pickKatherine Rundell has been one of my favourite authors for SO LONG and I hadn‘t read one of her books in a while so I thought “maybe I‘ve outgrown her”. NOPE. Still love it. Lover her writing style and the way her characters truly seem alive. It took me a while to get through due to outside circumstances but each time I picked it up again it was so easy to get into it again and I‘m overall so glad that I stuck with it!
4⭐️
pickThis isn‘t usually the type of genre I go for when reading but I‘ve been in a bad reading slump and decided to give this one a go. And I loved every second of it. It was perfect for what it needed to be and I think I read it at the perfect time. The characters were funny and lovable and though there‘s some moments of miscommunication, it made sense in the story and didn‘t bother me like it sometimes does. I really liked the writing style too!
4⭐️
You were right, Sadie Wen. I am completely, helplessly obsessed with you.
Love,
Julius
All of which is to say I really hope this finds you.
And I hope you find me too.
Sadie
I want you to hold me like a grudge, keep me like a promise, haunt me like a ghost.
“Do you always pay such close attention to everything people say?” he demands between short, uneven breaths.
“No. Only what you say.”
“You‘ll always be my first choice, Julius Gong.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“You made it clear—so terribly clear—how much you hate me. That I‘m the last person in the world you would ever consider. But I kept looking for signs that would suggest otherwise. I kept wondering if it was still possible. Because I‘m willing to lose everything,” he says, his eyes blacker than the surrounding darkness, than the sky outside, “so long as I don‘t lose you.”
We move like two planets in orbit; both on the same trajectory, but never touching.
“Why do you always single me out?”
“Because,” he says quietly, a curious expression on his face. I‘ve never seen him so serious. So sincere. “You‘re the only person worth paying attention to.”
“Your entire existence is basically a run-on sentence.”
“Hurt my feelings?” he says it like a joke. “You have far too high an opinion of yourself, Sadie. You aren‘t capable of hurting me. On the contrary…don‘t you remember what you wrote?”
[…]
“From what I recall you wrote two whole paragraphs protesting the colour of my eyes. […] You then write three hundred words ranting about my hands.”
“I‘ll have you know,” Julius begins, low and furious, “that I was not named after a Roman dictator.”
I‘m so disoriented, so shaken still, that I can only say: “You weren‘t?”
“Absolutely not.”
“What…were you named after, then?”
“A printing company.”
“It is so difficult, to be alive. It is so difficult, and it is so beautiful.”
Christopher turned; and the iron spike in his heart unfurled, and became a victory flag.
Together, longing to turn back, knowing they must go forward, they stepped inside.
It meant this feeling. It meant burning to keep watch, for that which needed to be watched. It meant burning to keep it safe. It meant a ferocious and careful love.
There was a look in Irian‘s face of recognition: the joy of one at sea, who looks up and sees land ahead. It was the face of somebody who has suddenly felt, for the first time, the precise shape and weight of their own swiftly beating heart.
“You should have more respect for fear. It‘s the engine in all your human history, fear. Fear, married to greed, married to power.”
“This is the thing my blood keens for — to protect something worth protecting.”
“How much of us is what we know and what we‘ve seen?”
Christopher waited. When Irian said no more, he said: “Well?”
“There‘s no answer, only the question.”
“Do not wait for people to be faultless before you allow yourself to adore them. Adore them anyway.”
“Stop expecting life to get easier. It never does; that is not where its goodness lies.”
“I have a headache the size of a western island. But I will not have it said that I don‘t feed my illegal stowaways.”
pickThis is probably the most brilliant piece of historical fiction I have ever read and could very well be the best book I read this year. It‘s the first one.
There‘s too much to praise about this book for me to make a coherent statement. The characters, the plot, the setting, the depiction of friendships, the betrayals, the list goes on. It‘s so well written.
Let‘s just say it‘s been a while since a book has impacted me this much emotionally.
5⭐️
She learned revolution is, in fact, always unimaginable. It shatters the world you know. The future is unwritten, brimming with potential.
“That‘s just what translation is, I think. That‘s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they‘re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”
Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one.
His thoughts flew about, casting desperately for anything to think about that was not this. He landed not on coherent memories but on hyperspecific details — the salty weight of the air at sea, the length of Victoire‘s eyelashes, the hitch in Ramy‘s voice just before he burst out into full-bellied laughter. He clung to them, lingered there as long as he could, refused to let his mind go anywhere else.
“Be selfish,” he whispered. “Be brave.”
“We have to die to get their pity,” said Victoire. “We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry. But I don‘t want to die, Robin. […] I want to live.”
“I don‘t know how to go on.”
“Day by day, Birdie.” Her eyes filled with tears. “You go on, day by day. Just as we‘ve been doing.”
“You have to believe there‘s an after,” she murmured. “They did.”
“They were better than us.”
“They were.” She curled around his arm. “But it all still wound up in our hands, didn‘t it?”
“I just don‘t like thinking of us as history when we haven‘t even yet made a mark on the present.”
“This country can‘t last a month without us. We strike until they bend.”
“Dead pigs don‘t fear scalding water.”
She gave him a wan smile. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“We‘re dead men walking.”
“But that‘s what makes us frightening.” She set the lamp down between them. “We‘ve nothing left to lose.”
He had a sudden, very clear vision of the tower in ruins. He wanted it to shatter. He wanted it to, for once, feel the pain that had made possible its rarefied existence. “I want it to crumble.”
Victoire‘s throat pulsed, and he knew she was thinking of Anthony, of gunshots, of the wreckage of the Old Library. “I want it to burn.”
Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore.
It seemed to deny the laws of physics that Ramiz Rafi Mirza could be silenced by something so tiny as a bullet.
Grief suffocated. Grief paralysed. Grief was a cruel, heavy boot pressed so hard against his chest that he could not breathe. Grief took him out of his body, made his injuries theoretical. He was bleeding, but he didn‘t know where from.
