Audio, Arthur, Astronaut: What I Read in April 2025

As promised last time, I'm still slowly catching up on the monthly reading updates I skipped earlier this year. In case you're new here or would like a refresher, when I made my reading goals for 2025 — Reading A Lot, But Differently — I decided to prioritise seeking greater variety and trying other formats (as well as avoiding buying new physical books and keeping up good habits). Because of my podcast, by default I read a lot of crime fiction from the first half of the twentieth century and sometimes I need an extra push to make sure I range beyond that. With that in mind, I managed a little genre exploration this month and completed two non crime fiction audiobooks.

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Murder by Matchlight by E.C.R. Lorac

This was the Shedunnit Book Club reading choice for May, chosen because members wanted to look at a golden age detective novel that was written during WW2 and covered the wartime experience. This one was published in 1945 and focuses on a seemingly impossible crime committed in London's Regent's Park during the blackout.

I had read this book once before several years ago, but reading it again with this focus on the wartime context gave me a much greater appreciation for it. The plot is decent although not one of Lorac's best, but her development of character and setting is excellent. The murder victim had been a lodger in a boarding house full of theatrical people and even the minor figures are memorable. There are some interesting details about the difficulty of investigating crimes in 1940s London, too, as records were lost to bomb damage and people killed or displaced from their homes. This time around I also gained a greater appreciation for the diligence of her recurring detective, Chief Inspector Macdonald, which ended up inspiring me to make this other podcast episode.

Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Another re-read. I got this cosy D&D-inspired fantasy novel from the library as an ebook last year after my production assistant Leandra recommended it in our newsletter and, despite knowing nothing about D&D, I really enjoyed it. Then at the start of this month I read an interview with Travis Baldree and learned that he is an audiobook narrator by profession. Since I needed a break from my re-listen of the Rivers of London series, I decided to give his reading of his own book a try. And it was excellent.

Long-time readers might remember me mentioning my frustrations with the general level of audiobook quality (when you have edited audio for a living as I have, your ear just zeros in on the issues automatically making it hard to follow a story) and it was great to find one that is so well narrated and produced. Baldree has a new book in this series coming out in November, Brigands & Breadknives, and I've already pre-ordered it in audio form.

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman

This was an impulse borrow at the library, based entirely on the fact that I read Grossman's Magicians trilogy a few years ago and enjoyed it (I did not watch the show and thus have no opinions on its controversies). It's a retelling of the Arthurian legends from the point of view of a new young knight called Collum, who overcomes great hardship to get himself to Camelot only to learn that King Arthur has been killed in battle two weeks before. He joins up with the few remaining knights of the round table for a quest to salvage the moral ideal of Arthur's united kingdom before it is too late.

The publisher's website describes this book as "the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium" and to begin with, this sensibility and ambition made me want to roll my eyes. I put the book down a few times in the first hundred pages. But once it had clicked that this wasn't really a novel but rather a very large collection of tales or romances in the tradition of Chaucer or Malory, it made a lot more sense to me. I think Grossman must have spent a lot of time immersing himself in the huge canon of Arthurian literature in order to be able to write something like this that both belongs to that tradition and does something fresh with it.

By the end, I felt like this was a really impressive work of literature that deserves to be read for decades to come. It has a lot to say about the waves of invasion and immigration in early Britain, and about gender and magic and family. It's also funny and silly and very moving.

Lift the Curtain by Dorothy Erskine Muir

This is an autobiography by a little-known crime writer about whom I made a podcast episode at the end of April. It covers her early life as one of the seventeen (!) children of John Sheepshanks, an Anglican vicar and later a bishop. It follows her through her time as an early woman student at Oxford University and then ends in 1917 when she receives the news that her beloved brother William has been killed while serving in WWI.

