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English Books Berlin, Berlin (2026)

05/09/2026

Actually very touching. An author’s last novel, a farewell to his readers. And his meddling with his friends‘ relationship.
„But what if you were pulled up and corrected by… your own brain? What if it could lay in front of you all your retellings and demonstrate how gradually yet systematically you had diverged from your original account? […] Every time you said ‘I love you’ whether you’re meant it or not. Every time you failed to say ‘I love you’ when you should have done, when you wanted to but failed. How would you face the record - the chronological record- of all your lies, hypocrisies, cruelties both avoidable and (seemingly) unavoidable, your harsh forgettings, your dissimulations, your broken promises, your infidelities of word and deed? […] Belching from your brain as you went along. And maybe in time an on-switch might be found, and you could access the entire contents of your past, as and when you wished. A question: would you want to know absolutely everything about yourself? Is that a good idea, or a bad one?
I have found myself thinking a lot in recent years about how we remember the dead, about how quickly memory becomes myth and once-living people are turned into a set of anecdotes.
We’re all more than grown up – except no one ever really is in my view, we’re all just infants in adult clothing… but we’re as grown-up as we’re ever likely to be…
Yes, it’s harder making new friends as you get older - but also more gratifying when you do so. Suddenly there is a whole fresh unfamiliar life in your presence, with an undiscovered past and the future yet to be explored - and in the meantime what a lot there is to talk about.
She wondered if there hadn’t been quite enough love in her life already, and if companionship was the most she actually cared for – in which case, was she not already, and happily, her own best companion?“

15/08/2026

“The days passed. Dew silvered the cobwebs in the morning. Cold winds combed leaves from the branches, the rivers swelled with every rain. […] At home, the dog lay out in the sun and twisted in the litterfall, the leaves from the oak drifted down with each passing breeze and from the window Miles watched him already half buried, disappear bit by bit, over the morning, until all the remained was a dog-shaped lump in the middle of the lawn which could have been anything, a stone, more leaves, a wildcat, a fox.”
“… beneath his feet were silver forests, and towers rising to the clouds, and thousands of warriors gathered by the fluttering pennants of their battalions! The herd of caribou and elk, the stalking lions? And pterodactyls circling, and sea beasts in the seas? Pink sunsets, rivers of sand? Ha! But to have never questioned the simple illusion of solidity! You have no sense of what they beneath him: the caves, the pith, the tumble.”
“… the dog known to human beings as Giuseppe, but to his brethren as a beguiling mixture of aroma, lay on a sumptuously shredded pillow, rank with the secrets of the fields its cotton had been culled from, the dark mills where it have been assembled, the hands of the toiling men and women who had assembled it, the oceans that had carried it to this country, the progression of creatures, human and otherwise, that had used it to rest their heads. It had been a long day. He had only been outside once, but in that short time, he’d gathered from the winds a tale of roots and moles and worms, of ghosts hidden within the leaf-fall, of rats and springtails, mosses, snakes. It had come down from the mountain through the trees where lumbermen had laboured, through the scars torn deep into the earth, through dens of bear and fox and wolf and lion, down, down, through the paths that turned and twisted, through cities, seas, and silvered forests, before it rose again, into the corridors of pine and maple. And meadows then, green with young spring grasses. Past apple trees and hawthorns, trunks scarred by the secret script of sapsuckers, down past gall and wasp, and tumbling water, and dragonfly, and nymph. The world trembled in his nostrils. Some of this was new, and some familiar. Closing his eyes, he took it in, all in, and then he pricked his ears and stared into the darkness. Something extraordinary was coming.”

13/08/2026

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me. Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.
‘ That’s because you’re just too far out there. A 36 year-old, single convenience store worker, probably a virgin at that, zealously working every day, shouting at the top of her lungs, full of energy. Yet showing no signs of looking for a proper job. You’re a foreign object. It’s just nobody bothered to tell you because they find you too freaky. They’ve been saying it behind your back, though. And now they’ll start saying it to your face too.’”

