Kieran.Stories

Sunshine! South Manchester! Saturday just gone.

I turned right out of Levenshulme station based on a feeling. I would not kowtow to Google Maps, not today. I walked down lovely terraced streets and dodged very polite kids on bikes. Realising I had gone wrong somewhere, I found my way back to the train station and made the right (left) turning. I located the high street. I walked the wrong way again. Inexplicably, I was now in Asda. I bought a Boost, but concerned that the chocolate would immediately melt on contact with the outside, I ate it while walking across the small car park. Defeated, I checked my phone for directions. A blue dot told me that Panda’s Books & Records was a ten-minute walk away. I was on the right track.

I walked in tortoise-like with my blue rucksack, and almost knocked a load of books from a shelf. I did this two or three times. At the desk by the window, next to the Christmas tree (which is always up), was Paul Magrs. He was writing in a notebook. I decided to introduce myself by asking if he still had the copy of Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie I had seen on Bluesky. (Great opening gambit: show me the pornography.) Very kindly, Paul got Lost Girls down from the literal top shelf. As I held it, and turned to a random page to see a giant ejaculating penis, I realised I wasn’t prepared to carry it around Manchester all day, but said that I would come back for it, if no one else nabbed it first. Then, I got to the point. I told Paul how much I like his bookish YouTube videos. ‘They’ve been a real tonic,’ I said, meaning it.

And after I had thoroughly (although not thoroughly enough) explored Panda’s and curated my pile of books to buy, I had a nice chat with Paul. I suppose the moral of the story is meet your heroes, if they’re bookish. Or meet the nice ones, like Paul. I got back to Piccadilly and played ‘Yes’ by McAlmont & Butler three times on repeat. I was sort of proud of myself, because although on the surface all I had done was visit a bookshop, I had in a small way put myself out there.

Three Days in June by Anne Tyler (2025)

I read this novel, my first Anne Tyler, over the first May bank holiday. It hasn’t stayed with me. I thought the writing was elegant and somehow intimate, but I cannot for the life of me remember the names of any of the characters. It is the story of a mother preparing for her daughter’s wedding, while dealing with the arrival of her ex-husband (foster cat in tow) on her doorstep. She has also, probably, lost her job at a prestigious school. Gail, that’s the name. I was slightly disappointed by the direction of the second half. Tyler takes us into the past. I was more interested in building on the present. Going back felt a tad rote. The dialogue was a highlight for me: very zippy, but truthful, too. I would also like to read more Anne Tyler, if anyone has a good jumping in point, although I have in a small way already jumped in.

Chris Mould’s War of the Worlds (2026)

I am on a bit of a Wells kick. I picked up this beautiful illustrated retelling of The War of the Worlds in Storytellers Inc. in St Anne’s. This was another first May bank holiday read. It is absolutely fantastic. I was particularly impressed by the way the Martians are defeated first with water, and then with the germs in the water. It works so well visually, the rain blotting the page, the bottom half of a war machine stumbling through a wetted forest. It’s strong stuff. Mould also changes the central characters and subplot. Now we follow a painter, a scientist, and their brood of foster children. They are all of course happily reunited at the end, but maybe that’s alright. I never really got that criticism of the Spielberg film, which reminds me strongly of my childhood. It came out in 2005 and I remember my parents going to the Odeon in Preston to watch it, and we were babysat by my aunty. I remember the poster of the Martian hand holding the world, covered in red weed. It practically blushed with horrors.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (2015)

The year before last, I made a conscious effort to step away from social media, and now I only post on Bluesky and this blog, which I don’t think of really as social media. I grew up in school during the Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook Messenger boom, and I think for a long time it felt like continuing to use those platforms was akin to carrying my digital history on my back. It feels good to have things a bit more streamlined. This is a book I bought a long time ago. Another antediluvian memory: reading The Psychopath Test by Ronson on the trampoline behind our garage and it being the first non-fiction book I ever finished. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was a fascinating read, because on one level its stories of people suddenly and irreversibly cut-off from polite society are timeless, but it is also a window into a world which, for me at least, has basically vanished. I saw the Twitter bird – surely, it had a name that has now dropped out of public consciousness – on a Blackpool Transport banner telling commuters to get in touch on socials. When will the bird go completely to be replaced by the dread X?

