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Hard by a Great Forest, Leo Vardiashvili’s polished debut, defies easy generic categorisation. It is both thriller and poignant exploration of the immigrant experience, set in a storyline studded with tropes and motifs from fairytales, quest narratives and coming-of-age novels.

The book follows Saba Sulidze-Donauri, the first-person narrator, as he attempts to find his father Irakli and brother Sandro, who have vanished in Georgia. The family fled Tbilisi in 1992, as the country descended into chaos and strife following the collapse of the Soviet Union, eventually finding asylum in Britain. Flashbacks show how Eka, the boys’ mother, was left behind and died before Irakli could raise enough money to bring her to London. Two decades later, he returned to Tbilisi but then disappeared, leaving a message to his sons that he has done something he “can’t undo”, warning them not to try to find him. Ignoring his father’s instructions, Sandro travelled to Tbilisi and eventually picked up Irakli’s trail, before also disappearing. The novel begins as Saba journeys to his former homeland, hoping to find them both.

Saba lands in Tbilisi shortly after a flood has swept away the city’s zoo (a real event that took place in 2015). One of his surreal first sights in Tbilisi is a hippopotamus, strolling incongruously past a shop selling Swatches. A tiger (one with – symbolically? – a Russian name) prowls Sololaki, the district where Saba lived as a child. The roaming animals add to his disorientation, confusion and increasing sense of danger as he searches for his father and brother while trying to evade the corrupt Georgian police. He is also accompanied by the internal voices – some benign, others more ambiguous – of the people left behind when the family fled Tbilisi.

Vardiashvili increases the tension as the narrative unfolds, punctuating Saba’s quest with genuinely heart-stopping moments, as, accompanied by Nodar the taxi driver – himself a refugee from intercommunal strife in the breakaway South Ossetia region – they follow Irakli’s trail through Georgia’s countryside and across the border with South Ossetia. Their journey allows Vardiashvili to reveal something of the region’s fascinating and bloody past – how previous generations of Georgian mothers like Eka sacrificed their freedoms to save their children, and the terrible price paid by those who fled as well as those who stayed.

The novel’s title refers to the opening lines of the tale of Hansel and Gretel, which Saba and Sandro’s mother used to tell them as a bedtime story before the family was separated. Saba imagines his search for Irakli and Sandro as a fairytale quest, and their clues – which include pages from an old play composed by Irakli – as a trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow. The escaped beasts, Saba’s journeys into Georgia’s dark forests and a quest for a lost child add to the novel’s fairytale resonances, but these are darker, unsanitised, pre-Disney tales with no guaranteed happy-ever-afters.

Returning to a place where he’s now an outsider, Saba is forced to confront his own traumatic history. And like all good quest narratives he comes to the end of the novel with a newfound understanding of himself and his own identity. Hard by a Great Forest is a sensitive exploration of grief, memory, loss and the immigrant experience woven seamlessly into a propulsive narrative.

Katherine Muskett is a part-time academic, freelance writer and tutor

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and someone in your family is planning to do you in over the festive season.

Wait – what??

The perfect snow-covered curveball for the horror fan, traditional story-lover, or just unfestive humbug in your life this Solstice-tide, Christmas and Other Horrors is a collection of eighteen new short fictions from around the world and its mid-wintery traditions, ideally suited to see you through from Kaamos to Epiphany, via Yule, Hannukah, New Year, and/or Kwanzaa.

Whether in fields, on islands, in sculpture gardens, through snow, rain or sauna steam, it might be tempting to assume there is nothing new under the low December sun. But, curated by its Hugo Award-winning editor, this single volume brings together Long Island Greeks, Finnish folklorists, Welsh second-homeowners, Washington State Jews, Icelandic glaciologists, even Australians(!), in an exploration of old ways, old calendars, and old ideas – some taken more seriously than others – that, in Jeffrey Ford’s words, “leaped out of the forest and mated with human imagination”.

As one not overly blessed in that department (imagination, I mean), I was impressed by how many fresh variations could be found on the ancient themes of letting strangers in from the cold, being good and living tidily, or the thin line dividing benign spirit from lethal monster – to say nothing of family gatherings not working out as per the Hallmark movie channel. (Nadia Bulkin’s story All the Pretty People suggests an annual get-together with the sole purpose of airing grievances. Joy to the world, indeed!)

Yes, some characters are literally trying to slay their demons. And one gets – ahem – “ghosted” by an old friend. But for every cabin-dwelling grandma, headless woman and Krampus, there were pure novelties involving five-year-old Lords of Misrule, seraphic saints, and Brueghel-ish, beaked Schnabelperchten (Austrian, if you’re wondering) who cut you open if you haven’t cleaned your house. The closest we get to Santa coming down the chimney is… well: it isn’t Santa. Which makes a change from all those bloody Coke adverts.

