Last year, I read just one of the starting books. This year, I have started off well as I had read January’s starter (which is not surprising since it was my choice, not Kate’s!) This month, however, we are back to business-as-usual. Before I get onto it, the usual reminder that if you don’t know this member and how it works, please check Kate’s blog – booksaremyfavouriteandbest.

The first rule is that Kate sets our starting book. This month, she nominated a book I have heard quite a bit about, because my Californian friend, Carolyn, read it recently. It’s Susan Choi’s Flashlight. She chose it because it topped lots of “best of 2025” lists (see Kate’s list.) It starts with a father and daughter taking a walk along a breakwater, but only the daughter comes back (apparently.) I thought of many links for this novel, including a father-daughter one, but, hold that thought, because it might return. Meanwhile …

I decided to go with something that my friend Carolyn told me in our correspondence which was that this book made Barack Obama’s top ten of the year. Another book that I’ve read which made Obama’s Top Ten, albeit back in 2021, was Anthony Doerr’s Cloud cuckoo land (my review). I know I’ve linked to this book before, but any book that Obama recommends and that is positive about librarians deserves a good airing.

I am sticking with the Barack Obama link, and am going with a book written by him that I reviewed early in this blog, his excellent origin memoir, Dreams from my father (my review). And lookee here, there’s a father! So, with that, I decided I should go with the flow, for a little while at least.

My next link is fiction – but autofiction – and to a book I also reviewed back in 2009 when I posted on Obama’s book, Elizabeth Jolley’s My father’s moon (my review). The novel’s protagonist is Vera, a lonely young woman. The title refers to her loved father, who had told her throughout her childhood that wherever she is, she can always look at the same moon he is looking at, ‘And because of this … you must know that I am not far away. You must never feel lonely’. Lovely, eh?

I could do a whole post on fathers and daughters, but I won’t. However, because I’ve just reviewed a book on this relationship, I will do one link on fathers and daughters, Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (my review). Apparently, Gaskell had initially planned to title it John Barton, for the father. This conveys that the story is evenly balanced between the two, but Mary is a good choice, I think, because she offers a more hopeful ending.

And now we leave fathers and daughters for unionism. John Barton turns to Trade Unions when he realises that the “masters” are not going to help workers without a bit of a push. Just as John and his mill-worker friends face starvation as employment disappears in 1840s England, so do the wharf labourers in 1920s to 30s Adelaide when jobs disappear, so the book I’m linking to is Wendy Scarfe’s Hunger town (my review). Although, unlike Scarfe, Gaskell lived during the period about which she wrote, the subject matter – workers’ struggles for fair treatment – is similar.

My last link picks up on two aspects of Scarfe’s novel – Adelaide and the Depression era – and is also historical fiction. The book is Margaret Barbalet’s Blood in the rain (my review). Barbalet’s novel is less overtly political. Rather, it’s a domestic story, but one that in its brief 200 pages tells a strong story about children, poverty and precarity.

Most of this month’s books are set in the 20th century, with just Mary Barton set in the 19th and Cloud Cuckoo Land spanning centuries. Two of my six books are by male writers, while regarding nationality, three are by Australians, two by Americans and one by an Englishwoman. And, though I haven’t read Flashlight, I think there is an argument for a circular link, because both the starting book and my ending one feature a young girl who is suddenly deprived of parents (albeit in Flashlight the mother is physically present) and who realises she must depend on her own resources to survive.

Have you read Flashlight and, regardless, what would you link to?