel Aviv. They hang out most evenings, work in similar jobs and have friendly disagreements about the history of their city. But then one day Alaa disappears without warning – along with all the other Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Ariel must now confront how well he knew his friend, and how he feels about Palestinians in general.

The narrative skips between Ariel’s story and excerpts from Alaa’s diary. In between are vignettes about how other non-Arab Israelis are affected by the disappearance of the Palestinians. From a farmer wondering why none of his day labourers have turned up, to a patient whose surgery is cancelled because the surgeon hasn’t come to work, at first the rumour is that “the Arabs” are on strike.

But how can four million people have just disappeared? Rumours swirl, security alerts are raised, official statements from the Knesset and IDF top brass are minimal.

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K-drama review: Tastefully Yours

Tastefully Yours screenshot

Sometimes I need my TV to be simple, warm and cosy. And what could be more cosy than the setting of a small-town restaurant with storylines about found family and sweet romance? That’s the vibe of Tastefully Yours (ENA 2025) – mostly. Unusually short for a K-drama (10 episodes of one hour each) the story gets to the point without repeating itself and ends satisfactorily.

Han Beom-woo (played by Kang Ha-neul from When the Camellia Blooms and Misaeng) is an executive at Hansang, “Korea’s top food conglomerate”, and is head of a one-star restaurant in Seoul called Motto. He’s a money guy, with no interest in the restaurants that he invests in, and therefore no qualms about destroying small businesses when they no longer serve his needs. His brother Han Seon-woo runs a two-star restaurant in Seoul also owned by Hansang.

Hansang’s founder and president is Beom-woo’s mother, who plays her two sons against each other, ruthlessly demanding the near-impossible and showing so little warmth it’s hard to believe these three people are meant to be related to each other. What is clear is the pressure both sons are under to get three stars by any means necessary.

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