November 2025 Book Reports (this time all hits)

Loved and Missed - Susie Boyt ❊ Nervous Conditions - Tsitsi Dangarembga ❊ What Belongs to You - Garth Greenwell ❊ The Most Secret Memory of Men - Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

To the mysterious and sacred blend of library holds, friend recommendations, and accidents: thank you for an excellent reading month. What a true treat to read so many books that registered above “good” into the category of “!!!,” that higher echelon when a book strikes the nervous system.

This month, I also read Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour, a character study about an orderly woman who runs a nail salon and used to be a boxer. The premise sounds interesting, but it is a minimalist and methodical novel that just didn’t work for me. I left with little feeling about either the character or the novel’s themes of class, bodies, and labour. Thammavongsa’s previous book was a short story collection, and I couldn’t help feeling that this would have been more effective at half the length. Ironically, this month Pick a Colour also won Canada’s largest literary award, the Giller Prize.

That was a quick review to slake my completionist thirst, before glowing praise for everything else I read:

• Loved and Missed - Susie Boyt

• Nervous Conditions - Tsitsi Dangarembga

• What Belongs to You - Garth Greenwell

• The Most Secret Memory of Men - Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

Loved and Missed - Susie Boyt

This book struck an arrow right under my armour, into the softest, fleshiest part of my emotional underbelly. The writing is beautiful, and the voice is so specific—light as air, funny and wry—elevating a premise that sounds, on paper, challenging to read.

Ruth’s daughter, Eleanor, is an addict. Ruth steps in to take care of Eleanor’s daughter, Lily, when it is clear Eleanor cannot. It is a very frank depiction of addiction: there is no handwringing over why or any attempt to psychologize the source of this tragedy. And despite the incredibly sad premise, the book is also quite funny, tapping deep emotions around platonic love between family and friends. At the core of it, Ruth’s sustained ability to love despite so much loss gives her this unshakeable sense of character and purpose.

The content of the book is Ruth’s day-to-day as a caregiver and teacher; the answer to the novel’s questions (about how to cope when you love someone who does not return that love) seems to be quotidian caregiving and continuing to give without reservation. It is a novel of women’s lives: there are few men, and they are uniformly unreliable when they appear.¹

As a sensitive soul, this is one of the best things I’ve read this year, largely driven by that singular narrative voice. First-person narration that is precise and alive: Ruth is a straight-shooter, a woman who puts her head down into the wind and forges on. We weave back and forth between flashes of her and Eleanor’s past and her present worries.

A word of warning: don’t finish this in public. I ugly cried in the privacy of my own home. It is devastating because it is so finely tuned. It’s the kind of book that needs a moment of pause after finishing it, to let it settle in. I recommend it unreservedly to anyone who wants something beautiful with a big impact.

✫ Recommended if you like emotional but not overwrought stories about mothers, daughters, and the selfless demands of caregiving. This book came to me by way of my friend Celine Nguyen, who recommended it based on the quality of the prose; praise I am particularly susceptible to. Really beautiful writing and an actual plot where things happen—tragically rare. I subsequently recommended it to my mother, who also loved it, so this is backed by a triple threat endorsement.

Nervous Conditions - Tsitsi Dangarembga

Nervous Conditions is a coming-of-age story in Rhodesia (pre-independence Zimbabwe), a modern post-colonial lit classic. Coming off of Loved and Missed, this book was a welcome reprieve—the emotions in this story are just as big, but they are more measured. It’s a book about the power of education and independence, with the removed, observational tone created by a narrator who no longer believes or recognizes the emotions of the person she is in the story.

Tambu is a young girl in Rhodesia who yearns for more—more knowledge, more agency, more grip on the world. The novel follows her early years, especially focused on her education and her increasing distance from home life via the missionary school run by her uncle. It deals with the lasting legacy of British colonialism, patriarchy, and class. The tendrils of colonialism are everywhere in a coming-of-age novel: oppressive religious education, limited resources, the hierarchies of language, and the stranger you can become to your own family when you want something different than is expected of you. It is a beautiful and subtle book, the kind you want to read with a highlighter in hand to admire how Dangarembga draws so many angles of the competing power dynamics and emotions without overt didactic hand-holding.

It’s another book about women. It lays this out in the opening paragraphs: Tambu, her mother, her aunts, her cousin, their escapes, entrapment, and rebellions. At the book’s center is both Tambu-the-character, who starts out rebellious and slowly assimilates to the orderly expectations of colonial education, as well as Tambu-the-narrator, who understands so much more, observing the women and her own behaviour through a changed lens:

In those days, it was easy for me to leave tangled thoughts knotted, their loose ends hanging. I didn’t want to explore the treacherous mazes that such thoughts led into. I didn’t want to reach the end of those mazes, because there, I knew, I would find myself, and I was afraid I would not recognize myself.

The novel ends with Tambu poised on the edge of great change, and I’m interested to follow the rest. The follow-up books were written almost 20 years later, and there is always something intriguing, sometimes even more convincing of their necessity, about a sequel written after a long gap.

✫ Recommended if you like: thought-provoking books about colonialism, gender, and family dynamics, coming-of-age novels that are easy to sink into, books that fall into the category of ‘modern classics.’

