After finishing Colm Toibin’s most recent novel, I looked at a few reviews to see what critical reaction to it had been and I was struck by how many reviewers referred to its “restraint”. It’s an important insight and one, it seems to me, that goes to the heart of the impact that Long Island makes. The main characters will be familiar to readers of Toibin’s earlier novel Brooklyn. Eilis Lacey, now married with two children, leaves her home in Long Island to make a visit to Ireland, ostensibly to see her aging mother but really to escape a crisis in her marriage. There she picks up a relationship with an old flame, Jim Farrell, a local pub owner. No plot spoilers here, except to say there’s not much of a plot and that doesn’t matter at all. Read Long Island for the brilliance of the characterization and the almost unbearable narrative tension that Toibin creates, but above all for the deep emotion teased out of ordinary lives with such poignancy, power and, yes, restraint.

Abroad in Japan is a simple enough account of Chris Broad’s decade living in Japan. What sets it apart from similar books is the affection and respect Broad clearly has for his adopted home. He avoids the default position many foreign commentators take when talking about the Japanese, the “they’re weird and wonderful” or “they’re impossible to understand” attitude that I’ve always found to be so patronizing and superficial. Broad has deep affection for the country and its people, has worked to learn the language and customs, and has put down deep roots. This is no travelogue, but a funny love letter to a country he has explored from top to bottom.

I have made 20-30 visits to Japan over the years and I have grown to love the country. I would never pretend to understand or know it well, because it’s a place that demands and repays deep immersion, but I enjoy returning there more than any other place I have visited. Some of that is down to its sights, its food, and its customs, but mostly it’s about the Japanese people – their kindness, hospitality, curiosity, and warmth.

I found reading Roman Stories a discomfiting experience and I think that is exactly what Jhumpa Lahiri wanted. The people in these stories find themselves in episodes of crisis, isolation, or disorientation. An expatriate woman waiting for surgery, an immigrant child minder forced to live in a different continent from her young son, another immigrant forced out of his home by his neighbors’ racist hatred, a lonely widow trying to make sense of a city transformed since her childhood. Everyone is sad, uncomfortable, angry, or alone. Rome, the author’s adopted home in recent times, is the setting for all the stories, and it’s not the Rome the tourists see. It’s a city in decline, a place scarred by graffiti and garbage, where the immigrants are mistreated and those born and raised there are uneasy and alienated.

There are powerful and poignant stories here (I liked The Procession especially), but I finished the collection feeling that many failed to make the impact the author intended. For me short stories require a sharpness of focus and a precision of expression. Something is lost in this most exacting of genres if the lens roams too freely. I wanted less, but the author always seemed to want to give more.

When Michelangelo moved to Rome from Florence in 1534 he was nearly 60 years old. He would have been considered an old man by the standards of the time. (Average life expectancy was around 70 years). He was to live another three decades, decades that saw him produce some of his most remarkable work. An exhibition at the British Museum, Michelangelo: The Last Decades, chronicles and celebrates this period. It’s not to be missed and, by the looks of the long lines outside the museum at opening time this morning, many agree with me.

The number and scale of the commissions he accepted in those decades would have daunted even a younger person. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be his patron, and he found it difficult to refuse the various popes and noblemen offering him architectural and painting work. Little wonder that he took to preparing outlines and sketches that were finished by lesser artists. The magnificent drawings, mostly completed in chalk on paper, are the heart of this small exhibition, and looking at them close-up it’s hardly surprising that his contemporaries marveled at this “divinely inspired” talents. Anyone whose experience of Michelangelo has been confined until now to his vast frescos or monumental sculptures ought to beat a path to the British Museum and marvel at these wondrous drawings.

There is quite a long list of “literary giants” whose work I have never read. From time to time I make resolutions to shorten the list, to read even just one work of a celebrated writer I have so far overlooked, and plug a hole in my ignorance. A planned family visit to Lisbon (that never happened) led me to the shelves in Daunt Books in Marylebone set aside for books by Portuguese writers, and it was there I spotted Saramago. Other than the fact that he came from Portugal and had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I knew nothing about him. There must have been some uncertainty at work in the back of my mind because I chose a small volume of reminiscences, leaving on the shelves the longer (and reputedly challenging) novels. With the planned trip abandoned, I put Small Memories aside for a few weeks. It’s a simple collection of reminiscences from Saramago’s childhood in Azinhaga and Lisbon in the 1920s and 1930s, told directly and without affectation. There is such warmth in his recollection of incidents and experiences, and of family and school friends, and such vividness in his retelling of the unexceptional events of his early life. Saramago’s boyhood was one of poverty and simplicity, but there is no trace of bitterness or self-pity to be found in Small Memories. I can’t say it made me want to delve further into his work, but I enjoyed every page of this short, touching memoir.

When I started to visit ancient churches more than thirty years ago, I discovered quite quickly that my tastes were particular. The older the better, the plainer the better – that pretty much sums up my preferences. While I’m delighted to have any opportunity to spend hours wandering around some Early English parish church filled with elaborate carving, statuary, and stained glass, I am happiest in the unadorned and simple interiors of Saxon and Norman places of worship. Don’t ask me why.

