| The picture of Lea Ypi’s grandparents that kickstarted the author’s quest. |
Troubled by a photo of her grandmother living it up in Mussolini’s Italy, the author of Free delves into archive and memory to uncover the truth
Sami Kent
3 September 2025
In Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s “A Spell of Good Things,” the lives of a working-class boy and a wealthy young doctor converge to expose the precarity of the social order.
A SPELL OF GOOD THINGS, by Ayòbámi Adébáyò
During the pandemic, my walking path in Berkeley, Calif., trailed past the Seabreeze encampment where a number of the city’s homeless population were living. Various municipal initiatives sprang up to try to protect this and other encampments from Covid-19, but these came on the heels of longstanding tensions between the housed and unhoused in the Bay Area — tensions that had, for the city, largely taken the shape of concerns about trash and safety. Accompanying these concerns I sensed an undercurrent of distaste: The encampments were unsightly, ugly, embarrassing. Locals wanted to help these members of their community, but more than that they really wanted them gone. Just over a year later, they were.
July 8, 2016
In a recent article about Beckett’s prose, the Guardian called him the “maestro of failure”, and described his work as being “a hypnotic flow of words, the meaning of which is initially utterly obscure…. but persevere and patterns emerge:” Or as one of his character says in this novel “It was like difficult music heard for the first time.” Indeed, the complexity of this novel is such that it is one of those rare works that sometimes requires reference to an annotated version giving a page by page guide.
This understanding – that his work is complex but full of patterns and themes – is arguably the key to reading all Beckett, but applies particularly to his prose, including this relatively early novel. This is not difficulty for the sake of it, obscurantism, but complexity. In this novel Murphy, an Irishman of indeterminate profession, likely none, lives in exile in a condemned apartment in suburban London. He is an eccentric character – when the novel opens we find him naked in the dark, tied to a rocking chair. This appears to be more a form of meditation than sexual perversion! Murphy’s acquaintances are introduced as Beckett assembles his cast. Neary and Wylie, friends, Celia, Murphy’s lover and reluctant prostitute, and Cooper, Neary’s dull-witted assistant. Pressurised by Celia, Murphy finds a job as a nursing attendant at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat in North London, a hospital for the insane, where he feels completely at home. The supporting cast attempt to track him down, but he eludes them by dying, apparently by suicide, caused by an opportune gas leak.
Thuy On
September 16, 2021
The cover art of Paige Clark’s debut book depicts a woman, a pot plant and a chair, positioned at angles to each other. The dark-haired woman does not face the reader but is looking through buttery yellow blinds; you can only see a faint outline of her profile. The image is misaligned and off-kilter, a foreshadowing of the contents of She is Haunted. Comprising eighteen short stories, Clark’s collection of fiction braids the real and the surreal. Perspectives are skewed playfully but an intent to explore serious matters often lies beneath the whimsy.