Reading List
Kit de Waal
Novelist
Kit de Waal worked for years in criminal and family law before publishing My Name Is Leon in 2016, a novel about a boy separated from his baby brother by the care system, and that grounding is why the book is so unsentimental about it. She used part of her advance to fund a creative writing scholarship for working-class writers, an intervention the field rarely gets. Supporting Cast collects her short fiction.
01
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The Safekeep
by Yael van der Wouden
“It’s set in Holland in the 1960s, and it’s about this pretty unhappy woman who lives in a house. Her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay with her. It’s really about the relationship between the two women, and also about how history rises up unbidden and knocks your life aside. It’s very well written. I think it will be a classic. It’s short as well!” — via Interview, April 2025
02
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Good Girl
A Novel
by Aria Aber
“Nila is trying things out, trying to stabilise herself, trying to accommodate all the aspects of herself that fight against one another. It’s not easy to write about that time of life without becoming maudlin and it isn’t that, it has a lot of life in it.” — via Interview, April 2025
03
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Tell Me Everything
by Elizabeth Strout · 2024 · Fiction
“It’s lovely to see Elizabeth Strout receiving so many garlands as her career goes on. I think, to begin with, these books were seen as ‘easy reading,’ but her literary cachet has grown.” — via Interview, April 2025
04
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The Persians
by Sanam Mahloudji
“The joy. It’s very funny, and it’s so unexpected. When I picked up the book, I didn’t know anything about it. I didn’t want to read any blurb or reviews, I just came to the work very clean. So I thought, when I picked this up, that it would be a historical novel about the Persians. I expected a different country, a different time, a different culture. But then this opens and it’s like the Kardashians of Aspen.” — via Interview, April 2025
05
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All Fours
by Miranda July
“There’s no way to get around this, it’s weird. I love its weirdness. It’s about a woman who is a semi-famous artist who embarks on a road trip from one side of America to the other. She’s been given some money and she’s always wanted to do this. She says goodbye to her husband and child, gets to the next town and stops. The whole book is about what happens in that next town. She never makes it across the country.” — via Interview, April 2025