Category Archives: Prize Winner

March 16, 2026 · 1:23 pm

Flesh: Weird and great

It’s hard to describe the narrative style of David Szalay’s Flesh, except maybe to say it’s unsettling? Other reviews describe it as ‘sparse,’ which I guess is a nod to the matter-of-fact descriptions and the abrupt changes to our protagonist, István’s, life. Like between two paragraphs he murders a man (accidentally?) and then in the gap between chapters goes to prison or war or or or.

I happened to enjoy the (somewhat jarring) jumps in time and the oddity of István as a protagonist (like he seems primarily motivated by whatever holds his attention in the moment, and achingly insecure), but I can see how another reader might find the narration hard to settle in to or missing something (though not the Booker jury who awarded it the 2025 prize).

There’s probably an undergraduate essay or thesis to be made of the representation of women in the novel – from the opening older woman (a gasp, 40 something) who first seduces István and then teaches him how to be an attentive lover until he (problematically) falls in love with her to the rich woman he chauffeurs around before (series of spoilers and events) marrying her and settling into a life of wealth and leisure (though it’s a stretch to say he settles in because isn’t he always a bit at odds with it all). Women then are tempting and distracting and absorbing – and (understandably because the book is about István) represented as in service to István’s character development.

Anyway, I liked it though I’m not sure I’d recommend it? Like maybe you have to be in the right mood for something kinda weird and different. If you’ve read it, let me know what you think.

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February 13, 2026 · 1:52 am

The Correspondent: The courage to connect

I know I’m late in praising Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. It’s on a million best-of lists and many of you have recommended it to me. What can I say. I was busy reading romantacy novels and separating from my soon-to-be-ex-husband (whee!). Fun fun.

But actually go get The Correspondent. It is fun (or at least in its formal elements) and helpful. Epistolary (that is to say, written in letters) the novel follows the aging life of Sybil through her correspondence with all manner of people.

A book in praise of human connection – not just the letter writing kind of connection, actually this is only a tiny part of it – more a book about how bravely reaching out to someone (sometimes a stranger, or a famous stranger, or a family member, or a friend, or a salesperson, or anyone) to tell them you’re thinking of them or what you like about something they did or what they’ve done to hurt you or what you admire about them or what you are reading or really anything (write about anything, Sybil says) is courage and connection and what we all need most.

The courage to connect at a time of intense loneliness for so many. The courage to say oh hey, yes, me? I was thinking of you and am just writing to say as much. And then the shock – the shock that never tires – of having this desire for connection reciprocated.

What Evans does best (I think) (and truest to my experience) is to have Sybil instruct young people in this art of courageous connection. She promises them that sometimes people will not write back (and this may be for many reasons and the arrogance of assuming it is you) and that is fine. The joy is in casting the line and that in knowing that sometimes – enough, actually – there is response, and sometimes – enough, actually – there is reciprocation and deep connection.

That these lines can – enough, actually – become thick connections that can hold us over years, through the hardest things, through the most joyous.

Sybil teaches these young people (and through them the reader) of the arrogance of assuming we can Go It Alone, or the cowardice of expecting others to come find us. We find one another when we bravely say ‘oh hey’ and then write back.

It’s a book about many other things – grief (of dead children or lost marriages or lost time), friendship, motherhood, guilt, romance, aging bodies, and trust – but for me (for me the reader right now) it was most of all this message of courage and connection. Certainly when I the individual human have needed it most, but no less, no less, when we the world most urgently do.

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January 9, 2026 · 2:18 am

Dream Count: Some parts are brilliant

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count has some spectacular sections (and you sense in there the corollary that there are some that just draaaag).

Following the interconnected lives of friends/relatives Chimaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou – Nigerian expats living in America (or Nigera but with some time in America) – the book explores their lives before/during/after the pandemic. How their romantic relationships, jobs, friends and family shape their sense of themselves and the possibilities for their lives – and certainly how access to money makes and limits choices. I found the section following Kadiatou utterly gripping, beautiful in its writing, heartbreaking and enraging. Honestly the whole book could have been her section as a short story and I’d have been just as happy. Plus a few of the descriptions Chimaka has of why she fell in love with the different lovers she has – and how much insecurity drove early decisions in her romantic life (and how she eventually discovers the essential value of loving yourself first and Boy Did That Resonate).

So while I loved Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun – in the end I’m lukewarm on Dream Count. I’d tell you to get it, read Chimaka’s section then skip ahead for Kadiatou’s section and then call it a day.

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December 28, 2025 · 11:57 pm

Saving Time: Read it before the new year?

I came to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time after reading Teaching Where You Are with my team. Teaching Where You Are had arguments about slow pedagogy and the relentless pace of post-secondary work that I found a useful reminder both of colonial efforts to organize time for Productivity and Efficiency. Around the same time I heard Odell on a podcast and so picked up Saving Time.

It is – perhaps with purpose – a slow read. There’s a lot of referencing other things and then referencing of the text itself and a sort of spiralling of the ideas on top of one another. I came away though having a renewed understanding that the constant experience of fast- short- not-enough time that I live in is a consequence of capital and gender, and that my temporal existence is eased by my race and class and that time, too, can be weaponized in arguments of more efficiency, more productivity, who gets to ‘afford’ leisure and under whose time crush that leisure comes.

The idea that women experience the press of time differently wasn’t a new idea to me – I could haven’t passed first year women’s studies without an awareness of the free domestic and emotional labour extracted – but there was a fresh pierce to it in my current reading moment, even as I reflected on the privilege I hold paying for childcare when I need it.

Perhaps the freshest idea for me – and in some ways the most terrifying and comforting – was the reminder of the excess boundaries of planetary time that are not concerned with the whisper of a moment of my life – and certainly not whether I get the laundry folded today, or a report filed that no one was going to read anyway. And with that length the existential angst and terror of our unfolding climate catastrophe a reminder from Odell that the future is long, too, and we might still write parts of it.

So in a year when the argument of AI has been More, Faster, Efficient, More, Faster, Productivity – alongside the worrisome avoidance of any conversation about the environmental cost of doing so – I’d recommend Saving Time (and yes, read that both ways – both hoarding your time for later, and that it is time to save the planet) for your 2026 first read.

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