2026 Walter Scott Prize

Somehow I managed to miss the announcement of the shortlist for Historical Fiction for 2026 which was published in April. This is my favorite prize to follow because I love historical fiction, although I get tired of WWII historical fiction. 

Back in February I blogged about the long list here.  Since that time the only additional book on that list that I read was Helm which I wrote about here.  It has been difficult finding the other books because my library doesn't always buy them or there is a long wait list.

The shortlist, which was announced April 16, 2026, was:

The Pretender by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury)

The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly (Bloomsbury)

Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Polygon)

Once the Deed is Done by Rachel Seiffert (Virago)

Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (Viking)

Of that list the only one I've read was Seascraper which I read last year when it was on a Booker Prize list. I liked it very much. 

The winner for 2026 was announced June 12, 2026 and is The Matchbox Girl by Alice Jolly. 

I checked and of course my library doesn't have it but I put a "notify me" tag on it. 

The Pirates of Penzance at OTSL

 

 

The Opera: Frederic has turned 21 which marks the end of his apprenticeship with the Pirate King (he was supposed to be apprenticed to a Pilot but his nursery maid, Ruth, mis-heard and apprenticed him to a Pirate). Frederic has done his duty to the pirates but once a free man he will do his duty as a citizen and hunt them down. Frederic falls in love with Mabel the youngest daughter of a major-general but before they can be married a loophole is discovered in his indenture of apprenticeship that requires him to rejoin the pirates. As with most operettas, the plot is complicated and there are subplots.  The Pirates of Penzance was first performed at the Royal Bijou Theatre, Paignton, United Kingdom on December 30, 1879 and officially premiered at the Fifth Avenue Theater, New York on December 31, 1879.  It includes the classic "A Very Model of a Modern Major-General". 

Composers: Gilbert & Sullivan

Principal Cast: 

    Daniel Luis Espinal (tenor) sings Frederic and is making his OTSL main stage debut with this opera. He has sung with the Lyric Opera of Chicago and was a winner of the Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition.  He has a beautiful voice but he looked older than 21 years (often a problem with opera). 

    Jana McIntyre (soprano) sings Mabel, the love interest of Frederic and the youngest daughter of General Stanley. She sang Tatiana in last year in OTSL's A Midsummer Night's Dream and is scheduled to be in Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera. She was a finalist in the Metropolitan Opera Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition. She sang beautifully and played Mabel with appropriate coquetry.

    Robert Mellon ( baritone) sings (and steals the show as) Major-General Stanley. Last year he appeared at OTSL in Die Fledermaus and in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He pulled off "A Very Model" to the delight of the audience and was also very funny. Of all the principal cast he seemed the most comfortable as an actor. 

    William Socolof (Bass-Baritone) sings the Pirate King. He is making his OTSL debut.  He was very funny but I would have liked a bigger voice in the role. 

Director: Sean Curran

Running Time:  2 hours and 30 minutes with one 25 minute intermission 

One good thing:  James Schuette's bright set and colorful costumes evoke the music hall of the late 1800's and Sean Curran's stage direction and choreography make the most of the slapstick aspects of the operetta. This would be a very good Opera Theatre of St. Louis production for people who have never been to the Opera before. In fact, there were a number of children (wearing Pirate hats) at my performance. 

One not-so-great thing: Because this is an operetta there are portions that rely on the spoken word. Sometimes the singers (who are singers and not actors) speak a little bit too fast and words get lost. But this is a minor nit. 

The Correspondent

The Book: Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer, long divorced with two living adult children who worry about her living alone. But she likes her house overlooking the river and her garden. Three days a week Sybil sets aside time for her correspondence. Sybil prefers writing letters to personal interaction. Writing helps her make sense of the world and helps her build connections with other people. She writes to her brother, her best friend, her neighbor, the young son of a former colleague, as well as famous authors like Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry.  She even writes to George Lucas. And sometimes they write back. She talks about the books she is reading and what is going on in the world and in her life. Through all these letters the reader gets to know Sybil, her background, her hopes, her fears, the mistakes she thinks she has made and the successes that she has had. But when she begins to receive anonymous letters from someone who claims to have been harmed by her in the past, she begins to worry. 

