As spring finally arrives, Charlotte Griffiths focuses on fresh starts in fiction
The Eights by Joanna Miller
University accommodation is home to a familiar skit. It goes something like this. A first-year student meets their neighbour and says: “Hi, nice to meet you – my room’s next door. Do you want to be the best man at my wedding and become friends for life?” The Eights follows four female undergraduates that have been assigned neighbouring rooms on Corridor Eight at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and who, despite their wildly different backgrounds, immediately become the best of friends.
It’s 1920 and the Eights are part of the very first cohort of women to be admitted as full students at the University of Oxford. We get to know them during their first year, as they study their subjects while also learning about themselves, each other and the world that awaits them upon graduation.
It’s a complicated time to be a woman: they’ve just won the right to vote, but years of warfare have taken an emotional and physical toll on the entire population. Despite armistice bringing peace, change is in the air. Each of the Eights has her own reasons for wanting a degree, yet what brings them all together is their pursuit of new opportunities and courage in taking this revolutionary step into the unknown.
Joanna Miller, who is Cambridge-raised, has a beautifully descriptive prose style and has clearly done her research, depicting all of the academic romance of life at Oxford, as well as the darkness of – and extraordinary misogyny faced by women in – inter-war Britain. The Eights is a captivating, expertly constructed historical novel about the very best female friendships, which you’ll still be thinking about long after finishing its final pages.
California Gold by Jodie Chapman
Young Frank O’Hara has a dream: to give his new, American wife Chrissy the House of Tomorrow, a mid-century, glass-and-white-concrete mansion that’s straight out of Palm Springs, dropped into the English countryside like an alien spaceship exploring strange new worlds.
Their meet-cute is pure cinema: he’s hitchhiking on the west coast of the US to seek a new life, wearing an Elvis shirt that’s already out-of-date, and she’s escaping expectations in a yellow convertible. They fall hard and fast for each other, are married within weeks and the American Dream seems right in their grasp – but will their love get lost in translation?
California Gold is a wide-screen epic of a novel, spanning 40 years and three generations of the O’Hara family as they repeatedly try to escape their version of the House of Tomorrow: the ominously named Mirage, which reminds us that their beliefs in each other and their connections are built on the flimsiest of foundations. Frank and Chrissy’s glossy, high-contrast, anything-is-possible dream becomes a nightmare, dulled by British snobbery,
tradition and the weight of expectation. An extraordinary life always has a cost. Here, the next generation will pay.
Chapman’s stylish, cinematic writing reaches new, dazzling heights in her third novel: a superb, shimmering, stoically life-affirming read.
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
This intricately structured novel follows Ursula Todd living life after life after life.
Set in 1910, in the first chapter she dies at birth before taking a breath. In the second chapter she begins again, but the doctor makes it to the house in time so she lives on, only to later die in a childhood accident – which is then avoided in the chapter after that.
Each of Ursula’s lives feels like a piece of music reaching a crescendo before crashing down into darkness, and then beginning again at a gentler, softer pace. In some she is unlucky, taken by influenza or in the wrong place at the wrong time; in others her undoing is the work of someone else, whether bad actors or well-meaning relatives. Sometimes, she can sensefragments of her alternate lives. At other times, she is alone in her thoughts, yet always surrounded by the same cast of characters: family, colleagues, lovers.
Once Ursula reaches adulthood and the horror of the Blitz, she dies in bomb shelters, works for the War Office and does her bit in London. In one life, she even appears as the now wife of a German in Munich, unable to return to her family. Eventually, enough of her existences align that she can discern a purpose beneath all the layers of life. Swirling, feverish, peppered with beautiful domestic detail, this clever book reminds us that a single existence contains a stunning amount of possibilities: change can be just around the corner.
Stay for the story…
If your love of literature is on life support, our very own University Arms has a proposition for you and your neglected TBR pile. The hotel’s new ‘Stay for the Story: A Reading Retreat’ package includes a two-night stay with breakfast, plus the unique opportunity to consult with a dedicated Book Butler, who will select the perfect book to get you back into reading. You can even hand over your phone during your stay for a total digital detox. Even better: 5% of all revenue from these literary retreats will be given to the National Literacy Trust’s year-long campaign to reinstil a love of reading in adults and young people. The perfect treat for a book-lover! universityarms.com/a-reading-retreat
Check out February 2026’s Book Club and the coffee table reads