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.

Some novels arrive at just the right time, catching the zeitgeist or perhaps foretelling it. Prophet Song is such a novel, landing when politics have shifted to the right in many countries and at a moment when familiar protections and liberties are under threat in places where, not so long ago, they were inviolate. Intolerance is on the march. Truth is in retreat.

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song imagines an Ireland of the not-so-distant future in which trade unionists are snatched from their homes by shadowy “security services”, where peaceful protestors are shot in the street, where children are tortued, and where fealty to the ruling party determines who prospers and who comes under suspicion. The judges of The Booker Prize in 2023 called it “soul-shattering and true”, a novel that “captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment”. Comparisons have been made to George Orwell.

The encroaching tyranny is seen through the eyes of Eilish Stack, someone ordinary in the ways all of us are ordinary, someone making an ordinary life through her family and her work. But nothing is ordinary when evil knocks at the door and Eilish’s quiet, unexceptional life is shattered gradually but entirely. What should she do? Leave and save her family or stay in the hope that the madness and badness will pass eventually?

Lynch’s novel deserves all the praise and prizes that come its way. It isn’t perfect. It is sometimes overwritten and its lyricism is occasionally intrusive, but these are small gripes. Prophet Song is very powerful, but little of its power is really to do with its timeliness. It reminds us that the slide into intolerance, brutality, and evil is one that happens incrementally. By the time many of us wake up to what is happening, it is already far too late.

Regular readers of The Times Literary Supplement know and love its NB column. It was written by James Campbell (J.C.) for more than twenty years. NB by J.C. is a compilation of those weekly columns between 2001 and 2020. J.C.’s patch is the literary world, but he interprets his job quite widely. Grammar, writerly reputations and rivalries, book prizes, pronunciation, the art of the translator, and much, much more attract his attention. Whatever the week’s topic, his style is unmistakable. Wry, teasing, ironic, and, more often than not, laugh-out-loud funny. This is a book to be dipped into and enjoyed time and time again.

Although I have subscribed to The New Yorker for many years, I wasn’t at all familiar with John McPhee until I saw a copy of Tabula Rasa displayed at McNally Jackson’s store in SoHo in the run-up to the Christmas holidays. That now feels like culpable ignorance on my part, or at the very least a huge gap in my reading experience, because McPhee is something of a legend in American literature and regarded by many as a master of creative non-fiction. The elegant cover of the book was what drew my eye, and I knew after a quick glance at the opening essay in the collection that this was a must-read.

The pleasure I felt reading McPhee’s essays had little or nothing to do with their subject matter. Bridge building, fly fishing, training sessions with long-dead Princeton coaches, imposter syndrome. These, and many more, are subjects about which I know nothing and in which I have little interest. Yet when McPhee writes about them, my attention never wandered. Why? Because of the delight of seeing something done so well. The craft McPhee has mastered is fully visible in every essay, and the beauty of the overall effect is in no way compromised by its display. Read Tabula Rasa to marvel at good writing, if marveling is your thing, and to learn how tough and wonderful it is to turn experiences, memories, and feelings into the kind of prose that will surely last.

Bob Mortimer isn’t well known in the US, but he’s something of a national treasure in the UK, famous as a quirky and offbeat comedian and TV personality. The Clementine Complex (published in the UK as The Satsuma Complex) is a silly and slightly fantastical yarn, as quirky and offbeat as its author. If your taste in fiction runs towards the light, the comic, and the eccentric (imaginary talking squirrels feature here, for example), this is for you.

Werner Herzog’s uncompromising gaze appears to challenge the reader from the cover of his autobiography Every Man for Himself and God Against All. “This is me, like it or not”, he seems to be saying, and that is very much the tone of this collection of essays about his life and work. And what a life he has had. Born in a remote part of Bavaria during the Second World War and raised in poverty and hunger, Herzog turned himself into one of the world’s most celebrated and accomplished filmmakers, driven by extraordinary determination, single-mindedness, and a unique artistic vision.

I first discovered Herzog’s films when I was a regular visitor to The National Film Theatre in London in my 20s. They made a big impression on me at the time, and I still think of Fitzcarraldo as one of my favorite movies. But the chapters in this essay collection devoted to the making of those films were for me, somewhat surprisingly, the least interesting. What will stick with me is the account of his boyhood in Bavaria and those early years making his way in Munich. He was a maverick, daredevil, and rule breaker from the very beginning, and he grew into the most marvelous storyteller.

I didn’t plan it that way, but my reading in 2023 seems to have been dominated by Irish fiction. Firm favorites like Sebastian Barry and John Banville appeared, but what pleases me especially is how many new names featured in 2023. Books by Elaine Feeney, Megan Nolan, Claire Keegan, Sara Baume, and Louise Kennedy all showed up last year and I’m very glad they did.

There were few turkeys in my choices. That’s a good sign and shows I was choosing wisely. That hasn’t always been the case. But it makes it very hard to choose my Book of 2023, so much so that I’m forced to pick two. Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry and After The Funeral by Tessa Hadley. Brilliant books by two of my favorite living writers.

My last book of 2023 was Megan Nolan’s well-received second novel, Ordinary Human Failings. It started strongly and I found myself intrigued to see what would happen when Tom, a young and ambitious news journalist sent to cover the tragic and suspicious death of a child, met Carmel, the mother of the young girl accused of the crime. The early chapters are especially good, focusing on Carmel’s terrible alienation, her background in Ireland, and the sad (yet all too common) circumstances that led her to London. If only Nolan’s lens had kept its focus on Carmel and Tom. Instead, other characters come into view, notably Richie, Carmel’s broken down brother, and John, her father, and somehow the carefully built tension is lost and the overall spell gets broken. There’s some very good writing here, and I suspect Nolan may have great novels ahead of her, but Ordinary Human Failings was ultimately a disappointment.