Crib Notes: Books to Stay Up Late With 2
Whether you're climbing into bed at the end of a long day of parenting, or nightfeeding a newborn, here is some engrossing storytelling to sink into.
Crib Notes is back!
For this long overdue issue, I wanted to go back to basics and recommend the kind of writing which I have sought out most in my six years of motherhood: sure-handed storytelling that sweeps you up, soothes you, entertains you and nourishes your mind. Perhaps you’re in the early days of motherhood and reading through the nightfeeds. Perhaps you are climbing into bed at the end of a long day of toddler-herding, or re-adjusting to the rigamorale of the school term (I still can’t remember which days my son does PE). Wherever you are in your motherhood journey, I hope you will find something here that you love sinking into during your hard-earned, well-deserved reading time.
Buy Your Books from Crib Notes Bookshop
If you love Crib Notes and want to support what I do, please do consider buying your books from the Crib Notes Bookshop. I’ll receive 10% commission for every title you purchase.
The Comfort Read
Welcome to Glorious Tuga by Francesca Segal
Twenty-nine-year-old Dr. Charlotte Walker travels to Tuga – a remote tropical island – for a year’s fellowship researching the rare gold-coin tortoise. On arriving, she finds that on this far-flung British overseas territory – a hotpotch of pastel painted cottages set against the backdrop of the jungle – there is plenty to distract her as she is taken up by Tuga’s tight-knit island community. No sooner than Charlotte has arrived, is she expected to preside over a funeral for a beloved piglet. There’s icy mango juice and coconut cake to be enjoyed at Betsey’s coffee shop, and the island’s whirring rumour mill – which has wasted no time making much of Charlotte’s inconvenient crush on the island doctor, Dan Zekri. Beyond this, are the interconnected lives of the Tugans: Marianne Goss and her daughter, whose father is a mystery to the other islanders; terse Garrick Williams, the island pastor, who has been inexplicably hostile to Charlotte since her arrival, and rich, cantankerous Grand Mary who presides over the community from her ornate townhouse. As Charlotte continues to be strong-armed into island life – tending to illegal cats and lending a hand with lambing – she begins to flourish and find a rootedness she has never known on home soil.
When to Read It: Before I began Welcome to Glorious Tuga, I think I was expecting a frothier, more book-equivalent-of-drinking-a-mojito-on-the-beach kind of read. These are delightful qualities in a novel – especially when one is looking for an escape from domestic life – but Welcome to Glorious Tuga is something far more special. It’s true that the lush, balmy, end-of-the-earth island setting and gentle romance plot add to the book’s pleasures, but what makes it even more satisfying is its resemblance to a good old-fashioned family saga. Like Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles, the intertwined lives of the islanders – their secret heartaches, everyday dramas and flaws – makes this a moreish and emotionally resonant read. Although island life has its share of sadnesses, there are no nasty shocks in this gorgeous novel. I read Welcome to Glorious Tuga earlier this month and found it a comforting antidote to the chaos of Back To School Season.
How to Read It: From the moment I dove into this book, I wanted to fully immerse myself in its vividly-realised world. So that I might inhabit Tuga as much as practically possible between soft-play with my toddler and school runs, I read the ebook and listened to the audiobook (which is pitch-perfect, read by Kristin Atherton, one of my favourite Audible narrators). Otherwise the hardback edition is a middleweight 368 pages – you can buy it here.
What to Read Next: Pleasingly, a sequel to Welcome to Glorious Tuga is on its way – currently scheduled for June 2025! In the meantime, I recommend getting stuck into the Cazalet Chronicles (as mentioned above). Okay, so they might not be set on a tropical island, but these books will more than satisfy your need for wholly engrossing, warm-hearted storytelling, as it follows the fortunes of one family over the golden summers of the 1930s and onwards. Start with The Light Years (you can read my review here).
