Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet has left me struggling to start another book. It took me several attempts to get into My Brilliant Friend, but I'm so glad I persisted. What an expansive, layered and beautiful representation of the coming of age of Lena and Lila. Their friendship, the neighbourhood, the shifting loyalties and the pull between staying and escaping have continued to occupy my mind. Their naivety, mistakes, resilience and bravery. The plight of women in that time. We watch the girls change, contradict themselves, return to old patterns and discover new ones. I was left with the message that true love lies within one's own creativity and, amazingly, that same message echoed back to me through a brilliant friend of my own last week.

I've just read Immortal Thoughts by Christopher Neve. It's a very beautiful short read that offers intimate glimpses into the lives and minds of some of history's greatest artists. Woven throughout are reflections on flowers in nature as it moves through the seasons, alongside observations on the Covid pandemic, referred to interestingly as "The Plague". I love the way it flutters effortlessly between art, nature, history and the human condition, never lingering too long in one place. It left me with the feeling that nothing exists in isolation — that creativity, gardens, history and human lives are all woven into the same living web.

The Hour of the Wolf is a beautiful and moving account of Fatima Bhutto’s relationship with animals, set in sharp contrast to a long-standing emotionally abusive relationship with a man. She outlines a deep understanding of care, boundaries and what it means to truly tend to another living being. Her framing of motherhood through her dog felt especially powerful (given her own longing to be a mother) and the way love finds form when natural boundaries are present.

In contrast, the relationship with "the man" in the book reveals a far more uneasy imbalance. There is a recurring sense of love misdirected, of care given without reciprocity and of how easily devotion can be taken for granted or abused. It made me think about the ways we, like animals, can become accustomed to dynamics that diminish us simply because they are familiar.

In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy reflects on the complicated relationship she shared with her mother, Mary Roy — an educator and activist who famously challenged India’s inheritance laws to secure equal property rights for Syrian Christian women in Kerala.

It is both intimate and unsparing. Roy writes about her mother’s volatility and emotional distance, but also about the fierce independence and courage that shaped her own sense of justice and determination. It is a beautiful exploration of the contradictions that often live within maternal relationships: love intertwined with conflict, admiration alongside pain.

I read Train Dreams last week after being deeply affected by its film adaptation,Train Dreams, directed by Clint Bentley. What surprised me was how different the two felt. Where the film conveys the force of nature through the sound and majesty of falling trees, the sweep of fire and the stark contrast between the wilderness and the accelerating life of the city; the novel traces a quieter, more internal relationship with the natural world, carried most powerfully through the recurring presence of the wolf. I found the book reaching further into something primal and instinctive, blurring the boundary between dream and reality, and suggesting how deeply the body can be shaped, overtaken even, by forces beyond our conscious control.

I’ve just finished On Immunity: An Inoculationby Eula Biss. It’s a clear-eyed exploration of fear, responsibility and care, written with intellectual steadiness. What I admire most about Biss’s approach is her refusal to simplify a complex subject. Rather than arguing from panic or authority, she writes from curiosity, holding science, history, ethics and personal experience in careful balance. I wish I'd encountered this book when my children were babies — it would have offered me a grounded way of thinking about decisions that were very much shaped by fear and noise. It’s a book about immunity, yes, but it's also about trust, collective responsibility and what it means to care for one another within systems larger than ourselves.

I've struggled slightly with this book, but I think it's perhaps because it's so quiet and detailed, so focused, that it feels like I need to force myself to go much slower in order to match the pace (and that's hard for me!). It's really a very beautiful portrayal of the intricate rhythm inside Monet's home and his devotion to the shifting light outside in his garden. The small domestic details feel as vivid as the paintings themselves and make you wonder whether there was much more than just light behind Monet's work; whether the entire ecosystem of care and domestic ritual around him was also woven within each considered stroke of his brush. 

I've just devoured John Banville's The Sea. I couldn't put it down. Banville’s prose is perfect: precise, graceful, stylistic, with a brilliant, dry humour underlying it all. He explores how memory distorts reality, how beauty and horror coexist and how the self is composed of fragments — the living and the dead, the seen and the hidden.

The novel circles around the concept that we are never whole, only a shifting collage of past selves, moments and losses; an absurd mixture of tenderness and decay. The narrator looks closely at the component parts of his life, he confronts love in all its forms, the grotesque (age, illness, death) and realises that, somehow, all of that together is, as his wife says, "everything".

I’m currently reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time, and I paused today on the line: “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.” 

It captures the novel's (/life's?) tension perfectly — that fine edge between awe and unease, between wanting to understand beauty and being undone by it. Tartt’s world of intellect and obsession feels both magnetic and disquieting; a reminder that what we seek to possess can also overwhelm us.

It made me think about the pursuit of beauty, what beauty really signifies and how the truest beauty should not be possessed, but simply named, witnessed and appreciated — as Stephen Colbert says, “I end up crying over beautiful things because they're beautiful, despite the grief of the world.” 

Following Dr. Jane Goodall's passing and the softness of her femininity that was felt and projected, I decided this week to pick up Mary Magdalene, The Way of the Rose by Ishtara Ammuna Rose. It’s a spiritual meditation on the sacred feminine — on softness as strength, and on how love, compassion, and presence can become radical acts in a world that often prizes noise over nurture. It echoes the same quiet but powerful femininity with which Dr. Jane Goodall led her teachings; an invitation to return to tenderness, to intuition and to the kind of power that doesn’t need to shout to be felt.

Art Work: On the Creative Life by Sally Mann arrived in the post today and just a few chapters in, I know I've stumbled across something special. This is a field guide to the inner terrain of the artistic life: the hazards of early promise, the sting of rejection, the unpredictable role of luck and the stubborn necessity of showing up, even when nothing seems to be turning out right.To be truly creative is, we're told, to follow a series of small, daily acts, to take risks and to say "yes" when it scares you. Mann's prose hooked me from the start. It's spell-binding, honest, humble and generous...and woven withphotographs, journal entries, letters and stories. If ever there was a book to help you back yourself creatively and be brave, this is it.

I started reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell on the weekend and am now savouring the last few pages. It's a life-breathing novel steeped in the elements of the natural world. At its centre is Agnes, Shakespeare’s wife, portrayed as a woman so attuned to plants, animals and the rhythms of the land that she is seen as a kind of forest witch. Her knowledge of herbs and healing, her instinctive reading of people and places, root the story firmly in nature’s cycles of birth, growth and decay. Against this backdrop, the sudden death of her son Hamnet becomes not only a profound personal grief, but also part of a larger meditation on the inevitability of loss woven into the fabric of life itself and the transformative power of creation through grief.