12/08/2026

“There was a river a short walk from the house. It was miles from the ocean, but still fairly wide and muddy in places. I don’t know why, but I thought if we were this close to the river we would have cooler summers. I was wrong. Even when the river was out of sight, the pungent smell of grass and stagnant water was overwhelming.
The cries of the cicadas made the air feel even stickier. To the right of the path was the river, and to the left was a row of houses, each with its own garden and walls covered in Goya and other vegetables. Beyond the leaves and vines, no signs of life.… The riverbank was covered with grass, and so were parts of the river. There were a few birds on the water. They looked like herons, large and gray. The place was overgrown with susuki, kudzu, and other kinds of grass I’d seen before but couldn’t name. Parts of the river were murky blue, stagnant green, or totally black from the blinding sunlight. The dry grass almost smelled baked.
Just then, a grasshopper as big as my fist leapt from the bushes onto the path. It quivered as it folded its wings. It crept closer, then spread its wings and jumped away. When I looked up at the path ahead, I saw a big black animal. At first, I thought the extreme heat was making me hallucinate, but the creature was really there. It was obviously a mammal – but not one I’d ever seen before.… It had wide shoulders, slender and muscular thighs, but from the knees down, its legs were thin as sticks. The animal was covered in black fur and had a long tail and rounded ears. Its ribs were showing, but its back was bulky, maybe with muscle or with fat. Slowly, it moved down the path ahead of me, barely casting a shadow, probably because the sun was right overhead. There were no birds, no dogs, no cats – just this black animal.… It was walking ahead of me, almost guiding me… I saw the animals tail slip through the grass, and I looked after it, but there was nothing there to catch me. I fell into a hole. It was probably four or five feet deep, but I managed to land on my feet. I looked around the grass – now at high-level – but the animal was nowhere to be found. I heard the grass rustling nearby, but before along the sound stopped.”

12/08/2026

“The so-called inland route involves many unpredictable changes of vessel along the way and is a long and expensive expedition. Once you gain the Lake District archipelago, there are treacherous shallows, powerful tides and rumours of lethal whirlpools. It is said that predatory gangs come shooting out from any of the countless hidden inlets on powered skiffs to deprive you of your goods and perhaps your head. There is no safety until the rough Sea of the Central Belt is reached. But once that is crossed and the comforts of New Glasgow are behind you, the same dangers repeat, especially as the boat skirts wild Rannoch Island.”
“Memory is a sponge. It soaks up material from other times, other places and leaks it all over the moment in question. Its unreliability was one of the discoveries of 20th century psychology. That did not stop people from relying on their own or from believing in the recollections of others, if it suited.”
“I was gripped by an impulse to tell her that I loved her, but a lifetime various mishaps made me cautious of uttering those contractual three words, easily uttered and near impossible to unsay. I blamed myself for my caution and bad faith.”
“The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist. As individuals or nations we embellish our own histories to make ourselves seem better than we are. Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.”
“At one corner of the dairy, there was an accidental alignment of the brickwork or a gap in the pointing that caused a soft note to sound whenever the wind was just a little stronger than a gentle breeze. Too hard, too soft, and the whispering flute-like note would vanish. I heard it now, the unvarying pitch coming and going with the wind’s rise and fall. Its familiarity soothed me. I closed my eyes and for the first time in months, or even years, I felt expansive and peaceful, released from the fractures and tensions that the random elements of my character imposed on me. In such a state of mind, I remembered my luck in being alive, in simply being. So easy, not to have existed, so easy to forget in the fine detail of daily life, and vital to recall from time to time.”

