Kieran.Stories

Near the start of April I bought two issues of Granta in my local second-hand bookshop, Brian House, in St Anne’s. There were five all together, but I’m not made of money! In the issue Losers, Granta 47, Spring 1994, there is an extract from the as then unreleased novel The Information by Martin Amis. It is given the title ‘Author, Author’. MA continues to follow me around this year. I found Money last week in the same shop for £2. There is now another copy of Experience (I bought a copy there in February). I read the novella Night Train and now every evening I play the first three tracks from the Oscar Peterson Trio album to calm the cats down. I can’t help but feel the presence of this Martin Amis fan who has, in my imagination, died. It’s a year since my downstairs neighbour died and I know he was a reader. I told him once about my story in The London Magazine. I suppose I wanted to impress him. He told me that he was big in Reader’s Digest, although I have never looked into this. He also said he jammed with George Harrison at Friar Park. I have not looked into this either. He drank Harrison under the table in a pub in Manchester, but George Best then drank him under the same table. Maybe he was trying to impress me, too.

I also read ‘The Door in the Wall’ by H.G Wells. It’s my birthday soon. I’ll be twenty-nine. I want to plan some sort of reading challenge: books you should read before you’re thirty. But then I wonder if honing in on one writer might be interesting, instead. H.G Wells would be my pick, right now. I’ve loved everything I’ve read by him. When I described the semi-slapstick ending of ‘The Door in the Wall’ to my partner, she laughed out loud, and although I laughed along, I also felt weirdly bruised, because that story sums up a sort of sadness which seems particularly personal (but which is of course universal). Life is what happens when you’re making other plans, or when you’re walking past the door in the wall. April has been a lot of life. Here are the books that made up my month.

Discord by Jeremy Cooper (2026)

This was my third Jeremy Cooper. I didn’t get on with Brian as much as other people did. I liked Bolt From the Blue more. I remember finishing that in the car on the way to the east coast, not last Christmas but the one before. Discord clicked for me at the start, and I enjoyed it overall, but by the end it felt less powerful to me. It’s the story of a composer and a young, exceptionally talented saxophonist. They are brought together by their agents to work on a new piece together. The chapters usually alternative between Rebekah and Evie. The novel worked best for me when we saw the same event repeated from the other’s point of view. It managed to say something profound about how we all react and hone in on different things (if that isn’t an incredibly banal observation by me). Jeremy Cooper, and I like and loathe this about his novels, is very good at creating situations and trains of thought that feel totally true to life.

Catland: Feline Enchantment and the Making of the Modern World by Kathryn Hughes (2024)

Reading is sort of how I find out what’s going on in my life. In that respect, this was a route one choice. We now have two cats and they’re growing every day, and finding new things to tip over every hour. They have yet to destroy our, if I do say so myself, impressive collection of Lego (check my Bluesky later for an epic Lightning McQueen – kachow!), but it won’t be long. Catland (like Discord, and come to think of it, Leonard and Hungry Paul) is another alternating book, alternating between a biography of Louis Wain and the story of how the perception of cats changed from the late Victorians to the Edwardians. There is something inherently interesting to me about the late Victorians. The end of the century. Fin de siècle. This book captured that mood very well. (‘The Rum Tum Tugger’ is an excellent song for washing up, by the way.) It is also an almost unbelievably entertaining and generous book. I learnt the phrase ‘opus Anglicanum’ from Kathryn Hughes. ‘English work’. There’s a story in that. Also, learnt that Derrida called his cat Logos. What a prat.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams (2025)

I read almost all of this book on the bus while listening to the soundtrack to The Social Network by that bloke from Nine Inch Nails and another bloke. I thought this book was great. It is totally missold by the quote on the front comparing it to Bridget Jones. It is such a misjudged comparison, I’m surprised Sarah Wynn-Williams didn’t veto it. But anyway. This is the story of how Facebook started to operate as a political, global force. In part, a classic ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale, but also a strong piece of work about perseverance in the face of adversity (and body horror). The book opens with Wynn-Williams describing a shark attack. It is worth buying the book for this section alone; a rare instance of not being able to look away, but not wanting to see what happens next, and that’s very difficult to achieve on the page. I picked this up for less than a fiver in Sainsbury’s. Good book: fuck Zuck.

A History of Heavy Metal by Andrew O’Neill (2017)

A bumper month for non-fiction and memoir. And metal!! Are exclamation points metal? Andrew O’Neill does not cover this, but they dig into every other metal nitch you can imagine. I bought a metal album, Into the Pandemonium by Celtic Frost, on the back of reading this book, and I was weened on The Smiths, Ben Folds Five, and the Beatles. Although all three, you could argue, have their metal moments. This book was a lot of fun. The epilogue, in which O’Neill imagines a future metal autocracy is genuinely hilarious. From page 277: “(In 2021) Meshuggah record an album with such complex time signatures they get trapped inside the music. The album is never released for fear of opening a black hole.” I bought this for – get this – £2.99 from HMV. Now, a bargain, that’s metal!

The Go-Between by L.P Hartley (1953)

I knew going into this that it was perhaps the influence on Atonement by Ian McEwan. It is one of those books that you read and think, ‘Oh, so this is the basis of basically everything. All those novels are trying to do this.’ You’d have no Atonement without The Go-Between, but you’d have no The Sense of an Ending, either, or The Remains of the Day, or take your pick. In the same way, I feel that in a few decades (and you might think this comparison is crass) every well-regarded literary novel will have the DNA of Normal People by Sally Rooney. But aside from that, The Go-Between is just an extraordinarily good novel, one of the best I have read in a long time. There’s magic in them there pages. And the last line before the epilogue is devastating. Leo Colston will be somewhere in my head probably for the rest of time.

Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession (2019)

If you told me the plot of Leonard and Hungry Paul, or described its central characters, I’d probably decide not to read it, because on paper this sort of sounds awful to me, but it is (very much) not awful, and it is, in fact, brilliant. Quite brilliant. I am about fifty pages from the end. I can very much envisage a situation in which I am in floods of tears tomorrow, when I finish it. Grace is the heart of this book for me, although I love all the characters, as much as they might frustrate me. The relationship between Shelly and Leonard is so deftly handled. Hession has a particular skill for taking a platitude, moulding it into something new, and revealing the truth that was hidden inside it all along; if that, in any way, makes any sense, to anyone.