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 Toibin. of Brooklyn and Long Island fame.

First published in 1988, The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow in 1913, on the cusp of change. Fitzgerald’s prose is spare and exact, attentive to small domestic details and quiet shifts in mood. 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.

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.

Another novel circling the life of a celebrated, though fictional, writer and the family shaped by his presence. Sicily, 1999. The court of revered novelist Don Travers gathers around him, four children, a silent and watchful wife Lydia, and a revolving cast of admirers. It feels darker and more unsettling, probing influence, loyalty and the cost of living in a great man’s shadow.