Charlotte Moore’s books of the year

Jane Shilling’s The Stranger in the Mirror is an essay on what happens to the narrative arc of a woman’s life when she reaches middle age. It is as deeply felt as it is witty and elegant. Henry’s Demons, by father and son Patrick and Henry Cockburn, provides the most compelling insight into schizophrenia that I’ve come across. As Good as God, As Clever as the Devil would have appalled its subject, the intellectually gifted, sexually tormented wife of the Victorian Archbishop Benson, but Rodney Bolt mines a rich archival vein and transcends gossip. First published in 1946, We Are Besieged, Barbara Fitzgerald’s charming novel of an Anglo-Irish family in the Twenties, is a welcome reissue from Somerville Press.