Peter Ross’s tastes, I’m glad to say, are more inclusive and embracing than mine. Steeple Chasing – Around Britain by Church is his account of wandering around such places just when the Covid-19 pandemic was starting to bite the UK. His tour includes some well known church treasures, for example Durham Cathedral and Westminster Abbey, but also less celebrated places of worship, ancient and not-so-old, like Pluscarden Abbey and small parish churches in Herefordshire and Yorkshire.

Ross’s book is not an architectural guide. Having said that, I learned a lot about individual churches, some of which I thought I knew well. His purpose is different; to understand what places of worship mean today, what functions they perform and what hold they continue to have even when so few people visit them for religious ceremonies or private prayer. It’s an important, valuable, and charming book, filled with anecdotes and personalities. It left me itching to re-start my own wandering around such places.

This collection of short stories first appeared in 2007, quite some time before Claire Keegan became the literary star she is now. The huge fanbase she has these days as a result of more recent books like Foster has led her publishers to re-issue many of her earlier books, and I’m happy about that.

Walk the Blue Fields has the feel of an early career book. The stories are uneven. Some hit the mark brilliantly, such as the title story and Surrender. Others don’t quite come off and the reader gets a sense of Keegan testing her reach and abilities. No matter. I’m planning on reading soon her debut collection, Antarctica, and that will complete my tour of the works of a writer who has become a firm favorite in such a short time.

I had no intention of re-reading Turgenev’s novella, First Love. I had gone into Primrose Hill Books simply to get out of the rain when I spotted a pretty paperback, Love and Youth: Essential Stories, published by Pushkin Press. My first thought was to leave it where it lay, amid a jumble of other books. My nightstand has lots of unread books and I didn’t need to add to the pile. But the sales assistant was sweet, I was glad of the shelter, and the charming bookshop worked its magic.

I first read First Love more than forty years ago. I was at that time going through something of a “Turgenev phase” and had convinced myself that he was my favorite of all of the great nineteenth-century Russian storytellers. The phase passed, as phases tend to do, but I still remember clearly how impressed I was in those days by the combination of clarity and vividness I found in his stories.

First Love is not the tale of foolish teenage infatuation that I first read when I had just left my own teenage years behind me. Decades on it seems to me to be a melancholy reflection on the innocent happiness of youth. “And now that the shades of evening begin to descend over my life, what is left to me that is any fresher or dearer than my memories of that storm which blew over so soon, one springtime morning?” Great stories change as we change. First Love is a great story and Turgenev is one the greatest storytellers.

The Cotswolds is an area rich in ancient and beautiful churches. Many of them are large and grand, endowed by the affluence and generosity of local wool merchants since the Middle Ages. The “wool churches” in villages and towns such as Chipping Campden, Burford, and Northleach, are some of the most magnificent in the country; dazzling expressions of that happy combination of faith and wealth. I have spent many enjoyable hours exploring their treasures over the years, but none of them stirs my spirit as much as the tiny, simple, and largely unadorned churches from even earlier times.

St. Oswald’s is one such gem. Although it’s easy enough to find, the church sits in a remote field and the only access to it is via a rough footpath. Widford itself is a hamlet with only a few houses and even fewer signs of life on the day we visited. We parked on a grass verge, walked over the cattle grid and headed for what looked in the distance more like a barn than a church. The building is clearly mostly from the 13th century, but once you’re inside parts of an earlier church (Saxon? Early Norman) become visible. Excavations of the site revealed Roman floor mosaics and partially uncovered wall paintings from the 14th century. Box pews from the 1700s are still in place.

Bare descriptions of the building’s features do nothing to convey the power of this church. It’s an austere, cold place. The god worshipped in this place for nearly a thousand years is no comforting or reassuring presence. This is a church that marks an older, tougher, more rigid faith. A church for a harder world, where many died in infancy and few lived beyond the age of forty. A place that knew plague, invasion, and real hardship, and served a god to be feared and obeyed.

If you believe in holiness and believe it persists in the wood and stone of ancient buildings, the chances are you’ll feel it in St. Oswald’s.

Mark O’Connell’s book attracted a lot of press attention when it was published last year. It’s not hard to see why. It tells the remarkable true story of Malcolm Macarthur, an educated, cultivated, and once affluent man who murdered two strangers in Ireland in 1982. Macarthur was finally apprehended by the police while living at the home of Ireland’s Attorney General, a detail that made the murders all the more notorious and caused political shockwaves at the time.

A Thread of Violence is, in some respects, a straightforward and accomplished piece of reportage, likely to appeal to true crime enthusiasts. What makes it distinctive, I think, is the author’s highly conflicted relationship with Macarthur. In spite of O’Connell’s very best efforts, he gets nowhere close to understanding what truly motivated Macarthur to commit his appalling crimes. Whatever one thinks of the author’s examination (and self-examination), it remains one of the most compelling and mysterious cases of recent decades.