Books of 2023
books I've loved: an imaginary bookclub & virtual library
It has turned especially cold this week in the UK. The light is contracting and it will not be long before we reach the shortest day. It is a sensory reminder we’re arriving at the end of another year and a time for hibernating. Typically a time for reflection, I thought I’d share some of the books I’ve read and enjoyed this year.
I want to share some of my favourite reads of 2023, and to remind myself of those I return to, and ones I’d like to read again. The ones I include here (aside Letty McHugh’s) are also all available on audiobook.
I have many more things to say about these books but to save on energy (yours and mine) I will do this at a later date, picking up on different themes in each.
Jade Angeles Fitton
Hermit: A memoir of finding freedom in a wild place (Cornerstone)
“When Jade's partner leaves the barn that they moved into just weeks before, he leaves a dent in the wall and her life unravelled. Numbed from years in a destructive, abusive relationship, she faces an uncertain future and complete solitude. Slowly, with the help of Devon's salted cliffs and damp forested footpaths, Jade comes back to life and discovers the power of being alone.
As Jade reacclimatizes, she considers what it means to live alone. Through conversations with other hermits across the world, Fitton sheds light on the myriad - and often misunderstood - ways of living alone: from monks to hikikomori, and the largely ignored female hermit. Jade questions whether hermitic living is possible in an era of constant communication and increased housing costs as she finds herself financially unstable and itinerant. She realises that home doesn't exist within walls, but within the landscape of her childhood home county.”
Letty McHugh
Book of Hours (2022)
WINNER OF THE BARBELLION PRIZE 2022.
“Over the course of the pandemic, a complication with my chronic illness left me alone in a darkened room for three weeks. I drew comfort from an imagined Book of Hours. Half Almanac, half prayer book, medieval Books of Hours offered guidance for every situation and every day of the year. As I recovered I started to wonder, where was the spiritual guidebook for people like me; lost, sick, artists who watch too much reality TV? I couldn’t find one, so I made my own.
Borrowing wisdom from Anglo-Saxon hermits, contemporary artists and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Book of Hours is a collection of lyric essay and poetry exploring what it means to have faith, why we chase suffering and how to take solace in small joys.”
Letty is currently working on preparing a reprint of this book, so while currently unavailable there are plans to make it available again soon.
Michael Malay
Late Light (Manilla Press)
“This is a book about falling in love with vanishing things…
Late Light is the story of Michael Malay’s own journey, an Indonesian Australian making a home for himself in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines.
Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety.
It is about the wonder these animals inspired in our ancestors, the hope they inspire in us, and the joy they might still hold for our children.
Late Light is about migration, belonging and extinction.”
Noreen Masud
A Flat Place: a memoir (Penguin)
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023.
“Raw and radical, strange and beguiling - a love letter to Britain's breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain…
Noreen suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.”
Polly Atkin
Some Of Us Just Fall: on nature and not getting better (Sceptre)
‘Long before I knew I was sick, I knew I was breakable . . .’
“After years of unexplained health problems, Polly Atkin’s perception of her body was rendered fluid and disjointed. When she was finally diagnosed with two chronic conditions in her thirties, she began to piece together what had been happening to her – all the misdiagnoses, the fractures, the dislocations, the bone-crushing exhaustion, the not being believed.
Some of Us Just Fall combines memoir, pathography and nature writing to trace a fascinating journey through illness, a journey which led Polly to her current home in the Lake District, where outdoor swimming is purported to cure all, and where every day she turns to the natural world to help tame her illness. Polly delves into the history of her two genetic conditions, uncovering how these illnesses were managed (or not) in times gone by and exploring how best to plan for her own future.
From medical misogyny and gaslighting, to the illusion of ‘the nature cure’, this essential, beautiful and deeply personal book examines how we deal with bodies that diverge from the norm, and why this urgently needs to change.
This is not a book about getting better. This is a book about living better with illness.”
Sally Huband
Sea Bean: a beachcomber’s search for a magical charm (Penguin)
A WATERSTONES NATURE AND TRAVEL BEST BOOK OF 2023
LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT NATURE WRITING PRIZE 2023
“A powerful journey of sea and self, trial and hope on the islands of Shetland
When a seed falls from a vine in the tropics and is carried by ocean currents across the Atlantic to the shores of Western Europe - it is known as a sea bean. It is still considered lucky to find a sea bean on the shore, they have been used as magical charms for more than a thousand years.
