Book review of Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell

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(Review based on a review copy from the publisher.)

 

A timely historical novel about the culture war waged in Germany before the Holocaust, which is also a deep and loving portrait of a self-invented young female artist making an impact in the most difficult and dangerous of circumstances. It is timely because it is published as Tech Oligarchs seek equivalent control over the arts as the NASDAP once did and the mechanism of control, deliberate impoverishment of the talented, is very similar in nature but further-reaching than Goebbels could ever have dreamed of.

It is apparent that whilst the accusation against the Jews is that they prosper, unduly, at the expense of the German people, it is the creative talent of the Jews which the new masters of Germany envy and fear in equal measure. The heroine, Hannah, a seamstress from a family entirely engaged in the garment business, who likes to draw, leaves home and starts out on her own, becomes interested in fine art, attracts the attention of an expert who mentors, but does not really teach her as she becomes a painter. None of the Jews in the story are hugely wealthy and only one family is even prosperous, but an Aryan female patron who funds and exploits Hannah in equal measure is indeed hugely wealthy and has several other wealthy Aryan female friends. They do not start out as obvious fascists and for several years Germany remains a democratic republic. But once there is a new Chancellor (who is not named until well towards the end of the novel) the wealthy swiftly and overtly side with the newly powerful and make themselves believe in the new doctrines, heart and soul.

Hannah gets paid lots of money to paint nudes of her wealthy patron and her friends and gives pretty well all of it away. Her art becomes both a target of the culture war and a weapon in it, used by both sides! She is betrayed by her patron and betrays her patron back, but it is the patron who rescues Hannah from imminent arrest and gets her out of Germany. The divisions are deep, but also complicated and ambiguous.

The principal difference between the culture war in the novel and that in the real world in the present day is that the historical German Chancellor passed surprise edicts and even enacted complicated legislation to deprive his victims of their rights, their jobs, their goods and their homes. The relevant quote from the present day Oligarchs is “Tech is how we by-pass the constitution” (so no need for laws at all!) and they are not just targeting an ethnic minority, or even a disenfranchised ethnic majority, or the creatives within them. All creative effort is being stripped of reward and the costs of carrying out creative activities for one’s own expression steadily ramp up. Every non-Oligarch is being steadily impoverished and the thought of what that might be preparation for makes one wonder if this novel is prophetic as well as historical?

Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell is published by Pan Macmillan/Picador on the 16^th of July 2026.

Tales From The Topless Café, new book coming soon.

 

 

 

A sequence of eight science fiction tales set in a lightly-revised version of the author's "Forest" universe (published via HMS Press in Canada in the mid nineties) this work includes seven original Katie Hounsome illustrations (in addition to the Katie Hounsome cover art, above) and seeks to add AI-free artistic value to the text while it is testing the waters for the significant investment of work required to revise and republish "Forest", "Tiger" and "Protegeé" and finish the fourth novel in a Milligan's trilogy: "Badge of Stars."

 (The only tale containing any serious (but entirely proportionate) mayhem is left unillustrated out of prudence rather than prudery.) 

 Delays in completing this work are all down to the author and his battle with two different life-threatening illnesses, and in the meantime Katie Hounsome has been busy on other projects: https://katiehcreates.com/

 There will be an e-book edition of this, but only some e-readers will be able to reproduce the art-deco-style colour illustrations to a satisfactory standard, so the plan is for there to be an Amazon print-on-demand paperback for those who want the text with the illustrations in tangible form and for appropriate platforms to carry e-books in a format that will allow colour rendition on I-pads, PCs and similar devices.

On Kindles and other simple e-readers, the text may appear with the illustrations appearing in monochrome. If this doesn't work well, a text-only edition may have to be created. The hope is that readers who appreciate the illustrations, will buy the paperback and those who are happy with the text won't have to.

None of the e-book editions will be particularly expensive. 

It currently looks as if this will be available by Autumn 2026. 

Book Review of The Enemy’s Wife by Deborah Swift

 

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(Fair review based on a review copy from the publisher.)

The second novel in a series about surviving war rather than winning it.