The Author: Virginia Evans    

Genre: Literary Fiction

Length: 475 pp (ipad mini e-reader)

One good thing:  Evans has created a memorable, wholly formed character through the letters that Sybil writes and receives. She was a character I wished I could meet in real life. 

One not-so-great thing: At one point Evans has Joan Didion write back to Sybil (they clearly have been corresponding for years). They are discussing the death of a child. Of course Didion wrote an entire book about the death of her child (as well as a book about the death of her husband), but it made me a little bit uncomfortable reading a fictionalized letter from her on this subject. 

Doorways: Story; Characters; Setting; Language**

This is a character-driven novel, not plot-driven. There is a plot as we come to care about what will happen to the different people to whom Sybil writes, but primarily we are watching the arc of Sybil as she deals, over the years, with old age. She becomes very real through her letters, always her irascible self but deeply caring about the people she loves. The setting in Maryland is not particularly important to the novel although Sybil's garden and path down to the river are important to her. The Correspondent is an epistolary novel that covers a number of years. Some people don't like epistolary novels. I happen to love them because I think they are very good at revealing character if done well, and this is done very well. Through the novel Sybil stays truly herself no matter who she is writing to but reveals different parts of herself to the different people to whom she writes. And despite the fact that Sybil seldom leaves home, the letters have a propulsive sense that carries the story along. 

**"It seems to me that all works of fiction and narrative nonfiction are broadly made up of four experiential elements: story, character, setting, and language. I call these “doorways,” because when we open a book, read the first few pages, and choose to go on, we enter the world of that book. And I’ve come to believe we can help readers better choose their next book by looking at the proportion of these four elements."  Nancy Pearl on the Four Doorways.

The Things We Never Say

The Book: Artie Dam is a high school history teacher who loves his job and is beloved by his students who call him Damn-Dam. Long married to his wife Evie, they live in the house she inherited from her wealthy family, right on the water where Artie keeps a sailboat and loves to go out sailing alone. Their son Rob is grown, having survived a terrible car accident when he was a teenager. Artie seems to have everything and yet he feels isolated and lonely. He feels that no one really knows him and that he doesn't really know other people, including those closest to him. He feels that he is living a double life - outwardly jovial and inwardly suffering. Then he discovers a secret that has been kept from him for years and an incident occurs to him, both of which force him to rethink his approach to life. 

The Author: Elizabeth Strout 

Genre: Literary Fiction 

Length: 334 pages (e-reader ipad mini)

One good thing:  This is a novel of ideas and the big idea is that no matter what we think we know we can never fully understand other people and we can never fully understand how we appear to other people. As we travel through life we are blind but we think we can see. Within each human being is a vast, unknowable universe. In creating a character who appears outwardly ebullient to other people but who, inside, is dealing with loneliness and feelings of isolation, Strout makes this idea very accessible.

One not-so-great thing: As with many of her novels, Strout doesn't shrink from having her characters deal with recent real events. For instance, in "Lucy by the Sea" Strout had her characters deal with isolation because of the pandemic. This novel takes place in 2024 during the presidential election. While I found her characters' reaction to the election and its immediate aftermath realistic, in real life events move so fast that some of the things she writes about seem dated already.

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways": Characters; Writing; Story; Setting 

This is a novel focused on one character, painting a picture of him during a certain year of his life but during which he reflects on his past and the author occasionally gives us glimpses of his future. I found Artie to be a great character study while at the same time finding the other characters hard to completely understand (which I think is the point).  We mostly see the other characters from Artie's perspective although occasionally the narrator jumps in with an insight.  

I am aware that many readers find Strout's writing style off-putting. She writes in straightforward sentences that appear simple on their face. I think some readers feel she talks down to them. I find her style fascinating; it is as if she is sitting across from you telling you a story. She will straight-out tell you that a character only understood something later. I found this novel easy to read and yet full of ideas to think about. The story is relatively simple, the plot is not action-packed and yet I found it difficult to put down. 

