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.

Book Review of Holy Boy by Lee Heejoo (translated by Joheun Lee)

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

 

Both a thriller and a study of obsession and modern-day idolatry.

This is a novel (based, apparently, on real incidents) about four women (two are young, two middle-aged) with an obsession in common, or as it turns out, different obsessions with an object in common, which happens to be a highly popular young male Korean pop star, who is perhaps a one-hit wonder or very nearly so.

This leads to their working at cross-purposes as they work together. At the same time, almost everyone else with any relationship to the pop idol in question is likewise plotting in some direction or another and most of those who aren’t plotting at all, swiftly fall victim to the plots. Although most of the outcomes in this novel are tragic, the kidnap of the pop idol by the four women does at least save him from what his manager sees as a neat (and very final) solution to the dangerous levels of obsessive behaviour exhibited by other fans, especially when it leads to violence against his colleagues and he could well be next!

The company’s chairman, though, is greatly impressed by the enterprise and inventiveness of the young female fans and thinks they are more talented than their Western or Japanese counterparts and they would be an asset to Korea if they had something more important to do, such as resisting an invasion or overthrowing a domestic dictatorship. And although all this is set in South Korea, more than one of the characters sees North Korea as a possible escape route back towards a simpler way of life, more in keeping with Korean tradition than the present-day South Korea.

This is not an idea likely to appear in any non-fiction published by or for South Koreans, however “free” the country might be according to the official narrative. There are very few countries in the world, let alone the Far East, where the idol of constant change in the name of “progress” can be safely questioned and to worship it is the only really safe course of action in most societies these days. What makes it a fantasy is that the North is just as obsessed with its own version of “never ending progress” as the South.

The boy pop star, is indeed an idol as well as a vulnerable and wickedly-exploited young man, he is also Korea, North and South, and even beyond that, the boy is the wider modern world, secretly desperate for a less frantic direction.

Spoiler alert: he is presumed dead, but narrowly survives and is found washed up on a beach by a young woman who decides a young man with nothing at all, not even a memory of who he is, is just what she is looking for. Obsession destroys, love redeems.

Holy Boy by Lee Heejoo is published in the UK by Picador on the 5^th of February 2026.

Book Review of The Living And The Dead by Christoffer Carlsson

 (Original novel translated from the Swedish by Rachel Willson Broyles)

 

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(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

An absorbing chain of consequences mystery novel.

Set in an economic and social backwater in rural Sweden, much more happens than just a murder and it continues to happen across more than two decades. At almost every stage there seems to be a new suspect, or at least a better explanation, but everyone has a slightly-different view of what has happened and each reacts to what he or she thinks has happened when the reality might be a little different or very different indeed. Small details that were once missed can change the way everything looks, but then, after twenty years even the most essential “known fact” in the investigation turns out to be a completely mistaken assumption. And over those two decades almost all of the principle characters do some level of harm to themselves or somebody else based on a flawed understanding of what others had done. The level of harm escalates into a cataclysm for the entire community and it doesn’t even end there.

This is all pleasantly comprehensible, because the narrative is a progression from one character’s point of view to another’s and so on and they tend to see flaws in each other’s logic and assumptions rather than their own. The truth is emerging, but it all seems horribly complicated until a belated admission of error leads to sudden clarity and great danger.

The Living and The Dead is published in the UK by Michael Joseph on the 8^th of January 2026.

The Orwell Nobody Quotes

Since February 2020, it has become apparent to a steadily-growing proportion of thinking people that medical science has fallen into anti-science hands: “I am The Science” is not the statement of a scientist but the shriek of a demigod. To anyone with an interest in miscarriages of justice, this was obviously happening in forensic science two decades earlier at the dawn of the 21^st century, which would suggest that the seeds had been sown even further in the past. In fact, the debasement of science was already being organised in the 1860s, when a “dining club” known as the X-club was created in London so that certain professional “scientists” could, by favourably reviewing each other’s work, promote each other to oligarch if not demigod status within their chosen fields. See a relevant book I reviewed here:

https://mswritingshowcase.blogspot.com/2024/05/book-review-of-popes-and-unicorns-by.html

The more palpable this debasement gets, and as further fields of scientific endeavour are added to the list of casualties, the more people start quoting phrases, passages and whole books by George Orwell. And whilst I don’t disagree with the relevance of these familiar quotations in a way, I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that as a teenager (this was not a recent experience) I read something or other by George Orwell which was even more relevant than “1984” or the more obvious essays. But the mists of time were more like a shroud of thick fog and I could not bring it to mind.