I can't link to this book because it seems to be vanishingly rare, even secondhand. I borrowed this copy from the London Library and other similar institutions may still have it. I requested it thinking I would just flick through it for any interesting facts about the author as research for the episode, but ended up reading it cover to cover and taking copious notes. I think I annoyed my husband quite a bit, reading out bits to him when he was trying to work, but I was so deeply into this book I couldn't help myself. If you are at all interested in late Victorian/early Edwardian childhood, I recommend trying to track this down.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

If you've been here for a while, you'll know that I don't typically read many books that win major literary prizes. However, we received a copy of this, the 2024 Booker Prize winner, as a Christmas gift and, in the spirit of trying to read some things that are not classic crime this year, I gave it a go. It helped that Orbital is under 150 pages long.

I was underwhelmed. I liked the conceit of this book, which follows the inner lives of the astronauts in the International Space Station as it completes one full day of orbiting the Earth. It lacked tension or memorable emotional scope, though, and felt repetitive. The idea of literary-skewing science fiction is intriguing, but this wasn't a hit for me.

Frederica by Georgette Heyer

I am still working on reading all of Georgette Heyer's twelve detective novels this year (there are two coming up below) but I decided to take a little detour into the Regency historical fiction for which she is more famous. I've read and really liked another of these (Cotillion) and Frederica also seems to come highly rated by Heyer aficionados.

It did not disappoint. I do read quite a bit of contemporary Regency romance when I need a brain break so the tropes and settings are pretty familiar to me, but reading Heyer is a completely different experience. Her fiction has a bite to it that is totally lacking from something like the Bridgerton novels and this makes the inevitable happy ending hit so much better. In Frederica the dialogue is witty, the family dynamics are amusing, and the plot is well constructed. It also gets extra points from me for having a better hot air balloon scene than the one in Enduring Love.

Behold, Here's Poison by Georgette Heyer

This is my fifth Heyer detective novel this year. I'm feeling more and more confident in my opinion that while she was only average at concocting mystery plots, her gifts for creating conniving characters and writing catty dialogue were first-rate. This inheritance mystery in which any number of heirs could have murdered an unpleasant but rich old man with a cunning domestic poisoning trick is probably my favourite Heyer mystery so far.

Conclave by Robert Harris

The Pope died, the film was out, and listening to Roy McMillan (an approved narrator of mine) read this novel just made sense to me at the time. I went through the audiobook in only a couple of days and it reminded me how much I like a procedural thriller. The bits that gripped me most were the details of how the papal voting process works — so much breaking of sealing wax and slowly threading bits of paper onto string — and then seeing how Harris made these things instrumental in his plot. If anyone has recommendations for similar books where there's no murder and the suspense comes from the slow, attritional progress of a peculiar institution towards an unusual outcome, I'm all ears.

They Found Him Dead by Georgette Heyer

I'm halfway through my Heyer reading for the year! Once again, this is an inheritance mystery set among a rich family replete with unpleasant characters. The plot is not as well thought out as in Behold, Here's Poison and it's moderately obvious throughout who the murderer is. However, it has three redeeming features. One, Heyer's recurring detecting duo of Inspectors Hannasyde and Hemingway are beginning to develop some enjoyable rapport and personality. Two, the addition of a cinema-obsessed teen trying to play detective too livens things up considerably. And three, I always enjoy the pairing of an irascible old lady and her long-suffering companion-secretary. I know there are plenty of mystery fans who don't rate Heyer's work in this genre, but I'm yet to have a bad time reading one of her books.

That was, belatedly, my reading for April: nine books, bringing me up to 41 for the year so far. I'm still a smidge ahead of the pace needed to hit my target of 120 in 2025.

I did manage to stay on track with my intention to read more literary fiction and non-fiction this year, via The Bright Sword, Orbital and Lift the Curtain. I also got great pleasure from my two audiobooks, Legends & Lattes and Conclave. Both were highly satisfactory to me, a very picky audiobook consumer.

If you would like to follow along in real time, you can see what I'm reading at any given moment on the Storygraph. I just use that as a tracker, though, I don't publish any reviews there.

Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that I receive a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookseller that (I believe) ships internationally at no extra charge.