Another great review in The Observer yesterday for A Quiet Evening, the anthology John Hatt compiled for Eland of Norman Lewis’s long-form journalism. Stephen Smith writes: “It’s a little early in the year to be handing out cups, but I doubt that there will be a finer book of non-fiction than this in 2025.”

The Observer also had a review by Stephanie Merritt of The Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on My Father’s Islands by Marianne Brown (Borough Press). Merritt says the book “offers a fascinating insight into a unique place that holds past and future in uneasy tension”, and is “written with clarity and rooted in deep affection – not only for the islands but for the broader land and elements on which we all depend”.

And both The Observer and The Sunday Times reviewed The Odd Woman and the City (Daunt), a reissue of the 2015 essay in which Vivian Gornick tramps the streets of her beloved Manhattan, aiming — as Nick Duerden puts it in The Observer — “both to keep loneliness at bay and to feed her insatiable writer’s curiosity”.