Some stories finish largely unresolved, and are the more discomforting for that (where, Benjamin Percy asks, does Father Christmas get his “elves”?). But one or two – I can’t say which – had quite consoling endings. “It is amazing,” reflects Glen Hirshberg’s Dry and Ready, “the accruing weight of rituals that stick.”

I was less blown away, it must be said, by the general quality of writing.

The best stories here are, in Bulkin’s words, “secular, ironic, caught between wanting to mock tradition and wanting to recreate it.” These characters have all seen horror movies, and several writers had fun with those inevitable resonances. More than one protagonist asks if he is being told a tall tale.

But the less compelling efforts are philosophically/mythologically overwrought, come with self-serious endnotes, or get waylaid by politics. And while no one buys horror stories hoping for DH Lawrence, I did expect a little more from such established authors. John Langan nods to Philip Roth, and Gemma Files works in some lines of Donne; but there is far too much expository dialogue, and tons of telling where there should be showing. One character says something in a “Dickens-ey” accent – and as a Kentish lad I just can’t overlook that.

And “if he expected us to scream and wet ourselves in fright, he is to be disappointed.”

Was I horror-fied? Well, no. I’m a 42-year-old man, reading these stories in the South Atlantic “summer”. But Datlow’s introductory lines suggest they’re aiming more for entertainment, really, than for dread. I did learn that Michigan has many Finns among its population. And two or three tips on medieval cooking. Plus lots of fun volcano vocab!

So, if you are dreaming of a black Christmas, why not order yourself a copy of Christmas and Other Horrors and settle in for the festive season by the fire.

Although, y’know… perhaps not too close.

It’s difficult to describe what Benny is exactly, but it’s definitely not a children’s story, which until now has been the stock-in-trade of Andy Stanton, creator of Mr Gum. Unless of course you want your kids immersed in a bizarre deep-sea world populated by marine life religious fanatics who revere the variously sized sex organs of their founders. While you’re digesting that last sentence, let me get on and introduce you to Benny, the eponymous blue whale, who has a tiny glowing penis with healing powers that is coveted by a sinister sect of cuttlefish called the Penis Plunders; his nemesis Jeremy, a Colossal squid with a gargantuan phallus that is also worship-worthy; and Chief Lena, head of the police, whose (presumably average-sized) shark-vagina is – according to one underwater hymn written by artificial intelligence – a “source of empowerment” for the Vagina Venerators who follow her.

If all this sounds utterly bonkers, it is. Though Benny isn’t some sort of comic-porn version of Finding Nemo, but rather the result of a seven-month long AI experiment involving a “conversation” between Stanton and the online chatbot known as ChatGPT. Lured into trying the programme by his cousin Dave, a retired software engineer, in a “silly and idle moment” the author types in: “tell me a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis”. And so it begins. In the exchange that follows, it’s sometimes hard not to feel sorry for the priggish chatbot as Stanton deploys all his impish (some might say puerile) irreverence to goad the programme into providing ever more intricate and salacious details of what really goes on beneath the waves.

The whacky plotline (if that’s what it can be called) is only part of the craziness. Stanton doesn’t constrain the conversation to simple prose, but gets the bot to compose scenes from plays, chants, songs, and even a late-night radio jazz show script. If that’s not mayhem enough, sharing the page with the story itself are the author’s own thoughts, interpretations, and musings on the bot’s apparent literary references, pulling the reader’s eyes all over the place, and making the text impossible to read in anything resembling a linear fashion.

Ultimately, however, it is there, in Stanton’s foot notes and marginalia, that the real genius of this book is found. For all the hilarity and absurdity, it asks profound questions about the relationship between humans and machines. What are the boundaries between human agency and that of the tools we use, in any creative process? There are moments when Stanton’s coded co-creator starts asking its own questions, produces something absurdly funny or seemingly clever, and on one occasion even suggests a major plot variation to correct its own narrative error. It’s a literal deus ex machina moment of the kind that leads many to see AI technology as a quantum leap towards artificial consciousness, and even an existential threat to humanity. Others see only a more advanced version of computer processing and machine learning, just vast quantities of data being scanned, retrieved and reassembled; they point out that AI doesn’t exist until we take it out of the box and give it a command. It would be unfair to give away Stanton’s own conclusions from his experience, but you’ll discover them if you make it to the end. There will no doubt be those who fail to get that far, for Benny is almost as tortuous as it is entertaining, more of a ride than a read. Those who do should take heed of the old warning that it’s impossible to unlearn something. Once you’ve taken a deep dive with a whale with a tiny but magical penis, you’ll be hooked on the conundrum that is AI. There really is no turning back.

