Chris Bissette

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• 13 Mar, 2026 Blue Remembered Earth - Alastair Reynolds

  I realised recently that Alastair Reynolds has quietly become one of my favourite authors. Blue Remembered Earth is probably my least favourite of his books that I've read so far, but that's like saying it's my least favourite Comeback Kid album. There are no bad Comeback Kid albums, and one of them has to be bottom of the list. (It's Turn It Around, for those interested. I know that's tantamount to blasphemy.)

  This has all the hallmarks of a Reynolds classic. Weird alien artifacts left behind by a race that's probably long dead? Yes. A race across the solar system in an improbable craft? Yes. A ton of science that feels real and probably but that's explained in a way that's easy to follow for people who don't understand science (me)? Yes. Complex characters making decisions with very limited information? Also yes.

  I haven't read enough of Reynolds' back catalogue to know if he always wrote thrillers of if he slowly slipped towards that form over time. I don't remember Pushing Ice being a thriller really, and so I suspect it's the latter. Blue Remembered Earth feels like an early step towards writing SF thrillers, and it's maybe a little bit of a stumbling step. This is very deliberately plotted, but it's a plot that shows its seams. A common criticism of Reynolds' prose is that he's very workmanlike, and this book is a good example of that.

  That's particularly true in the middle of the book, in the sequences that take place on Mars and in the underwater nations. Both of those sequences feel very "built", very deliberately designed to move the plot forwards without offering us much yet. It's the closest I've come to feeling like a part of a Reynolds book was "filler", and it's the first time I've found myself wishing that he'd just get on with it.

  But then he does get on with it and we're back to classic Al, and we end on a really warm, hopeful note that also sets us up brilliantly to take a step into the rest of this series. This is ultimately a book about remembering where home is, and about the desire to always have a place to come back to, and it's really nice.

  Not a perfect book, then, but there's no such thing as a bad Alastair Reynolds book (at least not yet, in my experience), and I still really enjoyed this.

• 05 Mar, 2026 Talking It Over - Julian Barnes

  I first read Talking It Over when I was about 19 years old, after I read A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters and decided I really needed to read more Julian Barnes. I liked it at the time, but I realise now that I wasn't old enough or possessed of enough life experience to fully appreciate it.

  When I was 25 I went through a bad break-up and my partner got together with my best friend of close to a decade. The three of us had spent years doing everything as a trio, and I felt hugely betrayed. I haven't spoken to them for close to 15 years - longer than we were ever actually friends to begin with, I've just realised - but I think about them regularly. They left a void in my life that has never really been filled.

  Unsurprisingly, re-reading this book brought up a lot of feelings about that time in my life. It's impossible for me not to place myself in the shoes of Stuart here, and I had a very strong reaction to the way he's portrayed. I feel like he's owed a little more grace and understanding as he deals with everything that's happening to him.

  None of the characters here is drawn particularly sympathetically, but that's always been a strength of Barnes' writing. He's very good at showing people as they really are, warts and all, and he nails all three of our main characters to the wall here. This situation feels utterly mundane and real, and it hits harder as a result of that.

  I re-read this mainly because I've only just learned about the existence of a sequel, and I wanted to refresh myself on this novel before I move on to the follow-up. I'm very curious to see what that book holds.

• 03 Mar, 2026 Taiwan Travelogue - Yáng Shuāng-zǐ

  On the surface, Taiwan Travelogue looks like exactly what it professes to be - a cosy, quiet novel about food, travel, and unrequited love between two women. A Japanese novelist travels around pre-war, Japanese-occupied Taiwan alongside a brilliant local translator, a woman with deep knowledge of the island's layered culture and history. The novelist has been officially invited to deliver a lecture series, and plans to spend a year writing travelogue articles for Japanese publications. It's a familiar setup: writer moves to foreign land, lives like a local, befriends a native who can help dissolve the exoticism of the place into digestible prose to send home.

