What I read during those strange late-summer weeks. Five books that kept me sane.
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"When people fear losing what they know, they'll follow any tyrant promising to restore the old order." Kingsolver's my go-to author. Every new book from her is an event. This one hit differently in 2025 - a story about collapsing structures both literal and metaphorical. Two families, two centuries, same crumbling house. She weaves past and present until you can't tell which timeline is more precarious.
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"She says he has the gift of survival. Her? Barely the gift of life." They ran fast from a world falling apart, escaped a pandemic that moved like wildfire. Years later, they're clinging to a mountainside between cliffs and forest. This sanctuary they've built feels temporary, fragile. Roux writes survival without sentimentality - it's just endurance, day after grinding day.
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"Willpower stiffens everything - never want anything too clearly, just position yourself to get it all with your eyes half-closed. Surrender. Trust yourself. The most beautiful things always happen naturally." Reinhardt dissects ambition and desire in contemporary France. It's sharp, uncomfortable, and way too close to reality. The title's ironic - these aren't comedies, they're autopsies.
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"Love? What even is love? Can you eat it? Drink it? Does it do anything useful?" Brodie Moncur has perfect pitch and a generous godmother - his only tickets out of the family manse. Boyd follows him through obsession, through the kind of love that destroys everything in its path. Historical fiction that feels present-tense urgent. The past isn't safely distant here.
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"After electricity, early vaccines, atomic energy, the personal computer, Progress's cutting edge bloomed right there, between the thighs of what some still dared call a sex toy." I was thoroughly bored by Bruneau's previous work, but this one grabbed me. It's about artificial intelligence and desire, technology and loneliness. Provocative in the actual sense - it provokes thought, not just shock.
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