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Autumnal treats

Some tasty books and music recommendations
Autumnal treats
How I've spent most of Autumn: running around old buildings, crunching on leaves, listening to audiobooks, dripping pus from various orifices (in this picture, for instance, the sunnies are hiding a truly grotesque eye infection). Not the worst, generally.

Hello loves!

London autumn is the worst and also the best. The sun sets at 4pm, you get to crunch through gorgeous red leaves, there's mizzle and mulled cider everywhere, the Tube is a Petri dish for medieval diseases. I have been recovering from a series of quite disgusting seasonal infections causing various parts of my body to seep inappropriate liquids. The upside of this has been that I've had lots of time to read superb books and listen to music, much of which I need to recommend!

Tasty music treats

I've been playing three newly released albums on repeat recently:

I've also been obsessively re-listening to the original Broadway cast recording of Sweeney Todd, which has become a bit of a Halloween tradition for me.

Tasty book treats

  • Yellowface by R. F. Kuang. Please read this novel if you have ever had even the most tangential interest in the publishing industry. It's the story of a woman who steals her friend's manuscript and passes it off as her own. It's outrageous and deliciously wicked and hilarious and brilliant and furious and carefully observed and an extremely accurate evisceration of how the industry really works. I bloody adored it.
  • Katabasis, also by R. F. Kuang. Please read this novel if you have ever had even the most tangential interest in academia, or know anyone who's ever suffered through a PhD. It's about two grad students who venture into hell to try to get a reference letter from their recently deceased supervisor, and of course the joke is that hell is a cakewalk compared to grad school.
  • Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth, for twisted unhinged domestic weirdness about a woman whose awful mother-in-law has just died, and might be haunting her husband. I cannot describe how utterly scrumptious the prose is. Read this if you love feral protagonists and complex mother-daughter relationships. It's a bit Mona Awad, a bit Meg Mason, a bit Yellow Wallpaper.
  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, which I'm rereading in eager anticipation for the Emerald Fennel film coming out in February next year. I first read Wuthering Heights as a gothy fifteen-year-old, which is exactly the right age and mindset to read it (a girl literally DIES out of MELANCHOLY just to SPITE her ex-boyfriend). The key to understanding the novel is realising that it's not a love story; it's a hate story, and I've been pleasantly surprised to find it's much funnier than I remembered.
  • Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward, a horror story set in the Rocky Mountains about a cult of lost children, like a dark riff on Peter Pan. Catriona's one of my favourite horror writers alive: her books are twisty puzzle boxes where things are never quite what they appear to be. There are some brilliant twists in this I didn't see coming, and the scares are harrowing, and the brother-sister bond at the story's heart is emotionally devastating. This one's coming out in February 2026, so if you like horror, pre-order it ASAP.
  • Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee is a hoot, imagining that King Arthur's knights (Lancelot and the lot) are magically resurrected whenever Britain's in trouble to ride forth and defend the realm. Only ... swords and chainmail aren't much use against climate change. Thomas D. Lee is a real-life scholar of the Arthurian Romances so it's richly researched and humane, with a lot of thoughtful things to say about the troubles of our age. It's also bloody hilarious. Think Ben Aaronovitch meets Terry Pratchett.
  • Maria Dahvana Headley's modern translation of Beowulf, which Thomas D. Lee recommended to me, is a treat. Beowulf is the most famous Old English poem, given a lot of energy and verve in this new translation. My favourite translation choice is the first word "Hwæt" which is usually translated as something like, "Hark", "Hear me" or "Attend"; Headley translates it as, "Bro!"
First page of Beowulf, on a scrap of manuscript dating to about 700-1000 CE. Folks, that's what Old English looks like!

And some non-fiction: Naomi Alderman has a brilliant new book out this week called Don't Burn Anyone at the Stake Today about the information crisis we're living through and what we should try to avoid repeating from historical ones. She's been supporting the release with a series of insightful essays about AI and disinformation on her Substack. If you've got kids and you've been anxious about how to prepare them for a post-AI job market, I highly recommend reading her thoughts on this.

NO ACTUALLY I'M NOT SORRY AT ALL my clowning obsession continues. I just want to say that the New York Times has also cottoned on to the clowning renaissance, and they pointed out that no other than Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute) has a background in clowning. Also, Londoners, Damien Warren-Smith's putting on a work-in-progress show on 21 November and I suspect it's going to be incredible.

Dwight Schrute is a clown, fact!

Project updates

If you missed our Marmalade is Missing AMA, you can watch the recording here. We had a great chat about the process of animation, film and history inspirations.

In the meantime, I've been making good progress on my next novel (I'm keeping a live writing journal here if you're interested in the whole agonising process).

Wishing you good books, music, and defence from seasonal infections,

Sam

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