Gunk by Saba Sams (2025)

I was a big fan of Sams’ short story collection Send Nudes when I read it in June 2024. In some ways, I found Gunk slightly disappointing, because I wanted something more, but then all of the wit and precision in those short stories is present here, even if to me it felt like a diluted version. Perhaps that is unfair, and I imagine I will enjoy this novel more when I read it again. Jules runs a nightclub, Gunk, owned by her ex-husband Leon. When one of her new hires, Nim, becomes pregnant, Jules, who suspects she is unable to have children, agrees to be mother to the baby. I found Jules very intriguing. I felt that I had lost her by the end. She was less real. This is all very nebulous criticism: apologies. I read a good portion of this book on the bus. One scene that struck me like lightning was the sonography scene. From page 141 of Gunk: “I turned my attention to the screen. There he was, clear as a satellite. The sonographer pointed everything out with the cursor of her mouse: the limbs, the spine, the major organs. She kept glancing at Nim, wondering why it was she wouldn’t look up.”

Finders, Keepers: The Secret Life of Second-Hand Books by Nicholas Royle (2026)

This was one of my most anticipated books of 2026. It did not disappoint. More meandering than its two predecessors, but just as interesting, Finders, Keepers feels more personal, too. It is the ginnels in this book that I find most attractive. Take this digression on false childhood memories, in which Nicholas Royle learns that he fell asleep and missed the Moon Landing on TV: “So, all the stories I tell myself are false? Or just from the ages of six and under? Or just those about the Moon?” Or just those about the Moon seems to be the key point. This is a book about connections, coincidences, and treating books as part of life, as objects with magical potential. In the book, Royle engages books and magical thinking, and while it sometimes leads him round the bend, it also puts him in touch with people and their stories. It said to me: get out there and read, think, don’t just sit in your room.

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G Wells (1896)

Again, I’m on a Wells kick. Ka-chow! I found this short novel terrifying in its violence and vision. The descriptors at the start of the story, when Edward Prendick sees one of Moreau’s experiments after being rescued at sea, are undeniably racist, and not repeatable here. But this is not a nice book. It is filled to the brim with cruelty and violent stabbing-to-deaths. Its ending, in which Prendick, having survived the island, returns to London and can only find peace when gazing up at the night sky to contemplate a universe with no humans, is what you might call a downer. In his introduction to The Scientific Romances of H.G Wells, Wells describes Moreau as “an exercise in youthful blasphemy” which is accurate.

Thirst: Twelve Drinks That Changed My Life by John Robins (2026)

Along with Finders, Keepers, this was another highly anticipated book for me. If you don’t know John Robins, he is a comedian and radio presenter. I basically wanted to be John Robins when I was eighteen, and I started drinking rum and Coke because of his eulogising on XFM. This book is about his alcoholism. You have to admire not only the quality of the writing in parts but the gusto with which Robins’ tackles the subject: himself. I’m sure there’s a Geese reference in there too, when he writes about learning to know the difference between what is real, and what is fake. I might be wrong, but it’s a good excuse to include the track below, which seems to sum up some of the book’s emotional weight. We can also add this to the growing list of books that have made me cry on the bus.

Thin Places in Hard Concrete by Ray Newman (2026)

This is another excellent collection of stories by Ray Newman. The best of the bunch for me is ‘The Presence Chamber’ which I enjoyed immensely, both the story itself and the voice of the narrator, a journalist writing a piece about a tech billionaire he has semi-befriended. The richo has recreated Nonesuch Palace underground. I had such a rich image of this folly. My other favourite was ‘The Horseman’, a very strange, unsettling alternate reality. The way Newman plays with the oddness of religion makes the story entertaining and weird page to page. The star of the show is ‘Unreleased’ which is probably most easily described as the Beatles story, but it isn’t really a Beatles story, it’s more than that. It’s brilliant but as a classic contrarian, I can’t love it, because so many other people do. Oh, and, check out Ray’s blog for the behind the scenes of each story in this collection; really interesting stuff about process and the accumulation of ideas.

To the Sea by Train by Andrew Martin (2025)

The second May bank holiday (the scorcher) will be remembered for my trip to Manchester (we’re looping back to the start of this post – clever!), starting Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, and reading this largely unmemorable (but nice enough) book, To the Sea by Train by Andrew Martin. Sorry for that awful sentence. No, really, sorry. To be honest, I feel a bit all over the place, and maybe this is rubbing off on my sentences, which are usually (shut up) impeccable. The weekend I went to Manchester was a big release for me. I went to a gig with my dear friend Dylan and we danced, which was really good. I also paid £9 for a pint: less good. But it was Grolsch: good. I am trying to appreciate things a bit more, and I think part of that is appreciating the opportunities I have. If there’s a bookshop I want to visit, I can go. That’s a great place to be. And it’s good to nap through a book like To the Sea by Train: it has a nostalgic, soporific quality which is irresistible to me when I’m in a certain mood.