MARCH READING

I devoured this complex portrait of Thomas Mann, the most celebrated novelist of his age and Nobel laureate, and of the family orbiting him. Tóibín brings to life his perceptive and steadfast wife Katia and their six singular children, each shaped by ambition, exile and the moral pressures of their time, set against war and the long shadow of fascism and the Cold War. From Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island and Brooklyn, later adapted into the film starring Saoirse Ronan.

First published in 1988, The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow in 1913, on the cusp of change. As a household unsettles and the city edges towards thaw, it becomes a novel about renewal, uncertainty and the subtle promise that arrives with the first signs of spring. It was critically acclaimed on publication and shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Author Penelope Fitzgerald was born in Lincoln and did not publish her first novel until her late fifties. She went on to write nine books, win the Booker Prize for Offshore, and was later named by The Times as one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Possibly the best writer you have never heard of.

John Wright distils decades of experience, including his time as resident forager at River Cottage, into a practical month by month guide to Britain’s edible landscape. March brings a quiet sense of promise as the ground begins to stir. Nettles, wild garlic and dandelions are at their best, alongside lesser known finds waiting in hedgerows, woodland edges and damp spring meadows.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Overstory is a vast, quietly radical novel that draws disparate lives together through their relationship with trees. Powers moves between intimate human stories and the towering patience of forests, asking us to reconsider scale, time and responsibility, and what it might mean to live with greater attention.

With brighter, warmer days returning, the kids are back outside, running, digging, inventing games that end with muddy hands and flushed cheeks. Channel that energy into simple, satisfying projects for gardens and windowsills. From sowing seeds and watching them push through, to picking fruit and making a terrarium for a bedroom shelf, it turns curiosity into something they can tend and grow.

Set in Sicily in 1999, The Unwilding unfolds around the court of a revered, though fictional, novelist and the family shaped by his presence. As the story quietly unravels, loyalties shift and long-held assumptions begin to fracture. It is darker than some of the other books on this month’s list, but compelling in the way it explores influence, identity and the cost of living in the orbit of a powerful figure. A thoughtful, unsettling novel for that moment in early spring when everything begins to change.