Tower and Town, November 2025 (view the full edition)A Good ReadI promised you last month that I'd read something, and indeed I have, though I'm only half-way through the first book I want to tell you about. It was recommended to me by Angus; he said it made him cry. The Winter Warriors by Olivier Norek (who, among other things, wrote the French TV crime series Spiral) is a fictionalized history of the brief and bloody conflict of the Winter War, the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. The main character is the Finnish sniper known to the Soviet soldiers as 'The White Death". Simo Häyhä and a group of friends from his village join up together and the story is of their experiences of uncompromising and dehumanising warfare. But as Angus says, it's not the descriptions of death and battle that are so heart-rending, it's the tender moments of ordinary life, friendship and resilience that make it so hard to read. The author also shows us the operation of the morally bankrupt Soviet army with utter disregard for the welfare of its troops, and the lies and excuses of the generals unable to report truthfully to Stalin. It's a vivid, and poignant and altogether brilliantly humane novel, do read it. And now, in a tyre-screeching motion-sickness inducing change of direction and pace, comes number several-hundred and something in our occasional series of books I really didn't think I'd enjoy. Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz is probably best described as 'cosy dystopia'. I don't know if that's an official genre, but it's the best description of this tale of a group of robots who band together in post-apocalyptic San Francisco to open a restaurant selling hand-pulled noodles. It's no more than a novella, the plot and characterisation really don't stand up to too much scrutiny, and I think proper SF fans would find it derisory. But if you fancy something light and gently uplifting and out of your normal reading comfort zone, you could do a lot worse. I am cheerfully embracing batty cat-lady-hood by reading The Writer's Cats by Meriel Barbery. Most stories about, or as in this case, ostensibly 'by' cats are too saccharine even for me (and sometimes too sad) - mais ce roman est tres Francais, so manages to avoid twee-ness. Just enough space to press upon you The Stones of Britain by the late and very much missed Jon Cannon. A study of geology and history and the landscapes formed by the interaction between the two. It is knowledgeable, elegant and full of information you didn't realise was so interesting. Debby Guest |