05/08/2026

“His father pauses in his speech but his hand keeps moving: Liam watches it add the miniature crosshatchings of rocks on one side of the line – which he now recognises to be the clifftop not far from here – and the sprouted marshland symbols on the other. Strange, he thinks, that his father seems to have entirely lost his mind but not his extraordinary cartographic skill. Tomás can draw geographical features freehand and with great rapidity, but can’t answer a simple question.”
“Of the frosty road, he knows this: that it cut through a V-shaped valley, with high peaks on either side, a deep and slate-grey lough filling its space, that he had been compelled to walk its length, very slowly, the dark shapes of the hillsides on either side of him biting into the sky, and that the weather had been bitter and chill, and dusk had been upon them, and the air was thick with the choking, sweetish scent of rot. It invaded his nose, filtered right down to the bottom of his lungs: ever after he would recognise the smell instantly, if he came across it. If he allows himself to delve into his mind, if he probes the memory at all, but she tries never to do, he senses that he had not been alone on that road.”
“The old altar at the foot of the mountain experiences these shifts and mortalities in ways that our imperceptible to the humans who walk upon it. All the land knows is that its trees are felled and cut – for houses, for fire, for weapons, for the walls of fortresses – and this leads, first, to an increase in water in the soil, and then a mysterious dryness as some of the streams vanish, their beds hardening in the summer sun. There are fewer birds, of course, because if trees vanish so do their inhabitants, and so after a while fewer meadow flowers grow as no seeds are dropped. Insect life increases, which means that more crops are devoured by their swarms. Some winters, therefore, are long and the people grow lean. The wild irises spread, gathering in the still-wet places, the fissures in the earth where the surviving streamlets run, their blade-like leaves a sign to anyone passing that water can be had. Lichen blooms on the sides of the remaining trees; the branches rattle back and forth in the wind, unprotected by the one-dense forest. What lies between the mountain and the shore now looks very different. The country has been conquered, ruthlessly and systematically, by an army commander from the colonising country. He has confiscated the lands and given them to his most loyal officers; they have established their plantations and estates, and the peninsula people – whom the landlords call ‘wild ones’ – are forced back to live in the scant and rocky places, to work in the landlords’ fields, and pay heavy tithes.”

05/08/2026

“As he lay on the bed it came to him with utter clarity: I am lonely enough to die. He remembered that his wife had loved some book – oh, years ago now – about a crotchety old woman from Maine, and he had read the book reluctantly only because his wife had liked it. He’d forgotten about it until now. In the book the awful old woman’s father had killed himself when the woman was younger, and now that she was older, the woman thought: people die of loneliness. It happens all the time. And he thought: yes, that was correct. People do die of loneliness, and I am – or will be – one of them.
He thought: this cannot be happening. This cannot be true, please let this not be true. Even as he knew what it was. He stared up at the sky. Oh, it was beautiful! White clouds moved far above him, momentarily blocking the sun, and then the sun came out again. This has been his dream: floating out to sea in the water with the blue sky and white clouds above him. But his mind was both stunned and very clear, and he thought again: this cannot be happening.”

05/08/2026

Quoting from the book blurb: Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, Whistler is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.
“Eddie had to leave our family because he had been so careless with my life. He had sent me out in the snow to find help. He did not bother to do it himself, even though his ankle was broken and his foot was pinned in place by the emergency brake. It was my fault that they were getting divorced? ‘Not your fault, not my fault. His fault’, my mother said. That part I never listened to because clearly it was my fault if she had to get divorced for my safety. That was the truth I carried with me. I chewed it up and swallowed it without examination. I was nine. My heart exploded with the blow.”
“She didn’t mind waiting because she was with the people she loved, the people she had missed for such a long time… She couldn’t remember how long she’d been trying, but then the horse was there, entering their circle from the pine trees to stand near the fire.… Mary felt terrible to think her horse had spent three days with her bit in her mouth… Whistler lay down on the ground. For a horse it was an unheralded act of generosity.… She had to get herself on top of the horse with a broken ankle, her broken wrist and ribs, all of it on the right side. She would have to do it or she would have to die there, though dying there wouldn’t be the worst thing.”
“‘Everyone shuffled through relationships with several other people, perhaps many other people?’ ‘To the best of my knowledge,’ I said.… ‘It’s a luxury not to know what happened to the people you were once in love with. Unfortunately, it was not a luxury I was afforded.’

