Hard to write about this book without spoilers, so let me just say I raved to the group chat that this deserves to be as well known as Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and a dear Goth friend got it from the library and read it and replied Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Which is the correct reaction.

One of the most spectacularly unreliable narrators I have encountered, telling an entirely different story from the one she thinks she is. So brilliantly and exquisitely done. Just read it. (NYRB Classics is about my favorite publisher these days, reprinting so many twentieth century women writers who should be incessantly praised.)

This was Katherine May’s pandemic book, a book haunted by lockdowns and mass death. Needing to feel grounded, May dug into the earth beneath her feet. Not in an ickily sentimental way – she makes it clear that Whitstable’s stone circle is modern, and that the sacred spaces of Dungeness are its WW2-era sound mirrors and Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage. She admits that her garden is a mass of weeds and that staying up late to watch meteor showers is tiring and chilly.

May’s pragmatism makes awe accessible. She learns the names of wildflowers (viper’s bugloss! Known to Australians as Salvation Jane or Paterson’s curse) and attends a class on bees. I listened to this book between drives to Rancho Viejo and bike rides to Heron’s Head, my own sacred landscapes. Big storms are coming. There’s no way out but through, and enchantment is one of the ways through.