Books from June 2025
June was a sweltering month in England (by our standards) and it meant my brain practically melted. I kept picking a book up only to read a page or two and abandon it on the side again. That being said, of the books I did read, June was pretty successful.
I started it still in Japan mode with a reread of Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and then by bringing an old, previously DNF’d, ARC of Kanazawa by David Joiner. Both of these are gorgeous love letters to Japan in completely different ways and styles. Then, I meandered into the British-Jamaican experience with Lisa Smith’s brilliant debut, which is a slow-burn literary fiction, woven with race, identity, love and history, but the burn is SO worth the wait. Later in the month, I moved onto my first Octavia E. Butler, and read a hilarious, satirical blend between The Bear and Bridget Jones’ Diary in the shape of Food Person by Adam Roberts.
June reads
- Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, trans. Eric Ozawa (reread)
- Kanazawa by David Joiner
- Jamaica Road by Lisa Smith
- Red Pockets: An Offering by Alice Mah
- Love Forms by Claire Adam (ARC)
- Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
- Food Person by Adam Roberts
In review
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, trans. Eric Ozawa (reread)
Rating: 4.75 stars
I first read Days at the Morisaki Bookshop before it was even released and quickly fell in love with the healing fiction ambience of it. In fact, this book is what inspired my fiancé and I’s recent excursion to Jimbōchō in Tokyo! Set in a secondhand bookshop in Japan, 25-year-old Takako is at a crossroads in her life. After a breakup and leaving her job, Takako reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle’s offer to stay rent-free above his secondhand bookshop inJimbōchō. While, truly, very little happens in this novel, it’s a short, enjoyable book-about-books that hones in on the healing power of… books.
Kanazawa by David Joiner
Rating: 4.25 stars
When I first tried to read this book in 2021, I wasn’t in the right headspace for such a quiet and subtle story. Yet, something drew me to pick it back up after our trip to Japan, and I found myself really enjoying this examination of Japanese life through the eyes of Joiner, an author that clearly adores the country and who has wholeheartedly embraced its history, culture and values.
Kanazawa was his second novel, famed for being the first novel in English about its titular city. Here, Emmitt and his wife Mirai are in the throes of purchasing their dream home. There emerges a push and pull between his desire to buy a machiya property in Kanazawa, and her desire to pursue a city life in Tokyo. This is a gorgeously quiet novel that is filled with the minutiae of everyday life in rural Japan, the comings, goings and misgivings of a marriage, the pull of storied history and allure of something new. I really appreciated Joiner’s long passages about Japanese culture, even if at times it felt as though he were going off on a tangent. In this way, Japan as a country became a character and plot line of its own – one that really worked. I loved watching Mirai as she discovered herself and her wants in life, and equally how her values ‘worked’ alongside those of her parents and Emmitt’s.
Jamaica Road by Lisa Smith
Thanks Knopf and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy!
Rating: 4 stars
I don’t read nearly enough about the Black-British experience in fiction, and so I was really excited to be accepted for an ARC of Jamaica Road. This book is a literary fiction novel that features a love story against the backdrop of a tumultuous decade in the tight-knit British-Jamaican community in London. It’s 1981 and Daphne is the only Black girl in her class. To survive London in the 80s, Daphne’s aim is to go unnoticed. Yet this is all upended when a boy, Connie Small, arrives undocumented from Jamaica. Despite Daphne’s most earnest attempts to keep her distance, Connie is a magnetic, charismatic forcer and they soon develop a close bond, navigating racial tensions in a volatile city and their families growing close, too.
Emotional and quick-witted and laden with humanity, Jamaica Road is a beautiful historical fiction and I am surely impressed that it’s Smith’s debut. The relationship and friendship between Daphne and Connie is realistic and haunting. You can really feel the pressure on Daphne as she navigates the fact that her best friend is here illegally, especially a dramatic, violence and tension-filled backdrop of 80s London and all the racism and cultural changes it is going through. The slow burn romance is perfectly plotted against this bigger plot. I also really enjoyed Smith’s inclusion and use of Jamaican patois throughout. While this slowed down my read as I worked to understand it, this really immersed me in the story and helped play up the themes of identity and heritage. The slower pace of this book won’t work for everybody, but I really recommend sticking with it. A gorgeous read.