“While collective memory is grounded in fact, it need not be,” cautions historian Margaret MacMillan in her 2008 book The Uses and Abuses of History. “That is why dealing with the past, in deciding on which version we want, or on what we want to remember and to forget, can become so politically charged.”

Nowhere is this notion more apparent than in Sofia Petrovna, a novella written in pre-war Soviet Russia where well over 700,000 lives were lost to the prevailing orthodoxy and collectively sanctioned madness of Stalin’s Great Purge.

Persephone Books is to be applauded for re-releasing a work both moving and savagely honest, and one that deserves a wide readership given the truths it aimed to expose are as relevant now as they were during the terrors of the late 1930s.

Written in secret and hidden for decades, Sofia Petrovna, Lydia Chukovskaya’s masterpiece of dissident fiction, is a short and pithy testimony to how values warp in order for a society to maintain a cogent view of itself, all the while remaining blind to its own tyranny. Our eponymous heroine is driven mad by the need to reconcile her son’s wrongful imprisonment and her own unquestioning acceptance of an oppressive regime pitted against its own citizenry.

Unsurprisingly, the Soviet cultural establishment – which during the 1930s had grown increasingly monolithic and devoid of irony – would suffer every bit as much as the Communist Party’s elite when it came to denouncements and vengeful takedowns. Creative freedom was no longer valued. Cultural policy had turned on itself. Critics grew hostile. Many former literary heroes would fall from grace.

It is hard not to draw parallels with our current climate of social censure where followers and likes trump truth and originality, and the increasing use of sensitivity readers has led us to the very real prospect of becoming a blinded society. Thankfully we have not yet crossed into the territory of arrests and executions.

The writing is unsentimental. Whether she is shivering in the interminable queues for the prosecutor’s office, waiting at the iron gates to the prison where her son is being held, or organising a children’s Christmas party at the publishing house where she is employed, Sofia Petrovna inhabits a mundane reality. The banal routine of her typist’s life only heightens the novella’s ultimate pathos. Hers is an unremarkable existence in a society poisoned by lies.

Chukovskaya’s literary credentials speak for themselves. Daughter of celebrated children’s author Korney Chukovsky, the author was raised in a literary milieu that included many celebrated names that would later fall foul of authorities and who had elevated outmanoeuvring state censors to an art form. The story of the novella is fascinating in its own right. The road to publication was a long one. The text appeared in its original Russian only in 1988.

Says Margaret MacMillan: “It can be dangerous to question the stories people tell themselves.” And that is why, like Lydia Chukovskaya, contemporary writers must find the moral courage to continue in this worthwhile endeavour. We must.

A World War 1 survivor sets up a photographic studio, finds ghosts in his portraits, thinks about physics, chemistry, trauma and loss, and reverberates down four generations. Moving figures, even though they exist, disappear in the long exposures of still photography – so might science explain how these figures are appearing although they don’t exist? It’s an intriguing premise for a story! But alas there isn’t really a story.

I’ll be honest. This is not the book for me. I stuck with it because it is the book for Margaret Atwood, whose books are very much the books for me, and who says on the cover that Michaels shows us our humanity. Many critics and prize judges over the years have agreed. Plenty of readers are entranced by the magnificence of Michaels’ sensibility, and don’t mind that it doesn’t leave much room for saying who is who, what is what, and above all why.

I peer and peer but I really can’t make out my humanity here. Am I some kind of lesser being, for not getting it? I decide to read as if Held were poetry: the beauty, the imagery, the incomplete and verbless sentences, the lush list-driven descriptions, the brevity of sections invite such an approach. But I trip, over and over. Something is “as undetectable as a tide in a river” – mmm, lovely. But listen: tides are completely detectable in rivers, both coming in, and going out. Much is made of there being “only rock” at a couple’s backs, then suddenly there’s sand. The sea is just across the street; a few sentences later it’s too far away to be heard. Is this high-end poetic licence? Or rookie errors? When I read a six-word, no-verb sentence where three of the words are “chalk”, I yearn for narrative. And I worry. When she (someone – I can’t always tell the many “she’s” apart) is in the bath with her husband, and he dies slowly as the water cools, ooh, that’s good. But in the next sentence she’s drawing a blanket over him, dressing and lying beside him. “She can never explain, she can never imagine a time when she would be able to explain all he was to her.” Which is fine, but what I’m wanting her to explain is how she got a wet, dead, naked man out of the bath, because I have this image that she got in there with him, and the blanket, and it’s distracting.

Another example: a passing character mentions the WW1 hospital at Sidcup, which was run by the famous surgeon Harold Gillies. On the same page, a second passing character is called Gillies. What can it mean? Does it mean something? Michaels must know about Gillies the surgeon – she’s just referred directly to his hospital. Is Gillies the character meant to be, or be connected to, Gillies the surgeon? He doesn’t seem to be. So – carelessness? Genius of some kind? I don’t know!