This well-researched story is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai just before and for several months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (and many other places, including Shanghai’s Western enclave). Two of the central characters are female refugees; one of them a Polish Jewess forcibly separated from her Japanese husband and the other an orphaned teenage Jehovah’s Witness from Austria. From that premise, the author does an excellent job of sustaining the reader’s hope in an ending which is not unbearably bitter, and that hope is not quite dashed, either. But in doing this the author redefines success as someone who has been through the struggle still being alive after it.

There have been many accounts of how brutal the Japanese armed forces were during WW2 (which started in China years before it was happening anywhere else) and most of these are true, but the author here goes the necessary distance to show that this was not a natural behaviour for many, probably most, of the men in question and that the brutality of their training and subsequent harsh discipline conditioned the men to accept that sort of thing as normal -and to do to those weaker than themselves what those stronger than themselves were constantly doing to the soldiers in the middle. The author does not labour the point, but she makes it. The methods described resemble those of the Ottoman Empire as documented by T.E. Lawrence (from his personal experience when he was mistaken for a potential conscript) except that the Imperial Japanese Army perhaps went further in the direction of making the killing of helpless victims a standard TRAINING exercise. But both the Japanese and Ottoman Empires sought to recalibrate the sexuality of recruits towards violence and exploitation. In the present day this is being done by online lifestyle influencers rather than drill sergeants and it is possible to foresee serious trouble brewing, or actively being brewed.

The author also presents the various different peoples and factions as collections of individuals making moral choices, or else acting solely in their own interests or even on their very worst impulses. There is no tarring with the same brush. The most despicable character of all is, ostensibly at any rate, a senior member of the CCP rather than the Japanese Army, but on balance the CCP itself gets a pretty good press, though that’s partly because there’s no other group in Shanghai offering organised resistance to the Japanese. Many of the people helping the resistance are not “members” of any party and that causes them to help others with a degree of impartiality the CCP itself has never been noted for.

And a Japanese officer does win his battle with addiction, even if he loses everything else.

The Enemy’s Wife by Deborah Swift is published by HQ on the 9^th of April 2026

Book Review of Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty

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This review is based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley of the first story only.

The life and death by scrolling of a young Irish woman.

This is set in the present day and is based on the heroine scrolling her way through life, whilst fretting about illnesses she doesn’t have, although she forgets to tell anyone about the one symptom that actually matters! But the structure is that of a basic text-only role-playing game popular on mainframes and TRS-80 type microcomputers in about 1982. The clue is that a troll keeps appearing and trying to kill her, and this is not a reference to someone posting nasty comments online. And yes, it is relevant that the young woman is Irish because this simply would not happen to anyone who was not.

It’s very funny once the reader gets their head around what’s happening. If the other stories are as good, and and assuming that there are enough of them, then the book as a whole should work quite well. The first installment was released this St Gertrude’s Day.

Getting the Electric by Louise Hegarty is published by Picador (Pan Macmillan) on the 30^th of April 29026.

Book Review of Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami

(Translated by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio)

  

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(Fair review based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK.)

This well-crafted novel is a long and enjoyable read, even though it’s all about alienation, exclusion, poverty and injustice. Hana, of High School age but no longer going to school, has no effective means of establishing her identity, cannot have a bank account, access insurance, medical care, or any of the many things which normal citizens take for granted. And because she has no means of establishing her identity, she has no way of getting any sort of document, or card, which allows her to legitimise her existence. Nonetheless, females in this position can get grey-economy or zero-hours jobs which permit them to exist (and serve the society which excludes them) whereas it’s very hard for males in the same boat to get ANY legal or even gig-economy position without the help of organised crime; the price of which is constant obedience and never-ending obligation.

As ever, in any part of the world and not just in Japan, the existence of a mandatory means of proving your entitlement to be part of society is, first and foremost aimed at the exclusion from society of those whom the rich and powerful despise, or those that they fear. That is a universal truth and it is why this novel will speak to any thinking resident of the United Kingdom in 2026. It will, however, be lost on the unthinking, whether they actually constitute a majority or not.

Having said all that, what makes this an enjoyable read is the relationship which develops between Hana and an older woman, Kimiko, who’s been in a similar bind for many years. Kimiko’s hopeless situation has destroyed any ability she might once have had to scheme her way out of her situation, but at the same time she has no qualms about sharing any resource that she has access to with anyone who needs it. If someone is thirsty, Kimiko tries to find something for them to drink, if they are sad she tries to cheer them up. From a position of being unable to help herself in any useful way, she helps others, especially Hana, even if it’s only to get through one more day.