  But Yáng Shuāng-zǐ does something subversive with these tropes. The translator's notes describe this as an onion of a novel, and that's exactly right. Beneath the quiet cosiness, tension is constantly bubbling. There's the tension of colonisation, of what an enforced language does to a people's culture and society. We're reminded from the outset that the narrator - the writer, our sole point-of-view character - is a coloniser, and we're never allowed to forget it. Footnotes interrupt the narrative throughout, correcting her language, challenging her history, and pointing out that many of the things she's describing no longer exist, casualties of colonialism, of travel and tourism. She is entirely unaware of the power she wields. This is, at its core, a book about quiet, polite power dynamics.

  Large sections are devoted entirely to food: lists of local dishes, descriptions of flavours, comparisons with mainland cooking, ruminations on names and preparation. I found myself initially charmed by these passages, then gradually bored, and eventually skimming them. I initially felt guilty about that, but by the end of the novel, I think that response is entirely intentional. We're meant to grow tired of the narrator's self-indulgence, the sound of her own voice. This is presented as a love story, but I don't think it's a love story between two women. I think it's a love story between the narrator and the sound of her own voice.

  The novel is also a remarkable nesting doll of translations. Fictional translators conduct conversations in the footnotes alongside Lin King, the real translator, who in her closing note reflects on the experience. She discusses being tempted to invent an extra meta-layer for the English translation, and laments that footnotes are so rarely used in literary translation. She tells us that they gave her space to explain context, historical detail, and her own translation choices in the moment, rather than saving everything for an end note.

  I find myself agreeing with her desire for more footnotes in translations. The footnotes here reminded me of Jennifer Croft's work in The Extinction of Irena Rey, another novel deeply preoccupied with language and the politics of translation. And they also brought to mind Paige Morris's translator's note in Han Kang's We Do Not Part, where she describes defaulting to Yorkshire English to render a working-class local dialect on the page, a decision I would have loved to encounter as a footnote while reading, rather than discover afterward. More footnotes in translated fiction, please. Publishers, if you're reading this.

  Taiwan Travelogue is intricate, layered, and quietly furious. I suspect I'll begin to see reviews calling it cosy fairly soon. It is not cosy. It's a book about tension, about violence, about colonialism and empire, about national identity and personal identity. I'm very glad I picked it up, and I'm excited to see what the rest of the International Booker longlist holds.

• 03 Mar, 2026 The Director - Daniel Kehlmann

  I read this in mid-February and never got around to writing up a review of it. Since it's now been longlisted for the International Booker Prize I thought I should have something on the blog, so here is a transcription of my notes from my reading journal.

  ---

  I only read this because a Booktok friend hasn't stopped talking about it for weeks, and I'm glad I finally relented.

  Historical fiction doesn't often work for me, especially when it's about a real person who I know nothing about. This doesn't read like historical fiction, though. I was halfway through the book before I realise that G.W. Pabst actually existed (something I'm mildly ashamed of as a self-professed lover of classic cinema).

  I suspect that not knowing anything about Pabst or his life made this more impactful than it might otherwise have been, as I wasn't expecting any of the developments. The opening had me ready to read about an immigrant director's journey through Hollywood. I wasn't expecting a powerful novel about life under Nazi rule and the moral struggle of artists attempting to continue their craft while being forced to work under the Reich's propaganda machine. This is a book I'm going to be thinking about for a while.

  After reading this I watched one of Pabst's films, Paracelsus, and I enjoyed it a lot. I'm going to seek out more of his work, and will also likely read more Kehlmann.

• 03 Mar, 2026 The Wax Child - Olga Ravn

  I read this back in January and never got around to writing up a review of it. Since it's now been longlisted for the International Booker Prize I thought I should have something on the blog, so here is a transcription of my notes from my reading journal.

  ---

  This was much better than The Employees. I liked the other novel, particularly stylistically and structurally, but thematically it didn't quite land for me.

  Here it works beautifully. Ravn's style and use of language are at just as high a level as in The Employees, and the strange, dream-like quality of her slippery prose works wonders here. This feels magical and dangerous, and that feeling is heightened by the inclusion of real spells into the text.

  At times this feels like a tone poem. It's beautiful, aching, and tragic. I loved it.

