BooksPlease

This is a monthly link-up hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. This month we are starting with Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Life of M.

I haven’t read The Life of M, so here is the description from Amazon:

M is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time

With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rM is a film star, and one of the most recognisable faces of our time.

With such fame, her life has the appearance of freedom: people are instantly obliging, spaces are altered to accommodate her, time can be rearranged. For her, it seems, the rules of reality have melted away.

Now M has agreed to let a stranger write her biography. Their project will sprawl and expand: to the olive groves and holiday beaches where M spends her days; across hotel rooms, bourgeois facades, film sets; through endless modern cities. It is hard not to feel ugly next to M, hard not to feel insignificant. But what truths – about the very experience of living – might this proximity allow the writer to briefly capture? And what in the end will M make of their work?

There’s another character known only as M in one of Rachel Cusk’s earlier novels, Second Place. She invites L, a well-known artist, to stay at her cottage. Having read D. H. Lawrence: the Life of an Outsider by John Worthen, I’d had an inkling that L was based on D H Lawrence and indeed in her Acknowledgement at the end of the book Cusk refers to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir of the time D H Lawrence stayed with her in Taos, New Mexico.

Worthen’s biography is a detailed portrait of Lawrence’s life from his birth in 1885 in Eastwood in Nottinghamshire to his death at the age of 44. I read it in November 2013 and in the same month I also read N or M? by Agatha Christie, a Tommy and Tuppence spy story, and another book with characters known only by their initials. Tommy is asked to go under cover to track down members of the Fifth Column, two German agents, whose mission is to infiltrate British society. All that is known about them is that N is a man and M a woman and they are thought to be at Leahampton on the south coast.

Following the publication of N or M? Agatha Christie was investigated by MI5 because she had named one of the characters ‘Major Bletchley’ and MI5 suspected she had a spy in Britain’s undercover code breaking centre, Bletchley Park.

In The Predicament by William Boyd, Gabriel Drax is spy who doesn’t want to be a spy. He is being drawn into the dangerous and shadowy world of espionage by his fascination/obsession with Faith Green, his MI6 handler, who effortlessly manipulates him. Part of the book is set in Berlin where Drax is assigned to assist the CIA prevent the assassination of President Kennedy.

Berlin is the setting of The Dancing Bear in the aftermath of World War Two, from Autumn 1946 to Autumn 1949. It’s Frances Faviell’s memoir mainly about her friendship with the Altmann family, who lived on the ground floor of a large ruined house – the upper storeys had disappeared and just the twisted iron girders remained, sticking up grotesquely against the sky. The ground floor looked very shaky, the windows were covered in cardboard and the door had been repaired from odd pieces of wood.

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell is about a completely dysfunctional family, living in 16 Cheyne Walk, London. Their house is dark, mysterious and steeped in a malevolent atmosphere, with panelled walls, locked rooms, a secret staircase and a full-size cannon in the front garden. And within its walls the family lived in fear, locked away from the outside world, dominated by a megalomaniac.

My links are characters known by their initials, two are by the same author, two are spy novels, two are books set in Berlin, and finally two books about families and their houses.

In recognition of Novellas in November, next month (November 7, 2026) start with a novella that’s on your reading list.