They get some breaks from atypically generous landlords who fell into wealth and are not hugely worried about IMMEDIATE payoffs, and much more sustained assistance from a seasoned and remarkably cautious gangster who has realised, from the experience of his elder brothers, that ambition and greed are very dangerous things if you are part of organised crime! Organised crime exploits societal greed: its foot soldiers are in mortal danger the moment they cease to be content with what they are given. He helps Hana and Kimiko as far as his own survival permits and is perhaps the only man Hana loves; certainly he’s the only man in Hana’s world worthy of her trust.

One of Hana’s older female friends falls into the hands of a more typical gang member (he mistakenly thinks he is upwardly mobile) and pays the inevitable price, causing a crisis which breaks up the friendship group, perhaps forever, but certainly until the Coronavirus pandemic puts the whole of Japan into the sort of state which has been normal for Hana all her life.

Somewhat ironically, Hana’s greatest financial success (this doesn’t last long) comes from the exploitation of cloned debit and credit cards: the very instruments of her exclusion from law-abiding society! At the end, Hana has lost everyone she loves, but that loss means they are always with her, which is the very last thing Kimiko teaches her. She finds peace.

Sisters in Yellow is published in the UK by Picador on 19^th of March 2026

Book Review of Death Watch Cottage by T. Orr Munro

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(Review based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK)

 

 Murder mystery where victims, killers and motives proliferate.

In this novel, there’s no whittling-down of suspects, either for murders or police corruption and attempts to pervert the course of justice.

The heroine is a Cornish crime scene investigator, who finds several pieces of significant evidence to do with a number of possibly separate cases, starting with what looks like an accidental death of an environmental campaigner in the splendidly ambiguous “Death Watch Cottage”, whilst going through an extremely bad time as a soon to be homeless single mother with a teenage daughter and with accusations of professional misconduct and even corruption flying in more than one direction. All of which makes it very hard to correctly understand the true, or the full, significance of anything until it has all been found, and even then the proper context is supplied by a single crucial but not very noticeable fact mentioned outside of the active investigation itself.

And even when the investigator has solved all the known crimes to her own satisfaction and their housing issues to her daughter’s satisfaction, there’s a twist still to come when her thoughts turn to a mystery connected with the same Death Watch Cottage from several years before the killing which triggered her investigation.

The rich list of suspects includes: a property developer, a different sort of environmental campaigner to the deceased, a possible gang of anti-second home vandals, an adulteress, a bullying police inspector, a publisher of illegal voyeuristic pornography and a teenage porn addict with an online handle of “Tate Boy” and a diminishing list of friends. The puzzle is not so much to sort out the innocent from the guilty as to match the offenders to the correct offences, which is really quite absorbing for the reader.

Death Watch Cottage by T. Orr Munroe is published in the UK by HQ on the 26^th of March 2026

Book Review of The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley

  

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The history of a friendship.

 

(Review based on a review copy from the publisher via NetGalley UK)

The saving grace of any nostalgic novel stretching across the Blair years ought to be that it does not mention Mr B at all, so score one for the author there.

A younger literary woman works, intermittently, for a magazine mostly edited by an older man, with whom she gets on very well. Quite what the magazine “Sequence” actually publishes is never quite clear; what matters is the politics of producing it! Quite why she is so tolerant of and loyal to her erstwhile boss becomes clear as she remembers some of her past relationships, which range from the abusive to non-sinister weirdness. And the (completely unproductive) two-year reign of “Shove” Halfpenny as editor of Sequence will strike a chord with people in almost any industry or other field of endeavour with experience of those born to executive privilege who rise relentlessly up the ladder regardless of the wrecked enterprises they leave in their wake.

The attractive thing about this book is that there’s no real rancour about the bad stuff, merely observation and endurance. The point of this book is that you have to get through the bad stuff because what you value, forever, are the people and places who get you through.

That may even be why the bad stuff has to happen: to smoke out those who actually care.

 

 The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley is published in the UK by Picador on the 2^nd of April 2026.