The Stylish Binge-Read
Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors
Avery, Bonnie and Lucky Blue have been lost – both to each other and to themselves – ever since the death of their beloved sister, Nikki. On the outside, Avery’s life is immaculate: she is a successful lawyer, living in a luxurious Hampstead townhouse with her equally successful wife. But beneath her polished veneer, Avery is starting to crack, and soon she will smash her carefully, tastefully constructed life to pieces. Meanwhile, Bonnie – a world-class boxing pro – is hiding out in Venice Beach, moonlighting as a bouncer, after a devastating defeat. Lucky is modelling at Paris Fashion week – but her hard-partying and hangovers are dangerously close to ending her career. On the anniversary of Nikki’s sudden, shocking death, the sisters are reunited at their childhood apartment in New York. Only together can they navigate the terrible heartbreak each has been suppressing since the end of Nikki’s life, and find their way back to their own lives. Just as Coco Mellors’ debut, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, explored finding love amid the ennui of modern life in bittersweet and astonishingly perceptive detail, Blue Sisters does the same for the sisterhood. Admittedly, the novel touches on some heavyweight themes — grief, addiction and loneliness — but Mellors handles them with a featherlight touch, which is no less exact for its gentleness. Blue Sisters is alluring, poignant and highly readable.
When to Read It: I read Blue Sisters during February half-term earlier this year. With a full-on, hands-on week with my five-year-old and two-year-old ahead of me, I knew I needed to meet my own needs as well as theirs. Unsurprisingly, reading is one way I recharge my maternal batteries. Blue Sisters was a real box-ticker of a book – the kind of book I most love to recommend on Crib Notes. Its stylish prose feels written for TV, and is just as bingeable. Mellors’ deep emotional intelligence both engages the mind and soothes the heart. And the novel is just a little bit glamorous. I never got tired of hearing about Avery’s clawfooted bathtub and goldflecked wallpaper. There’s a sprinkling of fame and affluence that seems to touch everyone in the novel. It doesn’t feel totally believable, but who cares? When I’m riding the endless carousel of outing-planning and lunch-box-packing, I am more than happy to suspend my disbelief for a bit of vicarious lifestyle wish-fulfillment.
Sensitive Content: Blue Sisters delves into bereavement and drug and alcohol addiction. It is worth mentioning that Nikki’s death is the consequence of an accidental fentanyl overdose, following years of excurciating endometriosis pain. It is also worth mentioning, however, that Mellors’ has a remarkable gift for writing about painful topics with both empathy and respectful grace.
How to Read It: Blue Sisters is available in a 339 page hardback edition (buy it here) and as an ebook, with a paperback to follow in April 2025. With its cinematic feel and brilliant dialogue, it also makes a fabulous audiobook choice.
What to Read Next: I adored Mellors debut, Cleopatra and Frankenstein – you can read my review here. I’ve also got my eye on Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful, a modern day rewrite of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, about four Italian-American sisters finding their way back to each other after a family rift.
The Prize-Winner
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
V.V. Ganeshanathan’s very deserving Women’s Prize for Fiction winner, Brotherless Night, is about Sashi, a young Tamil woman training to be a doctor against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war. Growing up in Jaffna village, Sashi is the only sister to four beloved brothers. At the age-of-sixteen she dreams of studying medicine at university like her kind, steady eldest brother, Niranjan. However, when anti-Tamil sentiment simmers and flares into violence, Sashi’s brothers are swept up into the fray, each in different, devastating ways: ‘The lights winked out across the peninsula, as boy after boy I had known and loved was extinguished or gone,’. Like so many young men from Jaffna, Sashi’s brothers Seelen and Dayalen are recruited to militant resistance group, the Tamil Tigers. As the Tigers grow and flex their power, rebellion becomes terror. Sashi tries to focus on her studies, but, privately, she is heartbroken and bewildered by her brothers’ faith in a movement which kills its own people. When Sashi is asked to work at the Tigers’ field hospital, she finds herself caught between ideologies, in a crossfire of loyalty, love, duty and politics. Sashi’s ties to her family – and her bond with K, a prominent Tiger and childhood friend – tug at her heart. Whilst it is ambitious in scope – spanning the years of war in vivid, ultra high-definiton – Brotherless Night feels as intimate as a memoir. Sashi addresses the reader as a confidante, laying her heart-rending story bare: her overlapping emotions and contradictory motives, her rage and tenderness. Above all, Brotherless Night is a thoroughly human story of conflict; it is powerfully compassionate and powerfully affecting. It scooped my heart out and set me on fire.
