I used to think everyone who read books also re-read them. I was surprised, once I was an author, to discover that there are plenty of book lovers who once they’ve read a book never pick it up again, no matter how much they love it. I don’t think such people are wrong—we have limited time, and there are always new books beckoning—and yet I can’t help but feel that such people are missing out on one of life’s great pleasures, of picking up a book which you already know from both personal and previous experience that you are going to love.
Perhaps my family was exceptional in its love of conversation, but all families are, to some extent, learning spaces for how to talk. This is the paradox of growing up. Language is learned in the family; it solidifies our place within it, but it also allows us to move beyond it, giving us the tools to widen our experience with people very different from ourselves.
With a sweet tooth that often leads me to scan the dessert menu before the main course, I find myself calculating exactly how much room to save. Fortunately for sugar lovers like me, restaurants worldwide are elevating desserts from an afterthought to the main event.
These aren’t bakeries, but upscale establishments and bars devoted entirely to multi-course dessert dining.
So in some ways, despite being the fifth Trainspotting spin-off so far, Men in Love makes perfect sense as a novel in 2025: old rope in a contemporary culture made mostly of old rope. It displaces 2002’s Porno as the original’s most direct sequel, taking place in the immediate aftermath of the drug deal/betrayal that closes it out.
Despite its elegiac tone, in Absence there is an underlying philosophical wave of hope. Ernst Bloch saw art and literature as vital for encouraging hope and envisioning a better future. For Bloch, hope was an existentialism. Art and literature are powerful tools that allow us to express our human desires and to push towards a better lived reality. This idea of absence—of what’s missing—this loss isn’t necessarily only the end of something. For our narrator, these reveries and ruminations lead to new understandings, new connections. This loss becomes an echo, a ripple, that reaches out and connects the disparate cast of characters in this book—an interconnected ensemble cast, using moments and fragments to build a mosaic of emotional resonance. It shapes, and reshapes, understanding, grief, and identity.