Good morning everyone,

YOU BETTER BELIEVE it's time for my books of the year. What it's also time for, though (and this is about my job not Fem Fri) is setting OKRs for 2023. Guys this is so difficult. It's like writing poetry,  trying to cram so much meaning and resonance into an incredibly restrictive structure and already so few words to play with. I've just done ONE this morning and already feel like T. S. Eliot probably felt after he wrote "The Waste Land." Don't @ me about this, I know that's not how "The Waste Land" got written.

If you don't know what OKRs are, I'm happy for you. If you know what OKRs are but don't know how they're different from, say, KPIs or SMART objectives, please do @ me and we can just be together at this time.

BOOKS OF THE YEAR, THOUGH.

Those People - Louise Candlish

As long term readers will know, one of my favourite genres of book is rich people being terrible to one another. Louise Candlish, though, has opened my eyes to a new and related genre, South East London try-hards being terrible to one another. Those People is one of several books that will have you doing little whoops of delight as middle class parents just TIP OVER into incredible wrongness. Great plotting, great central mysteries, and her calm, principled insistence that nowhere north of Tooley Street or south of Bromley exists should be an inspiration to us all.

Daughters of Jerusalem - Charlotte Mendelson

I've already written about Mendelson in Fem Fri, and here's another chance to get on that train. I'm recommending Daughters of Jerusalem as a book that manages both incredible charm and a properly rancid undercurrent. It's set in Oxford and she really plays with the closeness of the city versus the fragmentation of a family. She is also extremely funny, I laughed more at her books than at any others this year. I'd recommend that you buy this now for an easy and fun ACANYNY read.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot

The only non-fiction book on my list this year! I read it for work expecting it to be full of facts about life sciences, and it was, but it is also about family and faith and what we mean when we say "life." There would have been numerous temptations for a journalist writing this book, and Skloot steers away from all of them. It's so incredibly light touch, all of it, and since I read it there's not a week that's gone by that I haven't thought about some of the ideas that it touched on or made me think about. Incredible book. If you want to know the absolute basics about Henrietta Lacks, here is a decent place to start.

Luster - Raven Lelani

This book is very short and packs a lot in, which are two things I respect in a book. It's also, although not a comedy, full of very good jokes, as in you will read this book an laugh aloud several times. I suppose I'd describe it as the story of a young woman, who is an absolute mess, learning how you can be an absolute mess in many different ways and at many different life stages. You will gasp in horror several times while reading this and leave the whole experience very emotionally satisfied.

Lost in the Archives - E. Saxey

SO EXCITED to recommend to you a collection of short stories by long term friend of Fem Fri, E. Saxey. I know that you've loved it when they have guest edited this newsletter and I know you'll love their fiction even more. One of the things I've always really engaged with about Saxey's writing is the incredible sense of place and of setting. As I think back to these stories to write this for you, it feels like running through my own memories, that's how vivid their work feels. And the lovely thing about a collection of short stories is you get so many settings - foggy coasts and creepy libraries and sweet villages with bridges over rivers - and so much weird stuff happening in those settings. You want to get into Saxey's work because they've got a novel out next year so now is the time.

Love,

Alex.