Strout has set this novel in Massachusetts, a change from her previous novels, but unlike her novels set in Maine I didn't get a particular "Massachusetts feel" from this novel. In some ways it could have been set anywhere in New England.

Trigger warning:  There is a great deal of talk of suicide in this novel. 

  

May 2026 Reading

May was a good month for reading. One of the books I finished will surely go on my year end list of favorite books. I also re-read a classic novel and enjoyed it tremendously. This month I read three mysteries (I enjoyed all of them) and stretched myself by also reading  more general fiction and one memoir. 

These are the books I finished in May.

The Gospel of Orla by Eoghan Walls

Orla is a young, teenage girl in England grieving the death of her mother from cancer. Left with her father, who drinks too much, and her much younger sister Lily, Orla feels detached from the world including her school friends. She wants, more than anything, to escape and she plans to run away to her aunt's home in Ireland. She thinks she has all the logistics worked out but then she runs into (literally) a homeless man who says he is Jesus. And ... maybe he is. Eoghan Walls is a poet from Northern Ireland and this is his debut novel. While I didn't think it held together completely at the end, I did find it an engrossing read. Walls wrote in the first person as Orla, in the manner that a young, not too well educated 14 year old would write. There is punctuation missing and he uses run-on sentences. And that style works, revealing Orla's character bit by bit. There is a plot to this novel but it is mostly a novel based on Orla's character. Although the plot of the novel does include a journey across England toward Liverpool, there isn't much of a sense of place. My Quick Take is here. 

Murder at World's End by Ross Montgomery

This is an historical mystery set in Cornwall in 1910 (I seem to be on a bit of a Cornwall kick, unintentionally) during a time when Halley's Comet is making an appearance.  Stephen Pike has arrived at a manor house called World's End set on an island off the coast. Stephen has just been released from prison and has been recommended for the job of a second footman. When he arrives he finds the house in an uproar because the owner is convinced the tail of the comet will wipe out life unless every crack is sealed and the residents wear oxygen masks. Stephen is assigned to assist Miss Decima Stockingham, an 80 year old, irascible, foul mouthed aunt of the owner. By morning the owner is dead, apparently killed by a cross bolt in a room locked on the inside. As an ex-con all eyes are on Stephen as the murderer so he and Miss Decima must solve the crime. Yes, this is another locked room mystery but I found it more enjoyable than the last one that I read, possible because there is some humor in this mystery. And Stephen and Miss Decima make quite a team. I suspect this is the first of a series. 

Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

One day a man named Theo arrives in the small college town of Golden, Georgia. He is very mysterious, never telling anyone his last name or his whole story (except for one man in town who he hires as an advisor and from whom he rents an apartment). In the local coffee shop he notices that the walls are filled with the art of a local artist - portraits of local people who frequent the coffee shop and its surroundings. Theo begins to buy the portraits and present them to the subjects, learning about their lives. I admit that, on my own I would never have picked up this book and if I had I probably would have DNF'd it, but it was chosen by my bookclub. This is a very "southern" book, it meanders along, the characters (most of them) are nice and it almost seems beside the point to find out who Theo is and why he came to that town. In some ways, reading this novel reminded me of reading Jan Karon, whose books I like. But Karon keeps her books to a shorter length and while she introduces loads of small town characters she doesn't tell their stories in narrative as much as in action. In this book we get a lot of narrative. (A LOT of narrative.) For a while it seemed that each chapter was Theo meeting a new person and hearing their story. In some ways parts of the novel were like a series of short stories and as I was reading I kept thinking that the entire novel would have made a better short story.  Frankly at about the 50% mark I was bored by it although it did pick up shortly thereafter and had a surprising ending. I know this book is popular with many readers, including some in my book club, but it really wasn't for me.  

Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk

Jeremy Denk is a classical pianist and this is a memoir about his piano education - basically about all the piano lessons he took in his life. You might not think he or his life have much in common with Barbra Streisand but his memoir very much reminded me of hers. In each the author seemed to remember every moment of their lives and were determined to tell us about each of them. In Denk's case he seemed to remember every detail of every piano lesson he ever took.  In both of their cases they remembered every compliment (and every criticism) they ever received. Thank goodness Jeremy Denk is much younger than Barbra and this memoir mostly ends (except for the Coda) at about the age of 30. I listened to this on audiobook. I like to listen to memoirs on audiobook because I often feel that the author is speaking directly to me. Occasionally this backfires if it sounds like the author is reading and not talking, but mostly it works. I sometimes feel that hearing the author on an audiobook tells me even more about the author than just the words the author wrote. But in the case of this memoir, I think I would have been better off reading the written word because I think I would have appreciated the wordplay and Denk's wry humor better. Hearing him tell his story I didn't find myself amused. At a few points in his story he said that other students thought he was insufferable and I thought - yes, you ARE insufferable. (I sought out a Terry Gross interview after finishing this and he didn't sound as insufferable when he was answering her questions as he did narrating the audiobook.) I like classical music and at one point I played the piano so I found most of this memoir interesting even though I found his telling of it annoying. But unless you are VERY interested in classical music and piano lessons, I don't recommend this. If you are interested, I recommend you read it and don't listen to it. (Although the one benefit of the audiobook was that at certain points he would actually play passages on the piano.)

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex

In the early 1970's three lighthouse keepers in a tower lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall (yet another Cornwall book) mysteriously disappear. The lighthouse is spotless and the door is locked from the inside but they are nowhere to be found. Years later, in the 1990's, a writer of seafaring adventure stories decides to figure out what happened and write a book about it. The portions of this novel that take place in the 1970's are written in the third person. The portions written in the 1990's are partly written as transcripts of the responses of the people the researcher interviews - the wives and girlfriend of the men at the lighthouse. This novel is fictional but the author points out that she had inspiration from a true story from 1900 when three lighthouse keepers disappeared from a remote rock light light in the Outer Hebrides. This novel really kept my attention and made me turn the pages. The characters are well drawn and are interesting. The descriptions of the lighthouse made me want to see a lighthouse. Recommended. 

The Framed Women of Ardmore House by Brandy Schillace

At first I wasn't sure I would like this novel. The main character, Jo Jones, is an American who has inherited an estate in Yorkshire with a crumbling manor house and a cottage on the grounds where she decides to live. Then, almost immediately, she finds a dead man in the cottage and the local police are investigating the murder and her. The setup really appealed to me but in the first 50 pages I was constantly annoyed by the main character, her actions and the way she phrased things. Turns out she is neurodivergent, which explained a lot. I found this novel to be a real page turner and I liked all of the peripheral characters. I eventually liked Jo Jones. The plot is, perhaps, a little unbelievable in certain places (as these kind of stories involving crumbling manor houses often are). I do wish they had explained the main character's neurodivergence a little earlier in the story but my frustration with her at the beginning made me relate to the characters in the novel who are frustrated by her.  Recommended. 

John of John by Douglas Stuart

I feel fairly certain that this novel will go on my list of favorite novels of 2026. The main character, Cal McLeod, has returned to the island of Harris, off the west coast of Scotland, after failing to find a job following graduation from art school. He is to assist his conservative father with sheep farming and the weaving of "Harris Tweed" wool. Cal feels stifled partly because he feels he must keep his sexual identity as a gay man a secret from his father and the community or risk being ostracized. But his father and his grandmother have their secrets too, in fact the whole community has secrets. I was incredibly impressed by Stuart's writing. He evokes the island of Harris in all of its harshness and beauty and he creates multi-dimensional characters.  And he manages to make all the strands of the story come together in a believable way by the end.  My short take is here. Highly Recommended. 

