Anyone who knows the work of Robert Macfarlane knows that it’s suffused with a sense of loss. Lost words, lost creatures, lost habitats. His most recent book, The Lost Spells, picks up the theme and opens with these words. “Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear. Creatures, places and words disappear, day after day, year on year”.

This is Macfarlane’s second collaboration with the brilliant artist, Jackie Morris. It’s a gorgeous set of spells or incantations to be read aloud, celebrating the beauty and fragility of the natural world. Various birds, trees, and creatures are rendered in stunning combinations of words and pictures. Vivid enchantments for our beautiful, endangered world.

There are many celebrated contemporary novelists whose work I have never read. Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Stephen King, Michael Chabon, to name only a few. These omissions don’t bother me much. I’ll get to them eventually or I won’t. In other words, knowing they’re out there, famous and unread (by me), isn’t enough in itself to make me read their books. If, however, I learn about a well regarded novelist I’ve never even heard of before, I feel flashes of curiosity and irritation about my own ignorance that are strong enough to push me to the bookshop. That happened recently when I saw a profile in the FT of Mary Gaitskill. My local bookseller, who’s usually too well-mannered to show her disapproval about the gaps in my reading experience, was nevertheless surprised and suggested I start with the short story collection that launched Gaitskill’s career in the late 1980s called Bad Behavior.

Having now read these nine stories, I can better understand why Gaitskill’s reputation is so high and why her distinct and unusual style is so celebrated. The cast of characters here is uniformly unattractive and occasionally loathsome – cruel, narcissistic, exploitative, and deluded. But, unappealing as these people are, there’s a slice of life captured in these strange, cinematic stories, that feels vivid and authentic. I can’t recall reading in recent years anything about human relationships quite so relentlessly bleak as this collection, but it’s a testimony to Gaitskill’s talent that each of these small vignettes of unhappiness and solitude is made so compelling and memorable.

What’s going on here? That was the question I kept asking myself as I read the first few chapters of Snow. Why is a writer as sophisticated and as clever as John Banville pulling me into what seems like a classic Agatha Christie-style murder mystery? A Catholic priest is killed in a grand but faded country house, his mutilated body placed carefully in the library. Who’s the murderer? The old soldier who owns the house, his nervous wife, her shifty brother, the stable boy, the local doctor? Only very gradually did it occur to me that it was the very familiarity of this archaic, slightly stale genre, with its precise rules and restrictions, that Banville wanted as his setting for a theme altogether more ambitious: the horrors of clerical abuse and the subtle divisions in Irish society perpetrated by religion and social class.

In the harsh winter of 1957, Inspector Strafford is sent from Dublin to rural Wexford to investigate the brutal murder of Father Lawless. The crime is perpetrated in a house belonging to a member of the Protestant gentry, a milieu very familiar to Strafford, himself a Protestant. In a country and at a time in which the Catholic church has immense influence, Strafford is expected to uncover and conceal, to solve the crime but also to bury its most salacious circumstances.

Snow is a powerful novel but not an entirely satisfying story. Banville interrupts the action with an “interlude” narrated by the victim, a device that somewhat clumsily reveals the motive for the murder without divulging the identity of the killer. Although Strafford solves the crime, he does so without exercising much skill. Snow offers little to hardcore fans of mystery fiction, but I doubt that will bother Banville much. The decades of abuse perpetrated by priests and its systematic cover-up by an all-powerful Church – those are the crimes he wants us to remember.

Only my second in the lengthy Gamache series by Louise Penny and I fear the charm is wearing off. How many killings can the small village of Three Pines really bear? More importantly, how much of this slightly irksome cast of characters can I bear? The gratuitously rude old poet, the bitchy bistro owners, and the rest of the gang were charming enough in the first installment, but it all seems just a little too twee on the second outing.

To Penny’s credit Gamache and his team of investigators continue to intrigue and Gamache himself is undeniably a clever creation. I doubt if that’s enough to sustain a series of this length, but plenty of other readers seem to disagree if the sales figures are to be believed. The problem with A Fatal Grace is a simple one. The central plot is dull and far-fetched, and I found myself unable to care about the outcome. No amount of cozy characters and Canadian charm can make up for that.

Relatively little is known about Shakespeare’s immediate family, but we do know he had a son, Hamnet, who died of unknown causes in 1596 at the age of eleven. Maggie O’Farrell places this family tragedy at the heart of her latest novel, imagining that Hamnet fell victim to one of the plague outbreaks that afflicted England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.

Shakespeare (never named in the novel) isn’t center stage in Hamnet. That places goes to his wife, called Agnes in the novel but more usually referred to as Anne in historical studies. What a creation she is in O’Farrell’s hands! A deeply intuitive, sensitive woman, Agnes is attuned to the natural and spiritual worlds to a degree that makes her an uncomfortable presence for some of her family. The loss of her young son threatens to unhinge her until she joins a performance of her husband’s new play, Hamlet ….

For the less accomplished or less sophisticated writer, the historical novel is a cruelly exposing genre. Rendering a bygone period persuasively is an exercise fraught with risk. It’s not faithfulness to detail that’s usually the problem. In fact, most historical novelists tend to overdo the details, thinking that layer upon layer will be enough to transport the reader to the appropriate era. The real difficulty is drawing a convincing central character that thinks and acts in ways faithful to the age. That’s far harder than it first seems. In a great historical novel (Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell series comes to mind), characters never feel like 21st century people dropped into, for example, the Elizabethan or Victorian worlds. In Hamnet, O’Farrell has given readers a beautifully rounded and believable central character and a deeply moving study of grief.