So, I recently decided to invest in the Kindle edition of something billed as “The Complete Works of George Orwell” (which it isn’t because the BBC-related stuff is missing, along with articles written for The Observer about gardening and so on.) But it’s still a huge pile of Orwellisms, so I ignored all the volumes within the collection which I knew not to be what I was looking for, and read the rest. This took a while.

Along the way, I noted that that a lot of the material which Orwell wrote around 1939 to 1941, touched on the way that many English intellectuals who dabbled with fascism, communism (or, quite often, both at different times or even the same moment) appeared to be seduced by the “scientific” nature of the NAZIs and/or the Bolsheviks. H.G. Wells comes up quite a lot within that thread of Orwell’s writings, and elsewhere he names H.G. Wells as one of his favourite writers during his boyhood. He seems to have been much less fond of George Bernard Shaw, who gets mentioned twice and both times Orwell is at pains to remind us that Shaw was not English! Neither was Dylan Thomas, who does get mentioned (favourably) in an essay about the future of poetry on the Wireless (a field which Thomas made his own broadcasting from Cardiff during the war, but Orwell was writing at the start of that experiment so didn’t know how it went). It’s interesting that the only two “racist” remarks Orwell makes should be about the person who went around Europe preaching the “science” of eugenics and recommending the use of poison gas in the euthanasia of the “workshy” and disabled people to receptive audiences including both Hitler and Stalin.

Orwell gives his former literary hero, the “authoritarian” H.G. Wells, much more time than he ever gives to Shaw but he explodes Wells’s excuse for being impressed by Hitler on the basis of the latter’s reliance for “science” by pointing out that all of Hitler’s science was state-approved “German Science” which isn’t science. Science is just science.

{BTW: This didn’t stop the Americans and Russians, upon the defeat of NAZI Germany, going potty about the superiority of the science that had just lost the war and rounding up all the NAZI “scientists” they could find and carrying them off to new lives in the super-powers’ research labs and universities. Most universities in America have now been run by at least two generations of NAZI-trained educators and it is beginning to show: “I am The Science!!” The situation in Russia is less clear, but the current government there is not entirely free of NAZI-thought and there’s something dark and home-grown there as well. In my novel The Farshoreman this is known as “prochnost.”}

Thus far, Orwell has seen and expounded the dangers of authoritarian manipulation of science as well as literature, which one would have expected to be his main concern. But he also sees, across all of his work, a difference between authoritarian regimes, which tend to either liberalise or disappear within a generation or two, and totalitarian regimes which aspire to last forever and might well do so with the help of modern technology. He also sees a difference in the limited number of ways that an authoritarian regime might corrupt science, literature and the other arts compared to what a totalitarian regime would do: it would completely change the meaning and purpose of each.

That realisation comes to Orwell about two thirds of the way through his analysis of a little-known pamphlet written by Leo Tolstoy “no later than 1903” which is a astonishing attack on the works, competence and stature of William Shakespeare, with “King Lear” as exhibit A in Tolstoy’s case against The Bard. Orwell doesn’t seek to defend Shakespeare: he seeks to understand the thinking and motivation behind Tolstoy’s diatribe and that is where George Orwell meets a truly totalitarian mind face to face and he does not like what he sees.

Orwell’s Essay is entitled “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool” (it’s published in more than one collection of Orwell’s work) and it seems that he had to go to some lengths to lay hands on a good translation of Tolstoy’s pamphlet, though this seems to have been towards or after the end of the second world war when almost anything might have been difficult to get, regardless of political sensitivity. The document seems to have been too obscure (in the West) to attract censorship in any case.

After going in circles a bit trying to understand the logic of Tolstoy’s arguments, Orwell concludes that Tolstoy’s own life story mimics much of the plot of King Lear and that Tolstoy is outraged by this, especially as he made the same mistake: he gave up his wealth, his lands and the copyright on most of his work to move across Russia and live the life of a peasant. Lear gives up being king for a quiet life.