• 24 Feb, 2026 The Tainted Cup - Robert Jackson Bennett

  I have a general rule that I don't start reading a new fantasy series until it's completed, which you can blame Patrick Rothfuss and Robert Jordan (and, by extension, Brandon Sanderson) for. Something made me set that rule aside for The Tainted Cup, though, and I'm very glad that I did.

  This is what I've been craving in modern fantasy - something that feels new and exciting and that is also really well written. This was a real breath of fresh air and I'm fully locked in for the rest of the books.

  I love genre-blending, and the fact that this takes itself very seriously as a murder mystery is its biggest strength. And it's a really good murder mystery, too, that obeys all the rules of classic Christie-esque mysteries. All of the clues are there and we could put them together if we tried to (for the most part), and the detective's reveal of everything at the end feels satisfying and real. I loved all the characters and their complexities, and I really enjoyed that they existed as queer/disabled/neurodivergent people in the world without that being the focus of the story.

  My only complaint is that we didn't see enough of the leviathans, but I suspect that we'll get more of that in future books. And it's such a minor complaint, too, because everything here is fantastic. It's the weirdness of China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels with the twists and turns of Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle, with a hint of grimy grimdark fantasy action thrown in for good measure. Easily one of my favourite reads of the year so far, and my favourite fantasy novel in recent memory.

• 24 Feb, 2026 International Booker Prize 2026 Longlist

  The longlist for the International Booker Prize has just been announced. These are the books that made the list:

  • Taiwan Travelogue - Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King
  • The Wax Child - Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken
  • Women Without Men - Shahrnush Parsipur, translated by Faridoun Farrokh
  • The Witch - Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump
  • The Duke - Matteo Melchiorre, translated by Antonella Lettieri
  • On Earth As It Is Beneath - Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan
  • The Director - Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin
  • She Who Remains - Rene Karabash, translated by Izidora Angel
  • Small Comfort - Ia Genberg, ranslated by Kira Josefsson
  • The Deserters - Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell
  • The Remembered Soldier - Anjet Daanje, translated by David McKay
  • We Are Green and Trembling - Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated by Robin Myers
  • The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran - Shida Bazyar, translated by Ruth Martin

  Despite my efforts to read more translated fiction last year, most of these are new to me. I've already read The Wax Child and The Director and loved them both, though I'm yet to get around to reviewing them here. The rest, though, I hadn't heard of before the longlist was announced.

  I don't know if I'm going to make a concerted effort to read the longlist, but I'm certainly going to pick up a few that particularly appeal to me. If you've read any of these and think I should prioritise them, please let me know.

• 16 Feb, 2026 Fräulein Else - Arthur Schnitzler

  What an incredibly strange book this was. I never would have heard of this if it hadn't been for Milan Kundera's Immortality, which references it briefly in a way that made me very curious about it.

  The basic story is simple. A young woman's father accrues gambling debts, and in order to help him pay them off she agrees to show herself naked to a millionaire. Kundera implies that this is something of an erotic novel but I didn't get any of that from it. Instead this read more as a real-time, stream of consciousness account of a young woman's mental unravelling as she falls apart under huge pressure.

  I'm unsure how I felt about this. It's almost feverish, at times slipping into being a little incoherent. I'm not sure if that's an issue of the translation or it's just a strange writing style - I'm very aware that this is a century old and that I don't often read fiction from that era, so this could be a me problem rather than a problem of the book.

  I think I largely liked it but didn't get quite as much out of it as I was hoping to. Perhaps Milan Kundera oversold how good this is, or perhaps it just wasn't entirely for me. I'm glad I read it, though.

• 16 Feb, 2026 Immortality - Milan Kundera

  I've been trying to solve a small mystery around this book for the past couple of days. Based on all the information I can find about the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, the inaugural winner was Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle. And yet my paperback copy of Milan Kundera's Immortality has the words, "Winner of the inaugural Independent Award for Foreign Fiction 1991" printed on it.

  Will I ever figure out what's gone on here? I doubt it. Will I obsess over it for at least the next couple of months? Absolutely.

  Anyway.

  I went on a bit of a journey with this book. In the first few chapters I loved it. The way Kundera constructed an entire character out of a single gesture was magical, and I really liked the tension of being constantly reminded that Agnes is just a fictional character. I found myself asking why I should care about this character when I know she's "just" fictional, and then thinking about the fact that that's always the case when reading fiction. Why was this different simply because my attention had been drawn to the artifice?

