Crib Notes: Dazzling Books to Read in December (and a few other festive favourites)

Beautiful books for peaceful moments between grotto visits, school shows, present wrapping and the chaos of parenting at Christmas.

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Over coffee this morning, a friend told me she felt as if all of her mental energy was being spent on party planning and present shopping. ‘It’s all so inane,’ she said, ‘I’m doing nothing for my brain’. I knew exactly what she meant. When December arrives in a flurry of festive admin, the time I spend reading always feels especially scarce and especially sacred. This is why I don't do a Christmas gift-guide — because this newsletter is meant to be about carving out time to read amid the chaos of looking after children. And so I’m not going to write you a list of books to buy for other people, because you’re probably spending most of your time thinking about other people already. Instead, I've chosen four of the most dazzling, special books I've read over the last year, in the hope that you might find a moment of peace with one of them. Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for seasonal thrills, scroll down to the bottom of this email for some specifically Christmassy recommendations.

Please do leave a comment and let me know what’s on your wishlist this Christmas!

If you ARE looking for bookish gift ideas, let me know and I’ll try my best to ease your load!

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The Masterpiece in Miniature

Small Things Like These by Clare Keegan

Set in a small Irish town in 1985, Small Things Like These follows a coal and timber merchant in the run up to Christmas. Bill Furlong has made a steady life for himself, his wife and his daughters. As the illegitimate son of a sixteen-year-old housemaid, growing up in a community controlled by the Catholic church, Furlong knows he might have faced a harsher fate. ‘Times were raw,’ writes Keegan, ‘but Furlong felt all the more determined to carry on, to keep on the right side of people and to keep providing for his girls’. Past and present collide when he makes a delivery at the convent on the edge of town. Furlong is troubled by what he witnesses there, and is haunted by memories of his childhood. In the sacred, frosty hours between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Furlong makes a choice between complicit silence and quiet heroism, knowing he might lose everything. 

When to Read It: As a parent, it sometimes feels easy to lose the magic of Christmas amid the prepping, planning and wrapping. When I read Small Things Like These last Christmas Eve, I felt as if I had reconnected with the spirit of the season. Small Things Like These is a miracle of a book: a defiant flicker of hope at a dark time of year. 

How to Read It: At only 128 pages, this masterpiece in miniature can be read in a few quiet hours (perhaps after Santa’s sherry has been poured and everyone is tucked up in bed). It is available in a light-weight paperback edition from Faber. 

What to Read Next: I’m looking forward to reading Keegan’s celebrated short story collection, Antarctica (first published in 1999) and her most recent book, So Late in the Day. 

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The Debut Novel

All The Little Bird Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow 

One of my favourite books of the year, All The Little Bird Hearts is a beguiling and sharp-eyed story about the complexities of human relationships, motherhood and what it feels like to have the world closed off from you. Sunday Forrester lives with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Dolly, in her childhood home in the Lake District. Sometimes, she can only eat white foods. On ‘quiet days’, she takes refuge in silence. Sunday is perplexed by social encounters, but finds pleasure tending to plants and reading about Sicilian folklore. When ostentatious Vita arrives next door – deeply sun-tanned, clad in expensive, inky clothing and gold jewellery – the careful rhythm of Sunday’s habit-led life is disrupted. Soon Vita is insisting Sunday and Dolly join her for champagne suppers and inviting herself into their home. Vita seems delighted by Sunday’s eccentricities – and for once, Sunday feels loved and accepted. However, as the summer passes, Vita’s affection wanes and something threatening takes its place. For Vita desires nothing more than a daughter – and she wants to take Dolly for her own.

When To Read It: Read All The Little Bird Hearts when you are looking for something scintillating – this is a tense and subtly nuanced look at an intense friendship between two women, as it darkens. The novel is also a lucid portrayal of the female experience of autism. As a neurodivergent woman, I found it cathartic to find aspects of myself here. If this is you, perhaps this book will bring you the same feeling of affirmation. 

Sensitive Content: We gradually learn about the accidental death of Sunday’s sister. 

How to Read It: All The Little Bird Hearts is out in a 296 page hardback edition from Tinder Press, with a paperback to follow in February 2024. The audiobook is also a captivating listen. 

What To Read Next: I recommend Claire Fuller’s Unsettled Ground, Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss and Miriam Toew’s All My Puny Sorrows. 

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The Motherhood Novel

A Ghost In the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

At Christmas, I love stories that feel a little ghostly and magical. A Ghost in the Throat is definitely not supernatural, but it is the bewitching account of a woman haunted by the words of a poet who lived centuries ago. Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s days are governed by the loving ‘drudge work’ of looking after her young children: school-runs, hoovering and kissing bumped heads. But when she sits down to breastfeed, Ní Ghríofa’s thoughts return to the familiar cadence of a beloved poem – the Caoineadh Airt Uí Loaghaire. Composed by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman whose lover was murdered, the Caoineadh is wildly passionate and erotically charged. Fascinated by the life of this other woman, Ní Ghríofa feels compelled to unravel it from its neatly stitched-up history. Visiting libraries with her young children in tow, she plunges herself into archives and translations. ‘I hold no doctorate, no professorship, no permission-slip at all’ she writes, ‘I am merely a woman who loves this poem’. This may be so, but Ní Ghríofa weaves a dazzling tale, drawing together fiction and memoir to reimagine unwritten female history. A Ghost in the Throat is as luminous and striking as a full-moon against the black of night. 

