The Secret History draws you deep into the insular world of an elite New England college, focusing on a secretive, eccentric group of Classics students whose intense, codependent bond unravels into a series of dark and unsettling consequences. Donna Tartt explores their moral failings and transgressions through the eyes of Richard, an outsider who becomes infatuated with the group and completely mesmerized by their enigmatic professor, Julian. I found myself constantly questioning what Richard saw in any of them: a veneer of depth that ironically exposes his own shallowness. Nevertheless, he finds a surrogate family with them, becoming engulfed in their world and completely disconnected from the realities of everyday life. 

Richard’s adoration of the group and Julian obviously echoes Nick Carraway’s infatuation with Gatsby, a comparison that heightens the chilling coldness and callousness of the characters. Despite their emotional detachment, Tartt kept me fascinated with these obviously unlikeable characters, weaving their cruelties with casual ease into gorgeous, lyrical prose. 

French Braid by Anne Tyler
Genre: Domestic Fiction, Saga
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Hope’s thoughts: A pleasant and inoffensive novel following the connections between a family and their wider pool of relatives, spanning multiple generations and varied POV’s. 

Tyler’s writing is warm, humourful, and full of mundane relatability. This is not a passionate, roller-coaster-of-emotions tale littered with visceral murders (teaser of my upcoming review of A Certain Hunger.) This is a quiet, comfortable, and honest book about the nature of everyday life and everyday relationships. 

A short read – would be good on holiday. 

Blackouts by Justin Torres
Genre: Gay Fiction
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Fee’s thoughts: In Blackouts, Justin Torres cracks open the false neutrality of institutional knowledge, bringing to the surface stories deliberately buried beneath euphemism, moralism, and bureaucratic categorisation. The book is as much an excavation as it is a novel. It’s a hybrid text, drawing on and radically reworking the 1941 study Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. That book, a product of its time but also shaped by real, vulnerable voices, here becomes both source material and ghostly antagonist.

The original study, edited by George Henry and published by the Case History Division at the Psychiatric Institute of New York, drew on interviews with queer people collected by Jan Gay, a lesbian researcher whose involvement is largely erased from the published volume (see the Matilda effect). Torres not only returns Gay to the narrative but builds an entire structure around her in her absence and presence, honouring the queer women and femmes whose contributions were overwritten, whose testimony became data, pathology, or worse, moral lesson.

Torres takes the raw materials of the censored case files and re-contextualises them through a series of dialogues, images, and redacted pages. The mixed media aspect refuses the neatness of narrative resolution or the ease of linear history. The reader becomes complicit in piecing things together, and in confronting the violence of what’s missing.

At the core of this book are the intimate exchanges between two men, the younger narrator and the older and ailing Juan Gay, who met in a mental health facility ten years before the events of the novel and who have been drawn back together under the auspices of Juan’s palliative needs in the liminal space of The Palace: part convalescent home, part dreamscape, part philosophical theatre. Their conversations meander and loop, circling around memory and erasure and the difficulty of naming. It’s a queer temporality, where knowledge emerges not through revelation but through drift, suggestion, misunderstanding. Blackouts happen both as literal events – seizures, losses of consciousness – and as metaphors for history’s blindspots. What gets blacked out, and by whom? What do we inherit when the archive is already redacted? And who gets to re-voice the once silenced?