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Not quite short enough to be a novella, at 190 pages The Burrow is condensed and freighted with wise emotion on every page. When a grieving couple buy a pet bunny for their teenage daughter, little do they realize that the creature will begin to dominate their slow recovery. When the wife’s mother, herself pivotal in the underlying tragedy, arrives to stay after an injury, the new suburban home of the rabbit becomes a roiling bed of change and crisis. This spare, unsentimental, detailed novel asks: will recovery begin or is this just another crisis? Melanie Cheng is a pinpoint stylist adept at cycling through the four sufferers, adept at manipulating plot in the service of emotional revelations. This reader found the first three quarters of The Burrow to be riveting; if the final quarter lost some intensity, nevertheless the overall journey was a touching, rewarding one.

A documentary definitely not for everyone, but very much in my wheelhouse, Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever profiles Bryan Johnson, the multimillionaire publicly doing a one-on-one experiment on himself with the aim of living forever. If I tell you he finishes eating for the day at 11 AM, eschews alcohol, eschews most social life, eats precisely weighed and planned meals, volunteers for offshore gene therapy, and consumes a hundred pills a day (that number varies every time I read about him) … well, you’d be entitled to dismiss him as a nut. Yet this documentary portrays him (over sympathetically, I must admit) as a likeable, almost vulnerable soul of great obsessiveness. He is, in a word, interesting, and that alone makes Don’t Die quite an intriguing watch. Plot overlays are his love for one of his children (the others are estranged) and his online exhibitionism and business hawking, both of which deepen our appreciation for someone hard to comprehend. Well paced, simply shot, Don’t Die is worth a look, especially if longevity appeals as a topic.

In his quartet of novellas loosely organized geographically around a remote Irish island and organized (it seems) around modern issues of abuse and misogyny, John Boyne’s second instalment is Earth (see my review of the first, Water). At the end of Water, we witnessed a secondary character, a troubled seventeen-year-old youth, fleeing the island, and it is he, Evan, who now stars in Earth. Without preamble, the author deftly inserts us into a court case accusing Evan, now a soccer star, of abetting in a rape, the other accused being his teammate. Then Boyne switches us to and fro, between courtroom scenes and his fraught past since leaving the island. For Evan is damaged, a caring soul plunged into darkness, and the novel soon becomes an examination of his morals under pressure. As always, John Boyne’s writing is free flowing and acute, the dialogue a treat, the ancillary characters all quickly and deeply introduced and then developed. The 168 pages unwind in a pleasing blur, a blur that sinks the reader into the darkness of misogyny and rape, fully up to date in 2025. Not quite as riveting as Water, Earth nonetheless is a sterling, thought-provoking read.

My first Emmanuel Carrère book, V13: Chronicle of a Trial, has made me an instant convert. The esteemed author asked to be commissioned to write weekly about the sensational, grueling nine-month-long 2021-2022 trial in Paris of fourteen defendants of the horrific multi-location terrorist attack in 2015 that killed 130 and maimed hundreds. He missed very few days of the court sessions and grew to know many of the plaintiffs, lawyers, and even defendants. At the start of the book, the author’s plain, smooth, open-hearted style suggests the book will miss something vital about the case’s dramas or themes but great skill is at play. The reader becomes drawn in, until the feeling is of sitting on the author’s shoulder. Whilst never downplaying the dumb savagery of the attackers’ motives and tactics, he manages to draw each of the fourteen as an individual. Tragedies upon tragedies, either for survivors or families of the dead, are sketched with wonderful empathy. As we approach the climax of the judge’s verdicts and sentences, washes of emotion flood the court, including Carrère, who writes that what he anticipated as a “vain, colossal judicial spectacle,” instead morphed into something much more: “No: this was something else: a unique experience of horror, pity, proximity and presence.” V13: Chronicle of a Trial is a gently riveting and brave nonfiction chronicle that reminded me of Helen Garner at her best; I can offer no greater recommendation.

In his extraordinary ode to neurodivergence, Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum, Daniel Tammet, neurodivergent himself, plies language in the service of nine very different minds. Eschewing direct quotation, he gently (often oh so gently) retells their experiences (relying on copious interviews of and around his subjects) now and in the past, happy and sad, showing us innermost fears and joys while sketching the public personas involved. Some of the “minds” are super functioning in the way we imagine for autistic savants: a hand and wrist surgeon of international repute who nonetheless cannot remember faces; freakish comedian Dan Ackroyd, so different in humor and in life from an early age; a “murder detective” with an uncanny ability to solve crimes others give up on; a freakishly talented mathematician; a blind woman attuned to famous Australian poet Les Murray, himself autistic: a nonverbal man reared with extraordinary love by his mother. Never preaching, never even teaching, Tammet is a deeply sympathetic stylist whose nine stories all differ but all reinforce the central message of universality of love and connection and hope. Nine Minds is a special read, one I commend.