Both Tolstoy and Lear made the mistake of expecting the same care and respect from others they had whilst in wealth and power, after they had given it up. In effect, both of them expected that everything would turn out the way they expected, simply because that was what they wanted to happen!

At this point, Orwell starts to deal with what the pamphlet says about Tolstoy’s view of art and science and it is in fact explicit. This is a brief fair use quotation, that deserves wider attention. Tolstoy sees art and writing as legitimate only as “parables”:

The parables - this is where Tolstoy differs from the average vulgar puritan – must themselves be works of art, but pleasure and curiosity must be excluded from them.

Science, also, must be divorced from curiosity. The business of science, he says, is not to discover what happens, but to teach men how they ought to live. So also with history and politics.

Tolstoy’s vision, in other words, is not simply that the governed may not question their governors, which has been a common belief of governors through the ages, but that nobody may ever question anything, ever. Every branch of learning and discovery is turned into a submissive study of how to live one’s life, but a life without learning, with nothing new, ever, is a life without meaning and not really life any more. This goes beyond anything which Hitler or Stalin did or thought and it excels even King Nebuchadnezzar II. And yet, here in 2025, this is the very direction in which the global elite are taking us. We won’t be able to undo it by following the money because there will not be any money. We won’t be able to spread subversive ideas because there will be no thought. (Many politicians these days have a lot of trouble with thinking and have already largely contracted this nasty chore out to think-tanks, which are all seriously misnamed.) Curiosity becomes a crime, as does pleasure. Tolstoy may even be the source of the conclusion which Gino Giovanni and Benito Mussolini came to between them: private thoughts are selfish and should be banned.

Interestingly, Orwell sums up what Shakespeare is telling us through the play “King Lear” thus (another short fair use quotation):

If you live for others, you must live for others and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself.

That is not going to be a popular message in either Davos or Connaught Square!

Are failures in forensic science and criminal justice a symptom of failings in science itself?

 Below is the text of a comment placed by the blog author on this YouTube video

https://youtu.be/sv7Z6OSF6Tg  which may have a far wider relevance.

The video is embedded at the bottom of this article. 

 

There are two underlying problems [with scientific evidence] which have led justice into error, not just in the Lucy Letby case but many others from the murders of Leslie Moleseed to Jill Dando and beyond:

The first is that we've had sufficient generations of lawyers without any training in scientific thinking (if they had this, they would not need [much] specific scientific knowledge to cross-examine effectively) for a total absence of scientific thinking to have become respectable for lawyers. If you challenged me to name lawyers who excelled at scientific thinking I would nominate Reginald Hine and Jan Christian Smutts, both of whom published books and papers in natural history at a time when that included what are now seen as six or seven different disciplines, all of which have featured in forensic evidence since the 1950s. Robert Hitchens had a good grasp of engineering and navigation, too, and navigation really does require disciplined thinking! Even after Smutts became a field marshal (he never really wanted to be a soldier and for most of his career he wasn't) he was active in the field of international law to the point of helping to draft the UN Charter whilst still authoring papers on natural history. These men seem extraordinary today, but they were not at all untypical of their generations (Hitchens really was the generation after the other two).

The second is that Science itself has been willfully transformed from a community where even the great men listened to lesser known colleagues, into a hierarchy where the strength of one's position and reputation counts for much more than the strength of one's arguments and evidence is selected rather than tested. The dangers this state of affairs extend far beyond the courtroom, but it is in the courtroom that we can see the hierarchy in operation and study it in detail: the nature of modern scientific publishing is such that it's very hard for us to do it elsewhere, especially in the field of medicine and public health policy.

It is no longer the done thing to challenge assertions by any "scientific expert" even though the challenging and testing of assertions and the supporting evidence (on those occasions when that is actually offered) is the true basis of scientific progress! The number of genuine scientific breakthroughs has declined since about 1950 and it's been in freefall since 1972-ish, but the number of "scientific ideas" being reported in the press has grown enormous and bewildering. And that's because we're not allowed to question ANY of it. If the idea comes from someone in authority or someone the authorities endorse as an expert, it must be true, and if it comes from anywhere else it must be misinformation or a conspiracy theory. A forest of ideas, none of which we may test, prevents any new growth in human knowledge because there is no light at all on the forest floor where the seedlings are.