What Belongs to You - Garth Greenwell

This is a sticky, memorable book about the interior life of an American gay man teaching in Sofia, Bulgaria, and his relationship with a man named Mitko that he meets while cruising in a bathroom. The strength of this book is in its writing, the close observations about feelings, thoughts about those feelings, feelings about others—desire, shame, admiration—and thoughts about feelings about others. It is beautifully written, full of purple sentences I wanted to peel off and eat whole.

Emotions are at the surface of every page: pervasive loneliness, desire so sharp that it turns into hunger, and a core of shame that runs through the book. Mitko comes and goes from the narrator’s life, a power dynamic that shifts between the two as the narrator bobs along, attempting to scratch out something close to meaning and growth, while Mitko goes downhill. In between their dynamic, we learn of the unnamed narrator’s history (personal, familial) that informs so much of the person we’re reading about in his present.

It’s a book about unequal desire and how that desire for someone else reflects back on us—in lights both flattering and profoundly unflattering. The age-old adage, wherever you go, there you are, is abundant here. The narrator has traveled all the way to Bulgaria, but all the insecurities, hang-ups, and familial legacies took the flight with him.

I listened to this book as an audiobook because I was behind on my book club reading. It’s read by the author, which lent the book a very close, personal tone—Greenwell does a good job reading, but he has a normal person’s voice and not a commanding, audio narrator’s voice, which at times almost felt too intimate. What’s more, I think the book’s beautiful sentences deserve to be read and appreciated, something that is lost in audio format.

✫ Recommended if you like books written by poets, books about sex (through the kaleidoscopic lens of self-doubt and trauma), books short enough to take a good bite out of, and memorably good writing. This was a book club book, chosen by Friend, Housemate & Editor, Alanna, so for the readers that know her, this is one of her favourite books. Text her your thoughts.

The Most Secret Memory of Men - Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (trans. Lara Vergnaud)

Do you like big, multi-layered, post-modern books? Books spanning real continents (Europe, Africa, South America) as well as the vast continents of human ambition (along with its thorny sisters, jealousy and greed)? The Most Secret Memories of Men is a novel that follows in many footsteps but treads new territory.

Most straightforwardly, it follows a Senegalese writer, Diegane Latyr Faye, living in Paris, and his obsession with a ‘forgotten classic’, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity by the mysterious T.C. Elimane. In the world of the book, Elimane took the literary world by storm in 1938 before being accused of plagiarism and disappearing from public record, discussion, or library. Faye attempts to trace the book and its author across time and place.

It’s a book about loving books so profoundly that it has real costs. It is appropriately filled with metatextual references, and it unfolds with stories within stories. The most metatextual element of all: Elimane’s book was in discussion for France’s most prestigious literary prize, le Prix Goncourt. In real life, Sarr won the Goncourt for this book, the second Black author to win in 100 years and the first sub-Saharan African writer. A casual 87 years after the fictional literary elite are satirized by Sarr in this novel for the same thing.

The expression Don’t like the weather? Just wait five minutes applies to this book. It changes every few chapters, stepping lightly through the perspectives of characters Faye tracks down to reach Elimane, layering the story with new voices and styles, while consistently returning to Faye as the framing device of the novel. I did find one segment dragged more than others, lacking the emotional core that helped pin down the rest,² but for a book that hits nearly 500 pages, that’s not bad. It’s not quite a true door-stopper in length, but it is an indulgent book, taking its time with the story, creating a mystery that has a shifting target to resolve. ‘Who is T.C. Elimane?’ is a big question—we get literal answers from written record, answers steeped in oral tradition and folklore, and answers imbued with the literary ambition of the writers who revere him.

Every book in this small subgenre—the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges (who appears passingly in the book!),, Biography of X by Catherine Lacey, Possession by AS Byatt—have their own way of handling both real-world influences and the invented works at the book’s core. In this, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity is referenced but only fleetingly quoted, as are the many influences that shaped it. It’s a novel about what it means to be a writer in general, and more specifically, an African writer, bearing the burden of representation and expectation from home and colonizers. There’s no easy way to answer this; it’s everything and nothing, and the novel doesn’t have a moment of calm until the closing pages.

✫ Recommended if the words “post-colonial literary mystery pastiche” send exclamation marks up in your mind palace; if you like books that take big swings with big ideas. This book came to me by way of Martha’s recommendation, who wrote a much clearer summary of the book in her newsletter.

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That’s it for November! I can’t pick a favourite out of these books, because each one scratched a different part of my brain. What unites them all is that they are all books with memorably good writing, closely observed emotions, and well-paced plots. Not every book does all three.

I’m working on a write-up of my best books of the year, tempted to do the same as I did last year: declare the reading year over (gavel slam) and publish mid-December. This is a liminal time of year, after all! If you’ve read this far, tell me, do you end the year as usual, or pick something specific for the end of the year as we enter the period of Final Ascent.

August 2025 Book Report (& memory theories)

1. An interesting biographical note: Boyt is one of the painter Lucian Freud’s fourteen children, which means she is also the great-granddaughter of Sigmeud Freud. This is her seventh novel, and per this interview from 2022, lost or absent fathers are a common theme, along with the therapeutic impulse to try to improve people’s lives through caregiving.

2. Mild spoilers: the section of Elimane in Argentina felt a little hollow compared to the rest.