Walk around any ancient church and you will see the names of the long dead and the long forgotten who hoped for some remembrance by attaching their names to a part of the structure. Soldiers, scholars, saints, politicians – all hoping for a little immortality through their posthumous association with a grand place of worship. It’s not so different from tagging a bus shelter or a subway car or from carving your initials into a favorite tree. Maybe someone will pass by in a hundred or a thousand years and wonder who you were. In a cathedral as old and as beautiful as Winchester, the “graffiti” is a little grander, but it covers almost every surface, carved into elegant monuments, tombstones, glass, and plaques.

Winchester Cathedral’s origins are in the 7th century, but the oldest part of what the visitor sees today is from the church started in 1079 by Bishop Walkelin. To that base generation after generation has added for nearly a thousand years, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that what stands today is such a beautiful, harmonious whole. Winchester has seen it all – wars, plagues, vandalism, and pillage – and stands today, as it has in some form for nearly 1,400 years, as a monument to faith, power, and wealth. Walking the nave and transepts in 2020, as I did earlier this week, means following signs on the ancient floor to keep two meters distant from other visitors and using hand sanitizer provided as you enter the grand west end of the cathedral. The ancient stones and windows have seen it all before. They have seen pandemics come and go. They have watched one generation of visitors following another, each one in turn awed by the scale and beauty. Sic transit gloria mundi, but in Winchester Cathedral the glory passes very slowly indeed.

A detective novel that weighs in at nearly 1,000 pages is, among other things, a declaration of self-confidence by the storyteller. Maintaining the reader’s interest and sustaining the necessary suspense in a story of that length are feats that would test any novelist, even one with the bona fides of J.K. Rowling (writing here under her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith). Does she pull it off? Mostly, yes, but the author or her editor could have pruned the manuscript quite hard without damaging the overall story.

Troubled Blood is the fifth in the Cormoran Strike series and the pattern is well established by now. On this outing Strike and his partner/love interest take on a cold case, the mysterious disappearance more than forty years earlier of a London doctor, Margot Bamborough. It’s a complicated yarn with the usual large parade of potential suspects and, on this occasion, a plot layer of astrological nonsense that I found very irritating. The best part of this series is the central character and his growing affection for his sidekick, Robin Ellacott, so I was pleased to see Galbraith giving plenty of attention to that side of the story. Troubled Blood, like the others in the Strike series, is undemanding, entertaining fodder, and firmly within a distinctively English tradition of whodunits.

The simple premise of this slim book is that a manuscript donated to Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) by Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-16th century, is the Psalter of St. Alphege and was in the possession of Thomas Becket when he was martyred in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170. Christopher de Hamel, academic librarian and manuscript expert, makes the case in this fascinating historical detective story. As we approach the 850th anniversary of Becket’s death, this delightful book provides a compelling introduction to readers unfamiliar with his remarkable life and even more remarkable times.

When I arrived recently in the UK for the first time in six months, it coincided with warnings from the government there that the introduction of a further nationwide lock-down might be unavoidable because of rising Covid-19 infections across the country. Regional restrictions, mostly in the north of England, were already in place. I was intrigued to understand better why that was the case.

JFK airport had been almost empty when I left New York and there had been fewer than fifty passengers on my flight to London. Touching down at Heathrow, things seemed largely familiar. Everyone – passengers and airport staff – were wearing masks. It was only after driving to Canterbury that big differences started to be apparent. Walking around the ancient city that afternoon, I was shocked to find myself almost the only person wearing a mask on the street. Mask-wearing in shops and supermarkets was ubiquitous, but the moment those same, apparently careful people stopped shopping, they discarded their masks. Restaurants, pubs, and coffee shops – all very busy – had complied with social distancing rules imposed by the government – but no one was wearing masks while they ordered and waited for their food. Completely different from my experience during the past six months in NY where everyone wears a mask all the time in public.

I looked for some explanation and found none. Some I spoke to pointed to the low levels of infection in Kent, but I’ve heard from friends in other parts of the UK that mask-wearing, other than in stores, is uncommon all over the country, even in regions and cities where rates of infection are high. What’s going on? Pandemic fatigue? Perceived invulnerability among the young and healthy? I’ve no idea, but it’s making me anxious. At this rate it’s going to be a hard winter for the UK.

Many friends, all of them devoted readers, have told me how difficult they have found it to read during the months of the pandemic. I know how they feel. I haven’t abandoned reading but I have found it requires more effort to pick up a book and to persevere with it than at any time in my life that I can remember. Every part of everyone’s routine has been upended by the virus, so it’s hardly surprising that reading should be disrupted, but it feels like concentration itself has been infected and with it the steady calmness on which it depends.

The cure to a “reading drought” is sometimes simple: find a book so compelling and a story so well told that you feel drawn back to it irresistably. That was the recommendation I was given recently by a good friend just before she introduced me to the novels of Louise Penny. Since finishing Still Life I’ve recommended it to lots of friends only to discover that everyone knows Penny’s work (except me, it seems).

Much like Susan Hill and her Serrailler series or P.D. James and her many Dalgleish novels, the appeal of Still Life centers on the allure of a charismatic, flawed, and brilliant detective (in this case Armand Gamache of the Quebec murder squad). Gamache shows up in a small, pretty village in the Eastern Townships to investigate the death of a much loved, retired schoolteacher who seems at first sight to be the victim of a hunting accident. Needless to say, nothing is quite as it first appears …

Still Life doesn’t have the most plausible of plots and it lacks the twists and turns that delight those readers who love to have their brains twisted. What it lacks in intricacy, it more than makes up for with charm. And, more than anything, it has that quality that defines a great mystery writer: compassion for people and their all-too-human foibles and failings. I bought the next two books in the Gamache series, so Still Life must have worked its magic and broke my reading drought.