In The Script of the Stones (Atlantic, £18.99), Francis Gooding, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, offers both a portrait of what he calls “half a mile of scrubby, unremarkable clifftop” along the southern edge of the Gower Peninsula in Wales, a place he has known since he was a child, and a meditation on grief and deep time. Stephanie Merritt, reviewing the book in The Observer at the weekend, said it was “a colourful collage of genres of the kind that delights curious readers (and makes marketing departments despair). Its obvious antecedents are the likes of Olivia Laing’s To the River or W G Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn: narratives constructed around a walk through a particular place whose specific features and history prompt associations in the narrator’s mind that spin off into unforeseen tangents and digressions.”
Immersing yourself in the book, she says, is like having “a conversation with an erudite friend eager to share his wide-ranging knowledge, or the analogue equivalent of going down an internet rabbit hole, but infinitely more satisfying. Gooding’s writing is richly textured, full of fine-grained detail, allowing readers to feel they have walked the same paths and tasted the same soil.”