books you may love: November 2025

Now that I've jettisoned other pursuits (writing flash fiction and narrating and recording audio-stories for publication), I find myself with far more time to write and read, in addition to hanging out with KrA and D. 

It feels like a good place to come back to in my writing life without the presence of other distractions. 

And that allows me to treat you to a larger-than-usual list of books I've read and enjoyed this month. In addition to the usual short description, I've included excerpts of beautiful sentences, sometimes often several paragraphs, from these impactful works.

As always, let me know if you pick up any of these books and enjoy reading them!

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

This is a time-travel book, but also so much more than that. There's a government organization called the Ministry Of Time, and its employees are engaged in enabling people from the past to time-travel to the present. They are assigned 'bridges', who enable these time-travellers to get accustomed to the ways of the modern world.

The narrator of this tale is a 'bridge' for an 'expat' — Commander Graham Gore — who has come from 1847, the sole survivor of a doomed polar expedition.

This was such an intriguing and riveting read. Gore's understanding of the modern world as his 'bridge' explains to him how the world has changed since his time is dealt with much insight and empathy.

There are other time-travellers too, as well as a secret mission they're all entrapped in, quite without their knowing!

Here are some delightful excerpts from this book.

So far as I understood the British Empire, other people's countries were useful or negligible but rarely conceived of as autonomous. The empire regarded the world the way my dad regards elastic bands the post deliverer drops on their round: This is handy, it's just lying there; now it's mine.

~  

Everything that has ever been could have been prevented, and none of it was. The only thing you can mend is the future. Believe me when I say that time-travel taught me that.

~

I know how much you've longed for your future to clean down and cup your face, to whisper "Don't worry, it gets better." The truth is, it won't get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better.

...

Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.

An Irish Hostage (A Bess Crawford Mystery) by Charles Todd

This tale is set in the aftermath of WWI, when English nurse Bess Crawford heads to Ireland to attend the wedding of an Irish nurse she used to work alongside with in the war. Unfortunately, the groom, also an Englishman, disappears on the eve of his wedding. Bess takes it upon herself to unravel this mystery.

This was my first time reading a book set against the backdrop of the Easter Rising of 1916 in Ireland. As always, the authors portrayed all characters and causes in a very empathetic light.

There are rogues in every Cause. People who were either so intensely loyal they couldn't see beyond their faith in it, or were hungry for the power any change would give them. And they could do more damage to that Cause, even betray what it had stood for in the beginning, by their actions. I'd seen it happen elsewhere.

Was that what was going on here? A pocket of angry men who couldn't see that they were only going to make the English Parliament more resolute in bringing Ireland to heel?

Girl Dinner by Olivie Blake

I can't believe I haven't read any of Blake's works until now. 

Girl Dinner is a brilliant satirical take on feminism, motherhood, community (sorority), belonging, women and wanting to have it all, told through the intertwining tales of two female protagonists — a new mum who's going back to work as a lecturer at a university, and a sophomore student who's desperate to get into The House believing that doing so would change her life in a way nothing else possibly could.

I literally inhaled the book, devouring page after page of the feverish story-telling. To admit that the book made me feel completely seen as a mother, as a human being doing her best in this chaotic world, is an understatement!

There are pages and pages that I dog-eared simply to be able to read and re-read Blake's incisive writing. I'd quote the entire book if I could. So I've quoted entire passages instead, and even though I think I may have gone overboard, I'm not sure if I've managed to convey how searing her words are, and how truly they land.

~

Because what wouldn’t Sloane do if it meant a loving marriage, a happy child, a rewarding career? Forget the other two things, even. What wouldn’t she do to guarantee a healthy life for Isla, a life for herself where she could see her daughter grow up strong and well, where she had the resources to personally ensure that nobody ever caused her daughter harm, where her daughter would never have to know abandonment or pain or fear? It was impossible, of course, irrational, but what else was motherhood? What was womanhood if not a lifelong desperation for things that were not and could never be guaranteed?

As usual, Sloane collapsed into thoughts of Isla. A missing of her, eternal, that disappeared momentarily only for things like irritation, when Isla wouldn’t sleep or wouldn’t eat. Nothing felt natural to Sloane anymore but Isla, such that sometimes, with Max, Sloan would even feel a sort of hunger for Isla’s smallness, the smell of her skin. Sloane’s desire had transformed itself, now an unrecognizable mutant. 

So many things had disappeared from Sloane when she became a mother. Her younger self, her ability to make mistakes. Her capacity for judging the desperation of others. There was suddenly no limit to the person she could be — to what she genuinely believed you could become.

It was true there was a loss of something; in the unsurgical cleaving of her life, some fragments had simply fallen away. Caretaking was draining work, her time ruled not just by the presence of but the worry and the longing for The Child. There was so much capacity for resentment, for all the grains of life in the hourglass lost to the wee hours, the distant spectre of the capable adult she used to be, hovering out of reach like a ghost while she swayed half-asleep but still upright.

The things she used to love, the loathing for herself she used to feel, were suddenly immaterial. The person staring back in the glass had already shape-shifted irretrievably, the old her was gone. If it wasn’t baby weight, it was the pain of being torn in two or the atrophy from months of being forced out of her natural shape, first the belly and then the caring of the child, the soothing, the protecting, the strength she would reach for and use whether she possessed it in actuality or not.

But all those things were nothing. The physical shape-shifting only camouflaged a love that was more like insanity, contortions of the body to cage the madness inside. A love that defied reason and felt closer to pain. It would never be reciprocated—impossible, who had ever loved their parent as they loved their child? Who could ever reasonably ask for that kind of love in return? This, it was a rush of maternal carnage, love like nothing she’d been capable of before because it fell so close to violence. It was a love that didn’t whisper about the atrocities it would gladly commit. 