Red Pockets: An Offering by Alice Mah
Rating: N/A
N.B.: I no longer add star ratings to memoir works since it doesn’t seem fair to ‘rate’ somebody’s real, lived experiences.
Red Pockets: An Offering is Alice Mah’s memoir, combining an exploration of her Chinese cultural heritage and environmental justice. I knew I wanted to pick up a copy as soon as I read the blurb – my two favourite non-fiction topics! – and it felt like fate, somehow, when I found a pristine copy in one of my favourite secondhand bookshops in London.
The book begins as Alice returns to her family’s ancestral home in China seeking some answers to unasked questions before her grandparents passed away. I really enjoyed the paragraphs all about finding their ancestral village, and wish there was a touch more of this. From there, we move to her present life in England and, interspersed with her work in environmental studies, this is sadly where it began to fall flat for me. I don’t give star ratings for memoirs, but I do know that I was largely disappointed by this book. Red Pockets: An Offering ended up reading disjointedly, hopping from place to place, thought to thought. Perhaps I was raised in a different traditional Chinese household, too, but the focus on red envelopes (a money gift given to children) was a bit strong. I sort of got the sense that the author was mad at or embarrassed somehow by her Chinese roots, although I did find her quest to find their ancestral village fascinating.
Love Forms by Claire Adam
Thanks Faber & Faber and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy!
Rating: 3.75 stars
At just 262 pages, I flew through this book in a matter of heatwave days. In 80s Trinidad, Dawn Bishop – pregnant at 16 – is ferried off to Venezuela and cared for by nuns until she gives birth to a baby girl, before leaving her to be adopted. She returns home, changed forever, and thus begins a new life where she must try to carry on. Forty years, a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, and a divorce later, Dawn lives a quiet life alone, yet she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela and of what might have been. A chance online encounter from an Internet forum leads a woman to message Dawn, and thus ensues an exploration of what it means to be a mother, a daughter.
Beautifully arresting from start to finish, Love Forms enwraps you in Dawn’s love and grief. There’s a deep sense of sadness and longing (of course) when Dawn begins to quietly retrace her steps and turns the idea of ‘motherhood to a daughter’ in her mind, over and over. It’s quiet and slow and human, and unravels in such a way that you look around and wonder how you got there. I am slowly becoming more of a literary fiction reader: wonderfully human stories like these can’t be beaten in a world of devastation.
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
Rating: 4.5 stars
Dystopian at every turn, in Dawn we meet Lillith who has been Awakened after being suspended in sleep by the Oankali, a race who intervened in the fate of humanity some hundreds years before during an extinction-level event. Though she has lost her family, Lilith was spared. Why? The Oankali want Lilith to lead her people ‘back home’ to a place that has been changed: the Oankali intervened by curing disease, healing the world, upsetting and revamping social and political hierarchies. What’s more, the Oankali force Lilith to mate with them to form a new race.
I was blown away by this book and I’m so glad I finally got round to reading it! Butler expertly teams plot with character with world-building in a seamless manner, making Dawn an equally seamless read. For all of its hard-hitting subject matter – colonialism, birth-slavery, putting a microscope on what it means to be human – it’s a thoroughly enjoyable book from start to finish, and I loved Lilith as our strong-minded, feminist protagonist. Thought-provoking too; I kept thinking and overthinking what an alien species would ‘fix’ from Earth’s society and people, and the Oankali really nailed it to be honest. 10/10, no notes.
Food Person by Adam Roberts
Thanks Random House UK and NetGalley for my advanced reader copy!
Rating: 4 stars
NetGalley is great for finding books that you probably wouldn’t have heard of before. It’s how I discovered The Safekeep, years before it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2025, and how I fell in love with The Antidote by Karen Russell. It’s also how I came across Food Person, which I mostly requested for its quirky cover. Spoiler: I loved it.
Food Person follows Isabella as she loses her food-writing job and, by chance, snags a ghostwriting gig for a celebrity’s cookbook. I found myself laughing out loud at the satirical writing, the laser-focused lens on writing, ghostwriting and celebrity-dom, and marvelled at the glorious foodie descriptions. Roberts unflinchingly creates a raucous world where the vapid meet the meek, and I really enjoyed following as Isabella steps into her own, encountering plenty of kitchen and publishing mishaps along the way.