When to Read It: I read Brotherless Nights straight after finishing Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost – a book that helped me hold Palestine in my thoughts. At that time, I longed for more writing that made me feel engaged with the world beyond my little domestic sphere, and helped me hold onto humanity amid news of such inhumanity.
How To Read It: I’m going to be honest. I listened to the audiobook and I really, really wished I had read a physical copy instead. The audio edition is movingly narrated, but Brotherless Night requires close attention from its readers and I regret half-listening whilst simultaneously mentally compiling a meal plan in Sainsburys. If you suffer from a scattershot attention–span like me, I recommend reading this blazingly accomplished novel in the paperback (368 pages) or ebook edition. Buy it here.
What To Read Next: For another nuanced and passionate book about the human face of conflict, I highly, highly recommend Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (read my review here).
The Tantalising Gothic Treat
The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal
The Burial Plot transports the reader to Victorian London, where graveyards are bursting with the dead, providing ripe opportunities for criminals, who make profits from sham funerals and corpses dissolved in quicklime. One such criminal is Crawford. Bonnie – twenty-one years old, pretty and sharp – is both Crawford’s lover, and an accomplice to his tricks and scams. After a wealthy man ends up dead in a pool of blood, Bonnie must go into hiding or risk the hangmans noose. Crawford finds her a position as a ladies maid in an ostentatious Gothic mansion, the home of Mr Moncrieff, a widower whose wife’s death is shrouded in scandal and mystery. Bonnie’s charge is his fourteen year-old-daughter, Cissie, a strange and fragile girl who spends her days furritively scrap-booking love-letters from her fantasy suitor, Lord Duggan. Before long, Crawford is contriving an elaborate and ambitious new plan — one that he claims will make them rich. However, as Bonnie digs deeper into Mrs. Moncrieff’s tragic fate, as well as Crawford’s elusive beginnings, she unearths a dark lattice of lies and buried secrets. The Burial Plot is a tantalising Gothic treat, intricately and suspensefully plotted.
When to Read It: The Burial Plot is the very definition of a book ‘written and read in the margins of motherhood’. Elizabeth Macneal began writing it when her eldest child was a baby, and finished the final edits the day before her youngest child was born. Meanwhile, her previous novels have kept me in good company a number of times since becoming a mother. Her debut, The Doll Factory, was the book I read the first time my husband and I went on holiday with a baby – and I learned that poolside reading had changed forever. Her follow-up, The Circus of Wonders was a much-needed distraction from severe morning-sickness during my second pregnancy. I read this latest novel in the final weeks of the summer holiday; it is All Change in our household, with my toddler starting nursery, as well as my eldest son starting Year One – The Burial Plot was exactly the low-effort, high-entertainment read I needed during a tumultuous few weeks.
How To Read It: I read the new hardback edition, which is 356 pages (buy your copy here). I can imagine this historical page-turner also makes a satisfying audio listen.
What To Read Next: If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading The Doll Factory or Circus of Wonders, I recommend each of them. You can read my reviews here and here.
A Few From The Archive
One of the very best books I have read this year is Claire Lombardo’s Same As It Ever Was, an engrossing and emotionally satisfying novel about family life, motherhood and long-term love. Read my review here.
If you haven’t read a book in months, or the mental load feels especially burdensome right now, I recommend Kiley Reid’s pin-sharp, pacy, breezily readable campus novel Come and Get It. Underneath the juicy plotting is a provocative look at the intersection of money, race and class Read my review here.
Dip into this archive issue of Crib Notes for more ‘Books to Stay Up Late With’:
So glad to read you this morning!