As the leaves fall, we find ourselves turning inwards and reading more and more. We usually post a few Most Anticipated Lists each year but this year we thought we’d focus less on what we’re excited about, and more on what we’ve read recently and loved. Some of these titles are new, some have been around for a long time. All connected with us enough that we want to share.
Beth Ward, regular contributor:
White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
White is for Witching was published in 2009, so I'm a bit late to this incredible novel, but as soon as I cracked its spine, it felt like I'd slipped into a kind of elsewhere place, somewhere near and familiar, but clouded over with an unshakeable sense of foreboding.
In White is for Witching, Oyeyemi tells the eerie tale of the Silver family, who live in a grand, yet grotesque home in Dover, England. It's a story about being haunted, by the ghosts of our family legacies, by our own personal traumas -- and about the landscapes that play host to those hauntings. It calls to mind the dark psychologies of Shirley Jackson, the Gothic atmospheres and internal paranoias conjured by Daphne du Maurier -- and I adored it.
White Magic by Elissa Washuta
This essay collection, from Indigenous author Elissa Washuta, sits at the intersection of trauma, witchcraft, and art. And it takes an exacting look at the ways in which white colonial legacies have wreaked havoc on Indigenous bodies, spiritualities, and communities in the United States.
White Magic's stunning prose, which does not make for comfortable reading, covers such topics as Tarot and Twin Peaks, heartbreak and Fleetwood Mac, but the essays are also about Washuta's attempts to hold on to her own magic, despite colonial attempts to capitalize on it. It is also very much a book about place, and the ways in which place acts as a transmogrifier of experience. Washuta writes from the center of her own pain much of the time, and the essays feel like traveling through fun house mirrors or time portals, its structure broken up into three acts, Act 1: Ace of Cups. The Devil. Death; Act II: Four of Cups. Ten of Swords. The Tower; Act III: The Magician, The Empress, The World.
It is a beautiful, visceral book.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Katherine May most certainly did not write a "witchcraft" book. Her memoir Wintering isn't a book about casting spells or working with crystals at all. What May did write a book about was learning how to fully embrace the cycles of the seasons -- the seasons of the natural world, and our own private seasons. She writes about honoring the dark part of the year, the shadow and the cold, and all of the magic, lessons, and mysteries that can be found there. We learn in Wintering the surprising beauty that can be found in rest, retreat, and going to ground as the light of the year wanes.
In Wintering, May shares stories of visiting Stonehenge and learning to understand how ritualizing the turning of the year, the returning of the light, can help us ground and heal. She writes of her trip to Tromsø, staying with the Sámi people who still follow a polytheistic, animist spirituality that keeps them deeply connected to the rhythms of nature. It's not explicitly witchcraft, but it feels deeply connected to the ideas around which many people's craft is based. It is also a warm hug of a book, enchanting, comforting -- the perfect cold weather read.
Yas Floyer, Staff Writer and Book Club Editor:
The Birds and Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier
This chilling short story collection is one that I return to time and time again with tales that border on fantasy / science-fi. My favourites include The Apple Tree which tells the story of a murdered wife whose spirit is thought to live within an apple tree, and The Birds, which inspired Hitchcock’s movie by the same name involving a town set upon by a flock of birds. Each story is haunting in its own way.
Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden
Shortlisted for The Gordon Burn Prize, this debut novel by poet and writer Salena Godden focuses on Death’s life story as she dictates her memoir to Wolf, a troubled writer touched by Death early in his life. The narrative is beautifully lyrical and the books opens by confronting the idea of death head on, looking at our fears and how fleeting life is. Far from a cloaked figured personified as a man, Death is an old black women, exhausted from an eternity doing her work. As she unburdens herself, an unlikely friendship develops.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
By the writer who gave us Johnathan Strange and Mr Norrell, recipient of the Women’s Fiction Prize, Pirenesi is a fantasy novel that follows our eponymous protagonist as he navigates his way through a vast labyrinth of halls and meandering corridors, which we come to learn has a set of rules of it’s own. With many twists and turns and elements of gothic, this novel is beautifully written featuring one of the most endearing characters I have met.
