What I read in March
March's online and offline reading recs. Including: Kaliane Bradley, Sharlene Allsopp, and Anne de Marcken.
Hello!
Can you believe it’s the end of March, because I truly cannot. I also am finding it a very strange thing to wrap my head around the fact that Easter does not mean Spring, it means Autumn, which is… odd. Ha.
Books
The Ministry of Time, by Kaliane Bradley
This isn’t out till May but get it preordered already because it’s really good fun. I reviewed it properly on Instagram, but I’m including it here too because I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed it. Time travel, spies, double agents, a love story, a doomed Arctic expedition, it really has got it all. More speculative fiction that’s FUN, please!
The narrator is a woman working as a civil servant in the translations department before she is promoted to a new team, in a new role. The British government have discovered time travel, and have liberated a small group of time-travellers from a certain death in their own time, and pulled them into the present. She’s to be a “bridge” for the next year to one of the expats in time, Commander Graham Gore, a naval explorer pulled out of the fateful HMS Erebus expedition. They’ll be housemates for the next year, and she is to find *teaching moments* to ease the transition and help him integrate into life in the 21st Century, whilst reporting back on his ability to acclimate. Less straightforward than it seems, she also has to keep him out of harm’s way in a time he doesn’t know how to belong in, yet.
As well as being very funny, there are also some really beautiful moments when the bridge and the expats find moments of connection across eras, not just to the present, but also to their own different times - in particular, in two of the other expats, lively Maggie, a cinephile who would’ve died from the bubonic plague, and gentle soul Arthur, a World War 1 soldier pulled from the front line, Bradley creates such a strong sense of true friendship that the turn of the novel (which I won’t spoil) genuinely hits like a ton of bricks.
Loved loved loved.
The Great Undoing, by Sharlene Allsopp
I saw this everywhere I went for about a week - in the library, in the windows of every bookshop I went past in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, and so I bought it in my little Readings haul.
Set in the near future, communications have been knocked out by a data hack after people have tied (too much of?) their identities to their digital footprints, meaning everyone is under constant surveillance. Scarlet Friday works as a Truth-Teller, collecting truth and revising accepted histories with more accurate versions. Caught on the wrong side of the world after the shutdown, she finds an old book, Ernest Scott’s A Short History Of Australia, and begins to write her own history over it.
There are multiple timelines to follow, and Ernest Scott’s voice breaks through Scarlet’s narrative here and there, giving a differing opinion on the histories she knows to be false. It’s such an interesting set up, and manages to explore fiction, history, colonisation, First Nations rights (and/or lack thereof…) all without being preachy or overblown.
It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken
This was joint winner of the 2022 Novel Prize (I also bought the other joint winning book at Readings, incidentally!).
A newly animated zombie wakes up in a hotel and can’t remember who she was, before. Worried that her own memories are just an amalgamation of the stories told by other hotel residents she heads west with a dead crow in her chest and her various disintegrating body parts, driven by hunger and grief and the hope of remembering.
At just over 120 pages, it’s a beautifully written but brief foray into the afterlife, asking how much of a person is made up of love, rather than life, with a nice amount of gore for good measure. I read Lorrie Moore’s I AM HOMELESS IF THIS IS NOT MY HOME a while ago, and I’m very here for these kind of zombie stories where the zombies are trying to figure out their own zombie-purpose.
(Thank you to Fitzcarraldo for sending this one to me!)
Online reads
Everyone’s Writing Sounds The Same Now, from
.In a similar vein, I’ve read/listened to a lot about creating and taste and how to know what you actually like when you spend all your time on the internet (do with that information what you will), and this was a really good piece from
.
A reader-in-residence? Dream job.
Sophie Lewis’ deep dive on The Little Mermaid is incredible.
What did you read this month?
I’ve actually got a nice little stack on my bedside table now - looking forward to NEW JULIA ARMFIELD (caps absolutely necessary), Olivia Laing’s latest, The Garden Against Time, and getting stuck into the doorstop of Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy (which, if my current reading speed is anything to go by, is going to take me about a year to finish because it’s HUGE).
Terri-Jane x
If you were thinking of subscribing, a paid subscription is just £2 a month. Paid subscribers have access to all of the writing prompts and community posts, as well as discounts for our courses and workshops. This Substack is reader-supported, and paid subscriptions mean I can do more of it! Please feel free to share it with friends you think would enjoy it. Thank you for reading.