On the storm-tossed beaches of the Shetland Archipelago, Sally Huband is searching. A message in a bottle, a mermaid’s purse, a lobster trap tag, each find connects her more deeply with our oceans. But it is Sally’s quest for a fabled sea bean that unlocks the myths of these islands and carries her through chronic illness towards a new and more resilient self.”
Victoria Bennett
All My Wild Mothers: motherhood, loss, and an apothecary garden (Hachette)
“An intimate weaving of memoir and herbal folklore, All My Wild Mothers is a story of rewilding our wastelands and the transformation that can happen when we do.
At seven months pregnant, Victoria Bennett was looking forward to new motherhood and all that was to come. But when the telephone rang, the news she received changed everything. Her eldest sister had died in a canoeing accident…
She and her son set about transforming the rubble around them into a wild apothecary garden. Daisy, for resilience. Dandelion, for strength against adversity. Red campion, to ward off loneliness. Sow thistle, to lift melancholy. Borage, to bring hope in dark and difficult times.
Stone by stone, seed by seed, All My Wild Mothers is the story of how sometimes life grows, not in spite of what is broken, but because of it.”
All My Wild Mothers is due out in paperback February 2024 & is A BOOKSELLER BOOK OF THE MONTH.
I also return to A Spell in the Wild by Alice Tarbuck in the autumn, listening to it on audio when I’m able to walk in the woods. Another newly released audiobook, although not newly published, is Sanatorium by Abi Palmer, well worthy of an inclusion here too.
Abi Palmer
Sanatorium (Penned in the Margins, 2020)
BARBELLION PRIZE SHORTLIST 2020
“A young woman spends a month taking the waters at a thermal water-based rehabilitation facility in Budapest.
On her return to London, she attempts to continue her recovery using an £80 inflatable blue bathtub. The tub becomes a metaphor for the intrusion of disability; a trip hazard in the middle of an unsuitable room, slowly deflating and in constant danger of falling apart.
Sanatorium moves through contrasting spaces — bathtub to thermal pool, land to water, day to night — interlacing memoir, poetry and meditations on the body to create a mesmerising, mercurial debut.”
Alice Tarbuck
A Spell in the Wild: a year (and six centuries) of magic (Hachette, 2020)
“Witches occupy a clear place in contemporary imagination. We can see them, shadowy, in the corners of the past: mad, glamorous, difficult, strange. They haunt the footnotes of history – from medieval witches burning at the stake to the lurid glamour of the 1970s witchcraft revival. But they are moving out of history, too. Witches are back. They’re feminist, independent, invested in self-care and care for the world. They are here, because they must be needed.’
In A Spell in the Wild, Alice Tarbuck explores what it means to be a witch today. Rooted in the real world, but filled with spells, rituals and recipes, this book is an accessible, seasonal guide to witchcraft in the twenty-first century. Following the course of a witch’s calendar year while also exploring the history and politics of witchcraft, A Spell in the Wild is the perfect primer for the contemporary witch.”
You may spot that several of these authors are also Moving Mountains contributors. This is not a coincidence. It’s been through reading and loving the work of these authors that I’ve been gathering names and wish lists of people to commission for the anthology, and am very fortunate their work is included in the Moving Mountains collection. There are more books to come from those who have contributed to the anthology and I shall follow their progress here too.
What are the books you have read and loved this year? Let me know of any I’ve missed or if these are books you’ve read and enjoyed too…
Addendum: It’s only in reading this for the audio version of the post that I notice how strongly these books all interrelate with each other. Many wonderful themes of isolation, environment, and pilgrimage, of one sort or another, emerge and offer connection across and between themselves and the reader, making an engaging and beautiful bookshelf, as well as speaking to the themes of the Moving Mountains anthology.
Thank you, a few of these are already in my to be read pile, or on my to be obtained list but it's added a few more. Nature writing/memoirs are my main reading still at the moment and there are so many wonderful writers that thankfully I will never run out.
Such a great list, including some titles I own — some I've even read — and others which I need to investigate. Thank you.