Eva Clifford, Associate Editor:
Right of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell
Ring of Bright Water is about Gavin Maxwell’s life in an isolated house in the Scottish Highlands and the animals he encounters and cares for. Having recently moved to Scotland, I decided to read this after having seen the film as a kid and it was mostly as enchanting as I remember: I loved following Mij and Edal (Maxwell’s pet otters) into the rock pools, streams and coves around Camusfearna, and escaping to the remoteness of Maxwell’s world. I found the first section of the book slow-moving, but it improves once the otters are introduced. Through their adventures it’s as if we’re taken into a whole other world that would largely be overlooked by humans – the minutiae of nature and the traces of other animals in the landscape which suddenly become visible to us. There are parts of the wild life where we cannot follow, however, like when Mij dives beneath the surface of the ocean or disappears for hours on end.
Some parts of this book are laugh-out-loud funny - but the humour is often in the absurdity of the animals in man-made spaces. And as much as it is funny, it does raise serious questions about the domestication of wild animals. Although there are parts that are particularly disturbing to read, like the ordeal of transporting the otters from Iraq to Scotland – which would surely be illegal today – it’s important to remember this book was written in the late 1950s when the trade of wild animals was legal and accepted. Overall I recommend this book to anyone seeking an escape into the natural world - especially if you love otters.
Elizabeth Kim, editor:
The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Beauty of Growing Up by Evanna Lynch
Wow. I didn’t expect this memoir about Evanna Lynch’s recovery from anorexia to by magical, but it is. The actress and activist recalls her painful transition from girlhood to womanhood, sowing the seeds of her dreams, being cast in the Harry Potter series as Luna Lovegood, and what came next for her. Despite the extraordinary highs and lows, her honest account is deeply relatable. So many of us have experienced low self worth, mental illness, as well as the related stigma and the feeling that mental health treatment has a long way to go. A trigger warning: I am all too familiar with this particular mental illness, and in case you are too, it did take me to some dark places. But ultimately Lynch shines a light on the shadows, re-frames them, and shows how the same traits that fuelled her anorexia can be better channelled into creativity. Crucially, Lynch gets to the existential core of the illness long neglected by Western medicine: a feeling that life is intrinsically meaningless and a questioning of why we might consume anything at all. This might sound bleak, and sometimes it is, but in spite of the existential nihilism, we are reminded that there are some golden threads that tie things together, and remarkable people who guide us back to our path. There is a lingering feeling that we live both in a mechanical, empty world, and in an enchanted world where miracles really happen; we can decide which lens to commit to. This is recommended reading for all therapists, doctors, or anyone curious about what the deeper aspect this notoriously misunderstood condition. Lynch reminds us to be courageous—we can choose to let our inner fires burn us up, or use them to forge something that feels deeply meaningful.
With The End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in the Age of Denial by Kathryn Mannix
Death is one of our greatest taboos. People still edge around the topic, talking about “recovery” and “getting better” even when in the thrum of terminal illness. I have never been scared of death but I have been scared of the pain of dying, and even more so, the pain of loss. I am curious about what happens in the final days, and what consciousness feels like as it knows that the end is near (one day we’ll all get there, but for now we can read about it!). Mannix drew from 30 years of experience practising palliative care, weaving these stories about individuals nearing the end of the lives, and including, with refreshing honesty, their deaths. They are fictionalised but each story is a tapestry of real people who Mannix met and cared for; these are stories with universal and mythical resonance. Reading it I realised the end of life, like birth, can be quite beautiful and poignant, albeit terribly sad, if we fully show up for those we love nearing the end.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
This autumn I have been going through a bit of a fiction reading lull. This strange, quasi non-fiction novel broke it. The novel is the first from Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and as Mark Haddon says on the blurb, it’s like Labatut has created a new genre. Tracing the history of several modern physicists and their discoveries, Labatut conveys their brilliance, as well as their madness and desperation at the dystopian reality they had a part in creating. It conveys the proximity of science to mysticism, how both rely on stepping into the darkness, and how little of the world we really understand. It evokes the same Promethean terror as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There is the lingering sense that we are already in the grasp of a giant, cultural black hole. Writes Labatut:
“We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it's not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It's as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”