  Over the next hundred-or-so pages my initial joy waned, and I started to feel a little bored. This was particularly true of part two, which turns into historical fiction about Goethe, someone who I know nothing about. I struggled to find a reason to care, and the text became a bit of a slog. I didn't seriously consider DNFing, but I think I might have started to consider it had I not been reading this for a "challenge".

  And then it all changed again. At some part between pages 100-200 I realised I was in love with the book again. And from that moment on I was enchanted.

  I finished this a few days ago and I've spent the intervening time trying to figure out how to talk about it. I'm not sure I've quite got there yet, but I know that if I leave it any longer I'll never write anything about it at all. It's a strange, slippery book, and I'm not sure I fully understood it, but I know that I liked it a lot. Much of the philosophy and many of the literary and historical references - particularly around Goethe - were completely wasted on me. But what I did appreciate was the way this plays with and explores the novel as a form, the way it interrogates the act and craft of writing and examines what authors are actually doing when they construct characters and plots.

  I've begun to think of this as a deconstructed novel, with the first five parts essentially showing the process of developing Agnes and her story, which then becomes background material for the "real" novel that exists in part 6. Part 7 somehow brings everything full circle, wrapping up where the book began in a way that feels like a magic trick.

  Kundera's writing is a joy to read. It's light and conversational but imbued with warmth and scholarly knowledge. It reminded me a little of B.S. Johnson or Italo Calvino, though I think a lot of that is to do with the actual content of the book rather than the tone.

  As this reading challenge goes on I'll be interested to see whether I can identify any similarities between the books that win the Independent Foreign Fiction Award. Right now I can't see much similarity between Immortality and The White Castle, but since these two years didn't have shortlists I feel a little like the prize hasn't properly got started yet and hasn't found its rhythm or voice.

  We'll see how it develops.

• 10 Feb, 2026 Dungeon Cento

  I recently read Alia Kobuszco's Dream Latitudes. While much of it left me cold - not a criticism of the book, just a fact of how I often struggle to connect with poetry - a couple of pieces had a big impact on me. I liked the final poem cycle 'Snow On The Dead' quite a lot, and in particular enjoyed 'Snow On The Dead (v)', the final piece in the book.

  'Snow on the Dead (v)' is a cento, a poem constructed using lines from other poems by different poets (all helpfully cited in the appendix of the book). This was my first exposure to the concept of a cento and I'm immediately in love with the idea.

  A project I've had in mind for a long time is a sort of exploration of a fantasy dungeon from the perspective of the dungeon or the inhabitants of the dungeon, with each chapter moving from room to room. Last time I toyed with this idea I was drawing inspiration from Georges Perec's *Life A User's Manual, freezing the dungeon in time and having each chapter be a snapshot of what's happening at that specific moment as a group of intruders make their way through the complex. I haven't touched that for a while, because it's a very hard thing to write and I couldn't make it work.

  The concept of centos has ignited the desire to work on this again, but now I'm picturing it as a poem cycle built out of lines from old adventure modules and sourcebooks. There's something really enthralling to me about the challenge of taking what is objectively some of the driest, most blandly functional prose ever written and trying to elevate it into poetry.

  Here, then, is my first attempt at a cento for this project.

  No lights-
  The floor is littered with beams, plaster, ash.
  The western pile of rubble
  will open one eye, and then another and another,
  deep beneath the ground
  the water
  the chamber
  awaits its victims.

  Still very much a work in progress, but I think this project might have legs.

  Sources:

  • The Mines of Bloodstone by Michael Dobson and Douglas Niles
  • Slave Pits Of The Undercity by David Cook
  • The Ghost Tower Of Inverness by Allen Hammack
  • The Hidden Shrine Of Tamoachan by Harold Johnson and Jeff R. Leason
  • AD&D 1e Monster Manual by Gary Gygax
  • Lathan's Gold by Merle M. Rasmussen
  • Descent Into The Depths Of The Earth by Gary Gygax
  • Vault Of The Drow by Gary Gygax