The prose is deft and direct, thoroughly inverting the male gaze, and Clark’s portrayal of post-traumatic pain filtering into cruelty is pin sharp, confronting the reader with unsettling questions about power, control, and femininity.

“There’s a soft part of your brain. A place where you’re still just a child. Once someone’s poked the soft spot, the dent doesn’t go away. Like sticking your fingers in wet concrete.”

An uncomfortable read that challenges the way we view female violence, not as a reaction to male aggression but as a raw, ferocious assertion of identity. It’s also often unexpectedly and inappropriately funny. This is car-crash lit, packed with ugliness and uneasiness that you can’t look away from. An incredible debut.

For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh, The Bacchae by Euripides, or Mónica Ojeda’s Jawbone.

The Outrun by Amy Liptrot
Genre: Memoir
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Catriona’s thoughts: “Where do you belong?” That’s the Orcadian way of asking where someone’s from, and it’s the question Amy Liptrot keeps circling throughout The Outrun. After years of addiction, heartbreak, and drifting through city life, she returns to Orkney in search of healing, but nothing is quite the same. This book is about what happens when you come back changed and your home doesn’t quite fit anymore.

Liptrot writes with an honesty that’s raw and exposing. She takes us through her unravelling, set in London flats with paper-thin walls and strangers on either side, through toxic relationships, drinking, nights that stretch into days, and then through the slow process of coming back to herself. She takes us through this, viscerally revealing her drinking as slowly destroying her and all the relationships around her: “I squeezed the last love from him” 

She finds comfort not in people but in stories, myths, weather patterns, birds and sea currents. She maps the island, the skies, even satellite signals, like she’s trying to rebuild something out of fragments, desperately trying to find the belonging she craves. 

Having never been to Orkney, she made it feel both deeply familiar and completely otherworldly. There’s also something beautifully strange about the way she sees and talks about London as having its own mythology just like the ancient Scandinavian myths of Orkney. She finds stories in the city and in its isolation. “I felt unwanted, like I’d failed to find my space,” she writes. The breeze off the Thames reminds her of home, but in a way that feels distant, like a memory you’re not sure actually happened. The Outrun made me think about how sometimes we can feel like tourists in the places we’re meant to call home, how familiar landscapes can become unfamiliar, and how we try to piece together identity from wherever we can find it. It’s a book about returning but not quite belonging, losing and searching, and finding small, unexpected ways to start over.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐1/2

Alice’s thoughts: Originally I had picked up The Hearing Trumpet on a whim, with the understanding that it would probably sit unbothered on a bookshelf, acting mostly as a signal of my brilliant taste in books and art. However, in preparation for an upcoming Six Foot Spotlight, I decided to give it a go and was very pleasantly surprised. 

The Hearing Trumpet bears many of the motifs we expect from Carrington the Painter – criticisms of organised religion, divine female figures, and the apocalypse – but within this narrative Carrington fully immerses her audience in her vast imagination. Following Marian Leatherby, a 92 year old woman living in a retirement home, The Hearing Trumpet chiefly explores modern disconnectedness. After being shipped off to a retirement community run by a probably fraudulent and definitely culty Doctor and his wife, Marian uncovers secrets with apocalyptic consequences, and joins forces with her fellow residents to start a revolution. It goes without saying that Carrington has loaded The Hearing Trumpet with feminist undertones, putting a community of old women at the very centre of the narrative. She completely reimagines an oft-overlooked group of people, highlighting their complex inner lives, and emphasising their individual and collective power.