Persuasion by Jane Austen

This novel was the May readalong with the Blue Sky Book Club. Technically, for me it was a re-read because I read the novel a long time ago (maybe 40ish years ago). But since I remembered almost nothing about it, it was all new to me. The main character, Anne Eliott, is the daughter of a baronet and lives in a country house with her father and her elder sister Elizabeth. Austen makes clear from the start that Anne is not the favorite daughter (that would be Elizabeth). There is a third sister, Mary, who is the youngest and does not live at home during any of the important points in the novel (either being away at school or being married). Eight years earlier Anne had fallen in love with Frederick Wentworth, a naval captain with little money. Her snobbish father and sister felt he was an unworthy match. Lady Russell, a close friend of Anne's deceased mother and a kind of surrogate mother to Anne, persuaded Anne to turn down Captain Wentworth's proposal. It is clear that Anne always regretted this. Now, eight years later, the Eliotts have fallen on hard times and are forced to let their country estate and take up residence in Bath.  Before joining them in Bath Anne makes an extended visit to her married, younger sister Mary, whose family lives nearby. It turns out that the couple who lease the Eliott estate are related to Captain Wentworth, who comes to visit, so he and Anne are thrown together. Much tension ensues as it isn't clear whether or not Frederick and Anne will end up together (although, c'mon, this is Jane Austen.) This is not a long book (compared to other Austen novels) and Anne is much more mature than other Austen heroines. As with many novels, if the characters would only TALK to each other they would solve a lot of problems, but then there would be no story. I enjoyed this novel very much and am very glad to have re-read it. Recommended. 

A Deadly Episode by Anthony Horowitz

This is the 6th book in the Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery series that features the author, Anthony Horowitz, as a character in his own books. Hawthorne is a private detective, kicked out of the police service, who is a sort of grungy Sherlock Holmes type to whom Horowitz, grudgingly, plays his Dr. Watson. In this installment, the first novel in the series is being adapted into a movie and a death occurs on the filming location. Hawthorne is called on to help solve the crime and Horowitz tags along in the hope it will make another good book. Along the way Horowitz learns more about the mysterious background of Hawthorne. I like this series and recommend it but it definitely needs to be read from the beginning. 

John of John

The Book: Young John-Calum McLeod, known to everyone as Cal, has returned to the Western Isles of Scotland after finishing an art school degree that did not lead to gainful employment. Waiting for him at his home on the island of Harris is the small croft and sheep farm that has been in Cal's mother's family for years although his mother divorced his father and moved out long ago. Still living in the croft is Cal's ultra-conservative father, John McLeod, and Cal's maternal grandmother Ella. In this small community where people still speak Gaelic and English, the people adhere to a strict Calvinist tradition and Cal's father, a lay preacher at the local church, has definite ideas about proper behavior. He finds Cal's long, dyed hair to be sinful but what he does not know is that Cal is gay. It is a lonely life on the island; the nearest neighbors are two bachelor brothers who take care of their demented father. The next nearest neighbors have a daughter that everyone has always assumed Cal will marry. Cal longs for a connection he cannot have as he keeps his sexual identity a secret. But his father and his grandmother have their secrets too. 

The Author: Douglas Stuart 

Genre: Literary Fiction

Length: 787 pages on e-reader (ipod mini)

One good thing:  This man can write. I mean, really write. See below.

One not-so-great thing: There isn't much in this novel that is not great; if I had to pick one thing it would probably be the length. Or maybe that Oprah picked this novel for her book club which will scare off a lot of people because her picks tend to be viewed as depressing. I did not find this depressing.

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways": Characters, Story, Setting, Writing

Readers who will enjoy this novel: Readers who value characters above all else; Readers looking for a sense of place that makes them want to visit; Readers who value excellent writing; Readers who like a story that keeps them wondering how everything will work out. If you are a reader who demands a page turner, this probably isn't for you; this is a novel with a slow build.

