andrewp's 3 favorite reads in 2025

Five young lives are cut short by a German bombing of a South London department store in the final year of World War II. Francis Spufford takes the reader inside the physics of the milli-second explosion before asking, What if these five toddlers had lived? That speculation becomes the trope of this highly original novel. Spufford has us follow the (potential?) lives of Vernon, Alec, Val, Jo, and Ben, jumping into their worlds in 15-year increments, starting in a postwar grade school music class, through the free-wheeling Sixties, the punk-inflected Seventies, to the characters' own seventies in the 21st century.

Spufford wears his research boldly. In this book, he takes us into the world view of a (possibly) schizophrenic character and a (definite) synaesthesic. We learn the technological ins and outs of a publishing compositor (before he is displaced in the digital revolution) and get enlightening glimpses into both a master music teacher and a skilled crisis hotline counselor. The novel reads as a series of interwoven short stories, each one revealing more than the sum of its parts; each quindecennial interlude deepening the development of the characters. The final chapter, with the five reaching the twilight of life, packs a powerful cumulative punch.

What started, for author Rachel Cockerell, as family history became an exploration of 20th-century Zionism. For the reader, the experience is reversed: a history of Zionism evolves into a family's intersection with world historical events. In the process of composing her book, Cockerell made the striking decision to remove her own voice. Her authorship consisted of splicing together transcriptions of primary documents she painstakingly gathered, without transition or interpretation. The effect gives the reader a sense of the researcher's thrill of discovery.

The first part introduces the reader to Theodore Herzl (Father of Zionism), Israel Zangwill (author of The Melting Pot and founder of the non-Zionist Jewish Territorialist Organization), Chaim Weissman (Zionist statesman instrumental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration), Vladimir Jabotinsky (firebrand founder of the Revisionist movement), and David Jochelman (key player in the Galveston movement, which brought 50,000 Russian Jews into the American Heartland and the author's great-grandfather). It evinces the tensions in the movement between migration and assimilation, strict Zionism and colonization.

The second part follows EmJo Basshe, né Emmanuel Jochelman, growing up in the Lower East Side, becoming a noted playwright, and rubbing elbows with the likes of John Dos Passos. The third part follows the blended families of Jochelman's daughters in London: Sonia, Sephardic in appearance and passive in demeanor; Fanny, Ashkenazic in aspect and forceful in manner. (The source here is an edited transcription of the author's interviews with her grandmother and great aunt.) Neither cares for housework, yet together they raise seven children under 10 under a single roof. Think: the Brady Bunch in wartime and postwar deprivation. When Israel becomes a state in 1948, one sister chooses migration to Palestine; the other holds fast to her British roots. This ending embodies the fraught nature of the historical moment and of Zionism itself.

Niall Williams's book is balm for an ailing soul and a gift to readers. The title might suggest a saccharine, feel-good novel, but it is not. Christie, the book's big-hearted catalyzing character utters the title phrase precisely when he is thwarted in love, indicating that happiness is not a state but a state of mind. When tragedy arrives at the end, Christie, with difficulty, is still able to find the fullness of life.

But the narrator, 16-year-old No, is otherwise the main character of the book. From the perspective of sixty years hence, Noel recounts the life-changing events of 1960, when the rains suddenly stopped, spring felt like summer, and both Christie and electrification came to the western Irish village of Faha. The story is told recursively, in what I read as the great Irish oral storytelling tradition. Don't be put off by the slow start. The plot takes hold only with the arrival of Christie several dozen pages into the novel. Even then it takes many tours and detours, moving freely forward and back in time. The payoff is in both the humor--I may never have read a funnier scene than No's first date with the more experienced Sophie Troy in the balcony of the Faha movie palace--and the depth of feeling that accrues across 400-pages of otherwise lighthearted narrative.

Williams's novel made me see clearly that events are ephemeral; the people and places who shape us become lost to the passage of time. Only by storytelling, which is surely part mythmaking, can we keep at least the spirit of them alive.