05/08/2026

From intercollegiate rules for women undergraduates, 1920: 3. A woman undergraduate must obtain leave from her principal before accepting invitations for the evening, or for mixed parties. She may not go out after dinner without permission and must always be back by 11 pm and must report her return. 4. A woman undergraduate may invite men friends to tea in the public rooms or grounds of the college or hall to which she belongs after obtaining permission from her principal, provided there are at least two women in the party. A woman undergraduate may receive her brother in her room, but not other men.
“‘Your name is such fun. I’ve never met a girl called Otto.’ . Otto shrugs. ‘Mother hates it, and will only call me Ottoline, which is probably why I like it so much.’ She laughs, then drags on her cigarette so fiercely that half of it turns to ash and falls to the floor. Marianne resist the urge to jump forward and scoop it up as Otto kicks it vaguely towards the fireplace. ‘Was it a problem during the war?’ asks Beatrice, handing Otto a gramophone record. ‘You know, it sounding German.’ ‘Oh, I was told to ditch it dozens of times, that I sounded like a hun-lover and a traitor, but I didn’t care. Otto means “prosperity in battle”, you know. My father always wanted a boy, and I was the youngest, so that’s why the nickname stuck. He used to call me his Little Bismarck because I could engineer situations to my advantage. A skill that arose from being one of four sisters.”
“ Marianne will have to find out what Otto knows at some point, but there is no sense rushing into giving away the truth (or partial truths) when she does not need to. Her bones ache and since the tea party last week with the Hadleys she has found it hard to muster any enthusiasm about leaving her room.… She has woken in the night gulping for breath again, terrified, although of what she could not say. Frightened of fear itself, perhaps. Of that looming sensation that the world about her is not real. It is hot and the midges make her head itch maddeningly. The motion of the water is barely audible over the human clatter. Despite being continually ploughed through by the hulls of boats, the liver looks desperate to return to its natural surface of bottle-green bark flecked with silver. It brings to mind how she conceived a child on a dark and thronging riverbank, nine miles downstream from here. By comparison, this stretch of the river is urbane, tame. To look at it now, one could not even tell which way is upstream. It has lost its instinct to fight back.”

04/08/2026

“Voices, voices, voices. And Tata, he is laughing. He is growling. One eye is mirthful, the other angry. He is the god of light and shade and at this moment he is everything wrapped up in one. Fury. Passion. Madness. Ecstasy. He does not care about these people. Nor about this woman and her ideas. He does not care who these people are or what they’re arguing about but they are in his house and they are growing loud and the evening must be his and his alone and there’s only one way to end it. He pushes back his chair. Leans forward and picks up the deep brown tart in the centre of the table. He weighs it in his hand for a moment, and then he throws it in one sloppy mess against the wall. Sticky hazelnuts hit the Corot, unpeel, slide down. Shudder to the floor like rain. The men’s stumble out into the night. Warm air, the flash of a bat. A distant bell sounds two in the morning. Peggy is the last to leave and she turns at the door. Joseph thinks she is going to thank them for the evening, or perhaps apologise for her companions. But instead, she looks from Joseph to Ettie and pulls a card from her purse. She hands it to Ettie. ‘Please give this to your uncle,’ she says, ‘if he ever changes his mind.’ Ettie takes the card and Joseph glances over her shoulder. Peggy Guggenheim / Hôtel de Crillon – 10 Place de la Concorde – Paris. Ettie puts the card in her pocket, and closes the door.”
The story in a nutshell. I prefer In Memoriam.

English Books Berlin

05/09/2026

15/08/2026

13/08/2026

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12/08/2026

05/08/2026

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