It’s important to maintain a balanced diet in your reading, I find: plenty of roughage along with the ultra-processed books, that MFA American fiction so smoothed out it goes down like baby food. One way to ensure you get everything you need is to follow kitchen rules – salt, sweet, sour and bitter (plus I always throw in a classic, for umami’s sake). This year, All Fours by Miranda July is quite exceptionally salty; the Matthew Perry autobiography bitter; You Are Here by David Nicholls extremely sweet.
Few can compete with Bella Mackie when it comes to sour, and that is in no way an insult. Her spiky debut bestseller How to Kill Your Family proved a useful counterweight to the more saccharine end of the market, as well as being a post-pandemic chaser for those who had spent a little too much time in lockdown with their nearest and dearest.