Stuart creates his characters the way a painter creates a painting, slowly and stroke by stroke.  As the novel progresses, the broad, black and white outlines of the characters (seen mostly, in the beginning, from Cal's perspective) slowly develop into three dimensional, colorful human beings. There is not much narrative "telling" about the characters, the reader must discover them through their thoughts and actions which are often (as in real life) contradictory. Although this is not a plot driven mystery story, the main characters are all keeping secrets from each other and the reader is constantly wondering what those secrets are and whether the secrets will ever be revealed by the characters to each other. 

The heart of the community is the very conservative Calvinist Presbyterian church, in which those who are "saved" sit in the front of the church and the remainder sit in the rear, and those who are too sinful may be cast out. This adds tension to the novel as the secrets (as with most secrets) tend to be of the type that would be seen as sinful by the church and the congregation. John McLeod, Cal's father, is a lay preacher at the church and wants his son to repent his "sinful" ways, cut his hair and turn into a church-going family man. This is not the future Cal pictures for himself but he can't bring himself to directly tell his father. But Cal does not know that his father is constantly praying for forgiveness even as he regularly chooses what the church would see as sin.

The island of Harris is almost a character of the novel in itself. Stuart evokes its harsh landscape and life on a sheep farm, as well as the job of weaving the "Harris Tweed" woolens that are more profitable than the sheep. It is not a place I would want to live but by the end of the novel I wanted to visit just to see it. At the same time, the story doesn't shrink from the fact that tourism and holiday home buyers are changing the island.

Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for his novel Shuggie Bain, which I never read as the story didn't appeal to me. (I also never read his second novel, Young Mungo.) So it was with trepidation that I picked up this novel. But what a joy it was to read his prose. Without a doubt, this is the best piece of literary fiction that I have read yet this year.

It would have been so easy for Stuart to make John McLeod the villain of the novel and, indeed, there are moments when his cruelty seems overwhelming. But while he is a complicated, deeply flawed man, there is no doubt that he loves his son. It is the contradictions that make  him so interesting. All of the characters have their flaws but Stuart is not a writer who judges, he simply presents.  And while the novel is specific as to the characters, it is universal in its depiction of the human desire to "belong" which exists in juxtaposition with the need to be oneself and discover one's own identity. 

 

 

 

The Gospel of Orla

 

The Book:   Orla, a young, teenage girl in England, is grieving the death of her mother from cancer and angry at her dad who drinks too much. Orla longs for connection but feels detached from her friends. She wants, more than anything, to escape her life and plans to run away to her aunt's home in Ireland. But just when she thinks she has all the logistics worked out her plan is thrown into chaos when her life literally collides with a homeless man who says he is Jesus. And ... maybe he is. 

The Author: Eoghan Walls 

Genre: Literary Fiction.

Length: 333 pages on ipad e-reader

One good thing:  Eoghan Wells is a poet from Northern Ireland and this is his debut novel. He manages to recreate exactly how a 14 year old, not-too-well-educated girl would write: bad grammar, run-on sentences, missing punctuation and complete self-absorption. This may sound annoying but it builds the character of Orla very well. 

One not-so-great thing: While the premise was interesting I kept wondering how he was going to write a believable ending for the story he had spun and, in the end, I don't think he quite stuck the landing.   

Nancy Pearl's "Four Doorways":

    Story/Plot: While there is a plot, this is mostly a character-driven novel. But wondering if and how Orla was actually going to run away without being caught and wondering about her relationship with the strange man who calls himself Jesus, kept me reading although I would not call this a page-turner. I don't think that Walls tied together all the loose ends by the end of the novel and that may bother some readers. 

    Characters: The story is told in the first person from the point of view of Orla who is an interesting character for whom I had sympathy and annoyance (as with most teenagers). We see all the other characters through her eyes and there was no downside to seeing them, especially Jesus, from the point of view of a teenager. 

    Setting: Although the story includes a journey on foot across part of England, there really was no specific sense of place. 

    Writing: Walls managed to capture Orla through the way that he writes her first person story. The erratic punctuation and the run-on sentences may bother some people but it seemed very realistic to me. You won't read this book for beautiful writing but you may read it to enjoy how he built character through Orla's writing.