Books read in 2025

Orbital (Samantha Harvey, 2024)

I started the year finishing a book I started in the last days of 2024, the absolutely brilliant short novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey which had won the Booker Prize.   I hope I will have time to reread the book -- it is so exquisite, and has the virtue of being just 136 pages.  

Windfall (Desmond Bagley, 1982)

When we were teenagers, the genre my friends and I enjoyed the most were a class of thrillers written by (mainly British) authors such as Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley, featuring resourceful heroes pitted against villains (MacLean would use the phrase "the ungodly").  Such books were common in the lending libraries that children of professional middle-class Indians living in cities could access in the 1960s and 1970s.  Very occasionally a school library would buy them, perhaps because some teacher thought it was better that children read such thrillers rather than not read at all.  Also, each of us would also somehow manage to buy a few novels of this kind from our pocket money --  they were commonly available in bookshops in those days, certainly in Khan Market.   And especially in the bookshops or stalls at train stations, not just the Higginbothams of our times but even in those little carts that vendors plied on the platforms.  

Then there would be the usual frenetic exchange of such books within our circle of friends -- you were expected to return them within a few days, a week at the most.  Friendships could come unstuck if you broke that compact, taking too long to return a book or comic, or horror of horrors, losing it.  There was a constant fear of comics being confiscated by a parent, but not such books.   No one would anyway believe you lost it -- you were deemed unreliable thereafter.   And you would have to be a real idiot to take them to school and have them confiscated there. 

Bagley was a journalist and thriller writer who wrote books such as The Golden Keel, High Citadel, The Vivero Letter, The Tightrope Men, The Freedom Trap (which was filmed as The Mackintosh Man) and The Snow Tiger.  Windfall (1982) was the last thriller published while he was alive.  I saw this book in the library of the Delhi Gymkhana Club, a paperback that the library had had bound in a red hardback with the title and author's last name imprinted in gold lettering.  I immediately  picked it out since I was curious to revisit the kind of books I read nearly 5 decades ago, and  see whether the writers of this genre had any real quality to their writing. Beyond entertainment.   

I cannot say that this particular book by Bagley was remarkable for its writing.  The action in this novel is set mainly in Kenya, with some sequences in Los Angeles, New York and London.  Having lived in Africa, and travelling there, Bagley had some feel for that continent's terrain, vegetation and people.  He also has a good sense of geopolitics in the African context, with the characters commenting on the realities of borders. tribal and political allegiances in East and South Africa. This being the 1980s, the main baddies in the novel were the white South Africans.  The main protagonist Max Stafford (British) runs a security agency after retiring as a colonel in the British military intelligence -- there is nothing particularly charismatic about him.  Some of his collaborators and associates have capabilities that are a bit exaggerated. [There also are some odd names -- a Sikh called Nair Singh and a minor character called Natterjee, who is said to be a Parsi.  But hey, this was Kenya, and names could get transcribed differently there.]   The descriptions of the colonial clubs and colonies in Nairobi and hotels there and further into the bush sound reasonably authentic. A lot of cold beer and some gin is drunk by all (Nair Singh drinks juice or lassi though).  I got to learn a charming phrase for speed-breakers on the road: "sleeping policemen".

The Secret Hours (Mick Herron)

Mick Herron, creator of Slow Horses, is one of my favourite authors today.  Yes, yes, the comparisons with John Le Carré will be inevitable, but Herron has created some most memorable characters such as Jackson Lamb, Diana Taverner, Molly Doran and others.  He also has the ability to coin memorable phrases, not all of which can be repeated in polite company. 

The Secret Hours is a stand-alone novel, set in the present but with the past and a foreign country.  It has action happening in the present, and you can somewhat recognise a former PM.  It also has an interlaced deposition about actions from the past that cast long shadows.  I don't want to give away the plot, but characters from the Slow Horses series do appear, sometimes in the background (such as the Old Bastard). Diana Taverner as First Desk is one of the main characters in the present, together with others such as a retired academic and two civil servants.  The real story however is a remembrance of times past, a couple years after when the Wall came tumbling down.

Seeing (Jose Saramago)

An election takes place on a rainy day in the capital.

The Vegetarian (Han Kang)  (Translator: Deborah Smith)

An amazingly written and somewhat terrifying book about a Korean woman Yeong-hye who decides to become completely vegetarian following a bloody and brutal dream.   This abrupt and resolute decision (which follows an earlier decision to not wear a bra) and its sequelae are described in haunting prose, chronicling the protagonist's dramatic mental and physical deterioration in a series of grotesque events. The novel is organised in three parts, each from the perspectives of three people related to her and affected by this decision:  The first section is a narration by her husband Mr Cheong, with the Dream interlaced.  It culminates in Yeong-hye slashing her wrists when her bullying and violent father tries to force-feed her meat, leading to her being hospitalised. The second part (set two years later) focuses on her older sister In-hye's artist husband and his obsessive artistic project involving Yeong-hye, and its disastrous consequences.  The third part (set about a year later) focuses on In-hye and her relationship with her younger sister, now in a remote psychiatric hospital, and her own memories of her childhood, life and her young child.   This is an engrossing but deeply disquieting short novel that questions human nature and the mind. 

London Rules (Mick Herron)

The fifth novel in the Slow Horses series.   About Roddy Ho blissfully unaware of being scammed by  "his hot girl-friend" Kim, who is being played by North Korean sleeper agents.  Those young baddies had committed a massacre at Abbotsfield, then killed Penguins at the Watering Hole, left a (dud) bomb on a train, etc. Shirley Dander is managing her anger, and staying off coke for many many days at a stretch, and missing Marcus.  Louisa is still moping about Min.  Ho is hauled off to the Park, and Slough House placed under a lock-down by the Dogs, improbably only Emma Flyte there to enforce it; but she is outwitted by Lamb, and the Slow Horses escape from being locked down to track down the terrorists.

First Desk Claude Whelan had (for reasons not so clear) an ancient Park playbook op leaked sometime in the past.   Lamb protects his Slow Horses -- especially Ho (who had passed the document to Kim) and JK Coe, who accidentally knocks a paint tin from a height onto a populist pro-Brexit MP, and the others who mess up in different ways.  A Muslim politician whom the PM supports has skeletons to hide.  Di Taverner uses the opportunity to discredit Whelan and position herself in pole position for First Desk, and Lamb (with some help from Molly Doran) somehow is able to make a deal to shield his joes.   London Rules = CYA.   

Joe Country (Mick Herron)

The sixth novel in the Slow Horses series.  It's snowing in London but much more in Wales. 

Min Harper's son Lucas sees a Royal when he shouldn't and decides to cash in on it.  Except River's dad Harkness and his men are tasked (indirectly by the disgraced ex-minister  Peter Judd) with silencing him.  Louisa to the rescue, after a weird meeting with Clare Harper, now Addison.  Standish is buying bottles of wine after Di Taverner had told her (end of London Rules) how Partner really died.  Lamb tells her more details later.   River, JK Coe and Shirley rush off as support.  So does Emma.

Bad Actors (Mick Herron)

The eighth novel in the Slow Horses series.