When To Read It: I felt as if A Ghost in the Throat had been written just for me. This book, Ní Ghríofa writes, has been ‘composed whilst folding someone else’s clothes [...] stitched to the soundtrack of cartoon nursery rhymes’. Having spent the last five years reading and writing in the margins of looking after my sons, this resonated with me deeply. It seemed to epitomise what Crib Notes newsletter is about. It can feel impossible to read and write when one is embroiled in domestic demands, and what one does achieve can seem so small. And yet – as a writer friend recently said to me, ‘how often do we find that work made on the margins of anything is often some of the most exciting and unique’. To read a novel which illuminates this point feels profoundly validating. 

Sensitive Content: Ní Ghríofa describes the traumatic experience of her daughter’s premature birth and time in NICU. 

How to Read It: I listened to the audio edition which is performed beautifully by Siobhán McSweeney. However, such lyrical writing often requires full-immersion, rather than the half-listening I do when my attention moves towards meal-planning and the online grocery shop.  For this, I recommend the kindle edition or the relatively slim 224 page paperback. 

What to Read Next: I’ve just started reading The Long Form by Katie Briggs, an incandescent and precise blend of essay and fiction, which looks at reading, thinking and the everyday rhythms of caring for a baby.

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The Short Story Collection

Wednesday’s Child by Yiyun Li 

Wednesday’s Child gathers unpublished stories and a novella written by acclaimed author, Yiyun Li. Together, they offer a nuanced exploration of loss, grief, uncertainty and how we might choose to live, knowing of life’s fragility. In one story, a bereaved mother attempts to find comfort by compiling a spreadsheet of every death she has encountered. In another, a mother fears her greatest failing is that she is ‘too normal’ to relate to her autistic child. Elsewhere, a restless wife receives unwanted emails from a man she has met only twice, and a nanny cares for baby whose mother has PND. These stories are unflinching, and often spiky, but they are extraordinarily tender too.

When To Read It: Wednesday’s Child is unsentimental about the impossibility of protecting one’s children. In one story, Li writes, ‘Nina [...] had envisioned all the things she would not be able to shield her child from [...] What blind courage had led her into motherhood?' When I read this line, I felt my heart had been pierced by its truth. It was painful to see one of the hardest aspects of parenthood articulated so clearly on the page, but it felt consoling too. Somehow, there is a strange comfort in naming these fears and finding the courage to meet each day in spite of them. As Li writes, ‘Anything that could go wrong – a marriage, a child, a medical treatment, a painting, an affair, a tree – started with hope. The only option is to blunder on through hoping.’ Wednesday’s Child is an exquisite book, and one of the best I have read this year. 

Sensitive Content: Some of these stories explore suicide. Yiyun Li’s seventeen year-old son took his own life in 2017, and this loss reverberates through the book. 

How to Read It:  I found I had to read Wednesday Child slowly, catching my breath between each searing story. The beautiful 256 page hardback edition is out now from 4th Estate.

What To Read Next: I loved Li’s strange and caustic novel, The Book of Goose, which I reviewed in last year’s Christmas issue. Having read Wednesday’s Child, I am keen to start Where Reasons End, Li’s moving response to her son’s death.

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A Few Festive Favourites

If you fancy pure, page-turning pleasure instead of peaceful reflection, buy yourself the festive edition of Alice Slater’s Death of A Bookseller – a deliciously dark, bookshop-set thriller, which has its denouement at the staff Christmas party. Read my review here.

This year, I have introduced my eldest son to J.R.R. Tolkein’s Letters from Father Christmas, which I loved as a child. Every December between the 1920s and 1940s, Tolkein’s children received a beautifully illustrated letter from Father Christmas, full of comical and imaginative details about life at the North Pole. Reading this book with my son has felt magical, special and just as fun at thirty-five-years-old as it was when I was five. We’ve also been enjoying Mog’s Christmas, ahead of the Channel 4 adaptation on this Christmas. 

Years of watching BBC adaptations of literary classics on Boxing Day, have led me to believe that no Christmas is complete without a foray into the nineteenth century (or the early twentieth century, I’m not fussy!). I recommend cosying up with George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles. Read my reviews for both in the December 2020 issue of Crib Notes.

For a delightful blend of Christmas literature and cookery, get yourself a copy of Kirsty Young’s The Little Library Christmas, which features recipes for meringues and cream as enjoyed by the sisters in The Ballet Shoes; Mrs. Cratchit’s start-in-advance gravy, and champagne cocktails in honour of Nancy Mitford’s Christmas Pudding. Read my full review here.

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About Me 

I'm Elizabeth. Before my eldest son was born in October 2018, I worked as a book publicist and literary event manager. I started Crib Notes in December 2019 as a convenient overlap of the two things I loved the most: being a mother to my son and reading. I wanted Crib Notes to feel like a friend; a kind voice and a gentle hand on the shoulder saying ‘Look, I know you’re knackered, but this book might be exactly what you need right now’. These days I look after my two little boys. I read, write and chair literary events in the margins of motherhood.

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