B. Morrison's Blog

Reclusive Sylvia Wren is a famous artist, now in her eighties, living in New Mexico and painting flowers that resemble women’s private parts. Her peaceful life is upended when a journalist discovers her long-buried secret: She is actually Iris Chapel, an heiress who has been missing for sixty years. Concerned that her story might be distorted or sensationalised, she begins to write it herself.

With that, we leave the frame story and plunge in the life of Iris Chapel, the fifth of the ...

Why would a young man commit over 200 heists, stealing artworks and stuffing them into his attic bedroom? Finkel investigates the true story of Stéphane Breitwieser who stole nearly $2 billion worth of art—paintings, sculpture, tapestries, etc.—mostly from small museums that couldn’t afford a lot of security. Unlike other art thieves, he didn’t do it for the money. He claimed he did it to surround himself with beauty.

The first pieces he carefully displayed in his bedroom in the attic of his ...

Like some of Donoghue’s other novels, such as Room and Haven,  this story again follows people confined in a tiny location. In 1850s Ireland Elizabeth (Lib) Wright, an English nurse, is sent to a rural area to stay with an 11-year-old girl who supposedly can survive without food. Anna and her parents say she has not eaten anything for four months, only water and—Anna says—manna from heaven.

A committee made up of villagers, including the doctor and priest, want to prove that the girl is truly...

As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are twelve of the best books I read in 2025. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

Fiction

1. Orbital, by Samantha Harvey
Put six people from five countries into the International Space Station orbiting Earth and leave them there for several years. Now write about a single day, which encompasses sixteen orbits, meaning sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets. I...

For the winter solstice I wanted to return to East Anglia and the fens, a time and a place when the veil between our world and another seems to thin. Paver’s novel fit my mood perfectly with its luminous and sometimes eerie descriptions of life in fen country.

Many Gothic novels use a frame story, usually told by an ordinary person, someone the reader can identify with. Then the inner story plunges into the darker twists and turns of human nature before ending with a return to the realistic w...

Changing trains on his way home for Christmas from his first term at school, Kay Harker meets an old man who asks Kay to help him lift his large case onto his back. “ ‘Only I do date from pagan times and age makes joints to creak.’ ” Once on the train Kay, who seems to be around eleven or twelve, is approached by two suspicious men dressed as clergymen who entice him into playing cards for money.

When Kay disembarks in Condicote, he finds that his wallet and watch are missing. He meets the ol...

In one of my book clubs, we decide on a theme for the month and then each talk about the book we read. Our choices inspire great conversations and often end up on each other’s to-be-read lists. Our last theme was a favorite childhood book, so of course I chose this one which I wrote about in the early days of my blog. Here’s my earlier post about it. Note: the previous week I’d written about March, by Geraldine Brooks.

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Before leaving the Transcendentalists, I wanted to reread th...

A sick and emaciated man collapses on the steps of a Romanian hospital in the town of Iași. He is deaf and mute and (we learn) has been since birth so is unable to communicate with anyone. A nurse named Safta recognises him as Augustin—Tinu for short—who shared her childhood on her parents’ estate Poiana. Although Tinu was the cook’s son and Safta the cherished daughter, they had a special bond. She encourages him to draw, as he did as a child, but at first he refuses.

It is the early 1950s a...

In 21st century London, Mallory works as a low-paid intern at Swansby’s, helping prepare their dictionary to be digitised. As the sole employee, she also must fend off threatening anonymous calls from a man angry about the dictionary’s newly inclusive definition of marriage.

When owner David Swansby finds a mountweazel—a non-existent word sometimes added to catch plagiarists—he  assigns Mallory to go through every single entry to verify that it is a real word. Mallory’s girlfriend Pip, a bari...

In Virginia during the last days of the Civil War, a wounded Union soldier becomes separated from his comrades and is found near death by an escaped slave who saves him. Norman Pelham and Leah Mebane become inseparable and, after he is demobilised and they marry, the two decide to walk to his home in Randolph, Vermont. As they pass through nearby Bethel, his fellow veterans—already home for several months—watch for him.

So they saw him pass along the road that Indian-summer morning with ...