~

... and Sloane would no longer be desperate to be left alone for five fucking seconds—unlike the current state of being, where a toddler was constantly tugging her clothes down for something, a less (more?) demoralizing version of a randy husband.

God, what Sloane wouldn't give sometimes for five minutes alone, except that she was also so desperate for Isla to stay precisely as she was that she sometimes stopped breathing from the pain. 

Sometimes, when Isla was sleeping in Sloane's arms, Sloane would have to physically fight the urge to nuzzle her, to kiss her pink cheeks, her rosebud mouth. 

It was a strange thing, motherhood. Sloane didn't want to freeze Isla in time, nor did she want to go backward, now did she want to fast-forward. 

What she wanted, desperately, was to witness Isla in every form that Isla would ever take, all at once. She wanted to know Isla's future interests; she wanted to revisit the first gummy smiles Isla ever gave. 

Everyone else had warned Sloane that she'd eventually want children again, it was just biology, but Sloane had no interest in other children. Whenever she saw a fresh baby— fresh, her mind always said, like a vampire for milky breath — she never wanted another. She wanted five minutes of her own baby, a quick crack-pipe hit of the past.

Sloane understood that she would always feel that way; that parenting was relentless and unsolvable. Impossible that she could ever truly do right by Isla. But by god, she was desperate to try.

~

"Honestly, the real fuckery about getting older is this absurd resistance to looking old," Alex said when she joined Sloane for coffee later that week. "Which is ridiculous. Because as I tell The Girls all the time, getting older increases your value as a woman. It's a gift." She sipped her coffee with a shrug. "Needless to say, they don't believe me."

"In fairness to them," commented Sloane with that same diabolical rationalization, "there is a very palpable tipping point where becoming undesirable as a sexual object diminishes the mythology of your acceptance by men. But since that acceptance was a myth to begin with, the loss is imaginary, and yet absolutely crushing at the same time."

~

Her new TA laughed and swept a hand through his raven hair as he took the seat opposite hers at her desk. She had the vague sensation of wanting to witness him on horseback.

No Shred Of Evidence (An Inspector Ian Rutledge Mystery) by Charles Todd

After I finish reading a good book, I usually head towards another Charles Todd book. Because anything else I'd read, I know I would hold it to the lofty expectations of the previous book, and that would make it impossible to appreciate the new book on its own.

No Shred Of Evidence is a convoluted mystery. Four women set out on a boat when they see a man from their village drowning, his boat rapidly sinking under him. They rescue him, and are joined in their attempts by another villager who swims out to help. But when they've hauled the drowning man into the boat, the Good Samaritan turns around and accuses them of attempting to murder the drowning man!

Inspector Rutledge is called in to untangle this case where there's no evidence other than the word of one man against that of the four young ladies. It's a rather convoluted case that takes us into the hearts of many characters and their stories. An engrossing read, as one has come to expect with anything that Todd writes!

St. Ives, like so many parents across England, had had to deal with the aftermath of the Great War in unexpected ways. Their hero sons had returned covered not in glory but in swaths of bandaging. If they returned at all. but it was easier to mourn a memory that had marched away in the autumn of 1914 and never came back. He was still the handsome young man in uniform that families last remembered, smiling at the photographers, eyes alight with the excitement of going to war. The shattered remains of their child, coming home so utterly changed, was a very much harder cross to bear.

~

"What you learn, in times of great loss, is that the human spirit can survive the most terrible events in one's life and somehow go on." He took a deep breath, staring out toward the river. "Not that it makes anything any better. You just learn to tolerate the difference, the change. And then you get on with it."

~

He turned to Rutledge. "Were you in the war?

"Yes. In France."

"Was it as bad as we've heard? Worse?"

He wasn't asking for truth. He wanted reassurance that his son had not suffered as much as people were saying, now that soldiers had returned home and censorship had ended.

"I won't lie," Rutledge said quietly. "There were days that could drive any man mad with the horror of them. But that was not all it was in the trenches. You learned to depend on the man beside you, to trust him in ways you never trusted any other human being before that. You looked out for him and he for you. He was father and brother and son to you. It's what got you through, that friendship,. Knowing that you weren't alone. And God willing, he was there when you were wounded or dying. Or there was a nursing Sister holding your hand."

It was mostly true. But dying was a lonely business even so. He didn't tell Grenville that.

~

Too much could be read into bits of evidence. Wishful thinking on a detective's part, hoping to find truth in what was actually irrelevant. 

~

"I don't see why the statement of a farmer is more trustworthy than that of my daughter. Or Grenville's for that matter," Gordon fumed.

He was a soldier, accustomed to instant respect and men at the ready to carry out his orders.

~

"It's a tangle, isn't it?" he said pleasantly to Elaine. "We need facts—and sometimes there are no facts to be found. Or if there are, they point in different directions, until we're all in a muddle."

Widow's Point: The Complete Haunting by Richard Chizmar and W. H. Chizmar

This is the only time I'm going to talk about this book. I don't know what got into me but in October, the library had a tantalizing collection of horror and spooky tales on display.

Believing that I could stomach a scary tale, I picked up this book. No, I won't claim innocence because I knew what I was getting into.

And Good Heavens! This book scared me thoroughly! Very well-written, delivering all the scares, and keeping a constant undercurrent of tension going throughout.

Widow's Point is a haunted lighthouse and many ghosthunters have taken up challenges to spend a few nights locked in there for the thrill of it. None of them survive to tell the tale.

The book is also told in media format, employing video footages and audio recordings, and that adds to the immediacy of the narrative.

If you're a horror fan, this is probably right up your alley. After several sleepless nights, I've decided I won't read a ghost story or watch a horror movie ever again!

So! Do any of these books pique your interest? Write to me and let me know if you read any of them!