Hampstead Heath, 28/12/25

 

That Was The Year That Was

Reading (in no especial order):

Helm, Sarah Hall; Pulse, Cynan Jones; The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, Olga Tokarczuk; The Land in Winter, Andrew Miller; Landfall, James Bradley; When There Are Wolves Again, E.J. Swift; Greyhound, Joanna Pocock; Sleeper Beach; Nick Harkaway; Halcyon Years, Alastair Reynolds; Shroud, Adrian Tchaikovsky; The Silence of the Girls, The Women of Troy, The Voyage Home, Pat Barker; Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner; The Trees, Percival Everett; Night Watch, Jane Anne Phillips; In the Distance, Hernan Diaz.

Book of the year: We Live Here Now, C.D. Rose. Bookended by a pair of fictional essays by an art critic, twelve chapters chronicle the intersecting lives of people connected to the experimental installation artist Sigismunda Conrad, whose last work was abruptly closed after people began to disappear inside it. Begining with a bleeding edge parody of the contemporary art scene and its relationship with extraterritorial tax havens and cryptocurrency, the novel grows ever wilder and stranger, culminating in the hallucinatory, apocalyptic labyrinth of Sigismunda Conrad's new show, where the voices of the various characters merge as they discover (maybe) that they've arrived where they began. Restlessly inventive, ruthlessly comic, it fully embodies the weird hauntology of our happening world, where everything connects but meaning is impossible to triangulate.

Writing:

Began 2025 by accidentally blurting out a short story for a themed anthology, blending human and cosmic time and compressing the heat death of the universe into a single day. The anthology will be published in 2026, I think, by MIT Press.

Spent most of the rest of the year writing a new novel, Heaven's Grand Design (about which I'll say nothing except that it's some kind of high fantasy), and with getting Loss Protocol ready for publication. Which is also a kind of fantasy, even though it's set in the near future, and a very personal work and grief and the thinning of our world. Begun in 2022, it's been a long time coming, but will at last be out in the world -- at last! -- in February 2026.