There is much wisdom, much beauty, sections that work. Sometimes, magnificence of expression can fly readers breathless over potential stumbling blocks. But sometimes there are just too many trip hazards, and the wings aren’t solid. So unless shining poetic absorption is your only bag (and no disrespect to you if it is), Held lands somewhere near Icarus.

The Labour Party has not had a female leader in its 123 years of existence. That fact floated to the surface of my mind as I was looking through the contents page of Poetry for the Many, an anthology put together by former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the ex-General Secretary of UNITE, Len McCluskey.

The book collects 52 poems, fifteen by women. The number of words by women in the book is bulked out by the foreword – written by the journalist Melissa Benn – and the introduction from Karie Murphy, Corbyn’s former chief of staff and McCluskey’s partner (a relationship he used lawyers to deny, then admitted in his autobiography, Always Red).

The book’s advance publicity provoked a predictable wave of derision from critics of Corbyn and McCluskey. In the Jewish Chronicle, Hadley Freeman wrote: “If the choice here is between reading this book and eating a plate of hair, how quickly can you give me the hair?”

When Corbyn quoted from verse XXXVIII of Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy – “Rise like Lions after slumber…” in a Twitter post, many rushed to rubbish his terrible poetry, quickly backtracking, when corrected, to say they’d never like that poem anyway.

Inevitably, an excerpt from The Masque does appear, chosen by McCluskey. There are a lot of unsurprising inclusions in the book: Wordsworth banging on about clouds; Kipling’s If – a firm favourite with Tories, in my experience – Dylan Thomas raging against the dying of the light. But there are less-worn gems such as Warsan Shire’s Home (“No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark…”) and Stevie Smith’s short but sour Death-Bed of a Financier (“Deal not with me God as I have dealt with Man…”).

The decision to conclude with a merely passable poem written by Corbyn himself (Calais in Winter) and to invite Russell Brand to contribute a selection – a decision reversed when serious allegations about him were published – offer easy ammunition for critics. But this is a decent collection of largely left-leaning poetry that will make a conscience-salving stocking filler for, if not “the many”, a decent number of leftist kids with parents short on ideas.

“Some instruments come with songs in them,” Johnny Marr tells us, a few pages in to this beautiful book about the marvellous guitars on which he’s written innumerable classics. This gentle mysticism is a thread throughout the book, a humble fascination with tools and process from a master tunesmith, a man still in love with the magic of the guitar and the infinite melodic possibilities they contain.

Here, for example, is the story of Marr’s first Rickenbacker, “the first guitar that I would become associated with”:

“I decided to get one because, as well as loving the look of it, I thought it might make me write and play in a certain way. Unlike Gibson Les Pauls or Fender Stratocasters, the Rickenbacker isn’t known for a traditional rock approach and I thought it would be good for my melodic style of playing, focusing more on chord changes and hooks. It sometimes sped my playing up a bit too, as quite a lot of the songs I wrote on it were fast and hyperactive sounding. The best example of the way it sounds is on the intro to What Difference Does It Make? by The Smiths.”

The iconic cherry GIBSON ES-355 which graces the book’s cover has the sort of origin story that deserves a motion picture: bought for Marr by Seymour Stein, head of Sire Records, when the The Smiths signed to the label, Johnny raced back to The Iroquois hotel, where the band was staying, “took the guitar out of its case, and the first thing I played on it was what would become the next Smiths single, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. The song just arrived under my fingers, complete. Then the very next thing I played was what would become the B-side, Girl Afraid.”

Throughout the book I was reminded of Picasso’s maxim that “inspiration does exist but it must find you working.”

Friends and peers appear at intervals to share tales of Marr’s kindness and support, or marvel at his energy, technique, back catalogue, and collaborative zeal.
While you might not be able to tell a Jetglo from a Jaguar, a Martin from a Gretsch, you’ll know the sound they make because the music they contained is an indelible part of pop culture.

The entry about Marr’s 1963 Epiphone Casino mentions, almost as an afterthought, that “it’s the one I used for the tremolo riff on How Soon Is Now?”

You can hear it, can’t you? That matchless Bo Diddley tremolo chug.

In that respect this beautiful volume is a revelatory portal to music, fascination and joy. When he writes of being hypnotised by Marc Bolan on Top of the Pops, his love of Chic and Motown, his drive to write music that conveyed a feeling, or the miraculous way he found his voice though the guitar, one can’t help but be moved. Marr’s Guitars is a record of great partnerships, craft and quest but more intimately it’s about the passion of a musician for his instruments – a light that has never gone out